America's first independent president?

That time horizon is based on more than sheer self-confidence or grandiosity, however. Not long ago, a Republican guru of my acquaintance was brooding on who might be his party’s nominee in 2012—and questioning the sanity of anyone who’d want to be. “To run against Obama, you’re going to have to raise $1 billion,” he marveled. “Who in their right mind would want to try and do that to run against an incumbent president?”

Financial disadvantage, however, may be the least of the impairments that Obama has inflicted on the GOP. For more than 40 years, the Republican Party’s success was premised on the Southern Strategy, which exploited racial anxiety to cleave the “solid South” away from the Democrats. But as Rosenberg observes, “Obama’s election is the ultimate repudiation of the Southern Strategy. It has left the Republicans totally decimated; I don’t think they’ve been this far out of sync ideologically with the American people since the thirties.”