My suspicion is, the reason the cream of the GOP crop is sitting out 2012 is not because they’re worried they can’t beat Obama straight up. It’s because they’re worried that their base is so crazy they’ll be dragged so far to the right in the primaries that Obama will capture the center in the general election and make it impossible for them to win…
It doesn’t take any imagination to see what would happen to Eisenhower in today’s GOP. Ike would be booed off the stage. And Nixon? Well, Tricky Dick created the Environmental Protection Agency, which today’s Republicans want to abolish. Barry Goldwater wouldn’t have a chance; he strongly supported gay rights. Honestly, the Gipper couldn’t survive nowadays. After all, he signed the Therapeutic Abortion Act in California in 1967, and put his signature on what at the time were the largest tax increases in California history as governor and the biggest peacetime tax increase in American history as president. The rightward lurch has only accelerated during the Obama presidency…
I don’t see that kind of reformation in the Republican Party of 2012. Before you start feeling sorry for the country-club moderates being overwhelmed by the pitchfork populists, keep this in mind: the GOP elite created this monster. They were more than happy to have extremists willing to impeach Bill Clinton or loonies carrying signs comparing Obama to Hitler—so long as it helped them turn out the vote and win elections. But now the lunatics have taken over the asylum. And the price of winning the votes of the new, ultra-right GOP may make the party’s presidential nomination a prize not worth winning.
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