At the same time as Romney is mocked for faking radical-right sentiments, he is also derided for not being radically right enough. He is not one of the “authentic tribunes of the right” like Barry Goldwater or Ronald Reagan, we are told, by writers who contradict themselves a few sentences later and acknowledge that the narrow conservatism of the Tea Party and the evangelicals—today’s authentic right—lacks a wide appeal even among conservatives. In fact, Goldwater the Republican nominee and Reagan the Republican president benefited from a special circumstance that made their extremism palatable to the moderate voter. It was called the Cold War, and its absence makes this right-wing insurgency less substantial and more fragile than any previous right-wing insurgency. Perhaps nostalgia for the old stabilizing anathema is why today’s radical right talks about Obama as if he were the very spirit of Soviet communism.

By performing his aloofness from and contempt for the radical right, even as he fakes solidarity with it, Romney is doing exactly what he needs to do. He is keeping the radical right close to him for the general election by seeming to bow to its power, even as he is signaling to everyone else that he knows how miserably inadequate the support of the radical right will be in the general election.

So let’s all calm down and stop getting so excited about a deadlocked convention, and a dark-horse nominee introduced at the last minute, and an imploded Republican opposition.