A crazy party might have chosen Cain or Bachmann as its standard-bearer. The Republican electorate dismissed them long before the first ballots were even cast.

A crazy party wouldn’t have cared how Rick Perry debated so long as he promised to visit Texas justice on the Democratic Party. The Republican electorate did care, and delivered him less than one vote for every $1,000 dollars his campaign spent.

A crazy party would have either elevated Ron Paul to the nomination or damned him as a heretic. The Republican electorate has given him almost exactly the level of support and celebrity that a generally crankish, occasionally prophetic politician deserves.

A crazy party would have nominated the candidate who offered the most implausible policy pledges — Cain’s 9-9-9 tax plan, or Tim Pawlenty’s justly ridiculed promise of 5 percent growth a year, or Perry’s flat tax. The Republican electorate is poised to nominate a candidate whose domestic agenda is often light on details and imagination, but a long way from crazy…

What we’re really seeing from the Republican campaign, over all, is less a party gone mad than a party caught between generations.