Here’s a question:
Ezra Klein: “In 2008, Republicans nominated a candidate who’d fought the 2003 Bush tax cuts, opposed torture, sponsored the first cap-and-trade bill introduced in the Senate, flirted with joining the Democrats, passed a campaign-finance reform law, led the fight for comprehensive immigration reform and attacked the Christian Right. So why are so many commentators so certain that the heterodoxies of Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman will disqualify them?”
First of all, John McCain’s campaign collapsed and went broke before it was resurrected solely on the weakness of Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee as plausible opposition to either Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton. It’s not like McCain waltzed to the nomination. Secondly, Klein is forgetting that McCain weaponized The Stupid when he selected Sarah Palin as his running-mate, thereby forcing Republicans to defend the choice and every idiotic thing that came out of her head. The Republican Party has morphed from that moment into an organization with few traces of its former self. With T-Paw calling for a return to the Gold Standard and an imposition of a flat tax, Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman are their only real lifelines back to traditional Republicanism. That’s actually their best argument for being the nominee (“We’re not crazy”).
But crazy is what sells in Republican circles these days. While some think Obama will face a narrower path to election this time around, that is premised on him facing a traditional Republican, not some loon who advocates voucherizing Medicare.
