Members of the GOP are still feeling pretty gloomy and despondent about their nominee, but they’re talking a good game:

Some Republicans are making the best of it by noting that the party’s conservative base will keep Romney’s feet to the fire and asserting that he’s largely a vessel.

“This is not Taft-Eisenhower or Goldwater-Rockefeller,” said anti-tax leader Grover Norquist, who said he feels better now about winning than he did a month ago. “We’re not nominating a candidate to tell the party what direction to go. All of them ran as Reagan Republicans. We know what we’re doing and who we are — we just want a guy to sign the bills.”

Put simply, “We’re electing a coach of a team that knows the plays,” Norquist said.

Grover is saying that Romney is more like Taft and Goldwater than he is like Eisenhower and Nelson Rockefeller. He’s not talking about President Taft. He’s talking about Robert Taft, a mid-century senator from Ohio who got shafted at the 1952 Republican National Convention.

The fight between Taft and Eisenhower for the GOP nomination was one of the closest and most bitter in American political history. When the Republican Convention opened in Chicago in July 1952, Taft and Eisenhower were neck-and-neck in delegate votes, and the nomination was still up for grabs as neither had a majority. On the convention’s first day, Eisenhower’s managers complained that Taft’s forces had unfairly denied Eisenhower supporters delegate slots in several Southern states, including Texas, where the state chairman, Orville Bullington, was committed to Taft, and also in Georgia. The Eisenhower partisans proposed to remove pro-Taft delegates in these states and replace them with pro-Eisenhower delegates; they called their proposal “Fair Play”. Although Taft angrily denied having stolen any delegate votes, the convention voted to support Fair Play 658 to 548, and the Texans voted 33-5 for Eisenhower as a result. In addition, several uncommitted state delegations, such as Michigan and Pennsylvania, agreed to support Eisenhower. There were rumors after the convention that the chairmen of these uncommitted states, such as Arthur Summerfield of Michigan, were secretly pressured by Dewey and the GOP’s Eastern Establishment to support Eisenhower; however, these rumors were never proved. (Summerfield did become Eisenhower’s Postmaster General.)

Eisenhower ran against Taft because Taft had opposed intervention in World War Two, had opposed the Nuremberg Trials, opposed the establishment of NATO, and didn’t see Joseph Stalin as a threat. He wasn’t exactly a Karl Rove-Republican. He probably resembles Ron Paul more than Ronald Reagan or Rick Santorum or any major modern figure in the Republican Party.

You probably know him indirectly through the Taft-Hartley Act which greatly reduced the power of labor unions.

In any case, Mitt Romney doesn’t resemble Taft. Nor does he remind anyone of Eisenhower or Nelson Rockefeller. He comes closest to resembling Barry Goldwater, although even that is a bit of stretch.

The main thing is that he’s seen as a vessel. He’s just there to sign the bills that the radical modern GOP puts on his desk. He’s a weak coach who lets the star players run the team. That’s how the Republicans are consoling themselves.