Steve Benen has been pointing this out for a while:
This year is supposed to be a cycle ripe for the Republicans’ picking, but they’re stuck with a candidate they don’t really like, an agenda they can’t tout because the American mainstream would disapprove, and an opponent they consider awful, but unable to attack with legitimate attacks.
I think they could go after him with legitimate attacks, but for some reason they don’t really emphasize them. Instead, they make up crap about welfare and Medicare, and treat a centrist health care plan inspired by their own nominee as the second coming of the Bolshevist Revolution.
The GOP is really just high on their bullshit. That’s problem number one. Remember this from January 2010?
Mr. Obama told members of the House GOP at a Baltimore retreat that their decision to tell their constituents he is “going to destroy America” had made it virtually impossible for them to vote with Democrats on even moderate policies, at least if they didn’t want to jeopardize their reelection prospects.
Perhaps the most striking moment in the president’s appearance – which was reminiscent of a Prime Minister appearing before the British Parliament, though far more polite – was when the president complained that some Republicans had suggested his policies, which he cast as relatively moderate, were in service of a “Bolshevik plot.”
There was some applause following that comment – apparently not an endorsement of the president’s point, but rather the notion that he was, indeed, a Bolshevik. The moment seemed to point to the futility of the president’s message – the GOP is not suddenly going to start portraying Mr. Obama and the Democrats as moderate realists, especially when Republican Scott Brown’s victory in Massachusetts suggests the current strategy has been working just fine.
It did work fine for a while, particularly during the 2010 midterm elections. It worked for the extremely narrow purpose of winning elections, although plenty of Republican officeholders lost their careers in the resulting chaos, in spite of doing little to nothing to help the president. They lost to people who were high on the bullshit.
And that gets to problem number two. There really isn’t anything the GOP base agrees that the federal government should do aside from garrisoning the Middle East and Central Asia, and building a moat on the Mexican border. And, because Romney is so cautious and deferential to the base, he has no positive message. He has no message on education. He has no message on climate change. He has no alternate vision on foreign policy. He isn’t talking about veterans. He isn’t talking about Native American policy. He has nothing to say about prison reform. And he opposes all progressive change on social issues.
He can’t say what he wants the government to do. Close to 100% of his rhetoric is about what he wants the government to stop doing. They’ve delegitimized the federal government to such a degree that they can’t actually run it. They can’t even articulate a theory of how they’d run it.
That’s why we’re seeing a convention completely devoid of content. It’s also why they’re more comfortable telling lies than offering alternatives and honest criticism.
