Someone once something like, “When they look in the mirror, every senator sees a president.” But it doesn’t sound like many of the Senate Republicans believe it. To hear them tell it, everyone hates the Senate and, anyway, senators have no executive experience and aren’t even qualified to run the country. Plus, they’re way too long-winded and inept at retail politics.
Of course, the real problem is that senators like Chuck Grassley and Orrin Hatch take one look at Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, or Marco Rubio and they know they will be obliterated in a national election. Lack of overall experience is one problem. Lack of gravitas is another. Radicalism is a third. Regional deficits are a fourth. Inability to unite the party is a fifth. Being gaffe-prone is a sixth. You have to get pretty far down the list before you get to any particular problem with being a senator. After all, their voting records are just a subset of their radicalism. It’s the policies that they’d propose that are the main problem.
People talk a lot about the Tea Party vs. the Establishment, but the GOP has an Electoral College problem. If your problem is that you’re getting killed in Northern Virginia and the Philly suburbs, nominating a social conservative is a bad idea, and I don’t care if you’re talking about an ex-governor from Arkansas, a current governor from Louisiana, or senators from Texas, Kentucky, or Florida. When the Democrats had an Electoral College problem they overcame it with Democratic governors from Georgia and Arkansas, not Oregon and Vermont. And both Carter and Clinton kept their distance from the fringes of their own party, rather than trying to be the most liberal members in the country.
The problem is primarily that conservatism doesn’t sell as a national ideology. It’s not enough to nominate someone from Wisconsin if that candidate is an extreme conservative. I can almost guarantee you that Sen. Susan Collins of Maine would win more states than Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin.
