I am yet to see a more fitting description of the Republican quandary.
Fox News has earned it's dividend in the GOP.
Thank you Harold! Enjoy!
-Laye

When Your Base Is Nuts
In today’s Republican Party, the truth shall set you down, and out.
Harold Meyerson | June 8, 2011


By any normal measure, 2012 should be a political year in which
Republicans are fairly flocking to run for president. The economy
remains weaker than at any time since the 1930s. Corporate profits
have recovered smartly, but the economic indices that measure the
lives of ordinary Americans — unemployment rates, wage levels,
consumer confidence — remain obdurately dismal. President Barack Obama
has not laid out any plausible new plans to extend the recovery from
Wall Street to Main Street. When Election Day rolls around next
November, unemployment is almost certain to be higher than the level
at which incumbent presidents can usually win re-election.

The GOP presidential field is more notable for who’s not running than
for who is. Yet the shrinking Republican presidential field is more
notable for who’s not running—Mike Huckabee, Mitch Daniels, Haley
Barbour, John Thune, Chris Christie, Jeb Bush, and, lest we forget,
the Donald—than for who is. Each of the non-entrants has reasons for
not taking the plunge, many of them compelling. But a larger general
barrier looms for any sentient Republican contemplating a candidacy:
Today’s Republican Party is so whacked, so loony, so fey in the attic,
that winning its nomination requires taking positions that will render
the nominee unelectable come November 2012.

Thus, the Republicans who actually are running or still thinking it
over fall into two categories: those who have functioned with some
success in real-world politics and are now scurrying to repudiate
their previous accommodations with reality, and those who have been
Mad Hatters at the tea party all along. Some candidates have a foot in
each camp: Newt Gingrich is probably responsible for more
non-reality-based allegations than anyone else in the Republican field
(that may simply be a function of his longevity), but he knew enough
to recognize that Paul Ryan’s decimation of Medicare would never fly.
His mistake was saying so publicly—a position that so inflamed
Republican base voters he had to repudiate it (and, Newt being Newt,
he threatened to attack anyone who dared to quote his initial
criticism, claiming they would be speaking “a falsehood”).

In today’s Republican Party, the truth shall set you down, and out.

With one striking exception, the campaigns of those candidates who’ve
actually shown an ability to win centrist voters have already become
cascades of renunciations. In the very first GOP presidential debate,
Tim Pawlenty felt compelled to apologize for once having believed in
climate change and supporting cap-and-trade legislation. Jon Huntsman
also backed cap-and-trade when he, like Pawlenty, was a governor, and
he too, according to The Boston Globe, has now changed his position as
well as second-guessed his support for Obama’s 2009 economic stimulus.
Mitt Romney has continued to defend the health-care plan he signed
into law in Massachusetts (that’s the striking exception) but attacks
Obama for extending that plan to the other 49 states.

And the game has only just begun. The Tea-Partified Republicans of
Iowa and South Carolina, without whose support winning the nomination
will be all but impossible, still lay in wait for Pawlenty, Huntsman,
and Romney (and making their road steeper yet, the latter two are
Mormons, a religion that many evangelicals consider non-Christian).
Will the Real-World Three toe the party line on scrapping Medicare
(Pawlenty already has), collective bargaining, stem-cell research, and
the Pythagorean theorem? No such agonizing choices await the Mad
Hatter candidates, of course. Rick Santorum, Herman Cain, Gary
Johnson, and Ron Paul are free to indulge the fantasies of Republican
base voters with no fear of compromising their nonexistent chances of
winning the White House. In the wings await the Hatters who actually
have a following: Michele Bachmann and — now back touring the country
and about as welcome to Republican professionals as Banquo’s ghost —
the ineffable Sarah Palin.

How did the Republican Party become at once so insular and unmoored
that winning its presidential nod requires an extremism that would
give Barry Goldwater the creeps? Many are responsible for the
Republicans’ descent into madness, but pride of place surely goes to
Fox News chair Roger Ailes, the onetime Nixon aide who created a
counterfactual network that in turn helped create a counterfactual
Republican Party. Ailes, we now learn from a recent article in New
York Magazine, despairs over the current crop of Republican
candidates, but he has no one more to blame than himself for driving
more electable Republicans from the race. The man who gave Palin (as
well as Huckabee, Santorum, and Gingrich) a regular gig at Fox,
according to one Republican close to Ailes who’s quoted in the
article, now thinks “Palin is an idiot. He thinks she’s stupid.”

But take a bow, Roger; that’s the Republican field you’ve built.

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