Late yesterday, James Carville offered his take on the quality of the Republican primary field. In his usual blunt style, he denounces the current crop of GOP candidates as "a joke."
Now you are saying, "There goes that crazy Cajun again calling the opposition a joke." I can hear the men in wool sport coats with suede elbow patches scratching their chins. There is a collective harrumph from the "it's time to tone down the rhetoric" crowd of people. Before you condemn my rather provocative adjective in describing the Republican field, please consider the following:
1. It is undeniably the duty of the opposition party to field a credible slate of candidates for the nation's highest office. It is particularly important that they do so in times of national distress (and this certainly qualifies as such).
2. This situation in modern times is most analogous to the presidential primaries of 1980. To justify my deeming the Republican field an absolute joke I have compiled a list of comparable candidates for your reading pleasure. This battle of résumés proves incredibly entertaining -- feel free to indulge.
Carville then compares the three current top-tier candidates to the top tier of the 1980 Repub field. Follow me below the jump for the juicier tidbits.
Carville starts out by comparing Romney to Reagan. While Reagan was at least consistent (if consistently wrong), Romney is "an ideological pretzel of a man." Translation from Carvillese--he's a man who will say absolutely anything to get to the White House.
Rick Perry, in Carville's eyes, is a guy who "literally can't string two sentences together"--presumably because he didn't get a whole lot of sleep. He doesn't see Perry filling the shoes of his closest 1980 counterpart, Bush Sr. Michele Bachmann isn't likely to be a candidate for a Medal of Freedom any time soon, unlike Howard Baker. While Bob Dole was a war hero, Herman Cain is known for making bad pizza.
In Carville's view, it's pretty telling that the two candidates he sees as most reasonably qualified, Jon Huntsman and Newt Gingrich, have zero chance at the nomination.