Four years ago, I wrote a post on Daily Kos suggesting that Mitt Romney was about as good a candidate as the Republican Party could hope for. Not that I thought that Romney would be a good President, just that he was insincere and shifty enough, and able to say whatever he needed to say in a reasonably convincing way whenever he needed to, that he might be able to get elected, And I felt that was the best the party could expect to do.
A couple of comments on that post suggested that I was wrong, that Jeb Bush or Chris Christie would be more formidable, and that they were waiting for a better chance in 2016. But the failures of Bush and Christie illustrate the real problem with finding a standard bearer for the Grand Old Party.
You can't choose a reasonable, decent, rational person to lead an unreasonable, indecent, irrational organization. And the Republican Party has gone so far off the rails that anyone left to claim the leadership is deeply, fundamentally flawed in too many ways to convince the American people that he or she should be President. Not that either Bush or Christie is the epitome of reasonable, decent, or rational, but even they were judged by the raging right to have just a bit too much of those qualities, and they were kicked to the curb pretty quickly in the primaries. Anyone with enough good qualities that they deserve to be elected will be swiftly eliminated from consideration by Republican primary voters.
What's funny is, in that post four years ago, I listed the non-Romney Republican candidates in a loose order of viability: Pawlenty, Perry, Santorum, Gingrich, Huntsman, Bachmann, Cain, Trump. Then I said maybe Sarah Palin should go ahead of Bachmann, three spaces ahead of Trump. Times change, and yet, Trump is no more of a legitimate presidential candidate than he was a few years ago, back when he was the Birther in Chief and said Republicans were making a mistake letting the issue of Obama's birth go because "people love this issue." Yeah he said that -- let's just keep saying this same stupid, stupid, utterly stupid shit, because people love it. Even Herman Cain knew better than that.
To look at it another way, to get elected, a Republican presidential candidate has to believe, or pretend to believe, most or all of the following:
- Obamacare was the worst thing to happen since Hitler, or maybe slavery. Yes, extending health care coverage to 20 million people was such an egregious abuse that it has to be stopped at all costs, and let's get all of those people back to being uninsured again as soon as we can.
- Women should not have a choice in reproductive matters and, by extension, I should have a right to shove my religion down your throat. Because it's really all about God and how much he hates pregnant women.
- The government should help the rich get richer, because that helps everyone, and it should make the poor poorer, because that will make the poor try harder.
- Global warming is a hoax, or "I understand climate science better than those fancy climate scientists with their PhD's and their sophisticated computer models and their truckloads of evidence and their decades of research."
- We should balance the budget by lowering taxes and increasing military spending.
And so on and so on.
But then there is another job requirement: Must be able to convince the American people that you are the right choice to lead the country. And therein lies the problem, and it is only getting worse: You can act like a nutcase and convince the Republican base to vote for you (this we know), or you can appear sane and competent and convince the American people that you will be a good President. But man, it will take some sort of incredible trick to do both.