Five more years of crazy
by David Atkins
One of the worst things about Romney's impending lockup of the GOP nomination is that it ensures a minimum of five more years of increasing Republican extremism. It's no secret that the conservative base despises Romney with a passion. He will limp to "victory" in the GOP primary despite a consistent 60-65% of primary voters opposing him as an elitist liberal Massachusetts flip-flopper in the mold of John Kerry.
While I think that speculation about depressed Republican turnout in November as a consequence of Romney's nomination is overblown, what is certain is that win or lose, Republicans will blame their own failures on having nominated an insufficiently conservative standard bearer. If Romney loses to Obama, there will be recriminations galore. In the wake of 2004 where only a small cadre of progressives like myself believed that Howard Dean would have succeeded in beating Dubya where the more careful and conservative-leaning John Kerry failed, most Democrats figured that their loss in 2004 meant that they need to move even farther to the right. The only factor that mitigated that trend was the colossal failure of the Bush Administration, particularly in the wake of hurricane Katrina, that put the wind back in progressive sails in advance of 2006.
The opposite dynamic will play out amongst conservatives. The narrative will take hold that if the GOP had only nominated an honest-to-goodness fire-breathing conservative, they would have beaten in President Obama in 2012. They'll see no reason to concede even an inch, and will assume that their loss was a result of being too liberal.
If Romney does take the White House in 2012, the inevitable failure of his Administration will be laid at the feet of his supposedly liberal, big government leanings, in much the same way that George W. Bush has been recast as a bleeding heart, big spending compassionate conservative liberal.
The best thing that could happen to the country is for the GOP to nominate an arch-conservative, and then watch that candidate get obliterated in a crushing defeat. That would theoretically lead to a soul-searching retreat from the brink of Objectivist madness. But that's not going to happen, sadly. No matter the result in November, conservatives are going to careen even farther over the ideological cliff all the way through November 2016. Romney's inevitable nomination this year all but assures that.
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