Paul Krugman writes:
Steve Benen notes that by normal standards, Mitt Romney is a terrible candidate — but just not as bad as his rivals. He adds, “I often wonder what the race for the Republican nomination would look like this year if Romney had just one credible opponent.” But that wasn’t going to happen! The weakness of the GOP field is not an accident.
I view the primary race through the lens of the FOF theory — that’s for “fools and frauds”. It goes as follows: to be a good Republican right now, you have to affirm your belief in things that any halfway intelligent politician can see are plainly false. This leaves room for only two kinds of candidates: those who just aren’t smart and/or rational enough to understand the problem, and those who are completely cynical, willing to say anything to get ahead.
What sort of things am I talking about? They range from the belief that Obama is a socialist who will destroy America with his dastardly Heritage Foundation devised health care plan, to the belief that unemployment is high because lazy people prefer their unemployment insurance checks. On budget matters, you have to claim to believe that we can cut taxes sharply, maintain high military spending, and eliminate the deficit — all without upsetting those Republican-voting Medicare recipients. Notice that in the end, when it came to budget claims, even the supposedly hard-headed types — (cough) Paul Ryan (cough) — ended up relying on gigantic magic asterisks.
So what you have are fairly dim types like Perry, on the one side, and the utterly cynical Romney, on the other. (Gingrich manages to be both a fool and a fraud). Maybe, just maybe, the GOP could have found someone able to achieve Romney-level cynicism while coming across as sincere; but political talent on that level is quite rare. I mean, the various non-crazy-non-Romneys who were supposed to have a shot all turned out to be duds, e.g. Pawlenty.
The weakness of the GOP field is, in short, structural. Without the still-terrible economy, they wouldn’t have a chance.
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Its sort of an open secret in the U.S. is that one of the two parties will intentionally run candidates who are unelectable for some reason against each other's incumbents. Often this is just for tactical reasons, the chances of unseating the incumbent is so low that there is no point throwing resources in the race, but it occurs far more often than it would if the only reasons for the practice was tactical.
ReplyDeleteBut this usually was not the case for the big executive positions, governor and president. In recent years, we have been seeing this practice being used more for governor and president. The 2012 Republican primary is a case in point. In other words, Krugman is saying the Republican field is weak because the Republican supporters are crazy, but an alternative and stronger explanation is that they are intentionally throwing the race.