Reading the day-after quarterbacking on the Romney-Gingrich (or “Newt-Mitt”) face-off in South Carolina, I detect a certain amount of denial.<\/p>\n
A lot of America’s punditry corps want this primary race to look like Bush vs. McCain in 2000 or Obama vs. Clinton in 2008 or even Rockefeller vs. Goldwater in 1964.<\/p>\n
They want it to follow historic patterns.\u00a0 How many times can they tell us that South Carolina has picked the eventual Republican nominee every year since 1980?<\/p>\n
But I think it’s time to nod at the fact that this one looks different — really<\/em> different — for three reasons.<\/p>\n The first is the demise of the Republican Party as a monolithic institution.<\/p>\n The rise of independent tea party-like groups, the emergence of powerful media institutions like Fox and Rush Limbaugh, the ascendancy of free-operating conservative personalities like Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich, and the legalization of Super PACs with unlimited spending power have all eroded the ability of the GOP to control its destiny.<\/p>\n Yes, the vast majority of Republican leaders want Mitt Romney, and they bear deep distrust for Newt Gingrich.\u00a0 But the choice has been taken out of their hands.<\/p>\n Which leads us to the second issue:\u00a0 There is no longer such thing as a “Republican voter.”<\/p>\n In three contests so far, voters in different parts of the US have given dramatically different levels of support to very different candidates.<\/p>\n The regional and ideological factions that make up the conservative base are so far apart on the issues that it’s hard to call it “a” base anymore.\u00a0 Call it the legs of a stool.\u00a0 Or the legs of a centipede.\u00a0 Or the roots of a tree.<\/p>\n Voters in Iowa and New Hampshire laughed at Newt Gingrich.\u00a0 Voters in South Carolina crowned him.<\/p>\n Keeping all those moving parts together would be challenging even for a strong party apparatus.\u00a0 But that apparatus simply doesn’t exist.<\/p>\n Which leads us to the final factor:\u00a0 The candidates.<\/p>\n Each of the leading GOP contenders can boast a narrow, niche appeal (“Santoum=evangelicas,” “Romney=establishment,” “Gingrich=Southern voters” and so on) and they all have the resources to keep muddling forward.<\/p>\n But none has offered a broad, unifying message that will put everyone on anything like the same page.<\/p>\n What’s more, they all have enormous political flaws and weaknesses as candidates. Watch Mitt Romney talk about his taxes, or Newt Gingrich talking about his role in history, and you’ll see what I mean.<\/p>\n Yes, a Ronald Reagan could probably put all the pieces together again.\u00a0 But none of these guys are anywhere near his caliber.\u00a0 In contrast with this slate, George W. Bush really was a uniter.<\/p>\n So what’s the takeaway?\u00a0 The takeaway is that we don’t know what the takeaway is.\u00a0 This one’s different.<\/p>\n A conservative movement that hoped to be focused like a laser beam on unseating Barack Obama has instead embarked on a costly, muddled journey into uncharted waters.<\/p>\n In a way, I suspect, we’re still watching a painful evolution that began with heavy GOP losses in 2006, when the old Republican Party was wiped out — and 2008 when John McCain was defeated handily.<\/p>\n Conservative victories in 2010 helped to disguise the fact that the rebuilding effort, in many regions, has led to more factionalism, more division, and to louder calls for ideological purity.<\/p>\n All of those problems are resurfacing now.<\/p>\n The GOP’s next venture into terra incognita takes place in Florida.\u00a0\u00a0 Anyone who says they know what will happen there is full of baloney.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Reading the day-after quarterbacking on the Romney-Gingrich (or “Newt-Mitt”) face-off in South Carolina, I detect […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[6548,6550,20],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5400"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5400"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5400\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5401,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5400\/revisions\/5401"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5400"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5400"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5400"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}