![\"\"](\"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/files\/2012\/02\/doomsday.jpg\" "\\"doomsday\\"")
2012 Doomsday<\/p><\/div>This Sunday, I want to roll out what I see as the end-time-worst-case forecast for the Republican Party, as we march deeper into the 2012 elections.\u00a0 (Next week, I’ll do a similar think-aloud about scenarios that should keep Democrats awake at night.)<\/p>\n
So here’s how 2012 could go deeply, terribly wrong for the GOP:<\/p>\n
A HEALTHY ECONOMY<\/p>\n
By most mainstream measures, the economy has been trending upward for the last two years.\u00a0 Unemployment just dropped again and if Mr. Obama catches a break, we could be down below 8% by election day.<\/p>\n
There are signs the hopeful trend could be accelerating.<\/p>\n
If this continues, the doom-and-gloom scenario offered by Republicans, including Mitt Romney, will sound, well, doom-and-gloomy.\u00a0 Most politics-watchers will tell you that American voters prefer optimism to sky-is-falling rhetoric.<\/p>\n
But it could be very difficult for Mr. Romney to tweak or nuance his message, because the Republican base is wedded to the idea that this administration is an anti-capitalist juggernaut, eager to doom free enterprise.<\/p>\n
They don’t want better ideas for running the country.\u00a0 They want an indictment of a rogue regime.<\/p>\n
DITCHING ROMNEY<\/p>\n
If the right-wingers who make up the GOP’s core think their candidate is waffling (again) on his red meat message, we could see real disaffection come November.\u00a0 Worst case scenario?\u00a0 A full scale-revolt.<\/p>\n
Remember, the right loves to thrash Democrats.\u00a0 But they love to punish moderate Republicans even more.<\/p>\n
If the Republican candidate is Mr. Romney, this eventuality is made more plausible by the fact that he is a Mormon.\u00a0 His faith is viewed with deep distrust, bordering on real animus, by many within the evangelical movement.<\/p>\n
(A late January poll in Florida found that four out of ten likely Republican voters either think Mormons aren’t Christians or they “aren’t sure.”)<\/p>\n
A collapse in confidence at the top of the ticket could bring a cascade of damage in congressional races around the country, not least because the GOP brand is already in bad shape.<\/p>\n
A COLLAPSING BRAND<\/p>\n
Consider this:\u00a0 A poll issued last week by NBC and the Wall Street Journal found that Barack Obama has a net positive public image of +11 — meaning he’s liked more than he’s disliked by a significant margin.<\/p>\n
The closest Republican on the list?\u00a0 That was Rick Santorum, who scored an anemic -1.\u00a0 Mitt Romney was at -5 and the Republican Party as a whole was -13, two points below the Occupy Wall Street Movement.<\/p>\n
(The Tea Party movement, by the way, scored a net negative rating of -15.)<\/p>\n
That means the GOP is already on very thin ice with key swing voting groups, including independents and Hispanics.<\/p>\n
Their dissatisfaction could be sharpened disastrously by the fact that the party has entered 2012 with a gaggle of bizarre and potentially discrediting hangers-on.<\/p>\n
These days, Sarah Palin seems downright stateswoman-like.\u00a0 The Hermain Cain-Donald Trump-Michelle Bachman weirdness of the Republican primary took things to a whole new level.<\/p>\n
And it’s not just on the fringes.\u00a0 Just last week, Team Romney apparently thought it was a good idea to have their guy endorsed publicly by Mr. Trump.<\/p>\n
A public embrace from a man who ranks near the Kardashians on America’s pop-culture scale isn’t exactly a surefire way to look reassuringly presidential.<\/p>\n
And because conservative power is rapidly fragmenting into a constellation of media empires, Super-PACs, and powerful personalities (the Koch brothers, Karl Rove, Rupert Murdoch, Trump etc.) it will be difficult to put that mess back in a box again.<\/p>\n
A RESURGENT BARACK OBAMA<\/p>\n
But in an everything-goes-wrong election, it won’t just be Republicans bungling.\u00a0 It will also mean that Mr. Obama will find his voice again as a politician.<\/p>\n
And there are signs that this could be happening.\u00a0 After two years of professorial rhetoric, he is once again tossing off zingers like “Don’t muck it up.”<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, conservative efforts to defund Planned Parenthood, strip unions of collective bargaining rights, and roll back gay rights could mobilize, energize, and unify Mr. Obama’s base.<\/p>\n
LONG-TERM DAMAGE?<\/p>\n
S0 let’s sum up.<\/p>\n
In a worst-case scenario year, Republicans could emerge into the national spotlight with a weak presidential candidate that no one really likes very much.<\/p>\n
Their standard-bearer could be surrounded at the Republican National Convention by a zany cast of supporting characters with a menu of gloomy, out-there ideas.\u00a0 (Gold standard, anyone?\u00a0 A new moonbase, maybe?\u00a0 How about mass deportation of undocumented workers?)<\/p>\n
That b-list team could find itself facing a strong, energized incumbent president, who by contrast looks steady, competent, optimistic and grounded in the problems of average Americans.<\/p>\n
If everything goes wrong for the GOP, the outcome will be four more years of Barack Obama, which could well mean that he gets one more pick to the Supreme Court.<\/p>\n
But it could also mean a Republican majority in the House whittled down sharply, as well as continued Democratic majorities in the Senate.<\/p>\n
Perhaps most importantly, we could see the long-term alienation of crucial voter blocks (Hispanics, independent women, young people) that will shape American politics for generations to come.<\/p>\n
(Next weekend in doomsday scenarios:\u00a0 What if the Occupy movement occupies the Democratic convention?)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I’ve been on the road this week, listening to a lot of conservative talk radio, […]<\/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\/5475"}],"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=5475"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5475\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5477,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5475\/revisions\/5477"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5475"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5475"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5475"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}