Politico observes in today's almost superfluous top story -- "President Obama looking a lot less beatable" -- that "aside from the traditional advantages of incumbency, Republicans are also fretting about the strength of Obama’s campaign infrastructure, the potential limitations of their own field and, particularly, the same demographic weaknesses that haunted them in 2008."
Were I a GOP strategist, none of those factors would unduly trouble me -- except the last.
Obama's incumbency is just one of those political facts of life, I'd say to myself; Republicans are hardly poor fundraisers and ever since Our Supreme Court redefined brute corporate muscle as free speech we're even better at it, I'd remind myself; and as for the "potential limitations" of our field? Come, come, we haven't fielded a competent candidate in quadrennial memory, yet somehow we've managed a pretty good record of victories.
But that last one, dear God that last one: "the same demographic weaknesses that [merely] haunted [us] in 2008" will seem like rabid Spielbergian poltergeists in 2012. By frightful 2016 and terrifying 2020 there's only the unspeakable beyond -- a geographically centripetal party, constituted more and more by fewer and fewer aging, cranky, Limbaugh-listening white guys with a fondness for dressing up as Confederate reenactors.
Said a tuned-in, former GOP "political operative," presently a congressman: "The electorate will look much different in 2012 than it did in 2010. It’s going to be younger, browner, and more to the left."
That's an assessment with which I'd have no quibble, though I'd refine the last component to, "less to the right." For years, Gallup's annual tracking has shown little shifting within the nation's ideological makeup; roughly 40 percent conservative, 20 percent liberal, the second-ranked remainder betwixt.
Notwithstanding these inescapable factors -- or so I'd say to myself -- what do we in the GOP do? You got it: We march farther and farther to the extreme right, we exalt our extremists, we celebrate and honor them, we hurl out of acceptable bounds any internal criticism of them and we thereby intensify our alienation of the young, the browns, the blacks, the women, the gays -- virtually anyone with an open mind and a heart yet to undergo bypass surgery.
What's more, the longer we stew in extremism the greater the odds we'll be marooned in 2012 and beyond by nothing but unelectable extremists as candidates. They'll be the only ones who can survive our extremist primaries.
That's what I'd say to myself, then I'd have a stiff drink.
For the GOP, 2012 presents unique problems. But for the longer term, its problems are characteristic and chronic.