There's something a trifle uninspiring about a presidential campaign that promises us a "slog," but that's just what Mitt Romney & Co. is doing.
Casting himself as more guerilla fighter than Zig Ziglar motivator in the impending torment of yet another GOP psychiatric triage, also known as a Republican primary season, Romney hopes to slither through Iowa and South Carolina virtually unnoticed. This, for Mormon Romney, will not be difficult. In thus avoiding those particular guns of January and early February, he'll simultaneously wow them in New Hampshire -- a state populated by stoic multitudes not known for their wowability -- and then really get rolling in Florida. Such is his plan.
If all this sounds eerily Giulianiesque to you, you're not alone. "Mindful of Rudy Giuliani’s wait-until-Florida strategic disaster," reports Politico, "Team Mitt knows they must do well or at least meet expectations in the initial races to stay in the conversation."
Ay, and there's the rub. I, personally, have a better chance of landing on Jim DeMint's Christmas card list than Mitt Romney has of doing well in Iowa and South Carolina; indeed, should Romney actually "meet expectations" there, no matter how flat he attempted to stomp them, his next authentic run could be not in '12, but '16.
We know Romney has the money to sustain himself (one is tempted to insert "artificially" before sustain), but what about, uh, Republican primary voters? GOP and former McCain strategist Mike Murphy acknowledges that "It’s a long march," but then spins the tale that "eventually [Romney] is the candidate who resonates with the bulk of regular Republicans as the lesser candidates fall away."
Back to the rub: Other than as a mob of birthers and theocrats and tea partiers, how should one define "regular Republicans" -- that is, those who clutch primary ballots or attend caucus covens these days? There remain those spiritual Wilkie and Eisenhower Republicans, of course, yet many have drifted in horror at the recent GOP to independent territory (which in some states bars them from casting primary ballots). And whoever is left of conservative normality that the party itself hasn't run off, the GOP's presidential candidates do so in their near exclusive pandering to the birthers and theocrats and tea partiers -- which drives the quite unfashionable and older-school regular Republicans both crazy and out of the process.
What's more, it appears Michele Bachmann will be on hand throughout this go-around to herd the entire psychiatric enterprise into the outer far-right ditch. Every time poor Tim Pawlenty thinks he's gone sufficiently nuts to vastly appeal to the very basest of the primary base, someone like Bachmann comes along and lowers the damn bar again.
But I've faith in Mr. Pawlenty. He seems to possess even fewer principles worth defending than Mitt Romney. Soon, I'm certain, he'll hunker in a serious way -- perhaps salute South Carolina for having taken the lead in ridding this nation of slavery, as well as praise Iowa for its steadfast and pioneering abhorrence of Mau Mauism.
I remain equally convinced, however, that someday some GOP presidential field will lead an insurrection against its own madness; that the candidates will collectively announce that enough is enough; that they simply cannot get any cateringly crazier or sink any panderingly lower and it's time to rebuild; that it's time to cashier the fundamentalists and utopians and nihilists and psychiatric ideologues; that it's time to re-alight in reality.
I am immensely thankful, however, that they have chosen to merely triage again in 2012.