The GOP really, really needs Rick Perry

With Perry sinking like the Dow, a less desirable outcome's odds are rising. Rick Perry would have been the ideal nominee to sober up and thereby sever the contemporary GOP -- permanently.

If Mitt Romney wins the nomination, as is now likely, the far right, also known as the Tea Party, will scream that the party's candidate lost to President Obama only because the party failed to nominate a true conservative (which in reality Tea Partiers wouldn't know from a Bolshevik). This disgruntlement over what they'll interpret as a lost opportunity will motivate the extremists to remain in the two-party system and work to further radicalize the Republican Party, especially for 2016. Some will splinter off in 2013, if not before, yet enough could easily remain entrenched in the GOP to hold the party line farther to the right.

A Perry nomination, on the other hand, would serve up all the far-right radicalism the radicals could ever want. The above excuse-making would be invalidated. And in the bloody aftermath of a Perry-led GOP's crushing defeat to Obama, the party's moderates -- and they are out there -- would coalesce to brutally oust the extremists. Thus the creation of a more structurally cohesive Tea Party of the formal third-party species. In other words, political irrelevance and permanent obscurity.

Either route, however, poses a long-term danger to the Democratic Party. The party would weaken in the absence of a strong, unified opposition, as American political history has repeatedly shown. It will take time for the GOP to reorganize and resettle itself as a respectable party of authentic conservative grounding; and in that time the Democratic Party, too, will further splinter.

It's as plain as reading a road map.

Comments

[Robert Lipscomb]

My sense is that in spite of themselves, the 2012 presidential candidates will have one of the most honest and candid debates in decades.

Obama is already saying he wants to tax the rich and increase spending. My sense is that Obama has reached the Rubicon aand decided that if he can't be the president he wants to be, he would rather not have the job anyway.

The Tea Party will compel their candidate to say they want to end Medicare, give up on Social Security, give tax cuts to the rich and generally end the federal government.

Maybe the electorate will have a clear choice for once. Maybe the Tea Party will win. If so, it reminds me of a Bible verse, "He (God) gave them over to their sin."

[CK MacLeod]

I see what you're saying RL, but, though I sympathize with you and with our honorable host as well, I think the odds are much better that Romney, Perry, or whoever will run away from any dream of ending such cherished programs, that they will instead attempt to cast themselves as true defenders of the Entitlement Faith, and that the TP bubble will either pop or be shunted aside.

There's a lot of potential turbulence in the world system right now, and more than any other country "we are the world." If it's a conventional post-WW2 American election, then O would presumably be in big trouble. If it's an election not just on the cusp of change, but well into the first episodes in new era aborning, then all of our presumptions about what and how elections are decided, and what they even mean, may be put in question.

The Tea Partiers may be wrong about almost everything, but right about the well-nigh apocalyptic stakes for the American political system. What they don't quite understand is that they're more a symptom, almost the illness itself and certainly part of the syndrome, rather than anything like a cure. Put differently: The Christian Right believes we need to be punished for our sins, and is happy to become the scourge.

I know PM is a fan of Gordon Wood, whose work suggests that the same contradictions faced by Jackson, Lincoln, Wilson, Roosevelt, and now Obama were already present, vividly, during the period of the founding. That insight suggests to me that the real conflict must lie even deeper, and that understanding it calls for just the philosophical and even theological resources whose lack exposes the poverty of our incredibly wealthy civilization.

[Chris Andersen]

I think you are overestimated the rationality of the Tea Party.

[Robert Lipscomb]

The GOP has become a Hollywood movie. The rich kid dates the poor girl. He feeds her bullshit about really loving her and that he really will marry. The rich kid knows he is bullshitting, but eventually she really believes him.

Even then it would only be mildly dramatic when he dumps her at the end of summer. She would quietly go back to her friends, humiliated and embarrassed.

But ...

Just as he is dumping her, she learns she is pregnant. So, instea of just going away, she goes psycho.

That part of the GOP that is now going under the banner of the Tea Party has been bullshitted for 40 years. But they really believed the bullshit. They will not quietly go away. They will go psycho when the rich kid tells them he has been bullshitting them.

[MinneapolisPipe]

PM,

Let's see how the actual primaries go...

Remember when Howard Dean was leading the pack? Or that time when the charlatan John Edwards was considered a viable presidential candidate.

Right now, it's just debates. They need to go out and get actual votes before they're crowned.

[rikyrah]

Remember when Howard Dean was leading the pack? Or that time when the charlatan John Edwards was considered a viable presidential candidate.

Right now, it's just debates. They need to go out and get actual votes before they're crowned.

Posted by: MinneapolisPipe

MP,

we will be entering OCTOBER in under five days.

I know that the GOP Clown Car looks jumbled, but I thought about it, and compared it to October 2007.

If it had been October 2007, and Democrats were STILL looking for someone to ' enter the race'.

The Iowa Caucus is in JANUARY. that's in 2 months.

the GOP is STILL looking for someone...