This morning, on CNN's "State of the Union," Michele Bachmann candidly and accurately summarized her party's collective transcendence of Ronald Reagan's sunny, can-do optimism:
There is no future, there is no hope with President Obama having a second term.
Where does one go from there? When apocalyptic finality becomes your party's core message, nothing else matters -- everything hinges on that singular potential.
What should we do about taxes, entitlements, energy independence, as well as nuclear proliferation and the South Pacific and Afghanistan? Such questions are insignificant, in fact they're immaterial. Because, remember? With a two-term Obama -- which there will be -- there is no hope, no future. It's all over. It's all over; there's no point in discriminating between the little all-overs and the big all-overs. It is all, all of it, over. There's to be no hope. And no future.
And it can't get any uniformly bleaker than that.
When the doom fails to materialize, as it will, the uninebriated, majority portion of the 2016 electorate will pause to watch Joe Biden's presidential campaign ads. He'll need only one: that one clip, from 2012, when Michele Bachmann appeared on CNN's "State of the Union" to summarize her party's self-dooming transcendence of Ronald Reagan's optimism -- that under a reelected Obama, there will be no future.