This week Mitt Romney is playing Mr. Nice Guy at rallies--"Look, I know the president cares about America and the people of this country. He just doesn't know how to help them. I do"--a few seemingly innocuous lines which, however, as BuzzFeed notes, have "profoundly confused his most ardent supporters."
This phenomenon is truly fascinating. We are witnessing the post-cultivation of mass psychosis in real time. Romney and Gingrich and Bachmann and other GOP primary dwarfs as well as Fox News and right-wing talk radio have invested four years in the filthy delusionization of their base. Now, just as opportunistically and unsentimentally, the last man standing--Mitt Romney--is watching it devour his chances of promotion, and so he's throwing and grinding every tactical gear in reverse.
But of course it can't be done. Just as they required months and even years to engender, such seething, mad hatreds don't evaporate on command. Observes BuzzFeed:
Every time he tried to assert that Obama cares about America, some members of the audience interrupted with boos and insistent shouts of "No!" By his last rally, he had apparently learned his lesson, rushing through the pro-Obama part of the line so the eventual applause would drown out the resistance.
The GOP's worst problem hasn't even yet kicked in. Losing this election will be a holiday picnic compared to the massive headache the party will suffer afterward: how to retain within its fold these millions of raging paranoids, as a recovering base, while proceeding to reorganize itself as a responsible player in American governance.
It may be that this proves impossible--that the paranoids will retain unshakable control, hence surviving moderates will be forced to establish a third-party outpost (I don't think they can take another of these monstrosities); or perhaps the moderates will seize control and banish the paranoids, but to roughly the same ill effect. That is, the paranoids would move to a third party, thus stripping the GOP of its deranged, but essential, base.
Either way, the Republican Party has come as close to realizing Thomas Jefferson's nightmare of holding a wolf by the ears as any party since the 1850s.