Steve Benen reports that Bill Kristol is still casting about for late entries into the Presidential sweepstakes, and apparently Kristol’s not the only one:
This comes, by the way, a day after National Review’s Rich Lowry ran a piece quoting “a pretty prominent conservative officeholder,” who conceded that when it comes to the Republican Party and the 2012 presidential candidate, “[W]e don’t have our A team on the field.”
Which leads those of us out here in the hinterlands wondering: Precisely who is on that A team? This is a party, afte all, that has looked to people like Fred Thompson, and only recently, Rick Perry and Chris Christie as potential Messiahs. Christie may still be on the list, but only because he has declined to join the fray. A litte sunlight, and all these princes (and princesses) turn to frogs. I’m a partisan guy, no doubt, but I can recall a day when there were Republicans out there that I could imagine as president without simultaneously giving up hope for the republican (small “r”, there-an important distinction) experiment so bravely lauched by our sainted forefathers. Such people no longer exist. In twelve short years we have come from a point where we had to fear the presidency of a moron like George Bush to the point where a George Bush clone would look good by comparison with our other choices, and remember, by 2000 the choices were so bad that the media felt it necessary to try to turn John McCain into a man of principle. At such a time as this it was perhaps inevitable that only a chameleon like Romney could stand a chance to win as a Republican.
Bill Kristol bears more than a little responsibility for this state of affairs. It was he, to cite just one example, that first proposed Sarah Paln for the vice presidency. In typical fashion, he has never admitted how wrong he was, except implicitly by rejecting the current crop, few of whom are any worse than Sarah. The right may have marginalized the Republican party as a national presidential party. It can still win Congressional elections, of course, and given the Democrat’s startling ability to lose big in census years, it has the advantage of drawn to order districts. But so far as presidential elections go, where it’s fairly hard to hide the crazy, only Democratic incompetence or electoral fraud can save it. Unfortunately for the country neither of those commodities is in short supply.
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