Conservatives in Disarray; Republicans Just Too Liberal

This letter was the first one I read in the NY Post yesterday-

"Michelle Malkin has hit the nail on the head: Not only does Mike Huckabee sound like a Democrat, but all of the candidates running for president from the Republican Party sound like Democrats ("GOP Border Baloney," PostOpinion, Dec. 12).

It's getting harder to tell the parties apart.

What has happened to Republicans today?

Why do they think that they must sound and act like Democrats in order to receive the nomination for president?"

Yes, the problem with modern Republicans is that... they're too moderate or liberal??! Please someone tell me that the Post editors simply forget to mention that the letter was written by a Mr. "S. Colbert".

All this Huckabee hatred (now fueled by the party establishment) shouldn't shock me. Here is what Time's Joe Klein observed at a GOP focus group during a recent debate-

"Now, for the uninitiated: dials are little hand-held machines that enable a focus group member to register instantaneous approval or disapproval as the watch a candidate on TV...

...In the next segment--the debate between Romney and Mike Huckabee over Huckabee's college scholarships for the deserving children of illegal immigrants--I noticed something really distressing: When Huckabee said, "After all, these are children of God," the dials plummeted. And that happened time and again through the evening: Any time any candidate proposed doing anything nice for anyone poor, the dials plummeted (30s). These Republicans were hard.

But there was worse to come: When John McCain started talking about torture--specifically, about waterboarding--the dials plummeted again. Lower even than for the illegal Children of God. Down to the low 20s, which, given the natural averaging of a focus group, is about as low as you can go...

The members of the group were overwhelmingly white. There were two Latinos. They seemed nice, concerned, relatively well informed and entirely intolerant citizens."

Somewhere, Dwight Eisenhower is rolling over in, and punching, his grave.

I am really not sure what these people want. Whereas Democrats are trying to pick their favorite out of an interesting field of quality candidates, the Republicans are just depressed about their options (I have a few Republican friends; they really do feel deflated).

But why? The Romneys and Giulianis and others have spent the past year or so moving farther and farther to the right (less so with Huckabee, he's always been there) to satisfy them, using increasingly insane rhetoric along the way. And it's still not enough. Short of running a Zombie Reagan-Sean Hannity ticket, what do these people want?

As Andrew Sullivan loves to point out, the GOP created this monster ("Rove's Frankenstein", he calls it) and now the chicken is coming home to roost. They cultivated a bare-minimum base out of many of America's more extreme political elements (religious fundamentalists, military hawks, anti-tax zealots, nativists and bigots, etc) and, as a short-term strategy, it worked. But now, with so much in trouble-- the economy, foreign policy, etc-- Americans are looking to the future, looking for progress and rationality. And the GOP is trapped.

They're not finished by any chance, but for now I'm enjoying watching the most divisive majority in American history spiral downwards.