Looking towards 2012

Not to be a killjoy, but I'm gradually coming around to the opinion that the Republicans are just as fated to win the 2012 election as the Democrats were the 2008 election. I remember spending most of 2008 assuring everyone that the fundamentals were so biased in favor of the Democrats that it pretty much didn't matter who they nominated - the election was in the bag. Now I'm seeing a pretty much mirror image of 2008.

Look at this way: the two likely nominees for the Republicans are Rick Perry and Mitt Romney. Mitt Romney would probably kill Obama in an election, but it's difficult to see how he defeats a credible candidate in the Republican primaries. As long as Perry doesn't self-destruct, I think he's pretty much a shoo-in to be the nominee. Now Perry will lose a bunch of moderate/swing voters, sure, but what people don't realize is that people like that only make up 5-10% of the voters. Given how mobilized I expect the Republicans to be, and how demotivated I expect the Democrats to be (thank Obama), it's hard to see how Perry loses enough votes to cost him the election. Unless the economy magically turns around, and I don't see how it will, we're going to get creamed next year.

The only way to stop somebody like Perry is to do what Harry Reid did to Sharron Angle. The problem is that Perry isn't the Angle of this race - Michelle Bachman is. Sure, Perry has radical views on lots of subjects, but to fully exploit them you'd need a concerted, aggressive, and utterly ruthless negative campaign. Now tell me, do you really think Obama is the kind of politician to run that sort of race? If so, why didn't he do it against the Republicans in 2010? Or for that matter in 2009?

So I think that the best bet in 2012 is the election of a hard-right Republican President with a hard-right Republican Senate and a hard-right Republican House. Wheeee.