The GOP After Daniels and After 2012

Michael Grunwald has a piece in Time Magazine that looks at the state of the GOP in the wake of Mitch Daniels' announcement that he will not seek the GOP nomination for the 2012 election. Grunwald goes on to speculate as to where the GOP will be post 2012 - particularly if the GOP candidate loses to Obama. As a former Republican, I can speak personally to being driven away by the party's growing extremism - something that Grunwald believes will intensify if Obama wins re-election. Personally, I believe that the best long term solution for the GOP is to have the party go down to crushing defeat enough times for the rational few in the party (admittedly an ever declining number) to stage a coup and retake the party from the Christian Taliban and Tea Party. The question is how many elections cycles will be required to reach that point. Here are highlights from the Time column:
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The most important political story of the Obama era has been the Republican Party’s growing defiance of reality —its denial of climate science, its denunciations of Medicare cuts while proposing Medicare cuts, its denunciations of debt while proposing debt-exploding tax cuts, its resistance to financial regulation in the wake of a financial meltdown, and so on. Now the GOP’s most promising reality-based presidential candidate, Mitch Daniels, has passed up the race.
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Obviously, this has big implications for 2012. Michael Scherer thinks it means Mitt Romney is a practically inevitable nominee. I’m not so sure. But I am sure that reality’s fate in the primary will have big implications beyond 2012.
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There are still at least two reality-based Republicans in the race: former Utah governor Jon Huntsman, who has the inconvenient distinction of serving as Obama’s ambassador to China, and former Massachusetts governor Romney, who has the even less convenient distinction of authoring the blueprint for Obama’s health care reforms.
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If Huntsman or Romney wins the nomination, and then Obama wins the election, the GOP will quickly shift from “loosely tethered to reality” to “out of its freaking mind.” Remember, after its crushing defeat in 2008, the party faithful concluded that John McCain lost the election because he wasn’t conservative enough—and that George W. Bush lost his popularity because of his big spending. So the party moved even farther toward its right-wing base, casting away moderates
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On the other hand, if Huntsman or Romney wins the nomination and then beats Obama, the Republican Party might rediscover big-tent reality-based policies.
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And if a reality-denying extremist actually beats Obama, well, then we’re in trouble, because reality-denial isn’t going to fix the double-dip recession we must have had to make a reality-denier electable.
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There is one other possibility, and that’s Tim Pawlenty. He seems like he might have been reality-based when he was governor of Minnesota, but he’s doing an effective job of denying reality as he pursues the nomination.
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Maybe he’s the Fred Thompson of 2012—logical on paper but a dud on the trail. And as Scherer says, it’s definitely Romney’s turn. But I’m not so sure Romney will get his turn. He’s not so plausible when he pretends to be delusional.