Will Obama's Perceived Weakness Cause the GOP to Overreach and Lose 2012?

Based on my rant earlier today, it's no secret that I'm far from happy with the Barack Obama administration and it drives me crazy to watch Obama squander opportunity after opportunity. At the same time, however, the current line up of GOP presidential candidates, most of whom seem to drink Christianist laced poison Kool-Aid in large quantities, scare the Hell out of me. As my youngest daughter remarked today, Michele Bachmann is so whacked out that she comes across as a caricature that would be created by the writers at South Park. Yet she's real and popular with many in the untethered from reality GOP base. Some suspect that Obama's perceived weakness may turn out to be the undoing of the GOP in 2012 as the base is emboldened to demand and nominate a "true believer" who will unelectable in the general election. I agree with part of the argument made in a Bloomberg column from I offer these excerpts:

President Barack Obama has never looked more vulnerable. His poll numbers keep dropping. The economic news is still grim. And his team’s political sense often seems to be missing. . . . . Almost nobody is talking about Obama as a lock for re-election anymore. But maybe the biggest advantage he has is that his weakness is tempting Republicans to take risks with the election.

The more beatable Obama looks, the more the balance for Republican voters will tilt toward ideology and away from electability. That doesn’t just mean they will be more likely to support candidates such as Michele Bachmann and Herman Cain, who will have trouble winning votes from independents and Democrats. It also means the terrain of the primaries will shift: The candidates will place more emphasis on outflanking one another on the right and less on showing they can win in November 2012.

Even if Obama were doing better, the Republican primary would put a heavy weight on ideology. Whenever someone suggests that a candidate can’t win, many conservatives retort that people said that about Reagan, too. (What they forget is that people also said it about Barry Goldwater, and they were right.) And much of the Republican Party has convinced itself that Bush- era compromises bred political failure, a line of thought that makes concerns about electability seem beside the point. Combine these views with the natural inclination of people to think that their ideas are more widely shared than they are, and the result is a process where electability gets short shrift. Obama’s weakness only reinforces this tendency.

Already the Republican primaries have seen candidates take positions that will be hard sells in the fall of next year. Both Bachmann and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, for example, want to abolish the Environmental Protection Agency. . . . . Texas Governor Rick Perry has suggested that Social Security and Medicare are unconstitutional and that they should be replaced by state-run programs. There’s a reason no Republican candidate since 1964 has run on a platform anything like this one on entitlements: Both programs are extremely popular.

In each of these cases, provocative positions have been met by silence from rival candidates. Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney hasn’t come out in favor of abolishing the EPA or getting rid of federal entitlement programs, but he hasn’t denounced these ideas or even used them as an argument against the electability of the candidates who have advanced them.

If Republican voters had electability on their minds, they would also want to see the candidates address issues that concern the broader public: how to get wages growing again after years when they stagnated even during periods of growth; and what to replace Obama’s health-care reform with. But the candidates feel no pressure from primary voters to outline plans on those issues, and haven’t done so. Instead, they are focused on issues -- such as the alleged threat of “sharia law” and the heavy share of income taxes paid by the rich -- that are of interest only to the party faithful.

[A] party that cares about electability is looking outward, beyond its members. Today’s Republican Party is more interested in refining its doctrines than gaining converts. It has turned inward.

That is good news for Obama, at a time when he isn’t getting much. The more his political standing falls, the more Republicans will think they are sure to beat him. And the more they think that, the less likely they will be to win.

I agree with the analysis. But I'm not thrilled d by the prospect a nail bitter election in 2012 and worries that the new president might want to intern me and and the boyfriend in a concentration camp.