Is Losing Big Best for the GOP's Long Term Future?

The growing divide between the increasingly scarce number of moderates in the Republican Party and the extremists in the Christianist/Tea Party base of the party has been showcased throughout the primary travels of the current GOP presidential nominee clown car. Mitt Romney has felt obliged to pander to the Kool-Aid drinking elements and Rick Santorum wants to return the nation to the 1950's while eliminating the separation of church and state along the way. How can the GOP regain some balance and sanity? Increasingly, some within and outside of the party believe a huge electoral defeat in 2012 may be the only medicine that will cure the GOP's illness and growing extremism. This view is highlighted in a column in the New York Times where the author is rooting for Rick Santorum to get the nomination so that he can lead the party to ruin in November. A piece in the Washington Post reports that some party insiders are thinking the same thing. First, these excerpts from the Times op-ed:

I’m rooting for Rick Santorum to win the Republican nomination. Seriously. You probably think that is because it would be the best possible outcome for President Obama. No doubt it would be. . . . A Santorum nomination would likely lead to an epic defeat, ranking with Richard Nixon’s 49-to-1 state landslide victory over George McGovern in 1972, or Ronald Reagan’s 49-to-1 state whipping of Walter Mondale 12 years later.

But it’s not the Democrats I’m really concerned with. It’s the Republicans. For more than a decade now, moderate Republicans have been an endangered species, either losing elections or choosing to retire in the face of a hard-line challenger. The latest casualty was Senator Olympia Snowe of Maine . . .

[A] number of moderate Republicans lamenting the way the Republican Party is now placing a higher priority on social issues like contraception than on pocketbook issues like jobs and the economy. . . . many Americans, disenchanted by the poisonous state of American politics, have largely opted out, and that “only the most rabid partisans vote.” In other words, the Republican Party has largely been captured by its most extreme flank. Santorum is their standard-bearer.

If Mitt Romney takes the nomination and then loses to Obama, the extremists who’ve taken over the party will surely say the problem was Romney’s lack of ideological purity. If, however, Santorum is the nominee — and then loses in a landslide — the party will no longer be able to delude itself about where its ideological rigidity has taken it.

An alcoholic doesn’t stop drinking until he hits bottom. The Republican Party won’t change until it hits bottom. Only Santorum offers that possibility.

The Washington Post article echos these thoughts. Here are highlights:

As the Republican presidential race has worn on (and on), there are some within the party wondering — privately, of course — whether the only way for the party to face the growing divide between its moderate and conservative wings is for the 2012 election to be its Gotham moment.

“I’d personally enjoy all the ‘we can’t nominate another Republican In Name Only’ crowd getting a stomping by an incumbent with an 8.5 unemployment rate,” said one senior party strategist, granted anonymity to speak candidly, warning of nominating a strictly conservative candidate like former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum.

While some within the party have begun to believe that the only way for the GOP to truly heal is to first bottom out, most strategists don’t see 2012 shaping up that way — particularly if the establishment-friendly Romney winds up as the nominee.

“They won’t get it this year, as Romney is viewed as too moderate, so blame will go to moderates,” said former Virginia representative Tom Davis, himself a leading moderate voice within the GOP. “The narrative will be McCain and Mitt are too much like Obama.”

“If Republicans lose the next election badly, which would be unfortunate for a whole lot of reasons, conservatives will blame it on a nominee who wasn’t conservative enough, and the center-right and moderates will blame it on the purists.”

The question many Republican strategists are asking themselves at the moment is whether — in 2012, 2016 or even 2020 — it’s worth taking one step back in order to, hopefully, take two steps forward.

As I have noted before, I don't see the GOP regaining some semblance of sanity absent a crushing defeat with an extremist like Santorum as the party standard bearer.