What the GOP Would Learn by Picking Rick Santorum

I realize of late that I seem to reference Rick "Frothy Mix" Santorum almost daily. But to me, Santorum is the personification of what is wrong with today's Republican Party. He's also a personification of what's wrong with today's version of Roman Catholicism as interpreted and enforced by Pope Benedict XVI, a/k/a God's Rottweiler, and the reactionaries that he has appointed to bishoprics and named as members of the college of cardinals. Turning to the Republican Party, apiece in The Daily Beast reflects on what may over take the GOP if the party's Christianist/Tea Party base is insane enough to somehow deliver the GOP presidential nomination to Santorum. Here are some highlights:

A cleansing bout of craziness in 2012 could be just what the GOP needs. I’m talking about a nominee so far to the right that conservative populists get their fondest wish—and the Republican Party is forced to learn from the result. Namely, that there is such a thing as too extreme.

The dangerous groupthink delusion being pushed in conservative circles over the last few years is that ideological purity and electability are one and the same. It is an idea more rooted in faith than reason.

If Mitt Romney does finally wrestle the nomination to the ground, and then loses to Obama, conservatives will blame the loss on his alleged moderation. The right wing take-away will be to try to nominate a true ideologue in 2016.

But if someone like Rick Santorum gets the nomination in an upset, the party faithful will get to experience the adrenaline rush of going off a cliff together, like Thelma and Louise—elation followed by an electoral thud.

This could be educational. After all, sometimes you have to hit rock bottom before you recognize your problems.

Giving a self-identified “full-spectrum conservative” theo-con like Santorum the nomination would mean we’d really have a “choice, not an echo” election in November. Republicans would be forced to confront the fact that talk about Satan attacking America, negative obsessions with homosexuality, contraception and opposition to abortion even in cases of rape and incest alienates far more people than they attract.

It is absurd that clownish conservative caricatures like Michele Bachmann and Herman Cain were briefly elevated to the top of the polls while more sober-minded presidential candidates with executive experience like Tim Pawlenty and Jon Huntsman Jr. failed to gain any traction. The result is the weakest Republican field in living memory.

it’s been scrubbed from many conservative’s memories that the Tea Party in 2010 used libertarian appeals to attract independents—avoiding more polarizing social issues and instead keeping a tight focus on fiscal ones like reducing the deficit and debt.

But in the wake of 2010, we’ve seen the social-conservative agenda reemerge with a vengeance, because Republican legislators in statehouses and Congress made it a priority. Not surprisingly, this has alienated independents, women, and young voters outside the conservative tribe.

But in a tribal time, ideological apparatchiks have outsize influence. They come to debates armed with their own facts. In their Kool-Aid-laden retelling of recent political history, unsuccessful GOP nominees like John McCain lost because of his independent center-right profile (rather than a backlash against the excesses of the Bush administration or the nomination of Sarah Palin). Barry Goldwater’s 44-state loss to Lyndon Johnson in 1964 is recast as a triumph because it allegedly led to Reagan’s landslide ... 16 years later.

Giving conservative activists everything they want in a presidential nominee would ultimately be clarifying for the Republican Party. It would break the fever that has afflicted American politics turning fellow citizens against one another. It would restore a sense of balance, recognizing that it is unwise to systemically ignore the 40 percent of American voters who identify themselves as independent or the 35 percent who are centrist. After all, a successful political party requires both wings to fly. There’s nothing like losing 40 states to refocus the mind.

As I've noted before, part of me would love to see Santorum as the GOP nominee because it would likely lead to the monumental train wreck that the GOP needs to experience before it will wake up and drive the Christofascists from the party and back into the political wilderness where they belong.