Win Or Lose in 2012, 2016 Could Be Consequential for Both the GOP and Democrats

So far - absent as yet unknown events - the 2012 presidential race in some ways looks to be Obama's to lose. If Mitt Romney secures the GOP nomination, there's no assurance he can seal the deal in the general election. Moreover, should Rick Santorum, heavens forbid, be the GOP nominee, it seems even more unlikely that the GOP can seal the deal with women (at least outside of fundamentalist areas) and most minorities. Thus, an Obama re-election will postpone until 2016 the real day of reckoning when both parties will need to decide what they stand for. With the GOP and Santorum's popularity, we have a glimmer already of the backwards looking ideology of the GOP 2016. With the Democrats, it's much harder to predict since Obama has zig-zagged and left his core principles largely hidden while causing many Democrats often disenchanted. Granted, Democrat malaise seems to have lessened, but it will be an issue in 2016. A cloumn in the Washington Post looks at what 2016 might bring. Here are highlights:

[B]oth parties will confront questions of fundamental identity: ideological purity versus political pragmatism.

The cascade of recriminations that would ensue after a loss by the likely Republican nominee, Mitt Romney, is already evident. Rick Santorum has been making the case that the party loses when it runs moderate nominees, pointing to Gerald Ford, George H.W. Bush, Bob Dole and John McCain.

A Romney loss would pour kerosene on the conservative argument that voters want, as Barry Goldwater put it in 1964, “a choice, not an echo” — that they prefer, in the later formulation of Ronald Reagan, “bold colors” over “pale pastels.”

I would argue, if Romney were to lose, that the message is not the candidate’s deficit of conservative bona fides. Rather, Romney’s problem is his dual lack of both political skills (grits, y’all?) and ideological convictions.

The 2016 argument for a return to conservative purity is especially unconvincing in light of the implacable demographic math of a future, more diverse electorate. Republicans will find it increasingly difficult to assemble a winning coalition if they cling to an unforgiving policy on immigration. Many on the Republican bench — former Florida governor Jeb Bush, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.) — seem to get this. It’s less clear that the Republican base does.

Democrats confront a near-certain one [debate]. This is a debate that was largely ducked in 2008. Earlier in that primary season, party divisions were mostly obscured in the shared revulsion to eight years of George W. Bush.

Obama has not forged a cohesive vision of what it means to be a Democrat that would outlast his tenure. Perhaps that understanding would gel in a second term, but for now the shape of the post-Obama Democratic Party is indistinct.

Even as the right assails Obama for alleged socialist tendencies, liberals have been frustrated throughout his presidency for supposed capitulations, on everything from the public option in health care to the debt-ceiling deal to civil liberties shortcuts in the war on terror. Whether Obama wins or loses, those suppressed tensions will inevitably surface in 2016.

All of this suggests that the next election — not this increasingly stale, unenlightening campaign — is the one truly worth watching.

Of course, if all of these conjectures are wrong and Santorum wins in 2012, then I'll likely be writing about 2016 from some other country since it will be evident to me that America is headed down the toilet and that it's best to abandon ship.