Parties Get the Candidates They Deserve

I get really tired of the whining from establishment Republicans that they are totally set up to win the 2012 presidential election, but might lose because their candidates are terrible.  And they kind of have a point, in that every candidate has huge glaring weaknesses that seem to render it impossible for him/her to be nominated, except that someone has to win the nomination.

But here's the thing: the reason that there are no good candidates goes back to the wild and radical right turn made by the party over the past decade.  People don't run for president if they haven't been around politics (except for Herman Cain I guess, but I think we can agree he has a different set of problems), but ten years ago virtually nobody was in favor of the policies that are now mainstream.  Imagine the current positions from a Republican politician in 2000:

• Health insurance mandate= authoritarianism
• Taxes are too low on poor people
• Climate change is a hoax, and nothing should be done about pollution
• Muslims are dangerous, and should not be allowed the same religious freedoms as the rest of us
• Deficits are always bad, and the US should balance its budget (a particular howler given the runaway GOP deficit from 2001-2007).
• Illegal immigrants are a scourge, and must be rounded up and deported even if they've been here since infancy
• Medicare should be privatized and moved to a voucher system
• Social Security is a Ponzi Scheme and needs to be cut back severely

With so many areas in which the party has been dragged to the Right, no long-serving politician can possibly have started out his career with such positions.  I've said before that Romney and Perry have been unfarily burned by past positions that were actually quite sane and intelligent, because they don't fit the current mood of GOP primary voters.

"But what about Chris Christie?  He would have been great!".  Chris Christie who hires Mulsims in his administration?  Who is compassionate toward illegal aliens?  Who believes in climate change?  He would have come up with warts just like everyone else.  Jeb Bush too. 

The Republican party has gone completely off the rails.  And they still might win the presidency!  But to get the nomination its candidates are going to have to turn themselves into pretzels to come down on the right side of all these issues.  That's going to look ugly no matter how you slice it.  So don't blame Mitt for his serial flip-flopping- blame his party.

"But both parties have been radicalized! That's the problem!"  I've heard a version of this from a few Republican and centrist friends of mine.  I generally answer them with this challenge:

Think about both parties and their mainstream platforms in, say, 2000. I can name you a half dozen major issues on which the Republican party has moved way Right (torture, religious diversity for Muslims, cap & trade/ environment, health care, progressive taxation, etc). Now think about areas in which the Democrats have moved Left- I can come up with one- Gay Rights/marriage/civil unions. That's it. If you can think of any more I'd love to hear it. (I hope you're not thinking Health Care, in which Democrats passed a bill much less liberal than that proposed by the Clintons, with ideas drawn originally from Right Wing think tanks in response to ClintonCare. The only thing that makes it seem more liberal is that it succeeded in passing).

That's a direct quote from an email to one such friend.  I sent it 11 days ago and haven't seen an answer yet.  In fact, nobody has ever given me even a lame attempt at an answer.