I'm getting the impression that the farce that was, is, always will be Herman Cain has caused some conservatives to take a step back and reconsider with growing alarm and concern the state of the republican party, the state of what it means, in the age of Obama, to be a republican - in short, I sense a growing anxiety that maybe the right is becoming dangerously indebted to and defined by outrage, anger, reactionary zeal at the expense of short changing ideas, rationality, competence, meaningful experience, expertise - concern that it's not just the rank and file who are demanding their emotional needs be mollified and sated by some populist passion play but the entire cohort up on through the officer class also now increasingly it seems addicted to feeling rather than thinking as if the former were an entirely sufficient surrogate for the latter.
When a guy like Mitch Daniels, whose resume and executive track record seem to embody the needed tonic for what ails the nation, is marginalized early in the nominating process because he's not a shouter, not a fist pumper, not a shallow, grandstanding rhetorician and glib scourge of the left, when a solid and esteemed prospect like that is ignored while an utter clown like Cain or bombastic, ethically challenged narcissist like Gingrich are raised breathlessly on shoulders and rushed blindly towards the throne by the madding rabble - well, a man not entirely bereft of common sense should be motivated to take a step back and wonder just what the hell is going on here.
[maybe I should hope for Gingrich to win the nomination - that would pretty much guarantee a third party entry, and maybe Romney himself as that third party entry - hell, maybe that's part of the plan: try your best to get the uber right to accept you, but if they're gonna insist on theatrics over substance, insist on some phony ideological purity test, then screw 'em and run as an independent. I mean, if ya think about it, an argument can be made that even if Romney survives the primary the fact that so many republicans are gonna have to be dragged kicking and screaming to the booth to vote for him may render him not viable as an effective Obama opponent anyway - certainly the Limbaughs et al are unlikely to play nice. We're sitting here wondering who could be that third party challenger - I don't know if anyone's mention Romney yet - but if Gingrich manages to pull it off for sure there's gonna be a lot of conservatives out there saying 'No, sorry, not gonna happen' - in fact, if one is of the opinion that an ugly nominating process and convention will damage Romney to an unsustainable degree, a surprise Gingrich win that sets a Romney third party run in motion could actually be the best thing to happen]
