The GOP's search for a Great Red Hope

How do you search for Barry, and end up with NewtMitt? That's what the GOP needs to be asking itself right now, along with a tough followup question: what does it say about the state of your ideological confusion as a party that what your base wants most of all is "authenticity" -- as Adam Branden of FreedomWorks told me in an interview today -- and you end up being forced to embrace two of the most inauthentic Republicans in recent memory?

Their inauthenticity is not entirely the fault of NewtMitt, of course. Any Republican who's spent any years in politics, like these two, has had to play breathless catchup with a party that keeps driving itself off the known ideological map in each election, toward more extreme and simplistic conservativsm. (Still, even that doesn't explain the mercenary cynicism with which a cliented-up Newt backed prescription drug expansion, making himself a load of consulting fees; as Sen. Tom Coburn told me last year, the tea party really “started when Republicans were in charge"... under Bush.  "The Medicare prescription drug plan—that was the worst thing imaginable, $13 trillion in unfunded liabilities.”)

The GOP's existential crisis is already far worse than it was in 2008, when my colleagues at Newsweek and I wrote a cover story about the base's nose-holding, teeth-grinding shift toward John McCain. Now you've got Red State mocking National Review for attacking Gingrich, which was "just one more yelp from the once-proud flagship publication of the right," as tea partier  Erick Erickson put it. "Unfortunately, NR remains as tone deaf as it was during George W. Bush’s second term, when they drifted and meandered along uncertainly." That's why there is even talk of a brokered convention, a prospect that might be even likelier given the new GOP primary system that proportionally allots delegates until April.

These are new grassroots conservatives, which I guess explains both why they have to re-learn everything not only about Newt's real record, but even Barry's. People tend to forget that Goldwater got walloped by LBJ in 1964 because he was, to put it charitably, an inept candidate. Despite his rugged man-of-the-West demeanor, Goldwater's turquoise-studded cowboy boots kept landing squarely in his mouth. Only a year after John F. Kennedy’s death, Goldwater told audiences that JFK had orchestrated the timing of the Cuban missile crisis to help his party during the midterm elections. He went to Boeing and blundered through a simple “thank you” to the company for the performance of its planes in wartime, saying that in his administration Boeing planes “will be doing so again.” All of which, of course, played straight into the Democratic campaign’s brilliantly successful message that Goldwater was a warmongering extremist.

Obama is hoping for the same result, of course, though he's not going to get it, given the different temper of the times and state of the economy. But if he lines up against someone he can paint as both inauthentic and extremist at the same time, he's got a chance.