Bill Kristol, Lovesick Strategist

It's official. Bill Kristol has gone mad. Humbuggingly mad. Wretchedly, distressingly mad.

Ever since Election Day, you see, Mr. Kristol has played his own Elmer Gantry to the GOP's Sister Sharon Falconer. As political flimflammery goes, no problem there.

Yet the boy seems genuinely, even savagely smitten. What's worse, the nation's unrequited love for his comely evangelist has thrown him into an absolutely irrational tizzy. It's a trifle pathetic, but titanically obvious.

Writing, for instance, in the imposing-sounding "11/24/2008, Volume 014, Issue 10" edition of The Weekly Standard, our love-struck Mr. Kristol sets the preposterous stage:

GOP revivals depend on fresh and bold thinking at the national level. Figures like Jack Kemp redefined Republican economic policy between 1977 and 1980. By 1994, Newt Gingrich and Co. had brought into being a very different Republican party from that of the last days of the first Bush administration. Who are the Kemps and Gingriches today? The field is wide open for the ambitious and the daring.

OK, so you know the punch line. You know what's coming. But that attenuates not its hilarity. And here it comes:

[P]olitics isn't just -- or even mostly -- about ideas. It's also about political leadership. To see Sarah Palin at the Republican Governors Association was to wonder at a natural politician. Among her peers she may be in a class by herself -- like Reagan or Barack Obama.

So the GOP's comeback depends on new ideas, especially bold ones; on the other hand politics isn’t really about ideas. And that's the kind of exceptional thinking that allows Mr. Kristol to compare Sarah Palin to Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama.

But there's a villain in this love story. "Can she rise to the occasion?" asks Kristol. "The media," he answers -- I knew it, damn them to hell I just knew it -- "remain desperate to deny that she can, and even to deny her a chance to try."

Putting that demonstrable silliness aside -- as a post-election news feature, Ms. Palin has dwarfed everyone and everything but Barack Obama and the economy -- Kristol then moves on to attempt a serious point. And it was this maneuver -- not his undying if embarrassing love for Ms. Palin -- that caught my attention, gave me pause and prompted this piece.

"Palin is a phenomenon, and her future is unpredictable," he rightly observes of unpredictable futures. However "there are plenty of other Republican governors and ex-governors who would be competent and plausible nominees in 2012."

Did you like that? Merely "competent and plausible"? That was Kristol's way of segueing and looping back to the boring business of politics as ideas, should his party be so foolish as to shun his true love, the idea-less one. And here's what he had to say about that:

One pillar of any Republican comeback will surely be successful practical governance at the state level. The Republican revival of the early and mid-1990s … was due in part to the examples of effective state governance by Tommy Thompson in Wisconsin and John Engler in Michigan, to say nothing of Rudy Giuliani's efforts in New York City.

Kristol was of course obligated to also throw George W. Bush into that gubernatorial mix. Yet it was Bush, above all, who proved not only the non sequitur of state competence morphing naturally into national competence, but the gross incompatibility of modern conservative thinking and national governance itself.

Perhaps state and local governance is indeed within conservative capabilities -- microgovernance, you might say -- but the day Republicans attempt federal governance -- macrogovernance -- is the day they surpass not so much their level of competence, maybe, but, for sure, their level of interest. It's like granting a medical license to a physician who doesn't like sick people and goes out of his way to avoid them and their unwelcome problems.

Nevertheless Mr. William Kristol finishes with yet another incomparable flurry of rhetorical whiplash. Having started from the premise that "politics isn't just -- or even mostly -- about ideas," he concludes by writing that this rather troublesome economic wicket in which we're stuck "invites urgent new thinking."

Why is that? Why, we must "fight to save free-market capitalism from the Obama administration."

Oh my, Bill, you poor thing. That woman has you so discombobulated you don't even know who's doing what these days. And you're one of your party's more preeminent strategists.

The GOP is in big, big trouble.