The GOP's baffling suicidal tendencies

The way things are going -- or, to be more precise, the way things are crawling or stalling or dying -- Congressional Democrats have only one major hope for 2010: the Republican Party's hardest-core base.

There the GOP was, earlier this month, primed for what seemed like a shockingly substantial comeback. It retook the governorships of two populous states, rattled the Democratic Establishment, and, above all, had election-winning independents swooning.

The party's chairman, Michael Steele, was once again moved to rhetorical heights, bellowing and boasting about a "Republican renaissance." But this time, Michael was actually on to something: In at least one of the gubernatorial instances, his party had taken a historically immoderate man and force-fed him a modern, moderate message and plastered him in a moderate image.

That strategy worked, magnificently, and there seemed to be no reason -- see first paragraph -- why such successes couldn't be replicated throughout the republic in another year. After all, the party, loosely speaking, had also rolled out some old-time ideological extremism in upper New York, whose results only seemed to confirm the wisdom of Virginia and New Jersey.

But extremists, being extreme, still insist on going rogue. Following the ultraconservative Mr. Hoffman's defeat in a dependably conservative district, Sarah Palin, for one, scribbled on her Facebook page: "please remember Reagan’s words of encouragement after his defeat in 1976: the cause goes on."

She forgot to mention that Ronald Reagan understood that ideology is rather pointless if one isn't in office to execute it. Yet no one has ever accused Ms. Palin of even elementary logic. Indeed, her principal mission in political life seems to lie in confirming Jack Nicholson's line in "As Good As It Gets": when the male novelist is asked how he can write so well from, let's say, a Palinlike perspective, he replies, "I think of a man, then I take away reason and accountability."

Well, let's just say Ms. Palin has no gendered monopoly on that. And we can say it, with confidence, simply by looking south. There, in Florida's senatorial race, the hardcore Republican base has reason and its sister quality of accountability in full flight. Their champion: the ultraconservative Marco Rubio, rather than the imminently electable Gov. Charlie Crist.

This primary race promises to be perhaps the final diagnostic of GOP sanity. Here the party already had a popular candidate with cross-party appeal shown to be whipping the Democrat in the general by a whopping 20 points, yet its grassroots movers and shakers are agitating for challenger Rubio, shown to be losing to the same Democrat -- which Rubio undoubtedly will, if he wins the primary.

It's not like Gov. Crist is unconservative; he is not, that is, the Joe Lieberman of the Republican Party. Far from it. Crist possesses several of the indispensable bona fides of modern conservatism: he's anti-choice, anti-same-sex marriage, pro-gun and pro-death penalty.

But, alas, last February he went and did something foolish: in enthusiastically supporting President Obama's stimulus package, he acted like a responsible governor. The practical, material benefit to his state trumped reactionary ideology in his mind, and the ideologues are an unforgiving bunch.

Not only that -- Crist also had the unforgiveable unpresence of mind to be -- egads -- civil and warm toward the president of the United States, on stage. What followed was ultraconservative heresy -- l'abbraccio della morte, the hug of death.

Now, Crist is paying for it; he's paying for his civility, he's paying for sheer, governing competence. At Crist's appearances, Rubio hecklers scream "Go hug Obama!" The Club for Growth is running anti-Crist, anti-hug ads. Right-wing Web sites declare that "Charlie Crist must be destroyed." And, of course, pseudoconservatives like Dick Armey and Mike Huckabee have joined Rubio in his corner.

Poor, competent, conscientious Charlie. He's one helluva bull's-eye on his forehead, pasted there by his own party's troglodytes. And the latter are soaring on a trajectory of Pyrrhic success: the latest Quinnipiac poll shows Crist leading Rubio, 50 percent to 35 percent, cut from a 29-point lead in August.

In a NY Times profile of the Crist-Rubio race, none other than a pro-Crist Gainesville plastic surgeon encapsulated the often difficult truth of this and many other contests in upcoming play: "The majority of our country is not on either end of the spectrum, but somewhere in the middle."

Right-wing activists haven't learned that yet; and neither, I'm sorry to say, have many a progressive. Both tend to see the nation's body politic through their own prisms of political perspective. But that's where we are: in the middle, by and large. (Don't confuse my objective analysis -- backed by two centuries of profoundly centrist-to-conservative American history -- with personal preference. I simply prefer to analyze politics without ideological blinders.)

To ignore that is politically deadly, as the Rubionites, should they win the primary, will soon discover. And those Runionites, in Florida and elsewhere, may be Congressional Democrats' only hope.