Hugh Hewitt has gone from blameless to shameless in 2 years flat. It's hard for me to imagine that I've been listening to him for that long, but that's about right. Hewitt's head is about 180 centimeters up Mitt Romney's anal orifice, and disappearing fast.
I know that I have been terribly unfair to Mitt Romney. There is basically nothing I like about the man, except his rhetoric on policy. But then only when I read it, never when I hear it coming out of his piehole. He hasn't said the thing, he hasn't pounded the fist, he hasn't made the gesture. He's a suit. Not an empty suit, just a suit. I can't figure out a way to like him.
And yet Hewitt is talking about him as if there were no way the Party could survive unless Planet GOP starts revolving around Romney's star. He can't stand McCain, over the bleating protestations of Michael Medved, who makes sterling points about dragging up old stuff that people with more intellectual bandwidth than a squirrel shouldn't nitpick. So today Hewitt drags in Santorum to crap all over McCain on immigration.
Hewitt freaking out is just another symptom of the deeper problem Republicans have, which is the death of the significance of Karl Rove. There is no other political master operative and the GOP is out of ideas with regard to how they can keep all the big tent poles standing. Everyone, it seems, is dumbstruck by the fact that there is no Reagan. There is no 'true' conservative to the rescue. Instead the are lame-duck hacks who led by strongarm, not by inspiration. The fact the Republican Party is suffering from a complete lack of personality is echoed every day by Republicans everywhere who find something admirable to say about the true charisma of Barack Obama. It's undeniable. None of us Republicans are madly in love with any of our candidates. There are only the Ron Paul obsessives. The rest of us are holding out for a hero who simply doesn't exist.
The Hewitt freak out, and by extension the Republican freak out is going to remain the status quo until one of these guys gets inspirational. It ain't likely, but stranger things have happened. What are the chances that Hillary Clinton will do something to finally appear charming and sympathetic? That's about the same chance as we have of finding another Gipper.
So really the best thing that can happen on the Right is that the gloves come off and Rudy, Fred, John and Mike start cracking on each other and the fur flies. It's something we'll respond to. But better yet, it will give these stiffs some life. It's easy to know we cannot stand Hillary, it's harder to know what we won't allow McCain to stand for. But Romney has to instigate it. He can't be afraid of somebody wagging about 'negative campaing ads'. That's what politics is all about, bashing your opponent and then bludgeoning him into submission such that the public loses all confidence in him. None of the GOP has really even gone after Ron Paul.
What we have here is a failure to communicate.
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