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It looks to me like the Tories have decided that the right-wing populist horse has faltered, and has to be sent off to the glue factory forthwith. I wonder what James Dobson will say. Or Newt Gingrich. (Does it matter what he says any more?) I'm pretty sure I know what Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter will say, and George Will. Shooter we've already heard from. (He never liked the snake-handlers anyway, and they never liked his alligator shoes.)
Shades of the Democratic Party in 1968 -- except, of course, that this time there's no Nixon waiting in the wings, licking the wounds he received in saner times. Bloomberg, the last time I looked, was Jewish, from New York, an ex-Democrat, ex-Republican Tory with a reputation even among Democrats, of being a competent administrator -- Herbert Hoover redux, as it were, despite his Jewishness.
The question in my mind is how all this will play in a Republican heartland suffering, except in the ethanol states, from most of the same diseases that they suffered from in 1931. Can the Tories cobble together a stable plurality from the center of this mess? I don't know, but at this point, it looks like a put-up job, and it leaves the right-wing vote divided along the lines which have always divided it underneath the Rovian flim-flam of the last 30 years or so.
Well. The only thing certain at this point, it seems to me, is that David Broder, as usual, hasn't got a fucking clue.
