Being Successful in the Republican Primary: be an idiot, or pretend to be one…

Workout notes
I kind of got off to a bumbling start this morning. The weights: same old, same old; I did get 8 reps with 160 in the pull down, did my dumbbell presses standing up and got 10 x 135, 4 x 170, 4 x 170 and 9 x 155 on the bench. Yes, the bench has the lower rack for emergencies, but there weren’t enough people in the gym for me to push my limits.

Swim: 10 x 100 on the 2 (slow), 18:17 for 1000, 200 cool down. There were people in the pool today. One woman was pretty fast; I couldn’t stay with her. I know; that doesn’t mean that she is fast.

Republicans
Paul Krugman is less than impressed with the Republican presidential field:

There are two crucial things you need to understand about the current state of American politics. First, given the still dire economic situation, 2012 should be a year of Republican triumph. Second, the G.O.P. may nonetheless snatch defeat from the jaws of victory — because Herman Cain was not an accident.

Think about what it takes to be a viable Republican candidate today. You have to denounce Big Government and high taxes without alienating the older voters who were the key to G.O.P. victories last year — and who, even as they declare their hatred of government, will balk at any hint of cuts to Social Security and Medicare (death panels!).

And you also have to denounce President Obama, who enacted a Republican-designed health reform and killed Osama bin Laden, as a radical socialist who is undermining American security.

So what kind of politician can meet these basic G.O.P. requirements? There are only two ways to make the cut: to be totally cynical or totally clueless

Krugman goes on to note that Mitt Romney is not a stupid man, but he plays the party base…or at least attempts to. Then Krumgan talks about Newt Gingrich:

And Mr. Gingrich has some advantages none of the previous challengers had. He is by no means the deep thinker he imagines himself to be, but he’s a glib speaker, even when he has no idea what he’s talking about. And my sense is that he’s also very good at doublethink — that even when he knows what he’s saying isn’t true, he manages to believe it while he’s saying it. So he may not implode like his predecessors.

The larger point, however, is that whoever finally gets the Republican nomination will be a deeply flawed candidate. And these flaws won’t be an accident, the result of bad luck regarding who chose to make a run this time around; the fact that the party is committed to demonstrably false beliefs means that only fakers or the befuddled can get through the selection process.

Of course, given the terrible economic picture and the tendency of voters to blame whoever holds the White House for bad times, even a deeply flawed G.O.P. nominee might very well win the presidency. But then what?

Might…maybe. But maybe not.

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