Matt Bai Scours The Repug Wreckage

In a column in the New York Times Magazine yesterday that was sometimes tiresome for lamenting “the bitterness and polarity of (baby) boomer politics” as the reason for the sorry state we find ourselves in today (as if confrontation in politics is always baaad), Matt Bai came up with what I thought was the best description I’ve read in awhile of the current state of the Republican Party…

In a way, it is precisely this lingering adherence to Reaganism that makes the Republican candidates so implausible to many of the party’s own voters. Reagan’s ideology, after all, was devised at a time when Republicans hardly governed anything; it was the basis for a movement, not a majority. Over the last two decades, as Republicans have enjoyed far greater electoral success, they have also run up against the limits of modern conservative theory, the practical barriers to enacting a rigid ideological solution. It is little wonder that Mike Huckabee finds himself assailed now for raising taxes, or that Rudy Giuliani has to answer for his mayoral spending, or that Mitt Romney had to change his positions on gay rights and other issues. These Republicans actually had to govern, and what they found is that successful governing doesn’t lend itself to the inflexible theologies of a cause. (Reagan himself experienced the same thing, resorting to tax hikes as governor of California.) We are witnessing, in a sense, the closing act of those middle-aged Republicans who swooned for Goldwater and deified Reagan; they are left now to survey the sprawling wreckage of the conservative governing model, powerless to defend their own concessions to reality or to articulate any notion of how to adapt.

And oh yes, this was yet another homage to the so-called “superdelegates” who could play a role at the Democratic convention in the event that a winner has not yet been decided by then; Bai cited the 1984 campaign of Gary Hart vs. Walter Mondale as a precedent, claiming that Mondale locked up the superdelegates in California before the convention to secure the nomination, arguing that Hillary Clinton could try to do the same thing. We’ll see.