As I have said many times, we are seeing the fruit of the disasters of  the anti Bush/Republican backlash  of 2006 and 2008 with the pathetic crop of candidates we have now.  We have a phony (Romney), a whiny, religious nut (Santorum) , and a has-been, back stabbing over the hill hack (Newtie).

by Noemie Emery

There are many flaws among the current Republican candidates and they are all too well known. Romney is too close to the center and all of the others are much too eccentric.

They can’t reach the base, or they can’t reach beyond it. Romney’s too bland and Santorum and Gingrich are all too exciting — in fact, they seem borderline nuts.

No one addresses the big, urgent problems. Romney has problems closing the deal, but his rivals can’t close their cases against him. This is a field out of phase with the party around it, caught on the wrong side of time.

The Republican Party as it exists in the moment is the product of three different things: the fiscal implosion of 2008, Obama’s wide and expensive expansion of government, and the sudden collapse of the welfare state culture of Europe.

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In 2009, the Tea Party movement began the resistance, flowed into and through the Republican Party, and pulled off a series of stunning electoral triumphs, starting early with Chris Christie, Bob McDonnell and Scott Brown, and cresting in 2010 with a bumper crop of insurgents dedicated to cutting entitlements, curbing unions and helping small businesses thrive.

These are outsiders who are now the establishment, who appeal to the base and to independents, and have been winning the battle against Obama whenever they take to the field.

These are the people who ought to be running, but time is against them: the first class, like McDonnell and Christie, have little more than two years now as national figures; and the second wave — Marco Rubio, Kelly Ayotte and Susana Martinez — have even a year less than that.

They are too new to run, and their esprit is not found in our current contenders, who have nothing to do with our more recent battles, and quite clearly are blasts from the past.

Gingrich scored his big coup in the 1994 midterms, lost power in 1998, and since then has passed time having Breakfast at Tiffany’s while churning out mountains of books.

Rick Santorum came to the Senate in 1994, lost by 18 points a dozen years later, and since then has concerned himself with Satan’s grip on the country, and JFK’s failure to spend his tenure as president spreading the creed of his church far and wide.

Romney, who lost his first race in 1994, and left the one office he has held six years ago, has been endorsed by McDonnell, Christie and South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, whose campaign he backed in its earliest stages and has secondhand Tea Party cred.

But he is running the campaign he ran four years earlier, largely stressing his business experience, with no sign of additional urgency and few indications that too much has changed.

Still, he’s more in touch than Santorum or Gingrich, who are pushing a rigid and retro conservative vision that appeals to only a slice of the country, and disdains independents who swung back from Obama, and elected impure reformers like Christie and Brown.

There is a chasm between the GOP of 2012, revved up by the wins of the 2009-2010 cycles, and its candidates of the 1994-2006 vintage, who don’t understand and can’t harness its energies.

You call can it the Retreads’ Revenge.

Read the rest – The curse of the Republican retreads