The 25% of the Republican party is the part we associate with Karl Rove, the Old Guard, the GOP establishment ...and Mitt Romney who tends to get -- yes -- 25% in the polls.
Frank Rich writes in New York Magazine:
In the standard analysis of the race, which the embattled GOP Establishment is eager to believe, the rapid ascent and implosion of each wacky presidential contender is seen mainly as a passing judgment on Mitt Romney, the android who just can’t close the deal and improve his unyielding 25 percent average in polls of the Republican electorate. The Old Guard professes to have no worries. That steady 25 percent has been good enough to induce much of the press to portray Romney as the “presumed” (if not the “commanding”) front-runner ever since Beltway handicappers like Mark Halperin of Time and Chris Cillizza of the Washington Post labeled him as such early in 2010. One day or another Romney will surely make good on that bet. He has money, organization, and the looks of a president (or perhaps an audio-animatronic facsimile of one). Eventually primary voters will exhaust all conceivable alternatives and accept that no Chris Christie will descend from the heavens as a deus ex machina. Then they will come home to the 25 percent leader of the pack, because that’s what well-mannered Republicans always do. Add to this scenario the GOP conviction that much of the electorate shares its judgment that Obama is an abject failure—he’s “an incumbent nobody likes,” as Peggy Noonan framed it—and the presidency must be in the bag.
But this narrative is built on a patently illogical assumption: that a 25 percent minority is the trunk wagging the Republican elephant. ...Frank Rich, NYMag
Indeed. And will the absolutist 75% -- the radical, fragmented nutcases who have, in fact, seized the Republican party and made the "old guard" look like grey driftwood -- give in to their elders-'n'-betters and become Real Republicans?
Go on! That's crazy!
What makes anyone seriously assume that the 75 percent will accommodate itself to that etiolated 25 percent rather than force the reverse? That lopsided majority of the GOP is so angry at the status quo that it has been driven to embrace, however fleetingly, some of the most manifestly unqualified, not to mention flakiest, presidential contenders in American history. The 75 percent is determined to take a walk on the wild side. This is less about rejecting Mitt—who’s just too bland a figure to inspire much extreme emotion con or pro—than it is about fervently wanting something else. ...Frank Rich
Exactly! Rich goes on to describe the cultural disintegration of the Republicans -- their preaching about family values vs. their behaviors, its disrespect for common decency. There's no question but it has become a party riddled with self-deception and hypocrisy.
So what happens next? In 2012? Things are changing for the right as much or more than for the left.
Given its potentially lose-lose alternatives, some GOP elites are still hoping for a last-minute savior to be drafted at a brokered convention. But that’s a pipe dream—if not procedurally, then substantively. Even if any of the missing candidates were to reverse course and run, it’s hard to picture the 75 percent embracing them. Chris Christie is relatively moderate on guns, immigration, and climate change. Mitch Daniels has called for a “truce” on social issues. Paul Ryan’s Draconian plan for a Medicare overhaul was so unpopular with voters that even many in the Republican congressional caucus had second thoughts about it. (Nor has any sitting member of the House been elected to the presidency since James Garfield in 1880.) Jeb Bush’s very name is political poison—and he’s a moderate on both immigration and tax hikes besides. In the end, the most powerful Obama opponent remains the same it has always been—the economy.
Whoever ends up on the GOP ticket or in the White House, the 75 percent is no sooner going to disappear than the aggrieved 99 percenters in the blue populist camp. What Republican aristocrats in denial like Karl Rove can’t bring themselves to recognize is that “the most unpredictable, rapidly shifting, and often downright inexplicable primary race” they’ve ever seen is not just a conservative revolution but one that has them in its sights. ...Frank Rich
