Did he think for a minute that the GOP right would have voted for Obama?
No but they could have just stayed home and not voted. Without that base turnout, how can a GOP candidate win an election? Its why McCain picked Palin for running mate. Whether our criticism about Sarah of Alaska, she got that base excited and actually care (for a time) about the election.
Of course McCain's people (allegedly) pulled a Thomas Eagleton and didn't run a background check on Palin and well all those skeletons fell out of the closet. Then her gaffes and we know what happened. Hell her announcement effectively killed Obama's post-convention poll bounce, right after he gave what pundits called a A+ convention speech.
The straw-breaker was when (allegedly) Palin called her party allies/donors back home in Alaska and told them not to give anymore to the McCain campaign and instead save the cash for Palin '12. The fact that before the election, John McCain himself did a SNL sketch w/ Tina Fey parodying that very story, makes me wonder.
The Tea Partyers have made impressive gains in Congress and are quite influential. But they're all very new, and are, as yet, leaderless (recall that even Palin campaigned for McCain last year against a Tea Party primary rival). The likely GOP nominee will be a "mainstream" Republican--a tax/spend/deficit politico only rhetorically different from the average Dem. But he'll have to spend all of his time trying to placate the Tea Partyers instead of reaching out to the middle. Even worse: the Tea Partyers, holding their ideological purity sacred, nominate their own candidate, splitting the GOP vote and absolutely assuring a Dem victory.
Problem with the Tea Party is they're too big to be ignored, too small to take control of the RNC and make policies and thus we have a sustained partisan war between them and the party establishment figures. In fact quite frankly, what else unites them other than against Mr. Obama?
The other day on Fox News, Anne Coulter made this prediction about next year:
"Romney will be our nominee. And we will lose."
Is she right?
