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The GOP’s McGovern moment

George Packer imagines what might happen to the GOP should Romney win the nomination but lose the general election. Excerpt: This scenario is still the odds-on favorite. To deduce the consequences among Republican activists, let’s imagine a counter-factual from 1972: pit Nixon against Humphrey or Muskie or Jackson, a candidate imposed on the liberal Democratic […]

George Packer imagines what might happen to the GOP should Romney win the nomination but lose the general election. Excerpt:

This scenario is still the odds-on favorite. To deduce the consequences among Republican activists, let’s imagine a counter-factual from 1972: pit Nixon against Humphrey or Muskie or Jackson, a candidate imposed on the liberal Democratic base much as conservative Republicans feel Romney is being imposed on them. A Nixon win would have convinced the liberal base that the party had not been true to its core. The theology would have hardened a little more. Next time, they’d nominate a real liberal, a candidate of the grassroots.

It’s easy to picture hard-core Republicans coming to the same conclusion: Romney and the party élite betrayed the party’s principles (again, after McCain) and gave the country four more years of the hated Obama. Never again! Next time, a real conservative! (Go back another twenty years, to the G.O.P. convention of 1952, and Senator Everett Dirksen, of Illinois, a supporter of the conservative Robert Taft, pointing at Thomas E. Dewey, the party’s moderate two-time loser, and thundering, “Don’t take us down the path to defeat again!”)

Which do you think is the greater risk to the long-term good of the Republican Party: a Gingrich general-election candidacy and certain crushing defeat this fall, or a Romney general-election candidacy and likely defeat this fall? In the case of the former, the party would be forced to have an ideological reckoning with the base that would probably make it stronger in 2016. In the case of the latter, the pain will be delayed by years, but will eventually come.

Of course, the best-case scenario for the GOP isn’t very appetizing either: a Romney victory in November. If Romney were to have a successful presidency, that would be a true game changer. But even if Romney were a saint and a statesman, the obstacles the US president, whoever he is, will face over the next four years make a successful presidency unlikely.

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