Ross says that the Republican establishment failed to find its anti-Romney:

From Jeb Bush to Haley Barbour, Jon Thune to (especially) Mitch Daniels, we’ve watched the party’s leading lights and most experienced national figures repeatedly pass the buck, all of them hoping that somebody else would step forward to supply a credible alternative to Mitt Romney. Individually, their choices were understandable; collectively, they have represented a significant institutional failure — even a generational failure, you might say, which left conservatives scrambling to promote the next generation (Christie, Paul Ryan) ahead of schedule.

When a list of credible alternatives to Romney plausibly includes John Thune, that is a hint that something went awry a long time ago. Thune’s failure, if that’s what we want to call it, was not his unwillingness to enter the 2012 race. The trouble began when some Republicans started seriously floating Thune’s name as a plausible presidential candidate, and then Thune “declined” the invitation to waste his time running a quixotic presidential campaign. After all, what would have made him a credible alternative to Romney? This was the man who voted for the TARP and then claimed that he had been duped. He was hardly an inspiring standard-bearer for anti-Romney conservatives.

The complaint about institutional failure is mostly a complaint that Mitch Daniels didn’t run. In fact, as Jonathan Bernstein would say, he started running in the invisible primary, and he was told rather clearly by interested factions that he needn’t bother continuing. Since May, we have been treated to at least two efforts to draft candidates to take Daniels’ place in the field. If we want to identify when the institutional failure occurred, it was when Daniels entertained the idea of running and was discouraged from doing so. Family matters have been the final straw for him, but Daniels was already facing significant resistance before he announced, and that was likely to grow stronger over time.

More to the point, why are establishment figures going to go to great lengths to provide a credible alternative to Romney when they already have Romney? Romney embodies the Bush-era party consensus, and he has eagerly adapted himself to the party’s current mood (as he always does). The real institutional failure is that many party and movement leaders created Mitt Romney as a plausible presidential candidate four years ago, and now they find that they have to pay the price for that. Unfortunately, the rest of us have to pay the the price, too.