Wall Street Journal columnist Kim Strassel wonders who’ll be “the GOP’s next big thing” as she considers which Republican candidate has “the prospect of defeating President Obama.” While I agree with Strassel that the party needs a “hard-charging, big-thinking-articulate new face” and that the present field of candidates is less than inspiring, I find the rest of her analysis less than memorable. It’s typical of mainstream Republican papers, which are all too willing to extol Obama as an intellectual, oratorical giant. Strassel agonizes over “a group of voters that may not like President Obama but respect his skills.” These voters “want someone who can match him in charisma and communication.”

Strassel hopes to best Obama with a Republican equivalent. That is, with someone who does not lean so far rightward as to turn off the voters she would like to reach. She worries that Mississippi governor Haley Barbour, who hopes to be president, “is going to have to address the Confederate flag.” Perhaps Barbour has failed to stomp on the Confederate battle flag often enough to please the WSJ. This may be a reference to the fact that Barbour hasn’t changed the state flag, which includes in the upper left corner a Confederate ensign. But this position enjoys the support of most of Mississippi’s population, including a quarter of the black population.

Actually Barbour is unelectable as president not because he is insufficiently anti-Confederate but because he’s a gasbag. That characteristic may have helped him win his former post as RNC Chairman but it doesn’t make him a successful presidential candidate. Strassel is also less than informative about Newt Gingrich, whom she tells us may be flawed because of his longtime marital problems. Gingrich has a serious problem, but it’s not his womanizing. It’s that he’s spent most of his career as a GOP-neoconservative mouthpiece. While Bush was president, he was busily defending the president’s deficit spending in, among other venues, the WSJ. Like other career Republicans, Gingrich went back to the budget-slashing line after his party lost the presidency. The same swerving is true of one of the Journal’s other heroes Mitt Romney, whom Strassel thinks may have been hurt by the ill-advised health plan that he got passed as governor of Massachusetts. What may actually be Romney’s bigger problem is that in running for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008, he changed his positions on just about every social position that he had held earlier, from the treatment of illegal immigrants to gay marriage and abortion.

I’m also puzzled as to why Strassel is so impressed with Obama‘s oratory. The current president is clearly not as verbally challenged as his predecessor, but his diction has all the eloquence of someone who’s been locked up with Ivy League professors for too long. Let’s face it: if a right-winger of any color sounded as mannered and evasive as O, the media would have begun to dump on him years ago. My own idea of someone with “communication skills” is Chris Christie. His sentences are forceful; his rhetoric spontaneous; and I rarely catch him making grammatical mistakes even in the heat of battle. Another fine speaker is Marco Rubio of Florida. If Spanish is the first language of this child of Cuban exiles, I would never guess it from his command of English, which is truly impeccable. Perhaps Strassel should stop vying for media approval by gushing over Obama’s less than demonstrable golden-tongue.

Strassel is also concerned that her party is now “dutifully bashing the President,” and this may not suit a presidential candidate, who will “have to articulate a new vision.” But haven’t we already had it up to our ears with what PR experts call the “vision thing”? We get to listen to this every four years after the candidates’ speechwriters provide the fluff for their campaigns. As a teenager, I sort of liked this bombast. As a senior citizen, it causes me to reach for the barf bag. How about nominating as a presidential candidate someone who rages against an overbearing public sector? What Corbett and Christie have been doing in a modest way may energize a growing electorate, which may sweep the right person into the presidency. Let’s continue to shift the balance of power, from the public sector back to tax-paying citizens. There’s a presidential vision in a nutshell; and I’m giving it away free of charge.

Dole, Ford, the two Bush presidents, and McCain have all personified the WSJ mold. That mold imposes on candidates a painfully centrist course, with the need for periodic concessions to the left, coupled with a liberal internationalist foreign policy. Like her employers, Strassel is afraid that we may not get someone in her preferred mold. But unlike her, I’ve no doubt that the WSJ and the Republican National Committee will get what they deserve. That candidate in all likelihood (let’s call him Mr. Romney or Mr. Huckabee) will reenact the failure of McCain but will be praised in the GOP press for his restraint and sensitivity. Of course the other side will attack him, no matter what, as a stand-in for the Ku Klux Klan. And I won’t shed a tear when my Republican friends complain about this unfair treatment. Let the new Dole or McCain go down to defeat together with his/her outdated maneuvering.