2012 GOP Primary is Nothing Like Dems in 2008

      Kind of sad really that this is all they have left, but the new spin some Republicans are trying to make is that the 2012 GOP primary has been a "healthy process" and that kind of like the Clinton-Obama race of 2008 it will leave the eventual winner-who they dearly want to be Romney-will be much stronger as a result, indeed, they will be "battle tested."

     Nice try. This race is nothing like the Dems in 2008. That race had two highly qualified and respected candidates, either of who would have made a fine President. This was the view of the Democratic faithful. For my part I was actually a Hillary man, but I had no trouble making the switch when it was over. What is different about this Republican primary is that few see the GOP field as between highly qualified candidates worthy of respect.

     To the contrary most of them wish someone else was running. Romney's whole pitch is simply that he isn't a total nut like Santorum. Maybe not, but he is a total phony.

     If this primary reminds us of any past Democratic race it would be the Democratic primary of 1924. That was a freak show where you had the more conservative rural and southern Democrats up against, the northern, urban, more ethnic and immigrant Democrats.

     That was the year FDR rightly avoided running knowing that the Democratic ticket was going to be road kill which it was as Coolidge won in a landslide. That year the Democrats-like the GOP this year-got sidetracked on all kinds of peripheral "cultural" issues like a civil war between the rural Wets and the urban Drys and over racism-Bob McAdoo was actually a former Klans man, whereas the northern, urban Democrats wanted nothing to do with such racism.

    Part of the problem was that the economy was doing very well so there was little for the Democrats to really go on. This is what has happened to this year's GOP with the economy improving-they got off of economic issues as they had nothing to say about them really other than that the bailout was a terrible thing though it worked and that they wanted more tax cuts for the wealthy.

   So the 1924 Democratic party is who the 2012 GOP most resembles. Though today's op-ed in the Wall Street Journal recalls Kennedy's demagoguery against Nixon in 1960 about the illusionary  "missile gap."