Proving radical right-wing bona fides will be the undoing of the GOP presidential nominee

By Richard K. Barry

Many months ago, I made a point about how the Tea Party would drag GOP presidential candidates to the far right as these hopefuls battled it out to curry favour with this activist hard-core right-wing of the party. Conventional wisdom is that in nomination races you have to prove you are worthy of the party faithful who can have some pretty rigid views about what it means, in this case, to be a conservative. This is even more the case with the Tea Party, as we know.

In the general election, you typically have to moderate these ideological views to appeal to independent or swing voters who are more pragmatic and less impressed with your supposed purity as a standard-bearer for your party. 

It wasn't clear how this would all work out back then for the GOP, but now we know and so does the Obama campaign.

As Talking Points Memo pointed out recently:

The rise of Gingrich has forced Romney to take stands that Democrats are quite thrilled with, such as his new embrace of the Ryan Budget, which polled poorly back when the Republican House approved it. Months more of trying to win over conservative voters away from Gingrich could force Romney into more less-than-general-election-ideal stances. 

David Axelrod

That's assuming Romney wins. If the long primary results in a Gingrich nomination, well, the Obama campaign thinks more exposure for Gingrich is a good thing for them, too. 

Now, those with four year memories will recall that the epically long primary that resulted in Obama's nomination was widely seen as strengthening Obama and turning him in to a general election force to be reckoned with. Obama strategist David Axelrod said there's no danger of something similar happening to the GOP nominee that emerges from a long Gingrich-Romney slog. 

"The difference here is that we weren't being tugged to a pole in our party, we weren't being tugged to the left," Axelrod said. "They're being tugged to the right every day."

It seems likely that this Romney vs. Gingrich dust-up is going to take several months to resolve itself, which, if nothing else, assures less time for the eventual Republican nominee to focus his attention on Obama. But at least as important is all of the radical right-wing positions the GOP nominee will have blathered all over the country, which it will be really hard to walk back.  

As Axelrod says:

The agenda that the Republicans are embracing in order to win the nomination, I think they're mortgaging themselves for the general by tacking as far as they are now. I think the longer the race goes the more they're going to do that and the harder it is to scramble back.

Yes, that's the point and it wasn't hard to see coming. The Tea Party may not be the force it once was, but it set all of this in motion and now will reap what it sowed. Democrats everywhere are grateful.

(Cross-posted at Lippmann's Ghost.)