NO ONE CAN PREDICT EXACTLY HOW MASSIVE THE REPUBLICAN DEFEAT WILL BE NEXT NOVEMBER

Sane people already know it doesn't matter which of the pathetic pygmies plays the Bob Dole role in the 2008 presidential election. The only thing left unclear is the magnitude of the rejection of Bush and the Republican Party that allowed him-- encouraged him-- to devastate American ideals and values-- not to forget the American economy. Electorally speaking, 2008 will be an Armageddon for the GOP-- though not the kind of Armageddon their religionist nut segment has been having wet dreams about.

Republican activists aren't preparing themselves for it. They're missing the obvious-- like the lack of participation in Republican primaries and caucuses, while Democratic primaries and caucuses draw record numbers of participants. Instead the extremists on the ideological fringes of the GOP-- the ones who have been driving the show in the last decade or so-- are inventing substitute realities to explain the world of hurt headed their way. It's the mainstream media's fault, they screech, denying that the GOP owns the mainstream media.

Clearly, much of the mainstream media is pumping for McCain, irrationally a bete noir of the extremist apparatchiks. Like the mainstream of the Insider Republican Establishment, they fear and loathe The Huckster and his pseudo-populist appeal, tinged with racism, xenophobia, homophobia, and every kind of divisive bigotry he can come up with to appeal to the Republican masses in the backward precincts of the Old Confederacy. The Huckster's strategy was derailed in South Carolina by McCain's right flank man (Sir Frederick of Hollywood). A Republican propagandist at today's National Review mentions how McCain's victory rally in South Carolina yesterday erupted in cheers-- "Go Fred Go! Go Fred Go! Go Fred Go!"-- when a picture of ole Fred showed up on the Fox big screen. He thinks it was because they hate Willard so much and find Fred so likable. Well, as hateful as Willard is, I think he's leaving something out. It was Fred's appeal to so many of the Know Nothing voters in backward parts of the state that allowed McCain to beat the surging Huckster. Associated Press reports that "With returns from 93 precincts counted, McCain won about 33 percent of the vote and Huckabee had about 30 percent. Fred Thompson was in third place with 16 percent." So will Giuliani be able to stop McCain's momentum in Florida? No one believes in Giuliani any longer; he's a spent force that never even got tried out.

But it doesn't matter. It's like a bad reality show on TV. The Bush's economic policies are coming home to roost. His 29% approval rating will soon look like Republican glory days. And, as Frank Rich pointed out today, Ronald Reagan is still dead.

Never mind that the G.O.P. is running on empty, with no ideas beyond the incessant repetition of Reagan’s name. A battle over race-and-gender identity politics among the Democrats, with its acrid scent from the 1960s, might be just the spark for a Republican comeback. (As long as the G.O.P.’s own identity politics, over religion, don’t flare up.)

Alas, these hopes faded on Tuesday night. First, the debating Democrats declared a truce, however fragile, in their racial brawl. Then Republicans in Michigan reconstituted their party’s election-year chaos by temporarily revivifying yet another candidate, Mitt Romney, who had been left for dead.

...It’s not just that the old Reagan coalition of social, economic and foreign-policy conservatives has fractured. A more indelible problem for the Republicans in 2008 is that their candidates are utterly segregated from reality as it is lived by the overwhelming majority of their fellow Americans. The G.O.P. presidential field’s lack of demographic diversity by age, gender, ethnicity or even wardrobe, let alone race, is simply the leading indicator of how out of touch its brand has become.

The election is more than nine months away, and already this obsession is blowing up in the G.O.P.’s face with non-Hispanic voters, too. Far from proving the killer app of 2008 [as predicted by Republican strategists and the always wrong Democratic Party boss Rahm Emanuel], illegal immigration is evaporating as a national cause. In the nearly identical findings of The New York Times/CBS News and ABC News/Washington Post polls this month, it ranks near the bottom, the top issue for a mere 4 to 5 percent of voters. The economy (at 20 to 29 percent) leads in both surveys, closely followed by the total of those picking some variant of “war” and “Iraq.”

As if it weren’t crazy enough for Republicans to lash themselves to the listing mast of immigration, they are nonplayers on the issues that do matter most to voters. The more the economy tanks and steals Americans’ attention from a relatively less violent Iraq, the more voters learn that the Republicans have little to offer beyond their one-size-fits-all panacea of extending the Bush tax cuts.

To voters who do remember Iraq, the supposed military success of the “surge” does not accrue to the Republicans’ favor either. Quite the contrary. As every poll shows, most Americans still want the troops home ASAP. Republican declarations that we are “winning” merely lead many voters to a logical conclusion: Why not let the Iraqis take over the remaining triage so we can retrieve the $10 billion a month in taxpayers’ money that might benefit us at home? This is why even the poll-driven Mrs. Clinton, who has been the most cautious and ambiguous of the Democratic candidates about a withdrawal timetable, dramatically changed course to expedite her Iraq exit strategy in Tuesday night’s debate.