How Will Obama Fight Back Against Deranged Republican Charges?

Sometimes it almost seems like a conspiracy. Barack Obama is not just a mediocre president, he's been a reliable tool for Corporate America since the day he entered the U.S. Senate. And Big Business couldn't hope for a better friend in the White House. Wednesday evening we looked at why certain elements of that community oppose him, but sometimes I think it's just a great big game. Who would support Obama-- let alone enthusiastically support him-- outside of the context of the Republican alternative? The Party has been captured by the deranged brothers of one of the ardently fascist founders of the John Birch Society, the Kochs. They call the shots now and all the GOP candidates dance to their toxic tune.

When Rahm Emanuel counseled Obama that he could ignore progressives' demands for reform and for economic justice because the Republicans would offer such an untenable alternative that progressives would crawl on their bellies to reelect Obama, I scoffed. But Rahm was correct. I have no intention of voting for Obama... but I live in California, where he doesn't need my vote. What would I do if I lived in Ohio or Florida or Nevada? Of course I have no way of being certain, but I am certain that I'm sick of a string of mediocre presidents. There's never been a good one in my lifetime and I wonder if there ever will be. (I'm putting my hopes on Elizabeth Warren right now-- although she has to win her Senate race first.)

And, yes, of course I realize that mediocre is "better" than cataclysmically horrendous, examples of which we saw demonstrated Wednesday night at the final-- THANK GOD-- Republican debate in Mesa, Arizona. I always thought of Ron Paul as a crackpot; in fact, he clearly is. But he stood out as the relatively sane one next to Romney, Santorum and Gingrich. That's why Obama's going to win another term, a term that there is absolutely not a single reason to believe will be any better than the first one. In fact, there's as much of a reason to believe it will be even worse-- worse than the first one, not worse than a Romney or Santorum term. And even Republican strategists are starting to give up on that happening; they're just going to have to settle for a sane, conservative, corporate-oriented Democrat again.

In 2008, after Republicans were routed in the presidential and congressional elections, there was widespread consensus within elite GOP circles about the party’s structural problems: The Republican voter base was too old, too white, too male and too strident for the party to prosper long term in a country growing ever more diverse.

Four years later, many of the same GOP leaders are watching with rising dismay as the 2012 presidential campaign has featured excursions into social issues like contraception and a sprint by the candidates to strike the toughest stance against illegal immigration, issues they say are far removed from the workaday concerns of the independent voters Republicans need to evict Barack Obama from the White House.

To those Republicans, the probable result looks more and more like a general election fought on a much narrower band of turf than the GOP leaders assumed even a few months ago. As recently as 2010, when Republicans elected historic numbers of women and minorities to high office, a permanent expansion of the conservative coalition looked within the realm of possibility to party strategists.

The phenomenon of a party talking to itself-- rather than reaching out to new voters-- was on sharp display at a candidates debate here Wednesday night marked by nearly two hours of peevish and often confusing exchanges between Mitt Romney and his surging challenger, Rick Santorum