WILL REPUBLICANS GO TOO FAR? – AT 10:23 A.M. ET:  We regularly discuss here the conflict between ideology and electability that is going on inside both parties.  There are the true believers, then there are the believers, also true, who'd like a little power occasionally. 

Conservative writer Ramesh Ponnuru has written a very thoughtful column on this for Bloomberg.  It's worth mulling what he says, because blowing next year's election would be a sin for the Republican Party, and possibly lead to the party's splitting into endlessly warring factions.  From Bloomberg: 

In any presidential primary there’s a tension between the voters’ desire for a candidate who can win the general election and their desire for a candidate who shares their views -- between, in other words, ideology and electability. The more beatable Obama looks, the more the balance for Republican voters will tilt toward ideology and away from electability.

That doesn’t just mean they will be more likely to support candidates such as Michele Bachmann and Herman Cain, who will have trouble winning votes from independents and Democrats. It also means the terrain of the primaries will shift: The candidates will place more emphasis on outflanking one another on the right and less on showing they can win in November 2012.

Even if Obama were doing better, the Republican primary would put a heavy weight on ideology. Whenever someone suggests that a candidate can’t win, many conservatives retort that people said that about Reagan, too. (What they forget is that people also said it about Barry Goldwater, and they were right.)

And...

Already the Republican primaries have seen candidates take positions that will be hard sells in the fall of next year. Both Bachmann and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, for example, want to abolish the Environmental Protection Agency. Polls suggest that while the public doesn’t consider environmental protection its top priority right now, it favors regulation and trusts Democrats over Republicans on the issue. Texas Governor Rick Perry has suggested that Social Security and Medicare are unconstitutional and that they should be replaced by state-run programs. There’s a reason no Republican candidate since 1964 has run on a platform anything like this one on entitlements: Both programs are extremely popular.

And...

It’s possible, of course, for a party to concentrate too much on electability and to care more about gaining power than about accomplishing anything with it. But at least a party that cares about electability is looking outward, beyond its members. Today’s Republican Party is more interested in refining its doctrines than gaining converts. It has turned inward.

That is good news for Obama, at a time when he isn’t getting much. The more his political standing falls, the more Republicans will think they are sure to beat him. And the more they think that, the less likely they will be to win.

COMMENT:  That is good reasoning.  Ronald Reagan showed us that a candidate can be both committed and electable at the same time, but Reagan did it by tempering his ideology with an ability to work with those who disagree. 

Reagan's political role model was Franklin Roosevelt, who very skillfully presented himself as a man who wanted to strengthen American institutions, not overthrow them.  He would borrow programs from, say, the socialist movement, but keep that movement at a distance.  (And please remember that, when abortion was a very hot issue, Ronald Reagan never addressed a pro-life rally in person.  He always did it by phone.)

Ironically, Obama succeeded, cynically, in convicing a good part of the electorate that he was a centrist when he ran in 2008, a practical man interested in practical solutions. 

America is an idealistic nation, but not an ideological one.  Ideology means far less here than in Europe, where it's golden.   There's an old line about a socialist saying, "I know it works in practice, but does it work in theory?"  Americans just want to know that it works.  The successful presidential candidate will understand that.

September 7, 2011