If you had bet me six months ago that the grassroots disaffection in the Republican Party, as demonstrated by the “Tea Party” movement, would guarantee a responsive nominee for president, you would have lost.  I am no prophet, just an observer with some historical perspective.  I would have bet on Romney against all comers.  The Republican Party almost always returns to its roots (like a dog to its vomit) and selects a wealthy liberal from the Deep North to head the ticket.

The media and the “front runners” colluded to ensure than no real political debate made it to the airwaves during the sideshow of the primaries, which had no purpose except to make us poor dupes in the boondocks think that we had some input.  It will be the same at the national convention, which will not be a political event but a scripted advertisement.

Isn’t it curious that the Republican Party will have a presidential nominee from Massachusetts, which (along with its spawn, Connecticut and Rhode Island) has the smallest and most atypical Republican electorate of any state?

For a long time the state capitalists and political hacks who controlled the Republican Party dominated American politics by an appeal to respectability against the Evil Party of “Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion”—the desire for respectable conformity being the predominant American characteristic, according to Tocqueville in the 19th century and Solzhenitsyn in the 20th.

In the 1960’s George Wallace demonstrated the electoral strength of antiliberal sentiment, which brought forth a new marketing strategy from the party leadership, a pretense to “conservatism.”  Ronald Reagan, leading a revolt from the Heartland, was forced to take a rich liberal from the Deep North as his running mate and successor.  When it came George H.W. Bush’s turn to lead the ticket, his vice-presidential candidate was another rich boy from the Deep North, repackaged as a “conservative,” though nobody had thought of him as that before.

The party leaders are now presented with a problem.  To what extent should they recognize the disaffected grassroots?  Will they exclude them entirely from the campaign, relying on anti-Obama sentiment to bring in their votes for “the lesser evil,” a strategy that has worked every time?  Or give them some insincere lip service to keep them quiet?  We will be able to get some idea from the vice presidential nominee.  I would bet on some Quayle-like pseudoconservative, probably another rich boy from the Deep North, who might happen to live elsewhere now.

There is a genuine moral case to make, when the only choice is between two evils, that to select the lesser one is a correct action.  However, careful consideration is required in discerning which evil is the lesser, as well as recognition that the lesser evil is still an evil.

I hold no brief for Obama, whom I do not even consider to be a proper American citizen.  However, I note that the incumbent seems actually to believe in the leftist nostrums he espouses, disguising them no more than normal in conventional politics.  Every position that Romney will take in the coming campaign, especially in so close an election as is likely, will certainly be an insincere marketing strategy that holds us poor dupes from the boondocks in barely hidden cynical contempt.  True, a President Romney will not appoint any Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, just a Souter or Blackmun, which for all practical purposes will be the same thing.  I can think of only one significant difference between Obama and Romney, the purported “lesser evil”: Obama is slightly less likely to start an illegal, unjust, and unnecessary war.