(alex knepper)

Could Republicans win by losing?

The field of presidential candidates this year is so dismal, so inept, so lacking in character and resolve, that I’m forced to ask: would it be better to simply wait until 2016?

Let’s examine our options, here: Mitt Romney is an utter charlatan with no guiding principles other than his own conventionally-defined success. Becoming president would merely be the final notch in his belt; the grand finale to his perfect life. He believes in nothing but his resume: from taxes to immigration to abortion to unions to gay rights to guns, the man has been on every side of every issue. He is a caricature of a politician: a man who will say anything to get elected.

Herman Cain’s astonishing ignorance of the basics of foreign policy — as well as his astounding incompetence at managing his campaign and his willingness to play the race card against his opponents — has disqualified him. The man is a total embarrassment of a candidate and his ascent in the polls is a terrifying reflection of a party base drunk on identity politics and cultural indicators.

Newt Gingrich, suddenly in third place, already disqualified himself twice this year: once when he endorsed Dinesh D’Souza’s bizarre, racist screed against Barack Obama — accusing him of seeing the world through the lens of ‘Kenyan anti-colonialism’ — and once when he slammed Paul Ryan’s Medicare plan as “right-wing social engineering.”

Not that Rick Perry and Ron Paul are worthy of my support either way, but they, like the rest of the field, are, at this point in time, also-rans.

I don’t trust any of these people to lead us through our debt crisis and out of mass unemployment. Of course, I don’t trust Barack Obama — but politics isn’t just a short-term operation. There are tactics — beat the Democrats whenever you can — and then there’s strategy: what’s the most effective way to roll back harmful left-wing policies?

So again, I ponder: is winning the presidency always worth it? In the short-term, perhaps — but does anyone doubt that the Republican Party is better off for having lost in 2008? John McCain’s fiscal policies would have been hapless — he was never a believer in free-market principles, and his fetish for ‘compromise’ would have doomed him and his party to suffer the consequences of the worst of both worlds. His failures would have been tagged as a conservative disaster, and we’d currently be lamenting the fact that we nominated him in the first place — and, more saliently, that his failure would be sweeping in an era of hyper-liberalism in 2012 and beyond. It was better in the long-term for Republicans, for economic liberty, and for the country that John McCain lost.

Instead of flailing through a doomed McCain presidency, the Republican Party went through a few years of soul-searching. It has miraculously shaken off the Bush brand and is newly focused on economic liberty and the debt crisis — and that’s just in a few years’ time. If, say, Herman Cain is nominated and loses to Obama, it could possibly serve as the wake-up call that the party base needs to discipline itself, setting up a candidate like Chris Christie to easily walk to victory in 2016. (Worse, if Herman Cain wins, we will fail in our goals of addressing the debt crisis and rolling back left-wing policies. He is awful at public relations management and has not proven himself as a political leader.)

Moreover, it’s not as if — despite his oft-stated wishes — Obama can single-handedly enact harmful policies. The worst of the Obama era — four years or eight — is over. The Republican House already acts as a buffer on his left-wing dreams, and if we focus on re-taking the Senate, he will be rendered virtually impotent. He is no Bill Clinton: he’s not going to co-opt conservative ideas and spin them into left-wing victories. He’s not smart, savvy, or pragmatic enough to do it — he’d have already done so if he were. He’d simply have a failed second term, setting up a Republican to cruise to victory in 2016 — and the field next time is bound to be better, with people like Christie, Jindal, and possibly Ryan raring to run.

Sometimes, when you lose, you win. We have a competent slate of candidates waiting for us in 2016, should we lose to Obama. Since none of the Republican candidates this year are acceptable, I feel that I have no choice but to support Obama’s re-election and wait for 2016.