The American Prospect : Steve Erickson : The Republican Party now defines itself not by new ideas or adventurous thinking or anything other than a livid rage at the White House’s current incumbent

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"Why did Haley Barbour, Chris Christie, and Mitch Daniels prefer not to run against Obama ?? Each had his own reasons for demurring, but you still get the feeling that in their hearts of hearts none expects Mitt Romney to be running for re-election in 2016".

I agree with the author of this article Steve Erickson, Obama is very strong and it is a stupid lie that Republicans are telling about Obama being weak.

The American Prospect
Republican Roulette
How Rick Santorum was left holding the gun
By Steve Erickson
January 5, 2012

How Rick Santorum was left holding the gun


Some excerpts :

One of the popular canards argued by perfectly intelligent people over the last few years is that Barack Obama is a man lucky in his enemies. This bit of conventional wisdom is based mostly on Obama’s 2004 Senate race in Illinois, when a potentially formidable opponent was sidelined by scandal and in their desperation, state Republicans recruited conservative firebrand Alan Keyes, who was not merely prone to self-sabotage but imbued with a lust for it. Obama was hardly lucky, however, in his ’08 presidential race, facing the single most prohibitive front-runner in an open nominating contest since Bob Dole in 1996, or maybe I mean Ronald Reagan in 1980.

Hillary Clinton was backed by the most daunting machine in Democratic presidential politics since the Kennedys, and John McCain probably was as strong a Republican as Obama could have run against that year. Beyond all this, at what point might we conclude that the president makes his own luck? What about him did Haley Barbour, Chris Christie, and Mitch Daniels prefer not to run against? Each had his own reasons for demurring, but you still get the feeling that in their hearts of hearts none expects Mitt Romney to be running for re-election in 2016.

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Now the Republicans are the crazy-quilt hysterics, more or less equal parts evangelicals and Ayn Rand objectivists and hedge-fund robber barons, which is another reason why the party’s heavyweights sat out this round—not because those who are running seemed on the fringe but because, particularly in the wake of the 2010 midterms, the establishment heavyweights came to suspect that they are now the fringe. A Barbour or Christie is smart enough to know that Michele Bachmann, the waking refutation of the Daniel Patrick Moynihan maxim that you’re entitled to your own opinion but not your own facts, and six-gun-packing Fed-chairman-lynching secessionist Rick Perry, who in all his Texasanity makes George W. Bush look like Noel Coward, better embody the party.

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