The Vig

Rush Limbaugh yesterday declared Barack Obama the weakest of the Democratic candidates. Weaker than Kucinich. Weaker than even Gravel.

It’s tough to tell when El Rushbo is kidding or when he’s being serious. Olbermann long ago gave up on trying to distinguish between the two Rushes. He now only refers to him as “Comedian Rush Limbaugh”. A title the talk-show king no doubt relishes.

The thing is though, Obama isn’t that weak. Oh sure, the talk radio hosts will gleefully pound away on Jeremiah Wright and Tony Rezko. But as Newt pointed out, that type of politicking isn’t going to work this time around.

The Republican brand has been so badly damaged that if Republicans try to run an anti-Obama, anti- Reverend Wright, or (if Senator Clinton wins), anti-Clinton campaign, they are simply going to fail.

This model has already been tested with disastrous results.

In 2006, there were six incumbent Republican Senators who had plenty of money, the advantage of incumbency, and traditionally successful consultants.

But the voters in all six states had adopted a simple position: “Not you.” No matter what the GOP Senators attacked their opponents with, the voters shrugged off the attacks and returned to, “Not you.”

The danger for House and Senate Republicans in 2008 is that the voters will say, “Not the Republicans.”

From top-to-bottom, the Republican party has become completely bereft of ideas and instead relies solely on glib name-calling to win arguments and elections.  Even the idea guys don’t have any ideas.  Act Number One of Newt’s “Nine Acts of Real Change that Could Restore the GOP Brand”, for example, is repealing the gas tax.  Number Nine is reminding us about the judiciary.  Really?  Judges are a winner?

The real problem with the Republicans is voters just don’t see themselves in that party anymore.  That one fact. more than anything, is going to prove their undoing in November.  This sort of stuff is going to absolutely kill them.  Period.  Until the party can divorce itself from the Religious Right, it won’t be able to move forward in any meaningful way.  And even then, they’ll have to come up with a new standard bearer.  Their ranks have been so poisoned, though, by the glibertarian wing that it may take a generation for them to recover.