Hysteria has lapsed into disaffection: it was a bleak night for President Obama. But, despite the apparent immediacy of
a ‘conservative moment’, there is caution in Republican circles this morning: both Clinton and Reagan won from similar positions in 1982 and 1994. The G.O.P’s leadership knows that
elections are not won from the extremes, as Barack Obama has discovered to his cost, and it is trying to calm the party’s often excitable fringe, which will be no easy task if Rand Paul’s
‘Tea Party tidal wave’ is anything to go by.
Ben Brogan recently highlighted the G.O.P’s growing ‘Stop Palin’ campaign, and David Frum adds his voice again. Chancers and charismatics like Palin titillate their captive audiences; but they can enrage the unconverted and, as Karl Rove put it recently, affront the dignity of the office to which they aspire.
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