RED ON RED

If you go to any thread at Free Republic right now, partway down you'll probably see a sort of in-house ad featuring a YouTube video, followed by links to collected Freep threads related to the subject of the video. Several of these are in rotation. One looks like this:



That's a JPEG, but the video is here -- it's Romney promising in a Massachusetts gubernatorial debate to preserve abortion rights. The other links go to collected FR threads with the keywords romneytruthfile and rinofreeamerica.

I guess I'm surprised that Free Republic is declaring itself to be unswervingly anti-Romney, and doing it this early. I thought Romney had persuaded a lot of righties that he's one of them, and I imagined FR wouldn't want to frag another guy who could potentially be the GOP presidential nominee. But the site is declaring itself an anti-Romney zone.

I don't really think Free Republic has an enormous amount of clout on the right -- not like, say, Fox News, or even RedState these days -- but I think FR is a good place to go to take the pulse of the hardcore GOP base. I think this says that Mitt Romney, if he wins the 2012 nomination via the McCain route (by picking up all the non-lunatic Republican votes while Palin and Gingrich and Santorum and the others split the lunatic vote), is going to have difficulty motivating the base in the fall, even against the Kenyan Satan. He may have to pick the wingnuttiest running mate imaginable. (As I've said before: Romney/Bachmann '12?)