ROSS, IT'S A FEATURE, NOT A BUG

Ross Douthat thinks Republicans are screwing up the debt-ceiling fight. He thinks that's because they just never had a plan for the endgame:

What went wrong? It turns out that Republicans didn't have a plan for transitioning from the early phase of a high-stakes political negotiation, when the goal is to draw stark lines and force the other side to move your way, to the late phase, in which the public relations battle becomes crucial and the goal is to make the other side seem unreasonable, intransigent and even a little bit insane.

Winning the later phase doesn't require making enormous compromises, or giving up the ground you've gained. But it requires at least the appearance of conciliation, and a few examples of concessions that you're willing to (oh-so-magnanimously) make to those unreasonable ideologues in the other party....

It's not that Republicans needed to tug their forelock and go along with whatever grand bargain the White House whipped up. But to win the endgame, they needed something they were willing to concede, something they could tout in public as an example of meeting the Democrats partway.

But teabagger Republicans don't think they need any of that. They don't see any value in appearing reasonable. Their brand is unreasonable. They think they win only if they seem to have achieved total victory, because that's what they -- not unreasonably -- think their base wants.

Politico tells us this morning that

going into 2012, congressional Republicans seem focused on driving their conservative base, displaying little confidence that one of their presidential candidates will oust Obama.

I think it's more than that. They're not doing this because they expect little help from a presidential candidate -- they're doing it because they think it's a winning strategy for them no matter what, and they think it would be a winning strategy for their presidential candidate, too. It's Karl Rove's "50% + 1 vote" strategy -- you don't win by tacking to the center, you win by getting your base really, really pumped up. It's also Rush Limbaugh's pet notion that Republicans lose when they seem moderate and win when they seem really conservative.

I sometimes wonder if these guys are right -- in this country, so many voters, especially swing voters, are so ill-informed that what may sway them is the sense that a candidate really stands for something. It doesn't matter what the hell it is. So these swing voters turn out as well as the base to vote for the zealot, especially if the zealot uses a lot of abstract nouns (like "freedom") to sell the ideology.

Maybe being more of an ideologue would work for Democrats, too. Hell, who was the last Democrat to win a genuine presidential landslide? The guy who'd just signed what must have seemed like a radical left-wing piece of legislation, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a few months earlier.

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OH, AND: Obama's winning? Really? Go look at the Gallup tracking poll of Obama's approval -- it's down to 44%-49%. That's pretty much within the range it's been in for more than a year -- but it's at the low end of the range, and it's dropped in recent days. The Establishment may think he's doing a bang-up job, but the public doesn't.