I've never known what to think of Joe Scarborough (I've had him on, then off, then struck-through, and now +/- on my list of RWS™); he's clearly a conservative but unlike teabaggRs he's willing to praise Democrats and criticize Republicans when they deserve it. He'd really really like to see President Obama lose, and yet he has this to say:
If we want to win the battle of ideas in the long term, we should be willing to face the fact that Mitt Romney is likely to lose — and should, given that he’s neither a true conservative nor a courageous moderate. He’s just an ambitious man. Nothing wrong with that, except when you want to be president. Great leaders combine ambition and ideas and conviction.
Instead, we have a nominee who represents the worst of both worlds. Any swing voter attracted by moderate Republicanism can’t vote for a man who ran away from his core convictions. And conservative voters don’t believe Romney has any core convictions. This has all the makings of a Greek tragedy, all playing out on C-SPAN.
[...]
Craven calculation, on the other hand, does not pay off for conservatives. Romney needed to decide long ago who he was: the last of the Rockefeller Republicans (and thus somebody who probably wouldn’t have gotten through Iowa) or a genuine movement conservative with detailed ideas about how to right the country.
Me, I wouldn't necessarily consider it tragedy. But it's theater, all right. And, to "win the battle of ideas," they're gonna have to do more than unhitch from Mitt. They're gonna have to come up with better ideas.
