You can't make this stuff up:
Obama is chuckling all the way to the White House. He knows that McCain is token competition, and that this election is merely an exhibition contest. Had the GOP base unified behind a Romney or a Thompson or a Hunter, Obama would be in for a real fight.
That's D.R. Tucker on the Human Events site and, yes, he really is arguing that Duncan Hunter would have a better shot at beating Obama than McCain. It's impressive that conservatives like Tucker are sill able to convince themselves that the conservative movement is so powerful that Republicans need its enthusiastic support to be elected.
If that were the case wouldn't Republicans have, you know, not nominated John McCain, Bob Dole, or the first George Bush? The fact is that, as Rick Perlstein pointed out some months ago, the idea of a massive, homogeneous, well organized conservative movement is, and may always have been, a myth.
The extra-special-fun part for liberals of the persistence of views like Tucker's is that, as Matt Yglesias likes to point out, if McCain loses, people like Tucker will claim, wrongly, but most at least somewhat convincingly, that his loss proves them right. Hunter 2012 anyone?
--Sam Boyd
