Mirror mirror on the wall, who’s the most anti-sausage of them all?

Via Glenn Reynolds (who properly warns not to take counsel of your fears), I was drawn one of the most thoughtful — if fearfully depressing — analyses of the Republican plight that I have seen.

Here’s John Hinderaker:

Nevertheless, if you are a Republican, the vibes are very bad. The presidential primary season has turned into a disaster, in my view. Mitt Romney has shown a discouraging inability to appeal to the party’s base, while the race has damaged both Romney and the party. Newt Gingrich, in particular, sacrificed the party to his own ego by launching left-wing attacks against Romney. Gingrich is gone as a Republican contender, but we will see more of him in the fall, in Obama ads. What a swan song for someone who once led the conservative movement!

Rick Santorum is a bright guy who has performed well in the debates, and he is hot, this week, in the Republican base. But he doesn’t have the chance of a snowball in Hell of being elected president. He couldn’t even get re-elected to the Senate in his home state of Pennsylvania in 2006. The 2012 election will be almost entirely about the economy, although national security is always relevant to a presidential contest. It would be suicidal for the GOP to nominate a candidate whose signature issues are gay marriage and abortion. At the end of the day, the party won’t be that dumb. But the fact that the party’s base is flirting with Santorum manifests a lack of seriousness that may prove fatal in November.

Meanwhile, President Obama is quietly staging a comeback….

Oh yes. And he chose to start it right here in Ann Arbor, a block away from where I live. (I dryly noted the irony of Republican suicide in the face of the reinvention of Obama mania.)

I couldn’t agree more with Hinderaker. We have a Democrat who can be beaten in the White House who is one of the worst presidents in history, and in the face of this, the GOP appears to be hell-bent on committing suicide.  I have noticed and so have a lot of people. Many of my readers probably think the party is so moribund that suicide is long overdue, but I disagree. Not so much with the suicide as with the timing.

For cripes sake, there will be plenty of time to commit suicide after the election!

Right now the focus ought to be on winning. But as I have noticed, there is not even agreement on that.

Winning does not count. Suicide comes first!

Saying that this simply does not compute does not solve the problem, and I’m not sure it’s quite accurate to characterize the problem as a war between those who want to win elections and those who want their principles (as opposed to others’ principles) to prevail regardless of consequences.  The social conservatives have their principles, the economic conservatives have theirs, the libertarians have theirs, there are Tea Party principles, and I suppose a smidgen of a decrepit principle or two might even be found among the despised country club big business Republicans of the Northeast.

So many Republicans are so pissed off at so many other Republicans that at times like this I have to wonder exactly what it is that constitutes the base.

The base. That’s the group that cannot stomach Romney. Who are these people, and what do “they” want? I put “they” in quotes because depending on how the base is defined, I might even be part of it. I am, after all, a Tea Party sympathizing libertarian who detests big government and all the sneaky and underhanded wheeling and dealing that greases its wheels no matter who gets elected. Yes, I detest that process every bit as much as the red meat socon Birther WND types I am so quick to distance myself from. What this might mean is that while the base may not agree on all issues (and maybe “it” agrees on very few), there is a definite overarching common thread.  It would be a mistake to try to pin it down as libertarianism, social conservatism, economic conservatism, constitutional conservatism, and it might even be a mistake to call it conservatism.

For lack of a term, I’ll just call this unifying thread “Anti-Sausage.”

What those who are pissed at Romney and pissed at the traditional Republican machine are against most of all can be summed up in the famous phrase misattributed to Bismarck over a century ago (there are many versions):

Laws, like sausages, cease to inspire respect in proportion as we know how they are made.

I would submit that one of the most vile sausages ever made stuffed was that 2000 page unread monstrosity known as “Obamacare.” The people who passed it not only never read it, but even admitted that it would be better to pass it and read it later. Obamacare makes the sausage comparison seem lame, for at least we have the USDA and the FDA to police  sausage making; no such restraints are placed on the makers of legislation. (Hence the Tea Party movement. )

But there is something Bismarck did say (or at least seems to have said) which is another political truism:

Politics is the art of the possible.

Because not all goals are possible, politics inherently means compromise with principle. In a two or more party system when the making sausage, you try to get your stuff in, and keep the other guy’s stuff out, and politicians being human beings, because of the very nature of human interaction there will be tradeoffs along the lines of “I’ll let you put some of your stuff in if you let me put some of my stuff in,” or “I’ll let you put some of your stuff in if you agree to leave certain stuff out!” (And innumerable variations about agreements on what future sausages to make or not make, new redesigns for older sausages, etc.)

The process stinks. The anti-sausage people have had it with the sausage, and they have had it with politics.

It might help if they realized what unites them, and what they are against. They don’t want to support anyone who wants to continue the principle-destroying (not destroyed so much as ground up into the noxious mix), sausage-making machine.

The problem is, they are supposed to be electing their candidate for a job that amounts to Sausage Executive in Chief.  Enabling and enforcing the machine that cranks out the unwanted sausages, and then forcing us all to eat them is what he does, and what all of them promise to do with the exception of Ron Paul who does not count because he is too anti-sausage for serious consideration. Being anti-sausage, it seems, does have its limits.

After all, the goal of trying to elect an anti-sausage sausage kingpin who does the best job of saying he is anti-sausage without being really anti-sausage.

Is there such a thing as the art of the impossible?