Looks like the great (old) right hope might be a little more neo than previously considered. I know that folks like Daniel Larison are nutty about Mark Sanford, but I think he might suffer from Huckabee Syndrome: initially, he's an interesting right of center politician who seems willing to take a few different positions from most Republicans and seems like an intriguing reformist presence. Then he becomes a national figure and gets a taste of power, decides he wants more. And then it all goes round the tubes, said figure flames out and becomes indistinguishable from the rest of the wingnutisphere.
With Sanford, it appears that this process has passed swiftly and in obscurity, at a time when he's trying to attract 2012 attention. With Huckabee, the process has been much more public and drawn out. It's taken over a year for Huck to go from being pro-life, from the cradle to the grave, to decrying the United Soviet States of America. But in both cases the problem is ambition, which is not necessarily a bad character trait but one which, if pronounced enough, can easily overpower everything else.
And this is a symptom of the right's greater problem, which is that it has been so long divorced from anything resembling ideals that everyone with a rudimentary sense of justice or fairness has long since bolted the party, leaving behind an aging phalanx of hard-liners and a generation of political opportunists, i.e. the Rove Generation. Perhaps the best way of rebuilding the party would be to find a clean, articulate, ethical and unambitious politician who can present a fresh picture of what Republicans want to do but that doesn't really want to hold power, and that can thus avoid the corruption that power inevitably brings. This sort of thinking is, ultimately, what led to Barry Goldwater's 1964 nomination. And since I'd say it's highly likely that Barack Obama will be reelected in 2012, perhaps by a large margin if he's running against someone whose name rhymes with jailin', it's a good opportunity to find a compelling spokesman who will be able to articulate a vision that will be helpful going forward but that might not win the battle. Somehow, though, I suspect that this calculus will elude Republican elites, who will run Sarah Palin and then not have to worry about losing donor dollars or special interests walking away.
