"The sudden re-emergence on the political scene of former Vice President Dick Cheney is somewhat puzzling. Why would a man who has occupied positions of authority...want to re-enter the arena when he didn't have to? Could it be that he is testing the waters for a 2012 run for the Republican presidential nomination? [...] Cheney would unify and perhaps re-energize the Reagan coalition in ways that few if any of the potential GOP candidates could." -- Peter Roff (via Chris Orr)
It would be ironic (and, honestly, a little sad) if the GOP were the first party to run a presidential candidate who supported marriage equality. Still, I think the notion that Cheney could reignite the Reagan Coalition is misguided, as well as insufficient. Two words: Reagan Democrats. What will Cheney appeal to them on? Unclear, but Cheney's never exactly been known for his political sensitivity. Now, politics is always fluid and the Democrats hardly have a lock on these voters, but somehow I doubt that Dick Cheney is going to be the person to reach out to these folks, he of the bad impression of The Penguin.
Truth be told, I'm curious to see where the GOP would start in order to rebuild. In 1980, the GOP's strong spots were in the Midwest, the liberal Northeast (that still gave Reagan an awful lot of votes), and the libertarian West--California, before 1992, voted Republican for president with the same frequency as Idaho. Nowadays, those regions range from marginally Democratic to staunchly Democratic. The country has changed, and so must any possible center-right coalition. The idea that "just bringing the base together" will be enough to win suggests that the right really has begun to believe its own bullshit about how this is a center-right country, and that people have been bamboozled by liberal media bias and Obama's charisma. This is always the danger when one deals in spin.
