Here Is a Novel Idea

Michael Lind is sporting a novel idea: The Republicans should nominate Barack Obama for President in 2012!

It certainly makes sense to me. Their current crop of candidates is nothing to write home about. Besides, underneath all his rhetoric, Obama's policies more closely resemble Republicanism of the 1950s. As Lind points out, if Obama would run under the GOP banner, that would at least open things up for a true liberal to oppose him.

If Obama chose to run for reelection not as a Democrat but as a moderate Republican, he could bring about two healthy transformations in the American political system. The moderate wing of the Republican Party could be restored. And the Democratic presidential nomination might be opened up to politicians from the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party.

In the last generation, the old-fashioned moderate Republicans from New England and the Midwest symbolized by Nelson Rockefeller have been driven out of the GOP by the conservative followers of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. Streaming into the Democratic Party as voters, and buying it with ample Wall Street cash as donors, this upscale elite has changed the party from a populist liberal alliance of unionized workers and populists into a socially liberal, economically conservative version of the old country-club Republicanism of the pre-Reagan era. The transformation began under Jimmy Carter, accelerated under Bill Clinton and has nearly been completed under Barack Obama. This is not your grandfather’s Democratic Party. It is your grandfather’s Republican Party of 1955...

I'm not saying such a change in the political landscape would induce me to vote Democrat in 2012, but you never know.

Needless to say, Obama and the GOP would never go for this idea. Why should they? With Obama as the so-called "liberal" in the race, it effectively closes the door on a bona fide progressive push by his own party!

That's how the ruling elite wants it!