GOP Dice Are Rolling

I'm beginning to think the GOP's 2012 gamble looks like this: The big GOP money abandons the White House as a lost cause (because their best case looks like a dead-on-arrival widely disliked mistrusted Taxachusetts Mormon and their worst case looks like a dead-on-arrival raw slab of Teavangelical Crazytown meat) and they focus their resources instead on taking the Senate and keeping the House and making an Obama second term more or less irrelevant through ongoing criminal obstruction and culture-war divisiveness, setting the scene for a real Republican run in 2016.

The danger for them is that this sets the stage for a Goldwater debacle, in which case Obama's coattails trump the GOP money, Dems regain the House and limit the damage in the Senate and manage to accomplish enough in the second term in partnership with a functional Congress (if Dems miraculously hold the Senate, they really need to revisit the filibuster) to marginalize GOP obstructionists as useless do-nothings and GOP culture warriors as ugly throw-backs.

Given the level of Democratic organization and energy required to regain the House and regain the Senate, I think such a GOP bet isn't too bad. Of course, their win would be the whole world's loss, and so maybe this time the stakes are finally stark enough that Dems will find some fight in them. Wisconsin may have been a harbinger. Dice are rolling.