Free Republic

THERE IS one man who can save the Republican Party, and his name is Mitt Romney. Seriously. Seven years after Romney crashed and burned in the 2008 Republican primary and three years after he beat a weak GOP presidential field before losing to President Obama, he is still the party’s best hope of winning back the White House.

Last August, I wrote the following about Mitt Romney’s odds of winning the Republican nomination: In a sense, the stronger President Obama looks next year, the better Romney’s chances of being nominated. He needs the prospect of an uphill general-election battle to keep his potential rivals for establishment support safely on the sidelines. And then he needs that same establishment to rally around him once the primary voting starts — not out of love or admiration, but out of fear of the populist alternative. Six months later, this is almost exactly how things are playing out. In many ways, Romney...

ANOTHER weekend, another grass-roots demonstration starring Real Americans who are mad as hell and want to take back their country from you-know-who. Last Sunday the site was Lower Manhattan, where they jeered the “ground zero mosque.” This weekend, the scene shifted to Washington, where the avatars of oppressed white Tea Party America, Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin, were slated to “reclaim the civil rights movement” (Beck’s words) on the same spot where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. had his dream exactly 47 years earlier. Vive la révolution! There’s just one element missing from these snapshots of America’s ostensibly spontaneous...