Just out of curiosity, do you think any of the candidates in the 2008 GOP primaries could have won? I don't. I remember when this site was Fred Republic and he couldn't get out of the starting blocks. I doubt Rudy/Huck McRomney would have had much chance against The American Idol either.
I think Thompson would have had a good chance. Although he would have had to have more “fire” than he showed, and he would have had to have gotten into the race much earlier than he did. I still held out hope to him.
And because of the final turn to economic issues, I think Romney would have had a much better shot than McCain; although he probably wouldn’t have picked a conservative like Palin as his running mate, so who knows what would have happened.
But even Rush Limbaugh knew that Romney was relatively speaking more conservative than McCain, and a better pick (although he also seemed to think Rudy would have been a good choice, so maybe he’s not the best reference at this point).
But the point really is that we’ll never know, because McCain, the choice of NO conservatives, slipped through the process.
The question is, which candidate in 2012 can be the compromise conservative that can get the support across the conservative spectrum. If we have Palin, Pence, Demint, and maybe others, and nobody wants to consider anybody else’s candidate, and instead we all spend all our time tearing down every other candidate, they’ll all end up with high negatives like 2008, and some moderate will slip through again.