GOP has it all, except candidates

Republican voters show much more fervor about participating in those mid-term elections than do the new voters Obama inspired to go to the polls in November 2008.

Most Americans don’t like health care reform, at least for now. They fear the deficit and debt. They think the stimulus was a bust. They’re frustrated with a government that can’t get oil to stop spewing. They’re fed up with one that can’t manage to put a general in charge of a war who has better sense than to hang out over a few six packs with a writer for Rolling Stone magazine.

That is to say everything is going the Republicans’ way — except, that is, for one thing, which is the quality of their actual candidates.

It’s more than that, actually. It’s the quality of their general personnel.

It is to say that the Democrats have nothing going for them in the mid-terms except the weak, reckless and extreme Republicans. All Republicans need to do to win is not be Democrats. But zeal is hard to keep in strategic check. And the Republican talent pool, nearly drained anyway, has been infested with a major outbreak of zeal.

For a couple of years it looked as if Majority Leader Harry Reid was a certain goner in his bid for re-election this fall in Nevada. By virtue of his position, he was all tangled up in the current administration’s popularity. By his manner, he was making people madder by the day.

He was a loser running against himself. But that was before the Republicans produced their nominee. Now Reid is not necessarily a loser, for he has drawn in an opponent quite a piece of work.

The Nevada Republican senatorial nominee is Sharron Angle. She is chummy with the Tea Party. She talks about taking middle-aged people out of Social Security. She hasn’t demonstrated much use for the United Nations or the federal Education Department.

She says there’s a “Second Amendment remedy” to this nations’ woes, presumably meaning we’d have citizens taking up revolutionary arms against our tyrannical government.

But, to her credit, she hastens to qualify the statement: She says she certainly hopes the voters will just defeat Harry Reid and preclude this guns-in-the-street insurrection.

Suddenly Ron Paul’s libertarian ophthalmologist son, Rand, isn’t the most out-there GOP senatorial nominee.

Paul says the 14th Amendment doesn’t mean what it says in declaring that any person born in the United States and under the jurisdiction of the United States is an American citizen. He says some of these American-born babies are actually under the jurisdiction of Mexico. He wants that question litigated.

He wants to put an electrical fence under the ground all along the Mexican border. His idea is not necessarily to prevent crossing, but to send a message to nearby agents in helicopters that the electric current has been breached at such-and-such mile marker. In that event the authorities are to come quickly in their choppers.

Actually, that might work. It sounds costly, though, especially for a libertarian who doesn’t believe in much government.

Angle and Paul are merely in the tradition of Barry Goldwater, who said that extremism in defense of liberty is no vice and then actually carried six whole states — his own, Arizona, and five Deep South ones mad about the new rights for black people.

But let’ s not leave the impression that the Republicans’ personnel problems result solely from Tea Party and Libertarian infiltration.

Haley Barbour, the Republican governor of Mississippi, is now busy as an oil industry apologist worrying about whether British Petroleum can spare $20 billion for that claims fund. He formerly was the national Republican chairman.

How bad is it? Well, there’s this: George W. Bush came through Arkansas several weeks ago to lecture at a conservative college. And he sounded pretty reasonable, relatively speaking.

John Brummett is an award-winning columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock.