This week's No Duh Moment from the GOP, and why they haven't got a prayer

Politico is not exactly the most high-brow publication out there. But today's article, "GOP reality check: Obama looking tougher to beat in 2012", if it's accurate, shows that the Republicans still really don't get it. The premise of the article is that the Republican optimism of the last two years that Obama would go the way of Jimmy Carter in 2012 was perhaps misplaced. Why? Well let's let the Republican frontbench explain it:

Mike Huckabee: “You just don’t go against a billion-dollar mountain of money, a guy who’s already won the presidency once – but he gets to fly in on Air Force One and make all his campaign stops with the trappings of the office.”

Haley Barbour: “Incumbent presidents don’t lose very often, particularly if it’s a president who has taken over from the other party.”

Chris Christie: “He proved he could win once, so that’s one more time than anybody else who has run.”

That last is a staggeringly stupid thing for a pretty smart guy to say. So never mind Obama's policy successes, never mind his statesmanship, never mind any of the man's actual talents. And also never mind the GOP's lack of coherent policies, lack of desire to govern rather than score points, lack of party coherence and above all lack of a candidate. Obama will win because he's already president. I mean, like, duh.

There are more sensible people who offer their opinions in the article. But, significantly, none of them are running for president. It seems like the smart folks in the Republican Party are sitting this one out. So who does that leave us with? Seems to me like a whole slate of not-yet-candidates who each have at least one big reason that they're unelectable. Here's my breakdown, for what it's worth: