Romney vs. Republicans

Mitt Romney has a good piece in the NYT today about the looming bankruptcies of the Big Three American car manufacturers. He argues eloquently that the companies should be allowed to go bankrupt, but that the government should guarantee bankruptcy financing and should also force them to undergo a lot of structural changes that will leave them in better shape to compete down the road.

While reading the article, though, I kept thinking to myself "there is no way that Romney would've said this had he still been running for president." And of course there's no way any Republican candidate could have written that in a political campaign. There's no room left for intelligent discourse in the Republican party, not with people like Palin, Kristol, and Bush running the show.

As a Republican you can't even pretend that you're intelligent, while across the aisle you've got Obama giving his incredible speech on race relations in Philadelphia. It must have been incredibly frustrating for someone like Romney, who's obviously a smart, intellectual guy, to have to hide that and answer questions like "Do you believe in evolution?" It makes you realize how behind the times Republicans are these days. They're eventually going to have to divorce themselves from the Christian Right and look clearly at where America is going: multicultural, educated, intelligent.