Outstanding article:

Prominent Republicans keep hoping for someone to rescue them from its slate of mediocre candidates. But the party’s biggest problem is the ideological bloodlust of its base.                

 The bombshell dropped in Saturday’s Playbook, the chattering-class email sent out every morning by the Politico’s Mike Allen. If Mitt Romney fails to win Michigan next Tuesday, a few high-powered Republicans have started saying, the party needs to go back to square one and recruit a new candidate. Yes, maybe it does. But what will that fix? Not much. What the party needs is not simply a new candidate. It needs someone with the courage to stand up and say that the GOP has gone completely off the deep end—and that the party could run an amalgam of Ronald Reagan and Mahatma Gandhi and he wouldn’t win as long as the party’s inflamed base keeps with its current attitudes. But it lacks such a person utterly. It’s a party made up of on the one hand unprincipled cowards, and on the other of people devoted to principles so extreme that they’d have serious trouble attracting more than about 42 percent of the vote.      

The report continues with viable and on target points.