I think if he won the republican nomination after the democrats having 8 years like the republicans just did, unfortunatly its winning the republican nomination which is the impossible bit...

For all the republicans fault i think alot of the blame has to goto Obama, though im sure the complete lack of fiscal sense, imperial war mongering and degradation of civil liberties didn't help...

If the Republicans operated on something like the platform most republicans on this board want they would be a half decent party

I think the main problem with this is

But I think the panic you'd get... and it's not without reason I'm sure, is that it's hard to reconcile intellectualism with the pandering to just the opposite that a significant third or more of the GOP base requires in order to hit the polls. That whole crowd Sarah Palin hugely energized-- how do you get them with some soft spoken, intellectual Constitutional law scholar? And having to tell them, like spoiled children, no, you can't use law like just a bludgeon to legalize what you like and criminalize what you don't like, that that's not what conservative principles are about?

There seems to be a huge base essential to conservative electoral success which almost seems anti-intellectual, i thought it was intresting that college educated males went mainly to obama, of the different groups they discussed only white males without a college education went more for mccain than obama (the groups were blacks, hispanics, college education and not college educated)