"Younger people are kind of excited about being in the wilderness," libertarian writer Megan McArdle told the New York Times the other day. She was referring, of course, to the very strong possibility that John McCain and the Republican Party will be crushed this November. It's by no means a given, but it's certainly a popular notion. Harpers ran a cover story about the possible demise of the GOP, and I can't count the number of headlines I've read running along the lines of "Is Conservatism Out of Ideas?"

To be honest, I don't think Republican leaders much want to win this one. Bush and the Right have left the government in such a dismal state that they've honestly got no idea how to run it anymore -- short of Bush's blatantly anti-Republican method of rule-by-executive-fiat governing -- and they'd rather leave the Democrats to clean up the mess.

This is just a theory, mind you. I'll throw any evidence I come across up here.

The notion that party leaders might deliberately throw away an election (or, to cast it in less ) isn't really that hard to believe. What keeps us in the dark is the belief that the point of a party is to win elections. As Walter Karp contended in Indispensable Enemies (the one and only indispensable book ever written about American politics), the point of a party is to retain power, and there are countless instances where it would clearly be more harmful to win an election than to lose it. If your candidate turns out to be a "dangerous" man -- i.e., one who might turn his back on the party leaders and govern like a populist -- then clearly it goes against the party's interest to let him win. If your candidate would be taking office under dangerous circumstances -- i.e., the middle of a war or an economic slump -- then clearly it's in the party's interest to let him lose.

According to Karp, Republican leaders "nominated the egregious Barry Goldwater with every intention of sending him to defeat" in 1964. That's an interesting spin on the usual story, that Goldwater lost because his radical populist right backers took away the party from the "helpless" party elite. Frankly, it's much more believable than the usual story (which reads like an apology for the Republicans). As for other examples, I wouldn't find it hard to believe that -- for example -- the Republicans threw away the election in '96, when Clinton was governing as a far more effective centrist-Republican than Dole ever would have.