How Barack Obama is channeling Ronald Reagan

I ran across an amusingly insightful postcard on my Facebook news feed last week. It featured a quadrangle with head shots of the four remaining contenders for the Republican presidential nomination –– Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum and Ron Paul. Below it, the caption read, “The Committee to Re-elect Barack Obama.” How true, and how bizarre, I thought.

Republicans have traditionally been nice to one another. Yes, they have disagreed. They have even argued. But there was an understanding that Republicans don’t fight Republicans. They fight Democrats. The last couple of months have been different, though. The top GOP contenders have clawed at one another in a winner-take-all verbal death dance that may carry on until the bitter end of the Republican primaries, much to the delight of Democrats.

What the heck is going on here? How is it that Republicans are so off their game this election season? By now, we’ve all heard the Republican debates compared to a circus, with the participants described as clowns. How did this come to be?

The GOP is the party of Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower. This is the best field of candidates that Republicans could offer up?

Gingrich is a disgraced former House speaker who made a killing “advising” the Federal National Mortgage Association, more commonly referred to as Fannie and Freddie Mac, which played a role in sending the housing market –– and our economy — into a nose-dive.

Though Paul scores political points for sticking to his political guns, no matter the cost to his campaign, let’s face it: The guy basically wants to eliminate the government that he, as a congressman, is trusted with running. He isn’t as much a Republican as he is a Libertarian.

Romney is a multi-multi-millionaire who stashes his cash in Switzerland and the Cayman Islands, and who is, to my mind, attempting to buy the election rather than win it through soaring rhetoric and the depth and breath of his ideas. And Santorum . . . I just have no idea who he is, and, frankly, from the little that I’ve heard him speak, I have no desire to get to know him better.

I blame the Tea Party.