It's taken a while for many people to acknowledge it, but the real problem with the presidential candidacy of Willard Romney, the International Harvester, has been staring you in the face, yelling at you at top volume, all along. The problem has now become so all-consuming that even the Republican party has noticed.

The Republican party is demented.

Having examined, at some length, the process by which Romney distanced himself from his one great achievement in elected office — and, by extension, from all the good he'd done for thousands of people and their health insurance — I seem to have gotten backwards the political liabilities this held for Romney in facing a national Republican electorate gone, in the immortal phrase of the late George V. Higgins, as soft as church music. I thought his fashioning of a health-care reform program in Massachusetts, and its popular success, would be a problem on theoretical grounds. I was wrong. It turns out the problem Republicans have with the program is not the ideological big-government aspect of it. The problem they have with it is the good it turned out to do for people. The problem with it is that it made people's lives a little easier. The problem is that cruelty has become an ideology in itself, and it is an implacable one.

"The thing Romney needs to do to beat Obama is show up in this debate and not have another empathy comment. Those comments are really hurting him far more than any 47% comments," said Ryan Rhodes, a tea party activist from Iowa. "The government's not here for empathy, it's here for the law. If we use empathy for everything we want to do, that's how countries go bankrupt and bad policy is created."

The problem with the Romney campaign is not the alleged ideological incoherence of his political resume. The problem is that he's trying to appeal to a party full of moral monsters.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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