The GOP Race: None of the Above

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McCain, already 71, would be the oldest President in history. Giuliani has so far tiptoed around the subjects of his ex-wives, his alienated children and questions about his business practices. Romney has been elected to office exactly once, has a record of changing his positions on an unusually wide range of issues, and just announced that he's a Mormon to a nation that might not otherwise have known or even cared. Though as smooth as corn syrup on the outside, preacherman Huckabee is low on cash, light on organization and may not be able to fill the pews in New Hampshire the way he did in Iowa. And then there's Thompson, who has not found the transition from Hollywood's low-lit soundstages to politics' brighter lights as forgiving as many had hoped. Staffers have fled his campaign in horror throughout the fall, complaining that the candidate listens only to his wife. Thompson's condition was summed up best by a New Hampshire woman who, when asked in a rival campaign's focus group for her impressions of all the candidates, responded to a picture of the TV actor by saying, "Is he still running?"

Romney could be speaking for the entire field when he says, as he has done, "I'm not perfect." But one longtime political operative explained that the flaws are grander and gaudier this time, and so the question for voters becomes not whom do you like, but who can win. That means, he says, that what the Republicans are mounting in 2008 is not a race of passion or principle but simply one of pragmatism. It may also explain why the party's normally ferocious enthusiasm is so far absent in every poll.

And that problem brings up one other development in the race, something Republicans haven't encountered since they locked arms with the Moral Majority in 1979: the party's evangelical base has declared independence from its leaders. This fall, the Old Guard of the Christian right serially christened their preferred candidates. The Rev. Pat Robertson went for Giuliani; the National Right to Life Committee came out for Thompson; Bob Jones III and Paul Weyrich endorsed Romney. Few believed that Huckabee, the ordained Southern Baptist who actually seemed to be one of them, could win. And then, lo and behold, rank-and-file Evangelicals went off and lined up in unexpected numbers for the former Arkansas Governor. The falcons heard the falconers — and then flew off in a different direction. It's another sign of a party whose power structure has uncoupled from the people who put it in power in the first place.

This predicament cannot last forever — but it can go on for a while yet. Normally the G.O.P. comes to a decision quickly, and the Democrats stretch the process into the baseball season, bickering over delegates, platform planks, rules and speaking rights before everyone swears loyalty to the long-settled nominee. All that, and possibly more, could happen on the other side this time. But Republicans have at least one organic strength that will help them weather this confusion: they are tops in a knife fight. So uncomfortable is the party with anything that resembles an unsettled race after New Hampshire that its armies typically loose upon one another every nasty charge and attack ad they can afford, desperate to slice the field down to one or at the most two remaining contenders. This stage of the race is under way. It will be up to the lucky survivor to put the pieces of the party back together.

Who benefits, in the meantime, from all this upheaval? Every campaign has its constantly adjusting story line, how a win here by one guy or there by another benefits its man. McCain's team thinks the party will come to its senses and rally around the veteran. Romney hopes to emerge as the least objectionable choice everywhere. Giuliani's entire campaign is predicated on chaos lasting until late January, when he thinks he can clobber his rivals in Florida. And Huckabee is hoping for a miracle. Only one thing is guaranteed: some candidate, however bruised and battered, will survive this gauntlet. John Sears, the master G.O.P. strategist who worked for Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan and is watching the demolition derby, calls the race "a record setter." But he notes that someone will win it. "All politics is about," says Sears, "is being a little better than the other guy."