It will in many ways be too late but the one person who might be both electable and may make a difference for the good is Rand Paul who is without any doubt working his way towards the nomination. As part of the getting to know you process there is this article on Rand Paul in Vogue which is about as good as it gets for the American media about a Republican and conservative. But it’s early days yet. The article is fascinating from end to end but it is this comment by his wife Kelley I found particularly striking.

She sinks down next to Paul on the couch, folding her legs under a tasseled pillow, and explains that, in fact, she is not sold on a Rand Paul 2016 presidential campaign. ‘Because in this day and age it’s mostly about character assassination,’ she says. ‘When I think of the tens of millions of dollars in opposition research that they’d be aiming right at us and our family—that’s what it’s about.’

Becoming president is an endurance test that may not test the right kinds of qualities for someone who actually becomes the president. Winning elections and governing are not at all the same especially in trying to cope with the American media.

But a man is also known by his enemies and Rand Paul has just the right ones, including the Governor of New Jersey, the certain media favourite on the Republican side come 2016, or at least he will be up until he is actually nominated. Rand may dislike Christie almost as much as I do:

In fact, our interview coincides with a scrap between him and Governor Christie over their opposite philosophies on national security. Paul gleefully notes to me that his latest Christie-baiting tweet is ‘really going to escalate the war’ between the two Republicans.

People will be in no doubt who they are voting for by the time the primaries are done. Christie I would never support. There is no doubt that his helping Obama in the last week of the campaign was an all out attempt to keep Romney from the White House so that he could run himself in 2016. Roger Kimball on Christie, who has titled his article “Bully, Blowhard” doesn’t think it made the final difference but so what. It’s that he tried that counts and there is no way to say one way or another that we do not have four more years of Obama because of what Christie did to make Obama look presidential. But even if we don’t agree on the role Christie played in Romney’s defeat, Roger’s article is dead on about what a useless incompetent Christie actually is.

You really do have to wonder just how bad things have become before the religious left* finally acknowledges they have screwed up and that some other approach is required. The wheels do grind slowly but a decade or two is not that long in the history of nations and civilisations. Time is also not on our side. From Roger Kimball discussing the United States, with the bad news first:

Now that the transformation is well underway, there are fewer if any cheers. The economy is moribund. Obamacare is more unpopular than ever. Racial tensions are far worse now than when Obama came to office. Everywhere one looks, Obama’s domestic agenda is in shambles. And when it comes to international affairs — well, let’s just say that Obama must be rueing the day he drew that red line about Syria or heard the name Vladimir Putin. Has there ever been a more cringe-making presidential speech than the incoherent bilge that oozed out of Obama’s mouth last Tuesday? Jimmy Carter’s infamous ‘malaise speech’ is the only thing that even comes close, and at least Carter’s speech had the intelligence of Christopher Lasch’s book The Culture of Narcissism as a source.

But he thinks the problem with electing the hollowest of men as president is finally beginning to dawn on the left. This is the good news, such as it is:

I believe that we are witnessing the gradual, or possibly not so gradual, decomposition of the emotional consensus that put Obama into the White House in 2008 and, not without a struggle, returned him in 2012.

I’ll believe it when I see it. In the meantime, Obama has ceded the defence of the West to Vladimir Putin.

* The religious left are socialists of one kind or another who have substituted their political beliefs in place of an actual religion.

UPDATE: You have to click over to Powerline to see just how unlikely it is that the American media are going to walk away from their own creation, the man who represents their values almost down to the ground. The media are a fifth column of immense power. Until they are dealt with, the answers to our problems will not be forthcoming.