Behind closed doors, what do you think the "GOP Insiders" are feeling?

[Linus Van Pelt]

The GOP insiders understand that the party has a demographic problem on its hands, though not an insurmountable one. There are two ways out: either they shape social conservatism in a way that it starts to appeal more to non-Cuban Hispanics, or they regain serious ground among the prosperous suburbanites who left the party during the period 1988-2008. We are now kind of on the cusp where they don't require either group when the economy sucks and less affluent whites are really pissed off (and 2012 might still be a year like that), but basically under normal economic circumstances they are going to be in trouble. The party establishment has understood this for the better part of a decade; Bush Jr. and Rove were animated in both campaign style and policy by the Hispanic strategy, and Boehner has been basically onside with this. The general unpopularity of the Bush program and more specifically the cockup over immigration have made this approach temporarily untenable, but they are basically hoping to revive it with someone like Rubio or Jeb in 2016 or 2020.

But at least a play at the suburbs is a coherent alternative. This is where all these hack endorsements for Romney are coming from. The establishment's biggest fear is that the primary electorate will box the party into a sort of CARLHAYDEN-like position where it is too socially conservative and generally too unhinged for the suburbs (aside from the hard-core southern suburbs that are both evangelical and prosperous) and yet simultaneously too nationalist for the sort of religious aspirational Mexican-American who is at least a potential GOP voter (and who could be quite favorable of social conservatism of a certain kind). Even if it might turn out that the economy is bad enough, and the country white enough, to squeak out a narrow victory in 2012, Santorum still basically represents a road that the party doesn't want to go down in the long term.