At the same time, the Republicans’ conservative base doesn’t have much taste for the realists who dominated foreign-policy thinking in past GOP administrations (except for über-adviser Henry Kissinger, who has managed to transcend these divides with the same aplomb he has shown in past campaigns). For Republicans “there’s no upside in declaring, ‘These are my advisers.’ The base hates realists, and neocons are too controversial,” says sometime Romney adviser Dan Senor, former spokesman for the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq. “So the thinking is, don’t define yourself by foreign-policy advisers.” ~Michael Hirsh

It’s not entirely clear to me why “the base” would be so hostile to foreign policy realists (hate seems like an especially strong word), given the way things have gone over the last few years, but then I suppose I have a hard time understanding a group of people that still supports the President.  I guess year after year of talk radio, blogs and pundits telling Republican audiences that “stability” and “realism” are basically codewords for treason and defeatism has a corrosive effect after a while.  If you were someone who read and watched and listened to daily “conservative media” reports that are telling you incessantly that Islamofascism is on the march and that the restored caliphate (with Venezuelan help) is blazing a trail straight for Dubuque (or wherever), it is quite natural that “realism,”‘ grounded as it is in some measure of actual knowledge about the rest of the world, would not seem very good to you. 

If this claim is true about “the base,” it confirms my suspicion that there are no GOP “realist” candidates running for President because foreign policy realism doesn’t go down well with the primary voters and activists these days.  The “realists” supposedly refuse to “name the enemy” and do not “understand the threat” as such luminaries as Rick Santorum and Norman Podhoretz do.  The voters and activists have definitely become members of Bush’s Republican Party, and the majority of the candidates could not break out of this stranglehold even if they wished to do so.  Of course, in one important respect, it wouldn’t matter whether there were candidates being advised by foreign policy realists or not.  As I have said before:

Among politicians, all of the “realists” more or less embrace the continuation of the war.  Their very balance-of-forces, stability-centered view of foreign affairs dictates that they support an American presence in Iraq for the foreseeable future.