What happens when a political party dumps principles for "electability"?

George Neumayr, writing at The American Spectator sums up the problem that Romney presents the GOP

Mitt Romney’s plastic and philosophically vapid campaign secured an easy victory in Florida on Tuesday night. Sunshine state GOP voters swallowed his “electability” argument whole, according to the exit polls.

It appears that country club Republicans have succeeded again in duping the GOP electorate into crowning a “centrist” Republican. Never mind that “centrist” Republicans rarely win the center. They usually lose the center while sapping the spirit of the party’s conservative base.

Out of Bob Dole’s and John McCain’s tattered Big Tent steps another “reformed” RINO, Mitt Romney, who will receive, should he win the nomination, a similar thumping from the Democrats. 

But let’s say that he is “electable,” for the sake of argument. Who cares? The purpose of politics in a republic is not simply to win but to win on sound principles. A party that pursues victory by scrapping or sidelining its platform will have no truth left with

This is the same point I have been raising during this process. We are forgetting the important things about candidates, and no it is not just the GOP establishment types that are guilty of that. Voters are a big part of that problem as well. As my partner Ed Daley has told me, personality trumps positions with voters. That has lots of truth to it. But, in Romney’s case there is no personality at all, as Neumayr points out.

The confederacy of weasels that is the GOP establishment couldn’t even find a moderate with an engaging personality to run. They settled on a robotic bore.

His high-priced strategists — the ones who bragged to the New York Times about engineering his post-South Carolina comeback — wind him up and then find photographers to capture him “doing his own laundry,” buying a Big Mac, or woodenly tossing bags of potato chips to media jackals on his campaign plane.

This pitifully plastic campaign is what passes for winning politics in the GOP. Newt, Romney supporters crow, is a loser and “embarrassment.” But what about their own candidate? Romney’s teleprompter-dependent drivel is far more risible than Newt’s grandiose opining. Romney comes off as the blinkered technocrat whose idea of wit is to compare his opponent to “Lucille Ball at the chocolate factory.” All one can say for Romney is that he looks presidential. If Newt looked like Romney and Mitt looked like an overfed blowhard, Gingrich would be winning.

Yep! The GOP has managed to do it to us again, unless Santorum can produce a miracle. Another plastic, boring, non-Conservative will be our nominee, and even if he wins, we will  lose more of our ideological souls.