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" CPACTORS /// In Washington this weekend, America will learn if Mitt Romney has learned anything since 2008, or if Newt Gingrich has learned anything since 1998. But more fascinating is the race to be the Non-Mitt. (Illustrations by Chris Ware) Two remarkable events occurred over the past month that, taken together, give us all some idea of the forces gathering even now among Republicans and conservatives as they begin the long \u2014 and, if you&amp;#039;re a political consultant or a local TV station in Nashua, New Hampshire, very lucrative \u2014 process of trying to find someone to run against Barack Obama in 2012. The first is a now marginally viral video of a focus group brought together for Sean Hannity by Frank Luntz, the boyish charlatan who&amp;#039;s been concocting spin for conservative candidates and causes for what seems like a century now, but who still manages to look like the evil Cleaver brother. Anyway, Luntz got a group together made up of people who are likely to be voting in the Iowa caucuses, a quadrennial gathering of snowbound Caucasians given entirely too much responsibility for winnowing the field of candidates prior to the whole shebang&amp;#039;s moving along to the even crankier white people of New Hampshire. An unhealthy number of the people in the group told Luntz that they believed that the president was a Muslim. This made even Luntz&amp;#039;s wattles quiver, and Hannity felt compelled to step in and explain that, as far as he was concerned, the president was not a follower of The Prophet, but merely an adherent to a radical form of Christianity devoted to the Gospel According to John Shaft. Not long before Luntz gathered this group of our more mal-informed fellow primates, the new Republican majority in the Missouri state legislature made one of its first orders of business the repeal of a ballot initiative that established a series of regulations governing the state&amp;#039;s notorious &amp;quot;puppy mills.&amp;quot; Yes, there are conservative legislators out in the American heartland who take it upon themselves to go against the expressed will of the electorate in order to come out in favor of torturing puppies. Of course, many of these people likely will be delegates to the 2012 Republican National Convention, where they will choose a nominee and, if there is a just god paying attention, get bitten in the balls by a police dog. That is pretty much your Republican primary process right there. Suddenly, hereditary monarchy has a certain rational je ne sais quoi. Many of the bunch will all gather for the first time this weekend, as the prospective field visits the annual Conservative Political Action Committee convention in Washington, D.C. Here we will get to see if Mitt Romney has learned anything since 2008, or if Newt Gingrich has learned anything since 1998. The CPAC convention is less of a test track than it used to be; the organization faces a serious boycott campaign from the Shoeless Confederate element of the party&amp;#039;s base for including gay conservative groups, and for being somehow insufficiently zealous in pursuit of the Muslims rattling around in Peter King&amp;#039;s head. Nevertheless, it will be the first look at a field that already seems to be subject to the unique stresses of a changing Republican party, the forces that seem to be reducing the party to a gleaming diamond of pure goobery. (Which is not to say an unsuccessful diamond of pure goobery. Democratic control of the Senate now seems even more tenuous, what with Jim Webb&amp;#039;s decision to scarper after one term, and the likelihood that Obama&amp;#039;s going to be running with somewhere north of nine percent of the electorate unemployed. Always, as the song goes, keep that diamond in your mind.) Already, there are signs that the party&amp;#039;s main task for the next two years is going to be worrying about how to placate the base without nominating someone guaranteed to lose every state, including sanity. The sudden boomlet around Ambassador Jon Huntsman is proof enough of that. There are going to be pressures to nominate someone &amp;quot;electable&amp;quot; who can appeal to &amp;quot;moderates&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;centrists&amp;quot; in the general election.  (When writing about American politics, particularly of the Republican variety, it is helpful to keep a steady supply of quotations marks around for emergencies.) But, for the first time since the rise of Barry Goldwater, there will be an organized and well-financed movement pushing in the opposite direction. For many of the Republican primary voters, what happened last time was that they abandoned their &amp;quot;principles&amp;quot; and lined up behind John McCain, who looked like the &amp;quot;pragmatic&amp;quot; choice, and ended up with a Kenyan Socialist Nazi Muslim in the White House. Now, having won what even the lamestream media is telling them was a historic victory last fall, they have spent the past couple of weeks demonstrating to John Boehner that he serves pretty much at their pleasure, slapping him around on procedural votes and busying themselves trying to trim Roe v. Wade even further. It&amp;#039;s hard to imagine that they \u2014 and the people who elected them \u2014 are going to be more polite out in the hinterlands as the nominating process gets longer and uglier, as nominating processes inevitably do. Which leads us, remarkably, to Mitt Romney. Again. Last time, he wandered all over the landscape, saying remarkably silly things in an attempt to demonstrate that he hadn&amp;#039;t actually been the Governor of the Commonwealth of Health Care and Gay Marriage. He had the money to stay in the process longer than most of the rest of the candidates, but that&amp;#039;s about all he had. This time, he still has the money, and he has an organization left over from last time. Which means the process has to come to him. He still doesn&amp;#039;t have a decent answer to why what was good for Massachusetts is so bad for the nation in regard to health care. (The women of The View flummoxed him on that very question.) The reason for this is that he signed onto the reforms in Massachusetts because he thought that they would make him president in 2008. A Republican with a track record on the health-care issue seemed like a good bet. Now, with a good chunk of his party&amp;#039;s base believing that he cooked up the fascist nightmare of &amp;quot;Obamacare&amp;quot; in his home laboratory with a hunchbacked assistant named &amp;quot;Brigham&amp;quot; at his elbow, Romney finds himself with a complex needle to thread. More fascinating is the race to be the Non-Mitt. It&amp;#039;s hard to imagine this party producing a fight between two &amp;quot;moderate&amp;quot; positions, which means that people like Huntsman and Tim Pawlenty are going to have to find some way to appeal to the folks to Romney&amp;#039;s starboard. (Pawlenty&amp;#039;s already tripling down, insisting that he wants to reinstate Don&amp;#039;t Ask-Don&amp;#039;t Tell, a proposal that must have the military brass reaching for the Thorazine.) Unfortunately, Sarah Palin, or Newt Gingrich, or some other true believer likely will already be there, having locked up the Iowa focus-group vote. There will be deals to be made and pride to be swallowed, and god help the puppies who get caught in between. CLICK HERE FOR CONTINUING COVERAGE OF CPAC 2011 &amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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