Deptartment of Obvious Predictions

Nostradamus, James Carville is not,

2009 will be a year in which the Republican Party will be confronted with a near catastrophic ideological rift. There is no obvious Republican leader on the horizon, and the party is caught between its Southern/talk-radio base and the rest of the country on whether they should oppose or cooperate with Obama’s administration.

The combination of the lack of an obvious leader and the general political combustibility of the Republican Party will lead to a dangerous fissure that will plague it until the 2012 election cycle.

While the general sentiment seems obviously true, let me suggest a more controversial addendum to Carville’s offering: with no direction coming from the top down, the Republican Party may have to turn to a burgeoning class of “grassroots” conservative thinkers who are already toiling away at the wrong turns of the party what a properly constituted national conservative entity needs to look and act like in an America of the twenty-first century. If these thinkers have their way, the reconstituted Party could be a more deadly political foe to Democrats than it was circa Reagan.

Stay tuned!