Jack writes:

The predicament of a Romney presidency is that he may make George W. Bush look good by comparison. During most of Bush's eight years in office, the Republican Party was united and willing to follow his lead. Romney will not be so lucky. The party he heads has become so rigid, radical, and unrealistic that, despite his best efforts, he may end up as the last of the Reagan-era Republican leaders -- a disjunctive president like John Quincy Adams, James Buchanan, Herbert Hoover, or Jimmy Carter.

Republican partisans have often compared Barack Obama to Jimmy Carter, but Obama's situation is quite different from Carter's. Like Bill Clinton, Barack Obama is a Democrat swimming against the current of Reagan-era Republican politics. Carter, by contrast, took office as the defender of an exhausted New Deal Democratic regime; he offered himself as a problem-solving pragmatist who would get the country moving again. He tried to fix the New Deal coalition but found it beyond repair.

The next Jimmy Carter will be a Republican president -- a Republican who, due to circumstances beyond his control, unwittingly presides over the dissolution of the Reagan coalition. If Obama is reelected, we might decide in hindsight that George W. Bush best fits that description. But if Obama loses, the president who finally unravels Reaganism could turn out to be Mitt Romney.

Wow. Even if Romney wins, he loses.

I don't like those odds.

Tautological argument. Says the current party is radical (put aside that half the country or more elected it - so what defines "radical" anyway?) so Romney will fail governing it. Sorry, but I think you're just reading partisan beliefs drawing partisan conclusions and thinking it's news :-)

"But if Obama loses, the president who finally unravels Reaganism could turn out to be Mitt Romney." THAT'S the losing political proposition.

Naval, that's a good point.

The sense I get from the article is that neither Romney nor Obama would be able to work well with the existing Congress.

And although each member of Congress could be reasonable on her or his own, collectively the House of Representatives is difficult to reason with in 2012.

"collectively the House of Representatives is difficult to reason with in 2012." - Disagree. They just don't agree with you, is all. I've spent a lot of time in Congress recently and honestly I found the Senate far more obstructionist and harder to navigate. Anyway, the whole point of Checks and Balances is to force compromise that neither side likes. It's a good system, unless one party gets all of the power.