New York Times Columnists Don’t Like the Republican Field,

Even the House NYT Conservative Don’t Like ‘Em

Here is what New York Times Columnist Gail Collins has to say about the Republican field

Rick Perry is sounding as if English is his third language. Michele Bachmann is seeing invisible people who tell her terrible stories about killer vaccines. Newt Gingrich has contracted scary delusions of grandeur. (“The scale of change I am suggesting is so enormous I couldn’t possibly, as a single leader, show you everything I’m going to do ...”) Rick Santorum is on Fox News, brightly announcing: “We finished fourth in the straw poll in Florida, which was a big help to us.”

which is not unexpected, since Ms. Collins seems to be a moderate pro-good government person with reasonable opinions.  But here is what strong Conservative Ross Douthat has to say about the actual and would be Republican candidates.

Sarah Palin’s act grew tiresome, Mike Huckabee decided to stick with television, the Donald Trump bubble came and went, and Tim Pawlenty spent months running for president without anybody noticing. This left Michele Bachmann as the leading populist alternative to Romney — a status she enjoyed right up until the moment people started listening to what she was actually saying.

Rick Perry was supposed to put an end to the game of musical chairs. . . .

But then came Perry’s performance in the last two Republican debates. Tongue-tied, underprepared and tone-deaf, the Texas governor mangled his attack lines, lost the thread of his arguments and accused rank-and-file conservatives — his natural base — of heartlessness on immigration. In recent polling, he’s already lost a large chunk of his initial support to yet another potential populist standard-bearer — the pizza mogul Herman Cain.

This explains two things, one why Republicans wanted NJ Gov. Christie in the race (until they learn his position on the issues, always something difficult for Republicans to understand) and two, why Mr. Obama is polling better than his approval rate.

Mr. Douthat wants a true Conservative Republican Populist but doesn’t find any in the current Republican Party.

The populist “answers” to middle-class economic anxieties, for instance, are usually gimmicks that would make the problem worse: Buchanan’s post-cold-war case for protectionism; Huckabee’s zeal for the so-called Fair Tax; Paul’s call for a return to the gold standard; Cain’s budget-busting “9-9-9” plan for tax reform. The populist “answer” to the growth of federal power is usually a rote invocation of the 10th Amendment, with little detail on how it should actually be applied. And at least during the debt ceiling debate, the populist “answer” to Wall Street’s influence in Washington was to shoot financial markets in the head by refusing to pay the country’s debts.

And in the end who does he blame for the problem, why Fox News

Thanks to Roger Ailes’s network, the right’s populist folk heroes have career incentives to choose superficiality over substance — the better to follow in Huckabee’s and Palin’s footsteps, and segue into a career as host of “Bachmann Overdrive” or “9-9-9 at 9.”

Ok, blaming Fox News for most problems in probably correct even when one doesn’t know what problem one is blaming on Fox News.  But no, the problem here is not Fox News.  It is the Republican Party.