Jay Cost watches politics like a hawk. And so from time to time we check in to see how he’s processing what he sees. And so here you’ve clicked. He gave National Review Online’s Kathryn Jean Lopez his early-December view of political matters primary and general.

(Cost, by the way, has a book coming out next May, Spoiled Rotten: The Story of How the Democratic Party Embraced Special Interests, Abandoned the Public Good, and Came to Stand for Everything It Once Opposed, which can be pre-ordered on Amazon.)

KATHRYN JEAN LOPEZ: You’ve written: “[Obama] needs a noticeable uptick in the state of the union to stand a chance, as right now his numbers are just too weak. Barring that and/or a fumble by the Republicans, I see no path to reelection for this president.” Are you just pumping the base for clicks? Being overly optimistic?

COST: Well, those two caveats are not just to cover my you-know-what! Let’s take each in turn.

Right now, the consensus forecast for 2012 GDP is just 2.3 percent year-over-year growth, according to the Wall Street Journal. Unemployment is forecast to be at 8.7 percent. No president has ever been reelected when the economy was performing so far below its historical trendline. We can go back all the way to 1840 and see Martin Van Buren get tossed from office because of economic weakness. And if these estimates turn out to be more or less accurate, Obama will be in huge trouble.

But the GOP could still screw it up, and the probability of that happening looks to be increasing. I’ve talked before about the danger of an Obama “Frontlash” campaign — something like what LBJ ran on in 1964. To counter the backlash against Obama for a weak economy, the president’s team is going to try to make the GOP nominee seem so extreme and dangerous that swing voters will have no choice but to back Obama. Not all the would-be GOP nominees are susceptible to this kind of attack, but some of them are — and if the party selects one of them, then I’d honestly give the edge to Obama, weak economy and all.

LOPEZ: Is there a reasonably attractive candidate in the running on the GOP side? There is a lot of whining that the most reasonably attractive are sitting on the bench waiting for another year.

COST: This is a weak field. There’s no doubt about it. Even so, I think from a general-election standpoint, Romney is fine. Ditto Huntsman.

And I personally think conservatives need to assign more weight to the electability factor than many of them are currently doing. This is not like 1996, when it was ultimately okay that Clinton was reelected because the GOP still controlled the Congress. With Obamacare waiting to be implemented, this is a must-win election for the Republicans. Frankly, anybody who can beat Obama and sign the repeal bill is good enough for me.

LOPEZ: Do you have a potential-fumble-watch checklist?

COST: Foot-in-mouth disease. That’s what nailed Goldwater in 1964. And I’d add that LBJ was bound to win that year, but the disaster of the Goldwater candidacy yielded the Great Society Congress, which passed Medicare, which is now bankrupting the country.

To that end, it’s worth pointing out that the Democrats learned no lessons from 2010. That means that if the GOP screws this up, Obama gets reelected, the Democrats hold the Senate and retake the House, then that Obama-Reid-Pelosi trio will go right back to doing all the stuff that got them in so much trouble in 2010. They’ll never stop. The Left is totally in charge of the Democratic party now, and, to borrow a concept from Samuel Gompers, they have a simple goal: More. More regulations, more spending, more redistribution. More, more, more. They’ll never stop, unless the GOP stops them.

LOPEZ: Is the Newt surge for real?

COST: Yes and no. No, in the sense that these poll numbers have to be taken with a grain of salt. People aren’t paying a great deal of attention and they are most likely reacting to the news environment. No, also, in the sense that, unlike Perry or Cain, Gingrich does not make for a terribly good anti-Romney, in that he’s an insider who has held a lot of the same opinions that make Romney supposedly unacceptable. No, in the sense that it is hard to see somebody who took nearly $2 million from Freddie Mac winning over the Tea Party.

Yes, in the sense that there is an important group of opinion makers out there who do not want Mitt Romney to be the GOP nominee. They are looking for a guy, and they know what they’ll get with Gingrich.

LOPEZ: Not to preempt its seemingly inevitable end, but how may history remember the Cain candidacy?

COST: Probably not at all.

LOPEZ: Did you ever think he was seriously serious?

COST: I never took him seriously, no.

LOPEZ: Did Mitch Daniels make a mistake not running? Paul Ryan? Chris Christie?

COST: Yes, yes, and yes! All three of them would have made good not-Romney choices, been compelling general-election candidates, and good presidents. I remain thoroughly disappointed that none of those three ran, and that Tim Pawlenty dropped out.

LOPEZ: What the heck happened to Michele Bachmann?

COST: Same thing that happened to Perry and Cain: She got in front of the bright lights that go along with frontrunner status, and she couldn’t perform.

LOPEZ: Did Rick Perry surprise you?

COST: Very much so. I figured that with ten years as governor of Texas, he’d be able to handle himself better in the media. On paper, he is a very attractive candidate, but his performance has been horrendous.

LOPEZ: Why doesn’t Rick Santorum surge?

COST: He might still, given how crazy this race has been! But I think he hasn’t to date because his debate performances have not been all that good, at least not compared with Cain and Gingrich’s.

LOPEZ: I’m admittedly a Santorum friend and fan, but his debate performances have been steady and substantive, haven’t they? How does one define “good” here? And are so many debates a good way to be dealing with the field? Is it the best indicator of who’s going to be the best general-election candidate and president?

COST: Yeah, that’s a good question. On a personal level, these debates have been totally unhelpful for me as a voter. I don’t find them insightful or informative; if everybody viewed this stuff the same way I do, nobody would be better off in the polls. So, I can’t really say much in terms of what Santorum is doing wrong or is doing right.

So I guess I would explain it this way: People who have watched these debates — especially opinion makers — seem to walk away thinking that Romney does well on points, while Cain and Gingrich are the regular showstoppers. Santorum hasn’t performed on that level, as far as the debate evaluators are concerned.

This might sound like a punt, but it isn’t intended to be. I think these debates are a joke — totally unserious and a symptom of the disease that plagues the nomination process.

LOPEZ: Does Jon Huntsman make any sense in this race? Would he have an impact as a third-party candidate?

COST: Huntsman could have made sense, had his candidacy not been so terrible. He could have run as the insider/whistleblower on the dysfunctionality of the Obama administration, and offered himself as a competent alternative. But too many times he has come across as being embarrassed to be a Republican.

I doubt he would have much of an impact as a third-party candidate.

LOPEZ: Why does Mike Bloomberg buzz rise every few months?

COST: Because he has money and there is widespread sentiment out there that the two parties are too in hock to their bases, not governing from the center, etc.

LOPEZ: Does Romney have a ceiling? A real problem? Can he combat it?

COST: The anti-Romney sentiment is vastly overstated, at least when we are talking about the broader GOP electorate. His unfavorable ratings among GOP voters are extremely low, which is very good.

His problem, I think, is that many — certainly not all, but a good number — of the opinion makers on the conservative side intensely oppose him, and have pretty much committed themselves to finding somebody, anybody else. I doubt there is a lot that Romney can do about this, or that he could ever have done. It gets back to the Massachusetts health-care law. He can’t walk away from that legislation, which would only have reinforced the impression that he’s a flip-flopper. So, what can he do to appease these opponents? Nothing.

LOPEZ: What’s your Senate outlook?

COST: I think the GOP picks up seats, enough to get a majority but short of a filibuster-proof majority.

LOPEZ: Could current GOP House seats be lost in a big way?

COST: Unlikely. The end result of redistricting so far looks as though the GOP will not pick up many seats, maybe even lose a few, but they are solidifying their majority. Considering how many seats they picked up in 2010, that makes sense.

LOPEZ: Do you love this stuff? The horse-race watching? Does it get more serious and solemn with each cycle?

COST: I have not enjoyed this cycle at all. Two big reasons:

1. Our nomination process is a joke. The more I’ve studied the history of nominations, the more convinced I am of its gross inferiority to the past way of doing business. I could go on and on . . .

2. The stakes are too high. This president is an appallingly bad leader. Having watched him very closely during the campaign, I did not have very high expectations. But my goodness — Obama simply lacks the temperament to be president of the United States. He is too thin-skinned, too quick to demagogue people who disagree with him, and too responsive to his party’s client groups. He has absolutely no imagination, so he cannot look beyond the standard partisan categories to find allies on the other side of the aisle. Worst of all, he is so vain that fear of defeat next year has kept him from tackling the deficit in a meaningful way. We can’t afford four more years of such leadership. So, with the stakes so high, it’s hard to take any pleasure in the spectacle of the process.

LOPEZ: Do you have a pet race you’re watching?

COST: Curious about the Iowa caucuses this year. I think we might get a surprise.

LOPEZ: You have a book coming out in the spring. What should we watch for?

COST: The book is called Spoiled Rotten and it’s a revisionist history of the Democratic party. My argument is that FDR in the 1930s combined big-government liberalism with the patronage-oriented politics of Tammany Hall — and started using the state’s massive regulatory and redistributive powers to add client groups to the party (i.e., factions of voters who backed the Democrats for narrow benefits).

Subsequent party leaders would follow this model, and try to add more and more clients. But by the time of the 1970s, there were just too many clients in the party and they demanded too many different favors — so that it isn’t possible for the Democrats to tend to their clients and to govern in the public interest. The result is that the Democratic party — which was founded by Andrew Jackson to protect the people against the powerful — now represents everything it once opposed: government for its privileged clients at the expense of everybody else. A sad state for a once-noble political party.

— Kathryn Jean Lopez is editor-at-large of National Review Online.