Who will replace Mark Sanford?

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So in the span of one week, the presidential aspirations of two diehard conservative Republicans, John Ensign and Mark Sanford, have been dashed, if not extinguished. Sanford in particular was only recently the Right’s favorite son, drawing effusive praise from Limbaugh and company for refusing to accept  stimulus money. But an affair of the heart brought him down, proving once again that, in the recurring case of libido v. ambition, libido almost always wins.

Without Sanford or Ensign, the 2012 GOP field is looking pretty lonely. Mitt Romney is still desperate, and Sarah Palin is still crazy. But both will have a hard time winning; movement conservatives will never fully trust the flip-flopping Romney, and the futility of Palin’s candidacy is by now pretty much obvious to everyone. So let me float another name out there: Mike Pence.

Like Sanford, Indiana Congressman Pence is revered by fiscal conservatives for his austerity about the federal budget. He’s a real ideologue on the subject. He won some brownie points among National Review types for vocally opposing the exploding deficit–before Obama, when Bush was still president. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, he laid out legislation not to help the victims, but to reign in federal spending. OK, maybe “ideologue” is too kind a word. He’s an extremist about the budget. But that tracks with the current teabagging mood of the Republican Party.

During the Obama Administration, he’s quietly become one of his party’s loudest spokespeople, regularly appearing on Hardball and the like. Of course, he barely makes sense when he speaks. He led the effort to present a Republican “alternative” budget to Obama’s, but was then unable to explain what the deficit would be were his budget enacted. And when asked by Chris Matthews if  he believes in evolution, Pence couldn’t deliver a straight answer.  There’s almost something Bush-like in this guy’s incoherence, isn’t there?

He’s begun to show “leadership” on foreign policy, too, drafting a resolution supporting the Iranian protestors that, after revision, was eventually approved by the House Dems. As Adam Blickstein has pointed out, the original wording of the resolution was incendiary enough to actually diminish the chances of the protestors succeeding. Yet his full-throated, damn-the-consequences support for the protestors became the general approach of the Republican Party.

Look, I don’t think Mike Pence is ever going to be president.  And 2012 is a long, long way off. But there’s no denying he’s got his finger on the pulse of today’s GOP. Mark Sanford’s collapse is his gain.