There are great Republican candidate out there...

Just none who are running.

Why not?

Because they don't think they can beat Obama this time around.

Nobody Republican in the public eye will say so--they'll say Obama's doomed because no president gets reelected with unemployment this high (can you say FDR?), and then launch into a litany of his deficits as a president and as a human being.

But 'andsome is as 'andsome does.

If Republicans were really sure of his defeat, those hotter candidates would have tossed their hats in the ring. Candidates that excite Republicans. The current crop doesn't.

This doesn't make Obama a shoe-in in November. The Republican core strategy is to make him the subject not their guy, and a loose assortment of billionaires are going to flood the airwaves with a superslick campaign of ads and pundits for hire and a TV channel dedicated to pretty much nothing but his defeat, hoping to make him so hated, so much the personification of everything that's gone wrong in voters' lives, that they'll take a chance on the not very likeable candidate who emerges from the current tussle--still almost certainly Mitt Romney.

And the guys who aren't trying to get the GOP nomination know this. Yet they aren't running.

They're voting with their feet.