Washington Post editorial editor Fred Hiatt asks the $64,000 question many of us have been asking for a long time: "Why is the Republican presidential field so weak?"

The short answer is: Why would anyone with a reputation for seriousness risk that reputation trying to lead a party in which a significant block of the party's coalition just voted to support Rick Santorum for President? That really happened -- last Friday -- at an "emergency" meeting at a Texas ranch organized by Tony Perkin's Family Research Council where 100 Christian evangelical leaders agreed to back Santorum by near unanimous acclamation.

In many ways the character of a party's presidential field is the canary in the coal mine that exposes a party's inner strengths and character flaws. And for the GOP, the most recent presidential campaign has opened a window that reveals the disturbing realities within.

Any roster of candidates looks like the "seven dwarfs" at the beginning until front-runners emerge who rise in stature, says Hiatt.

But that hasn't happened here, says Hiatt, who runs through the Republicans rather disappointing roster:  Mitt Romney "looks no less presidential" than he did at the start. Ron Paul is still a "fringe candidate." Rick Santorum is "sincere but sour, less inclusive." Rick Perry had the "most promising resume" but after calling the Fed Chairman a traitor is was all downhill from there. Newt Gingrich has "a disqualifying ego." And before he withdrew, John Huntsman's only distinguishing feature was that "he can speak Chinese." And that's not even counting Herman Cain and Michele Bachmann.

Random chance, the imperative to flatter billionaire contributors, and Barack Obama's standing as a more formidable candidate than most Republicans are willing to allow may all play a part in explaining why the GOP's A-list is sitting this one out in the dug-out, says Hiatt.

But the most likely reason, says Hiatt, is that the Republican Party's A-list got their reputations as political leaders to be reckoned with because of their ability to work cooperatively and constructively with Democrats on the other side.  And so they risk throwing all that away to win the nomination of a party that "has come to loathe compromise" -- indeed a party that has gone so far as to internalize "the conviction that reaching across the aisle is weak and treasonous," says Hiatt.

And until that conviction "fades," says Hiatt, "politicians who want to get things done, and would know how to strike deals in the nation's interest, may stay on the sidelines."

It took Fred Hiatt most of his column to get there. But he finally gets it right when he blames the Republican's weak field on the Republican Party itself and on its allergic reaction to the fundamentals of democratic politics.

Tom DeLay set the tone a few years ago in his Farewell Address to Congress when the disgraced Republican leader announced that among true-believing Republicans compromise was no virtue at all but was, rather, the vice of "preening self-styled statesmen."  

This refusal to compromise on "conservative principles" that cover just about everything applies not only to Republicans in their dealings with traitorous Democrats but also in their dealings with other Republicans, as the fractiousness of the Republican field reveals.

The extremism at the root of this obstinate refusal to compromise has always worn a familiar disguise. Rather than admit to their own unbending stubbornness, ideologues who make a virtue of their unwillingness to budge unfailingly cast their antagonists as the true aggressors in any dispute, who ideologues charge with trying to impose their views on them.

Republican leaders today who are taking a pass on 2012 ultimately hope to lead a political party that once again understands "politics" is impossible without compromise - indeed that politics is defined by compromise since only on that basis can differences be resolved short of brute force and war - two alternatives that, tellingly, Republicans threaten constantly.

And so these "political" Republicans who are nowhere to be found in this campaign have no interest in being the figurehead prisoners of a right wing ideological movement with its legions of litmus tests that is intent on imposing its narrow dogma on others by any means possible.

Hiatt calls this refusal to compromise a "conviction." I would call it a pathology, an anti-social personality disorder, the manifestation of a radical ideological movement.

But in any event, Hiatt is being far too optimistic when he predicts we must only wait for this right wing "conviction" against compromising to subside -- to "fade" as he puts it -- so that Republicans of greater stature and seriousness can then step forward to lead the GOP again.

An extremist political movement secured to an absolutist faith or ideology is not likely to just "fade" away like some old soldier. Such movements must either be annihilated or abandoned through repeated electoral humiliations so that people can see the futility of a worldview that has nothing to offer but My Way or the Highway.