I am falling asleep at the wheel.

The Republican primary season has been bottomed out and banal for weeks. There have been no debates, few state primaries and few real, perceptible consequences. I am bored with this! Yawn! Where is the excitement? Where are the developments?

I’ve been wishing for weeks Newt Gingrich would just drop out already. He’s going nowhere. It’s difficult merely to imagine him as a candidate still. “Oh, Gingrich? He’s still in this thing?” He’s long overdue to do his business or get off the pot already, and hopefully the reshuffling of his leftover support could make the Mitt Romney vs. Rick Santorum matchup actually worth something. But Gingrich just won’t let it go.

And Ron Paul is like a little fly buzzing around the table. He exists and is a little annoying for existing, but he’s not really harming anybody, so there’s no reason to swat him down.

So in the style of “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” I say, get on with it!

Maybe the intensity of the 2008 primary season is still too fresh in our memories. Maybe we’re all making the mistake of expecting a drawn-out primary season actually to be enthralling. Now that we’re stuck with 2012, it’s just … pathetic, I guess.

But down to business: From an empirical perspective, a long primary season does _not_ have a history of being necessarily detrimental to the eventual nominee. Typically, long primaries are only harmful when an incumbent president or vice president is facing a strong, intraparty challenger on the way to the nomination, which isn’t the case for Republicans this year.

The argument that exposing the intolerable wackiness of this year’s GOP candidates for too many months will hurt the party in the general election is, though I wish it were true, unconvincing. Being a horde of science-denying, patriarchal, id-driven theocrats with embarrassingly little class or racial consciousness is nothing new to the Republican Party or American voters. If this behavior hurts the GOP this year, it won’t be because such behavior is new — it would be because the electorate is getting smarter.

But you won’t like my answer if you ask me whether the electorate is getting smarter.

Republicans, especially the Republican National Committee, are trying to quell the anxiety that the long primary is a curse upon their eventual nominee (ahem, Romney) by comparing this season to the 2008 Democratic primary contest. “2008 was a long primary too,” they say, “and it strengthened Obama’s status as the frontrunner.” This is cute, but those shoes really are too big to fill with this year’s selection of GOP candidates. The matchup of then-Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama was actually _exciting._ They were polarized against a very definitive political enemy in President George Bush and had much more room to invest lots of energy, awaken their base and define a much more positive rhetorical landscape. That primary had us on the edge of our seats. 2012 has us struggling just to stay awake.

But isn’t this emblematic of a deeper structural obstacle for Republicans to overcome this year? None of these candidates are answers to Obama in the way Obama-the-candidate was an answer to George W. Bush. Obama has been too Republican in his presidency. He’s given so little room for Republicans to combat him short of rewinding to the 1950s. Even the individual health insurance mandate, the Goliath itself, is a Republican idea that originated in the alternate reality of the Heritage Foundation.

The extent to which this campaign season has shamelessly evacuated reason from its every fiber isn’t even news anymore. We’re just desensitized to it now. “Oh, Rick Santorum flippantly mentioned war with Iran again? Whatever, I’m going to be late for work.”