It’s getting harder and harder to take the Grand Old Party seriously these days. And it ain’t just me: Two-thirds of Republican voters see their party as essentially rudderless, just when the onset of the Obama Era demands a credible alternative.

And I’m thinking that turning to the political equivalent of a child preacher isn’t going to restore confidence in the right-wing faithful.

Because that’s all the sideshow that is 14-year-old conservative wunderkind Jonathan Krohn is — a bizarre attempt by the conservative core to somehow demonstrate that the next-generation cavalry is coming. All it signifies is that there must be a huge age-group void between the old lions of the Reagan Revolution and the present day, and that any intellectual reinvigoration of the American right is going to have to wait until after senior prom.

Until then, I guess the nattering nabobs of negativism stance will serve as a strategy placeholder (to borrow the best thing that ever came out of Spiro Agnew’s mouth — with no small irony that he was a Republican himself).