I sometimes think about a caption Newsweek ran in the early 1970s — back when news magazines still carried news — below a photo depicting a jazz combo in Moscow, Soviet communism’s imitation of that most American of art forms. The caption: “Grace notes to a dead ideology.”

Someone might write a similar caption for a photo of Mitt Romney during this presidential campaign. It’s hard to remember when a major party nominee ran on a platform so extraordinarily distant from any of the country’s actual needs.

Ever since Barack Obama was elected in 2008 amid the greatest economic implosion since the Great Depression, Republicans have figured their ticket back to power is massive resistance to Obama’s plans, no matter how moderate or sensible. For the presidential race, they envisioned an economy still unrecovered, with wage earners in dire straits.

They’re not exactly getting their wish. While the recovery has been unusually slow and painful, that’s hardly surprising. This was no ordinary recession, but a crash following reckless financial speculation we hadn’t seen since the 1920s.

Even so, unemployment is down significantly from its peak, and will probably be near the 7.4 percent that helped re-elect Ronald Reagan with his “Morning in America” campaign.

There will be no bright mornings in the Romney campaign. It will be scorched earth, with unrelenting attacks on Obama for the next six months. Will it work?

Not likely. Obama is a skilled campaigner and seems to have cornered the market on the catchy slogans that often drive campaigns. The Buffet Rule — the idea that CEOs should pay tax rates at least equal to their secretaries’ — is so broadly accepted that the GOP’s only response is to change the subject.

Still, it’s fascinating to see Romney speaking, day after day, of enacting still more tax breaks for the wealthiest, the “job creators,” even though (as during his tenure at Bain Capital) such leaders seem to destroy more jobs than they create.

It will indeed be hard for a candidate worth $250 million, with an annual income of $20 million, to explain why he needs to pay still less than the 15 percent he reported for 2010. Public understanding of the 99 percent versus the 1 percent, thanks to the Occupy movement, is fairly keen.

Yet Romney has nowhere else to go. The contemporary Republican Party is built on two pillars, following communism’s implosion. The first, handed down by Ronald Reagan, is that tax cuts are always good, even though the corollary — that they produce revenue — turned out to be false.

The second pillar, invented by Karl Rove and sold by George W. Bush, is “starve the beast” — use ever-lower tax rates to devastate government’s ability to deliver services. Paul LePage is currently trying this theory in Maine, with the early result that the state fell from 28th to last in the nation in personal income growth, and is also dead last in job creation. Nobody said this would be pleasant.

Romney is stuck with both pillars. He can’t advocate for even the status quo on tax rates because of the Reagan rule. And he has to insist that deficits created by decades of tax cuts are caused solely by government spending, meaning that more starvation is required (the W. Bush rule.)

The austerity he’s demanding would, in fact, have turned the recession into a depression. Austerity — the lack of public and private spending — is what caused the Great Depression to continue more than a decade. Europe, now caught in the austerity trap, continues to stagger without recovery. So how does Romney win swing states?

The contemporary Democratic Party doesn’t have an ideology, which may be a good thing. If there’s a formula for creating a prosperous economy with full employment and social justice, no one has yet discovered it.

So Democrats have been playing along with the dominant GOP ideology. In Maine, Gov. John Baldacci’s two terms are Exhibit A. Except for Dirigo Health, soon abandoned, Baldacci’s policies were largely devoted to creating tax breaks and incentives for business, with disappointing results — though, late in his second term, he did help launch Maine’s most successful new industry in decades, windpower. And for all the Democrats’ pains, they took 19 percent in the last gubernatorial election. Imitating Republicans won’t work.

There will be no important third party candidate for president. The only potential late entrant, someone rich enough to finance his own campaign, is a class Romney already represents.

So the election of 2012 is likely to mark the death of a moribund, discredited ideology. What comes after is anyone’s guess.

Douglas Rooks is a former daily and weekly newspaper editor who has covered the State House for 25 years. He may be reached at [email protected].