In an hour-long podcast last Friday, David Axelrod chatted with former presidential candidate Mitt Romney.  The conversation ranged through family illnesses, Romneycare, Paul Ryan, and most notably why Romney lost in 2012.

Obama's hatchet man suggested that having a moderate, progressive RINO like Romney trying to appease the "anti-government populists" of his party was akin to "walking the gauntlet."

Axelrod also said he sees the same thing happening with Donald Trump, whose hard-line rhetoric is threatening to derail another Republican's chances of winning in the general election.  Romney agreed, stating, "I think Donald Trump has said a number of things which are hurtful and I think will be potentially problematic either in the primary or in the general election."

Look how Romney and Axelrod have come together to make a plea to voters not to elect Trump.  Did Romney forget he failed to unseat the worst president in American history because he decided early on to follow in John McCain's footsteps?  In February 2012, Romney vehemently proclaimed, "I'm not willing to light my hair on fire" for the right-wing conservative base of the party.  He refused "to say some really outrageous things that are accusative and attacking of Obama."  "I am who I am," said Romney.

During Friday's chat, Axelrod suggested he knew how difficult it would be for a Republican candidate to navigate the troubled waters between Tea Party conservatives and GOP establishment stalwarts.  After the 2010 "shellacking," the PR man said he told Obama that the conservative base had just sown the seeds of a Republican defeat in the general election two years away.

From the Axe-Files:

DA: Your party has had a hard time in national elections in part because, let me put this in this perspective, when we lost the midterm elections, we being the Democrats, in 2010 and we did it as you will remember in spectacular fashion, we lost 63 seats in the House...

MR: I remember well.

DA: ...and I said to the president the next day, "I think the seeds of your reelection have just been planted," and he looked at me like I was nuts…the reason I felt that way was because I felt the election had empowered some basically very strident voices, anti-government, populists rather than governing conservatives and that whoever ran was going to have to satisfy factions within the party to be the nominee, that would make it very difficult to win a general election.

And it seems to me you're still in that same spot. I mean you basically were the governor of a pretty liberal state. You got elected as a kind of moderate Republican, probably if you had run as that, you'd be a strong general election candidate in this country, but you can't run like that and get nominated in your party. How do you overcome that?

MR: I think I was elected in part because people wanted someone who was a fiscal conservative who would rein in the excesses of government and that was in Massachusetts..

DA: And on other stuff as well. On abortion issues, social issues...

MR: On social issues, Massachusetts is certainly on the liberal side of things.

DA: And you passed muster with voters there who didn't feel like you were going to make those the fulcrum of your administration. But when you ran for president, I think back to those crazy Republican debates, and some of the stuff that happened there, the self-deportation thing which I'm sure was not in your plan, to say that, but that's the kind of way the debate went and and these things, one or two words gets a life of their own, and it made it tougher and you know, I watched it from the other side as a strategist and I thought man, these guys are boxing themselves out of the general election.

And I have to tell you it seems to me you have the same thing going on right now, you must have, having walked that gauntlet, you must have some concerns about that now as you watch this whole thing unfold, Donald Trump and all that.

Axelrod was sure that the Republican seeds of division were planted in 2010 for the Democrats to win in 2012.  He was also sure that the only way to keep a deep division inside the Republican Party was to nominate a moderate progressive.

Read more Evans @exzoom.net.