( CNN ) -- As usual , Professor Paul Krugman 's piece in the Monday morning New York Times is causing a great deal of chatter among the political types . Krugman points out just how inept the Republican field is . In some cases he takes a scalpel ( and in others a machete ) to surely the weakest field of presidential aspirants any party has offered in modern American history ( see my earlier CNN column comparing this field to 1980 ) . I believe I can explain why this field is so inept . In order to proffer this explanation I am going to utilize Professor Krugman 's field of economics . Hold on : I confess I 've never taken an economics course and if you ask me the relationship between interest rates and bond prices I would have a Herman Cain Libya moment . I could probably get the right answer but it would take me a while . There are some laws of economics that I believe all economists ( be they salt , fresh , or brackish water ) would agree on . One of these is : The more valuable a thing , the more people will be interested in purchasing that thing . And as Professor Krugman points out in his piece , the 2012 Republican nomination was clearly considered by most observers to be a thing of value . Even the most partisan Democrat -- me for example -- would concede that three months ago the Republicans had an excellent chance to win the presidency . So ask yourself : Why does this thing that appears to have so much value have so many low bidders ? Why did people like Govs . Chris Christie , Mitch Daniels , Haley Barbour , Jeb Bush and Sen. John Thune , all look at this and decide not to raise their paddles ? So here we wind up with the political equivalent of the Hope Diamond going for $ 99.99 . I think that these guys were smart enough to see a big flaw in the process and it is this : The majority of the people in the Republican Party who were going to pick their nominee had been so overwhelmed by misinformation , unworkable simplistic solutions -- e.g. , electrifying border fences -- and anti-science , right-wing pandering , that the potential candidates decided they just could not go through with it . We have watched GOP debates where audience members booed gay soldiers and cheered the prospect of someone dying without health insurance . We 've seen a candidate who was n't penalized in the least for not knowing that China has had nuclear weapons since 1964 but had to drop out because of a consensual sexual relationship . We have seen a member of the House Intelligence Committee who apparently did n't realize that we have n't had an embassy in Iran for the last 30 years , candidates who do n't believe in evolution , and a candidate that did n't even know the voting age in the United States . Maybe Bush , Daniels , Christie , Barbour and Thune figured out ahead of time what Fairleigh Dickinson University uncovered just recently : that people who watch Fox News are actually more ignorant than people who watch no news at all . Could you imagine what they would have found had they studied people listening to talk radio ? Perhaps the Republicans are getting exactly the kind of candidates that best match the intellectual composition of the majority of the people in their party -- just a thought , but it 's my only explanation of our low bidders . Looks like their chance at the presidency is going , going , gone . The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of James Carville .
Tom Carville says the GOP field for president is very weak and he thinks he knows why . He says economics says that if a thing has value , people want it , but few want this thing . He says good candidates shied away because they could n't take low level of discourse . Carville : GOP getting candidates that match intellectual composition of many in the party .