For Republicans, it’s all over but the disappointment. Mitt Romney is probably going to be the party’s presidential nominee, and there’s not much the conservative base can do about it.

This isn’t just true, it has always been true. Republicans (with a little help from the media) have simply spent the last few years distracting themselves into believing they could avoid it.

One way to look at Romney, who has managed to skate through the nominating process so far with barely a scratch but with no passion behind him, either, is that approximately 75 percent of Republicans don’t want him. Another, is that he’s the only candidate capable of convincing 25 percent of Republicans to support him.

The others, from evangelical favorite Rick Santorum, to the tea party’s last, faded hope, Rick Perry, to the odd Libertarian phenomenon, Ron Paul, have their niches. But the not-Romneys have failed to consolidate because they’ve gotten in each other’s way. Their supporters cannot combine because they are not really parts of a whole. They are distinctive, competing movements within a party that has no captain capable of compelling them to row together.

Thus, Romney —the only candidate with the financial wherewithal to purchase a professional campaign apparatus — will head into South Carolina, comfortable in the knowledge that while he may not be his party’s rock star, he and his money are about as unifying as it’s going to get.

Part of Republicans’ challenge is the natural disorder that comes with being the party out of the White House. Without a focal point of national leadership, political parties can become discombobulated. When George W. Bush was in the White House, the Democratic base, no matter how deeply they despised the president, struggled to find a unifying message-bearer, and often drifted toward and then away from former president Bill Clinton and former vice president Al Gore. The Democrats, too, struggled with whether to feed their passions or play it safe, and wound up doing the latter with John Kerry in the 2004 election.

Republicans have, for various reasons, rejected their most recent president, George W. Bush, as either an elder statesman or kingmaker. Bush and his administration are seen by many conservatives as having squandered a rare moment of Republican political ascendancy between 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina, on big spending, big government programs and military adventurism in Iraq.

Bush then anointed his old enemy, John McCain (a man long distrusted by movement conservatives), to be his successor, and sealed his isolation with an unprecedented government intervention into the nation’s banking system — an effort to rescue the economy from the fiscal abuse largely perpetrated on his watch.

Conservatives vowed to never be fooled again. (How ironic, then, that Romney’s advisors and ideas largely come from Bush world.) But they have been unable to find a candidate capable of embodying or articulating their sense of impotent rage at not being able to keep Barack Obama out of the White House, or to stop “Obamacare” — with its steps toward universal healthcare that conservatives view as the slippery slope toward full-on socialism — from coming into being.

Hatred and rage are powerful motivators, but they are also easily spent fuel, which often burns the hottest in midterm elections. With no one to articulate a positive reason to return them to the White House, Republicans have careened from one candidate to another, searching for one who could reflect back to them their loathing of Obama, only to find that each of their favorites was fatally flawed. Romney certainly tries — directing continual and often patronizing insults at the president, doing his best to play the part.

But unlike, say, his surrogate, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, Romney isn’t the angry guy stuck in traffic, screaming obscenities at cars. While prickly at times, he isn’t a natural bully. And he lacks Newt Gingrich’s skill at distilling reverse class resentment, directed at the less fortunate, into talk radio-ready prose.

Mitt Romney isn’t angry, because he doesn’t have much to be angry about. Like Bush, his contentment is marinated in privilege. Mitt is the guy who fires your dad (and apparently likes it), then sends your family a lovely holiday card.

That’s not the kind of candidate conservatives had in mind.

But that’s the candidate they’re going to get.