Of late, VDH seems to falling into the elite media category himself. The entire piece could have been written without slamming Donald Trump.
The crux of the article is correct; whichever of the candidates, Walker or Cruz, can pick up on these issues without the Trump bombast will win the nomination. I believe the media and the powers that be don’t calculate that there is a very substantial number of us in the base that will NOT vote for Jeb Bush under any circumstances. he is nothing but, as Reagan used to say, a pale pastel of a liberal Democrat on virtually every position and he ain’t very pale compared to his friend, the confused, aging Hillary.
IMO VDH is tweaked over Trump. He’s trying to analyze Trump’s trajectory with finely-honed intellectual tools and frankly he’s not especially understanding the populist nor grass-roots appeal. VDH is VDH. He’s not really hitting on all cylinders (as he usually does) on this topic. Yes, “of late”, because Trump has been his focus of late. VDH doesn’t quite get it and is not ready to accept it.
His NRO articles (plural) lately does seem to ‘not get the base’. Especially the one about Obama and Trump peas of the same pot.
But in this new one, at least he gets why we were so fed up right.