Posted on 02/24/2016 5:55:44 AM PST by Kaslin
As things stand, Donald Trump is the presumptive GOP nominee. That's awful news, and depressing to contemplate. But terrible possibilities don't become less terrible if we refuse to contemplate them. Rather, they become more likely.
The GOP's collective desire to look away has been a problem for months. Nearly everyone, including yours truly, believed that Trump's candidacy would exhaust itself on its own terms. There are many reasons why that hasn't happened. Chief among them: Too many people thought it was someone else's job to bell the Trumpian cat. No better evidence for this can be found than the fact that of the $215 million spent by super PACs so far this cycle, only 4 percent was spent attacking Trump, according to the Washington Post.
While a queue for allotments of blame would be longer than a Great Depression breadline, the person at the head of it is Ted Cruz. For months, Cruz embraced Trump as a comrade-in-arms. This helped send the signal to talk radio hosts and various conservative activists that Trump was as a healthy addition to the political conversation. Even though the two men are wildly divergent ideologically, they both found shelter under the "anti-establishment" umbrella.
Cruz finally broke the clinch in Iowa and demonstrated that negative attacks on Trump work.
But then, disastrously, Cruz stopped attacking. He wrongly reasoned that he had no chance in New Hampshire and had little to gain, so why bother fighting Trump there? For the entire crucial week leading up to the New Hampshire primary, the GOP field went back into a cannibalistic frenzy to win the non-Trump mantle. This allowed Trump to run up a huge victory in the Granite State, and that momentum let him gobble up Cruz's evangelical base in South Carolina (where 73 percent of voters describe themselves as evangelical or born-again), resulting in a strategically devastating third-place finish that shattered Cruz's claim to be the standard-bearer of true conservatism.
The morals of this story so far should be familiar. First, you can't count on politicians to look beyond their immediate tactical self-interest. Second, rumors of the so-called establishment's power -- or even existence -- are greatly exaggerated. Waiting for "the establishment" to save the party from Trump's hostile takeover is like waiting for Godot to bring the beer to the party.
Marco Rubio is now the only plausible alternative to Trump. But it's unclear whether he's taken either of these lessons to heart. According to his campaign's post-South Carolina strategy memo, he thinks he can wait until after Super Tuesday to post a win in any state. Rubio assumes first-place finishes will ultimately come his way because the field will be clear. Will it? Jeb Bush is finally out, but Ben Carson seems to be running one of the most ingeniously disguised book tours in modern memory. John Kasich is hunting windmills in Ohio and Michigan, in the apparent hope that he can parlay such victories into being Trump's running mate. And Cruz is unlikely to stop running for president because that's all he knows how to do.
Rubio's strategy isn't crazy, just implausible. If he's hoping the "establishment" can rescue him, or that attacking everyone but Trump is the route to victory, he should take a moment to review how the primaries became such a raging garbage fire in the first place.
Is there another way? One possibility would be for Rubio and Cruz to cut a deal. Republican disarray is largely attributable to the fact that no so-called "establishment candidate" secured much support from the conservative grass roots, and no grass-roots candidate secured much support from the establishment.
If the two factions -- which make up the overwhelming majority of Republican voters -- could be unified, it might be enough to stop Trump.
What would the deal look like? A Rubio-Cruz ticket. Cruz won't work at the top of the ticket for the simple reason that too many GOP quislings fear Cruz more than Trump. But a unity ticket -- a la Reagan-Bush in 1980 -- in the form of Los Hermanos Cubanos might just do the trick. There are real costs to such a deal (not least the fact that there are better general-election running mates for Rubio).
Maybe there's another way, but I haven't heard it. And in a race where Trump has changed everything with his boldness, it's long past time for his opponents to provide some of their own.
Rubio’s a weasel. If Cruz teams up with him I’ll officially tune out of the election season.
I don’t know how to tell you this, Jonah, but that won’t do it.
Cruz will come out of March 1st with 2-4 more wins under his belt.
Rubio... will not win Florida.
The premise is good... the ticket is backwards.
No one is going to fund Rubio knowing full well his continued candidacy is Trump’s path to an easy nomination.
To have a garbage fire, you first must have a big pile of garbage. And we do, created by years of GOPe malfeasance. Trump is burning it to get rid of it, and the RINOs can't stand their own stench.
? Why not a Trump-Cruz? Or a Trump-Rubio? Or a Trump-Carson?
So sick of the infighting.....this cycle is nuts. At least for me. None of our frontrunners thrills me, which is why I have sent all of them financial support. None of them repulses me either.....
Cruz has killed himself off and Rubes is about to once Trump starts on him. Neither can really help the other quite frankly.
Rubio + Cruz is a nothing burger.
Goldberg is just another establishment, inside the beltway desperado.
Great idea. Put both ineligible candidates on the same ticket. Double down on the Congress we are trying so hard to flush.
Pffft... what a bunch of hokum. Rubio and... anybody, or anybody and Rubio is out of the question. Rubio and his cheap labor express backers can go pound sand.
Just what we need.... two illegal candidates on the GOP ticket.
Only Rubio supporters think that’s a good idea
Thanks a lot. Not
I actually think that would make it TOUGHER to stop Trump (not that I think anything can as it pertains to the nomination).
Rubio is a weasel and Cruz is a bigger weasel. Then there is the general ineptitude of both. It goes on and on.
Bye bye Marco and Ted....
If Cruz wants to be POTUS, he needs to make nice with Trump and cut a deal to be his VP. He is too green right now, and will end up getting clobbered by the Dems if, by some miracle, he ends up as the nominee.
He can use that VP spot to build his much needed credentials for the top spot. Right now he is somewhat less appealing to US voters than Mittens was at his peak.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.