Saturday, July 9, 2016

Failure of the Republican Party: GOP Establishment Preferred Trump to Cruz

Sorry to have been away for a while. I’m the proud new father of a one-month-old girl, and with four other children aged nine and under at home and a day job at Hoover that keeps me quite busy, I’ve been a bit stretched for writing time.
But I thought that Eliana and Tim’s excellent article on Sen. Cruz’s reconfiguring his team for a possible 2020 run would be a great opportunity to rejoin the conversation. It’s also a reminder that we don’t even need to wait for one Presidential election cycle to be over to start talking about the next one!
The article as yet another reminder of what a lost opportunity 2016 represents for the GOP, facing the weakest Democratic candidate since (at least) Walter Mondale. From the day after Super Tuesday it was abundantly clear that only Ted Cruz could stop Donald Trump from being the GOP nominee. And yet, in a fit of staggering immaturity and political idiocy, GOP elected officials, with some honorable exceptions, did little to nothing to stop Trump. In making that statement, I’m not making a value judgment on Trump as a candidate. I’m no Trump fan, to say the least, but I’m not a #NeverTrump partisan like many of my fellow National Review contributors. I’m simply estimating GOP elected officials’ political acuity by their own thoroughly amoral standards of what strategy was best to save their own hides.
Does anyone really think that if Ted Cruz were the GOP nominee we would have 20 GOP representatives and senators who have explicitly refused to vote for the nominee and another sixty or so representatives and senators who have refused to say who they would endorse—against Hillary Clinton, the most polarizing and unpopular Democratic nominee in history? Do any of the GOP’s do-nothing caucus claim that Cruz would be trailing Hillary as badly as Trump as trailing now? Do any think that Trump would be better at winning among non-white voters that will increasingly be a part of any winning national coalition? Do any of them think that on the day when Hillary Clinton’s non-indictment should have been dominating the news cycle, we’d instead be discussing whether or not the presumptive GOP nominee was tweeting anti-Semitic material?
Read the rest of this op-ed HERE.

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1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Yes, the powers that be chose Trump over Cruz, and they should pay a heavy price for it. Unfortunately, the rest of us are the ones paying the price.

-Martha