Judging by his most recent Washington Post column, George Will still hasn’t come to the realization that today’s Republican Party isn’t the Republican Party that he remembers and that the primary voters of today’s Republican Party are in a mood to burn the house down. He’s still pushing Chris Christie:
Paris was for all Americans, but especially for Republicans, a summons to seriousness that should have two immediate impacts on the Republican presidential contest. It should awaken the party’s nominating electorate from its reveries about treating the presidency as an entry-level job. And it should cause Republicans to take another look at Chris Christie, beginning with his speech in Florida the day after the Paris attacks.
[…]
To the large extent that Trump’s appeal is his forceful persona, no candidate in the Republican field can match Christie’s combination of a prosecutor’s bearing and a governor’s executive temperament. In Florida, Christie sounded a new theme: “There are all too many people in academia and in global business that aren’t really interested in America as a nation-state anymore.â€
[…]
Heightened security concerns might be Christie’s opportunity. The more disorderly the world becomes, the less luminous is the one credential that supposedly qualifies Hillary Clinton for the presidency. The credential is not her adequate but unremarkable eight-year Senate career. Rather, it is her four years as secretary of state. Recall the question Ronald Reagan posed to voters at the conclusion of his single debate with President Jimmy Carter a week before the 1980 election: Are you better off today than you were four years ago? The electorate’s answer was emphatic.
In a debate 10 months from now, the Republican nominee will ask a variant of Reagan’s question: Is America safer or more respected today, anywhere in the world, than it was when Clinton became secretary of state? Today, Republican voters need to ask themselves a question: Whom do they want onstage asking that question?
I don’t think that Republican primary voters are just posturing. Chris Christie can get no traction because he’s an experienced politician and is willing to work with the other party to accomplish his objectives. Judging by the polls, that’s just not where the collective head of today’s Republican primary voter is.
They’re not merely giving the cold shoulder to Chris Christie. They’re turning their noses up at all of the candidates with executive branch of government experience (e.g. Jindal, Kasich, Bush).
Yeah, George Will still occasionally reflects that he grew up a Cubs fan, and thus was unhappy as conservatives are oft unhappy, and learned the deep lessons of conservatism as a result. Meanwhile his friends were happy Cardinal fans that took the lessons of liberalism of unbounded optimism and carefree attitudes.
I cannot comment on his network of friends in Champaign, but I’m not sure this division has much larger reality, but it made me reflect: Who is the happiest candidate and who are the happiest supporters of a candidate?
I’ll give everyone a hing, it’s not a Democrat.
hint
Historically, the candidate who has prevailed in the general election is the candidate who has painted the brightest picture of America and its future. I struggle to see Hillary Clinton doing that.
That’s a personality thing for her, but it’s also difficult to joyfully promise that things are going to be so much better that your head will spin when you are the status quo candidate.
What I think that many progressives fail to realize is that most Republicans and independents don’t see the Republican field as the spawn of Satan as they do. When you’re so completely sure you’re right, it’s an easy thing to miss.
Your comment touches on something I’ve mentioned before. Everybody has traded places. The conservatives aren’t conservative any more but the progressives are. Yes, Hillary Clinton is a status quo candidate but in a real sense so are Bernie Sanders and Martin O’Malley. Sanders is the closest thing to a reform candidate but he struggles to come up with actionable strategies for doing the reforming.
IMO the GoP has become a reactionary party and the Democrats a statist party. Of course there is some cross-dressing, abortion being the obvious case.
The Republicans are radicals. The Democrats are liberals without a cause.
Steve
Extremism is the political stance of choice by the talking heads of both parties. And, for those who chastise the GWB era resulting in the election of Obama, it can be said that the Obama presidency is now producing the popular appeal of the outsider republican candidates now leading in the polls.
Steve, Obama’s presidential behavior and myopic policies are producing anger and frustration on the right, which is now seen by people like you as being a bunch of “radicals.” Unfortunately there are few sensible choices out there anymore.
Maybe reasons behind the growth of radical push back under this presidency is the following:
First you have United Health Group heaving sighs about “pulling back” on offering individual health care coverage. And, then a more human interest story, from the NYT, reciting a new seasonal stress called Shopping for Health Insurance.
Welcome to life in the pressure-cooker of progressive policy-making.
jan- We have changed insurers about 15 times in the last 20 years. If you want the lowest price, that is what you do. Of course in the GOP non pressure-cooker years, people just didn’t buy health insurance since they could no get it at all or could not afford it.
Steve
I’m generally not a fan of “they do it too.” But before we go too far in lamenting how the Republican Party’s center of gravity has shifted, lets consider that Kennedy or Scoop Jackson would shit their pants at todays Democrats. Of course, they do have the moral and even/steady hand of a true middle of the roader in Harry Reid……….my-way-or-the-highway petulant brat Obama, we’ve-got-to-pass-the-bill-to-see-what’s-in-it Pelosi and my-biggest-enemy-is-Republicans (and the FBI, heh) Clinton. What giants of statesmanship they, eh??? (huge snicker)
Separately, anyone earnestly defending the performance of ObamaCare on all criterion but “we got a few million signed up,” is plain and simply delusional. The acceptable “its too early to tell” date has passed. Its a freakin’ mess.
Republican voters haven’t turned their noses up at Establishment type Republican candidates so much as they’ve had their noses rubbed in it repeatedly by those candidates. Immigration is the most obvious point of contention, but there are many others. They’ve got no reason to trust candidates who either repeatedly lie to them or who repeatedly tell them their concerns are irrelevant.
The explanation doesn’t change the outcome. The leading Republican candidates are not establishment candidates. Not just the top candidate—the top two or three.
I think the prevailing wisdom among establishment Republicans is that eventually the base will come to its senses and come running back. I’m not so sure.
There is a helpless confusion being experienced by the electorate. The so-called leader of the free world has views and policies stuck in his own ideological concrete. The establishment oppositional party, though, appears stuck in their own bureaucratic paralysis.
So, people are wondering out into the frontier of untested lay people who verbally are addressing the anger and woes felt by the public at large, as they contemplate their choices for the next POTUS.
Pundits have been describing this election cycle as very different. I tend to agree, along with not being able to decipher where it will all end up.
To continue the conversation about the health of our healthcare policy:
Bloomberg had a piece out today entitled Obamacare Insurers Are Suffering. That Won’t End Well.
The writer, Megan McCardle, is careful not to frame it in death spiral rhetoric, like she formerly did, but merely pointing out what she cites to be “worrying symptoms.”
In the meantime, bloggers like Glenn Reynolds are more blunt, saying ” It’s as if the whole thing is a scam designed to result in single-payer.”