First, the Lincoln Caucus would work with the rules committee to get rid of any party bylaws that inhibit delegate flexibility at the convention. Second, it would tell the Trump and Cruz campaigns this: After the second ballot, we will entertain offers for our support. You may offer us policy pledges, personnel positions or anything you think will win our favor.
.. It would also create a democratic path toward a Republican nominee who is not Trump or Cruz. Remember, the members of the caucus would be delegates, not Washington insiders. They would be a committeeman from Missouri or a state rep from Ohio. They’d be tied to the grass roots, and the press would be all over these people at the convention. This is the best way to get a non-Trump/Cruz candidate without sparking riots in the streets.
.. In our republican system, it is parties that choose nominees; not primary voters. Parties are lasting institutions that manage coalitions, preserve historical commitments, protect us from flash-in-the-pan demagogues and impose restraints on the excessively ambitious. The Lincoln Caucus would embody these legitimate institutional responsibilities.
After Trump, Revisited
The party has been unable to co-opt Trump, unable to endorse him, unable to oppose him effectively. But Trump is not going to bequeath to Republicans a squadron of Trumpistas in Congress. He is not going to build the kind of institutions that ideologues use to pressure a major political party. He’s just going to make a spectacle of himself. Barring a black swan event, he will fade away.
The GOP will still have all the problems that pre-dated Trump and that only he exposed. A plurality of its voters will still be unsatisfied with the party’s agenda, especially on the economy. It will still have problems with young voters, and still have a long-term demographic problem. Its philosophy will still be outdated.
But by 2018, all the talk of bloodbaths and schisms and fracturing will go away. The party will have powers to exercise, sinecures to offer, and orthodoxies to protect again. The party will get out of its hospital ward and move on.
.. Republican politicians will have to decide whether to support him. And anyone who does, anyone who speaks up on Trump’s behalf and encourages voters to choose him in preference to Hillary Clinton, will carry that albatross around his or her neck permanently.
Is Donald Trump Self-Destructing?
Trump sought to deny the evidence provided by the video. Not only that, he defended Lewandowski’s actions, on the grounds that Fields might have represented a physical threat to him. “She had a pen in her hand which the Secret Service is not liking because they don’t know what it is, whether it’s a little bomb,” he said on CNN.
This reaction didn’t just make Trump look deluded, sexist, and cowardly—it provided his political enemies with more ammunition to use against him.
.. The irony in all of this is that, of all the Republican candidates, Trump is historically perhaps the least hostile to abortion rights. Cruz is so ardently opposed to abortion that he doesn’t favor exceptions in the case of rape or incest. Kasich does, but he has been pro-life for a long time, while Trump hasn’t. In 1999, Trump said that he was “very pro-choice.”
.. Brian Phillips, the rapid-response director for the Cruz campaign, said on Twitter, “Don’t overthink it: Trump doesn’t understand the pro-life position because he’s not pro-life.”
.. Trump doesn’t do details. He never has.
When there were ten, or six, candidates in the Republican field, and a televised debate was taking place every week, this didn’t matter much.
Kristol Attacks Me?
I could have stomached Chris Christie, but didn’t think Ben Carson or Carly Fiorina or Mr. Trump were qualified to be President.
I am unalterably opposed to Ted Cruz who I consistently believe is an existential threat to our Senate Majority.
Our party is in the shape it is today because of people like Bill Kristol. Kristol is a leader of the neo-conservative movement. He was a leading proponent of the Iraq War. He is also a leading proponent of America attacking Iran. Neo-conservatives are one-time liberals who migrated to the party because they were drawn by the Reagan doctrine of a muscled foreign policy. I don’t have anything against neo-conservatives although I don’t think that every foreign policy crisis requires the United States invading somebody. I believe that Iraq was a huge mistake and I believe that most Americans share my view of that war. Kristol still defends it and believes we should do something similar in Iran. Donald Trump articulated the view that the Iraq war was a mistake more forcefully and more crudely than I would have and he did it in South Carolina, a place that was thought to be the most pro-military in the country. If Kristol’s view of the use of our military would have any resonance, it would be in South Carolina. Trump won the Palmetto State easily.
.. Kristol believed that Sarah Palin would be the savior of the party and he promoted her heavily when she got on the ticket with John McCain.
That was the real start of the dumbing down of the GOP.
Kristol stood by Palin through thick and thin, even briefly making the case that she would make a great Presidential candidate.
.. You don’t get to Donald Trump without Sarah Palin.
.. Palin was also the first one to really attack the Republican Party just as much as she attacked the Democrats. And through her attacks on the party, she gained even more energy.
Ted Cruz learned that lesson very well. And he has built an impressive fundraising operation based mostly on the Palin principle.
.. Trump is not my first choice. Is he an existential threat to our Republic? I don’t think so.