The running mate’s role is to support and amplify the boss’s message, not to usurp it. As Gingrich demonstrated on Thursday night, with his call for American Muslims to be subjected to a Sharia-law test, he’s not one of nature’s number twos.
.. Many of the potential problems with picking Gingrich also apply to the New Jersey governor, who is loud and domineering, and has an equally dismal approval rating: thirty-four per cent
.. Trump’s only realistic, or semi-realistic, chance of getting to two hundred and seventy electoral votes is to storm through the Midwest and the Rust Belt, racking up huge majorities of white votes. To this end, his ideal choice would have been John Kasich, the popular governor of Ohio, but Kasich didn’t want the job. Nor did Rob Portman, the Ohio senator who served in the Bush Administration, or Scott Walker, the governor of Wisconsin. And no one in Michigan or Pennsylvania was particularly suitable, either. That left Pence
.. In May, after wrapping up the nomination, he said, “This is called the Republican Party, not the Conservative Party.” But, like John McCain and Mitt Romney before him, Trump ultimately had to come to terms with the nature of the beast he is trying to ride to the White House.
.. Selecting Pence, a former head of the Republican Study Group on Capitol Hill, sends a signal that Trump is willing to work with the Party establishment and listen to what it says.
.. Ryan released a statement saying that there could be “no better choice for our vice-presidential candidate.”
.. Most people who take civil rights and the Constitution seriously are already aghast at the prospect of a Trump Presidency. Is there anyone out there who was willing to look past Trump’s call for a ban on Muslims, a resumption of torture, and the deportation of eleven million undocumented workers, but who will not vote for the Republican ticket because of Pence’s support for an Indiana law that allowed businesses to discriminate against gays and lesbians? Perhaps such people exist, but I doubt there are very many.
How Trump’s adversaries lost it all in Cleveland
‘Pigs get fed, hogs get slaughtered,’ said one negotiator who tried to deal with the GOP insurgency.
.. In exchange for dropping some of his most divisive proposals – a ban on lobbyists serving on the RNC and a plan to weaken the power of the national GOP chairman – Cuccinelli would get concessions on a package of reforms to the 2020 presidential primary process, as well as on a change to the terms of RNC members.
.. the RNC pulled out of the talks when, according to three sources involved in the final negotiations, Cuccinelli conceded that he couldn’t guarantee the support of his faction – even for a more favorable version of the agreement.
.. He sought a proposal to provide closed-primary states with a 25 percent bonus in their delegate pool at the national convention. The RNC countered by proposing a 15 percent bonus to states’ at-large delegate pools.
.. former Congressman Doug Ose, one of Trump’s supporters on the committee, repeatedly invoked procedural motions that permanently ended debate on the most divisive subjects, catching Trump’s opponents off-guard and ensuring that the committee proceedings moved apace.
.. After a five-hour delayed start, they decided – with little warning – to continue meeting late into the night Thursday, while most of Trump’s opponents were preparing to recess and continue debate on Friday.
“Why give them a whole day to regroup, refresh,” said one RNC official. “Once you press the attack, you don’t let off.”
.. Now Cuccinelli is threatening to disrupt Monday’s convention proceedings by encouraging delegates to vote down the rules passed by the committee, when they come up for a final vote. That would throw the convention into chaos on the day delegates are expected to formally nominate Trump.
The (G.O.P.) Party’s Over
This column has argued for a while now that there is only one thing worse than one-party autocracy, and that is one-party democracy. At least a one-party autocracy can order things to get done.
.. We can survive a few years of such deadlock in Washington, but we sure can’t take another four or eight years without real decay setting in, and that explains what I’m rooting for in this fall’s elections: I hope Hillary Clinton wins all 50 states and the Democrats take the presidency, the House, the Senate and, effectively, the Supreme Court.
.. Finally, if Trump presides over a devastating Republican defeat across all branches of government, the G.O.P. will be forced to do what it has needed to do for a long time: take a time out in the corner. In that corner Republicans could pull out a blank sheet of paper and on one side define the biggest forces shaping the world today — and the challenges and opportunities they pose to America — and on the other side define conservative, market-based policies to address them.
.. Right now, the G.O.P. is not a healthy center-right party. It is a mishmash of religious conservatives; angry white males who fear they are becoming a minority in their own country and hate trade; gun-control opponents; pro-lifers; anti-regulation and free-market small-business owners; and pro- and anti-free trade entrepreneurs.
.. The party was once held together by the Cold War. But as that faded away it has been held together only by renting itself out to whomever could energize its base and keep it in power — Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, the Tea Party, the National Rifle Association. But at its core there was no real common denominator, no take on the world, no real conservative framework.
.. John Boehner gave up being speaker of the House because he knew that his caucus had become a madhouse, incapable of governing.
Southern Trouble for Donald Trump
In many ways, he’s running a campaign that revives the old Southern strategy, practiced by Barry Goldwater and, more craftily, by Richard Nixon, of peeling disaffected white voters away from the Democratic Party with dog-whistle racism and a certain amount of sympathy for the lowered prospects of the working class. Trump is sure, naturally, that he’ll “do great” with that approach in the so-called solid South—solid for Democrats, from Reconstruction until the civil-rights era; solid for Republicans thereafter.
.. Trump declared, “People of North Carolina want strength, protection, and jobs ..
.. the South is no longer all that solid. In many places, North Carolina among them, Trump’s rummage-sale version of the Southern strategy is as likely to activate voters against him as it is to insure a G.O.P. victory.
.. An angry white man killed three Muslim students in Chapel Hill last year, but the Muslim community in the area proved vibrant enough not only to survive that assault but to launch new institutions, including a scholarship at North Carolina State, programs to aid Syrian refugees, and a local thrift store whose proceeds go to charities the victims supported
.. What’s also important, though, in loosening the Republican lock on the South is what’s known as in-migration—people moving from other states, especially in the Northeast, to growing metropolitan areas of the South, like the Research Triangle in North Carolina.