OVER the last two decades, through Bob Dole and George W. Bush and John McCain and Mitt Romney, it has become an article of faith that the Republican presidential nominee is a person blessed by, or acceptable to, the party’s establishment, meaning the elders, the bankers, the cool heads, the deep pockets.
There’s mess along the way — brief tantrums by restive voters, fleeting triumphs by renegade candidates — but order and obeisance in the end.
Is this the election cycle when that changes?
The twilight of the Republican elite?
Donald Trump’s stamina and the ascendance of Ben Carson and Carly Fiorina suggest as much. The three of them, who have led national polls since mid-September, aren’t just political outsiders, which is the label hung on them most frequently. They’re instruments of protest by Republican voters unwilling to heed the prompts and protocol that they’re expected to.
For Republicans (and perhaps for Democrats, too) this is a season of rebellion, as the chaos in the House of Representatives vividly illustrates. A consequential share of the Republican majority there have made it clear that they will not bow to precedent, not follow any conventional script, not have anyone foisted on them. No, they’ll do the foisting themselves.
Glenn Thrush of Politico captured this dynamic in an article following the withdrawal of Representative Kevin McCarthy from the race to be the next speaker of the House. Enumerating the reasons no sane person would seek the job, Thrush wrote that “if you have any chance of winning, you’re automatically the ‘establishment,’ ” and you’re thus anathema to a group of bomb throwers in the Republican caucus who are “leery of anybody who followed the preordained lines of succession.”
Those bomb throwers are mirrors of the voters who are saying no to Jeb Bush, no to Chris Christie, no to John Kasich, no to anyone who was once or could soon be the darling of the northeastern Acela corridor.
And they’re pointing the Republican primary in a genuinely unpredictable direction.
This isn’t a mere replay of four years ago, when Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain and Rick Santorum had their moments. They were middle fingers raised one at a time, in succession (even if Santorum was really more a pinkie). Trump, Carson and Fiorina are parallel, simultaneous phenomena, constituting a gesture of more profound rebuke.
I still don’t believe that any of them will be the nominee. Each has too many peculiarities and too big a potential to crash and burn. Carson seems to be on the verge of doing that right now.
But then who? If the electorate really is more defiant than ever, Bush is done. Scott Walker and Rick Perry are already gone. Voters, it appears, prefer someone brattier.
Someone like Ted Cruz.
“He’s perfectly positioned himself to own that space when Trump and Carson disappear,” said a Republican operative who is among the smartest analysts I know. “He’ll be a force to be reckoned with. I think that he has a very clear path to the nomination, as much as that horrifies me.”
This is a strange season, in which old rules and truths seem to be going up in flames. It’s a bonfire of the verities.
Remember the longtime thinking that governors made the best presidential candidates, being able to cite executive experience and run on clear records? Well, Perry was and Walker is a governor, and none of the former or current governors still in the hunt is meeting expectations.
Remember how much money was supposed to matter, partly for the commercials it could buy? Well, the ads didn’t have, or aren’t having, the intended effect for Bush, Perry, Kasich, Bobby Jindal (another floundering governor) and — on the Democratic side — Hillary Clinton.
Remember the “shock and awe” of the Bush rollout, in which his speedy commandeering of wealthy donors and prominent advisers was supposed to scare off or marginalize other contenders?
He’s the marginalized one, at odds with the populist zeitgeist, laboring ludicrously to present himself as the skunk at the garden party and not the one sipping a cold Tom Collins in the gazebo’s shade.
Party leaders have begun to wonder if he can overcome voters’ resistance to him, the potency of which was suggested by a private internal poll that some of them have been buzzing about. It put Trump in hypothetical head-to-head primary matchups against each of the five next most popular candidates, according to the Real Clear Politics average of national polls: Carson, Fiorina, Marco Rubio, Bush and Cruz. Each beat Trump by at least 10 points — except Bush, who lost narrowly to him.
Bush finds himself in an almost impossible bind. In order to distance himself sufficiently from Washington, to dispel any notion that he’s not conservative enough and to make the case that he’s earned rather than inherited the Republican presidential nomination, he has understandably begun to emphasize the past and Florida — he governed that state from January 1999 through January 2007 — at the expense of tomorrow and America.
“Jeb’s talking about things he worked on more than a decade ago: ‘Let me tell you what I did in the late 1990s,’ ” said the operative I mentioned before, a Bush fan. “It’s a local story, and it’s so backward-looking.”
What’s more, he, Kasich, Christie and others are selling themselves as potentially effective leaders to a Republican electorate that may be more interested in fantasists who set out on futile quests, which is the modus operandi of the troublemaking House Republicans — and of Trump, with his grand delusions.
“When pressed about how he’s going to round up 12 million immigrants, his answer is: Don’t worry!” one veteran Republican strategist marveled. “How will you get Mexico to pay for the wall? I’ll do it! The idea that you have to compromise and eventually govern — that there’s a Constitution and we pass laws and sign treaties and have courts that can say no — is thrown out the window.”
Cruz is more like Trump, outrageous and unyielding, than like the governors. And in a radio interview on Thursday, he predicted that he’d inherit Trump’s supporters because he’d “stood up to Washington” and “taken on leaders” of his own party.
A day earlier in National Review, Eliana Johnson called Cruz “the most under-covered serious candidate in the race — and the most underestimated.” Johnson noted that he’s a good fit for voters in primaries in the South, where he’s been diligently organizing and spending time.
In Politico, the conservative soothsayer Rich Lowry recently observed that Cruz, who is not yet halfway through his first Senate term, just needs “voters to become slightly, and only slightly, more desirous of political experience” and he’s “sitting pretty,” as the headline on Lowry’s column read.
Ted Cruz sitting pretty?
This could get even uglier than I’d feared.
Frank Bruni
The New York Times October 11, 2015
