Remember watching the second Jurassic Park movie, when Jeff Goldblum is furtively looking into the foreboding arboreal deathtrap while his companions are marveling at the dinosaurs hulking past? He murmurs to those around him; Oh, yeah…’oooh’, ‘aaaahhh’, that’s how it starts…then, later, there’s running and screaming…
This GOP primary season is starting to remind me of that.
The Republican party is definitely divided, there’s no question about that. The only questions that remain to be answered are; ‘can the damage be repaired’, and ‘is that going to happen before November’. I won’t claim to have the answers to either, but a positive answer to both of these problems posed to the GOP is looking increasingly less likely with every passing day.
Can the Damage Done to the Republican Party be Repaired?
It might be instructive to examine why the damage happened in the first place before attempting to heal wounds. The rise of a blustering, narcissistic demagogue didn’t just happen overnight or by some unforeseen accident. It was a culmination of years of neglect by the party to address the concerns of the people they served. Trump’s rise to fame and popularity is directly proportional to the level of nativist populism he dishes up. The people he most closely identifies with are disaffected white, blue-collar Americans who were left in the dust by the Great Recession after the Obama Administration rewarded America’s willingness to throw money down a hole with a jobless recovery. Employers figured out how to do more with less people. Every celebration of a falling unemployment rate was slightly tempered by the hangover of a falling participation rate in the labor pool. It’s easy to achieve a low unemployment rate if people just give up looking for work.
Trump has swept in, appealing to the common American heritage he shares with them, preferably if they’re whiter than snow. After flirting with a little xenophobia, he’s successfully managed to place the entire blame of a lost decade and a faltering job market on outside forces, calling upon the images of 9/11, Mexican narcoterrorism, and the occasional conspiracy theory.
Standing against him are Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and….who was that guy again? These three are currently locked in a Sisiphyean struggle to the death over Florida and Ohio, attempting to hold back the forces of evil – or at least questionable taste in baseball caps – from overwhelming the party and making everyone wear synthetic fibers. Along the way, their supporters take to social media to decry anyone who dares to compete in a primary other than their favored son. Right now, the Rubio and Kasich camps are furiously trying to get Cruz supporters to abandon their support of him and vote for their candidate to prevent Trump from getting Florida and Ohio delegates.
It doesn’t help that they refer to anyone who isn’t going along with this masterful stroke of genius as ‘the enemy’. I ask the Rubio and Cruz supporters; to what end? Let’s say everyone goes along with you. Both Rubio and Kasich stay in the race, convinced America really is turning a corner in their direction, buoyed by their newly formed foundation of support. And let’s face it, you’ll be thinking the same thing and you will probably be telling Cruz supporters the exact same thing in the next state.
Here’s why that doesn’t work. You’re trying to convince the supporters of the one candidate who took in more delegates on Super Tuesday than Trump that their guy is destined for failure and that they should instead back the guy who has won ONE STATE (Puerto Rico is not a state) or the one who hasn’t won any. That’s not a winning marketing strategy, that’s a Mamet screenplay.
Let’s say that Cruz supporters play along with your cunning act of electoral dexterity. Fast forward to the general election in November, and for the sake of argument, we’ll posit that Ted Cruz was the eventual victor of the primaries – far-fetched as it may seem to you. Cruz and his supporters, having graciously allowed Kasich and Rubio their respective wins, now make their appeals to the voters in Florida and Ohio.
Cruz: “Hey, (Florida/Ohio), vote for me!”
Voters: “Why should we? This is the first time we’ve ever seen you campaign here.”
Cruz: “I, uh…was taking one for the team the last time.”
Yeah, that sounds like a winning proposition from someone who has the brass ones to be in the Oval Office, now doesn’t it? I voted for Rubio here in Texas because he had the cojones to ridicule Trump when no one else would. C.S. Lewis was once quoted as having said, “Above all, the devil cannot stand to be mocked.” Rubio went after him with great gusto, and I appreciated it. But, now his surrogates are furiously trying to unsell me on the notion of his presence in the general election later this year.
Earlier today, someone in the Cruz campaign apparently forwarded an email to the effect that Rubio was planning to drop out (never mind that CNN said it had direct sources inside the Rubio campaign that told them the same thing) and every Rubio supporter in the world took to Twitter to scream, “DIRTY TRICKS!!” in the general direction of the Cruz campaign. The campaign said it was a staffer, not the candidate, who forwarded it, but that mollified nobody. Never mind that Cruz has been the only candidate to actually fire someone in his campaign for pulling an actual dirty trick. Trump’s campaign made the Nevada caucuses look like the Mafia set a dumpster on fire to cover up an execution-style murder and nobody’s done jack about it. Cruz is the only candidate so far to take responsibility for his surrogates and is the only one who fired a communications director after he selectively edited a video of an interaction between Rubio and Cruz’s father in a hotel lobby.
Can the Damage Be Repaired by…say, November?
Today, I came across a blog post written on The Collision Blog (and if you haven’t read it, you need to) that was written in a heartfelt manner that bespoke of the honest concern the author feels for the future of the nation. Ultimately, to me the post is steeped in self-defeat, if the future she predicts is as bleak as she suggests, the time give up is now before start self-immolating themselves in the streets. Just forget about a Republican presidency, because under the conditions we have now, nobody is going to be happy.
It’s true. There is no way a fractured party like the GOP can heal in time to elect one of their own in November. Many will suggest that a brutal primary contest will be like a fire to steel, it will temper it in the flames, resulting in a stronger, tougher…oh, screw it. I can’t do this.
We’re going to destroy our nominee before they ever get there. It won’t be like a fire hardening steel, it’s going to be like a flu victim dying of pneumonia. The immune system, knocked around by an unrelenting virus, will have no defenses when an opportunistic bacterium sets up an infection, killing the patient. If you think the dirty tricks are happening now, you have no idea what the Democrats will do to preserve their gains under the Obama Administration. Anyone who wins in this primary will be so battered, so toxic, so leprous, they will have no chance at victory.
This plays out three ways:
Rubio wins, the heavens part, a single white dove lands on his shoulder and the party will be urged to come together as one. The Trump supporters would rather dip themselves in honey and roll around on a fire ant mound than vote for someone with an even remotely foreign-sounding surname….and isn’t white. The minions of the Great Satan of the Senate will recoil from the emergence of the Sun, unable to approach a ballot box, they will stay home. Hillary wins.
The Prince of Darkness wins, his servants of evil rejoice and command the party to heel or be damned to an eternity of proofreading his court summations. Rubio supporters will wistfully yearn for their candidate, blaming his loss on the machinations of millions of Martina McBride and Toby Keith fans. Trump supporters mount lawsuit after lawsuit to prove Cruz took his naturalization test at age five. Hillary wins.
Trump wins, sweeping down as Moses to lead his army of Israelites – oh, wait, I better not say that around them – to their land flowing with milk and honey (well, Keystone Light and Red Lobster…) and $9000 iPhones. The cherubim and seraphim of the Anointed One as well as the children of Lucifer, both preferring to pass razor blades through their collective urethrae to voting for someone who makes penis jokes during a presidential debate decide to stay home. The Rubio supporters would because they’d rather die than have to listen to Ted Nugent play the national anthem at the national convention. The Cruz supporters would simply because after being told they were the most repulsive people on the planet who didn’t deserve the right to vote for months on end, they decide to stay in character. Hillary wins in a landslide.
Nobody’s winning this one. Just accept a second Clinton Administration. Hey, the last one was fun. Maybe Bill will find someone hotter this time.
The Dented Vessel 