Fear Strikes the GOP: The Age of Norquist Is Over
Today's GOP is not the GOP of Ronald Reagan, it is not even the GOP of George W. Bush. The shibboleths that have underpinned GOP strategy for a quarter century--the rules set forth by Grover Norquist--are no longer germane to GOP voters whose incomes have been stagnant for two decades or more. Instead, those voters have turned to the economic populism and nativism of Donald Trump
The Republican and Democrat presidential candidates are each running campaigns that place them toward the extremes of the political spectrum. Bernie Sanders is a socialist, while Hillary Clinton is fighting to claim she is right there with him. Ted Cruz is as conservative a candidate as we have had in memory, while Marco Rubio is straining to match him stride for stride. Jeb Bush, a very conservative candidate by any traditional metric, was a center-right candidate in a year when there has been no market for moderation.
It is increasingly apparent that Donald Trump is going to be the GOP nominee. While establishment Republicans are tying themselves into knots suggesting how Marco Rubio may yet wrest the nomination away from the New York billionaire, Trump is leading the field in a race designed by the Republican National Committee to favor an early front-runner. Between now and March 15th, thirty states will hold their primaries, and as of today Donald Trump is leading in every state polled by ten points or more, except for Ted Cruz's home state of Texas. Based on the current state of play, and absent some dramatic event, it is reasonable to expect that by the time the polls close on March 15th, Donald Trump will have amassed as many as 950 of the 1,200 delegates required to secure the Republican nomination, while Marco Rubio may not have won a single one.
If they meet in the fall, Trump will not be playing from the normal center-right Republican playbook. Instead he will attack Hillary from the left as well as from the right. He will pick up on Sanders' foreign policy themes, on the failures of the war in Iraq, of regime change in Libya, and in Syria. He will go farther than Sanders has on political contributions, on Wall Street speeches, and bring back the selling of the Lincoln Bedroom. He will go after the soft corruption of the Clinton Foundation. And, much to Hillary's chagrin, he will paint her with the high costs of ObamaCare, the payoffs to the industries that benefitted, and its failure to assure healthcare for the neediest Americans. As his Republican rivals have found, he will be light on policy substance and hard to pin down politically, but he will articulate issues that resonate with voters.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-paul/fear-strikes-the-gop-the-_b_9330576.html?
Fairly long, I think it makes some interesting points.
= new reply since forum marked as read
On the bright side, they did in fact fix the 2012 problem of Mitt Romney limping across the finish line after a protracted slug-fest.
