This is up on National Review today. This bit is hilarious:
“The group is there, believe me, and it’s growing by the day, maybe by a factor of 50 times more than what it was in 2011,” Langone tells me. “He’s getting traction with people because people want to win. After 2012, it dawned on a lot of us that we need to have a better candidate, somebody who can connect, and Christie is the person who can do that.” Langone doesn’t make much of criticism of Christie’s handling of Hurricane Sandy: “I know some people say [Christie] got too close to [Obama], but it wasn’t a time for politics and pandering. It was a crisis! I saw it firsthand at NYU’s medical center, and people who get that aren’t unhappy with him.”
This is why the Stupid party always loses. The other guys never permit one of their own to wander off the reservation. They never excuse it. They know that only encourages disloyalty. That’s a basic organizational technique. You enforce all of the little rules dogmatically and the big stuff takes care of itself. Junior Lefty sitting in the back of Congress knows he is done for if he does not toe the line. By the time he gets to the front, he is invested in the cause completely. So much so he is willing to impose those rules on the junior guys in the back. The Stupid Party has it backwards. By the time their senior guys get to the front, they are invested in nothing but stabbing their fellows in the back to score points with The Evil Party.
Then this:
“His early moves have been good,” says Steve Schmidt, a veteran Republican operative who managed the McCain-Palin presidential campaign. “He’s now looking at a decisive reelection victory this year in a blue state, and then he becomes chairman of the Republican Governors Association next year, which will enable him to build all of his relationships to an even greater extent than he has done already. There will always be commentary about [the Sandy controversy], but I don’t think a photograph from five years ago will be an issue in a primary that’s driven, as almost all Republican primaries have been, by electability over ideology.”
In 1996, the argument for Bob Dole over the paleocon Buchanan and the libertarian Steve Forbes was electability. Dole was crushed by Clinton. In 2000, Bush was electable and he ushered in eight years of government expansion and endless war. In 2000 McCain was the electable choice and was crushed by Obama. In 2012, Romney was the electable guy and he lost to a badly wounded incumbent. That means in the last two decades the GOP is 2-for-5 and their one winner was a complete loser in terms of policy. If you are a small government conservative, a social conservative or a libertarian, the success of The Stupid Party means you lose.
Frankly, I hope that fat slob wins the nomination and gets clobbered by that old skank Hillary. The problem we have is the same problem they have in Britain. None of the parties represent the 40% of the voting public that is on the right. In Britain, the Tories are there to insulate the ruling elite from the conservatives. In America, the GOP keeps the right in a ghetto so they can make deals with the Democrats. The way forward for the American right is the same as in Britain. UKIP is aiming to bring down the Tories. In America, the collapse of the GOP is what has to happen for a true opposition party to rise up.
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