The other day I was listening to someone on the radio talking about the presidential campaigns. I was driving and not really paying close attention. It was one of those deals where they bring on an “expert” to answer questions about different aspects of the campaign. At some point, the host asked the expert if Trump could really win the nomination and even the general election.

That caught my attention as the conventional wisdom has been that Trump will either fade or blow himself up by saying something crazy. No one ever talks about “President Trump” as it is just assumed he is a novelty act. Heck, I don’t think about Trump as President or even as the nominee and I’m enjoying his run. So, I listened to what the expert had to say about it.

The first thing the guy said was that Trump has more paid staff on the ground that anyone other than Bush. He has the second biggest team in Iowa and the biggest team in New Hampshire. Bush with all his money has more paid staff in Iowa, but Bush has collapsed and is laying off staff everywhere. Trump meanwhile keeps climbing in the polls. Current numbers have him in the 30’s.

The other thing he said is professionals on the ground in the early states are getting used to the idea of him winning. According to the expert, this is the prelude to voters getting used to the idea of him winning. That’s why his numbers keep climbing and why it gets harder for a challenger to emerge. The pool of people looking for an alternative is shrinking and is divided by the field, thus making them seem less credible.

You have to take these things with a grain of salt simply because we now have a whole industry built around elections. The “experts’ make six figure salaries in the business of being an expert on elections so they naturally promote their industry by placing a lot of importance on ground games, polling and consultant teams. A man good with the hammer sees the world as a nail.

Still, if you look at Trump’s 2015, it looks a lot like what you would expect from a winner. Six months ago, he was in the teens along with half a dozen other choices. The experts dismissed him as a clown and a side show. It was just a publicity stunt, we were told. Once he got bored, he would sell more books or TV shows and quit the race. Blah, blah, blah.

When his numbers improved, the establishment threw everything they had at the guy. The ambush by Fox at the first debate was well choreographed. His numbers rose into the 20’s and he became the front runner. The subsequent attempts to promote others like Farina and Carson were flops. Trump is now in the mid-30’s and there is no one that looks like a credible challenger.

In the 1980 campaign, the Cult went bananas because Reagan was too Hollywood. He and his team used the things they learned from movies and TV to present their man to the public. Reagan was a natural in front of cameras, he knew how the medium worked on audiences and he had spent a lifetime being quick on his feet in front of crowds. His team used those assets to great advantage.

In some respects, it was the birth of campaign-industrial complex. Suddenly, the people who sold laundry soap could make money selling Fred Jones for town dog catcher. The people who made movies could make campaign videos for congressmen, senators and presidential candidates. The math dork with the bad wig could get work as a pollster and maybe even get famous.

Of course, the ad men and consultants suddenly had whole new markets beyond making issue ads. They could shape the message, tailor the speeches, choreograph events and even tell the candidate what to wear. Today, tens of thousands make a living in some way from elections. They fill dead time with lobbying and issue advocacy, but their main business is the business of elections.

The reason the chattering skulls, and much of the consultant class, has been all wrong about Trump is they have been getting high off their own supply. For over a quarter century these people have been telling the public that elections are about service, issues and principles. They actually believe the crap they school their clients to tell the public. Every day some jack-off on NRO posts something about this or that candidate’s core values and he seems to believe it.

Trump looks at the election industry as he would any other business. He is not romantic about it. For him, it is a simple thing. You hire good people, let them do what they do best and he sells the hell out of the enterprise to the potential customers. The Trump campaign is just like a Trump golf course or a Trump casino.  His job is to sell it and make sure he has good people running it.

That’s the other aspect of it. Trump is good at winning. He also knows how to lose. Again, this is not a guy who gets high off his own supply. His act is for the customers, not for him. On the other hand, the people in the election rackets are all convinced they are geniuses. They are convinced they are the smartest people in the room, despite losing most of their campaigns.

The party system is somewhat to blame. Both parties have often pulled their punches for the sake “bipartisan” cooperation. It’s the equivalent of handing out participation ribbons. The result is an industry where losing often has no downside. In some cases, it is all upside. Eric Cantor lost his House seat and landed in a $3.4 million per year gig at a bank. Losing is not so bad in modern politics.

I suspect this is the cause of some of vitriol coming from Conservative Inc. Yeah, they are wedded to immigration romanticism and they fear nothing more than being called insensitive to the NAM, but they also resent Trump’s success. His poll numbers say to these people that the public is not buying their bullshit anymore. The game is up and they no longer hold the place of prominence they imagine.

This is most obvious among the conservative scribblers. They were so looking forward to the paying gigs where they penned 10,000 word essays on the GOP’s tax reform proposals. Trimmers like Ramesh Ponnuru were salivating at the prospect of maybe getting a paying gig with Team Bush. Bill Kristol was ordering drapes for his new office in the White House. Now this crude outsider is making them look like idiots.

The financialization of the political class over the last 25 years has caused all sorts of mischief in American life. Probably the worst result has been a layer of individuals between citizens and their rulers, who function as insulation for the political class. It’s been a good deal for them. So much so they started believing their own bullshit and now that’s being threatened by a vulgarian with a billion dollars to spend.

Jonah Goldberg still churns out a newsletter, of sorts, that National Review distributes for some reason. I’m not a subscriber, but they post it on their site. I don’t read Jonah Goldberg very much, but I don’t have anything against him. It just feels like he has said everything he has to say as a writer. Whenever I read one of his columns these days it just feels like I read it a few times already.

That’s not unusual. A lot of opinion writers exhaust their supply of insights, gags and gimmicks within a few years. The exceptions are those who have very fertile minds and a high degree of curiosity. Christopher Hitchens was an example of someone who never stopped fine tuning his worldview so he kept his work interesting, even though I rarely agreed with him.

Anyway, his column starts with the stock gags he has been doing for a long time, but the point of it is to solve the puzzle as to why the Left keeps denying the obvious about Islam. After meandering around a bit, he gets to this:

And that is why, as I argue in my column today, Barack Obama is so eager to respond to the Paris attacks with a rhetorical fusillade against Republican bigotry. It is a ploy as brilliant as it is disgustingly cynical. Obama is a co-author of this refugee crisis. As Walter Russell Mead writes, “No one, other than the Butcher Assad and the unspeakable al-Baghdadi, is as responsible for the humanitarian catastrophe in Syria as is President Obama.” Somewhere deep inside Obama’s supposedly Niebuhrian conscience even he must suspect there is some truth to this. And even if his denial is total, he must understand that a great many historians will side with Mead in this appraisal.

One of my themes here is that the Professional Right is not all that interested in understanding the motivations of the Left. They much prefer to be the foil as the pay is better and the work is easier. Instead of digging deeper, the preferred response is to just assume the Left is playing politics, dodging responsibility or scoring points for the party. In this case, Jonah just assumes Barry both agrees that the refugee situation is a disaster and that he knows he is largely responsible for it.

There’s no evidence of this and there’s plenty of evidence that Obama thinks the refugee situation is a pretty good result. Further, he does not seem all that concerned about the politics of it. You can tell when a politician is worried about how something looks by watching him change his position, often denying he was ever on the other side of the issue. None of that is happening with Obama.

The general consensus from people who have read his two autobiographies and studied his life is that Obama was a Muslim growing up. His church in Chicago was nominally Christian, but was modeled on a mosque. Within Islam there’s a tradition of street corner Imams building a following, which is what Reverend Wright did in Chicago, but waving the Christian Bible around instead of the Koran. Reverend Al is another obvious example. Holy man without portfolio is common in Islam, too.

That’s not to say he is a Muslim. I don’t think Obama is very religious. It’s just that when he thinks of religion, he thinks of what he knows and that’s the street corner Islam of his youth. Therefore he is sympathetic to Muslims in the same way normal Americans would be sympathetic to Christians fleeing the ISIS lunatics. The truth is, most Americans would welcome Syrian Christians. Obama’s instincts are 180 degree out of phase with normal Americans.

None of this is groundbreaking. As I said, this is the consensus of people who have read his books and studied his life. People who are his supporters often point to his exotic foreignness as the primary attraction. Obama’s critique of America is from the outside and his desire to fundamentally transform the country is from the perspective of an outsider, particularly an outsider who is emotionally outside the traditions of the West.

You never hear anyone in the professional Right point this out. It’s as if they fear it. If you go on Fox and talk about Obama’s own words in his autobiographies, you get branded an extremist loon. The only people referencing Obama’s writing in their columns are hate-thinkers like John Derbyshire, who may be one of the few people to read Obama’s books.

The reason for this studied avoidance of the obvious by the Professional Right is fear. When Obama was elected, the great fear of Republicans and their cheerleaders in the conservative media was that Obama would be accommodating to them. They would have no choice but to go along and, in effect, sign off on his proposals. The game would be up and it would no longer be possible to carry on like there is substantive fight over public policy.

Obama turned out to be a petty and venal guy once in office so everyone could relax and pretend there’s a real fight going in Washington. Obama seems to fine with it and may even enjoy it. He wins all the fights so I suppose he should embrace this dynamic. The GOP huffs and puffs. The “right-wing attack machine” goes into high gear. Then, Obama wins and he feels like a hero. Everybody is happy.

The news brings word that Bobby Jindal has dropped out of the presidential race. I can’t say I had strong opinions about him one way or the other. He always struck me as one of the earnest strivers that infiltrated the GOP in the 90’s when the Boomers took over politics in America. These are men and women who planned their elections from the womb, tailoring their education and early employment with the sole focus on running for office.

The dominant feature of these modern politicians is the obsession with apple polishing. In school, they studied hard not so they could become educated. They studied hard so they could repeat to the instructor the answers that most pleased the instructor. Out of school, they became a toady for a local politician or maybe a judge. Having proven their skills at toadying, they moved up the party ranks getting prime appointments and then running for office on their own.

As politicians, they have carefully crafted positions that are designed to bore the voters into a trance. The idea is to curry favor with the locals, but not sound like a yahoo from the sticks. All of them dream of being president so that last part is critical. No thick accents. No local color. No nothing other than generic poll tested positions approved by the party and its donors.

That was the problem for Jindal in the primary field. He said all the same things the others said but did it sounding like the guy from accounting telling us how he saved money on envelopes. The worse part for Jindal is that Indians are a successful migrant group in America, so they don’t get any piety points. If Jindal were black or Hispanic, he probably would be in the thick of it trying to be the donor party candidate.

His other problem is regional. The GOP, like the Democrat Party, is run by people living in the Acela Corridor and financed by people in the great financial, cultural, and technological centers. Money men from Hollywood, Silicon Valley, New York, and Boston own the two parties and exert a tremendous amount of influence over the management of the parties. The result is the leadership is Yankee and Midlands, with a few members from the other regions of the country.

Louisiana is one of those outlier regions that Woodard called New France, but most people think is Deep South. I’m not sure any state, outside of West Virginia, carries a worse reputation outside the South than Louisiana. The typical person in the Northeast, for example, thinks Louisiana is a place full or spindly legged rednecks speaking gibberish while wrestling alligators.

But, the Deep South, Tidewater, Appalachia, and the Far West have little say in the management of either party and that’s clear in these primaries. On the Democrat side, Clinton is a Midlander with Yankee predilections. Sanders is a Yankee Jew. Bill Clinton was probably the last national Democrat we will see those hails from outside Yankeedom or the Midlands.

The GOP field is similar. Trump is from New York and representative of what Woodard labeled New Holland. Carson is a Midlander. The Party Men may hail from areas outside the two dominant regions, but they reflect Yankee culture. Ted Cruz is perhaps the one exception. There’s an Appalachian dodginess to him that I can’t quite put my finger on with him. Regardless, the only member of the Deep South is Caitlyn Graham, and he is a joke.

For Democrats, it makes perfect sense for their party leaders to be from their strongholds. New England, the upper Midwest and the West Coast are where the Cult is strong, so it makes sense that they get their political talent from these areas. Modern Progressivism is the religion of Yankeedom now and to a lesser degree The Midlands. It makes sense that their leaders are the truest of true believers.

In the GOP things are different. They rely on votes from the Tidewater, South, Appalachia and the far west, yet they pick their leaders from Yankeedom and The Midlands. Boehner was from Ohio, but he represented a district with a strong Yankee culture. Look at the place names in his district. Hamilton, Fairfield, Middletown, Springfield, Eaton, Greenville, and Piqua are place names brought by the Yankee settlers from New England.

His replacement is a man from a state that votes just like Massachusetts. Paul Ryan would have been a moderate Democrat thirty years ago. If you look through the GOP leadership in both houses, you find very few people outside the two dominant regions. Mitch McConnell is the glaring exception, mostly because he is a glaring exception. Otherwise, the GOP is a Southern Party with Northern leaders.

Some of this is an accident of history. You rise up in a party by sticking around a long time. The American South just went fully to Republicans in the last generation. There’s a lot of young guys from these areas, while old farts from the dominant regions fill up the leadership jobs based on their seniority. Father Time will remedy this. But the time is rapidly approaching when the voters will not tolerate the foot dragging and deal cutting of the GOP leaders. Donald Trump says “Hello.”

Minnesota is a good place to use as an example. They have a deranged lunatic as governor. Mark Dayton has repeatedly said that people not in his cult should leave the state. Looking at the neighboring states in Yankeedom, one has to assume he is wildly out of step with the people. There’s also the fact that Trump is drawing huge crowds in these states, solely on the issue of immigration.

I’m trying to make a few points at the same time with this post so forgive the length. On the one hand, we see a sharp divide between Yankeedom and the rest of the country culturally. The Midlands is currently aligned with Yankeedom. The leaders of both parties are from these dominant regions. Demographics and the calendar say the GOP is about to break loose from the ruling coalition.

Parallel to that process is the one issue that seems to unify the nation and that’s immigration. The loopy logic of the Left does not do well outside the faculty lounge. The average person in Yankeedom is paranoid of outsiders and hostile to strangers. In the South, familiarity with diversity makes people wary of adding more of it. The one thing everyone agrees on is we don’t want any more immigrants.

Putting the two together you have one party that maybe can continue to dominate Yankeedom but is struggling with core issues that contradict the cultural instincts of the people. Open borders and multiculturalism sell very well in New England as long as they are not applied locally. Otherwise, the locals will look elsewhere for their political leaders. Again, Trump is running the table in New England, for example.

On the other side of the street, the GOP is soon to become a very southern and southwestern party. Mark Steyn famously said that the future belongs to those who show up and right now it is the people from these nations showing up to vote GOP. They will get leaders that reflect their values and desires. Cultural Marxism is not going to be on the table, but maybe a divorce will be in order.

There is a class of citizen, a growing class, who look at the Republican Party, shake their heads and vow to never vote for any of them. It’s not that the Republicans have unusually dumb ideas or present their ideas in an off-putting way. It is simply the realization that The Stupid Party is not a serious endeavor and there is no point in bothering with them any longer.

Here’s a perfectly good example.

On State of the Union this morning, CNN’s Jamie Gangel sat down with Senator Marco Rubio (R., Fla.), where she picked the Republican presidential candidate’s brain on a variety of topics. Such as:

• • Why is Donald Trump beating you in your home state?
  • What do you think about Donald Trump saying he’s going to win with Hispanics?
  • Is Donald Trump more in tune with Republicans on immigration than you are?
  • Are you comfortable with Donald Trump having “his finger on the button”? Is Donald Trump “ready to be commander in chief”?
  • If he’s the nominee, will you “enthusiastically support him”?
  • “Do you think there needs to be a Stop Trump movement”?

If that sounds as if she asked a lot of questions about Donald Trump, that’s because she did. In the five-and-a-half-minutes interview, Gangel asked eight questions about Donald Trump. The only other topic she found time to cover was Rubio’s missed Senate votes while campaigning.

I should say that the Stupid Party does not operate in a  vacuum. Their cheerleaders in the so-called conservative press are just as dumb. The writer here is probably a child just out of college, but even a child should be aware enough wonder why Rubio or any other Republican is going on CNN?

These shows on CNN attract a few hundred thousand viewers, none of whom will vote Republican. The people in charge of CNN are fully committed Progressives who would be OK with rounding up the bad thinkers and putting them into internment camps. There’s zero value in going on these shows if you are a Republican.

The stupidity does not end there as you can forgive a politician craving attention for going on a hostile program. The bigger error here is the waste of resources. The most precious asset a campaign has is the candidate’s time. A campaign is all about getting your guy as much face time with as many people as possible. It’s why you run ads and do large town hall style events.

Squandering half a day or more doing a five minute TV spot on a network no one watches is the opposite of smart. It is a stupid waste of time. Yet, one Republican after another lines up to wait around all day to do a five minute segment on these lefty networks. Most of the time, the result is embarrassing. It’s as if they are trying to lose.

Now, complaining about the questions is old hat for The Stupid Party, which is why they are the Stupid Party. They never learn, they just keep moaning about having the same gags pulled on them over and over. The point of the Peanuts cartoon was that if Charlie Brown had anything on the ball, he would have slapped the bleep out of Lucy for pulling the ball away the first time.

Here’s the thing. CNN is trying to attract viewers. Trump generates ratings. Rubio and the rest of the establishment dwarfs do not generate ratings. At some point, people with anything on the ball would wonder why and do something about it. Instead of moaning about the lack of interest, try being interesting and talking about things that seem to interest the voters. You know, like the Trump guy is doing.

Instead, the Stupid Party demands we pretend it is 1996 and their plans to shuffle commas around the tax code are fresh and exciting. They may as well be sporting mullets and jorts or leisure suits and perms. Marco Rubio is a great candidate to beat Bill Clinton in the 1996 campaign. Today he sounds like a guy who just woke up from a 20-year slumber.

It takes guts to stand out from the crowd and the one thing the Stupid Party has little of these days is guts. It is a collection of technocrats and trimmers, more at home in a cubicle working a spreadsheet than rubbing elbows with the hoi polloi. It’s not just that they are stupid and boring. It’s that they are cowards, little mice afraid to make a sound fearing the cat will notice them.

Rubio, if he was worth anyone’s time, should have cut that questioner off after the first question and then delivered a five minute dressing down so that she would never make the same mistake again. Even George Bush the Elder could drop the hammer on a guy like Dan Rather. The modern GOP pol is one step from groveling to these people on camera.

It’s unmanly and disgusting and that’s why no one takes Rubio seriously. He looks and sounds like a little boy being corrected by his teacher. But he is the modern GOP. The only thing they are missing are guys with neck beards and ear gauges, perhaps a few trannies thrown in to make the pathetic freak show complete.

In the 1980’s, the Republican Party became the party of National Review. It was a blend of the Old Right and the New Right, but mostly the Old Right. American Conservatism of that day was about free markets, free trade, personal liberty, preservation of the traditional culture and a tough stand against Soviet authoritarianism. Reagan famously said “In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”

Imagine a modern politician of any stripe saying something like that today. Watch this speech from Reagan and try to imagine, without laughing, a modern Republican saying similar things about the American Left today.

Most people reading this understand that the National Review of today is not the National Review of yesterday. In the 90’s Buckley started to lose his marbles and then gave way to a new group of editors who think homosexual marriage is a sacrament and citizenship is a vice. That said, the GOP is no longer the party of National Review. It is the party of The Weekly Standard.

In the last quarter century, the Republicans have held the White House once and members of The Weekly Standard held key jobs in that administration. No man is more important to the Republican Party today than Bill Kristol, who was a Bush consigliere. He has selected their last two nominees and their running mates.

Long before the 2008 election, he “predicted” McCain would beat Romney and the others and then he “predicted” McCain would take an unknown governor from Alaska as his running mate. The next cycle he “predicted” that Romney would win and select Paul Ryan as his second. Kristol is really good at “predicting” these things.

But, the truth is the modern GOP is the party of The Weekly Standard. There you find the technocratic authoritarianism that embraces the universal state, but with a alpha male veneer as opposed to the feminine version offered up by American Progressives. Neo-conservatives want the state, for example, to encourage family formation so women can have babies. Progressives discourage family formations so women can have abortions. Same gun, different target.

That’s why it is a good idea to pay attention to Bill Kristol when he starts talking about Republican politics. Back in the summer he somewhat jokingly said he would start a third party if Trump win the nomination. Now he is quite serious about it and he is letting us know who he will select as the party’s nominee.

The Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol predicted Thursday that Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and Carly Fiorina will eventually lead the Republican ticket, and that Donald Trump would fade.

“Now there’s this Trump thing going on, I gather he’s going to do OK in the polls for a while, but he’s not going to be the nominee. We’ll be fine,” Kristol told MSNBC. “Rubio-Fiorina or a Fiorina-Rubio ticket’s going to win in November everyone should calm down.”

After MSNBC’s panelists prodded him into acknowledging Trump has a chance of winning the nomination, Kristol indicated it might be time for him to leave the GOP if Trump becomes its standard-bearer.

“If all the other candidates remain as pathetic as they’ve been so far, I suppose it’s conceivable he’ll [Trump] be the nominee and then we’ll have to support a third party,” Kristol said.

There you have it. It will be war or it will be Rubio- Farina. I think given the way men are now portrayed in modern America, the proper ticket here will be Farina – Rubio, but Ben Carson will be taking over the important running mate duties, while Rubio watches from the side, maybe filming it for the campaign website.

All joking aside, Kristol could be whistling past the graveyard, but he is the man behind the GOP curtain. He was not right all those times before because he is a good guesser. He was right because his iPhone has the contact information of every major donor, campaign staffer and fund raiser in the country on it. He is the most connected man in America or at least one of them.

The problem, of course, is that the formula The Weekly Standard prefers works great if you are Mr. Roarke and your resort offers realistic fantasies about being a successful politician. In the real world, there’s little appetite for invade the world-invite the world polices. Rubio- Farina might play well on the cocktail circuit in Georgetown, but they will get destroyed by Clinton in the general election.

But, maybe that’s what it will take. The years from 1964 through 1976 saw Progressives running wild while normal people figured out what was happening and then fashioning a party to represent them. Perhaps the site of Clinton auctioning off national monuments for cash to the Clinton Foundation will finally focus the minds of people who really should know better.

There are new polls out showing Ben Carson as the leader in Iowa at the moment. None of this means anything as there are loads of examples where candidate X lead three months out and failed to get single digit support in the actual caucuses. Ben Carson could say something batty like evolution is the work of Satan and everything changes. I have nothing for or against Carson, I’m just pointing out that these polls are meaningless.

But, it does raise the age old question about Iowa. Why do they go first? Iowa is not very representative of the country. Iowa, for example, is 2.6% black, while America is 13% black. It has a family formation rate similar to Texas, but votes like Connecticut. Similarly, it has church attendance similar to Tennessee, but votes for pro-abortion candidates. Iowa is a very weird state.

If I’m running the GOP, I’d want a state that is typical of my voting base to kick off the season. Virginia would be a good example as it is usually Republican and conservative, but it’s not Utah. They will vote Democrat and parts of the state are fairly loony so it has a good mix. The best solution would be to have a group of states vote first and pick the states that hover around the political center, like Missouri, Indiana, Pennsylvania and Ohio.

Thinking about it reminded me of a previous post about how the country would look post break up. America is becoming two ships passing in the night with most areas solidly in one camp or the other. It occurred to me that both parties are collapsing largely because they are out of sync with the balkanization of the country, even though both parties are responsible for it.

If you travel around the country, it is clear that Arlington Texas is in a different country from Arlington Massachusetts. On the other hand, Portland Oregon is not a lot different from Portland Maine. It’s a big country with distinct regional cultures and sensibilities. The parties would be wise to take advantage of this to produce leadership and nominees that represent a broader segment of the country.

I’m thinking about this great map from the book American Nations.

We have roughly five regions in the country. New France, El Norte and New Netherland are too small to make this work so I’m sticking with the big five. If we divide the states into five buckets and have each vote for the presidential nominee as a block, then it forces the candidate to appeal to at least three regions of the country.

The obvious flaw is that one or two regions could have a hometown favorite and you end up with no candidate getting three regions so this regional vote has to be an over layer on the state by state system. Currently, the states send delegates to the convention based on the makeup of their congressional delegation. Then there are a bunch of extra delegates so the party leaders can put their thumb the scale.

My thinking is you have regional delegates that are awarded to candidates that win the popular election in the regions. A candidate that won the most votes in Yankeedom, for example, would get all of those regional delegates, even if they only won Mass and Connecticut. Similarly, winning California by a few points, could still mean losing the region if the other candidate wins the other states by big margins.

The idea is not to create national candidates, but to create nominees that think regionally and strategically. Crafting a campaign that appeals to The Midlands, Appalachia and the South is not just going to win the nomination, but it will make for a winning general election campaign, at least for the Republicans. It also breaks their nominees free from trying to appeal to primary voters in the Northeast who will never vote for them in the general.

Obviously, I have no spent a lot of time thinking it through, but I’m thinking that the current situation is headed for a bad place. The GOP is dumpster fire of a party, as we see with the struggle to find a new Speaker of the House. If a welfare state technocrat from Wisconsin is the bets they can do, it may be time to disband and try something else.