1/14/16
A few thoughts as we head into the Fox Business GOP debate in Charleston, S.C. tonight.
The GOP establishment’s standard-bearers in the presidential
race aren’t man enough to take on Donald
Trump directly, unless we consider a few indignant sniffs from colossal
failure Jeb Bush about Mr. Trump’s
failure to follow the Marquess of
Queensberry rules to be confrontation.
Instead, they trot out South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley to attack Mr. Trump in a speech that was supposed to be
a response to President Obama’s State of
the Union address. And even Ms.
Haley lacked the intestinal fortitude to call out Mr. Trump by name. Instead, assuming everyone would know whom
she was talking about while maintaining plausible deniability, she warned
against “the siren call of the angriest voices” and the GOP’s “not always being
responsible with their words in terms of extending our tent.” The latter comment, by the way, is
especially curious given that Mr. Trump is the only GOPer who seems to be drawing
outsiders into the GOP tent, but I digress.
After the speech, Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, the epitome of the GOP
establishment, went out of his way to tell everyone what a terrific job Ms.
Haley had done:
“Governor Haley did a great job with her speech, had the pen, and didn’t
need much input from us.”
Thus, anyone whose most salient characteristic is not naiveté
can safely conclude not only that Ms. Haley’s speech was awful and woefully
misdirected, but also that it was written for her by the cowering, milquetoast,
lily-livered GOP establishment.
Given the timidity of the other guys
who purport to be qualified to defend the free world, can there be much wonder
that the rank and file of the GOP and/or just typical fed up voters find it so
easy to support someone so otherwise unsupportable as Mr. Trump? (See WHY TRUMP IS SOPOPULAR WITH THE MIDDLE CLASS, 12/26/15 for more insight on this matter.)
The guy to watch at the debate tonight
is Chris Christie. As my regular readers know, Mr. Christie has
been moving up rapidly in the polls as the GOP establishment decides he is the guy
who can carry their standard while keeping the Party is a reasonable degree of
unity; see CHRIS CHRISTIE GETS “IT”; CAN HE GET THE NOMINATION?, 1/5/16 for greater insight into
Mr. Christie’s ascent and prospects.
The
great question is whether Mr. Christie comes out firing on all cylinders, guns
ablazin’, both barrels firing…or whether he decides it’s time to start playing
the “statesman” and cower in the corner with the likes of Jeb Bush for fear of alienating the high priests and priestesses of
political correctness in the national media.
If I were advising Mr. Christie, I would advise him, at the
expense of sounding trite, to let Christie be Christie. If Mr. Trump’s popularity is any indication,
there is a large contingent of the electorate who likes a guy who calls them as
he sees them and who gives no quarter to political correctness and the
incessant and endemic fear of offending. Such an approach is in Mr. Christie’s DNA;
why suppress such innate characteristics at the very time that the electorate
is clamoring for fearless, if not reckless, honesty? Given the public’s increasing aversion to pusillanimity,
this is no time for Mr. Christie to adopt a Bushesque attitude of “Oh, I’m so
very sorry; I’ll make sure to never adopt any real convictions for fear of your
possibly not liking me.”
Further, those who are longtime fans and supporters of
Mr. Christie like not so much his policies, which are not all that different
from any run of the mill Republicans, but, rather, his style. They like that he is direct, confident, and,
at times, bordering on the rude when dealing with people who deserve to be
treated that way. His supporters like
that Mr. Christie brooks no nonsense from those who can roll over a more
conventional politician with cries of racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia,
big moneyism, or any number of imagined transgressions of the doctrines of all
that is good and pure in the febrile minds of those who decide such
things. These people would be very disappointed were
Mr. Christie to, as one of the few recent Western leaders with any sense of
courage or commitment would put it, go wobbly on them. And this is no time for Mr. Christie to
abandon his base in an effort to become more conventional like, say, Mitt
Romney or John McCain.
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