1/24/24
The new Republican Party has decided it wants nothing to
do with the likes of Nikki Haley, i.e., the Tea Party types who were espousing
and practicing the principles of limited government, strong defense, low taxes,
and defense of the unborn back when Donald Trump was writing checks to the
Clintons’ campaigns. Ms. Haley would be
foolish to stick around until South Carolina for yet another humiliation at the
hands of the man who wins a lion’s share of the self-proclaimed Christian vote
while bellowing “I don’t get mad; I get even.”
While she may be a bit deluded, Ms. Haley is not foolish, and neither
are those who will be expected to finance the continuation of her Quixotic journey,
so yours truly expects Ms. Haley to pack it in before February 24, perhaps long
before that august date.
So where does Ms. Haley go from here? Her ideas clearly have no place in a Party
that seems to think that plenty of government is just what the country needs at
this juncture so long as the power of that government is used in the right
way. A noble person would retire from
politics and do something useful, but noble people rarely go into politics;
politics is the province of egotists, solipsists, and those seeking something that
can’t be found in public office, and Ms. Haley is not all that much different
from her fellow public servants in that regard. She must have a government job to, in her
case, crusade against the evils, or at least the misuse, of government. As a shark must continually move in order to
stay alive, a pol must continue to seek office to remain relevant in his or her
mind. Being a fan of Ms. Haley, yours
truly hopes that she proves me wrong and shows that she really believes in the
efficacy and virtue of the free market she so ardently espouses and hence would
find doing real work in the private sector desirable, but I’m too old to be
that naive.
So might the man who continually called her “birdbrain”
and last night stated that his quest was to “get even” with her make Ms. Haley
his running mate? As astounding as this
sounds, her selection by Mr. Trump to take the job of continually inquiring
after his health is not impossible; shame has no place in politics, and if Mr.
Trump thinks he could improve his chances at the White House by selecting Ms.
Haley, he will do so. But with the
likes of Vivek Ramaswamy and the previously respectable Tim Scott and Doug
Burgum now assuming the roles of court bootlickers, Mr. Trump, whose ego is his
most salient feature, will have a hard time denying one of those sycophants or his
legions of lickspittles in the House.
So how about Nikki Haley on a 3rd party ticket? Yours truly thinks a third party run would be
even more pointless than Ms. Haley’s quest to deny the New Republican Party its
choice of standard-bearer has turned out to be; 3rd parties, to put
it mildly, don’t do well in this country.
However, one might argue that the last third party candidate to get any
electoral votes, Alabama Governor George Wallace, did so in 1968, perhaps the
worst year of a period of tumult in this country quite comparable to the
troubles the Republic is currently experiencing. So if one is going to throw caution and good
sense to the wind and blow a lot of money and a lot of time on what will turn
out to be a lark, this is probably as good a time as any as long as one can
find enough dreamers, or opportunists, to finance such an ego excursion.
Apparently, lots of people have come to this conclusion;
witness The Third Way and the like. The
reasoning behind this year’s enthusiasm for a third party probably does not run
as deep as yours truly’s thinking regarding Mr. Wallace’s comparative success
in a time of division similar to ours; in fact, it goes no further than the
idea that most people, if the polls are credible, do not want to see either Joe
Biden or Donald Trump get re-elected.
Since this incipient third party fascination lacks a credible candidate,
why not somebody like Ms. Haley? While
those of us who are familiar with her record and her background would argue that
Ms. Haley is too conservative for the likes of The Third Way, such details could
easily get lost, willingly or otherwise, in the media gloss that would
accompany a third party effort. So why
not a, say, Haley/Manchin, or a Manchin/Haley, ticket? This would make this year’s race even more
interesting.
There are, of course, plenty of problems with such a possibility
that transcend the hopelessness of third party efforts in this country. One is that the heretofore best argument for
a third party effort in 2024, i.e., the revulsion of perhaps most of the electorate
to the thought of a Biden/Trump rematch, may soon become moot. My increasingly firming conviction that the
Democrats will dump Joe Biden (er, sorry, that Mr. Biden will choose not to run
in order to spend “more time with his family”) has only grown now that Mr.
Trump has the GOP nomination in the proverbial bag.
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