Cards on the table: I’m not going to be supporting the Republican nominee in November.
I might not be supporting the Democratic nominee either. I’m not a Hillary hater, but I never liked her husband (and I think he’s going to be a huge problem when and if he gets back into the East Wing). I think she’s a poor political talent and a poor manager. Most important, I think her foreign policy is far too reflexively bellicose. But against most Republican candidates, I’d still be rooting for her to win even if I can’t bring myself to actually vote for her. (Not that it’ll matter whether I do or don’t; if she’s having trouble winning New York, it’s already long over.)
So, assuming I’m rooting for the Democrat, presumably I want the Republicans to be in maximal disarray, and to nominate their weakest general election candidate. Right,
Mr. Chait?
Not really. First of all, I think any Republican nominee has close to even odds of winning the general election. Some candidates have stronger prospects than others. I think the strongest general-election candidate for the GOP is probably the personable and non-crazy John Kasich, followed by the slick and well-packaged Marco Rubio, and the weakest is probably the extreme and personally-repellant Ted Cruz followed by the hapless legacy Jeb Bush. But none of them are so weak that they couldn’t win, and none of them are so strong that they are the obvious choice for a party concerned primarily with winning (which may be one reason the party is having so much trouble deciding). And if we go into a recession, even Ted Cruz would have a better-than-even chance.
Beyond that, it’s important for the health of the Republic that we have two (or more) parties that offer plausible choices to the electorate, both worthy of being trusted with governance. I don’t want either party to be in a state of chaos, or to nominate someone who would make a totally unacceptable president.
So, if I want a nominee who’s at least minimally acceptable, and I don’t want chaos, then presumably I’m in the anybody-but-Trump category. Right,
Mr. Linker?
Not really. First of all, while I think Trump would be a very bad president, I don’t think he’d be obviously much worse than some of his opponents. Trump’s enthusiasm for torture is horrifying – but it is exceptionally common in the party that nominated Mitt “double Guantanamo” Romney, and the candidate who most directly confronted that corrosive evil
has unfortunately dropped out. I would expect a President Trump to run gleefully roughshod over legal and Constitutional niceties – but, we still have the separation of powers, the division of power, and the existence of an opposition party to challenge an exercise of Trump’s worst instincts, and Trump would have less reason than a normal party leader to count on Republican party loyalty should he find himself threatened with impeachment.
But, more to the point, when you set aside the obnoxious bluster, Trump’s actual instincts are considerably less alarming in some areas than some of the other candidates. In particular, he is a rare Republican who seems comfortable with the idea that foreign affairs is not a zero-sum game. He doesn’t say it’s wrong to deal with an evil regime like Iran; he thinks he, as purported super-negotiator, would have gotten a better deal. If Putin wants to prop up the Assad regime, he doesn’t see why we should interfere – if they fail, that hurts Putin, and if they succeed, that hurts ISIS. He is certainly not a realist, and certainly not anti-interventionist – as I’ve said before, he’s a
to-hell-with-’em-hawk. But he seems to understand that sometimes the only way to win is not to play.
Which is more than I can say about some of his Republican opponents – most particularly Marco Rubio.
Finally, it’s not obvious to me that if the GOP establishment actually got its act together and picked a winner, and muscled that winner over the finish line, that this would do anything to quell the chaos that Trump has channeled so effectively. After all, part of the reason we are where we are is that the GOP establishment did exactly that in 2012.
So . . . what is it I want?
First, I want the nomination process to continue. I want the Republican electorate to be forced to ask, “what do we want our party to be” and not merely, “who’s more electable” or “who’s the real conservative,” the questions that the establishment and the conservative movement prefer to ask. Trump has, in a more-than-imperfect way, forced that question. I don’t want the question withdrawn prematurely.
Second, I want credible non-Trump candidates both to continue to challenge him frontally where they believe he’s wrong and to copy him in challenging the establishment conservative consensus where they themselves may believe he’s got a point. The party needs to have a real debate about immigration, about foreign policy, and about its core economic policy ideas. That debate should continue all the way to the convention.
Third, I want the ultimate nominee to be someone who I will not be terrified of should he actually win the presidency.
For all of the above reasons, what I want most of all out of New Hampshire is . . . to stop Marco Rubio.
Laying my remaining cards on the table: I genuinely believe Rubio is the most dangerous candidate of the whole bunch, more dangerous than Trump and certainly more dangerous than the declaredly more-extreme Cruz. It’s partly that Rubio’s foreign policy views are exceptionally ideological and divorced from reality, but more that his whole political identity seems to me to have been engineered based on positioning, and positioning within the world of professional ideologists. The candidate he reminds me of most is John Edwards, and I loathed Edwards.
The
Robo-Rubio business from the last debate is overblown in any literal sense – any candidate can be thrown in a given moment, and the pressure of live debates is very different from the pressure of the situation room. But I’m extremely glad it happened, because Rubio really is an empty suit – or so it has seemed to me for months. It’s a well-tailored suit for winning a Republican primary, but that’s not good enough, and anyway, I don’t even know if it’ll fit right once he finally grows into it.
I’m not going to predict how New Hampshire is going to vote. But what I hope happens is that Trump wins with roughly 30%, that Kasich’s momentum carries him well above his recent polling to crack 20%, and that either Bush or Cruz comes in third with roughly 15%.
Looking past New Hampshire, keeping the race, and the real debate, going means keeping the race open. That means hoping that Cruz wins South Carolina (since if Trump win’s he’ll be the overwhelmingly strongest candidate going into Super Tuesday, and he’d be favored to win some of the large Northern states that follow, like Michigan, Illinois and New York).
An open race, in which Cruz and Trump are the leaders but neither looks capable of putting it away, but where the establishment hasn’t coalesced around Rubio, is probably the best-case scenario for a Cruz nomination. It’s also probably the only scenario under which a brokered convention is a real possibility.
And I can live with either prospect.
Ted Cruz is a jerk and an extremist on many things. But at least he seems to care about the Constitution; at least
he opposes torture; at least he has some skepticism of over-committing the American military; and at least his extremism is worn relatively honestly. A Cruz-Clinton race would certainly be a choice, not an echo. And Cruz would probably lose, which would hopefully force some kind of reckoning with the wages of extremism.
A brokered convention, meanwhile, would force the GOP to come up with a candidate who actually satisfied the various factions in play at the convention, most definitely including the mob behind Donald Trump. The party would finally get to decide, but they’d have to decide publicly, without the facade of popular endorsement that primary-season bandwagoning produces.
And who knows? Maybe they’d settle on somebody like Kasich who isn’t so terrible?
Stranger things have happened.
