By Jonah Goldberg
Wednesday, January 13, 2016
According to conventional wisdom, the GOP nominates the
guy whose turn it is, while the Democrats look for a savior. As Bill Clinton
once said, “In every presidential election, Democrats want to fall in love.
Republicans just fall in line.”
George H.W. Bush came in second to Ronald Reagan in 1980.
As the sitting vice president, it was Bush’s turn for the nomination in 1988,
and he got it. Senator Bob Dole came in second to Bush in 1988, so in 1996 it
was his turn. In 2000, there was no obvious line of succession, but George W.
Bush came closest as the heir to the Bush dynasty. Senator John McCain came in
second to W. in 2000. In 2008, McCain got the nomination. Mitt Romney: Second
in 2008, he got his turn in 2012.
There’s a chance the power of love will still triumph in
the Democratic primaries. Right now, Hillary Clinton is running like a
Republican, insisting that it’s her turn. That’s the real meaning of “Ready for
Hillary,” after all. But all the love is for long-shot Bernie Sanders.
On the Republican side, however, the conventional wisdom
is dead. The so-called establishment GOP candidates look like they’re
re-enacting the fight scene in the movie Anchorman,
attacking one another at every turn.
What’s going on? In the GOP race, the real culprit isn’t
Donald Trump, it’s Jeb Bush.
The next-in-line tale is correct, but the moral of the
story isn’t what people think. The Bushes, Dole, Romney, and McCain didn’t
defeat their primary opponents because voters simply accepted their right to
the nomination. (Voters aren’t that compliant.) They won because they took
advantage of their solid starting positions to broaden their support.
Each more or less had the establishment or moderate wing
of the party locked down early. That freed them to spend months or even years
wooing the conservative base. If you secure the moderate or establishment
Republicans, you only need a relatively small slice of the true believers to
get over the top (Barry Goldwater and Reagan had the opposite problem; they had
the true believers sewn up but had to work to persuade the moderates. The
former failed, the latter succeeded.)
During his vice presidency, George H.W. Bush cemented his
lead by moving rightward on abortion and embracing Reaganism in totality. Dole,
who’d let Bush get to his right in 1988, didn’t repeat that mistake in 1996.
Throughout Bill Clinton’s first term, Dole courted the Right by attacking
Hollywood and embracing the Christian Coalition. In the lead-up to 2000, George
W. Bush raised money from the establishment but courted Christian
conservatives. The same pattern held true, more or less, for McCain and Romney.
Jeb Bush, for his part, went into the 2016 campaign with
the establishment largely in his pocket. The big donors, his family’s political
machine, and veterans of his brother’s White House lined up. So far, so good.
But Bush never really bothered to cultivate the Right. He even seemed to take
it for granted. Once it became clear that the grass roots were not going to
rally to Bush, he started to hemorrhage support from voters and donors who
wanted to back a winner. But by then it was too late to unify the establishment
around someone else.
This was a particularly bad moment for such a mistake.
Even moderate and liberal Republican voters have gone populist, which is why
many are flocking to Trump. Acting a bit like Democrats, his supporters have
fallen in love. It’s not clear they can be won back by conventional
politicians.
Meanwhile, Senator Ted Cruz has been methodical in his
attention to the right-wing grass roots. He’s not exactly the unifying
standard-bearer of the Right that Reagan and Goldwater were, but he at least
figured out the political math — and the populist mood — early. That’s more
than you can say for Jeb Bush.
So now we have a free-for-all where there is supposed to
be order — and we have relative order where there is supposed to be a free-for-all.
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