Don’t Count Out the Anti-Establishment Republicans
Bush and Romney are marquee names in U.S. politics and the Republicans haven’t nominated an anti-establishment candidate since Barry Goldwater more than a half century ago.
Yet there is an equally interesting, and perhaps as important, struggle for the movement-conservative or non-establishment crown. There is a sizable segment of Republican voters who believe it’s time to break that 50-year run.
There’s no shortage of liberal whining about how the GOP always nominates ‘establishment candidates’, notable examples being Romney, McCain, or George W. Bush. But contrary to popular leftist myth, there is no secret ‘cabal’ that convenes before a pyre to anoint the chosen one; we do – though the nomination process. No candidate was suppressed, either. Ron Paul got to debate along with Mr. Moneybags Mitt Romney, and everyone got to answer questions. Although Romney did get more face time during the New Hampshire debate, how much of an impact this made on the nomination process is hard to ascertain. It could be because Romney gave longer answers and interceded more often.
The nomination process for GOP candidates does a good job of weeding out the candidates that aren’t viable and or are unqualified, leaving only the ‘establishment’ candidates. There is nothing wrong with this; why do we want the inept in the world’s most important position of power? As we said before, most of the 2012 candidates were awful, and it was a miracle many of them got as far as they did. For example:
Herman Cain: No policy experience whatsoever and entirely reliant on advisers to formulate his economic and foreign policy. Palin in 2008, to her credit, showed initiative but Herman Cain seemed lackadaisical, and then there was the whole sex scandal that put the nail in the coffin.
Santorum: Too religious. The most successful GOP candidates aren’t too obsequious to the religious right. Voters care more about policy than religion. unless you’re the anti-Christ, being thr GOP front-runner pretty much guarantees the religious right voting bloc; there’s no need to waste too much time and money on them.
Newt Gingrich: Doomed by baggage, prevaricating on Fannie and Freddie consulting fees, weak debate performance.
Rick Perry: Naive on important issues, suffered a catastrophic brain freeze on a nationally televised debate, threatened a public official (Bernanke) with violence.
Michele Bachmann: Too religious, not enough policy experience, like Ron Paul seemed to subscribe to weird conspiracy theories, weak performance during debates.
Ron Paul: Endorses economic policy that would plunge the economy into a recession, destroying trillions of dollars of wealth. Endorses foreign policy that emboldens and appeases our enemies.
So what does that leave us with? Establishment candidates. If the establishment is as patently awful as the whiners on the blogs insist it is, voters would have given a non-establishment candidate enough delegates to win the nomination, but they didn’t.
But what about Obama? He was an ‘establishment’ candidate, and he is incompetent. He’s an outlier, a product of the convergence of extreme political and economic events of the likes never seen before. You had Bush leaving office with the lowest outgoing approval rating of any president in Gallup’s polling history, combined with the worst financial problem since 1929, combined with Obama being the most charismatic democratic candidate ever. Brainwashing millions of youth didn’t hurt, as well as the liberal media’s bias against the more qualified Hillary, and the media over-hyping the overblown financial problem to get Obama in office. Hillary did get the hard-working white vote, but that wasn’t enough to compensate for Obama getting the ignorant, low-information youth vote and the ‘white guilt’ vote. Fast forward to 2016, the strategy that worked so well for Obama in 2008 won’t work again, especially given the disillusionment many young people feel with Obama (and the democrats in general), the fact that Obama cannot run again, and that there is no financial crisis to blame republicans for. Therefore, to the disappointment of the far-left, Hillary, another establishment candidate, will get the nomination. And as bad as Hillary is, she can’t possibly be worse than Obama.