It’s Super Tuesday Eve, and the polls, and the twitter feed, are pretty depressing. Real Clear Politics shows Trump ahead by 14 in Virginia, by 15 in Georgia, by 27 in Massachusetts, and so on. The only state, of those with enough recent polling for RCP to calculate averages, where Trump isn’t leading by a significant margin, is Ted Cruz’s native Texas.
It’s deeply discouraging to listen to Trump, and to his supporters. It’s not just that he makes unsupportable assertions of grandiose plans — bringing jobs back, funding tax cuts by dealing with “waste, fraud, and abuse,” and so on. It’s not just his ignorance on details. There’s his past — Trump University, for instance, and Trump Steaks, and so on. There’s the fact that he shoots his mouth off, and his bizarre statement of a moratorium on any Muslim entry to the United States. And there’s the deep suspicion that his policies would be a make-it-up-as-you-go-along, unpredictable, and, worse, potentially quite reckless. What’s more, the small flurry of endorsers — Chris Christie, plus rumors that Newt Gingrich is in the picture — feel like attempts to co-opt Trump, imagining they can control him behind the scenes, much as Weimar Republic power brokers thought they could control Hitler in a coalition.
At the same time, Kasich and Carson are staying in the race for what appears to be reasons of personal vanity, and there’s no indicator they’re leaving the race any time soon. And certainly Cruz and Rubio are each convinced they ought to be the “last man standing” for the final two-man fight, and neither of them are budging.
So I’d been trying to will Rubio to take the lead, get notice, get voters’ attention, but it’s not happening. And my twitter feed tells me that, in the same way as voters and pundits and bloggers couldn’t get past Christie’s “bro hug” with Obama, there is too much opposition to Rubio for his Gang of 8 amnesty bill for him to gain supporters. If Cruz drops out, his voters won’t make their way to Rubio, at least not reliably. A significant number will move to Trump.
Which leaves Cruz.
Which is discouraging to contemplate.
Look at Rubio’s website: you might not like them, but he’s got policy prescriptions for pretty much every issue you can think of. And I don’t think he’s simply delegated the task to staffers, but has genuinely, over the years, thought about these issues.
What’s on Cruz’s site? Surprisingly little. Restore the constitution (which means reduce executive/federal power). Support the Second Amendment. Secure the border. Defend the nation (e.g., defeat ISIS, cancel the Iran deal, rebuild the military). Stand with Israel. Support religious liberty. Oppose abortion and gay marriage. Rein in Washington, by eliminating various government agencies (IRS, Depts of Education, Energy, Commerce, HUD), and other bureaus/commissions/gov’t programs. Oddly, his flat tax proposal isn’t even highlighted, but categorized under “jobs and opportunity.” And he doesn’t even mention his proposed VAT-like tax.
He’s a sucky candidate, in every respect but one: he’s not Trump. And being not-Trump will have to do.
(Yes, OK, Hillary Clinton is also not Trump. But, no, she’s not an alternative. Democratic readers, I’m in the middle of a book by Peter Schweizer which lays out a pretty damning pattern of donations to the Clinton Foundation, and speech purchases, for favored political outcomes.)
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