http://www.nationalreview.com/node/431778/print A Rubio-Cruz Ticket Might Be the Only Way to Stop Trump
By Jonah Goldberg — February 24, 2016
As things stand, Donald Trump is the presumptive GOP nominee. That’s awful news, and depressing to contemplate. But terrible possibilities don’t become less terrible if we refuse to contemplate them. Rather, they become more likely.
The GOP’s collective desire to look away has been a problem for months. Nearly everyone, including yours truly, believed that Trump’s candidacy would exhaust itself on its own terms. There are many reasons why that hasn’t happened. Chief among them: Too many people thought it was someone else’s job to bell the Trumpian cat. No better evidence for this can be found than the fact that of the $215 million spent by super PACs so far this cycle, only 4 percent was spent attacking Trump, according to the Washington Post.
While a queue for allotments of blame would be longer than a Great Depression breadline, the person at the head of it is Ted Cruz. For months, Cruz embraced Trump as a comrade-in-arms. This helped send the signal to talk radio hosts and various conservative activists that Trump was a healthy addition to the political conversation. Even though the two men are wildly divergent ideologically, they both found shelter under the “anti-establishment” umbrella.
Cruz finally broke the clinch in Iowa and demonstrated that negative attacks on Trump work.
But then, disastrously, Cruz stopped attacking. He wrongly reasoned that he had no chance in New Hampshire and had little to gain, so why bother fighting Trump there? For the entire crucial week leading up to the New Hampshire primary, the GOP field went back into a cannibalistic frenzy to win the non-Trump mantle. This allowed Trump to run up a huge victory in the Granite State, and that momentum let him gobble up Cruz’s evangelical base in South Carolina (where 73 percent of voters describe themselves as evangelical or born-again), resulting in a strategically devastating third-place finish that shattered Cruz’s claim to be the standard-bearer of true conservatism.
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