Why Jeb’s Dropping Out Would Weaken Trump by JONAH GOLDBERG
December 19, 2015 4:00 AM
That scene in Independence Day where Jeff Goldblum has the brilliant insight to infect the alien mothership with a computer virus has always bothered me because it is so 1990s. The whole idea of computer viruses was a new thing in 1996, and so the idea of giving an alien computer a “cold” seemed brilliant and cutting edge — at least by Hollywood-blockbuster standards. In hindsight, the stupidity of the scene really can’t be exaggerated, since any advanced alien civilization would have heard of hacking a long, long, long time ago. They just might have been prepared for Goldblum’s 8MB Mac PowerBook, particularly given that WiFi hadn’t even been invented yet.
A friend of mine recently saw Spotlight, the movie about the Boston Globe’s investigation about Catholic sex-abuse stuff. The less about all that, the better. But he told me that there’s a scene where you can see a huge AOL banner in the background and the whole audience started to chuckle, given that AOL today is about as thriving as Anthony Weiner’s Twitter account. It was a quick reminder of how fast things change. It got me wondering: What will people say are the defining markers of the moment we’re living in?
Part of the problem with writing about this decade is that I’ve got no idea what it’s called. The twenty-teens? The ought-tens? Ever since Y2K (how’s that for a dated term?), we’ve been handicapped by the lack of an easy, widely accepted, and euphonious term for the decade we live in. For the 80 years prior to that, one could always say, “It’s the ’60s man,” or “High-Five! It’s the ’90s!” Anyway, what’s the kitsch of this era? In just four years, when it becomes the ’20s again, what will we remember as the acid-wash jeans and Rubik’s Cubes of today? “Make America Great Again” hats are hopefully on the list. Ill-fitting T-shirts on potbellied dudes with bushy beards should be on there, too.
If you’ve read this far, you might say the same thing to me that you would if you spotted me at the post office packing up a mason jar of manure: “Mailing that sh*t in, huh?”
So let’s do at least a little punditry.
This week’s debate in Nevada, sort of like airplane steak tartar, is disagreeing with me more the farther I get away from it. For starters, while it was right to focus on ISIS and terrorism, that stuff went on for way too long. There are other geo-strategic threats that got short shrift. By the way, “short shrift” should really be one word. You rarely see the word shrift used (outside discussion of confession) and you never see the phrase “long shrift.” But, as Hillary Clinton said to her ethics adviser, “That’s not important right now.”
Second, both the questions and the answers were based on the premise that Americans are terrified of ISIS, which I don’t think is quite right. More on that in a moment. With the exception of Kasich, I think all of the players helped themselves. And even Kasich got something out of the debate. He probably got a good cardio workout with his special version of Sanctimonious Policy Wonk Kung Fu.
I think Jeb had his best night in a while and finally managed to win an exchange with Trump. But his problems go deeper. If you ever watched the sitcom Community you might remember the — generally unfunny — Chevy Chase character who was desperate to seem cool. For a while he tried to make the phrase “Streets Ahead” hip. As in, that song is “Streets Ahead.” It’s similar to that bit in Mean Girls where Gretchen tries to popularize “fetch.” In one scene she says “That is so fetch!” and Rachel McAdams snaps, “Gretchen stop trying to make ‘fetch’ happen. It’s not going to happen.”
It seems to me that the problem with Jeb Bush is that he’s still trying to make “fetch” happen, where “fetch” = “Jeb!” Unlike a lot of people, I feel sorry for Jeb because I think he’s an honorable and capable guy, even if he’s never been my first choice for president or the nomination. But, sort of like that AOL banner, he’s just so 1990s. His basic attitude is that there’s nothing wrong with America that 4 percent growth won’t fix. He’s not only a pre-Obama candidate, he’s a pre–George W. candidate. His problems mostly speak well of him as a person, but don’t bode well for his campaign.
The bigger problem is that the longer he stays in, the more he helps Trump. Going by Twitter and e-mail at least, there’s still this bizarre notion out there that opposition to Trump amounts to support for Jeb. That might have had superficial plausibility when Jeb was a front-runner or even a top-tier candidate. But now? The whole rationale for Trump’s candidacy was based on exploiting animosity towards the “establishment.” Jeb represents the establishment for lots of people, fairly or not. If Jeb bows out, that would give a lot of Trump supporters a victory and an excuse to look elsewhere. I hate saying candidates should drop out before the first ballot is cast, but at the very least, if Bush does poorly in Iowa and New Hampshire, he should hang it up. The sooner Trump can’t claim he’s the alternative to the “establishment,” the sooner more people will look at alternatives to Trump.
Hey, I figure if the GOP front-runner has no idea what the nuclear triad is, I can use Triad any way I want. Anyway, I think Cruz got the better of Rubio in the debate, but Rubio accomplished what he wanted: igniting an upsurge of Cruz skepticism. People aren’t talking about Rubio’s continued support for a path to citizenship (after enforcement). They’re talking about Cruz’s credibility on the issue. It was akin to sacrificing a couple pawns to get a castle. After all, people already knew about Rubio’s vulnerabilities on immigration. But this conversation about Cruz is new, at least in public.
Cruz has worked assiduously to create a brand as the purist in the race. He’s had a lot of help from his friends in talk radio and elsewhere. To listen to his supporters — and Cruz himself — Republican animosity towards Cruz can be explained as wagon-circling by the “Washington cartel.” Cruz is the principled man in a dirty town, according to this story. No doubt there’s some truth to this version. But not everyone subscribes to it. There are a lot of very conservative and principled politicians and activists who don’t like or support Cruz — and not because they’re “RINOs.” They see him as a calculating politician willing to set the house on fire for his own political self-interest, not for the party or the cause. Wherever you come down on the government shutdown, the only thing everyone can agree on was that it was good for Ted Cruz.
The charge that he was lying about his immigration amendment in order to cram in a poison pill against amnesty may or may not be persuasive, but it is not the kind of explanation that helps maintain his brand. (And, I suspect, he will have a similar problem down the road if/when Donald Trump finally jumps the shark and Cruz has to explain that he never really meant that “Donald is great” he was just saying it for strategic reasons.) Wherever you come down on the Story of Ted (I think both versions have merit), as a political matter, it does not help Ted Cruz to have people debating whether his purism stems from strategic calculation rather than conviction.
As I mentioned above — and wrote about in my column today — I didn’t like the premise of the debate; namely, America is terrified of ISIS. For the most part, I don’t think a lot of Americans are terrified of ISIS, but I do think a bunch of us are worried that, through a combination of ideology, inertia, and incompetence the government can’t or won’t take the threat of ISIS seriously: But the president himself is a symptom. The whole system seems to have lost its mind. That there’s even a debate about whether security officials should be allowed to look at the social-media posts of immigrants is a sign that our bureaucrats have such open minds their brains have fallen out.
We should have seen this coming five years ago, when we learned that Obama told the new head of NASA to make one of his top priorities outreach to the Muslim world. Terrorism is a big concern, but this sense that the political system is unresponsive, unaccountable, and operating on its own self-interested ideological agenda is bigger. One point I couldn’t flesh out — not least because I was so high on cough syrup when I wrote the column — is that I think the government, along with the countless remora-institutions that live off it, have become a ruling class unto themselves. It is a kind of secular aristocracy that resents efforts from the masses to dictate what government should do. Obviously, this isn’t a new idea. But if there’s one thing that arouses sympathy in me when it comes to support for Trump, it is the idea (exploited by him) that America is a nation and deserves to act like a nation.
John O’Sullivan has a great piece in the 60th Anniversary issue of NR in which he takes exception to the near-universal talking point that “America is not just a country, it’s an idea.” The problem with that formulation — which has an ancient and venerable pedigree — is that it tends to obscure the fact that we are, in fact, a country too. We have a culture. We have a history. John prefers it this way: “America is not just an idea; it is a nation.” And so do I. It’s not that I don’t love the idea of America. I do, passionately. But without some respect for the nation, for the tribal attachments that translate the idea into cultural norms, the idea will die. No nation of ideas can sustain its ideas without sustaining some sense of being a nation.
My problem with Trump is that he goes too far the other way. He gives no indication he cares ones whit about the idea of America, beyond its past record of “winning.” His comments this morning celebrating Vladimir Putin as a “leader” even though he kills journalists and political opponents, were exactly what you’d expect from someone who only cares about strength, power, popularity, and “winning.” Anyway, my point is that the people running the government, the bureaucracy, higher education, much of the media, etc. seem to have turned their backs on the very idea of America as a nation. The ideology of transnational progressives occasionally lines up with American self-interest, but that alignment is more accidental and — in their minds — regrettable than anything else.
Read more at:
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/428777/donald-trump-jeb-bush-drop-out
