Screw up. Reince. Repeat.
Such is standard operating procedure at the RNC with its attempts to try to organize affairs beyond its control – such as the messy unwieldy proposition of a Presidential nominating process. The fumbling bumbling incompetent and witheringly tone deaf Reince Priebus just can’t get out of his own way.
The RNC and GOP establishment is much like big government itself in this way, trying to operate outside the constraints of human nature and cause and effect in an attempt to manipulate that which they cannot really ever control from headquarters. Thus the law of unintended consequences almost always yields a result opposite of what was intended. You know, just like failed liberal big government that the RNC is supposedly against.
You would think this irony might dawn on them. It has not.
Their idea was to have Jeb Bush raise a couple hundred million early, then take advantage of his money and name recognition with a front loaded primary and caucus schedule, and have all of this done by mid- March if not February.
No fuss. No muss. Or not.
As the smoke in Wisconsin clears, the two candidates the Washington establishment fear and loathe the most continue to dominate the process. Gone are Washington favorites Jeb, Chris Christie, Marco Rubio – and John Kasich is such a phony self-righteous stooge and his absurd and doomed campaign is such a farce that establishment figures have over the past month flirted with Donald Trump and now are trying to get in with Ted Cruz as well.
This was not the plan. This was so not the plan.
We are on their side of the 50 yard line. As surmised here in Breitbart on Christmas Eve, the base has effectively defeated the establishment – or at least turned the tables on them. In recent months, luminaries such as Charles Krauthammer have concurred, albeit months late. Of course the Washingtonians won’t give up, and who knows what might happen in Cleveland, but the insiders have certainly lost field position.
And to be sure, the non-establishment lane is currently rather fractured and divided among Trump and Cruz camps, but that’s an issue for another column. The focus here is how the RNC’s plan to control the process has actually guaranteed that it lost control of it. The paradox is simply delicious.
The biggest beneficiary of the front-loaded emphasis has been Trump himself. Coming seemingly out of nowhere to a position of media and poll dominance, Trump was experiencing his most powerful momentum just as a whole bunch of states were having primaries. The cliché is to strike while the iron is hot, and thanks to the wizards inside the establishment of the party, most of the irons were being struck while Trump was at his hottest.
Conversely, the biggest loser as a result of the schedule was Jeb. His early failures, in polling and in votes, were magnified because the expectation (though not by your’s truly) was that Jeb would roll to some early wins and would intimidate others from jumping into the race with his shock and awe fundraising. So many of the primaries were held when Jeb was at his lowest, and his campaign sunk like a $140 million stone.
To millions of voters outside the Beltway group-think universe, Jeb as a non-starter was preordained and predictable. Frankly, the idea of a third Bush was something that never resonated outside of a few counties in Northern Virginia and a few blocks in Manhattan in the first place. Jeb was doomed from day one by a nation not at all interested in another Bush regardless of whether he was qualified or not. The RNC, the rest of the Washington establishment and the Jurassic media missed it because they are fully unfamiliar with the nation outside of their respective echo chambers.
This is one reason why big centralized government cannot work, and why big centralized Republican political strategy won’t work. Both groups misapprehend the nature of their clients. One thing both groups have missed is just how ticked off so many people are.
Enter Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump.
Another mistake Priebus made, which complicated the other mistakes was to continue to go to CNN, MSNBC and CNBC for Republican debates. This guaranteed that Republican debates would be held under liberal Democrat templates, and it’s a major factor in stirring the anger of the candidates towards each other and away from Democrats. This is what these liberal moderators want and they craft their questions towards that end. Hey Reince, have you noticed?
And even Fox News, with liberal Chris Wallace, philosophically agnostic Bret Baier and self-absorbed Megyn Kelly gave us petty questions and an emphasis on furthering journalists’ careers and not on solving the nation’s problems. Their debates were theater of the absurd. Hillary and Bernie always emerged unscathed, but all of our candidates took on water.
Thus the entire notion of a nice polite neat and speedy nominating process has completely been an exploding cigar for the RNC. Dittos the idea that this tidy package would deliver another great “electable” establishment candidate.
Regardless of where this goes from here, it’s not going to be nice or neat or short. It’s not likely to result in a unified party. It might end up with Hillary Clinton in the White House and three more young ultra leftist members of the Supreme Court – or maybe Trump or Cruz can salvage something from the ashes. If someone other than those two wins the nomination, it will be ugly and maybe the end of the party as we know it.
But to hell with that. This is far bigger than party. Priebus may go down as the most failed Chair of the RNC ever, and have had a hand in losing two elections that were both winnable and where the losses were nothing less than catastrophic for the country. And that’s the main point.
Big centralized arrogant and bureaucratic government destroys the country. Big centralized arrogant and bureaucratic designed Republican politics guarantees that we’ll have more of it.
Edmund Wright is contributor at Breitbart, American Thinker, Newsmax TV, Talk Radio Network and author of Amazon Elections Best Seller WTF? How Karl Rove and the Establishment Lost…Again. This is the 17th installment of Rove-Stupid: The new definition of the Republican Establishment. Read the rest here.