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Serendipity led me to come across the above quote
just after the announcement that the previously scheduled campaign for last
night was being canceled because of the withdrawal of Donald Trump and John
Kasich. The conjunction of the discovery and the cancellation led my mind to
roam, then think: Was it really
August 6 of last year when the round of Republican primary debates began?
There were 17 candidates back then—not far off the
total number of debates for the entire season—and numerous enough that they
could have hired a small bus. There was so much squabbling for attention that Fox
News, the network hosting that night, felt compelled to separate them into two
tiers.
Nobody can say that Republican voters lacked
choices. But in the end, look what they ended up with: As of this late,
desperate hour, a front-runner with no attachment to principle but a decided
propensity to alienate some group or person virtually any time he runs his
mouth off. I never thought, prior to
this year’s lineup, that I’d hear candidates talking about rivals’ energy
levels, hand size, sweat glands, water retention, female physiognomy, child
molesters, etc. Altogether, hardly an edifying spectacle.
But even when candidates have had a chance to talk
about something more wholesome—something that, while not illuminating an issue
or their reaction to potential crises, still can sum up their values—they’ve
still managed to muff it. Case in point: A topic that came up in mid-September,
the U.S. currency.
Asked by CNN’s Jake Tapper which woman they’d like
to see on the $10 bill, the then-GOP Presidential hopefuls offered predictable
but sound choices: Rosa Parks, Clara Barton, Susan B. Anthony, Abigail Adams. (Eleanor
Roosevelt, a well-known Democratic First Lady, was conspicuous by her absence,
but did you really expect otherwise?) Others flipped off what they undoubtedly
saw as an absurd question with an equally absurd response (wives and mothers).
One candidate, Trump, offered an unexpectedly serious choice (Parks)
with an expectedly creepy one (daughter Ivanka, whom, you might recall, he once
said that he might have dated had circumstances been different).
Kasich’s choice, Mother Teresa, was certainly
offered with an eye on Catholic voters, some of whom might object that he had
embraced another faith in midlife. But aside from that (the more cynical might
say, because of that), his choice was all the
more brilliant, as it:
* took the question seriously without, thankfully,
mentioning a female relative that only he could relate to;
* satisfied the one longstanding legal requirement—that
the honoree on the currency has to be deceased;
* represented out-of-the-box but not downright nutty thinking;
* rested on morally non-objectionable grounds (come
on: besides the late contrarian Christopher Hitchens, who’s going to argue with
a saint?); and
* reminded audiences of his own professed commitment
to maintain the social safety net (he told one mega-donor furious over his
decision to expand Medicaid to more than a quarter-million Ohioans, “I don’t
know about you, lady, but when I get to the pearly gates, I’m going to have an
answer for what I’ve done for the poor”).
In contrast, former Gov. Bush (excuse me, Jeb!)
(pictured, in all his tortured glory) demonstrated so much combined shameless pandering, tone-deafness and all-around
bone-headedness that it called into question the conventional wisdom that he was
the smart one among the sons of George and Barbara Bush. His response? Margaret
Thatcher.
Even those with today’s average attention span—the
length of a tweet—would surely be reminded in debate post-mortems about the
irony of citing “The Iron Lady” who felt compelled to q=warn Jeb’s father not to
“go wobbly” on invading Iraq. But there are other reasons why it might not have
gone over well with the rank and file who eventually doomed his campaign:
*A tough, partisan female who gave no quarter
against males who stood in the way of her rise to the top: Didn’t that sound
like—well, Hillary?
*Only the National
Review of the early 1990s regarded Thatcher, together with Ronald Reagan,
as part of “The Heroic Age of Conservatism.” You remember the National Review, right—the opinion
magazine with a special “Against Trump” issue with contributions from nearly
two dozen Establishment GOP figures? An issue that maybe influenced six people?
*Thatcher is a reminder of “The Special
Relationship” that, at its height, featured the United States and Great Britain
allying against the two worst dictatorial regimes of the 20th
century. More recently, that alliance saw countless millions of dollars being
sucked into a War on Terror with little sign of success or ending—a conflict
that Trump got away with criticizing while incurring no lasting damage from
GOP voters.
* “Margaret Thatcher” is not exactly a name to make
most Irish-American conservatives stand up and cheer. They disagree with
liberal and even Irish Catholics on a whole host of issues, including
birth control, abortion, same-sex marriage, and the value of Mother
Church. But they stand firmly with these
others in regarding Thatcher not just as obstructing talks to end “The Troubles” in
Northern Ireland, but also as the very symbol of the arrogant, indifferent
leadership that perpetuated Irish misery under centuries of British colonial
misrule.
The news media spent so much time covering Jeb
Bush’s hapless attempt to counter Trump’s charge about his “low energy” that it
gave scant attention to an answer on U.S. currency that would have made half of
Irish-American GOP voters throw up their hands and made the other half simply
throw up. It was a short moment in Bush's campaign, but it conveyed much about
why he went nowhere fast, carrying with him the hopes of a now-clueless
political dynasty.
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