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Surveying the Wreckage of Hurricane Trump
Noah Rothman has an interesting look at Donald Trump’s candidacy, and how it has turned around the Democrat tactic of pining for the “Republicans of old.”
With Donald Trump’s defeat all but assured, the left has become bizarrely resentful of their own effective messaging against the Republican nominee. “There will be no accountability for Trump, for what he has wrought and almost wrought. It will disappear down the George W Bush memory hole,” mused MSNBC host Chris Hayes ruefully. “I think the scale, scope and depth of the disastrousness of his presidency has been weirdly forgotten.”
The Democrats have thrown everything but the kitchen sink at Trump, and there will be few attempts in the future to look back at his candidacy as a paragon of GOP virtue. This presents an opportunity for the GOP to forge their own narrative for the future. Unless things change dramatically between now and November 8, the Republicans are going to have even more of a blank slate to work with than they did in 2016 and 2012.
The obvious front-runners are Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and whoever picks up the banner from Donald Trump. This provides a good opportunity to form a fresh narrative about what the GOP stands for, rather than than what we oppose. Our candidate in 2020 will be able to run free from the comparisons to the Republicans of the past and set his or her own agenda. It will better be an agenda based on growth and expanded liberty, or else we are certainly doomed to fail once again.
Democrats, however, face an even bigger challenge when it comes to their candidate for 2024 (or possibly 2020), because aside from Tim Kaine, who do they have that is Presidential timber? Their lack of quality candidates for Senate races this year is so obvious even the New York Times has noticed it, and the best they could run against Hillary was Bernie Sanders, an aging Socialist who isn’t even a real Democrat.
That’s the problem with machine politics: Buying off votes and dirty political tricks work well when the machine is built around the goal of keeping one person in power for as long as possible. But once that person is gone, the machine quickly breaks down. The Hillary machine works really well when it’s devoted to electing Hillary, but after it has completed its mission, it serves no purpose. It will leave a huge power vacuum inside the Democratic Party, with no one standing by to take up where it left off.
The Republicans have a blank slate when it comes to their choice of a future presidential candidate. The Democrats, however, have an empty cupboard to chose from.
Published in General
I don’t think anyone did so. But even if you read that equation into the comments, the point would have been valid across forums: Accusing someone of hiding behind a pseudonym is best left to those who don’t.
@kevincreighton
Are you familiar with the budding politician Michelle Obama?
Do you agree that she could win a Senate seat in whatever blue state she decided to reside in, as did another recent First Lady?
Could she win the majority of a Democratic Party primary electorate that is committed to race and gender identity politics?
I’ll assume you answered “yes” to all three questions. Now here comes the big one:
Name the conservative Republican you think could take her on and beat her in a general election in either four or eight years.
Ben Sasse? Greg Abbott? Tom Cotton? George P. Bush? Mia Love?
Yes.
No. She starts off with even higher negatives, and unlike Hillary, didn’t try to champion major legislation while her spouse was in office. Her school lunch program was one of the more lightweight programs ever championed by a First (alleged) Lady.
No. Not in the slightest.
I’m not a professional journalist. That’s a big difference.
I’m going to save this.
The ones who send pictures of David French and Ben Shapiro’s young children being put into gas chambers by a Nazi-uniformed Donald Trump.
Not that Trump is responsible for this kind of thing, but it exists and is evidently more common than either of us had assumed until now.
Do you think Donald Trump is getting pictures sent to his twitter feed by “rabid Trump supporters” that show him in a Nazi uniform putting his own Jewish grandchildren into gas chambers?
I don’t like to quote myself, but I posted this comment on another thread:
Given the anonymity of the internet, I have to wonder what percentage of the abuse attributed to the alt-right is actually coming from the clever little provocateurs we saw on the O’Keefe videos.
My name is Chana Siegel. I live at HaShofar 22/2, Ma’aleh Adumim, ISRAEL.
I am not a paid journalist, and this is a private forum supposedly dedicated to civil discourse.
The main feed is pretty public. Everyone can access it. And how do we know Decius is a paid journalist? He is, after all, anonmyous.
Or just right.
Yay! Amnesty
I will never vote for Rubio.
Its hilarious to see grown men like Jonah and JPod get so bent out of shape by Decius. Just more Conservative Establishment nail biting over their dwindling influence.