For those of us with political memories more far-reaching than a fruit fly’s, it’s a little hard to stomach the collective Republican freakout over the outside chance Donald Trump wins the primaries.
Granted, Trump might make a perfectly disastrous nominee or a mediocre-at-best president. That would only be par for the hazard-heavy course that leads through the Republican National Convention.
Democrats mock Republicans’ Gipper worship by charging that they’d secretly like to run zombie Reagan for president. Given the alternatives, can you really blame them? Every GOP candidate after Reagan has been, in his own way, deeply unimpressive.
In 2008 and 2012, Democrats racked up comfortable Electoral College majorities (of 365 and 332; need 270 to win). In the two presidential contests before that, Republicans could only stitch together bare, dangling majorities (with Florida and then Ohio tipping the scales).
Yes, Bushes managed thrice to get elected, but only by running against weak and weird opponents. The textbook example of this would be Michael Dukakis, facing accusations he was soft on crime, beginning a debate answer about the possible rape and murder of his own wife by piously repeating his death penalty abolitionism.
Al Gore practically chest butted W. during a townhall debate and proved so doctrinaire that he couldn’t carry his own Southern state of Tennessee. Opponents of George W. Bush correctly gauged the mood of the country in 2004 when they launched the ultimate clothespin-voting advocacy website with the vulgar but unforgettable url www.johnkerryisadouchebagbutimvotingforhimanyway.com.
And now the Bushes want to put up their weakest candidate yet, Jeb!, who managed to lose his first election for governor in the heavy Republican wave year of 1994, and who has so far managed to waste over $100 million of donor money to vie for this year’s Rick Perry Award.
Actually, scratch that as overbroad and slightly unfair to the Bushes. After all, clan matriarch Barbara said in an interview that the country was sick of Bushes for the time being and maybe he should sit out this election cycle.
The non-Bush GOP past candidates have been even worse. Bob Dole, the honorable but dull Washington insider who should never have run for president, turned what ought to have been a hard reelection by a scandal-plagued incumbent into a coronation. John McCain, a man often at war with his own party’s base, ran a broke campaign because of his own reforms and made Barack Obama seem like the sane and balanced candidate in the debates.
Even turnaround expert Mitt Romney turned out to be a badly flawed candidate — given to unrealistic hopes and dragged down by his own political past. Obamacare is Romneycare, writ large. Romney’s nomination blunted criticism of Obama on the issue on which the president was most vulnerable.
All of these candidates were either Republican establishmentarians or acceptable to the powers-that-be in the party. Trump boosters now take their warnings with a grain of that preservative which health scolds lecture us about, because they don’t think the modern GOP has what it takes to win anyway. They may be right about that.
Jeremy Lott is the Washington Examiner’s night editor.
