With the nation’s media focused, appropriately, on the passing of former first lady Nancy Reagan, the harsh theatrics of the GOP presidential campaign will fade for a few hours from the 24/7 coverage it had been receiving. Thank you, Mrs, Reagan, for this one last, great service.
My wonderful wife of 33 years sent me a direct message upon learning of the death of Mrs. Reagan: “She’s with her Ronnie.” I declined an opportunity to write about Nancy Reagan because I was only a junior staffer in her White House, a White House full of people much better positioned today and this week to offer commentary on her amazing life than me.
But I am grateful that her last bow and exit will remind us of how she and President Reagan lifted the country’s spirits in the early 1980s. The Reagans arrived at 1600 Pennsylvania at a grim moment and almost immediately set about lifting the county’s eyes and mood higher. The next president will have to do much the same in early 2017. May he or she and their spouse be as successful as the Reagans.
Who will be the winner of the GOP nomination is of course beyond guessing, especially after Sen. Ted Cruz’s big wins Saturday. With the launch of the Romney missile at Donald Trump, and Trump’s problematic debate performances and KKK controversy, the race is in flux, and may remain so all the way to Cleveland.
I think former Secretary of State Clinton will emerge a terribly flawed and easy-to-beat candidate because of the continuing scandal that is her server and the compromise of national security it represents. The GOP nominee, whoever it turns out to be, will have to remind the public every day of Clinton’s fecklessness and selfishness and the enormous damage it did to America’s security. I do not believe she can win the election.
But the GOP can lose it. Very easily.
Right now the GOP convention in Cleveland appears almost certain to be “open,” that is, without any of the would-be nominees possessing the allegiance of the 1,237 delegates needed to secure the nomination outright. That will mean most delegates will be set free on the second ballot in the rough seas of an “open” or “contested” convention. There aren’t any “brokers” to control or even guide them. (I’m not even sure it is a crime to bribe them, though I suspect it is.)
Whoever gathers 1,237 will be the nominee. Hopefully some smart folks at the Republican National Committee are running through some planning scenarios right now that anticipate the minutes after that first ballot fails to nominates anyone. Hopefully RNC Chairman Reince Priebus has remarks prepared on the procedures. Hopefully the state delegations will retire to their hotels, hear from their leadership, deliberate, and nominate someone quickly, taking into account all that transpires between now and then.
And hopefully, whether it is Sen. Ted Cruz, Gov. John Kasich, Sen. Marco Rubio or Donald Trump, or someone the convention turns to rather than choosing from among a fractured field, he or she and their spouse will greet the Cleveland audience and world with the same charm, cheer, good humor, elegance, rhetorical and policy muscle and resolve the Reagans did in 1980 and again in 1984. Hugh Hewitt is a nationally syndicated talk radio host, law professor at Chapman University’s Fowler School of Law, and author, most recently of The Queen: The Epic Ambition of Hillary and the Coming of a Second “Clinton Era.” He posts daily at HughHewitt.com and is on Twitter @hughhewitt.
