Politicians are different from you and me, and no one has ever explained it all better than Elizabeth Drew in The New Yorker, as she followed the hopeless presidential campaign of Edward M. Kennedy as it ground to its preordained end. “Kennedy arrived in New York yesterday … as strident as … ever,” she wrote August 9, 1980.
“He seemed almost crazed, a caricature. A number of people … even some of his staff, have become puzzled about what he thinks he is doing. Leaving aside the style in which he is doing it, the question is not so puzzling. Kennedy and his people are aware that the odds against his getting the nomination are long indeed, but they have travelled all year on the theory that at some point the bubble around Carter would burst …
“In politics … one can become so obsessed with reaching one’s goal — so certain that if only X will happen the goal will be reached — that any number of things that happen will be assumed to be X. Publicly and privately, Kennedy has been saying that he expects to win; in reality he has been hoping that something would break.”
Sadly for them, this tendency of politicians to hang on till the end in the hopes that X will arrive and something will happen is rather bad news for mainstream Republicans, who hope to narrow their field to one or two people who can take on the Trumpster. “Here in New Hampshire, the establishment is crushing Donald Trump, even if it’s not obvious,” says Josh Kraushaar in National Journal, noting that Trump holds first place with one-fourth of the vote, while the numbers against him — for Marco Rubio, Chris Christie, Jeb Bush, John Kasich and others — are divided in five different ways.
Of the four, Rubio is the only one who can compete everywhere, while Kasich and Christie have few places to go after New Hampshire, and Bush has nowhere to go under any conditions at all. The popular governor of an important swing state, Kasich in person is less than his resume. Christie should have entered the race in 2012, when his name was untarnished (by Bridgegate, and by hugging Obama), when his lane was uncluttered and everyone from Nancy Reagan on down had begged him to run.
And as for Jeb Bush, he is, like Ted Kennedy, the third of his line to be running for president, from a family prominent for two or more generations, who contrived to suggest that his heart wasn’t in it and blew a large lead (and millions of dollars) in a matter of months. But Jeb is faced with an election he does not want to lose, either — in their clans, not being president makes you a failure. So he may stay in for as long as Ted did, spending even more money to no end whatever, and looking with longing for X.
Trump has been able to stay in the lead because so many people are running against him, which means that the interests of the party at large run counter to the instincts of the runners inside it, which is to keep fighting as long as they can. Politicians are egoists, or they would not put themselves forward. They are extremely competitive, and they are gamblers by nature who feel that while they remain in the game new things can happen, but once they leave it the future is ended for good. Thus Trump’s biggest friends may be his opponents, as they stay in, hoping against hope that ‘X’ still may happen — and waiting for something to break.
Noemie Emery, a Washington Examiner columnist, is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and author of “Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families.”
