Conservative columnist George Will is urging the GOP electorate to stop “treating the presidency as an entry-level job,” and says candidates like New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie should be taken more seriously in the wake of the Paris attacks.
“Paris was for all Americans, but especially for Republicans, a summons to seriousness that should have two immediate impacts on the Republican presidential contest,” Will wrote Wednesday evening in his latest column for The Washington Post.
Up until now, Will suggests Republicans have used their own party’s nominating contest to send “a message to Washington.” However, the deadly attacks by radical Islamic terrorists in France last Friday should “cause Republicans to take another look at Chris Christie, beginning with his speech in Florida the day after the Paris attacks,” he wrote, referring to the governor’s passionate and unscripted remarks at the 2015 Sunshine Summit last Saturday.
Just hours after the Paris attacks, the former prosecutor told voters in Florida that the U.S. “must never allow this cult of evil to take hold.”
“It is the antithesis of what it means to be a free America,” Christie said at the time.
“[N]o candidate in the Republican field can match Christie’s combination of a prosecutor’s bearing and a governor’s executive temperament,” Will opined.
Will also noted that Americans’ “heightened security concerns might be Christie’s opportunity” to re-emerge as a top-tier candidate in the GOP field. For much of his candidacy, Christie has polled in the middle of the Republican pack. He is currently sixth in the Washington Examiner’s presidential power rankings and earns 2.3 percent support among Republican voters, according to polling data by RealClearPolitics.
WIll also said that as chaos consumes the Middle East and Americans grow increasingly fearful of a domestic terror attack, Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton is likely to become less popular among the electorate.
“The more disorderly the world becomes, the less luminous is the one credential that supposedly qualifies Hillary Clinton for the presidency. The credential is not her adequate but unremarkable eight-year Senate career. Rather, it is her four years as secretary of State,” he wrote.
Will added that the Republican party, too, becomes less credible when it “claim[s] to represent what the country craves — adult supervision,” but fails to behave as adults in its own primary process.
“Fortunately, sufficient days remain for Republicans to reshuffle the deck, to relegate [Donald] Trump’s rampaging to the nation’s mental attic, and to recognize in Christie a serious political talent,” he wrote.
