Plan B

I’m not a fan of neocon Bret Stephens at the WSJ, but his article on the GOP campaign is worth reading. He says that the GOP nominee is going to lose in November, and the reason is that the candidates who ran for the nomination were all unviable. His closing passage:

What should readers who despair of a second Obama term make of all this? Hope ObamaCare is repealed by the High Court, the Iranian bomb is repealed by the Israeli Air Force, and the Senate switches hands, giving America a healthy spell of Hippocratic government.

All perfectly plausible. And the U.S. will surely survive four more years. Who knows? By then maybe Republicans will have figured out that if they don’t want to lose, they shouldn’t run with losers.

That’s the heart of what I’m calling Plan B—that Obamacare is overthrown by the Supreme Court, rather than repealed by the Congress and a Republican president.

There’s one problem with Stephens’s analysis. The phrase, “they shouldn’t run with losers,” implies that the Republican Party gets together as a corporate body and chooses candidates for the nomination, so that if the candidates are all unsatisfactory, that is the party’s false, and, therefore, in the words of the article’s title, “The GOP Deserves to Lose.” But that’s not the way it happens. Since John F. Kennedy’s candidacy in 1960 and the adoption of the universal primary system starting in 1972, candidates for a party’s nomination are self-chosen. There is no consensus of party elders that so-and-so is our best man, we’ll tap him as our nominee.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 26, 2012 09:05 AM | Send