If Jeb Bush’s people are to be believed (I guess Jeb Bush still has people), candidates Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio and John Kasich requested meetings with him in Florida this past week. The meetings with Cruz and Rubio already happened, and the one with Kasich is supposedly coming up.
I’m not so sure the candidates requested this. It sounds more to me like the latest attempt by the Republican establishment to find a way to stop Donald Trump, and for whatever reason I guess they think Jeb is the man for the job. He ran such an effective campaign, after all!
Much of the noise we’re hearing concerns something of a “chaos” strategy that keeps all three non-Trump candidates in the race as long as possible in an attempt to deny Trump the 1,237 delegates he would need to capture the nomination. The theory, I guess, is that Rubio can take Florida’s 99 delegates, Kasich can take Ohio's 66 delegates, and a variety of other things can happen that would leave Trump short of 1,237 heading into the convention.
The reason that’s important is that delegates pledged as a result of primary results are only bound to their candidate on the first convention ballot. For example, since Trump won South Carolina’s winner-take-all primary, all 50 South Carolina delegates are bound to vote for him whether they are actually Trump supporters or not – but only on the first ballot. After that, if the people who got elected to those delegate slots actually prefer someone else, they are free to change their votes.
So the GOP establishment figures that as long as they can keep Trump under 1,237 pledged delegates coming out of the primaries and caucuses, they can deny him a majority on the first convention ballot and then then broker the votes on subsequent ballots to give the nomination to someone else.
As usual, the establishment doesn’t get it. If you don’t want Donald Trump to be your nominee, why don’t you try actually beating him at the ballot box? That requires you to take your case to the people, and the GOP establishment rarely shows much interest in that, nor do they have much success with it when they do. They would rather send in people like Jeb Bush to manipulate results behind the scenes so they can cut deals and set things up for someone they can control.
Oh, and don’t think for a minute that if it gets to that point, they'd be getting behind Ted Cruz. He is the one candidate still in the race who has a shot at catching and surpassing Trump’s delegate count via the ballot box. But the establishment doesn’t like or trust him either because he is committed to limited government and constitutional conservatism. They would rather broker the convention to give us another Mitt Romney or John McCain or Bob Dole – candidates with whom the establishment is comfortable, and who also lose.
If Republicans would like to win a presidential election for a change, they’re going to need to start listening to what the people are saying. Those who back Trump are tired of politicians talking about things and never doing them. They’re also tired of the establishment assuring us that they can defeat the Democrats by nominating milquetoast moderates who will be acceptable to the news media. That never works. And we are not going to keep Hillary out of the White House by following the lead of GOP Nervous Nellies who are aghast by the will of the people.
Jeb Bush can’t solve anything. He proved that beyond a shadow of a doubt during his sad campaign. The Republican Party has to hear the people and let it be known that their concerns are its top priority. If they won’t do that, they will lose and they will deserve to lose.
The problem with that is that the nation doesn’t deserve the horror of four years of Hillary Clinton just because the GOP establishment lacked courage, conviction or wisdom.
If Jeb Bush’s people are to be believed (I guess Jeb Bush still has people), candidates Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio and John Kasich requested meetings with him in Florida this past week. The meetings with Cruz and Rubio already happened, and the one with Kasich is supposedly coming up.
I’m not so sure the candidates requested this. It sounds more to me like the latest attempt by the Republican establishment to find a way to stop Donald Trump, and for whatever reason I guess they think Jeb is the man for the job. He ran such an effective campaign, after all!
