IS THE GOP ESTABLISHMENT PREPARING NOT TO FIGHT FOR THE WHITE HOUSE IF NEWT IS NOMINATED?
In this discussion between Ezra Klein and Steve Benen about whether the GOP establishment has the ability to deny Newt Gingrich the party's presidential nomination, I agree with Steve.
Ezra writes:
There’s just no way the Republican establishment lets Gingrich become their nominee. As Andrew Sullivan pointed out today, you're already seeing the anti-Gingrich mobilization among conservative thought leaders: Here's George Will, Charles Krauthammer, David Brooks, Ross Douthat, Tom Coburn and Ann Coulter, just for starters. There's this Politico story about all the Washington Republicans who hate Gingrich.
Now, I think it's more likely that this mobilization leads to a Romney win then a brokered convention or a new entrant. But I think it makes a Gingrich win almost impossible to imagine.
Steve adds an obvious name missing from Ezra's list -- Karl Rove -- but then disagrees with Ezra:
...I'm not convinced. There's no doubt that the party's establishment really does hate Gingrich, and has for quite a while....
But ... I'm not altogether sure the Republican establishment has the wherewithal to exert its will over the process.
He cites Sharron Angle's primary win, and Christine O'Donnell's. I think he's right -- the voter base is crazy; the insiders can't necessarily control the outcome.
Which leads to two possibilities: either these folks disagree with Steve and me, and are 100% certain they can stop Gingrich, or they're willing to have him as the nominee with no establishment support -- in other words, in that eventuality they plan to treat him as a tainted nominee, a David Duke or Alvin Greene, and just dissociate themselves from him.
I say this because the rush of pundit panic really looks coordinated -- I think the establishment has asked everyone available, all the people Ezra named, to contribute to this effort, stat. Which means the bridge to the party's possible nominee is burned.
And maybe the establishment just doesn't care.
Some of you will say the establishment doesn't care because Barack Obama has been as Republican a president as the GOP could ask for. I very much disagree with that -- he's pushing some things forward in a liberal direction and he's holding the line on others.
But to the GOP, maybe he seems manageable. The GOP thinks it knows how to contain him, and how to push him back. The GOP also knows how to use him as a foil. So maybe defeating him doesn't seem worthwhile, if it means trying to defeat him with the unpredictable Gingrich. Better to see this as a long war and try again with, say, the more biddable Marco Rubio or Chris Christie or Nikki Haley or Paul Ryan in 2016.
It could be that; it could just be a hubristic sense that they can stop Gingrich. Either way, they clearly aren't trying very hard to avoid a situation in which the nastiest quotes aimed at nominee Newt in the general election came from fellow Republicans.
