I can’t help but imagine the panicked reaction of the Republican establishment as they watch this all unravel. Surely the wiser among them realize their own responsibility for what is happening. Surely they know that this is their own plan gone awry.
They were the ones who decided decades ago that their grip on power could best be maintained by appealing to the worst instincts of its electorate. They were the ones who decided that with his name, race and background, Barack Obama offered the perfect opportunity for taking that strategy up to a fevered pitch.
Thanks to them, Obama wasn’t allowed to be just another mainstream Democratic president, an honorable American whose ideas and policies were mistaken, at least as viewed from the GOP perspective. No. He was a foreign-born usurper who meant to “fundamentally transform” America in nefarious ways; he would destroy the country as we have known it, crumble the Constitution into a wad of paper to be tossed in the trash, and turn white people into the most persecuted majority group in the land unless patriotic, right-thinking Republicans could rally to stop him.
Yet stop him they could not. Obamacare passed and still stands, he raised taxes on the wealthy, we have a treaty with Iran that has ended its nuclear program and an economy that was losing 800,000 jobs a month when he took office now boasts an unemployment rate below 5 percent.
To top it all off, in 2012 the American people re-elected Obama. Today, Gallup puts Obama’s job approval rating at 48 percent, comparable to that of Ronald Reagan at the same point in his second term (50 percent) and far better than George W. Bush (32 percent). Not bad for a Kenyan anti-colonialist.
So of course the GOP electorate is angry. The party leadership and its propaganda machine sold them a narrative of a nation betrayed from within, teetering on the brink of collapse, then they neglected to give the story a happy ending. They needed a hero, someone to ride in and vanquish the villain, and John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, Mitt Romney and the rest proved to be spectacularly ill-cast for such a role.
Enter Donald Trump, a man whose head expands enough to fill any vacuum.
Trump will do well in Tuesday’s voting. He’s up by 10 points here in Georgia; in Massachusetts he’s up 34. In Alabama he’s up 20, up six in Virginia. After Super Tuesday comes Michigan, where Trump is up by 20. There’s no firewall in any of those states, only dry tinder to feed the flames.
The real day of decision is now March 15, the date of the Florida primary. Florida will be the first state on the calendar that awards all 99 of its delegates to the outright winner of its primary. It is also the home state of Marco Rubio, the sole remaining candidate with any hope of halting Trump, the apple-cheeked boy upon whom the establishment is placing its hopes.
The latest polling in Florida gives Trump 44 percent of the GOP vote, compared to 28 percent for Rubio. If that’s not reversed in the next two weeks, if Rubio loses, he also loses any credibility as a viable alternative and the nomination is decided. Florida, the land of the hanging chad, will be the last stand of the GOP establishment.
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