Will Elites Blow Up the GOP?

“Buchanan, if you ever hear of a group getting together to stop X, be sure to put your money on X.”

So, Richard Nixon told me half a century ago, after he had been badly burned in just such a futile and failed enterprise.

It was the Cleveland Governors Conference of 1964.

Sen. Barry Goldwater had just defeated Gov. Nelson Rockefeller in the final and decisive winner-take-all primary in California.

As the story is told, Stu Spencer, Rocky’s man in California, had come to his candidate and said, “Governor, I think it’s time to call in the Eastern establishment.”After eight deadlocked ballots in a three-way contest, that Baltimore convention turned to a “dark horse,” Speaker James K. Polk, who promised immediate annexation of Texas by the United States and that he would take us to war with Mexico to guarantee it.

With the two-thirds rule dead, the only way to have a convention without a nominee on the first ballot is a three- or four-way split in delegates.

But assume at the GOP convention in Cleveland that Trump runs first, Ted Cruz second, Marco Rubio third and Ben Carson fourth.

Rather than wait for Karl Rove & Co. to tell us whom the party shall nominate, Trump would phone Cruz, offer him second spot on the ticket in return for his delegates, and if Cruz declined, ask for Rubio’s phone number.

Candidates who have gone through a yearlong campaign, and sustained the defeats and suffered the abuse, are not going to let a Beltway cabal decide the nominee.

Carson has already warned he will walk away from the party if such a decision were imposed upon the convention.

Moreover, the old establishments are dead. Conservatives killed the GOP establishment in 1964. The Vietnam War and George McGovern killed the Democratic establishment in 1972.

What is left are elites, collectives of officeholders past and present, donors, lobbyists, think-tankers angling for jobs, party hacks and talking heads.

What the Republican collectivity has to realize is that it is they and the policies they produced that are the reason Trump, Carson and Cruz currently hold an overwhelming majority of Republican votes.

It was the elites of both parties who failed to secure our borders and brokered the trade deals that have de-industrialized America and eviscerated our middle class.

It was the elites of both parties who got us into these idiotic wars that have blown up the Middle East, cost us trillions of dollars, thousands of dead, and tens of thousands of wounded among our best and bravest.

That Republican elites would sit around a dinner table on Capitol Hill and discuss how to frustrate the rising rebellion against what they have done to America, and decide among themselves who shall lead us, is astonishing.

To borrow from the Gipper, they are not the solution to our problems. They are the problem.

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