The Republican party establishment must be having sleepless nights over Donald Trump shooting to the top of the polls in their presidential primary. Pundits have been consoling them by suggesting that at some point Republican voters would tire of him and his numbers would come down and a candidate that is more acceptable to the party, such as Jeb Bush, would gain ascendancy.
However, they never gave a plausible reason for why voters would get disillusioned with Trump and he has maintained his lead now for four months and the realization is sinking in that they are stuck with him for the long haul.
The first signs of someone overtaking Trump has appeared but this must be an even worse nightmare for the party since a new Quinnipiac poll in Iowa shows Ben Carson with a 28%-20% lead over Trump. The party favorite Jeb Bush has dropped to sixth place with just 5%, tied with Carly Fiorina. The sample size was 574 with a margin of error of 4.1%.
Yes, the Republicans of Iowa think that Trump is not crazy enough for them and have gone with the more soft-spoken but weird nutcase. Carson is clearly a religious zealot with delusional ideas and it seems like there are enough Republicans out there for whom such a person is their dream candidate. So it looks like the people of Iowa favor someone who is a genuine crazy conservative over someone who might be just playing one on TV.
An NPR reporter talked to some people who attended a Carson event and they spoke of him like he was Jesus. Addy Earhart said that she was “shaken” and “nervous” just at the prospect of being in his vicinity. Kathy Yosten teared up when talking about him, saying “I love that man. He’s wonderful. He’s calm. He’s intelligent. I see a goodness in his eyes. He makes me feel safe.” Beverly Belew said, “Oh, my heart was racing just to see his face, to walk up there and his smile. He smiled at me, and he said, welcome. And I said, I love you, Dr. Carson.”
As the reporter said, the reaction was like a “teenage fan meeting a Taylor Swift or a One Direction”.
If the Republican party establishment was having sleepless nights over Trump, one can only imagine what they would go through if Carson becomes the solid front-runner everywhere.
Carson is baffling. Despite having started as a darling among the libertarians, allegedly for not being Mainstream, he sure does adopt a lot of socially regressive ideas. Despite being a very accomplished surgeon and a man who must be very intelligent, he regularly says stupid shit like any other Republican politician or pundit. And despite a fan base reacting to him like he is a charismatic messiah figure, he must be one of the least charismatic politicians I’ve ever seen. For fuck’s sake, he makes Ben Stein seem interesting.
Republicans Gone Wild: Q&A with Mann and Ornstein
Carson, at least judging by his coverage, speaks only about the “social” issues.
I so far see no reason to believe that, if elected by some fluke, he would not follow along with the standard Republican corporatist agenda on the economic matters central to what passes for the GOP heart.
“I see a goodness in his eyes.”
So that’s what their calling that look now…OK, I guess.
Republican nut-bag stupidity will never override Republican racism. There is no way in hell a black person can become the GOP nominee.
Title: The Republican party must be tearing its hair out
So we can expect that soon all the candidates will be wearing weird orange things on their heads?
@anteprepro(#1):
You don’t have to be smart to be what is essentially a mechanic for the human body.
What you need is a good memory (and yes that is usually correlated with being more intelligent), steady hands and a supreme confidence in your abilities since doubt can kill the person who you are repairing.
And that last one is what we see on full display. Dunning-Kruger on steroids due to the application of that self confidence of knowing what he does to subjects he does not know anything about. That self confidence in his own abilities is also the immovable object on which facts that don’t fit his world view splinter.
I can imagine an older Republican thinking that never in his whitest dreams did he think he was clawing his way up through the Klan, the John Birch Society, Citizen Counsel and Liberty Counsel politics, and up through the Tea party, to see them working to get a black man into office. The Southern Strategy worm has turned.
I guess if you’ve been raised to think of TV evangelists as your benchmark for “good”, it’s an easy mistake to make…