Disclaimer of the Day
An amusing lede to an exasperating column.
George Will‘s latest WaPo column is titled “Tim Scott, please drop out, urge others to follow and unite behind Haley.”
It begins,
Disclosure: The columnist’s wife, Mari Will, an adviser to Republican presidential candidate Sen. Tim Scott (S.C.), disagrees with this column.
One imagines not.
As to the column, the idea is hardly novel:
By catalyzing a coalescence around Haley, Scott could transform the nation’s political mood. As long as the Republican race pits Donald Trump against a cluster of lagging pursuers, the nominating electorate cannot ponder a binary choice. When, however, it is Trump against one experienced, polished, steely and unintimidated adversary, voters can internalize this exhilarating reality: There is a choice suitable for a great nation.
The problems for this suggestion are manifold.
First, it’s not at all obvious why Haley would be the default normie Republican. She’s barely registering in the polls. To be sure, Scott is doing even worse. But the campaign has barely started and few seem to be paying much attention to the non-Trump, non-DeSantis candidates.
Second, Trump is currently at 58%. Even if all the other candidates joined Will Hurd in dropping out, endorsed Haley, and managed to persuade their nominal backers that Haley was the one, that would put here at 42%—still way behind.
Third, this ignores DeSantis and Ramaswamy, who hold the second and third spots in the polls—way behind Trump but also ahead of Haley. Even if Pence, Christie, Burgum, and Hutchinson went along with the Will-Scott gambit, there’s no reason on earth that the two non-normie, non-Trumps would.
Additionally, Will posits,
Scott could mercifully end the candidates’ miserable “debates,” which are caricatures of real ones and diminish everyone involved. (In the Lincoln-Douglas debates, one spoke for an hour, the other for 90 minutes, then the first speaker delivered a 30-minute answer.) More 60-second simplicities about complexities will benefit only the nonparticipating candidate, who has time on his side.
Granting the non-debate nature of the so-called “debates,” the chief reason they’re so embarrassing this go-around is that the candidates are going out of their way to appeal to a rabid base. You know, the Republican nominating electorate, who have Trump at 58% and two Trump-like figures at 13.2% and 7.8%. That’s, um, 79%. How Haley gets the nomination with the other 21% is not obvious to me.
But let’s just assume she does, for funsies.
She would be heavily favored against the fast-fading President Biden. So, if her nomination becomes likely, Democratic panic might produce what Democratic prudence evidently will not: a 2024 ticket other than one joining someone no longer fit for the presidency with someone who never will be fit.
It is true that a handful of polls have Haley with a modest advantage over Biden, with an average margin of 4.3. Indeed, no poll that’s less than six weeks old shows him with an advantage. Then again, not many companies are bothering to poll this incredibly unlikely matchup.
Might have worked in 2016. Too late now.
Steve
We really should have term limits for pundits. With all due respect to George Will, who’s had his good times without question, they really should pack it in after about 10 or 12 years. I can think of many others who are coasting on reputations gained in past decades.
@Not the IT Dept.:
Sadly, by the time you get to be famous, you’ve already done your best work.
George Will, please resign, urge others to follow and unite behind truth.
Hahahahahahaha…
This is before the following sets in:
I’d love to be proven wrong, but the misogyny in this country runs deep and I’ve heard this all too many times–from people in BOTH parties–to think that it’s magicked away just because she’s a Republican.
Will is properly disgusted by Trump, but it’s more than a bit naive for him to assume that (1) Tim Scott’s endorsement carries any kind of heft, and (2) that Nikki Haley can do the 180 degree turn it would take to convince rational people that all the crazy talk in the primaries was just white noise. Like so many others, Will fires the “Biden is too old” bullet and is then out of ammunition in his argument that Biden is no longer fit to be president. George’s wistful columns of today take him back to when he was coaching George W for debates with Al Gore and then, without disclosing his connection to the Bush campaign, would write columns on Bush’s stellar debate performance.
Mr. Will is clearly no longer fit for the pundincy. He’s not aware of his surroundings and lives in an imaginary 1980s.
In 2011, George Will claimed that the person taking the oath of office in 2013 would be Barack Obama, Tim Pawlenty, or Mitch Daniels. Of course technically this prediction turned out to be accurate as Obama won a second term, but his analysis of the 2012 Republican primaries was laughably off. Pawlenty’s campaign never went anywhere and he dropped out by Aug. 2011, and Mitch Daniels never even entered the race. But Will not only thought these two were the strongest Republican contenders, he didn’t give Romney even a fighting chance.
Anyone who thinks Will is only losing it now wasn’t paying attention. He’s always lived in an ivory tower, but he got a lot of unearned praise because (like his idol William F. Buckley) he knew how to sound intellectual and pretend to be distancing himself from the extremists within his party.
I remember when people were trying to draft Colin Powel as a republican candidate for president. Some pundit, can’t remember who, made the observation that the reason Powell was so popular is because his policy preferences were simply not known. The piece ended with the pundit making the pithy statement, ” Powell’s popularity will drop 50% after taking his first question as a presidential candidate, “what is your stance on abortion”.
For a lot of people the dividing line between a moderate and MAGA is, “… do you think the election was stolen”?
I understand that the two questions are not the same in impact or in history (early in the 21st century vs now), but you are ether in the tank for Trump (most Republicans even if they believe it or not), or your Chris Christy (or one of the other candidates hardly registering candidates who are coming clean on that question). Fealty to Trump seems to be all but universal among Republicans where it’s a sincere belief or calculated. Steve above is right, “Might have worked in 2016. Too late now.”
The fact is you are on the Trump train or you are no one in the Republican party.
The other problem for the Republicans is that if Trump is not on the ballot for whatever exotic reason you can think of, there will be a lot of Trump voters who will stay home because “the fix is in”, and Biden wins comfortably (I also think keeping Trump off the ballot in one or two states is a loser overall for Democrats because it will add to Trump voter energy. No proof here; just my opinion.).
That is what the Republican party is terrified of. Without Trump there is no energy among the base. This is also the reason I hate the popularity contest that presidential races have become. It’s nice to have a charismatic leader, but charisma is only a useful trait for getting elected, it does not suggest leadership competence.
I feel like Will has written a number of similarly absurd columns things about the nomination process over the years (decades?). Despite his Ph.D. in political science (issued the year I was born, and I am no spring chicken) he does not understand a lot about basic electoral dynamics (or, at least, his writing does not betray any such knowledge).
@Kylopod:
I think that that is a lot to this, TBH.
@Steven L. Taylor: Although I would amend: he sounds like he lives in an ivory tower, but actually very much lives in the world of media (albeit, one that has evolved beyond him, for good or ill).
Living in a Midwestern college town, I’m in my own bubble. But if Haley somehow got the nomination, I think she easily cleans Biden’s clock and becomes the first female President. I might as well say it because I won’t be proven wrong (or right).
Part of my convoluted reasoning is I think the House is going back to the Democrats and the American people love split government.
@Not the IT Dept.:
I realize Will got a Pulitzer. But I started reading him on and off when he joined Newsweek in the mid 70s. The first time I read a column of his was because I glanced at the byline and thought it was Gary Wills. Wills did thorough research and applied Jesuitical (literally, he was so trained) reasoning. I got three paragraphs in and was wondering what had happened to him, maybe early Alzheimer’s. Then I realized it was Will, not Wills. The classic was a column, I swear I’m not making this up, in which Will argued at length that the new volunteer Army was having trouble recruiting, particularly in technical specialties. Went on for some time about their personnel shortage, and concluded they should NOT recruit women. A logical head snap there at the end. Will was a fatuous twit in his prime.
Have I mentioned the old study that showed financial success for pundits is inversely correlated with prediction accuracy. George is a very financially successful pundit. But at least he seems to have realized his AGW denial was a lost cause.
Story idea: a djinn or some other magic creature reads a pundit’s column, and is very impressed by the wisdom of it. They read several more columns by the pundit, maybe some or all of their books as well, and their impression of great wisdom gets reinforced.
So they decide to use their power to grant the pundit what they wish for in their subsequent columns. For instance, the djinn would get Scott to drop out and throw his support behind Haley.
Of course, the results will not be as the pundit predicted. And of course the djinn would then double down, then triple down, etc., never getting the expected results from this incomparable wisdom, until there’s a climax that forces a denouement and then an ending.
ETA: this sounds a lot like one of Asimov’s Azazel stories. George would be far easier to impress, and the tiny demon would know granting the pundit’s wishes would be a bad idea.
@Franklin:
This might have been true pre-Dobbs. I don’t think she, or any Republican, can triangulate their way out of their own abortion disaster. She would be forced into a bunch of out-right lies that she wouldn’t be able to prevaricate out of.
@Franklin:
This might have been true pre-Dobbs. I don’t think she, or any Republican, can triangulate their way out of their own abortion disaster. She would be forced into a bunch of out-right lies that she wouldn’t be able to prevaricate out of.
My opinion on Mr. Wills was formed in his Newsweek days, and hasn’t improved since.
1. Boy, I sure wish I had a couple of keys of whatever he’s smoking.
2. They gave a Pulitzer to this maroon?
I realize that this is somewhat off-track but …
Before he, Tucker Carlson, went off the rails I used to think that he could be George Will’s son. No, really – both have elite prep school educations, both attended Trinity College in Connecticut, both regularly wear starchy bowties.
Early on Will burnished his ‘man of the people’ credentials by revealing to us, whenever possible, that he is a big fan of Major League Baseball and of the Chicago Cubs in particular. That was almost enough to make me want to move to Chicago for a year and buy a Chicago White Sox season ticket package.
Let me finish by saying that Tim Scott is becoming very cringe-y. I can only surmise that Tim is running for Vice President. George is right about one thing – Tim should drop out.
@Rick DeMent:
It was a mixture of memories of Eisenhower, combined with Powell’s being black and potentially peeling away black support from the Democratic Party.
Now, it isn’t totally true that his policy preferences were unknown–certainly nowhere near to the degree of Eisenhower in 1952 (where it wasn’t even known which party he favored up to that point). He was known to be pro-choice and pro-affirmative action. (Or did he reveal those things only after he announced he wasn’t running? I can’t remember.) Why Powell never entered the race could be because he just wasn’t interested in the job, but it also could be that he correctly discerned he didn’t stand a chance of winning the GOP nomination.
Before leaving the subject of ridiculous, out-of-touch predictions about future nominees, I still get amusement at Dick Morris’s 2005 book >Condi vs. Hillary: The Coming Fight.
@Kylopod:
I am not going to Google this, but I wonder if Powell’s race had less to do with why he might not have been elected President than some stuff from his past in the military that could have been used against him. I seem to remember articles tarring the reputation of Powell because he was in Vietnam and an officer who was aware of the nasty event that was the Mail Lai Massacre. Wait…I did google, and yes, his name comes up in articles discussing this shameful event in our Military’s past.
He was running pre-Trump, so folks might have actually cared about this and such a connection to a sordid event in the past having a light shined on it would have hurt his chances at the ballot box.
Despite Obama’s skin color, his chances to be elected were certainly enhanced precisely because he was a bit of a cypher (I used that term right in this instance, yes?), as James was oftentimes reminding us that he did not have a lot of experience as a Politician swimming in D.C.’s shark-infested waters, there was not much to use against him other than his running for President while black.
Sure, I believe some folks tried to make hay that he smoked weed and inhaled (lol), but Obama was running right around the time folks (on both sides of the political aisle) were starting to roll their eyes at the pearl clutchers’ who were aghast that some adults smoked weed now and in their youth.
The Republican party is not going to nominate a gay Black man, or an Indian-American man, or an Indian-American woman. Scott, Ramaswamy and Haley are window dressing for a deeply racist, homophobic, White supremacist party. They will nominate a White man. Almost certainly a White man named Trump. Will and his wife are deluded.
@Rick DeMent:
As I said way back in 2015, Trump IS the Republican Party, meaning that he is the most perfect representation of what committed Republican voters want. Trump didn’t lead the Party anywhere, he merely expressed their desires in the most primal and atavistic way possible. The idea that, absent Trump, someone like Haley or Larry Hogan or any semi-normal human being would appeal to voters is laughable. The only chance for that to happen is for Trump to drop out and tell his voters to sit home leaving 20-30% of the primary voters to chose from the randos.
@Michael Reynolds:
Will might be deluded, or just writing his usual column as the “sane, clear eyed Republican” character he has always assumed and that keeps him lucratively employed on the Republican Billionaire Boys Club speaking network. But that seems unfair to his wife, who I assume is getting paid. In that case delusion doesn’t really enter into it. If political advisors only worked for people they agreed with and that they felt had a shot then there would be 99% fewer political advisors.
@inhumans99:
I don’t buy this argument. If that were the case, we’d have had a black president a long time ago. Nobody saw Obama’s rise coming, and the conventional wisdom up to that point was that it would be at least a while before we saw one.
Part of the reason was the issue of experience. When people talk about experience for presidential candidates, usually this means people who have served as governor or Senator–two offices where blacks have been wildly underrepresented. Obama was just the fifth black Senator in history, and the third since Reconstruction. There’d only been two black governors since Reconstruction up to that point, the second one of whom (Deval Patrick) had just been elected a couple of months earlier.
Another factor was that black presidential candidates had a history of being written off as outside the mainstream, and that was a perception Obama had to work hard to overcome, as there was a concerted effort by the Republicans as well as the Hillary campaign to paint Obama as a radical. It’s why the Rev. Wright controversy blew up like it did, whereas white candidates almost never have to answer for the bizarre things their pastors have said in church. One of Palin’s pastors was quoted as saying “God is going to strike his hand against the United States of America.” Why didn’t that receive the same attention as “God damn America”? Why was Palin never called upon to denounce it?
One of my favorite SNL skits about Obama was this animated one from 2008 where Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton keep trying to attach themselves to the Obama campaign, and he keeps trying to find ways to get rid of them (such as sending them on missions to imaginary African countries).
Anyone who’s read Dreams from my Father knows Obama is deeply interested in the subject of race, yet he hardly said a word about it during the campaign, unless he was forced to. He hardly even talked about making history as the first black president–which is about the most uncontroversial thing he could have said on the topic. In contrast, Hillary talked repeatedly about becoming the first woman president. Even Sarah Palin talked about breaking the glass ceiling with her candidacy. Why did Obama avoid it? To make himself seem less threatening to white America, I’d argue.
It’s amazing to me that however unlikely Obama’s rise was, and how much a tightrope act he had to walk to get there, people still try to treat it in hindsight like it was somehow inevitable.
@inhumans99:
There was a fair amount of commentary at the time that this was the case, that with little history he caught the Republican character assassination team flat footed. And they had a lot of trouble figuring out how to exploit his race. Pre-Trump they were still afraid of pissing off the soccer moms if they got too obvious.
@Jen: I hear ya, and I’m not saying you’re wrong.
AND, I think the first woman to be elected president of the US will be conservative. It just seems less scary to many, in my estimation. A conservative can be more hawkish without raising questions, and so on.
I say this as someone who has proudly voted for a woman (who is not conservative) for president on multiple occasions.
@Michael Reynolds:
I think you underestimate just how stupid Ramaswamy is — that’s something that can really appeal to the base. He’s chock full of simple solutions to complicated problems.
@Jay L Gischer:
I’ve long said this too. However, I’ve been shocked at how…punitive conservative women are when it comes to voting for one of their own for president. I’ve heard nasty barbs coming from Republican women directed at Nikki Haley, Kristy Noem, Condi Rice…there’s always, always some kind of asterisk following even cautiously positive statements. It’s astonishing.
I’m no longer as certain as I once was that a Republican woman is electable. The standards are impossible.
1) Will is right: Haley has the best chance of any of the normies (there was an RCV poll last week that showed she’d be second to Trump) and has probably the best chance in the general.
2) But there is zero chance she’d win the nomination. Even head-to-head, she loses to Trump by 20 points. Because the base loves Trump more than they like winning.
FWIW, and just for the record, I think there is a non-zero possibility that Trumps drops out or is seriously incapacitated before primary season. I don’t think it is likely, but he is an out of shape, angry, permanently stressed out man who IMHO has been regularly abusing prescription meds for decades. The odds of him having a serious health incident are not insignificant. Significantly more likely than Bide, I would think.
@Michael Reynolds: “Will and his wife are deluded.”
Will is deluded. His wife is getting paid.
@Jen:
True.
And same is true about many liberal men and Democratic women. No longer shocked, I just alternate between bemusment and nausea.