- BitsBlog - https://bitsblog.com -

The Establishment Still Doesn’t Understand

One of the people I consider to be always worth reading is Don Surber.

He gets it mostly right here [1].

As The Donald laps the Republican field, commentators offer a variety of reasons for his popularity: He is a demagogue, a celebrity, an exploiter of anger, and supported by a bunch of nimrods.

Let’s put the name-calling aside for a moment and look at the fact that this is not a very good field of candidates. Doctor Ben Carson is in third-place in the daily Reuters Poll [2]. Think about that. He is a brain surgeon, true, but he has never run anything larger than a department in a hospital, and is woefully behind in foreign policy. He has shown an inability to articulate his beliefs in an effective manner in five debates now. His campaign is in a shambles. But he is in third place in the Reuters Poll.

image [3]

Forget Donald Trump. What does it say about such seasoned and polished political veterans like Jeb Bush, Mike Huckabee and Chris Christie that they are being whacked by a neophyte in the polls?

image [4]

Yes, I get that the voters are pissed with the Establishment. Yes, I get that Trump is sucking all the air out of the room. Yes, I get that it is a weird year. But what I do not get is how an inexperienced and poor candidate named Ben Carson is ahead of them. John Kasich scored so low that he did not even make the top 10 (beaten out by “wouldn’t vote,” who finished fifth).

Every single one Republican candidate has had a year to establish himself (or herself in the case of Carly Fiorina) as the front-runner. If at this point “wouldn’t vote” is beating you, the time has come to cast your ego aside and pull the plug on your campaign because you ain’t the next Reagan; you’re Al Haig. There is nothing wrong with being Al Haig, a four-star general. You just ain’t gonna be president.

This election is becoming a referendum on Donald Trump. He may not be a giant. He might not be even average height. But he stands tall in this field — most of whom cannot beat Ben Carson.

The only reason that I can see that Surber is unable to determine why person is beating up on the entirety of the GOP establishment, is a lack of understanding of just how disconnected the voters are from said GOP establishment.

Amongst those disconnected from the GOP establishment comma in fact the majority of them, are people who simply don’t vote anymore, not having anyone to vote for.

The polling from the last few cycles, tells the story…The vast majority of Americans come down to the right of anything either party has puked up since Reagan. Which in turn is why most Americans no longer vote, feeling there is nobody to vote FOR. “I’m not Team D” isn’t enough to get out the vote…. the people are smarter than that.

Yet, we elect Democrats. Why? Well, ignoring vote fraud, which is another topic altogether, the answer is simple… there are no conservatives to vote for. So, the majority don’t vote, not wanting to sign their name to either liberal, or liberal lite as represented by today’s GOP.

Those that still do vote come down in the area of the radical left, which explains both congress and Obama. Though I note with satisfaction some disenchantment there. That disenchantment is totally understandable given the quality of the only two viable candidates in the Democrat crowd. Hillary Clinton, whose negatives are running in the high 60’s, and Bernie Sanders, likely the only candidate in the country who could actually come down to the left of the much despised Hillary Clinton.

I say again, there is no winning elections for the GOP, as a rule, unless and until they start offering real conservatives to vote for. And it is America that loses when the GOP fails to offer real conservatives on the ballot.

This is by no means to suggest that Trump, or Carson for that matter, are principled conservatives. What it does mean, is that they fill that role better than anything the GOP establishment has coughed up.