Plenty of Republicans have been lamenting their party’s nomination of “the one guy who cannot beat the historically unpopular Hillary Clinton,” but Salon’s Gary Legum thinks they’re assuming facts not in evidence. In a Friday article, Legum indicated that Hillary would have been a prohibitive favorite against anyone the GOP might have chosen.
For one thing, he argued, the Republicans’ so-called deep bench was a mirage. He dismissed the major non-Trump candidates one by one, starting with Ted Cruz (“whose family literally thought he was called by God to become the president”) then moving on to Marco Rubio (“a feather duster in a suit”); Chris Christie (“a loudmouthed bully and walking New Jersey stereotype”); Jeb Bush (who suffered from a “lack of charisma and seeming disinterest in the job”) as well as John Kasich, Scott Walker, and the rest. Legum stated that “none of these candidates had much in the way of policies to offer. What they had was a sense of grievance and anger.”
Legum claimed that it’s “silly” for Republicans to hanker for a Hillary-slayer given that “the GOP that would have nominated such a candidate does not exist. It has not existed for years.” He continued (bolding added):
Why pretend that a candidate with more mainstream appeal could have come out of a primary season where he or she had to appeal to the basest instincts of the party?
The GOP that does exist…has spent decades feeding its base a diet of angry rhetoric and personal attacks, instead of honest attempts at governance. It is a party that has spent 25 years hitting Hillary Clinton with dishonest attacks, driving down her favorability ratings even while alleged scandal after alleged scandal petered out into nothing…
For the GOP to nominate someone capable of beating Hillary Clinton in 2016, it would have had to have been a completely different GOP since at least 1992. And if that GOP existed, Clinton would not be a weak and unpopular figure, because she would not have spent 25 years being hit with every ridiculous charge under the sun. So you can’t assume she would be losing this campaign.
The New Republic’s Brian Beutler did a similar piece on Friday in which he acknowledged, “Trump is a uniquely bad candidate. But…this election was never going to be a cinch for the GOP…Even if Trump had never entered the race, the nominee would still have had to prevail in the Republican primary, a process that entails appealing to the same ethno-nationalist base that Trump fully embraced.”
Beutler sees Trump’s rise as historically rooted, “a product of [the GOP’s] political culture,” adding that even though “it was hard to see in real time,” Mitt Romney “lost [the 2012] race before the general election had even begun. The internal politics of his party were just that toxic. Clinton is decidedly not Obama, but any qualified Democrat would stand a good chance of beating the nominee of a party as sick as that.”
