Last Week of the Campaign: Scooby-Doo at the Crossroads

Results of the 2016 Republican Presidential primary, after primaries of April 26 in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware, Connecticut and Rhode Island. Trump won every county in all five states, most of them by a solid majority. He thus garnered 118 bound delegates, as well as at least 39 or 40 (depending on the source) of the uncommitted elected delegates in Pennsylvania. This gives him at least 990-1000 solid votes at this point. Even if he loses Indiana, he now has plenty of slack to put him in the "red zone" going into June 7.  His ability to get his own delegates elected at the ballot box in Pennsylvania, despite clumsy attempts by his opponents to confuse Pennsylvanians, augurs well for him to do the same in West Virginia, which will give Cruz little quarter, if the map above is any indication of trends. As many have pointed out, we are now seeing the "bandwagon" effect where the second place guy will find it harder and harder to stay up with the front runner. How many ways can one state the obvious that Cruz is finished?

Last week of the campaign. The Democratic race was over last week. It is now a matter of figuring out how to let Bernie exit gracefully.

On the Republican side, Tuesday's results in the Northeast primary finished off Cruz. There was little doubt that it would, but the magnitude of the defeat, like the results in Staten Island, were a gut punch of cold reality to the Establishment-lackey media, whom we as a people are still permitting to "set the narrative," at least this one last time in American politics (apparently it is they themselves who must ultimately declare themselves to be irrelevant).

For one more week at least, Cruz is allowed to keep leading the Cruz-aders to the slaughter of defeat, which will most likely happen in a big way in Indiana, the perfect Crossroads of America once again.

On May 7, 1800, the United States Congress passed legislation to divide the Northwest Territory into two areas and named the western section the Indiana Territory. (wikipedia).

His picking of Fiorina as a Vice President is ghastly to behold in how farcical it makes him and his campaign look (there is a reason that one does not do this, this early in the cycle). Very few people are as good at shooting their feet off as Cruz.

Donald Trump seems to have this superpower: he gets people to believe that because he himself is "making mistakes", being crude, clumsy, and offensive, etc., that they are allowed to be that way in turn, with the same loosened rules, rhetoric and behavior. Usually they are not. No matter how many mistakes Donald Trump makes, he gets his opponents to make worse ones, ones that ultimately cause their own downfall.

Cruz is a beautiful example of this. His strategy to go state to state after each primary and caucus, to do the follow-up ground work to sway the delegates back to him, via the help of party insiders in each state, would have been the perfect tactic for winning the Republican nomination up until this election cycle.

Perhaps Cruz and his followers still legitimately expects to go into the convention with a majority of support from the delegates who will attend in Cleveland. He might actually achieve this.  He was told early on, by the the higher ups,* that he had the blessing to do this. Once at the convention, the strategy goes, they can rewrite the rules. Heck, they could make it so that Donald Trump is specifically prohibited from being nominated even on the first ballot, which then goes to scratch, and the house proceeds straightway to a second follow up vote that overwhelmingly makes Cruz the nominee. Sure, Trump would sue, etc., but by then it would be fait accompli.  The public and the media always wants to move on, and the challenger never has the mojo in these cases. Not surprisingly, the 2000 U.S. presidential election remains the textbook example of how this principle works.

If this were 2012, Cruz might have actually pulled it off. But of course Cruz would not have gotten this far in the past, without Trump having blown the whole process wide open, and letting Cruz sneak in as the last one standing for the Establishment.

Because this is not 2000 or even 2012, in the end this strategy will wind up counting for nothing, except to make Cruz look like a clumsy Scooby-Doo villain.

From Breitbart.

This is the way tyrants go down, by looking foolish in the eyes of history at some point. Respectable people suddenly want to look the other way. Cruz never got the chance to be a tyrant himself, but he willingly threw himself into the role of being the point man for the Establishment, right as it was going down in flames and tightening its grip on the throat of America. In a way, he is doing us a great service by showing how it actually worked all along.


*who have now mostly cut him loose, realizing he is not up to the task.