Design for failure

Why the Republicans may be doomed

Jeb Bush and the GOP Donor Problem

“He’s the most desired candidate out there,” said another bundler, Brian Ballard, who sat on the national finance committees for Romney in 2012 and John McCain in 2008. “Everybody that I know is excited about it.”

When i read that i thought of Sen. Everett Dirksen remonstrating Gov. Tom Dewey (and two-time loser in presidential races): "We followed you before, and you took us down the path of defeat!".

What is that definition of insanity again?

One quibble. Jeff Lord writes:

The hard political fact of life inside the GOP is that the base sees Establishment Republicans, as exemplified in that Post story about donors pushing for Jeb Bush, not as the solution but rather as part of the problem. They see a GOP consultant class whose main aim is making money regardless of whom they elect — contributing either way to exacerbating America’s Big Government addiction.

I think the problem is even worse. For many consultants, the issue isn't that they make money electing moderates. On the contrary, the bigger problem is that they can make a lot of money working for candidates who are doomed to lose. What matters is not electoral viability but fund-raising ability. Consultants are drawn to Meg Whitman of E-Bay, not to Sarah Palin, small town mayor with grassroots support.

G. B. Shaw:

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

G. K. Chesterton:

But assuredly there has been no ideal in practice so moonstruck and misleading as the ideal of practicality. Nothing has lost so many opportunities as the opportunism of Lord Rosebery. He is, indeed, a standing symbol of this epoch-- the man who is theoretically a practical man, and practically more unpractical than any theorist. Nothing in this universe is so unwise as that kind of worship of worldly wisdom. A man who is perpetually thinking of whether this race or that race is strong, of whether this cause or that cause is promising, is the man who will never believe in anything long enough to make it succeed. The opportunist politician is like a man who should abandon billiards because he was beaten at billiards, and abandon golf because he was beaten at golf. There is nothing which is so weak for working purposes as this enormous importance attached to immediate victory. There is nothing that fails like success.

Heretics

Related:

Metrocons in a nutshell