Oh, GOP. Do you do this only to entertain the rest of us?
From The Hill's pundit columns, I've read this four or five times now, and I still can't figure out if it's satire.
I don't think it is.
This race could well go to a brokered convention. If Jeb Bush is proposed, so Sarah Palin should be minutes later. She is now and always has been the singular Jacksonian voice in the original Tea Party phenomenon; the only one who can bring it to the mainstream. Her absence from the primary race has left a vacuum and no substitute has been found. Every other possible or potential leadership hopeful has risen and receded in this long Republican primary season.
That's some premium, high-octane nuttiness, right there. We've watched conservative savior after conservative savior be elevated in rapid succession, only to have each knocked down again when people actually heard them, you know ... talk, but the conservative Palin fetish is something that I don't think I'll ever understand. She was a disaster the first time around, every interview and press availability a train wreck, but conservatives still praise her apparently invisible intellectualism. When she quit as Alaskan governor, the rest of us saw it as the actions of a flighty persona more interested in television time than government, but true believers embraced it as an act of rebellion (against what, God only knows.)
How you get from there to being a Jacksonian voice is beyond me, unless it involves opium.
The Bush secret agenda has been a subliminal theme for months with New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie as the favored proxy and pitchman. At CPAC it broke through to the surface: Al Cardenas, head of the American Conservative Union, says that Republican turmoil might lead to a brokered convention in which Jeb Bush would emerge as a “possible alternative” party nominee. It made Drudge this weekend.
Oh, well if it made
Drudge.
(Continue reading below the fold)
Again, the obvious question becomes: why Jeb Bush? The country has hardly been clamoring for another Bush presidency. His brother's term in office has become all but unspeakable in conservative circles. I can see why members of the Bush family might want to redeem the family name, or at least have some claim to fame other than worst president ever, and father of the worst president ever, but asking the entire conservative movement to play along seems like a long way to go. Florida, for its part, was not exactly a shining beacon of anything during the tenure of the elder scion, so there would seem little there that would cry out for making sure this other Bush fellow got a chance to be president too.
Conservatism is at the shore of a new awakening but is afraid to cross the river.
And the name of that broad current is the Batshit Crazy River, known far and wide in the land as the river you really ought not cross. But there hasn't been a river yet the modern movement has not been willing to plunge into and through—they made quick work of Liar's Creek, Delusional Brook, and the mighty Racist River (southern fork)—so I have little doubt they will make short work of this one.
But Bush/Christie vs. Sarah Palin/Rick Perry positions coming head to head at the Republican Convention would pit the storied worlds of Dexter and Paulie Walnuts; the most notoriously corrupt, burned-out, busted-up, used-up, dangerous, underwater and broke Eastern states, against the new, independent, states-oriented, freedom-seeking constitutional conservatives like Palin of the Western states, Texas and Alaska.
Get it? Bush and Palin are two mafia officers. Jeb Bush is the old, "burned-out" one, and Sarah Palin is the psychopathic, paranoid, violent nutcase. A fresh face, in other words!
I'm going to out on a very stout limb here and say this fantasized-about episode will never happen. I have to believe that Jeb Bush, who is painted by most of his friends as not an idiot, knows full well that the country is not ready to give his family name another shot at things quite so soon. I have to believe Sarah Palin would be immensely flattered, and do as much as possible to push the rumors herself, but in the end I do not see her committing to the actual effort of any campaign, because that is not what she does. But the conservatives will continue to dream of it, and that says as much about the rudderless movement as anything I could come up with myself.