GOP Ignores Inaugural Lesson at Own Peril
Monday, January 27, 2025
Conservative columnist Rich Lowry correctly notes how the Democrats paved the way for Donald Trump to win the last election. He concludes:
The Democrats appeared to believe that it didn't matter how out of touch and radical they'd become, so long as they were running against a Donald Trump, who could be ruled out of bounds.This is about the same Trump who angered enough voters to get a nonentity like Biden elected in the first place.
But if the public concluded that Trump made more sense than his adversaries, a campaign to render him ipso facto unacceptable was going to fail.
This is not to say that Trump is an anodyne centrist. His zeal for tariffs, his revisionist views of Jan. 6 (unmentioned in his address) and his apparent determination to re-take the Panama Canal are hardly consensus positions.
No matter how much momentum Trump has now, controversies will pile up and events will take a hand. The current goodwill could prove quite transitory.
Still, it was Trump who was the focus of all the attention at his inauguration, Trump who is setting the agenda and Trump who can plausibly define himself as closer to the middle than his opponents -- and they brought it on themselves. [bold added]
It is interesting to note that Lowry earlier mentioned how Democrats cut less "progressive" voters out of their nomination process, but that there is no mention of the extremely foreshortened Republican primary process.
I don't know if it's Lowry's intent above, but it practically screams Trump is running a 24/7 pro-Democrat ad for the 2028 election to me.
Whichever party (if either) that can find a way to give more centrist voters a real say in nominating candidates first will be able to achieve a positive victory in the following election. Otherwise, we can keep expecting alienated voters to cast ballots against incumbents who weren't ever really popular in the first place.
-- CAV
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