Mitt Romney will speak tomorrow morning about the presidential race. Indications are that it is neither an endorsement nor an announcement of his own candidacy.
I like Mitt Romney. The more you learn about him, the more he impresses. He’s a kind, generous, decent man. But, as Jonah Goldberg put it: he has “an authentic inauthenticity problem. He seems fake, but that’s really him.”
That’s mostly why I think we don’t need to hear from him tomorrow. I expect him to speak about what it is to be a gentleman, and how we can deeply disagree with one another and still show one another respect, and how lacking the current GOP race is in such qualities. It will be a fine message, but one made easily parodiable by its deliverer, and ineffective in any case.
Why? Because Trump’s supporters have heard this endlessly for six months. Are there any fewer of them? The crude boorishness is a feature, not a bug.
There is no longer any realistic hope of anyone but Trump capturing the nomination. The best chance to stop him is now with a brokered convention, and the most effective path to a brokered convention is Cruz, Rubio, and Kasich staying in to siphon off as many delegates as possible themselves. (Kasich is a dead man walking, but he could exhaust his final efforts snatching Ohio away.)
Any people with money and influence who are interested in stopping Trump need to be figuring out where the most vulnerable delegates are and channeling their resources there and there alone. Whether a call for civility such as I expect we’ll hear tomorrow would have ever been efficacious is arguable, but if there was a window, it closed a long time ago.
Republicans, this is now a guerrilla war.
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