George Will finds his presidential candidate
I'm so old that I remember when George Will's opinion mattered to Republicans. Apparently, the Bezos Bulletin scribe realizes he's lost his influence on the Grand Old Party and now offers advice to the Democrats on their nominee, in hopes that someone out there still cares about his opinions.
His disgust at President Trump — who has the support of roughly 90% of Republicans — is such that he has now taken to telling (fellow?) Democrats whom they should nominate in 2020, in order to defeat the man who has restored the American economy to growth rates exceeding population growth (a task his predecessor assured us required a "magic wand"), nominated conservatives to the federal bench in numbers that matter, and exposed a nefarious plot among the federal intelligence and law enforcement apparatus to reverse a presidential election.
George Will at the 2014 CPAC gathering — when his opinion mattered to conservatives.
Photo credit: Gage Skidmore.
All of that matters less than George Will's animus toward Trump.
In the pages of National Review, whose standing has forever changed because of its impassioned special issue decrying Trump, Will has found his candidate: Senator Michael Bennet, who (I paraphrase) is progressive but not crazy.
[I]f Democrats are as serious as they say they are about defeating Donald Trump, Bennet should be their nominee.
Bennet checks a requisite number of progressive boxes: He is impeccably (as progressives see such things) alarmed about the requisite things — the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision, climate change, Mitch McConnell, etc. And he has endorsed — perfunctorily, one hopes — other candidates' gesture-legislation to "study" reparations for slavery (Senator Cory Booker) and for same-sex couples who lived in states where same-sex marriages were legal but who could not file joint tax returns before the Supreme Court's 2013 decision overturning the Defense of Marriage Act (Senator Elizabeth Warren).
So Will hopes Bennet doesn't really mean ("perfunctorily") the progressive nonsense. And he is willing to bet the future of the Republic on his candidate's insincerity. What's conservative about that?
Perhaps the best thing about Bennet? He comes from a "good family"!
Bennet's father, a descendant of a Mayflower passenger, earned a Harvard Ph.D. (medieval Russian history), and was an aide to a U.S. ambassador to India, and later worked for Democrats Hubert Humphrey, Ed Muskie, and Tom Eagleton. Bennet's mother, who survived the Holocaust by hiding in a Warsaw suburb, reached New York — via Stockholm and Mexico City — where her parents opened an art gallery. The city was the center of the postwar art world, and they did well. Bennet says that in second grade he won both ends of the competition to see who had the oldest and newest American family branches.
No vulgar Queens roots! Harvard! An art gallery!
I am certain that this article is not a parody, though it certainly reads like one in places.