Only in Pub World
IN a typical presidential campaign, the most successful candidates lay claim to leadership with their high-mindedness. They reach for poetry. They focus on lifting people up, not tearing them down. They beseech voters to be their biggest, best selves.
Not the two front-runners in this freaky Republican primary. They’re unreservedly smug. They’re unabashedly mean.
If you’re not with them, you’re a loser (Donald Trump’s declaration) or you’re godless (Ted Cruz’s decree, more or less). They market name-calling as truth-telling, pettiness as boldness, vanity as conviction. And their tandem success suggests a dynamic peculiar to the 2016 election, a special rule for this road:
Obnoxiousness is the new charisma, in today's Republican party.
Cruz is unsettling enough in isolation, but it’s the combination of him and Trump that really galls. And it galls not just Democrats but other Republicans.
“At some point, we have to deal with the fact that there are at least two candidates who could utterly destroy the Republican bench for a generation if they became the nominee,” Josh Holmes, a former chief of staff to the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell.
The headline on Isenstadt’s story was “Trump and Cruz send shivers down G.O.P. spines.”
In the current issue of Time magazine, David Von Drehle put it this way: “The G.O.P. has awakened less than a month from the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary to find itself in bed between a bombshell and a kamikazi.
Don't ya just LOVE it?
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