Watching
the 2016 GOP primary season unfold beats seeing Hillary run against herself.
By Donald Kaul
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| DonkeyHotey/Flickr |
Baseball has spring training, football’s got
its training camps. But for a political junkie like me, nothing compares
with the opening of the presidential primary season.
Some 19 candidates, give or take, recently swarmed a
Republican forum in New Hampshire in search of a kind word and a smile from
voters there. They spent much of their time arm-wrestling each other over who
hated Hillary Clinton more.
Candidates who couldn’t even spell Benghazi, let alone
find it on a map, emerged as experts on the death of our ambassador in a
terrorist attack there in 2012. Hillary’s fault, naturally.
I thought it was great.
It was there, for example, that I had my brush with
greatness: an exclusive face-to-face interview with Ronald Reagan. Actually, it
was more like shoulder-to-shoulder.
It was 1980. Reagan, the former governor of California,
was making his run for the Republican nomination. I didn’t think he had much of
a chance. He was too old for the part, for one thing, but I thought it might be
fun to follow him around for a day.
We went from one picturesque little town to another,
always met by friendly, enthusiastic crowds, until we got to a junior high
where he was scheduled to speak and where I decided to take a bathroom break.
As I walked to the boys room, the smiling crowd parted
before me and formed a lane, as though in welcome.
“I hadn’t realized I was this popular up here,” I said to
myself.
I went inside, and moments later in walked Ronald Reagan.
He took ownership of the urinal next to me.
Drawing on my experience as a crack political reporter, I
said: “How’s it going, Governor?”
And he replied: “Oh, pretty well. I always do well up
here.”
And that was it, the whole interview.
I spent the rest of the day following him around. I found
him remarkable. He gave exactly the same speech at every stop with exactly the
same inflection on every word, the catch in his voice at precisely the same
moment.
His theme was essentially that he would bring back that
time when respect for the United States was so universal that an American could
walk through any revolution in the world without fear simply by putting an
American flag in his lapel.
Nonsense, of course, but the New Hampshire crowds ate it
up. I was sure, however, that Reagan, charming as he was, couldn’t sail so weak
a vessel all the way to the nomination, let alone the presidency. He would be
found out as an entertaining fraud and dismissed.
To make a long story short, I was wrong.
Still, I miss New Hampshire when the smell of hypocrisy
is in the air.
I judge this group of Republican candidates to be
superior to the ill-fated slate in 2012. They are, for the most part, much
smarter. There’s no Michele Bachmann for one thing.
Even Texas Governor Rick Perry, another member of the
double-digit IQ club, has started wearing glasses to make himself look smarter.
A few of them — Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, John Kasich — seem
reasonable, for Republicans. And no one would call even the more flamboyant
hopefuls, like Rand Paul and Chris Christie, dumb.
Even the minor players are substantial people. Ben
Carson, who didn’t make the New Hampshire forum, was a brilliant neurosurgeon.
And Carly Fiorina, the lone woman in this crowded field, headed
Hewlett-Packard.
It’s true that most of the candidates looked more like
vice-presidents-in-waiting than incipient commanders-in-chief. But that’s
always the case early on. They’ll sort themselves out as the months go on.
To tell you the truth, it promises to be much more
interesting than watching Hillary running against herself.
OtherWords
columnist Donald Kaul lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan. OtherWords.org.