The primaries contain become so bruising that even the successful candidate will emerge damagedThe Wi-Fi password for Tuesday night’s Republican debate in Milwaukee was: “StopHillary”. Therein lies both the party’s greatest strength and weakness. The Democrats contain all but settled on Hillary Clinton as their presidential nominee. She has led every poll for the last year and all but two of those leads were in double figures. So Republicans know who they contain to defeat.
The disaster is,at first sight, they don’t appear to be any closer to reaching a consensus on who they should pick to defeat her than when the debates started. On Tuesday night there were eight candidates on show. Over the last year the Republican field has boasted six different frontrunners. For the past four months that has been either Donald Trump, or the billionaire windbag for whom “bloviator” might contain been invented,or evangelical neurosurgeon Ben Carson, who recently claimed the pyramids were for grain storage and that the Holocaust might contain been prevented were it not for gun control. Between them they are attracting half of all party support. Both candidacies should be taken seriously, and not least because they deprive other candidates of oxygen and because of the direction in which they are dragging the debate.
Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com