Leon H. Wolf:
I understand and respect what Kendal Unruh and so many others have been involved in doing in trying to unbind the delegates at the GOP convention. In one sense, they are trying to save the country from Hillary Clinton, which is a noble and worthy goal, and anyone who engages in it should be supported to the greatest practical measure.
It looks like the effort will likely come to naught, which is regrettable for the sake of the country. But it isn’t regrettable in this sense: because the GOP does not deserve to be saved from itself by conservatives. They deserve what is about to happen to them at the hands of Trump. And if the good party in America is so rotten as to deserve Trump, then maybe the country as a whole deserves Hillary.
It was the GOP who changed the rules after 2012 to provide the early front runner an overwhelming delegate advantage, after they saw how narrowly their favored pick Mitt Romney escaped with a victory. They put into place a delegate selection system that was specifically designed to prevent conservative challengers from having a chance to unseat moderates. That selection system is what allowed Trump to mathematically eliminate Cruz and the rest in spite of only having gotten about 40% of the popular vote to that point. They are now bound by the consequences of that choice, which is that Trump has crossed the bound delegate threshold despite not having come close to earning a proportional popular vote.
It was the state parties who wrote primary voting rules that either outright allowed Democrats to vote in many cases or allowed voters to change registration literally the same day to vote. It was their decision to chase after this false gold – because of the belief that moderate, fickle votes are more important than conservative ones – that contributed to or directly caused Trump’s victory.
It was the party leaders whose fecklessness and inaction enraged conservative voters, and then by and large steadfastly held their noses up in the air at Ted Cruz and the conservative voter anger he represented, rather than unite behind him to stop Trump, even after it became clear that Cruz was the only feasible Trump alternative.
