Live from the Roasterie: SUPERPOPCORN!! The curse of Goldwater, Nixon, Gingrich, and Murdoch: spend fifty years pandering to the racist, the resentful, and the unhinged, and then twenty-five years feeding their paranoia--and then expect them to be happy with yet another establishment Republican as a standard-bearer? It doesn't work like that, does it?
: [What's at Stake in the Second Republican Debate: Full Panic in the GOP](http://www.newrepublic.com/article/122826/whats-stake-second-republican-debate-full-panic-gop?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=New Campaign&utm_term=TNR Daily Newsletter): "The four... establishment-friendly... campaigns...
...are in the grip of a severe collective action problem. Were one of them the consensus choice of the GOP donor class, the current field would look a lot like the one in 2012, with Carson in the role of... Gingrich or Herman Cain. Trump would be the key difference... but with Rubio or Kasich holding steady at 20 percent, in a field clear of other establishmentarian candidates... a nuisance, not a nightmare. Mitt Romney didn’t have a particularly smooth path to the nomination in 2012, but as other candidates bowed out, his share of the vote grew and grew....
For the purposes of the debate, ameliorating the collective-action problem would entail one of the four establishmentarian candidates performing unusually well, and at the expense of the others. That could mean making the case, implicitly or explicitly, that the key to defeating Trump isn’t taking him head on, but winnowing the rest of the field to create a single power center of opposition to him.... If the debate ends... [with] the... four candidates are tussling among themselves for the same small sliver... maybe it'll be time for Republicans to panic...
Mind you, there is a big difference between Kasich on the one hand and Rubio, JEB!, and Walker on the other: Kasich's policies would be conservative, but would be likely to work in the sense of doing more than slowing economic growth; getting us into pointless, expensive, and dangerous military and diplomatic misadventures; and transferring yet more income to the parasitic fractions of the plutocracy.
