Live from Dan Drezner's Intellectual Nadir: : A year ago, I wrote the dumbest column I will ever write. You won’t believe what happened next: "Exactly one year today... a garbage fire of a column titled...
...‘Why Donald Trump will be good for the Republicans in 2016’... ‘Trump will lose, and lose big.’ ‘Trump makes the real GOP candidates look good.’ ‘Trump offers an opportunity for GOP contenders to shine in the debates.’... Let’s pause for a brief moment to appreciate the mind-blowing retrospective stupidity of that column....
I think I made three mistakes... First, I overestimated the degree to which voters would value... political experience.... For a party that has been primed to reject the very idea of expertise in some issue areas, this proved to be a more potent tactic than I had anticipated. Second, I badly overvalued the abilities of the other GOP candidates.... Third, and most important, I overestimated GOP voters. I foolishly thought that the good people of New Hampshire and South Carolina and Nevada, having dealt with presidential candidates for most of their lives, would recognize a total charlatan when they saw one.... So here we are, a year later... way, way off the equilibrium path: Every week that Donald Trump remains the Republican nominee, the party comes closer to removing itself from the presidential gene pool. Self-selection is at work here. Trump’s supporters are choosing their party’s demise....
I was badly, horribly wrong about the primary.... I still think that the general election will play out very differently.... Still, this anniversary reminds the hard-working staff here at Spoiler Alerts to focus a wee bit more on world politics and less on the 2016 election. Because when it comes to campaign prognostications, I’m clearly a hack.
