Now, I have a question for Philip Klein, and it is a serious question. He says that if the Republicans lose the upcoming presidential election they should just “throw in the towel.” The headline writers at the Washington Examiner chose to interpret this as a call to “disband the party.” I prefer the former formulation. In boxing, when your fighter is getting beaten so badly that you’re worried he might sustain serious and irreversible damage, you can signal to the referee that you want him to stop the fight by throwing a towel into the ring.
So, my question is this: in this analogy, who is the referee?
Who is supposed to stop the beating?
And how are they supposed to stop it?
And, really, the Republican Party has too many legal and institutional advantages to be disbanded or supplanted, so maybe what Klein really means is that the Conservative Movement should get out of the ring and let some other fighter vie for the prize?
I’d be very interested in this solution. I’d very much like to believe that we could beat the conservatives severely enough in the upcoming election that they’d abandon traditional electoral politics and go focus on home schooling their children on human civilization during the time of the dinosaurs.
So, Philip, do I have this about right? If you lose this next election, you’ll conclude that you will never win and go buy a shack in the woods and focus on salmon fishing?
