"In matters of style, swim with the current. In matters of principle, stand like a rock." Thomas Jefferson
February 3, 2016
By: Linda Case Gibbons
It hurts when people don't like your kid.
He's not good with people. He's not good at speaking in public. He's not good at a lot of things, but you love him and you think he's gifted.
"If only the world knew him the way I do," you think.
So you go to the coach, or the teacher, or out on the campaign trail and tell the people in charge to give him the trophy he didn't win.
"Why won't you," you demand angrily. "Don't you know who he is? Donors have invested $128 million in him. He has to win! He's a Bush!"
It's also kind of tough when you want to win so badly, you can taste it. It can make you crazy.
All the attention, the thrill of the political chase, it has a way of changing you. It turns your head. It makes you say things like, "I guess he's quitting," when a frontrunner leaves Iowa before the caucus to head home for a change of clothes.
Most candidates would have thought it was Jeb who was quitting. That would have made sense. But it wasn't. It was Dr. Ben Carson, and it turns out he wasn't quitting. He was just going home.
Was this a bad call by the guy who won the Iowa caucus? Ben Carson thought so. So did Donald Trump.
"He really lies," Trump said, speaking of Ted Cruz. "I don't like to use that term, but he really lies. What he did was a fraud."
And Dr. Carson? He was angry and disappointed in a colleague he had counted as a friend. There is, after all, no way to un-ring the Iowa caucus bell. Apology or not, it cost him a bunch of votes.
This was Washington politics, political correctness and beltway double talk rearing its ugly head.
Dirty politics was the reason all three candidates got into the presidential race to begin with. They were the "outsiders." They were against this sort of thing. And people loved them for it.
Was there outrage at what happened to Dr. Carson? Nope. Only from Carson and Trump.
It isn't illegal, reporters and observers said.
You can't prove it made a difference in the number of votes Carson lost, they said.
And it was CNN's fault anyway, they said. After all, they reported it. Even Cruz agreed, to explain what he did.
After a while, it sounded like it was Dr. Carson's fault, didn't it? He's the one who said he was going home and then to Washington to attend the Prayer Breakfast.
It was at the Prayer Breakfast in 2013 that he first came to national attention.
It was there he gave a powerful speech attacking political correctness, the one that had Barack Obama seething. The one that was considered critical of the Obama administration and had the White House demanding an apology from Dr. Carson.
But he didn't apologize. "I talked to the president afterwards," he told reporters. "He didn't seem upset and there's no reason he should be unless what I said applied to him."
People liked that.
So who would think a guy like this would throw in the towel in the middle of things, in the middle of running for president?
And who would think Ted Cruz would tell precinct captains that Ben Carson was suspending his campaign, and that they should tell voters "not to waste a vote on Ben Carson," but to "vote for Ted Cruz?"
Carson wouldn't have done that. Neither would Trump. And until now, neither would Ted Cruz.
Funny how the glare of the footlights blinds some people, how it changes them.
Remember in 2010 when Marco Rubio was running for the Senate as a Tea Party candidate, when he opposed legalization of citizenship for illegal immigrants?
Remember in 2013 when he joined the Gang of Eight to provide a citizenship path for immigrants already here illegally?
It's called amnesty. And what Marco did is called flip-flopping.
Now it is 2016, Jeb is at 8 percent on a good day, and the SuperPacs and GOP Establishment donors are running scared, aghast at having nothing to show for the outrageous amount of money they've dumped into Jeb's campaign.
Even with Barbara Bush coming out to tell us how nice her boy is and how bad Trump is, and George making his brother a campaign ad, even with that, Jeb has tanked.
According to Washington politics, that's not what was supposed to happen. Not to a dynasty. Not to an insider.
So now the Establishment has chosen Marco to carry the Establishment flag. And Marco's not saying no.
Washington politics. It makes good guys crazy.
Hold the line, America.