The Republican presidential logjam has finally broken.
Donald Trump, who believes not only that he would make the best president but that he could win, declined to run because making money is his true "passion." It's as if Cincinnatus loved his plow too much. (One wonders if Trump would have made a different call if he could have kept his tax returns private.)
Jonah Goldberg
Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee also bowed out, with class and dignity even his friend Trump could not buy.
Ron Paul, the libertarian Harold Stassen, is in for another go, presumably on the mistaken assumption that America has turned into Tea Party Nation (if only!).
And then there's Newt Gingrich.
On NBC's "Meet the Press," the former House speaker — a man who has spent much of the last decade declaring the need for radical transformation of this, that and the other thing — denounced Paul Ryan's Medicare proposals as too "radical" and nothing less than "right-wing social engineering." He also came out in favor of a state-based individual mandate for health insurance.
This last bit of news was no doubt greeted with jubilation in the Mitt Romney camp, given that Romney had only days earlier given a speech defending his own landmark achievement — a state-based individual mandate that helped inspire "Obamacare." By my count, Romney's speech bombed with 9 out of 10 conservatives (the 10th being influential conservative talk show host Hugh Hewitt).
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-goldberg-gop-20110517,0,5126865.column