Weigel

Bill Kristol Will Go Sailing No More

We can count on Bill Kristol to react to the April 3 primaries with some fantasizing about a brokered convention. Can’t we? Can’t we?

OK, I’ll concede that contest is getting close to over as well. Mitt Romney will almost certainly be the GOP nominee.

What? No! Has the Kristol who once argued that “a deliberative convention could be a good thing” been replaced by some otherworldly body snatcher? Has anyone seen Donald Sutherland recently?

Rick Santorum is entitled to stay in the race, and to offer voters in the remaining states an alternative. But it’s probably time for him to do what Mike Huckabee did in similar circumstances in 2008—basically to stop attacking the almost inevitable nominee, and instead to adjust his own message going forward to a positive and issues-based one.

Actually, this might be consistent. Kristol suggested that a GOP savior could arise if he announced “his entry as early as mid-January or as late as early March.” And it’s not early March anymore. The beautiful dream of Mitch Daniels arriving out of nowhere and winning convention after convention with the power of his charisma and op-ed endorsements died somewhere in Ohio. We are only now noticing.