Bill Kristol unwittingly confirms that there will be no anti-Trump protest candidate:
It’s unclear whether a credible independent candidate will choose to step forward. But there are many more such candidates than are dreamt of by conventional commentators and operatives. Recent attempts to write obituaries for the Never Trump/Never Clinton effort are wildly premature [bold mine-DL]. Something new and different can be difficult to imagine for the old and tired. And our political class and pundit elites are nothing if not old and tired.
Kristol’s pronouncements on all sorts of things are useful for identifying the things that won’t or can’t happen. If he believes there is still a chance for something to occur, that chance never existed or has since vanished, and if he is certain that something will not take place it is a safe bet that it will. His involvement in trying to recruit a protest candidate this year was probably the earliest, best indication that the effort was doomed to fail. Kristol is the quintessential pundit elite, and he has the incredibly shoddy record to prove it.
There is something especially absurd in describing the protest presidential campaign he wants to have as being “new and different” when the point of the protest effort has been to affirm a stale, discredited party agenda that at least half of Republicans have rejected to one degree or another. It isn’t difficult to imagine what this would look like, because we have seen it on display many times before, and most Republican primary voters wanted something else this year. Nothing could be more “old and tired” than trying to create a splinter faction devoted to unreconstructed Bushism, and that is one reason why there is so little support for it.