Crossroads for the GOP

America’s most accomplished tea-leaf readers have now concluded their study of the November election results, and they are turning up with an interpretation so unexpected and so unsettling that many of them profoundly wish they had never investigated the matter at all.

Just about all of them have long agreed that the only relevant question, in choosing a Republican presidential nominee, is “Who has the best chance of winning?” And it seemed perfectly safe to let this problem merge imperceptibly into the technically subordinate question, “Who can carry New York and California?” —on the hitherto sound principle that these two large states are indispensable if a Republican nominee is to win nationally. The 1964 answer to this not terribly complicated conundrum is, of course, supposed to be Nelson Rockefeller.

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William A. Rusher

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Presidential Election

America’s most accomplished tea-leaf readers have now concluded their study of the November election results, and they are turning up with an interpretation so unexpected and so unsettling that many of them profoundly wish they had never investigated the matter at all.

Just about all of them have long agreed that the only relevant question, in choosing a Republican presidential nominee, is “Who has the best chance of winning?” And it seemed perfectly safe to let this problem merge imperceptibly into the technically subordinate question, “Who can carry New York and California?” —on the hitherto sound principle that these two large states are indispensable if a Republican nominee is to win nationally. The 1964 answer to this not terribly complicated conundrum is, of course, supposed to be Nelson Rockefeller.