Eight years ago, I declared that I would win the Tour de France before Rudy Giuliani won the Republican presidential nomination, even though he was sitting atop the polls. With Donald Trump and Ben Carson in mind, I am thinking such a proclamation might soon be in order again. Thinking about the 2016 Republican presidential nomination has generally boiled down to two competing views. The first is that Trump and/or Carson, the consummate political outsiders, will remain at the top of the GOP field, with one or the other ending up as the nominee; the prospect makes some Republicans ecstatic and drives others into a near-clinical depression. The second view: While we certainly don’t know who the GOP nominee will be, we can feel reasonably assured that it won’t be one of those two. Adherents of this view see today’s Republican Party as behaving crazily but not actually insane. Things aren’t ever quite this simple, but in my view, this dichotomy is close enough. Longtime readers of this column can guess I’m of the latter view, that conservatives’ serial infatuations
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