If This Man Was a Stooge, We Need Not Three but 300 More Like Him

Former Massachusetts governor Bill Weld suspended his little noticed campaign for the Republican nomination for president one week ago today.

He had pursued the prize for over year and, at the end, had only one committed delegate to show for all that time and effort.

Donald Trump made it a policy to ignore Weld's candidacy, never bothering even to slur him on Twitter with one of the nasty-but-catchy nicknames he likes to deploy, like "Low Energy Jeb," "Little Marco" and "Sleepy Joe."

The closest Weld, 74, got to eliciting Trump's contumely was to be lumped by the Tweeter-in-Chief together with the other Republican primary challengers, Mark Sanford and Joe Walsh, as "The Three Stooges."  Sanford and Walsh both left the race before Weld did.

Weld seemed to be paying Trump back with the same coin of indifference by not mentioning the president by name in his written withdrawal (or suspension) statement.  At the outset of the Weld campaign, things were much different.  The old Brahmin laced hard into Trump then.

When announcing his candidacy, Weld said Trump "has difficulty conforming his conduct to the requirements of the law.  That's a serious matter in the oval office." He added:

"...we have a president whose priorities are skewed toward promotion of himself rather than toward the good of the country.  He may have great energy and considerable raw talent, but he does not use them in ways that promote democracy, truth, justice and equal opportunity for all.  To compound matters, our president is simply too unstable to carry out the duties of the highest executive office -- which include the specific duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed -- in a competent and professional manner.  He is simply in the wrong place."

Weld ran a serious campaign based on the propositions that (a) Trump had flouted the Constitution and undermined the rule of law, (b) the U.S. needed to strengthen relationships with traditional allies, (c) climate change had to be arrested by putting a price on carbon emissions, and (d) federal budget deficits of more than a trillion dollars a year are irresponsible in the extreme and must be stopped.

After no Republicans voted to impeach Trump, and only one Republican (former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney) voted guilty on one article of impeachment during Trump's trial in the Senate, we did not need further proof that Trump has taken over the GOP like Sherman took over Georgia.  But that's what we got when Weld had one delegate in hand after 13 months of campaigning.

Bringing down the curtain, Weld said, "Thousands of supporters and donors from across the country joined our cause, working day and night to promote strong, experienced, decent leadership for the United States.  They were determined and indefatigable in their efforts to give Americans a better choice in the 2020 presidential election.  Leading this movement has been one of the greatest honors of my life, and I will be forever indebted to all who have played a part."

You can laugh at Bill Weld for thinking he could be president.

You can dismiss him as a relic of a far different political era.

You can ignore that he dared to dream greatly of undoing Trumpism.

But how can you not, at least for a moment, stop and admire a person of principle who, with no one truly powerful backing him and with a slim-to-zero chance of victory, undertakes a campaign to wrest the leadership of his ancestral party from a Republican-come-lately incumbent he believes has besmirched it, and brings that campaign, in painful slow motion, ultimately to a condition of nothingness, and yet afterwards declares it "one of the greatest honors" of his long life to have led that effort?