The More You Tighten Your Grip, Mr. Ginsberg...

CREDIT: WOOKIEEPEDIA I've been working quietly on the next phase of the New Party for a couple of weeks, but in the meantime I was interviewed by reporter Gwynn Guilford for an article that was just published today. It's called "How the Republican elite tried to fix the presidency and instead got Donald Trump," and I think it's pretty great, both as a chronicle of the Ron Paul 2012 insurgency and as an explanation of how the Republican Party set itself up for self-defeat in 2016. Gwynn did her homework with the GOP rules nerds, and it shows:

...the big changes to the 2016 delegate math still changed the race’s strategic dynamics in a way that wound up favoring Trump. The binding of previously unbound caucus-state delegates made it impossible for grassroots activists to rally their support behind a challenger to Trump. The newly bound delegates included the hundred or so RNC representatives from each state—party insiders that, had they not been bound to vote for Trump, might have coalesced around a consensus candidate, giving that candidate motivation to stay in the race. Without Rule 40, more candidates might well have had the impetus to stay in the race longer. That could have given national convention delegates—the majority of whom don’t like Trump—a better chance of supporting a challenger to the party’s new orange-haired overlord in Cleveland.

By shutting up a vexingly vocal minority, GOP leaders may have summoned forth Trump’s “silent majority.” Though Minnesota’s James Heaney is avowedly anti-Trump, he still relishes what he sees as “poetic justice” in what resulted from the Republican elite’s rules overreach in Tampa.

“That line from Star Wars comes to mind,” he says. “‘The more you tighten your grip, Mr. Ginsberg, the more star systems will slip through your fingers.’”

Read the whole thing; she earned the clicks. I am now officially on record comparing Ben Ginsberg to Grand Moff Tarkin, so I guess my career in the Republican Party as presently constituted (where I am currently clothed in immense power as precinct vice chair) is doomed whether or not the New Party takes off. I can't say I'm the least bit sorry.