The sprawling redundancy of the GOP race to the bottom

The nation trembles. It's been 40 years since the exhilaration of the Ford administration, and some wonder if we'll ever again see such a star-spangled display of greatness called, and greatness answering. Schoolchildren have read of it, Boomers thrilled to it, and the surviving Silent Generation was reminded of its almost Coolidgelike splendor. Dare we now dream a little dream of a presidential thunderbolt regained?

One man believes we can. And indeed, this Thursday, he'll say just that. Our long national yearning is over. George Pataki is running for Gerald's House.

He's stealthy, I'll give him that much, as does his one supporter in New Hampshire. "I think many have underestimated him and I think that’s just where he wants to be," says, to the New York Post, military veteran Alissa Tweedie in a flash of strategic guile.

GOP strategist Ed Rogers, writing for the Washington Post, differs with Ms. Tweedie a wee bit: "While I’m no Nate Silver, my own proprietary computing aid (vodka) inspires me to calculate that [Pataki has] no better than a .000117 percent chance of being the Republican nominee for president in 2016." (Note of no importance: I prefer Rogers' psephological methodology to Silver's. It's got soul.)

Let it not be said that Rogers is disapproving of Pataki's entrance into the race, however. It will be "useful and good for the GOP," he writes. Pataki and others with a .000117 chance "will play an important role in keeping the rest of Republican field on its toes and will force the leading contenders to raise their game."

Here, of course, Rogers uses "raise" in its keenest Orwellian sense: i.e., war is peace, ignorance is strength, raising is lowering — and the latter has been the precise effect of each additional GOP contender on the GOP race. Every time a Bush or Walker or Rubio stakes out what's believed to be the lowest road to his party's ignorance, along comes a Fiorina or Carson or Huckabee to plow an even deeper path. In today's GOP, pluralism and a competition of ideas mean conformity — and into that, we watch nearly all of them plunge.

And that's OK, because a Pataki is as good as a Bush, who's as good as a Rubio, and so on. In other words, it makes little difference which is called to the greatness they're all so cleverly concealing.