Matt Bai

The goal of the #NeverTrump movement is to keep Donald Trump from amassing the 1,237 delegates he needs to clinch the nomination. (Photo: George Frey/Getty Images)

We all had a good laugh at Chris Christie’s expense after the New Hampshire primary, when he decided to get behind Donald Trump in exchange for dibs on an especially comfortable chaise longue at Mar-a-Lago. Next to the kinds of craven endorsements we’re seeing now, though, Christie might be in line for a Profile in Courage award.

Just yesterday, Jeb Bush followed his pal Lindsey Graham by coming out in support of Ted Cruz, although apparently he didn’t think he could get through an actual announcement without falling to his knees and rending his clothes in self-loathing, so he released a tepid statement instead. Bush described Cruz as a “consistent, principled conservative who has demonstrated the ability to appeal to voters,” by which he meant that Cruz is not Trump and that’s all there is to say.

This followed the bizarre contortions of Mitt Romney, whose state-by-state endorsement strategy has been so convoluted that I’d suggest getting a blank NCAA bracket if you really want to keep up.

All of which gets to why this #NeverTrump movement among governing Republicans might more aptly be called #NeverGoingtoHappen instead.

That’s not to say I don’t understand the strategy here, because I do. The singular goal is to keep Trump from amassing the 1,237 delegates he needs to clinch the nomination, thus hurtling the party into an open convention for the first time in 40 years.

Bush has apparently decided that this can happen only if it’s a two-man race, even though he almost certainly believes that John Kasich is the only candidate left who has any business being in the Oval Office. So he and other leading Republicans are going to close ranks around Cruz and hope they can get control of the process once the voters are finished making a holy mess of it.

(It’s interesting that Jeb has not been joined in this cause by his brother George W., who seems to have decided that he would sooner paint Trump’s presidential portrait himself than endorse the fellow Texan who once worked for him. That ought to tell you something.)

Romney’s strategy is more elaborate. Like many of you who probably also assumed you were watching an old “Bewitched” rerun on daytime TV until you realized that Darrin had just way too many lines, I watched Romney’s speech attacking Trump a few weeks back, and I have to say I was impressed. Where Trump was vulgar and insecure, Romney was cutting and confident, reminding us that titans of business don’t hawk bad steaks in late-night infomercials.

It seemed possible that Romney, in his advancing years, had at last found within himself some hidden reserve of political steel.

But no – turns out some distant race of extraterrestrials had actually snatched Romney’s body for a day so they could deliver a message about the grave danger of a Trump presidency, and when they were done they dropped the old Romney right back into our laps.

Romney endorsed Kasich in Ohio, noting that he was the “only guy with a real track record.” But then he turned around and announced he was voting for Cruz in Utah anyway – although he wasn’t actually endorsing Cruz, just so nobody gets confused. Right.

If you step back for a second, you can see why Romney might have some interest in getting to a convention with the delegates divided as many ways as possible. Mitt made his fortune as the consummate turnaround guy — the bloodless analyst who swoops into a company in crisis and fires all the incompetent executives.

What is the Republican Party now if not an organization in crisis? If you were Romney, why wouldn’t you look at the disaster looming and recognize a ripe takeover opportunity?

But here’s the problem for Bush and Romney and the whole #NeverTrump thing generally: You don’t win campaigns solely by running against somebody else. You have to give voters something — or someone — that they can be for.

This, of course, was Romney’s essential flaw as a nominee four years ago. He effectively ran as the #NeverObama candidate, avoiding anything that could have been misconstrued for a declarative worldview or agenda. He thought it was enough to not be Barack Obama and not be objectionable, and he was wrong.

That’s pretty much how Jeb! ran his campaign this year, too. First he was the anti-Clinton, and then he was the anti-Trump. The ubiquitous exclamation point hinted at the hole in his campaign, which is that in the end he offered nothing for anyone to be genuinely enthusiastic about.

That’s almost never enough in politics, which is why governing Republicans will almost certainly end up ruing their missed opportunities. As I’ve written before, there was a moment, in the week before the New Hampshire primary, when Marco Rubio, having surged out of the Iowa caucuses, seemed poised to emerge as the hopeful candidate of the governing class.

But then Christie dismantled Rubio on the debate stage, and the field didn’t winnow as it otherwise would have, and the party’s leaders continued to watch and wait. Rubio’s chance passed.

There was probably even a brief moment, right after New Hampshire, when Republican governors and lawmakers could have swung behind Kasich, who’d easily finished second in the primary, and who had the strongest governing record and approval ratings of anybody in the field.

But there again, the party elite cowered and dithered. They were afraid to get on the wrong side of the Trump brigades, worried about being embarrassed if they made the wrong choice.

Instead of shoring up a candidate they could enthusiastically be for, they continued to define themselves by the campaigns they were against, offering support only when it was already clear which way the voters were going. (For sheer spinelessness here, no one beats Florida’s governor, Rick Scott, who declined to endorse anyone until the day after his state’s primary, when he boldly threw his weight behind the guy who had won by almost 20 points.)

Even at this late hour, you have Scott Walker, erstwhile candidate and two-term governor of Wisconsin, refusing to endorse a candidate in the April 5 primary there, although he hinted he would probably back Cruz at a moment of “maximum impact.” Maybe that means he’s discovered a time machine.

Because it’s almost certainly too late now to derail Trump. So if you’re going down anyway, at least go down with some conviction. At least stand up for Kasich, a candidate you think can actually win and actually govern, as opposed to a guy we all know you can’t stand.

The bottom line is that you can’t beat Trump by underscoring the central theme of his ignoble campaign, which is exactly what all this strategic endorsing is bound to do.

Trump has gotten to where he is by savaging the Republican establishment as expedient and craven — politicians willing to sacrifice any principle to preserve their own power. It’s amazing that Republican leaders seem so hell-bent on proving him right.

Ohio governor and Republican presidential candidate John Kasich speaks at Villanova University in Villanova, Pa., on Wednesday. (Photo: Dominick Reuter/Reuters)

Normally, it wouldn’t be a very big deal for a popular two-term governor to win a presidential primary in his own state, especially if it’s the first of 29 states (and a couple of territories) he’s actually won. But normalcy isn’t even on speaking terms with politics this year, and so it was that John Kasich — after laboring as an afterthought through weeks of primaries and a dozen debates — woke up yesterday to a changed reality.

On the Villanova campus, where I caught up with him, something like 1,000 students jammed into an auditorium and an adjoining overflow room to see Kasich, who often sounded more like a dad than a presidential candidate. (“Here at Villanova, there’s a lot of lonely kids,” he said at one point. “Invite them to go out for pizza. Invite them to the basketball game.”)

Afterward, Kasich wandered into an impenetrable swarm of TV reporters, whose aggressive and overlapping questions — almost entirely about Donald Trump and delegate math — he politely deflected.

Then I followed him out the back door, where his Ohio State Police detail was holding off another sizable throng of onlookers and photographers. We jumped into his black Suburban.

“Do you believe this, Matt?” Kasich said, turning around from the front seat to face me as the car surged forward. “Can you even believe what you saw there today? It’s incredible. Holy cow.”

I had to admit: It was something.

I’d interviewed Kasich on the eve of his announcement last July, and what we’d talked about then was temperament. As a young and ambitious congressman, and even in his early years as governor, Kasich had been known as impulsive and impolitic, quick to offend and quicker to retaliate. He chafed endlessly against the established order of his own party.

The knock on Kasich then was that he could never be disciplined or measured enough to project a presidential stature. Seriously.

Now here he was, the last man standing against Trump and Ted Cruz, the only candidate left with governing gravitas. And more improbably, it seemed the campaign had transformed Kasich himself, or at least the public perception of him.

Somehow, the brash, prickly boy wonder of the Gingrich revolution — a guy still reviled by a lot of his liberal adversaries in Ohio for his evident moral certainty — had been elevated to the position of his party’s designated grownup.

Not only had Kasich managed to contain his famous temper over the last several months, but he had emerged as the most relentlessly upbeat candidate in either party, the favorite Republican of editorial boards and just about every voter who wasn’t planning to vote in Republican primaries.

I asked him if he thought he’d grown into this role during the campaign.

“There has been a big change in me, and that’s that I realized that people need encouragement,” he said. “More than I thought they did. They need to believe in themselves and their ability to change the world. I know that.

“I guess there’s an evolution as I’ve aged, and there’s my family and all that,” Kasich went on. “I’m not a kid anymore, you know? I’m 63 years old. Everybody grows up, I hope.”

But if it’s true that Kasich has mellowed (and I think it is), then it’s also true that his metamorphosis has a lot to do with the contrast he’s drawn. If this year’s Republican field were led by, say, John McCain or Mitt Romney, Kasich would probably seem like a slightly less irascible, less impulsive version of the guy who took the stage on the night of his first gubernatorial election and shouted: “I’m going to be the governor of Ohio!”

But as we and most alien civilizations surely know by now, this year’s field has been dominated by a crass showman who plays with extremist language as if the entire campaign were a Mad Lib. And every overshadowed governing candidate has had to make a decision, at one point or another, about how to remain relevant without losing all dignity.

Jeb Bush vacillated between punchless attacks and plaintive whines. Marco Rubio descended for a pivotal week into Triumph-the-Insult-Dog territory, then regretted it just as quickly. Chris Christie befriended the bully and now seems to occupy the organizational rung just below Trump’s butler.

Alone among his peers, Kasich decided that if this was the last campaign of a long career, he was going to go out his way, with seriousness of purpose. And if espousing pragmatism while ignoring Trump has made him seem, for much of the campaign, like a man oblivious to the moment, it has also earned him broader admiration than all the balanced budgets in the world.

Kasich said this week that he would weigh in soon on Trump’s attitude toward women. I asked him if this signaled that a new, combative phase in his campaign was about to begin.

“I’m going to say things when I feel compelled to say them,” he replied, shaking his head. “More combative? I don’t like the sound of that. I’m not interested in being combative, but every once in a while, when you see something that makes your blood boil, I think you should say something about it.”

Trump’s rhetoric isn’t new, so why had he waited this long to get incensed?

“I had a lot of stuff I didn’t know,” Kasich told me. “You might say, ‘Well, how could you not have known about what was happening at those rallies? How could you not have known about his rhetoric?’ Because I didn’t know. I’m running my own thing.

“And when I’ve seen it,” Kasich continued, “frankly I’ve been stunned by the coarseness. It’s beyond coarse, the insulting and incendiary nature of some of what he has done.”

I couldn’t be sure whether Kasich was really the last American with a television to find out about Trump’s verbal recklessness, or whether he simply couldn’t afford to ignore it anymore. As much as he’s burnished his image by remaining at an Olympian remove, the mathematical fact is that Kasich can’t win without somehow taking Trump down.

Even if Kasich were to consolidate his vote with most of Rubio’s (which is unlikely), it wouldn’t be enough to beat Trump and Cruz in most states, as long as they continue to pile up the kinds of pluralities they did this week. Kasich would have to peel off some sizable segment of voters from both candidates, and even then all he can do is keep Trump from clearing the threshold needed to clinch the nomination.

“I have a unique opportunity, because we’re now gaining momentum,” Kasich told me, shrugging off the obstacles. “What would you rather have, momentum in the first quarter or momentum in the fourth? Cruz didn’t win anything last night. I did.

“And you know what? People across the country are celebrating that victory in Ohio. Because they believe it sends a message that somebody who has a record, somebody who can bring us together — that there’s hope for that yet.

“I don’t see that anybody is going to have enough delegates,” Kasich told me. “And then you have a convention. I mean, why are people hyperventilating about that?”

Kasich’s plan, in other words, is to keep Trump from amassing the 1,237 delegates he needs, and then to effectively declare a reset at the convention. His campaign added a team of serious party insiders this week — among them the superlobbyist Vin Weber and the longtime strategist Charlie Black — to begin preparing for a delegate war.

But as Kasich well knows, the “hyperventilation” in some circles comes from imagining what will happen if Republican operatives try to overturn the will of their own voters. And this is why Kasich needs to do more than simply keep Trump under the magic number; he also needs to win a bunch of states that aren’t his own between now and early June.

In the end, an establishment-led challenge will be viable — or at least something less than suicidal — only if the leaders of various delegations can plausibly make the case that Kasich was the party’s strongest candidate by the time the primaries ended.

If nothing else, there’s little question that he’s now the most electable of the bunch. I asked him if it felt odd, despite his sharply conservative record and evangelical fervor, to have become the Republican Democrats like best.

“I have always been able to attract the independent and conservative Democrats,” Kasich told me as the car came to a stop. “When their party’s turned hard left and they feel left behind, we’ve always had an ability to get those votes.”

We were sitting in the driveway of a country club in Merion, Pa., where Kasich was about to attend a fundraiser. I thanked him for spending a little more time with me on what I knew was a rough day.

Kasich laughed, as if deeply amused.

“It’s not a rough day,” he said.

Photo illustration: Yahoo News; photos: Brynn Anderson/AP, J Pat Carter/Getty Images

Imagine you have this incredibly valuable sports car, and when you drive it up to a valet stand there are two guys anxiously vying to take the keys. One of them looks wild-eyed and agitated, like he just drank seven Red Bulls. The other is a guy you remember from high school, except that you hated each other and he’s eyeing the hubcaps with contempt.

Now you have a rough idea of how Republican insiders in Washington are feeling this week. With the season of choosing passing its midpoint, governing Republicans are slowly resigning themselves to what looks like a two-man race between the unpredictable Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, a man so universally disliked that if you Google “hated senator,” every single link that pops up is about him. (Try it yourself.)

It’s an agonizing thing for them to contemplate, but in conversations with a half dozen of the leading Republican strategists and lobbyists this week, it became clear that a solid consensus is forming as to which guy they would rather see get the keys. When it comes to Trump versus Cruz at the top of the ticket, most in the so-called establishment would prefer the devil they know to the daredevil they don’t.

For the moment, of course, Trump looks very hard to stop. And if you’ve been paying attention to his debates and election night speeches lately, you may have noticed that — in between recitations of every poll he’s ever read, and the rambling monologues on genitalia and civil jurisprudence, and the brandishing of his personal steaks and his own print magazine (who knew?) — he’s been consciously trying to reach some kind of rapprochement with party insiders.

On Tuesday night, for instance, after winning in Michigan and Mississippi, Trump used the opening minutes of his victory speech/news conference/traveling revue to call for party unity. He managed to cough up some kind words for Paul Ryan and Lindsey Graham and even Mitt Romney, whom he said he didn’t really know, despite having recently called him a “dope” and a “loser” and “one of the dumbest and worst candidates in the history of Republican politics.”

(And those insults came before Romney essentially pleaded with all right-minded Republicans to banish any thought of Trump as a nominee and bury the brief flirtation in some dark hole of repressed memory.)

All of which may yet lead to some awkward photo ops and panic-induced endorsements on the Capitol steps should Trump be nominated, but make no mistake: Most Washington Republicans want about as much to do with Trump as he does with them.

They see him as erratic and untrustworthy, an ideological trespasser who would borrow the party but holds dear few of its conservative convictions. And they’re profoundly troubled by an authoritarian streak — on issues like immigration and the military’s treatment of civilians — that would seem to make George W. Bush look like a lawyer for the ACLU.

Vin Weber, the congressman turned superlobbyist, does a pretty tidy job of encapsulating these concerns. “I don’t think he’s a ‘big R’ Republican, and I don’t think he’s a ‘small D’ democrat,” Weber told me, “and both of those are big problems for me.”

Most of the party’s governing class, of course, is still hoping for a kind of triple bank-shot gambit to stop Trump’s march toward the nomination. The latest plan goes like this:

Somehow hope that Marco Rubio — who received exactly zero delegates from the four contests earlier this week — can stage a comeback win in Florida Tuesday, while John Kasich manages to eke out a win in Ohio (where he’s the governor, by the way). Then keep Trump from amassing the 1,237 delegates needed to lock up the nomination before the convention, by which time Republican leaders will have settled on a preferred candidate (probably Kasich) whom they can try to ram through.

Which isn’t a terrible plan, except that it’s a little like me saying I have a brilliant plan to become a billionaire, and all I have to do is start by coming up with some kind of amazing app that everyone in America wants to buy. Hope is not a strategy.

The more likely scenario for denying Trump the nomination, at this point, is that Cruz can overtake him, or that he ends up mounting a serious convention challenge if Trump can’t lock up the delegates before then. And while the D.C. elites are none too jazzed about this possibility, they’re starting to almost embrace it.

The reason Republicans in Washington don’t like Cruz is that even by the standards of Washington, where we think of blatant self-promotion the way most other Americans think about getting out of bed in the morning, he seems to stand out for his insincerity. Colleagues disdain the holier-than-the-rest-of-you image he has cultivated since arriving in the Senate just three years ago.

But that same opportunism, they will tell you, is what ultimately makes Cruz a more palatable nominee. That’s because they assume that Cruz’s evangelical and anti-government purity is more a matter of political positioning than it is of actual zealotry.

If nothing else, the insiders believe, Cruz is coachable and calculating in a way Trump is not, and he’s a more reliable conservative.

With Cruz as the nominee, Republicans figure they have at least an outside shot at holding the Senate, mainly by giving their more vulnerable candidates some distance from him. Less so with Trump, whose insatiable need for controversy and incendiary appeals to emotion might overwhelm everything else.

None of which is to say that Cruz has a better chance of winning than Trump. He doesn’t, and even most governing Republicans will admit that Trump could conceivably broaden the appeal of the party nationally, while Cruz almost certainly runs it aground. He’d have a better chance of landing his own show on MSNBC than he would of winning the popular vote — something Republicans have done only once in the last 20 years.

But that might not be the worst thing in the world, either. If Cruz were to become the nominee and suffer a Goldwater-type thrashing in November (which probably can’t happen, given the polarized electoral math of the country today, but he could certainly do worse than John McCain or Mitt Romney), then governing Republicans might finally be able to go on the offensive against their own activists.

The argument then would go something like this: “Hey, we tried it your way, and we nominated a purist, and we got dismantled, and now the Clintons are prying up floorboards in the Lincoln Bedroom and retrieving all the secret files they once squirreled away. So maybe it’s time to build a more tolerant party that actually governs.”

It’s a bleak excuse for optimism, to be sure — half-hoping to lose in the expectation that you can make people understand how to win. But for Republicans in Washington, it’s all pretty bleak right about now.

If you think your choice is between a reckless driver and a spiteful one, maybe the only realistic goal is to keep the car in one piece.

Photo illustration: Yahoo News; photos: Brynn Anderson/AP, J Pat Carter/Getty Images

Imagine you have this incredibly valuable sports car, and when you drive it up to a valet stand there are two guys anxiously vying to take the keys. One of them looks wild-eyed and agitated, like he just drank seven Red Bulls. The other is a guy you remember from high school, except that you hated each other and he’s eyeing the hubcaps with contempt.

Now you have a rough idea of how Republican insiders in Washington are feeling this week. With the season of choosing passing its midpoint, governing Republicans are slowly resigning themselves to what looks like a two-man race between the unpredictable Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, a man so universally disliked that if you Google “hated senator,” every single link that pops up is about him. (Try it yourself.)

It’s an agonizing thing for them to contemplate, but in conversations with a half dozen of the leading Republican strategists and lobbyists this week, it became clear that a solid consensus is forming as to which guy they would rather see get the keys. When it comes to Trump versus Cruz at the top of the ticket, most in the so-called establishment would prefer the devil they know to the daredevil they don’t.

For the moment, of course, Trump looks very hard to stop. And if you’ve been paying attention to his debates and election night speeches lately, you may have noticed that — in between recitations of every poll he’s ever read, and the rambling monologues on genitalia and civil jurisprudence, and the brandishing of his personal steaks and his own print magazine (who knew?) — he’s been consciously trying to reach some kind of rapprochement with party insiders.

On Tuesday night, for instance, after winning in Michigan and Mississippi, Trump used the opening minutes of his victory speech/news conference/traveling revue to call for party unity. He managed to cough up some kind words for Paul Ryan and Lindsey Graham and even Mitt Romney, whom he said he didn’t really know, despite having recently called him a “dope” and a “loser” and “one of the dumbest and worst candidates in the history of Republican politics.”

(And those insults came before Romney essentially pleaded with all right-minded Republicans to banish any thought of Trump as a nominee and bury the brief flirtation in some dark hole of repressed memory.)

All of which may yet lead to some awkward photo ops and panic-induced endorsements on the Capitol steps should Trump be nominated, but make no mistake: Most Washington Republicans want about as much to do with Trump as he does with them.

They see him as erratic and untrustworthy, an ideological trespasser who would borrow the party but holds dear few of its conservative convictions. And they’re profoundly troubled by an authoritarian streak — on issues like immigration and the military’s treatment of civilians — that would seem to make George W. Bush look like a lawyer for the ACLU.

Vin Weber, the congressman turned superlobbyist, does a pretty tidy job of encapsulating these concerns. “I don’t think he’s a ‘big R’ Republican, and I don’t think he’s a ‘small D’ democrat,” Weber told me, “and both of those are big problems for me.”

Most of the party’s governing class, of course, is still hoping for a kind of triple bank-shot gambit to stop Trump’s march toward the nomination. The latest plan goes like this:

Somehow hope that Marco Rubio — who received exactly zero delegates from the four contests earlier this week — can stage a comeback win in Florida Tuesday, while John Kasich manages to eke out a win in Ohio (where he’s the governor, by the way). Then keep Trump from amassing the 1,237 delegates needed to lock up the nomination before the convention, by which time Republican leaders will have settled on a preferred candidate (probably Kasich) whom they can try to ram through.

Which isn’t a terrible plan, except that it’s a little like me saying I have a brilliant plan to become a billionaire, and all I have to do is start by coming up with some kind of amazing app that everyone in America wants to buy. Hope is not a strategy.

The more likely scenario for denying Trump the nomination, at this point, is that Cruz can overtake him, or that he ends up mounting a serious convention challenge if Trump can’t lock up the delegates before then. And while the D.C. elites are none too jazzed about this possibility, they’re starting to almost embrace it.

The reason Republicans in Washington don’t like Cruz is that even by the standards of Washington, where we think of blatant self-promotion the way most other Americans think about getting out of bed in the morning, he seems to stand out for his insincerity. Colleagues disdain the holier-than-the-rest-of-you image he has cultivated since arriving in the Senate just three years ago.

But that same opportunism, they will tell you, is what ultimately makes Cruz a more palatable nominee. That’s because they assume that Cruz’s evangelical and anti-government purity is more a matter of political positioning than it is of actual zealotry.

If nothing else, the insiders believe, Cruz is coachable and calculating in a way Trump is not, and he’s a more reliable conservative.

With Cruz as the nominee, Republicans figure they have at least an outside shot at holding the Senate, mainly by giving their more vulnerable candidates some distance from him. Less so with Trump, whose insatiable need for controversy and incendiary appeals to emotion might overwhelm everything else.

None of which is to say that Cruz has a better chance of winning than Trump. He doesn’t, and even most governing Republicans will admit that Trump could conceivably broaden the appeal of the party nationally, while Cruz almost certainly runs its aground. He’d have a better chance of landing his own show on MSNBC than he would of winning the popular vote — something Republicans have done only once in the last 20 years.

But that might not be the worst thing in the world, either. If Cruz were to become the nominee and suffer a Goldwater-type thrashing in November (which probably can’t happen, given the polarized electoral math of the country today, but he could certainly do worse than John McCain or Mitt Romney), then governing Republicans might finally be able to go on the offensive against their own activists.

The argument then would go something like this: “Hey, we tried it your way, and we nominated a purist, and we got dismantled, and now the Clintons are prying up floorboards in the Lincoln Bedroom and retrieving all the secret files they once squirreled away. So maybe it’s time to build a more tolerant party that actually governs.”

It’s a bleak excuse for optimism, to be sure—half-hoping to lose in the expectation that you can make people understand how to win. But for Republicans in Washington, it’s all pretty bleak right about now.

If you think your choice is between a reckless driver and a spiteful one, maybe the only realistic goal is to keep the car in one piece.

Photo illustration: Yahoo News; photos: Mary Evans/Walt Disney Pictures/Ronald Grant/Everett Collection, Mary Schwalm/AP, Alan Diaz/AP

Once upon a time, in a little town called Establishment Creek where prosperity trickled down through a burbling stream, there lived three little pigs. Their names were Jeb, Chris and Marco.

One day a wolf came up their windy trail, followed by a very angry mob and a horde of TV cameras.

The wolf cut quite a figure. He had wild orange fur and teeth whiter than a Bernie Sanders caucus.

The wolf, who was a builder and a businessman by trade, hadn’t actually incited the mob, and he wasn’t especially angry about anything himself. He had little to be angry about, really, since he was rich and famous. He had simply been sitting around when the mob happened by.

But there was an emptiness in the poor wolf’s wolfish soul, a sense that if the townspeople weren’t constantly talking about him he might just disappear. And it had occurred to the wolf that if you were looking for new ways to be loved and admired, being at the head of an angry mob wasn’t the worst place you could be.

And so it was that he came upon the first house, an old and tasteful mansion with lots of ivy growing all around. This was Jeb’s house.

The wolf recoiled.

“This house is just horrible,” the wolf said when Jeb came to the door. “It’s total low-energy.”

“I use LED bulbs,” Jeb said proudly.

“Whatever,” the wolf went on, “but we’ve got to tear it down. We’re gonna build something huge, something that will really dazzle. Let me tell you, it’s just going to be so spectacular, you wouldn’t believe.”

Jeb faced a decision.

“Here’s the deal,” Jeb said, because he had trouble starting a sentence without saying that, though it was something he was working on. “My granddad built this house, and my dad added onto it, and my brother put the batting cage out back. You can do what you want, but I’m proud of this house and what it stands for, and I’m not leveling it for some angry mob.”

“Well, that’s all very moving,” the wolf went on, reaching into his pocket, “but I’ve got this eminent domain order.” The wolf kept them around for just this sort of emergency.

And with that the mob demolished the house, and in its place the wolf built a garish, windowless casino with giant video screens to entrance the masses and his own name in gold letters at the top.

“There’s gonna be so much winning here, you’re gonna get sick of it,” the wolf proclaimed, and then he and the mob moved on down the road.

Next he came to Chris’s house. It was a big, imposing house with a giant amphitheater for town hall meetings. The wolf rapped on the steel door.

“Time’s up, loser,” the wolf told Chris when he answered the door. “I’m gonna make you squeal like a pig. Figure of speech, you know.”

Chris faced a decision.

He looked up and down the street to see if anyone was listening, and then he leaned in close to the wolf.

“Lookit,” he said, because he had trouble starting a sentence without saying that, though it was something he was working on. “Truth be told, I built this house on top of a rickety bridge. The engineers told me it wouldn’t hold, but I went ahead anyway, and it’s about to collapse any minute.

“How about I let you tear it down, and then you and me and the mob go over to Marco’s place and show him what’s what? I can’t stand that little swine.”

The wolf thought it over. “That’s a pretty good deal,” he agreed. “I make the most unbelievable deals, you have no idea. I pay factories in China a dollar a day to make my beautiful ties. I get the wool for free. I mean, I’m a wolf, OK? Do the math.”

So the mob tore down Chris’s house in no time, and in its place the wolf ordered built the tallest, most depressing wall anyone had ever seen. “The Mexicans are paying for it,” the wolf declared, which really confused all the undocumented Mexican workers he had employed to build it, because they thought he meant them.

Finally they all moved on to Marco’s house, which was the newest, most contemporary place on the block, with lots of glass and light.

Marco was newer to Establishment Creek, but he had worked very hard to make his house a showcase. Every arch and alcove had been meticulously planned, every material handpicked. The house was regularly featured in magazines. It was the envy of the town.

“Hey, little pigface,” the wolf said. “I need you out of the house. I’ve got this great idea for a university.”

Marco faced a decision.

“I think the president knows exactly what he is doing,” Marco said, because he had trouble starting a sentence without saying that, though it was something he was working on. “Anyway, I’m not going to let you tear down my gorgeous house like you did the others.”

“Look, I’ll give you a crate of bottled water, OK?” the wolf said impatiently. “You seriously look like you’re about to swallow your tongue.”

But Marco had a better plan. He decided he would tear down his own house, beam by beam, and make it into something just as dark and ugly and crass as the things the wolf had built. That way the mob would be transfixed and would leave him be.

In record time, Marco managed to transform his light-filled home into a burlesque monstrosity, with flashing neon martini glasses and seedy, life-size ads for adult comedy.

The cameramen all surged forward, eager to record the spectacle. Marco beamed before them. With a stroke of genius, he had managed to do what the other little pigs had not, which was to match the wolf at his own game. If the wolf could enthrall the mob, so could he.

Except that Marco had misunderstood what brought the mob to his neighborhood in the first place. He had assumed that the angry townspeople were drawn to all the new things the wolf had raised up for them — from towering monuments to the basest kind of entertainment.

All the mob really wanted, though, was to tear things down. They didn’t much care what came next. And all Marco had achieved was to defile his own house.

The wolf chuckled, and the mob quickly set about dismantling what remained of Establishment Creek. Marco watched the end of the story unfold, just another pig covered in mud.

The candidate at a Trump rally in Las Vegas on Monday. (Photo: Erik Kabik Photography/MediaPunch/IPX)

Cheer up, Republican leaders!

OK, it’s true, your grand old party, which not long ago stood for family values and dime-store flag pins, is now on the verge of being taken over by a man who once likened his risqué sex life to a tour in Vietnam. And yes, perhaps the 168 members of the Republican National Committee are about to find out how janitors get treated at the Trump Taj Mahal.

But if Trump does become your nominee — and even I’m now persuaded, after months of being wrong, that it’s pretty likely — it doesn’t mean you’re destined for another Goldwater-type defeat in November.

On the contrary, Trump would likely face Hillary Clinton, who would be an underwhelming candidate even if she weren’t swimming against a powerful historical current in seeking a third term for her party. And if Michael Bloomberg jumps in as an independent next month (because, you know, two New Yorkers and one billionaire aren’t enough), Clinton’s path only gets harder.

No, the real question isn’t whether Republicans really have a chance to win with Trump, because they do. The question is what kind of president he would be. My guess is that President Trump wouldn’t actually be the reactionary, often venomous leader we’ve seen rallying the faithful these last few months.

He might well turn out to be something worse.

Let’s first dispense with the idea that Trump, should he continue his long march to the nomination unimpeded, will bring about the end times for politics as we’ve known it. I doubt that.

Trump will never be an orthodox candidate (nor would any sane person look at the results thus far and conclude he should be), but he’s shrewd enough to understand that general election campaigns aren’t the same thing as raucous primaries and that only a handful of people really know how to wage them. By convention time, you can bet he’ll have added a coterie of trusted hands to his campaign, and you’ll see pictures of him with Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan on the Capitol steps, projecting the grim sobriety of an Amish deacon.

Trump can play the game as well as anyone. He has no reason to overturn the board.

But what if he were actually inaugurated? Does he really have a governing philosophy, and what can we extract from it?

As Trump’s rivals never tire of pointing out (usually just before they flame out and quit the race), the full list of issues on which he’s radically changed course over the years is long. Thoughtful politicians evolve, of course, and we should applaud them for it, but this is less like an evolution than a brain transplant conducted by aliens.

Here’s a sampling. Trump supported single-payer health care; now he wants government out of the business altogether. He called for a steep tax on the wealthy; now he would cut so many taxes, you just wouldn’t believe. He was pro-choice and pro-gun-regulation; now he’s neither. He was an independent leaning toward Democrats; now he’s a Republican leaning toward Know-Nothings.

I wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn that Trump used to be a huge proponent of losing but has since come to embrace winning in all its myriad forms.

But it’s not right to say that Trump has no discernible ideology. That’s true only in the binary context of our politics, where we tend to see all governing constructs through the prism of left versus right.

INTERACTIVE: Where the candidates stand on the issues >>>

Trump has an ideology, and it’s all about ratings. The one constant, through his careers as a celebrity developer and then a reality TV star and now as a politician, is that he measures his own success by sheer affirmation.

Trump is, above all else, a supremely gifted entertainer, and like all entertainers, he must have your adoration, or at least your attention. He goes where the crowd is, and he finds it hard to respect anyone who doesn’t.

This is why he can’t get through a single debate without reciting his poll numbers and mocking his opponents for theirs. Polls, Nielsen numbers, “most wealthy” lists, building names — external validation, in whatever form, is his life’s urgent work.

And it’s why I suspect that, for all his nativist and anti-government rhetoric, Trump is no more of a right-wing culture crusader than I am an astronaut. He is, as I’ve written before, an emotional extremist, a reckless provocateur who wants to make you feel pride or love or revulsion — whatever it is, as long as you feel something visceral.

President Trump could just as easily end up a liberal president as a conservative one, an interventionist or a peacemaker, depending on where the applause was leading him. He could just as easily fill Justice Scalia’s seat on the court with Judge Judy as with Ken Starr, if that would please the masses.

You might take solace in the idea that Trump isn’t at heart a doctrinaire, anti-government nationalist. You might intuit in that a certain kind of pragmatism. You shouldn’t.

The system, after all, is built to repel extreme doctrines. You can’t just walk into Washington and enact some militant, right-wing agenda, or a left-wing socialist one. The voters won’t follow an ideological zealot too far down that path before reversing course. (And no, before you start with me, Obama’s health care plan isn’t close to socialism — just ask Bernie Sanders.)

But a president who is a vehicle for the mob of the moment, no matter which direction it’s coming from, is something else entirely. A president who wakes up every morning asking if his latest speech beat “The Big Bang Theory,” or if it made him more popular than his adversaries in the overnight tracking poll, poses a different kind of peril. A president like that will say anything — ­do anything — to feel the love.

All presidents are asked, at moments they can’t foresee, to act as a bulwark against what John Adams called the “tyranny of the majority.” (Had he lived in the social media age, Adams might have worried more about the tyranny of the loud.) Where George W. Bush sought to protect Muslim Americans from an outpouring of anger, Trump has already indulged it. Where Barack Obama moved cautiously to ease the racial tensions simmering in America’s cities, Trump might consciously inflame them.

What worries me about Trump isn’t that he’s not capable of making wise decisions, but rather that his core ideology prevents him from telling his audience anything that isn’t immediately and emotionally satisfying. Which is pretty much the definition of a demagogue.

All is not yet lost, Republicans. Trump could still turn out to be your savior.

But just remember: If so, he’ll be your responsibility, too.

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie. (Photos: Paul Sancya/AP, Kayana Szymczak/Getty Images)

When Mitt Romney lost his presidential bid in 2012, a lot of senior Republicans blamed Chris Christie for cementing his defeat. At a critical moment that fall, you may remember, New Jersey’s governor had stood arm in arm with President Obama as they toured the wreckage of Hurricane Sandy, which seemed to undercut Romney’s entire argument about Obama being a divisive and incompetent leader.

In truth, it was pretty weak to blame Christie, given the litany of Romney’s shortcomings, not to mention the fact that Christie had a decimated state to govern and shouldn’t have been thinking about electoral votes at that moment anyway.

But if the field of Republican hopefuls not named Donald Trump remains overcrowded and hopelessly muddled after this weekend, and if Trump himself cruises to another victory in South Carolina and ends up winning the nomination, a lot of those same Republican leaders may look back and conclude that it was Christie who cost them a victory yet again.

And this time, they may actually be right.

Christie, of course, departed from the race last week, with uncharacteristic silence, after finishing a disappointing sixth in the New Hampshire primary. He didn’t go quietly, though. In his final debate, three days before the primary, the former prosecutor gave us the campaign’s most memorable moment so far, gleefully taunting Marco Rubio as the Florida senator tried in vain to repeat his scripted talking points.

Christie, you see, didn’t like Rubio’s attacks on his record, and as anyone could see in that moment, he doesn’t much like Rubio, either. Rubio is boyish, glamorous, politically malleable and beloved for his inspiring story — all things for which Christie has a healthy dose of contempt, if not perhaps a hint of envy.

Well, all right, you say. That was all very entertaining, but now Christie is out and Rubio looks to be at least somewhat resurgent, so it was really just a bump in the road, right?

Maybe. Except that one bump in the road, placed at a crucial intersection, can cause a major pileup.

To understand why that minute-long exchange between Christie and Rubio may reverberate for years to come, you have to understand the underlying dynamic of this year’s Republican race.

Trump’s support over the last several months, minus a few peaks and valleys, has basically hovered around or just over the 30 percent mark in the early primary states. That’s a sizable plurality of the vote, and it’s proved to be surprisingly unshakable, but it hardly makes him as dominant a figure in the party as his round-the-clock media coverage would suggest.

The problem for the governing wing of the party is that, when you add to Trump’s plurality the support for Ted Cruz and Ben Carson, more than half of this year’s electorate seems to be chiefly looking for a candidate who will blow up the status quo. And the rest of the Republican vote has been almost equally divided among an unusually populous group of eminently electable governing types.

My thinking several months ago, as I’ve written before, was that before the campaign got to the South, the party’s more traditional electorate and its leadership would have congealed around one or possibly two candidates, causing poll numbers to tighten considerably and making Trump look like far less of an imposing force.

Congealing is what establishments are good at. It’s pretty much what they exist to do.

And, for better or worse, that’s exactly what was about to happen the week before the New Hampshire primary. After a shaky few weeks, Rubio had exceeded expectations by finishing just a point behind Trump in Iowa. He arrived in New Hampshire with a gale force gust at his back, drawing something like 800 people and half the national media to a tiny theater in Exeter, where I watched him ignite the crowd with a mix of partisan fire and unscripted humor.

Though untested and sometimes unsteady, Rubio is the closest thing the fractured party has to a consensus candidate (except maybe among the hardcore, anti-immigration crowd), and at that point his campaign had taken on real momentum. Driving around New Hampshire in those first few days after Iowa, I expected Rubio would surge solidly into second place, and I didn’t discount the possibility that he could end up surpassing Trump.

Had that happened, my guess is you would have seen the party’s donors and elected leadership close ranks pretty quickly. There would have been enormous pressure on Jeb Bush and John Kasich to follow Christie out the door. The South Carolina primary, devised in the 1970s to give the new establishment of Southern and Western Republicans a firewall against apostates, would have been reduced essentially to a three-man race.

But then Christie came to his final debate looking to inflict the same kind of damage he’d suffered, and within a few minutes Rubio was basically in the fetal position at center stage, begging for a commercial break. The clip went viral. For a few days, Rubio dropped faster than the Tower of Terror at Disneyland; he finished fifth, just behind his old mentor, Bush.

That brief window for congealing around a non-Trump candidate quickly closed. And now, instead of showcasing a winnowed field, South Carolina looks just as jumbled as New Hampshire.

Four years ago, South Carolina was a race between the establishment favorite, Romney, and three insurgent candidates — Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum and Ron Paul — who were all vying to emerge as the anti-Romney. (Gingrich ultimately won, but not by enough to derail Romney.)

This year looks almost like a reverse image. Now it’s Trump with a commanding lead and Cruz consolidating evangelical support, while three governing candidates — Rubio, Kasich and Bush — battle to outlast one another.

The state’s popular governor, Nikki Haley, endorsed Rubio this week, which is a major seal of approval for him (especially after the former president, George W. Bush, worked her over for Jeb). But Haley is only the third of 31 Republican governors to swing behind one of the current candidates.

Rather than having rallied around a clear favorite after New Hampshire, one of the most powerful blocs in the party remains perilously detached from the process, apparently afraid to end up on the wrong side of the Trump rebellion.

Unless one of the governing candidates surges late and finishes well above the others (and I wouldn’t be shocked to see Rubio do just that), chances are that the entire field will move on to the 13 states holding contests on March 1, while a helpless establishment looks on. And by the time those states vote, it’s quite possible that Trump’s nomination will have come to seem palatable or even inevitable to the majority of Republican voters.

There’s a long way to go before then. But if Trump wakes up March 2 and finds himself planning for what once seemed an unlikely convention, he should probably start thinking about Christie as a potential running mate.

It’s the least he can do for the man who inadvertently cleared his path.

Hillary Clinton speaks on Tuesday night after the New Hampshire primary. (Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

In the days before Bernie Sanders positively obliterated Hillary Clinton in New Hampshire, raising the very real specter that she could lose the nomination, I found myself thinking a lot about an exchange she had with voters during a CNN town hall in Derry.

A tired-looking man rose and told Clinton he had terminal colon cancer, and he wanted to know what she would do to help advance the conversation about end-of-life decisions. Clinton seemed visibly moved.

“I don’t have an easy or glib answer for you,” Clinton said candidly, adding that she needed to immerse herself in the ethical and scientific writings.

Not five minutes later, another voter asked Clinton how she would stand up to Republican attacks. She scoffed knowingly and let loose a recitation of how victimized she had been over the years, and how horrible it was to be the target of smear campaigns, and how she was still standing anyway. “It’s unlike anything you’ve ever gone through,” Clinton said.

I thought to myself: Tell that to the guy with colon cancer.

A better politician would have said yes, of course she’d have to deal with some attacks, but that’s life in the arena and she feels lucky to serve. A great politician, like her husband in his prime, would have actually meant it.

But Hillary, truth be told, just isn’t a very gifted politician. And while Sanders focuses relentlessly on the big themes that preoccupy voters, Clinton’s campaign feels like it’s all about her — her résumé, her mettle, her 25 years of suffering through the indignities of public service. “I’m with her” is the slogan for a campaign that seems to signify nothing beyond the joyless accretion of personal loyalties.

Clinton really should beat Sanders in the weeks ahead, but she has only one clear winning strategy here, near as I can tell. She has to stop allowing the campaign to become a referendum on her — and turn it, instead, into a referendum on the guy she wants to replace.

That won’t be Clinton’s instinct, of course. The first thing she’s going to do now, apparently, is the thing the Clintons have generally done when backed against a wall: blame the staff.

Even before New Hampshire buried Clinton in bad news, handing her a 22-point defeat in which she even lost women by double digits, stories were circulating about a shakeup at the Brooklyn headquarters (where, you would think, Clinton’s high command now feels like the Lost Battalion caught behind enemy lines, surrounded by turtleneck-wearing hipsters with “Bernie” signs in their windows).

All of which reminds me of what a scandal-damaged Gary Hart said in 1988 when his chief operative in Iowa, a young law student named Martin O’Malley, informed him that he had registered at zero percent in the caucuses and apologized for letting him down.

“Martin,” Hart said dryly, “this was not an organizational problem.”

Clinton doesn’t have an organizational problem. Oh, sure, there are probably too many informal advisers, too much conflicting advice, no shortage of arrogance and infighting. But that’s nothing new in the Clinton orbit. Only the cast of characters ever changes, and even then not much.

No, Clinton’s problem is the moment and her inability to meet it. What happened in New Hampshire Tuesday wasn’t just some ideological rebellion in both parties, a predictable insider-outsider conflict with less predictable results.

This was the shock wave of 2008 finally rising to the surface of our fractured politics. What Sanders and Donald Trump embody, each in his own strident way, is the disgust that’s been building for the eight years since Lehman Brothers collapsed and took the markets with it — eight years in which the wealthy and their wholly owned political parties recovered fabulously while everyone else stagnated.

President Obama once told a roomful of bankers, in frustration, that he was the only thing standing between them and the pitchforks. Turns out he was right, and now that he’s stepping aside, the pitchforks are overturning our politics.

Here’s where Clinton finds herself in a real box. Having represented New York and its chief industry, finance, she’s nowhere near a credible populist; the more she tries to sound like Sanders and tout her history as a progressive rebel who once worked for the Children’s Defense Fund, the more she comes off as desperate and expedient.

But if instead Clinton tries to own her real convictions and make the case for a more pragmatic approach, she’s seen as an ideological apostate, unwilling to take on the system. And so her choice is to be either a less genuine candidate than Sanders or a less progressive one — or some days both.

A supremely talented candidate might navigate a way out of this box, but as I said, that’s not Clinton’s superpower. Her team’s strategy for beating back Sanders seems to rely, instead, on demographics. The coming states will feature more black and Latino voters, and Clinton is assuming they won’t be as impressed as voters in New Hampshire were by the rumpled white guy from Vermont.

That’s a pretty shaky assumption, if you ask me.

Remember, Bill Clinton, who once commanded the loyalty of African-American voters like no Democrat since Robert Kennedy, hasn’t appeared on a ballot for 20 years. A lot of younger black and Latino voters don’t even remember the Clinton years, and they’re just as tired of the status quo as their white counterparts.

It won’t be so easy for Hillary to convince minority and younger white voters, who soundly rejected her in New Hampshire this week, that somehow she represents real change and progressive ideals.

But they believe that still about Barack Obama, and this is where Sanders has left her an opening.

Because for the past few weeks, if you’ve been paying attention, Sanders has subtly extended his indictment of his party’s timid status quo right to the door of the White House. I don’t know what Obama said to Sanders when the two of them sat down to talk in January, but whatever it was, it left Sanders in an uncharitable mood.

Since then, he has said (in a string of angry tweets, no less) that real progressives can’t be for trade deals like the Trans-Pacific Partnership. He has said real progressives can’t take money from Wall Street. Having apparently appointed himself Political Philosophy Czar, Sanders has said you can’t call yourself both a moderate and a progressive at the same time.

Sanders has brushed aside the health care law that is Obama’s signature achievement (and his most politically costly), calling for a single-payer system and castigating pharmaceutical companies as if “Obamacare” had never existed.

In other words, while he praises Obama in debates, Sanders is saying, unmistakably, that Obama hasn’t been a progressive president and doesn’t embody systemic change. And that’s the cause — rather than her own long résumé — that Clinton, having played a pivotal role in the administration, should champion if she wants to get between Sanders and the voters she needs.

If I were Clinton right now, I’d be asking some pretty simple questions every chance I got in South Carolina and Nevada and Michigan.

Who gets to claim the mantle of change — the nation’s first black president, who overturned the old order on health care and Wall Street regulation and Cuba and Iran, or a senator who’s voted with the gun industry? How seriously can you take a candidate who doesn’t think Obama represents a real departure from the status quo?

A vote for Clinton, at this point, has to be a vote of validation for Obama’s legacy, too.

It’s not a perfect strategy. You might point out that Obama himself once derided Clinton, eons ago, as shifty and calculating. You might point out, as I have, that elections are supposed to be about the future and not the past.

But here’s the reality: To this point, Clinton has run a campaign that’s all about her bona fides, and nobody’s swooning. If she’s still defending her Wall Street speeches and whining about the vast right-wing conspiracy a few weeks from now, the nomination could very well slip away from her, again.

Clinton’s best move now is to lash herself tightly to the man who once beat her and hope it’s enough to ride out the wave.

Republican presidential candidates Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush. (Photos: Getty Images)

The day after the Iowa caucuses, I watched as the Shakespearean drama underlying this year’s Republican race — a classic tale of friendship and betrayal — played out its final act on either edge of New Hampshire.

In Keene, close to the Vermont border, I joined the small group of reporters who came to hear Jeb Bush speak to a polite audience of workers at a grocery wholesaler. Bush was, as ever, reasoned and respectful, but he seemed a little frustrated as he compared his old Florida protégé to President Obama.

Marco Rubio is “gifted as a politician, an unbelievable orator,” Bush said. But “the presidency is a leadership position. It’s not a backbencher, where you argue endlessly over amendments.”

Later, I drove down to Exeter, on the seacoast, where Rubio had just arrived to a line of satellite trucks and a raucous crowd of maybe 800 people, packed so tightly into a steaming, centuries-old theater that I heard a volunteer raise questions about the sturdiness of the balcony.

Playful and sure-footed, Rubio seemed like a different guy from the halting candidate I’d watched in Iowa just a few weeks earlier, under attack from all sides. “It is not enough to be angry,” Rubio told the crowd. “You have a right to be angry. But anger is not a plan.”

At one point, he told the story of how he had courageously decided to take on Florida’s Republican establishment and its then governor, Charlie Crist, when he ran for Senate in 2010. He left out the part about how his mentor, Jeb, had helped make it possible from the shadows.

New Hampshire is a fiercely unpredictable place, and anything can happen Tuesday. But it sure looks like we’re witnessing the last week of the long Bush dynasty in Republican politics — vanquished, in part, by a onetime confidant who understood where American politics was going.

This is not the way it was supposed to go down. When I talked with Rubio back in March, a few weeks before his official announcement, most analysts believed that Bush’s entry into the race had made Rubio redundant. Bush was better known, better funded and better positioned to lock down Florida’s coveted money and delegates.

The thinking among Republicans in Washington then was that the only thing keeping Bush from choosing his younger sidekick as a running mate was the fact that they hailed from the same state, which was just a damn shame.

Primary seasons, though, are when the tectonic undercurrents of our politics reveal themselves. And what’s become clear in the months since is that Bush fundamentally misread the seismic signs of the moment.

Having been out of elective office for eight years, Bush took too long to grasp that the anger fueling conservative revolt was as much about the Republican establishment — with which the Bush name had become synonymous — as it was about Obama.

He entered the race without even thinking through a response to questions about his brother’s foreign policy. Somehow he conceived of his own candidacy as tangential to the family legacy.

“I won the lottery, I totally get it, I’m totally blessed,” I heard Bush tell voters this week with evident exasperation, as if he hoped to acknowledge it and then move on. He should have realized months ago that there was no moving on — that as long as he carried the Bush name, he would have to either defend or disown the past.

Nor did Bush seem to realize that Donald Trump’s sudden surge had nothing to do with ideology and everything to do with a sense of futility. Thinking that Trump was really just playing the role to him that two Pats (Robertson and Buchanan) had played to his father, Jeb’s first instinct was to demonstrate that he was the truer conservative.

In what was probably the worst day of his campaign, Bush marched down to the border with Mexico, declared himself tough on illegal immigrants and defended his use of the term “anchor babies.” He came off as pandering, and his attacks on Trump’s lack of conviction did nothing to dampen the uprising.

And Bush spent far too much of his campaign prattling on about his decade-old record as governor, oblivious to the fact that good governance no longer generated any mojo in either party; he might as well have been talking about his high school transcripts. (Actually, I heard him do a little of that, too.)

All that establishment money Bush piled up so effortlessly — more than $100 million for a California-based super-PAC — turned out to be infinitely less effective than Trump’s boxes of cheap hats with an even cheaper slogan. Bush’s allies spent a reported $14 million in Iowa, more than any other candidate, to corral 2.8 percent of the vote.

You’d have to think now that Rubio, having been close to Jeb in recent years, intuited that his old patron would end up being a man out of time. Rubio, remember, ran as both a party leader (he was Florida’s House speaker) and a tea party idol during his improbable Senate campaign in 2010.

He learned then, better than his mentor, how to precariously balance the dueling impulses in the party — how to edify the rising anti-governing faction with seething rhetoric, while at the same time soothing the broader electorate with inspiring, aspirational themes.

And as a younger, nonwhite politician who watched Obama closely, Rubio understood, as completely as Bush did not, that résumé mattered for little in the post-boomer, entertainment-obsessed political age. What resonated more was a powerful story about how you got here or where you would take the country — something that reaffirmed, either through the power of identity or imagery or both, the things we wanted to believe about ourselves.

Lately, as the two men have vied to unify New Hampshire’s fractured non-Trump vote, a Rubio-aligned super-PAC has been pounding away at Jeb as a relic of the Clinton-Bush age of empire. In a radio ad I heard on a rock station while driving around New Hampshire, the narrator says: “Jeb Bush keeps talking about the past — about his father, his mother, his brother. All good people and respected. But their time has passed.”

But if in fact the Bushes’ time has passed, then it may have less to do with Jeb specifically than with this very notion of dynastic governing families in national politics that defined a lot of the 20th century.

Sure, we’ll probably have the Clintons and the Palins to kick around for a while longer — families that entertain us with their scandals and foibles, the same reality-show drama that makes Trump endlessly fascinating to some plurality of voters and much too large a segment of reporters.

But this concept of inherited establishment that defined the Roosevelts and Tafts and Kennedys, the idea that a family brand can endure through political generations, is probably anachronistic now, born of a time when parties and their leadership inspired more loyalty. We reward personalities, not paternalism.

No one can tell you what’s about to happen in New Hampshire. But unless something profound shifts in the next several days, and New Hampshire finally learns to love the Bushes, a long chapter in American politics may well be coming to a close.

The last heir will see himself pushed aside, eclipsed by the acolyte who refused to yield.

Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders and Ted Cruz on the campaign trail. (Photos, from left: Mary Altaffer, Charlie Neibergall, Jae C. Hong/AP)

So apparently Iowans are fed up and frothy and about to dismantle American politics as we’ve known it, upending the tired status quo of at least one party and possibly both.

What exactly does this mean? It means they might caucus overwhelmingly for a Republican candidate — Ted Cruz or Donald Trump — who vows to cut yet more taxes, scale back government and get tough with our enemies. Or they might choose a socialist — Bernie Sanders — who would raise taxes, restore regulations and expand entitlements.

Good lord! We haven’t seen this kind of radical experimentation since Major League Baseball decided to institute “throwback day” and make every team dust off its uniforms from the 1970s.

(Just by the way, White Sox: They were bad then, and they’re worse now. How about next year you scour the closet for something that doesn’t make you look like a bunch of Oreos with legs.)

The truth is that when it comes to challenging orthodoxies, the insurgents on both sides are way more retro than they are radical. And that may be why, no matter what transpires in Iowa Monday, they’re destined to come up short.

Oh, I know, now I’m going to hear the wails from all quarters. Sanders is going to start a political revolution! (We know this because he says so.) Cruz is the modern George Washington, riding in on horseback to remake the country! (We know this because Glenn Beck says so. Seriously, he does.)

And I’m sure that to a lot of their supporters in Iowa and elsewhere, all of this sounds very disruptive, as they say at TED Talks. None of the college kids who pack Sanders’ rallies can be expected to remember George McGovern or Walter Mondale, or even Al Gore. A lot of the tea party leaders I’ve met seem to think American politics started with Alexander Hamilton and then skipped, more or less, to Jim DeMint.

As a society, generally speaking, we now consider all modern history that isn’t trending on Twitter to be ancient and disposable.

But trust me on this much: Proposing to raise income taxes past 50 percent on the wealthy and to reimpose the Glass-Steagall banking law isn’t taking Democratic politics in some radical new direction. It’s pretty much embracing the status quo for the vast majority of the 20th century.

I find it stupefying every time I hear Sanders make his case for universal health care like almost every Democrat before him, as if President Obama’s most ambitious and divisive achievement — the largest new social program in almost 50 years — had never happened. It’s like he’s actually lifted his platform from Jesse Jackson or Jerry Brown (circa 1992) and isn’t going to let himself be distracted by anything that’s happened since.

About the only truly new idea Sanders is floating is his “debt-free college” plan, which is really more of a slogan than a plan, and which hardly threatens to upend the political system in any event.

Cruz, meanwhile, sounds to me not like some visionary neo-patriot, but rather like a late-night commercial for “Solid Gold Hits of the ’80s.” Federal austerity fused with religious fundamentalism was once called “Reaganism.” Add a little xenophobia, and you’re pretty much reading from the same script as Pat Robertson and Pat Buchanan.

In fact, Republicans spent about 20 years near the end of the last century doing exactly what Cruz claims will revolutionize Washington — slashing spending and taxes and reining in some social programs. The results weren’t so spectacular.

You can make the same point about Trump, with his vow to re-create an America that wins again — which, near as I can tell, basically means going back to a time when the only thing standing between him and all the real estate in Manhattan were a couple of Japanese holding companies.

Even Marco Rubio, who started his campaign talking persuasively about rethinking our dated notions of manufacturing and service industries and college education, has lately devolved into nostalgia, running mournful ads about this newfangled America he can no longer recognize. (I know someone who might appreciate a vintage White Sox uniform.)

We’ve heard often — and I’ve probably said as much myself — that what’s at stake in these caucuses and primaries is the relevance of party establishments. But it seems to me we’re also testing the relevance of one of Bill Clinton’s central insights into politics.

Presidential elections, Clinton famously said, are always about the future and not about the past.

You can’t find an election in the past 50 years that doesn’t lend credence to this theory. Reagan’s pitch was all about “morning in America,” the promise on the horizon. Clinton championed the new economy and offered a “third way” out of the previous generation’s political stalemate, then built his “bridge to the 21st century.”

George W. Bush’s “compassionate conservatism” promised a new approach to social and economic progress — and a break from his own party’s legacy of resistance. Obama’s campaign, rooted in his own identity, was about turning the page on decades of division and intransigence.

You have to wonder what President Clinton, by his own standard, makes of his wife’s campaign, which has to this point — as it did in 2008 — relied almost entirely on an argument about her résumé and stature, rather than offering any thoughtful framework for how government might keep up with transformative forces in the society. For this reason, among others, Hillary Clinton seems to me an eminently beatable frontrunner, both in the primaries and in a general election.

But she’s mostly vulnerable to a challenger who can relegate her to the past while articulating a more hopeful, more modern vision of the next American chapter, as Obama did. And this is where Clinton finds good fortune (and really, she’s probably due for some): Neither Sanders nor the Republicans poised to win Iowa, for all their antiestablishment street cred, seem even slightly inclined to abandon the last century’s well-worn orthodoxies.

Of course, the other possibility, and I’m not dismissing it, is that this is the year when Bill Clinton’s axiom on elections no longer holds true. Perhaps unrest in the country is so profound, the primary electorates so ideologically pure, that nostalgia turns out to be an actual strategy.

Maybe we’ve reached a point — after a string of presidencies premised on visions of a future, economic and social, that never fully materialized — where we’d rather retrench than rethink. Maybe this is throwback year, and it’s easier to go backward than look ahead.

If so, then Iowa will launch Sanders or Cruz or Trump, or maybe all of them, into a primary season that won’t end until the conventions, and maybe not the way party leaders would hope.

If that happens, though, don’t confuse it with the end of the status quo. It will be anything but that.