In nearly simultaneous statements Sunday night, Ted Cruz and John Kasich announced plans to coordinate their campaigns to play to each other’s regional strengths and, hopefully, deny Donald Trump enough delegates to become a first-ballot nominee.

This bold plan takes us from a status quo where Trump might reach the 1,237 delegates required to become the Republican party nominee, with his opponents mathematically eliminated, to one in which Trump might reach the 1,237 delegates required, with his opponents still mathematically eliminated. The most Cruz and Kasich’s plan can do is wreck the Republican party.

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The GOP reflexively blames Washington gridlock and electoral failure on co-opted candidates and the perversions of the political process thwarting the will of the people. Meanwhile, Donald Trump has spent the last two weeks successfully castigating the Republican delegate process as a rigged game. His opponents’ brightest idea was to jointly announce their plans to rig it even more.

That is a kind of plan. Then again, so is burning down your house to collect the insurance money.

Here’s the strategy: Cruz will focus on friendly territory in Indiana, while the “moderate” Kasich focuses on friendly territory in Oregon and New Mexico. How the rest of the states get divvied up is anyone’s guess, as is how much money Kasich will have on hand for the states he’s supposed to lure away from media-saturated Trumpism.

This is a political superhero team assembled out of a kill-priced remainder bin of bad ideas. There hasn’t been a sadder or less formidable duo since the Wonder Twins on the old Super Friends cartoon – two kids from another planet whose superpowers involved one turning into forms of water and the other turning into shapes of animals.

Only in this case you have John Kasich, who takes the form of a perpetually peevish dad who looks like the only thing he wants to say at a podium is, Hey, kids, quit playin’ grab-ass and take a knee, before “moderately” suggesting we start the third world war in the Middle East.

His partner, Cruz, takes the shape of whatever the guy from Duck Dynasty thinks is most likely to prevent a Muslim apocalypse and start the Christian one.

But they’re both serving an establishment attempting to salvage a party that has spent years fomenting resentment against elites and Washington insiders.



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Kasich touts his Ohio mailing address, but he also brags about his 1990s role negotiating budgets in the House, where he was a ranking committee member. After Congress, he became a managing director at Lehman Brothers, which stopped existing after it broke itself and the world. He also took the Obamacare Medicaid expansion in Ohio.



And despite Cruz’s insurgent antics, remember that this is an Ivy League-educated former US supreme court clerk who worked in the Bush administration and who decamped for a top-flight law firm before partially funding his Senate campaign with loans from Goldman Sachs. Ted Cruz can refuse to play nice in Congress all he wants, but railing against ivory towers falls apart when you studied at two of them and work in a third.

As for the everyman touch, well, if you like “dadbod” as a concept, you could vote for Kasich. On the other hand, outside of very fundamentalist audiences, Ted Cruz comes off like a Martian whose sleeper-agent research on humanity was conducted by watching six hours of The Junior Christian Science Bible Lesson on public access TV.

Whatever these two hope to accomplish is doomed. Kasich will enter the Republican national convention a distant third, and Cruz will come in second. Both will then have to argue that they have some right to ignore the desires of everyone who voted for the first-place candidate.

That is not a plan. At best, it’s a plan to have another plan later, with the hope that somehow events between now and then will recast snookering the majority of Republican primary voters as a noble act.