Good grief. Scott Walker can’t even drop out of the presidential race without invoking Ronald Reagan! He began his exit speech, “As a kid, I was drawn to Ronald Reagan …” then went on to read a statement written for him by GOP donors, calling on the other one-percenters (in the polls) to get out, so that the party can nominate a “conservative alternative to the current front-runner.”

A true admirer might have recalled that the front-runner terrifying Republican insiders in the summer of 1979 –– was one Ronald Reagan. (And surely, everyone remembers how Reagan’s constant droning on about Dwight Eisenhower propelled Dutch to victory and allowed him to crush the Soviet War machine and usher in 20 years of peace and prosperity.)

Which reminds me: Perhaps Donald Trump, Ben Carson and Carly Fiorina are soaring in the polls not because they’re “outsiders,” but because they’re not dumb. I notice that, other than Ted Cruz, they’re the only GOP candidates for president who went to top schools.

I think we want a president who’s better than us.

Marco Rubio’s grandfather seems to have been cheering the little fellow up when he told Marco that, in America, “even I, the son of a bartender and a maid, could aspire to have anything, and be anything,” including president! At least since the late-1960s when the SATs, rather than geography or social class, began to determine college admissions, it seems very unlikely that a community college student could be elected president.

This is the problem with using the word “elites” to refer to Republican Party apparatchiks: They’re all such utter mediocrities.

I don’t mean to be unkind. It’s simply a fact.

Trump graduated from the Wharton School of Business and went on to make $11 billion. Carson went from Yale to the University of Michigan Medical School and was the first man to separate twins conjoined at the brain. Fiorina graduated from Stanford University and then earned $80 million in business.

By contrast, look up the educational achievement of the average pundit sneering at Trump’s idiocy and the ordinariness of his supporters. I won’t be as nasty as they are, but wow! – people who went to bush league schools shouldn’t throw stones. There’s nothing wrong with attending a bush-league college. But maybe ease up on holding yourself out as a great intellectual appalled by the dirty masses if you went to a third-rate college in the era of need-blind admissions.

These guys damn well better be good at what they do. But, to the contrary, Republican insiders are the Washington Generals to the Democrats’ Harlem Globetrotters. They enjoy being good losers. That’s their job.

The consultant class wants a neat, static world, where nothing ever changes. They produce an occasional tepid victory to create the illusion of a two-party system. But like Arafat with the PLO, Republican insiders don’t actually want to govern. The organization itself has become the cause — not the purported goals of the organization. Just keep the donations rolling in.

A majority of elected Republicans, their advisers, conservative magazines and newspapers are nothing but junior partners to the left. They go on TV and repeat prepackaged conventional wisdom, hoping to get at least a small ovation. Trump is popular because we now live in a Kardashian nation and are one big cult of celebrity!

By mounting only impotent opposition, professional Republicans win the admiration of The New York Times, as they turn our country over to the left. All that matters is that they get to keep their offices, their salaries and their friends.

It’s important for them to think of themselves as better than other people — especially those yahoo proletarian conservatives.

Ironically, it’s the Ivy League billionaire living a glamorous New York City life who has rocked the political world by speaking for ordinary Americans and insulting the powerful. Meanwhile, depressingly average Washington insiders insult ordinary Americans and suck up to the powerful.

When someone like Trump comes along and is actually serious about winning the very causes the GOP purportedly seeks to advance, he is seen as a disruptive force.

Most alarmingly, Trump brought up immigration . The Democrats thought they had this one in the bag — they’d worked it all out with Republicans! Both sides had agreed: I won’t talk about it if you won’t.

The decision has already been made: We aren’t going to ask the American people what they think. We’re just going to do this because we think we’re right, and at a certain point it will be impossible to reverse, because Republicans will never be able to win another national election.

The transformation of our country has been a deliberate, methodical process, carefully hidden from the public.

Until Trump started talking about immigration, most Americans had no idea that immigrants take more government assistance than natives, that we are allowing nearly half a million anchor babies a year to force their way into citizenship and a lifetime of welfare, and that we’re bringing in rapists, murderers and terrorists.

Immigration is an easy argument to win. But if you talk about it, the media will cut your mike.

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Once the Democrats get the voters they want through immigration, they will be like kids in a candy store. What will they do first? Ban private ownership of guns? Strip Christian churches of their tax exemptions for being “homophobic”? Release criminals from prison? Imprison the police? It will be the LBJ and Carter administrations rolled into one for all time, without end.

All the debates we have now on talk radio and cable news will be completely irrelevant. The most left-wing policies imaginable will be enacted, with no opposition — as they are today in California.

You might think California would wake up even the utter mediocrities in the Republican Party. But their predictable little lives have been disrupted. That’s why Trump has them in a panic.

COPYRIGHT 2015 ANN COULTER

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