It's time to usher in seriousness

Maybe, just maybe, the Republican Party’s nightmarish summer will come to an end this week.
Or maybe not.
Wednesday’s “debate” among 11 of the party’s presidential aspirants was expanded to allow former Hewlett-Packard president Carly Fiorina to participate.
And like the last such event, the real question was whether anyone or anything could rein in Donald Trump.
The Donald has specialized this summer in making comments that are simultaneously outrageous, offensive, xenophobic, sexist, racist and appealing to a good chunk of the GOP base. Thoughtful Republicans find Trump embarrassing, and they are even more embarrassed by his appeal within the party they thought they understood.
Beltway pundits have characterized this as a push-and-pull between “establishment” Republicans and “grass roots” Republicans. But that’s a gross oversimplification.
And the images such a characterization conjures up — a fat cat, well-heeled, establishment Republican on the one hand vs. a corn-fed, blue collar, evangelical Republican on the other — could not be more misleading.
Republicans — or, for that matter, Democrats — don’t fit into cartoon stereotypes.
They tend to be complicated people with complicated political views. They might be a little bit libertarian, they might like the idea of national health insurance, they might insist that they are anti-abortion while at the same time knowing a family member who has made that difficult choice, they might distrust Iran while at the same time concluding that the deal to lift the sanctions is the best hope in the long run.
In other words, they are complicated, multi-faceted people.
Now, into that complexity and subtlety, inject Donald Trump.
With bombast, with insults, with “trust me,” with ever-changing opinions and with the skills of a carnival barker, he’s been able to get a chunk of the GOP electorate to believe the world is simpler than it really is. Those folks have set aside the unappealing complicated questions in favor of a bunch of simple — yet unworkable — answers.
The challenge for Trump’s rivals — and they are his rivals since he’s the guy in the lead —  is to remind voters how complicated the world actually is while at the same time being at least halfway as entertaining as The Donald.
That’s not going to be an easy chore.
You can’t beat the guy with facts, at least not with part of the electorate. And you’ll never beat him when it comes to showmanship. Yet you’ll need facts, and you’ll need to deliver in the showmanship department.
Waiting for Trump to do himself in hasn’t worked. Somebody needs to be the one to usher him off the stage so that the party can get serious again. — J.R.