Apparently the Republican plan to win the White House in 2016 is to talk smack about Hillary Clinton.

At political fund-raisers and party conferences, over intimate dinners and in casual telephone calls, top contenders for the Republican presidential nomination are constructing an image of Mrs. Clinton that is relentlessly unappealing: as rusty and unloved, out of step and out of date, damaged and vulnerable.

To win the party’s nomination in a contest over which Mrs. Clinton looms so large, likely candidates are now jockeying to appeal to several overlapping constituencies, including Republican activists who loathe her, donors who respect and fear her fund-raising prowess and party leaders who view her candidacy as a test of their attempts to modernize the Republican brand.

For a candidate to be taken seriously, said Rick Wilson, a Republican consultant, “party leaders need to know that you have a game plan and a path to victory against Hillary.”

Notice there’s nothing in there about how they’re planning to help the economic recovery (from a disaster that their last president largely caused), fix education, immigration, infrastructure, or even address foreign policy issues.  That stuff is for nerds; they’d much rather cackle like a bunch of middle-schoolers.