(I originally started this as a reply to a comment by Brian K on Booman’s article Getting Bullied. It grew.)
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Brian K wrote:
As soon as I first heard Trump refer to Jeb Bush as “low energy,” I knew it was one of the best political attacks of my politically conscious life. Trump didn’t use surrogates, didn’t use any dog whistles or implications, he just insulted him in the most potent and unusual way imaginable.
I have been referring to Trump in my circles as the Issac Newton of Republican politics since then. Not that I respect Trump, but it’s like he has the equivalent of the Principia of how to run a Republican campaign in these times, and no else has developed a full understanding of the language yet. Josh Marshal had a couple of articles about tactics that get at the same basic idea.
Expanding out a bit from that premise, I think one of the non-explcitly stated reasons Trump has so upset the GOP and the other candidates specifically is that he has totally disrupted the official established order of operations as to how the Repubican process was supposed to go. By this I mean Jeb Bush and his people had sized up the field and assessed their threats and their plans of action around fundraising, the debates, the first caucuses and primaries, etc. Same for Huckabee, Walker, Rubio down the line. They had their expectations about the order of things, and Trump came in and quickly and shockingly lit the whole thing on fire. That’s what we are seeing with Walker specifically, in my opinion. He and his people had no sense of what was coming, and they have no answer. In contrast, Carson and Fiorina have just ridden the Trump wave, and will do so until the sharp winds of reality blow them akimbo.
The only candidate on the Republican side squarely set to accept the reality Trump brought was Cruz, who stood to lose the most if the establishment order had held.
Lastly, and on a side note, this weekend I listened to both Mark Levin and Michael Saveage’s response to the Republican debate on 8/6/15, and I’m sure now that that is why Megan Kelly had to take a break. Those two junkyard dogs, let alone the countless other talk radio goons gave approval to their awful audiences to go after her, and I bet she received, and continues to receive vileness we cannot fully comprehend in her inbox. Funnily enough, Glenn Beck was the one sounding the voice of reason there. Strange times.
This got me to thinking.
My response:
Indeed. Compared to Trump, they are all low-energy. Dems too, so far….including Unca Bernie. Elizabeth Warren could stand up to him, though. Biden? I dunno.
Warren would have three things going for her.
1-She actually believes in what she is saying. Never discount the power of the truth.
2-She is a national figure. Name recognition is a huge part of national politics, and she already has a good start..
3-She appears to be strong enough physically, mentally and emotionally to make it through the grind.
Read on for more.
No one else currently in real contention…not HRC, not Trump, not Sanders, not Biden…has all three of those strengths. HRC is running on fumes. She’s just about all used up physically and emotionally. Plus she is caught in a massive web of lies that date back to Bill’s presidency and maybe even further. Every time she opens her mouth she has to backcheck to see if she’s giving away some damaging info. Spontaneity? Difficult under the circumstances, to say the least. Trump? He doesn’t believe a word of what he is saying. Not really. Most of it has no basis in fact whatsoever. No plans, no nuthin’. Just winging it. Bernie? Sorry…he’s too damned old. End of story. Look what the presidency did to Obama, and he was young and strong when he moved into the White House. Biden? He’s in great shape for his age and he’s a pro, so I think he’d handle the rigors of the presidency pretty well. Plus he has the emotional wherewithal to battle Trump with real joy.
Like dis:
Now, take our magnificent RAF lads. They grin when they fight. Ah, yes, they grin when they fight. I like a man who grins when he fights. -Winston Churchill
But…he has his share of lies with which to deal. More than his share after decades in the Senate and 8 years as VP. Lies a’plenty. Bet on it. That’s the name of that game, longterm. Bet on it.
If Trump manages to make it through the convention and wins the nomination, only Warren stands a chance of saving the day for the Dems. And she’s not exactly a PermaGov fave.
Is she.
—snip—
So let me say this to anyone who is listening at Citi[group]. I agree with you Dodd-Frank isn’t perfect. It should have broken you into pieces!
If this Congress is going to open up Dodd-Frank in the months ahead, then let’s open it up to get tougher, not to create more bailout opportunities. If we’re going to open up Dodd-Frank, let’s open it up so that once and for all we end too big to fail and I mean really end it, not just say that we did.
Instead of passing laws that create new bailout opportunities for too big to fail banks, let’s pass… something… that would help break up these giant banks.
A century ago Teddy Roosevelt was America’s Trust-Buster. He went after the giant trusts and monopolies in this country, and a lot of people talk about how those trust deserved to be broken up because they had too much economic power. But Teddy Roosevelt said we should break them up because they had too much political power. Teddy Roosevelt said break them up because all that concentrated power threatens the very foundations of our democratic system.
And now we’re watching as Congress passes yet another provision that was written by lobbyists for the biggest recipient of bailout money in the history of this country. And its attached to a bill that needs to pass or else the entire federal government will grind to a halt.
Think about that kind of power. If a financial institution has become so big and so powerful that it can hold the entire country hostage. That alone is reason enough to break them up.Enough is enough.
Enough is enough with Wall Street insiders getting key position after key position and the kind of cronyism that we have seen in the executive branch. Enough is enough with Citigroup passing 11th hour deregulatory provisions that nobody takes ownership over but everybody will come to regret. Enough is enough
Washington already works really well for the billionaires and the big corporations and the lawyers and the lobbyists.
—snip—
Wow!!! Talk about truth-telling!!!
I wonder if she’s having second thoughts about running. If I were her, I would. She’d beat the pants off of Trump.
Like I said…never discount the power of the truth. Especially when the opposition is the King of Lies.
Let us pray.
AG
Who?
The only ticket without Warren in the prez spot that might have a chance of beating Trump running as a Republican would be Biden/Warren, with Biden promising only one term.
Trump 3rd party? All bets are off.
What say y’all?
AG
Thanks for the post and all the thought that went into it. Speaking just for myself, I’m going to try to wait until January (at the earliest) to get into prognosticating matchups. (We all remember that Clinton v. Huckabee presidential race in 2008, don’t we?)
The media are beginning to put Carson in the chute to get more attention. Trump will have to attack Carson effectively to do that and at the same time continue to deliver colorful language in order to keep the media focused on him. Ailes wants to kill Trump’s candidacy because Ailes knows that Trump is poison for the Republican party in the general election unless Trump pulls the false humility stunt that W pulled. Anyone with a sense of dignity eventually wins; at some point in that campaign a candidate has to pretend to be an adult.
Trump wins Iowa only if he successfully organizes Iowa. My sense is that Carson or Walker win South Carolina. Trump’s poor showing in Mobile tells me that the Southern Republicans are going with someone either more strategic or who provides them with cover against the charge of racism.
I’m not sure that raiding the Senate or a current governorship is a wise move for Democrats unless they can surely backfill the seat with a candidate as strong or stronger. And you can’t trust the establishment Democrats to win a special election. Warren’s candidacy this year is as problematic as Obama’s was in 2008, and Democrats lost that seat to a Republican. That’s the downside to a Warren Presidential run; it helps the financial interests get her out of the Senate; why Goldman-Sachs would probably contribute to he primary campaign just for that and to provide a target for Republicans to aim at in the general election.
I think the media destroys Trump (after all they created him as a mythical figure) before SuperTuesday. I don’t think that Trump is creative enough to go a full six months with the same attack strategy on other candidates. At some point he becomes old hat or jumps the shark. There just aren’t that many creative ways to attack even 17 opponents. People might even tire of immigration as an issue by SuperTuesday. How does Citizen Kane get beat in the classic movie? That’s likely how Trump goes down.
Clinton IMO is running on willpower to beat the naysayers and make history (first woman President). That doesn’t break the glass ceiling but it puts a crack in it and causes the misogynist to froth just like the racists have. I think the bit about lies and hidden shenanigans in the Clinton’s background has always been overstated. The more serious things she has to dodge rhetorically are the double-messaging involved in the 1990s triangulation strategy and now required to dodge progressive positions while appearing to embrace them. And choosing words that the media cannot seize for the Republicans to have a hissy-fit over.
Her more serious challenge is dealing with the outright lies of Republicans aimed as delegitimizing.her as President should she win. For the Republican attack squad, Hillary the dominatrix lesbian is not qualified to be commander-in-chief (the general point of delegitimization). And the whole Benghazi and email investigation and now the focus on Huma Abedin (and collaterally bringing in Anthony Wiener. Watch as like in the 1990s the story becomes kinky sex and affairs. That is the sort of circus that Clinton has been trying to avoid while practicing the sort of evasions (like private email systems) that Republicans routine have gotten away with. Avoiding unleashing that sort of circus is her main concern because it distracts from a carefully triangulated policy platform.
Bernie is gaining momentum slowly and outside the media. Staying out of the media is Bernie’s best bet for winning the nomination. Gaining widespread name recognition across 50 states, gaining poll standing, and staying out of the media crosshairs is going to be his campaign’s challenge. Honesty, plain speech, focused policy, and boredom are their current tactics. As he succeeds, this gets more difficult. Can he then play the media as a foil? If is momentum begins to slacken, being out of sight what then is his plan B and how does that translate into organization on the ground (which is what he has to deliver to rebuild the Democratic Party)?
It takes more than strong, honest words to win a Presidential campaign. Those words have to be heard by people who will respond by getting out of their houses and going an voting twice, even registering if they currently are not registered. It is the failure in that action step that has been killing the Democratic Party for the last 48 years.
Jimmy Madison used to do it with peach brandy. But civics class says you are not supposed to bribe voters with booze.
I rarely disagree with you, Tarheel. But I do here, on several levels. Here they are:
You write:
Yes, Carson is climbing and the media is a part of that climb. But…he doesn’t have a shot at winning the nomination. Not because of his race…although w/the RatPublicans that is always a factor…but because is a cipher. As Gertrude Stein said about Oakland, CA, “There’s no there there.” In fact, that characteristic is why the media are (tepidly at best) helping him. He seems to be a nice, polite, intelligent man…except of course for when he’s not, like when he speaks about evolution.
I’m sorry, but his Seventh Day Adventist bullshit would doom him nationally and those who agree with him are almost all racists and white supremacists as well.
You also write:
Patently false. Nixon comes to mind immediately, w/Bush II a close second.
Plus, in today’s reality TV culture it is quite possible that the majority of potential American voters accept the sensationalism that has been foisted upon them by the media a “adulthood.” I mean…people actually watch WWE!!! Lots of them. Compared to that shit, Trump is almost gentlemanly.
I don’t think that they can “destroy” him. They have …so far…shown no understanding of what will work on him. Not a clue. Only hard facts…extraordinarily negative facts, and totally provable…will bring him down. They haven’t even tried. Not publicly. Not yet.
Again, I reference the WWE. Or any of the other “reality TV’ showa, which altogether prove that there are a near infinitiy of ways to run a lame game. Over and over and over and over and over again. Look at the ratings. Who’s watching them? “Adult,” voting age Americans. Are there enough of them to swing an election? I think so, myself.
UH oh!!!
I am sorry, but I think that you are dead wrong here. Old-fashioned racism supported by new-fashioned economic worries will keep this pot boiling for years among both middle class and working-class white Americans. Bet on it. Only a miracle economic upturn would have a chance of quieting it, and that is not appearing on the immediate time horizon, to say the least.
I think that the real question is not necessarily “how,” but when. Do you think Trump is about to break down and say the equivalent of “Rosebud?” It doesn’t appear that way to me. He is in hog heaven and loving every minute of it. Every minute of himself, too.
HRC?
She simply has too much baggage to carry. Too much history. It stops her from evincing even a hint of spontaneity, as do:
1-Her desperate need to be the first female president.
2-Her equally serious need for some privacy.
She’s a flawed candidate, Tarheel. She’s going down. Jeb’s position, familial history and war chest aren’t saving him from the wrath of Trump, and neither will HRC’s. He’ll whiplash her on the debate stage…all ad lib. Bet on that as well.
Bernie? Sorry. Not a strong enough image for red meat national American politics. Not even close. And I do mean “image.”
I’m sorry again, Tarheel. Really. Twice sorry.
1-Unca Bernie is not a marketable image.
2-I’m also sorry that U.S. national politics has devolved into a brand image contest, but that’s what has happened and it’s not going to change soon. Bernie Sanders’s heart and mind are in the right place, but his face, body and mannerisms are about 10 to 15 years too old-looking. There it is and so it goes.
In the Republic.
So it goes.
Trump is…barring a real scandal of some kind…here to stay.
Deal wid it.
Wishful thinking never stopped a bully.
The German people learned that the hard way with Hitler.
Later…
AG
P.S. That “sense of dignity” thing.
It reminds me of the comment that has been attributed to any number of Hollywood people.
“Sincerity is the most important thing in this business. Once you can fake that you’ve got it made.”
Trump can fake “dignity” when it suits his purposes. Watch as the campaign moves along.
Watch.
The media will want horse races; that raises their ad revenue as the nearly even up their ad buys to get ahead. Their failure to get Trump out of the way really lowers their primary season revenues so long as the 16 lesser drop out, which at the point is not looking likely. Not even the bottom six have called it quits yet. So there is not the financial pressure to create a horse race–and Trump still is a media draw. I will grant your point that the media might fail and Trump prevail, but that will make it a shift in how politics operates.
I just point out that the media will work hard to get the musical chairs routine going again so each candidate gets his chance to be the frontrunner and spend lots of media money.
Yes, Carson will fail, but his cueing up next shows that the media consider him the bottom of the pack and they want him to spend his media wad now (boost revenues) so they can narrow the race and increase the excitement. And your profile of the base for Carson is spot on: religious right and racist. They love his Daniel Patrick Monyihan stylings on black culture and the black family.
Nixon went to extreme pains in 1968 to so control the narrative (see Joe McGinnis, The Selling of the President 1968) so as to appear to be the adult. Humphrey looked in appearance like a perpetual baby, and Wallace was unredeemably Southern in style. No five o’clock shadow in any of the campaign period coverage for Nixon. The only window of importance is during the campaign and expecially during the general election debates. W engineered the media to take down Gore, who got so frustrated with the dishonesty that he lost his adult composure (the crowding in moment). W was likely the most mature acting of his entire life for those 5 or so hours. And it still took the Supreme Court to put him in the White House. Might we see a House of Representative coronation this time around?
Yes, the importance for the puerile is that dignity can be faked and seemingly relatively easy. Watch who shifts from crazy and when.
The immigration issue motivates registration and voting among Latinos. Will there be more of them than the bigots who showed up to vote against the Kenyan Muslim Socialist in 2008 and 2012? IOW, how much more upside is there to the nativist vote? Might the GOP run out of bigots?
How the Republicans tried and failed to beat Bill Clinton was to try to capture him in the bubble where he did not do what he was good at, retail politics. And by bedeviling any media strategy he had. The GOP is working that same strategy against Hillary as Bill II–the same scandal-mongering, the same sexual innuendos. And adding a dose of sexism, if not misogyny. In 2008, it was an unforced error on the part of Bill Clinton that started Hillary’s slide; he tried dogwhistle racism in a race in which it stuck out like a sore thumb. Hillary’s staff’s divisions did the rest. Presidential candidates with stuff to hide have been given huge passes by the media in previous elections–probably none more than JFK’s adoption by Henry Luce. Still standing in the face of the very opposite of that is Hillary’s appeal to many women and not a few men. Is that enough. We won’t see until the early primaries. But most of Hillary’s campaign vulnerabilities are fixable with leadership; it the failure at that most see as her biggest vulnerability.
To imagine that Bernie needs to be a strong enough image means that the assumption is the votes will show up at the polling places (the true test) only through media motivation. From the beginning I have said that Bernie wins only if that is not how voters are turned out but by the Sanders campaign not engaging in a marketing campaign but finding some (as yet unidentified) other means of getting voters to the polls that builds off of the character of social networking instead of door-to-door sales (which is what canvassing is). If that happens, you won’t see the effects until there are a series of surprise victories in primaries. If successful, it will be a stealth campaign in plain sight because people will be cuing off of conventional images of campaigns and electability. I’m not sure if there are other ways of getting sufficient numbers of people to the polls, but using one of those is the only way I see a Sanders primary victory and general election victory. Under that only scenario, Bernie does not need to be a marketable image; 75 million people just need to show up and vote for him on election day. How? The new shape of American politics if there is to be one. (I share your pessimism.)
And if it is not Sanders in the primary, it looks to me from this far out that it is Clinton. And if some scandal implodes Hillary’s candidacy, it’s a Thomas Eagleton situation all over again but on a bigger scale. Biden likely is the establishment’s hedge against that (a Sargent Shriver role).
Trump has had his scandals; you mean barring a new scandal.
Can you imagine the Secretary of Defense and the Director of National Intelligence reading in President-Elect Trump during his transition period. Let me recount an Truman quote:
Hitler brought his muscle with him. Who will Trump mobilize? The Oath Keepers? And how will he do that without it being very visible and threatening to a even more voters?
Trump’s vulnerability is his purported strength. He is running as completely independent of anyone or anything. If he isn’t, then his pretense that he is becomes a scandal.
And if he wins, he will have steep climb learning to be a politician in an environment in which there are independent permanent power centers. Some of the Russian oligarchs ran into the same issue within the context of their own political system when they tried to seize power. And their training in the Soviet Union should have prepared them not to make the mistakes they made.
Yes. Especially the Truman quote about Eisenhower, although Ike proved to be a more agile civilian politician than many thought that he would be. Of course he was a genius military pol or he wouldn’t have risen to the position he held during WWII. Poltics is politics, whether it’s a rural dogcatcher election, presidential elections or any other set of bureaucratic ratraces.
The only thing with which I might disagree is the following, and it’s not so much a disagreement as it is an answer.
Might the GOP run out of bigots to the point where the hispanic and black votes will equal them? I dunno. My gut feeling is that they won’t, because the bigots seem to vote en masse while minority voters do not in the sense that so many minority voters have simply given up thinking that the government is going to change things regarding their situation in the society and the marketplace. Not by way of voting, anyway. Plus…so many hispanic and asian voters are really not yet bilingual. Not enough to begin to truly understand how this so-called “democracy” really works, anyway.
Dassit from da Bronx point of view, anyway.
Later…
AG
P.S. Bush III seems to think otherwise.
It is obvious that Bush III thinks that his marriage to a Mexican woman and his relative fluency in Spanish will somehow save the day for him vis-à-vis Trump. What he does not understand…I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt because of his apparent sincerity and say that perhaps he really is too innocent, that he was too protectedly brought up and sheltered under the Bush family umbrella to truly understand the depth of nativist white race hatred here…but what he apparently does not understand is that for every hispanic voter that he either lures to the Republican party or loses to the Democrats he is creating another three or four that are going to go to Trump rallies and vote racist RatPublican if given half a chance.
Buh-bye, “Jeb!”
Watch.
AG
In the Republican primary, the demographics work against Jeb because of the overall tenor of the GOP. It’s the general election where it gets interesting.
And your point about turning out as a block is correct; that’s what moved a bunch of things in the 1970s before the GOP pulled the Jimmy Carter religious folks into their coalition with the coup in the Southern Baptist Church.
That’s what Carter refers to when he said that his church left him.