In the comments/replies section of Booman’s recent post This is What a Landslide Election Looks Like, I took the position that Trump will win the election against HRC no matter what the polls and pros may say now. As various people jumped up and down in anger that I would even consider such a possibility, JoelDanWalls asked me:
OK, let’s grant your claim that polls are worthless this year. Then tell us what you are basing your claim of a Trump landslide on.
Despite the fact that I never even intimated that it would be a “landslide,” I decided to answer him in good faith. The answer grew, and I am now posting it as a standalone post.
Read on if you wish to hear what I have to say about this election as it seems to me to be shaping up.
The basic reason?
OK, here it is.
Trump is a professional celebrity. He is one of the best in the business at that job.
HRC is a professional politician. She is one of the best in the business at that job.
The candidate who is the best at what a celebrity does…look good, say witty and/or at least memorable things in memorable ways…has won every presidential election since JFK/Nixon with the possible exception of Jimmy Carter, who could only hang on for one term. And maybe Nixon himself, who only manged to last 5 years and profited mightily from his opponents, Humbert Humbert…errr, ahhh…Hubert Humphrey, a totally non-charismatic hump of a man, George Wallace, who was an entirely regional candidate and came across as a mean-tempered, KKK-allied bigot plus the totally verklempt Chicago DemRat convention.
Trump has the “it” factor. Clinton does not. That’s why. Simple as that. Presidential politics in the U.S. has become a popularity contest. Not enough people “like” Hillary Clinton and evidently huge numbers of people “like” Trump. So it goes. History? Policies? They mean nothing in a nationwide election. Watch.
Further…Trump can hire professional political managers. He says that he is good at hiring managers and such, and it appears that he is telling the truth about that. Paul Manafort has done a very good job for him over quite a short time. When Manafort was hired the RatPub hierarchy was busily conspiring to steal the nomination from Trump. Now Trump is the presumptive nominee. I expect that Trump will run an effective campaign, that he will hire people who can get the job done. And…Trump is a consummate pro at what he does, which is hustle the rubes.
Hillary Clinton is, as I said, a professional politician. But she is a professional back room politician. Behind closed doors among the powerful she does very well. But…she has zero charisma. Bill provided that for her, which is why she managed him up from being a coke-snorting, lecherous Arkansas barfly lawyer…that segment of his life reminds me of some character out of the TV series “Better Call Saul”…all the way to the White House. Electoral politics is a shell game. Trump can hire pros to run the organizational aspects of his campaign, but HRC cannot hire someone who will provide her with charisma.
Ergo, Trump wins.
JoelDanWalls also wrote:
If you tell me, well, I just get that vibe as I drive around the northeast to my various musical gigs, then I’m going to tell you about my 25 year old household member who’s still convinced Sanders is going to be the nominee because he obsessively watches Sanders rallies on the Internet and sees how jazzed the crowds are.
What’s the reason for your prediction, AG?
And…yes, I keep my ear to the ground in any number of ways. I travel a great deal…not just in the northeast…and I pay attention to what I hear and see. I have been saying for decades that the first presidential candidate to talk street to the people of the U.S. would win. Trump…God help us…is that candidate. Barring a serious scandal or some kind of…ahem…”accident,” I think that he will win and win big.
You asked; I answered.
Go contemplate your polls.
Later…
AG
P.S. Hiring Paul Manafort, besides apparently being a good hire politically, was also a sign to the people who do bad things to candidates that they do not trust. Here’s the scoop on him:
The Quiet American
Paul Manafort made a career out of stealthily reinventing the world’s nastiest tyrants as noble defenders of freedom. Getting Donald Trump elected will be a cinch.
—snip—
The genesis of Donald Trump’s relationship with Paul Manafort begins with Roy Cohn. That Roy Cohn: Joe McCarthy’s heavy-lidded henchman, lawyer to the Genovese family. During the ’70s, Trump and his father hired Cohn as their lawyer to defend the family against a housing discrimination suit. (Cohn accused the Feds of using “Gestapo-like tactics.”) But Cohn and Trump became genuine pals, lunching at the Four Seasons and clubbing together at Studio 54. It was Roy Cohn who introduced [Roger] Stone and Manafort to Trump.
During those disco years, Stone and Manafort were tethered together. They were both kids from Connecticut, attending colleges in Washington, though they couldn’t have been more different. Stone loved attention and garnered it with theatrical flair. He was a bad boy, soi-disant. As a student at George Washington University, Stone moonlighted for the Nixon campaign and gravitated to Jeb Magruder, deputy director of the Committee to Re-Elect the President. Dirty tricks came naturally to Stone. He assumed a pseudonym and made contributions on behalf of the Young Socialist Alliance to one of Nixon’s potential challengers. He hired spies to infiltrate the McGovern campaign. Stone wasn’t shy about his handiwork. In fact, he wasn’t shy about anything. He loved to sit for interviews and vamp. Stone is a bodybuilding fanatic who posed shirtless in the New Yorker. The photo captured his implanted hair, but not the tattoo of Richard Nixon on his back.
Manafort had a very different mentor. He studied under the future secretary of state, James A. Baker III, who wielded his knife with the discipline of a Marine and the polish of a Princetonian. It was a good fit for Manafort, who shared his mentor’s pragmatic conservatism and his thirst for politics. (His father spent six years as the mayor of New Britain, Connecticut, a Republican who flourished in Democratic terrain.) Baker, an avid collector of young talent, had managed Gerald Ford’s re-election campaign. That’s where he spotted Manafort and anointed him aide de camp. When Baker needed his own manager for his 1978 campaign to become attorney general of Texas, he tapped Manafort. The experience of whispering in Baker’s ear left a lasting impression. “Paul modeled himself after Baker,” one of his friends told me.
—snip—
Manafort and Stone pioneered a new style of firm, what K Street would come to call a double-breasted operation. One wing of the shop managed campaigns, electing a generation of Republicans, from Phil Gramm to Arlen Spector. The other wing lobbied the officials they helped to victory on behalf of its corporate clients. Over the course of their early years, they amassed a raft of blue-chip benefactors, including Salomon Brothers and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.
—snip—
Manafort and Stone built a glamour firm. The Black in its name belonged to Charles Black, who as a 25-year-old launched the Senate career of Jesse Helms. Later, they lured Lee Atwater, the evil genius who would devise the Willie Horton gambit for George H.W. Bush. The firm had swagger. In the early ’80s, the partners spoke openly to the Washington Post of their annual $450,000 salaries. According to the consultant Ed Rollins, Black would later boast that the firm had schemed to gain cartel-like control of the 1988 Republican presidential primary. They managed all of the major campaigns. Atwater took Bush; Black ran Dole; Stone handled Jack Kemp. A congressional staffer joked to a reporter from Time, “Why have primaries for the nomination? Why not have the candidates go over to Black, Manafort and Stone and argue it out?”
Manafort actively avoided the spotlight, though he had a knack for garnering unwanted attention. He took on clients and causes that even most of his colleagues on K Street considered outside the usual bounds. Black, Manafort, and Stone hired alumni of the Department of Housing and Urban Development then used those connections to win $43 million in “moderate rehabilitation funds” for a renovation project in Upper Deerfield, New Jersey. Local officials had no interest in the grants, as they considered the shamble of cinder blocks long past the point of repair. The money flowed from HUD regardless, and developers paid Manafort’s firm a $326,000 fee for its handiwork. He later bought a 20 percent share in the project. Two years later, rents doubled without any sign of improvement. Conditions remained, in Mary McGrory’s words, “strictly Third World.” It was such an outrageous scam that congressmen flocked to make a spectacle of it. Manafort calmly took his flaying. “You might call it influence-peddling. I call it lobbying,” he explained in one hearing. “That’s a definitional debate.”
Strangely, the HUD scandal proved a marketing boon for the firm. An aide to Mobutu Sese Seko told the journalist Art Levine, “That only shows how important they are!” Indeed, Manafort enticed the African dictator to hire the firm. Many of the world’s dictators eventually became his clients. “Name a dictator and Black, Manafort will name the account,” Levine wrote. (Levine’s piece, published in Spy, featured a sidebar ranking the ethical behavior of Washington lobbyists: It found Black, Manafort the worst of the bunch.) The client list included Philippine strongman Ferdinand Marcos (with a $900,000 yearly contract) and the despots of the Dominican Republic, Nigeria, Kenya, Equatorial Guinea, and Somalia. When the Center for Public Integrity detailed the firm’s work, it titled the report “The Torturers’ Lobby.”
—snip—
Manafort understood the mindset of the dictator wasn’t so different from his corporate clients. According to one proposal unearthed by congressional investigators, the firm boasted of “personal relationships” with administration officials and promised “to upgrade backchannels” to the U.S. government.
—snip—
Who pays Paul Manafort? The question can be devilishly difficult to answer. He doesn’t always file the forms demanded by the Foreign Agents Registration Act. And he may not even need to disclose who cuts his checks. The law is porous, and over time revisions in the act have created various ways for lobbyists to hide their deeds. Like Henry Kissinger, Manafort can claim that he merely “consults” with foreign governments, relieving him of the legal burden of announcing his benefactors.
Money arrives to Manafort circuitously, sometimes through the dodgiest of routes. We know this because he admitted one instance to investigators. If there’s one place on the planet inhospitable to American political consultants, it is France. So when Manafort wrote a campaign strategy for Eduoard Balladur’s presidential campaign in 1995, his role was kept from the public. Payments traveled beneath the table. In fact, the French investigation revealed, the money came from a good friend and old client of Manafort’s, a Lebanese arms dealer called Abdul Rahman al-Assir. (Manafort took Assir to George H.W Bush’s inauguration in 1989; Assir once loaned Manafort $250,000, as the Washington Post reported this week).
Manafort’s fee was a small piece of a larger kickback scheme. At least $200,000 came to Manafort, some of it via accounts in Madrid. It was part of a deal brokered by Assir. He arranged for France to sell Pakistan three Agosta submarines–with tens of millions of euros in “commissions” returning to the coffers of the Balladur campaign. The scandal, known in France as the “Karachi Affair,” has hovered over the country’s politics ever since it broke in 2010. (The English ex-wife of another Franco-Lebanese arms dealer involved in l’affair revealed the Manafort payments to a French judge.)It wasn’t the only time that Manafort received money from the Pakistanis. Michael Isikoff has reported that Manafort was paid $700,000 by the Kashmiri American Council–ostensibly a grassroots organization advocating against Indian control of the contested borderland. Funding for the group, however, came from Pakistani intelligence. The assistant U.S. attorney who investigated the Kashmiri American Council has called it a “false flag operation.” Manafort flew his own false flags in the name of his stealth client. In 1993, he traveled to Kashmir to obtain footage for a video his firm was producing on behalf of the Pakistanis. The work entailed interviewing Indian officials, who would have never granted access if Manafort announced his true purpose. To get in the door, he lied about his identity, telling the Indians that he worked for CNN. Manafort has denied that he ever misrepresented himself, but he so offended the Indian government that a spokesman for its foreign ministry issued a public rebuke: “The whole thing was obviously a blatant operation of producing television software with a deliberate and particularly anti-Indian slant by lobbyists hired by Pakistan for this very purpose.”
–snip—
I could go on, but why? Manafort is a civilian spook. He’s connected with the underworld of the Permanent Government…deeply connected…and his presence on the Trump team is a signal to the bad boys that Trump is indeed an establishment goodfella, that he’ll play ball with whomever offers him something he wants.
This election is going to be a contest between the two dominant factions of the Permanent Government. The Obama/Clinton faction…the “kinder, gentler/hopey feely” crooks… had its 8 years and things got worse here. Now the bad boys are going to try to take over again.
They have a good horse to ride in Trump.
Watch.