The Donald Trump National Convention in Cleveland .. wasn’t really much for storytelling. Its messages were muddled, its shared agenda boiled down to hating Hillary Clinton, many of its speakers didn’t want to talk about the candidate and one declined even to endorse him.
.. First, it was a showcase for the institutional failure of the Republican Party in the face of Trump’s assault.
.. Almost none of these figures made a positive case for Trumpism
.. Trump’s campaign actually seemed to hype — by apparently whipping boos against Cruz from the floor, and by having Trump show up in the hall as the speech wrapped, as though the two men might stage a W.W.E. confrontation.
.. the greatest danger of a Trump presidency might not be his transparently authoritarian tendencies, but rather the global chaos that a winging-it Great Man in the Oval Office could unleash.
..free of policy beyond the promise of quick fixes and delivered with a strongman’s permanent shout — while also pulsing with an ideological message whose power will outlive Trump’s wild campaign...That message was a long attack, not on liberalism per se, but on the bipartisan post-Cold War elite consensus on foreign policy, mass immigration, free trade.
Seven Reasons It Made Sense for Donald Trump to pick Mike Pence
The running mate’s role is to support and amplify the boss’s message, not to usurp it. As Gingrich demonstrated on Thursday night, with his call for American Muslims to be subjected to a Sharia-law test, he’s not one of nature’s number twos.
.. Many of the potential problems with picking Gingrich also apply to the New Jersey governor, who is loud and domineering, and has an equally dismal approval rating: thirty-four per cent
.. Trump’s only realistic, or semi-realistic, chance of getting to two hundred and seventy electoral votes is to storm through the Midwest and the Rust Belt, racking up huge majorities of white votes. To this end, his ideal choice would have been John Kasich, the popular governor of Ohio, but Kasich didn’t want the job. Nor did Rob Portman, the Ohio senator who served in the Bush Administration, or Scott Walker, the governor of Wisconsin. And no one in Michigan or Pennsylvania was particularly suitable, either. That left Pence
.. In May, after wrapping up the nomination, he said, “This is called the Republican Party, not the Conservative Party.” But, like John McCain and Mitt Romney before him, Trump ultimately had to come to terms with the nature of the beast he is trying to ride to the White House.
.. Selecting Pence, a former head of the Republican Study Group on Capitol Hill, sends a signal that Trump is willing to work with the Party establishment and listen to what it says.
.. Ryan released a statement saying that there could be “no better choice for our vice-presidential candidate.”
.. Most people who take civil rights and the Constitution seriously are already aghast at the prospect of a Trump Presidency. Is there anyone out there who was willing to look past Trump’s call for a ban on Muslims, a resumption of torture, and the deportation of eleven million undocumented workers, but who will not vote for the Republican ticket because of Pence’s support for an Indiana law that allowed businesses to discriminate against gays and lesbians? Perhaps such people exist, but I doubt there are very many.
Choosing Leaders: Clueless or Crazy
These days, if you want to elect a leader, you generally have two choices: a sensible, establishment figure who is completely out of touch, or a populist outsider who is incompetent, crazy or both.
.. It’s not clear Johnson was really in favor of Britain leaving the European Union, but leading a campaign for it seemed to be the quickest way to make himself prime minister. When his side of the referendum surprisingly won, he emerged ashen-faced, like a boy who’d had fun playing with matches but accidentally blew up his own house.
.. The big historical context is this: Something fundamental is shifting in our politics. The insiders can’t see it. Outsiders get thrown up amid the tumult, but they are too marginal, eccentric and inexperienced to lead effectively.
Without much enthusiasm, many voters seem to be flocking to tough, no-nonsense women who at least seem sensible: Angela Merkel, Hillary Clinton and, now, the Conservative Party front-runner, Theresa May.
.. We probably need a political Pope Francis-type figure, who comes up from the bottom and understands life there, but who can still make the case for an open dynamic world, with free-flowing goods, ideas, capital and people. Until that figure emerges, we could be in for a set of serial leadership crises.
Brexit Right
The U.K.’s vote to leave the European Union betrays a failure of empathy and imagination among its leaders. Will America’s political establishment fare any better?
Instead, they deploy slogans of the status quo: Remain, Stronger Together. These are intended as dark warnings of the costs of change, and intimations that those who vote for it are motivated solely by prejudice and ignorance.
And here is where the failure of imagination proved catastrophic for the established elites. They failed to paint a vision of a better, brighter future.
.. They audaciously gambled that by presenting a stark choice, an all-or-nothing vision of globalization, they could persuade their voters to go all in.
.. “Good on you for ignoring all the fear mongering from special interest globalists who tend to aim for that apocalyptic One World Government that dissolves a nation’s self-determination and sovereignty,” cheered Sarah Palin.
.. Will they display enough empathy to convince angry, hurting voters they understand their pain is real? Will they exercise enough imagination to offer a positive vision of the future, one that promises them that America’s greatness lies ahead, and not behind?