It turns out Donald Trump really is another Sarah Palin. By that I don’t mean that he’s ignorant, ill-prepared for the job, or incoherent in his opinions – all of those things were already clear months ago. Nor do I mean that he has no class, taste or manners – those things were also already clear months ago.
What I mean is that he has far less control over his own persona than I had previously assumed. Until fairly recently, I bought into the idea that Trump was a professional wrestler, putting on an outrageous show, breaking all the rules, and flummoxing all the traditional candidates who could neither win as the Marquess of Queensbury nor grab a chair and jump into the ring with him.
But I’m coming to the opinion, bit by bit, that, while Trump is indeed a wrestler, he’s also one of the saps who doesn’t know the fights are fake. He really believes he’s the character he’s been playing, and gets quite defensive when somebody expresses doubts about his actual prowess. This is a huge problem for Trump, because the core of his appeal is precisely that he’s the one who sees reality for what it is, and is willing to call a spade a spade.
.. The primary reason is that Trump – at the very moment that he most obviously needs to begin making a general-election argument – is instead driving the conversation back to himself, and to his peculiar obsessions and insecurities.
There’s no reason to do this. Trump no longer needs to be outrageous to get attention – he’s the clear front-runner for the GOP nomination; he has our attention.
What’s Wrong With Hillary?
Back then, if you had told Clinton’s campaign that she would be outraised by that Vermont socialist, that she would be losing younger Democrats, including young women, by landslide proportions, and that she would be facing a months-long slog through every primary—you would have been accused of smoking some of that now-legal-in-Colorado product.
.. And finally, however she wishes it were not so, however much she argues that she represents the future as America’s first prospective female president, Clinton still embodies the past, just as she did in 2008 when she lost to Barack Obama.
.. But when you look at the positions she has taken on some of the most significant public policy questions of her time, you cannot escape noticing one key pattern: She has always embraced the politically popular stand—indeed, she has gone out of her way to reinforce that stand—and she has shifted her ground in a way that perfectly correlates with the shifts in public opinion.
.. What was different about Clinton, however, was that in her October 2002 speech she said this about Saddam: “He has also given aid, comfort and sanctuary to terrorists, including Al Qaeda members, though there is apparently no evidence of his involvement in the terrible events of Sept. 11, 2001.”
.. Again, plenty of Democrats were on record as opposing gay marriage in 2004—the year that voters in 11 states voted to ban the practice by significant margins. What’s striking about Clinton’s speech is the intensity of the language, the assertion that it is a “bedrock principle.” You might think that a conviction so strongly held would not be subject to “evolution,” much less shifting political winds. Not so, apparently—any more than a trade deal can be the “gold standard” one year and an unacceptable threat to American workers the next; or that a generation of potential “super predators” requires draconian crime laws one decade, while the next demands an end to such laws.
.. Another aspect of Clinton’s weakness is less an issue of personal liabilities than of a misapprehension on her part of what political space she occupies.
.. I don’t believe there’s any dissembling here; I think she really believes that a woman cannot possibly “exemplify the establishment.”
.. Bill Clinton was often credited with the observation that “every election is about the past versus the future.”
.. The answer, of course, is that 25 years in the most rarefied circles of political life, countless speeches—where an hour’s work earns you five years’ worth of a middle-class income—a multimillion dollar wedding for your only child, and friendships with every manner of celebrity does tend to make that “establishment” label fit.
.. But … if the discontent with the economy persists in the fall, or even deepens should the woes of China and Europe reach our shores, there is no Democrat more in the cross-hairs of an angry electorate than Clinton. Everything from her Wall Street financial links to her work as secretary of state become targets of opportunity.
Inside the Clinton Team’s Plan to Defeat Donald Trump
“There is something to this idea that nothing has stuck,” Mr. Brock said, but that, he argued, is because the Republicans have been too restrained to avoid offending Mr. Trump’s supporters.
.. Stephanie Schriock, the president of Emily’s List, said that an expanded research shop at the organization had compiled “an endless amount of misogynistic and outrageous comments towards women.”
.. And Mrs. Clinton has benefited in her career when male opponents have overstepped or appeared to bully her.
.. But as Democrats hold their breath for the next sexist comment, they also acknowledge a problem that opposition research cannot fix: Mr. Trump and Mrs. Clinton are polar opposite politicians, and Mr. Trump’s direct and visceral style could prove difficult for Mrs. Clinton, whose inclination is detailed policy talk and 12-point plans.
“Can you imagine what he’ll do?” Mr. Dowd, the former Bush strategist, said. She will bring up equal pay for women and abortion rights, Mr. Dowd said, “and he’ll turn to her and say, ‘You can’t even handle your stuff at home.’ ”
The Hamilton Rule: I’ll Take Hillary Clinton Over Donald Trump
“If we must have an enemy at the head of government,” Hamilton said in exasperation, “let it be one whom we can oppose, and for whom we are not responsible.”
In other words: Better to lose to a true enemy whose policies you can fight and repudiate, rather than to a false friend whose schemes will drag you down with him.
.. If elected, she will enrich Wall Street and raid the public coffers while preaching hateful doctrines of identity politics to distract America’s poor and working classes.
.. But Trump will be worse. Morally unmoored, emotionally unstable, a crony capitalist of the worst kind, Trump will be every bit as liberal as Hillary—perhaps more so, given his statements over the years.
.. Conservatives can recover from four, or even eight, years of Hillary Clinton. We might even flourish: remember, President Obama’s cult of personality—to which Trump’s mindless fan base bears more than a little resemblance—sacrificed more than 900 Democratic seats and a passel of governorships on its altar over the past seven years.
.. In the end, a Trump administration will not only avert the first chance at unified Republican government in years, but will finish off the conservative movement itself. Indeed, it is a bitter irony that some of Trump’s blind followers are willing to declare defeat at the moment of impending victory, when a complete GOP takeover of all elected branches could finally overcome the obstruction of divided government.