Whether you read
newspapers or watch cable TV news, you’re probably inundated by coverage about
Trump. This coverage is virtually 100
percent critical. Journalists hate Trump.
He calls them liars, and they return the favor, presenting him as an
uninformed, uninquisitive, dangerous demagogue. Some days, the Washington Post’s lead
editorial is devoted to bashing the guy, and then when you flip to the Opinion
page, you see two or three additional stories with the same theme. When it comes to the journalist community, lung
cancer and heart disease may be more popular than the mogul from Queens.
And that, my friends,
is helping to prop him up with the Republican electorate. The majority of that electorate hates the New
York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, and MSNBC, and they may have crossed the
line to hating Fox News as well. Yet, as
the saying goes, the enemy (Trump) of their enemy (the mainstream media) becomes
their friend. I think Trump realized
that early on in this campaign. That
may have been his masterstroke as a candidate: egg on the media, and everything
will fall into place, at least with the Republican electorate.
Personally, though, with the passage
of time, I have grown less and less interested in this circus act. As a fan of Rickles – the other master
entertainer named “Don” -- I can enjoy some of Trump’s jokes at his rivals’
expense. What’s more, I can even
appreciate some of his substantive points.
Campaign finance absolutely needs to be reformed so that politicians can
be independent of their financial benefactors.
And politicians also need the
guts and the motivation to become more natural and authentic on the stump. The ability to read watered-down,
poll-tested drivel off a teleprompter is not my idea of a political
credential.
So
good for Trump to shake things up a bit.
But he has given us too many reasons to want him to stay the hell out of
Washington. First, there was his “Birtherism,”
which was worthy of Joseph McCarthy.
And then came his crass insults of POWs, his threats forcibly to remove 12
million illegal immigrants from their homes, and last but not least, his un-American
proposal to ban all Muslims who are not American citizens from this
country. That’s just a few of his gems,
but each one is a doozy. Those
positions left me uninterested in him as a serious candidate. And as a comedian, his shtick is getting to
be old hat. Rickles did a better job of
keeping it fresh.
The
media’s current obsession with the Donald is whether he can unify his
party. Honestly, I don’t much care. That party was plenty unified under Mitt and
it still got smoked; why should this election be any different? At a time when young Americans no longer
figure to be as affluent or as secure as their parents and grandparents, what
does the Republican Party have to offer us?
Tax cuts for the rich? More
economic polarization? A social agenda
that caters entirely to the most Orthodox and right-wing portions of religious
communities? The one time during the last 24 years when
they were in power, they also gave us a war backed by false evidence that
turned into an international embarrassment and further destabilized the most
dangerous part of the world. How do
these guys expect to get a majority of Americans to vote for their standard
bearer?
The
truth, I believe, is that Trump can win ... but only if Hillary is unable to
unify her own party and attract some independents. She is the one who everyone should be
thinking about now, not Trump. She is
ahead in the polls, ahead in the betting markets, ahead in her campaign
infrastructure and war chest, and ahead in her command of the issues. And
yet, at the rate she is going, Hillary will have the highest unfavorability
rating of any Democratic Party Presidential nominee in a generation.
It has become
conventional Washington, DC wisdom that whoever succeeds in getting the nation
to focus primarily on the OTHER candidate will win in November. That may be true about November. But we’re six full months away from Election
Day. Right now is the time for the
politicians to be introducing themselves so that they can develop a broad base
of support and appear as a viable alternative to those who are yet
undecided. What we saw on Tuesday in
Indiana is just how far Hillary is from accomplishing that goal. Despite the fact that she had already
effectively locked up the nomination and Americans like to vote for winners,
the Hoosiers still gave Bernie the victory.
She seems to be more intellectually agile than Bernie, more informed, and
more experienced, and he still beat her.
That is a troublesome sign for those who think that she should wipe the
floor with the man she aptly calls the “Loose Cannon.”
Truly, the nation needs
to rally around Hillary. We need her to
beat Trump. But it sure would be nice if
the majority of the electorate voted FOR her, rather than simply pulled the
lever for her while holding their nose.
I’m not kidding with that metaphor.
At the rate we’re going, you won’t know a voter from a guy who is drinking
colonoscopy fluid – it will become an exercise in nostril tightening to dull
the pain. We can do better. And Hillary has it in her to do better. I just don’t know if she has the political
courage to make it happen.
Here’s a simple way to
understand the problem with the Clinton candidacy: she has learned too much
from Al Gore’s mistake. In 2000, Gore distanced
himself from Hillary’s husband (the sitting President), and it cost him the
election. Understandably, Hillary has decided
to take the opposite strategy and fully align herself with Barack Obama. But at a time when voters are understandably
frustrated and even scared, you don’t essentially campaign under the slogan “Four
More Years.” You demonstrate the passion
and the vision to stand behind specific ways in which this country will change
if you are elected. And if that requires
that you distinguish yourself from the current President, so be it.
Personally, I’m not
sure I can name a single area in which Hillary expects to change this
country. In other words, I can’t think
of one way where she will depart from President Obama’s approach – and believe
me, departures are very much in order.
For example, I see the infrastructure of my city crumbling (our once-revered
subway system is an absolute disgrace), and yet Hillary doesn’t have much of
anything to say about it. Surely, she
has issued policy statements about that and every other topic, but she has
never brought passion and poetry to this cause.
I want Hillary to
become a cause candidate – and it’s not enough that the only cause is that we
need to become something like the 81st country to elect a woman to
our top governmental job. We’ve never
had a Native-American President either, but I don’t think people would be
excited to elect one if all s/he spoke about passionately is the importance of Native-American
rights.
In short, Hillary needs
to guarantee that to elect her is to create a mandate for certain specific
causes – and not merely to guard against the cancer of Trump. Otherwise, we will have plenty of voters in
November who are excited about voting for Trump, and precious few voters
excited about voting for Hillary. That’s
a dangerous scenario, one that permits the Democrats to lose the election even
if the Republicans remain divided.
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