It looks like months of campaigning for the parties’
nominations are over. Donald Trump and
Hillary Clinton will be the major party candidates in November.
Each of them will have been selected by a process involving
only a small part of the electorate plus, in the case of Clinton, by senior
party officials who serve as something of a check on the process.
The media meanwhile gears up for the next stage in its
engagement with fantasy. The amateur
pundits who make up the vast majority of those reporting and commenting on the
campaigns these days can move on to promote obviously weak stories designed to
sustain viewer and reader interest.
Remember where they have been. Clinton-Bush as the likely contest. Trump as a laughable but not serious
candidate. Brokered or at least open
conventions looming. Stop-Trump. Cruz as a real alternative. Decisions being made by billionaires. Not once counting the raw number of voters in
the selection process or even trying.
But believing the polling is authoritative so that when it turns out to
be wrong, the story is amazing.
Coming soon: Trump has a real shot at winning. Without that story line, what do they write
about for the next six months? You can
only write about Senate and House races for just so long.
What the pundits want you to believe is that there is a scheme
that is playing out, which they understand and can explain to you so you can
avoid thinking for yourself. In fact, a
political campaign is like a living beast, unpredictable and whose behavior is
influenced by events that have not yet taken place.
For Trump, he will face a candidate and a party that won’t
go away no matter what he says, unlike the GOP nomination race. For Clinton, she will face a freelance
candidate who can and will say and do anything, a situation she has never
faced. Their reactions may be what
matters. Does Trump get more extreme or
more conventional? Does Clinton lose it
or find a way to show she is more to be trusted?
And what about the business-oriented, traditional
Republicans? Do they stick with the
party (probably most will) or realize that they should like Clinton for some of
the same reasons as Sanders doesn’t?
A word about history. Some pundits are analogizing Trump to the GOP’s
Wendell Willkie in the 1940 campaign against FDR. Tells you a lot about the quality of the
punditry. Willkie was a progressive
Republican who was a class act. He had
no chance of winning. What part of
Willkie does Trump resemble?
The election? Of
course, anything can happen. But one
recent report noted that if Clinton won all of the states the Democratic
candidate had won each election since 1992 plus Florida, she would be
president. That Democratic run includes
the two elections won by Bush the Younger.
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