I like to keep ragging on this one point about how John Kerry chose Amanda Marcotte as his internet outreach specialist in 2004 not because the tactics of it matter anymore but to choose Amanda Marcotte, fucking 2004 Amanda Marcotte, as OUTreach specialist meant that at that late date you
1) Knew the internet was Important
so to deal with that
2) Had heard of A Young on the Internet
2004! Christ.
2008 Obama was with the curve (which was something given national campaigns were traditionally run by elder lions), honestly these guys might even be ahead of it, completely yielding TV for memes
But more than anything, to be a success a Trump presidency would have to bury its charisma in institution for successors to draw on, and they’re already doing it without even having won and that’s impressive. Like, quick, what was Kerry’s slogan? McCain’s? Romney’s?
To hear the right’s triumphalism of recent
years, you’d think that only smug Democrats were appalled by Reagan
while Republicans quickly recognized that their party, decimated by
Richard Nixon and Watergate, had found its savior.
The Republican elites of Reagan’s day were as blindsided by him as their counterparts have been by Trump.
A typical liberal-Establishment take on Reagan could be found in Harper’s,
which called him Ronald Duck, “the Candidate from Disneyland.” That he
had come to be deemed “a serious candidate for president,” the magazine
intoned, was “a shame and embarrassment for the country.”
A strategic memo by Carter’s pollster,
Patrick Caddell, laid out the campaign against Reagan’s obvious
vulnerabilities with bullet points: “Is Reagan Safe? … Shoots From the
Hip … Over His Head … What Are His Solutions?” But it was the strategy
of Caddell’s counterpart in the Reagan camp, the pollster Richard
Wirthlin, that carried the day with the electorate. Voters wanted to
“follow some authority figure,” he theorized — a “leader who can take
charge with authority; return a sense of discipline to our government;
and, manifest the willpower needed to get this country back on track.”
[Trump’s] constant harping on his polls is not simple narcissism, but a sped-up version of a quarterly earnings report: he is reassuring his supporters that they are with the smart money, in on the ground floor of a big thing.
Not only did Trump somehow win a debate he didn’t go to, instead he had an event where the ‘08 and ‘12 Iowa caucus winners - Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum - gave auxiliary speeches from a lectern bearing his name.
As, in the language of political stagecraft, endorsers do. With nothing to gain and everyone coming for him, he somehow left everyone bruised and in his debt by running away and tricking HIS OWN OPPONENTS into endorsing him.
The ironic thing is that today’s actual New York City values - moneyed, credentialed, cautious and middlebrow - are exactly what people meant by “country club” Republicanism.
Anonymous asked: So, uh, Trump lately. Should we be worried?
I DID put a lot of stock in his ability to claim the initiative, tear the media a new Overton Window, get inside liberals’ OODA loop and put them on the defensive, but even I’m a little slack-jawed lately.
I’m not terribly worried though, for two reasons.
First, Trump’s made very clear for decades that he thinks of himself as a negotiator first and foremost. And that one of his go-to tactics is to open with an absurd ask, backed by an adamantine self-confidence that means he can’t be laughed or shamed out of the room.
So to the extent there’s anything here, I think it’s just a refusal to do the “negotiating with yourself” - making preemptive concessions in the mere hope that your counterpart will reciprocate - that first-term Obama caught flak for.
So if a President Trump did anything with this, I expect it would be to say “Here’s this thing I’ve got enough support to make a decent run at that you really, REALLY don’t want. Now am I married to it? No. So. What’ll you give me in exchange for ruling it out?”
Honestly I think it’s the same with immigration. When your offer is as far from the status quo as “deport everyone immediately, Mexico pays for a wall”, you’re opening a lot of space for compromises where everyone leaves satisfied, your team feeling triumphant and the other guys like they held a defensive action.
Now, if you picture yourself on the other, liberal/Democrat side of the deal you could sniff that given our traditions and institutions you shouldn’t HAVE to give anything up in return for not registering and/or deporting ethnic and religious minorities.
Fair, fair. And going into 2015 conservative/Republicans thought that given those same things they wouldn’t HAVE to spend any power upholding the principle that full civic and economic inclusion shouldn’t be conditioned on willingness to participate in blasphemous parodies of the holy rites of the nation’s traditional and still majority religion.
So learning experience for everyone.
Second, I don’t think he has a deep enough following to bend American institutions to his unimpeded will even if he got elected and tried - he has some high profile majordomos and allies that could lead initiatives, and at his rallies a ton of dedicated foot soldiers, but he doesn’t have, as far as I can tell, a corps of loyal professional (political and/or technical) middlemen of sufficient size or scalability. Assembling such a corps is a big part of why political parties (and within parties, party elites) are so powerful.
In his business dealings Trump’s offloaded that stuff on mercenary institutions like building trades unions, contractors, investment banks, New York Mafia families, and media companies, but I can’t see that working at national scale.
Everyone got the significance of Donald Trump expelling Jorge Ramos from his presser the other day, right? The obviously intentional symbolism of Trump ejecting a Mexican guy from his domain, telling him to “go back to [where you came from]”?
Well have you thought about the symbolism of how he eventually let him back in and talk to him, after time had passed and he was willing to wait his turn and go through proper channels?
Or the significance of how a lot of the media didn’t evenbother trying to ding him for that because they said “yeah, fair enough, that guy was arrogantly breaking the rules and that’s a reasonable response”.
I’m thinking Trump’s accepted a significant hit among hispanics, his messaging at this point - and honestly GOP messaging on race-adjacent issues in general - isn’t trying to win them. Only state that’s going to flip on overland hispanic votes this cycle is Colorado anyway (Florida’s a different demographic beast).
What it’s targeted at is places like my homeland, the “collar counties” around Philadelphia that determine which way the state swings. Places full of nice, comfortable, suburban whites who vote that identity and those interests, chief among them that they can keep thinking of themselves as nice (and ideally not have to think of themselves as white).
Their concern with immigration and racial policy isn’t with its effects but with its aesthetics - they recoil from deportation and interdiction only insofar as the attached adjectives are “malicious and hateful”, but if Trump can sell the exact same policy as “tough but fair”…
And it’s not like that’ll make him win them over with the issue, but it means he won’t lose them on it. He gets painted as “far-right” but it’s basically just immigration (which gives you a sense what our painters think counts in politics) and in any other respects he’s exactly the moderate-liberal Republicanism that kind of voter loves. Seriously, dude’s like a Aaron Sorkin wet dream, not even so much a Rockefeller as a Lindsay Republican.
The most-enthusiastic Trump backers began arriving at the stadium at
dawn, hoping to get a spot close to the stage. The first in line were
Keith Quackenbush, 54, and Bill Hart, 46, co-workers at a retail giant
in Pensacola, Fla.
“I’m telling you, everyone who is a worker at
our store, they’re excited about Trump,” Quackenbush said. “I don’t care
what race or gender, whatever age — they love Trump. This is a
movement.”
– – –
But none have put on a show like Trump. Friday night resembled
something between a Lynyrd Skynyrd concert and the Daytona 500. People
came to see a celebrity, Trump, but also to hear his fiery call to
revolutionize the nation’s politics. Many attendees said they had never
attended a presidential campaign event.
Cheryl
Burns, 60, was on a road trip from California when she heard that Trump
would be in Alabama. She turned her car around and got in line, warning
people of what happened to states when liberals took them over.
“There
is no more California,” Burns said. “It’s now international, lawless
territory. Everything is up for grabs. Illegal aliens are murdering
people there. People are being raped. Trump isn’t lying about anything —
the rest of the country just hasn’t found out yet.”
As the sun
began to set, the sweaty throngs in the stadium snapped their heads
toward the sky as the roar of a jet engine pierced the air. Here it was,
gliding toward them above the Friday night lights: a gleaming Boeing
757 with “T-R-U-M-P” stretched across its navy blue body, circling twice
and dipping its wing toward the sloped stadium bleachers.
The
crowd roared its approval to Trump as his jet tilted away to land at a
nearby airport. Minutes later, he was whisked in a caravan of SUVs past
sleepy neighborhoods and the shipyard-lined coast of the Deep South to
the surreal political festival.
“This is
history happening right before our eyes,” said Laura Teague of Mobile,
one of the few black attendees at the rally. “I’m going to help Trump
make history.”
March 13 - The Tyrant is now at Lyon. Fear and Terror seized all at his appearance.
