Quote:We Will Be Saying Two Names for the Rest of the Year
Get used to it.
BY CHARLES P. PIERCE
APR 20, 2016
He, Trump has done everything you need to do to win a presidential nomination. He has run—and won—in different parts of the country. He can engage an audience—with abject nonsense, I grant you, but he's hardly the first prominent Republican politician of this era to do that.
He can finance—or self-finance, or whatever—as well or better than his opponents. And he has proven himself to be a better politician by any measure than any of the other people running against him.
After his smashing victory in New York Tuesday night, if He, Trump were a conventional Republican, he'd be running his acceptance speech through SpellCheck by now.
He knows it, too. You can tell that by the way he declined to be an arrogant prick in his victory speech. "Lyin' Ted" became "Senator Cruz." He knows something else, too. He knows that he set the bar for his being an arrogant prick so low that anything he does that flirts with human decency will be praised by the elite political media as a sudden outbreak of gravitas.
This, of course, happened almost immediately. He, Trump was praised for his newfound "discipline." Putatively observant primates noted that he had begun to "pivot" toward the general election. (It also helps that his new campaign director, Paul Manafort, is a nobleman of the Beltway whose name appears in many of the more influential contact lists.)
That this is the single most predictable political development since John McCain last threw a tantrum—which also happened on Tuesday—was left unsaid on this night of all nights.
There was an obvious thrill going up the leg of Chris Matthews, who also unlimbered himself of the opinion that Hillary Rodham Clinton had "underperformed" by beating Bernie Sanders like a tin drum in a state where the latter had campaigned hard and spent big.
The He, Trump campaign is back to being a phenomenon, and the birds-on-the-wire love nothing more than a phenomenon—except, of course, the phenomenon of electing a woman to be president of the United States. That's no big deal.
Of course, the speech in which He, Trump declined to be an arrogant prick on Tuesday night was, substantively, the same farrago of bluster and nonsense that all of his speeches are.
He once again cited his prospective junk-bond cabinet. (I can't wait for the fiscal policies of Treasury Secretary Carl Icahn.)
He babbled his usual babble about "our vets" and about how he's going to get rid of Obamacare and Common Core, about which latter, I guarantee you, he knows next to nothing. He whined once again about rules that were in place long before he rode down to glory on his golden escalator.
"Nobody should take delegates and claim victory unless they get those delegates with voters and voting. And that is what is going on. And you watch, because the people aren't going to stand for it. It is a crooked system. It is rigged and we are going to go back to the old way—it is called 'You vote, you win.' No matter what happens, and I think we are going to get so strong over the next couple of weeks."
But all people cared about was that He, Trump declined on this particular occasion to be an arrogant prick. It even prevented most people from noting that front and center on the stage with him was Carl Paladino, the nutball sage of upstate New York, alleged animal-porn enthusiast, and the man who put the goober in gubernatorial back in 2010. That was just as much of a statement as He, Trump's sudden turn towards a rough approximation of civility. People will believe anything.
In addition, He, Trump has been gifted with a staggeringly incompetent group of opponents. The Stop Trump movement has proven its complete inability to organize a two-car parade.
In fact, it doesn't seem that the members of said movement even yet understand why He, Trump has such appeal out in the country. The idea that these people could euchre not one but two disastrous candidates on the floor on the convention and come out of it with an intact political party lined up behind Candidate X at this point is like expecting a flock of geese to sing Aida.
The last hope may be the Unbound Delegates—an unruly gaggle of local yokels who can be bought with an All U Can Eat buffet. Is there anybody who doesn't think He, Trump can dazzle enough of these people to put him over the top?
These are the people who climb on buses to come to his failed casinos. The Stop Trump people are still going to be plotting halfway through the Inaugural Ball.
Meanwhile, on the Democratic side, Hillary Rodham Clinton can't win for winning. She smashed Bernie Sanders in New York, where he campaigned hard and spent lavishly.
The result was that Matthews felt she'd underperformed and that much of the rest of the coverage concentrated on two precise points—one, that she's been "damaged" by a "rough" primary campaign, and two, that Bernie Sanders should fold up the tent and go away.
The carnival of fools on the Republican side is portrayed as a fascinating context for a genuine phenomenon. The Democratic campaign is allegedly a bloodbath between an unpopular favorite and an unruly Socialist bombthrower.
It's all a lot of bollocks. None of these people has changed materially since they began their campaigns. (If you change during the campaign, you get pilloried for months. It's one of the things that doomed Young Marco Rubio.)
I think we got the two candidates we are going to see in November on Tuesday night. You don't vote for president with the candidates you want. You vote for president with the candidates you have. Rummy was so damned wise.
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