i suppose you no longer remember how he let Romney be hoisted on his own petard? Obama was cooler in his delivery, but his staff was just as cutthroat against McCain and against Romney.
This is not low, this is just a warm up. Heck, it’s not even taken out of context.
The thing about Trump’s appeal is that it hit a solid limit. He got all the voters who would vote for an opossum if it were the Republican candidate, but by securing those he disillusioned the softer voters that he needs. My crystal ball says that a historically huge chunk of Republican voters are going to sit this election out, which will have repercussions in congressional races as well.
I propose we elect a group of people that will gather and decide who should be our president. Each state could send a delegation, proportional in size to population (but with a couple extra to keep small states happy).
What could go wrong?
Well, there can’t be that many undecided voters at this point. Which makes motivating your base incredibly important. There is a game of chicken evolving in the Democratic party between Sanders supporters that plan to abstain, and Clinton who would rather use the spectre of Trump than move left in her policies. Ads like this are pointless, because they don’t give that faction a reason to vote for her.
Republicans couldn’t effectively attack Trump for the same reason Clinton couldn’t effectively attack Sanders.
Sander’s only vulnerability was on the right, but Clinton couldn’t hit him there without using Conservative attack lines which would hit her base as well. So she had to make policy neutral attacks about vague things like experience while he was free to hit her from the left.
A similar thing happened with Trump, Republicans attacked his policy for being too left wing but a huge portion of the Republican party doesn’t care about policy, it’s about identity politics. The core of Trump’s message, to hell with political correctness, tear down the establishment, protect us from Muslims and Mexicans, etc. Those are ingrained pretty deep in the Republican party, they could say Trump was a terrible nominee but they couldn’t actually say why he was a terrible nominee without contradicting years of their own rhetoric and attacking their own supporters.
I think the only one who actually tried to build a proper moral case against Trump was Jeb Bush, and he was the biggest underachiever of the whole primary.
But the general election is very different, Clinton is now free to hit Trump from the left by making a coherent moral argument in favour of equality and expertise. He is ridiculously vulnerable there and unlike the Republican base the general electorate cares about those things.
Though Trump can probably attack Clinton from the left on things like wars etc.
Trump was initially in favour of the Iraq war.
Trump was in favour of invading Libya.
Trump is in favour of invading Syria and Iraq.
Trump would not be advised to attack Hillary for her support of military interventions.
Let’s evaluate the ad for its persuasiveness.
Trump’s proposition is that the establishment is a bunch of useless losers and he can do better. The ad shows Trump being opposed by… a bunch of useless losers on the Republican side. Trump annihilated every one of them. And it wasn’t even hard.
http://blog.dilbert.com/post/143898615346/how-not-to-make-a-campaign-ad
Is it really a delusion?
You’re projecting rationality and analysis on the voters, which is pretty dubious. What the voters will remember is Trump brutally disparaging the invasion of Iraq on television to the Republican leadership. Clinton’s moment of truth, on the other hand, was voting for the war in 2002. So Trump can attack her from the Left on the war. He can also attack her past and probable future fondness of trade deals like NAFTA, TPP and TTIP – again from the Left. Trump’s basic theme is class war, not race or religion. The latter are metaphors or symbols of the former. The proles know that the people of the Established Order don’t care about them and are constantly making their lives worse while arranging good things for themselves. This year, one might say the proles made two attempts to destroy the existing leadership of both parties. In the Republican Party, they seem to have succeeded, in part because the Republican leadership had long played with racism and bigotry. ‘Raise crows, and they’ll pluck out your eyes,’ as the proverb goes. It is extremely unfortunate that things have worked out this way, but given the death-grip of neocons and neoliberals on the Democratic Party, there does not seem to be any other likely route for the revolutionary impulses of the lower classes to follow. Ironically – politics is full of ironies and paradoxes – Clinton’s machine of minorities, privileged academics, media stars, and neoliberal capitalists have given us a great monster.
Thanks, hadn’t heard that, it’s a good one.
It’s Spanish: ‘Cría cuervos y te sacarán los ojos.’ It’s also the title of a well-regarded movie. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cría_Cuervos.
Wish I could get you an animated version, but that’s the Canadian Prime Minister hugging the leader of the opposition yesterday. “Routine Proceedings”
And yet still she manages to be more militaristic, interventionist, and war-mad than Trump. That’s my point.
You’re probably right, because the people who like Trump will conveniently overlook the fact that he didn’t publicly state that going to war with Iraq was a bad idea until more than a year after the 2003 invasion.
This is one of those things where anti-Trump people are going to focus on facts - Trump wasn’t really against the war before it started the way he claims he was - while ignoring the point. The point is that Trump has every right to say he was smarter on Iraq than the rest of the Republicans and smarter on Iraq than Hilary Clinton. That article you link says:
We could only find one example of Trump commenting on the Iraq War before the invasion, and he seemed apprehensive but not vehemently opposed to the operation.
Apprehensive but not vehemently opposed was smarter than “for”. And while Trump started saying it was a mistake only a year after the war launched, Clinton waited until 2006 to start really questioning it.
So when Trump says, “I was against it from day one” saying, “That’s not true” is just not addressing the issue. Now if Clinton said, “What I learned from Iraq is not to be mislead by intelligence into thinking that foreign wars are a good idea. Iraq was just another Vietnam, and I’m not going to start Vietnam 3. Not in Syria, not in Iran, not anywhere,” then she would be addressing the point Trump is making. But she won’t say that, because she is going to start Vietnam 3 in Iran or in Syria (or maybe in Iraq again somehow).
This whole, “Please present your arguments in coherent form so that I may refute them” game is not going to beat Trump.
Yeah, but we can’t say how he would have voted on the thing if he’d actually been required to do so.
If Clinton hadn’t been forced to take a stand one way or another you can bet she too would have said “I knew this was a mistake!” much earlier than she did.
Yeah, I don’t doubt that. But he did actually start forcefully criticizing the war years before Clinton according to that article. If he had been in the Senate to vote I think he would have voted yes. I still think Clinton has to address the meat of the criticism - that being that she is generally pro-war. If that is not true then she should be convincing us that’s not true. If it is true then I guess pointing out that Trump isn’t exactly being honest and that he didn’t have to make a decision the way she did is the best she can do. She’s doing the latter, so I assume the point that she is pro-war is accurate.
Donald Trump, on the other hand, by acting entirely at random, will be right about foreign wars half the time. [Random.org for president!]
I agree, but it sure is an odd line of attack coming from someone who recently claimed “I’m the most militaristic person there is” while calling to “bomb the hell out of” various countries.
A pacifist this man is not.
Like I said, Random Number Generator for president!
