Posted on 07/18/2015 3:17:55 PM PDT by conservativejoy
Quotes of the day
posted at 8:41 pm on July 17, 2015 by Allahpundit
Why is he so popular?
Listening to Mr. Trump as he campaigned across the country over the last week, and talking to the people shouting U.S.A! U.S.A.! U.S.A.! who crammed into halls and ballrooms by the hundreds and sometimes thousands, shed some perspective on his appeal, and on the void he is filling in Republican politics.
Mr. Trump is not, as many Republicans have suggested, merely a renegade agitator who sneaked up on the party establishment and threatens to spoil its plans for a tidy, civil primary. Rather, Mr. Trump has become the new starring attraction for the restless, conservative-minded voters who think the political process is in need of disruption.
Some align themselves with the Tea Party movement. Others call themselves independents or Republicans who are just fed up. The praise they heap on Mr. Trump He speaks the truth, Hes fearless, Hes not politically correct echoes the words conservatives have used to describe others, like Sarah Palin and Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, who have stirred their passions before."
Theyre all talk, theyre no action, Trump said, revving up his fiery takedown of politicians.
Im more disappointed in many ways with the Republicans, Trump said. They have this great indignation, whether its Benghazi or the emails nothing ever happens.
New Hampshire voters said Trump spoke to their broad range of concerns. But his greatest appeal may be that they see him as authentic and unfiltered. The opposite, voters said, of even the Republicans they elected to serve them in Congress.
When he talks, he talks like them. He has the same frustrations they do, said Craig Robinson, a GOP activist in Iowa and editor of The Iowa Republican website. They still want someone whos just going to turn Washington on its head.
The issues that are driving the average Trump voter are, first and foremost, that hes not a politician. Secondly, he is self-funding his campaign, so he cant be bought, said Steve Stepanek, Trumps New Hampshire co-chairman, who supported Newt Gingrich in 2012 and Rudy Giuliani in 2008.
People today are looking for plainspoken people who say whats on their mind, said Lou Gargiulo, a New Hampshire activist and Trumps Rockingham County co-chair who supported Mitt Romney in the 2008 and 2012 Republican primaries
At least in that way, said Murray, they really are like Richard Nixons silent majority of middle Americans. Theyre in the middle of the Republican Party. Theyre not evangelicals. Theyre not hardline social or fiscal conservatives. Theyre also not on the liberal side of the party, he said
They seem to be galvanized [by] a notion that Washington is hopelessly corrupt and you need somebody who is completely outside of the process to go in there and shake things up, he said. Immigration really isnt an issue in New Hampshire, but for a lot of these folks, I think immigration speaks more broadly to a federal government thats not doing its job as effectively as they think it should be or could be.
Next was Timothy Doody, 51, Colorado, real estate appraiser.
I dont know, he said when I asked why he donated $500 to Trump. I dont know why I do half the things I do. I was probably drunk.
Doody explained that hes a conservative-leaning person but a registered Democrat. Mostly, he sighed, I just am fed up with politicians. I do know [Trumps] negatives and I do know what hes done as far as supporting Democrats via his corporations and supporting both parties. But at the end of the day, Doody said, he liked that Trump could rabble-rouse and make waves.
McNerney said he likes Trump because hes nonpolitical. He tells it like it is. Hes truthful, and he has more experience than being a short-term senator before he became president. What kind of experience does Trump have, I asked. At life and management, and Im sure he has more foreign experience, which Obama Hussein has ruined.
But even major figures in the GOP donor community who have no love for Trump now accept that little can be done to exclude him from the first debates.
I dont think you can step in to sideline him, said one major donor, John Jordan, who has previously been critical of Trump. The news organizations run the debates. Thats a done deal, the party cant intervene, and at some point you have to say theres good and theres bad in democracy.
There are few people who are as good at getting media attention as Donald Trump, who is doing it either through flashy statements or downright demagoguery, said Julian Zelizer, a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University.
The problem is that there are some second-tier candidates who might have a chance as underdogs or could become important national voices for the party, like a Lindsey Graham, who find that there is less interest in them as the cameras and keyboards are turned toward New Yorks real estate mogul and TV star.
Trump presents a challenge for Bush because hes a hand grenade, said Nelson Warfield, a longtime Republican strategist who has prepared a number of candidates for debates. His people understand that and will be prepared for anything that comes their way.
As the Aug. 6 debate grows closer, some Republicans are relishing the prospect of Trump tearing the bark off the former governor or, at the very least, trying to trip him up. Trump has one target and one target only, said an adviser to a rival GOP candidate. Hes going to bring a lawn mower for Bush.
If Trump is a danger for Bush, some close to the former governor say, he also presents opportunity. The debate will give Bush a national platform to take on Trump in strong terms, presenting himself as a mature, substantive leader who rises above toxic discourse. Bush may have hinted at that approach during a campaign stop in Iowa on Tuesday. Whether its Donald Trump or Barack Obama, their rhetoric of divisiveness is wrong, the former governor said. A Republican will never win by striking fear in peoples hearts.
It all depends on how far Trump is willing to take this, said Warfield. If he comes after Bush, and Bush defends himself forcefully, it could be a positive thing.
Trumps potential appeal to voters in the partys populist wing is what could tilt his impact on Bush from threat to asset. Polls generally show Bush running best among the partys managerial wing of college-educated, moderate, and upscale voters. That means if Trump can sustain his supportwhich many Republican analysts questionhe is likely to be strongest among the voters where Bush is weakest. And to the extent Trump attracts those voters, he denies them to more-conventional Bush rivals like Walker or Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida.
Many GOP analysts agree that Bush will benefit if voters alienated from him gravitate to Trump, who probably faces a lower ceiling of total support, than to Walker or Rubio, who have the potential to build a broader and more potent coalition. Combining results from the past three NBC/Wall Street Journal national surveys, just 27 percent of GOP primary voters said they would consider voting for Trump, far fewer than indicated they could back Bush, Walker, or Rubio
Walker may be the candidate with the most at risk from Trumps ascent. Longtime New Hampshire GOP activist Tom Rath, who is unaffiliated in 2016, says that in the states critical primary next February, Trump really hurts Walker, because Walkers path to winning the nomination is to do really well in Iowa and then come in here and become the dominant ideological conservative coming out of here, and parlay those two things into a good showing in South Carolina. But, Rath adds, Walker only can do that if the Right doesnt splinter.
Trump could benefit Bush in one other way: By expressing suspicion of immigrants in such unvarnished and incendiary language, the billionaire could provide the former Florida governor a foil to make his own views appear more mainstream, not only in the primary but also in the general election if he gets that far
[C]ontrary to the pretensions of the anti-populists, it has been technocrats not populists who have had egg on their faces over the past decade. Pedigreed members of the meritocracy were the architects of the real-estate bubble and the 2008 financial crisis. Technocrats flocked to Barack Obama, sure that No Drama Obama with his perfectly creased pants would be the return to competence. As the rise of ISIS, the OPM hack, and the Affordable Care Act rollout demonstrate, this belief was sorely mistaken. And the establishment hasnt exactly been the embodiment of judicious sobriety, either. Many in the cultural and economic elite drive the frenzy of the new intolerance. Its not slack-jawed yokels who want to ban Civil War video games, suppress Latin literature, and hector transgressive comedians. The philistine demagogues of our day can, unfortunately, all too often be found in boardrooms, college classrooms, newsrooms, and seats of government. The current ruling establishment has not lived up to its own standards, which has made it harder for this establishment to ward off populist challenges.
At the moment, there is potential for a party to craft a governing majority that combines populist energies with sober deliberation. This enlightened populism would try to scale back the Byzantine bureaucracy that so often aids the powerful, but it would also focus on crafting government policies that would ultimately strengthen the nations vast aspirational majority. It would seek to temper popular anger with an optimistic and realistic narrative about the United States.
Republicans in particular have much to gain by embracing an enlightened populism. Far more damaging than any remarks Donald Trump might make at a press conference is the fact that many voters fear that Republican politicians either do not care about them or do not have policies that will improve their situations. That working-class alienation more than any comments about self-deportation is what sunk Mitt Romneys presidential run in 2012. Repealing the Affordable Care Act will not shore up this popular deficit, nor will passing the Trans-Pacific Partnership. And, despite what some in the RNC might hope, slamming Hillary Clinton wont, either. Myriad scandals did not stop Bill Clinton from winning two terms.
One of the explanations for Donald Trumps surging poll numbers goes like this: The base doesnt trust Republican leaders on immigration. This manifests in support for a man who tells it like it is.
The problem with this is that the immigration schism on the right is largely about rhetoric. Almost everybody agrees we must secure the border, and even the most hawkish anti-immigration reform advocates wont admit they want to deport the 11 million, or so, illegals. There are differences of opinion on whether to allow for a pathway to citizenship or to legalize them, but almost nobody is advocating for mass deportation
This brings us to some fundamental questions about leadership: Should leaders merely reflect the opinions of their followers, or try to lead them? My take is that, ideally, leaders persuade followers to follow them. But sometimes that doesnt work. And then were left with this: If youre the captain of a ship, and your most vocal passengers insist you to steer towards something that looks to you like an iceberg, do you do it?
***
Trumps bubble tells us little about the 2016 race. What it says about Republican ideology, on the other hand, is that none of the factionsthe libertarians, the religious right, the Tea Partyhave much life in them. After all the sound and fury of the Obama years, no quarter of the right has generated ideas or leaders that compellingly appeal even to other Republicans, let alone to anyone outside the party. The Ron Paul revolution has become a Rand Paul Thermidor. There is no philosophical insurgency this year. Instead, theres a sense that the right is becoming a prisoner to formalism: the religious right, the libertarians, and the Tea Party are all reduced to repurposing ideas minted decades ago. The various factions policies arent generating any excitement, which leaves room for an outsize, outrageous personality, in this case Trump, to grab attention.
The fields failure here isnt about satisfying an appetite for novelty, its about the failure of new circumstances to generate fresh applications of principle from the leading figures of the different factions. From Rand Paul we should be hearing something we didnt hear much from his father, namely how libertarianism and noninterventionism can be made politically viableespecially in the hard cases, not just the relatively popular and easy ones like surveillance reform. From Huckabee and Santorum and Carson we should be hearing about what it means to be a moral minority in a country that has already accepted same-sex marriage; they could even be talking about the Benedict Option and whether the religious rights mode of political engagement remains an alternative to it. (Judging by the GOP race itself, Obergefell doesnt seem to be lighting any populist fires.)
There are difficult questions today that Ronald Reagan and the Cold War right never had to address. But they arent questions that the factional candidates or their ideological proxies are answering. None of them represents a 21st-century conservatism. Nor, of course, does Donald Trump.***
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is standing by his past support for universal health care
Trump said his health care plan would take care of poorer people by negotiating deals with hospitals, saying he actually a conservative with a heart.
Then on top of that, the people that cant afford to do that, we have to help them out at the lower level, added Trump. We have to help them out. And I would make deals with hospitals, and Id make deals with people where they can get some care, John. I mean, you cant have a guy that has no money, thats sick, and he cant go see a doctor, he cant go see a hospital. You know, I just dont think you can have that. I mean, cause Im actually a conservative with a heart.
Trump added that he didnt care if he lost votes for his position, saying you have to take care of poor people.
Why is he so popular?
Illegal aliens
The GOP has been frustrating every effort by the citizens to stop the invasion/cheap labor importation/colonization.
ping
Trump is also consistently saying we need to be for American jobs once again.
We run a MASSIVE trade deficit, with the largest communist nation on earth.
And that is growing, every year. Trump is saying that is a problem, and Trump is right. Nobody else is saying one single thing about it.
Not one person.
This is by far and away The Issue of the Day. All the voters have been waiting for is someone who they truly believe means it when he advocates sealing the border.
The citizens have been frustrated for years by one administration after another violating our laws and their oaths and allowing the rape of our country from the southern border.
The Donald clearly is a highly disruptive, some would say, controversial, figure, much like H. Ross Perot was in 1992.
The Republicans erred then in not including Perot within their broad tent, regardless of his feelings for George H.W. Bush at the time. Perot was wary of both political parties, but his feud with the Republicans boiled down to a personal, and very visceral, dislike of Bush-41, and not much was going to buy him off at that point. Had the Republicans invited him in, and agreed to pursue some if not most of the concerns Perot raised, the election in 1992 would have gone perhaps rather differently, but Perot would still have been a kind of a burr under the saddle to the Establishment Republicans.
Sadly, we cannot rewrite history to our convenience, and certainly not to our benefit, but why continue to try to repeat it over and over?
The feisty and truculent billionaire is at least within the tent this time, and while a totally warm welcome may be too much to ask for, perhaps a careful weighing of the objections and criticisms he has raised should be of prime importance.
Better to harness the raw energy and strong convictions of The Donald, than to try to lock him out. He might still be a distracting and somewhat disturbing influence, but massaging egos is still a very profitable and useful skill.
Count your successes by the enemies and battles you choose.
And though defeat may be magnificent, it is still defeat.
That's funny. That is how the democrats win!
People should be afraid of the current administration of leftist fascists and their useful idiot minions.
I think conservative Americans are begging the question... Is anybody there... does anybody care?
Hear Hear! Well stated.
I’m sick and tired of backing a politician then watching him ‘reach across the aisle’ and compromise everything that I voted for.
Do I believe that Trump will do everything that I want?
Nope.
I believe that he’ll scare the crap out of me. But at least he’ll do something different than politics as usual. I won’t watch my party slow march us into the leftist camp.
We might actually be able to eat when he gets done with us. My children’s generation may be able to get jobs and buy homes of their own.
The other two words that spring to mind are “the republicans”
Yup. He’s a loose cannon, alright.
One good thing is that he’s forcing the others to show their true colors. I love that he’s calling them out.
Lord knows how this is going to play out.
I hear ya. It is going to be interesting.
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