Posted on 05/07/2016 7:08:15 AM PDT by MarvinStinson
Campaign 2016 went down the rabbit hole and straight into Wonderland
One of the remarkable exceptions to the rule of Pavlovian conditioning can be found within Washington’s pundit and political class. No matter how many times conventional wisdom is proven wrong, Washington salivates every time it hears it. Bloviating pontificators inside the Beltway build entire careers just spouting conventional wisdom.
And the current, faulty conventional wisdom is that Hillary Clinton will inevitably make Kibbles n’ Bits of Donald Trump in the general election.
What the prognosticators fail to realize is that this election season long ago went down a rabbit hole and straight into Wonderland. Nothing is as it seems, and nothing will be what one expects. And that is because the legitimate anger of the electorate has supplanted all the usual models and assumptions that typically drive voting patterns.
Let’s look at what was “inevitable” so far this year:
Inevitable: King of Hearts Jeb Bush would cruise to the Republican nomination because he had hundreds of millions of dollars, the sanctification of the Establishment and, as the third Bush in line for the presidency — well, it was just his turn.
Result: Donald Trump dubbed him “low-energy Jeb” and he didn’t come close to winning any primaries or caucuses. He dropped out of the race after the third contest, South Carolina.
Inevitable: Queen Hillary Clinton breezes to the Democratic nomination, challenged only by a geriatric socialist and a faceless former Maryland governor.
Result: Clinton goes 15 rounds with a 74-year-old socialist from Vermont, and while she likely will pull off a TKO, her brand is battered nearly as badly as it was in 2008, when she slunk away in defeat.
Inevitable: Trump, a political trickster who is in the race mainly to promote his hotels and his neckties, according to the Establishment, is massacred by the firecracker field of traditional, experienced candidates arrayed against him.
Result: Trump eviscerates each of his opponents one by one and today stands as the presumptive nominee.
The common denominator undergirding these “surprises” is this: The people did something entirely different from what the disconnected Washington political class expected. The people are angry, and they expressed this by backing anti-Establishment candidates. It is this very anger that Trump has shown he can tap into — and Hillary Clinton, through her difficulty with Bernie Sanders, has shown she cannot.
That is why the polls today — the latest showed Hillary beating Trump nationally by double digits — do not reflect what will actually occur in the general election. Campaigning matters, and Trump is a lot better at it than Clinton. Despite his boorish behavior, Trump’s approval rating among Republicans after months of campaigning keeps going up, not down, and is now at record heights – above the 50 percent mark that was supposedly his “ceiling.” The same will happen once he begins targeting the disaffected Democrats, independents, and even young people who have shown no enthusiasm for Clinton.
Pundits think this move toward Trump is impossible, because Sanders is a leftist ideologue and his supporters could not possibly be convinced to support a Republican. But this is not, in fact, an ideological election. Sanders’ support is driven by the same thing that propelled Trump: anger at the status quo. The country is sinking, stuck near zero economic growth, and people are watching their jobs disappear because of trade and immigration. Meanwhile, the Establishment in both parties fails to recognize the tectonic plates moving right underneath them.
The polls showing Clinton beating Trump are a joke. No way. She has no accomplishments, she is unlikable, she is unhealthy, she has rotten associates, she has a tin ear, she has a shrill and unpleasant voice, she has no campaign ideas.
Trump is a thousand times better than Hillary in every category. The race is just starting, and Hillary does not have a prayer.
Key words. The voters are angry
I would replace the word angry with knowledgeable. except maybe for benie’s poeple.
Trump was much better at it than Cruz, who was better at it than any of the other GOP candidates. More importantly, not only is Trump better at it than Hillary, Bernie is better at it than Hillary.
Cruz, at his best, made his audience want to follow him, which is what Bernie, at his best, does with his audiences. Trump triumphs over both of them because he makes his audience feel he is one of them, which is a much more difficult task to pull off but much more effective when it is accomplished, and one that Trump does admirably. Only three other candidates in my lifetime have had this ability: JFK, Ronald Reagan, and William Jefferson Blythe Clinton.
Hillary, by contrast, expects her audience to follow her, which is a horrible campaign technique. That is why she will lose in November, or be ousted before August and replaced by slowJoe and the Native Massachusettian.
OK, so we’re all angry. Implication being we’re acting irrationally. We’d be insane not to reject these idiots, on both sides of the aisle.
Since the author was delivering bad news to his circle of influence, he had to insert the obligatory Trump slur. “Boorish”, this time, “divisive”, “brash”, “arrogant”, held in reserve. Don’t all those descriptors fit our current White House occupant better?
Of course.
Standard leftwing action to accuse anyone who doesn’t agree with them of being mentally ill.
“Don’t be THREATENED.”
‘You are paranoiac.”
“Why are you so filled with HATE”?
And lots more.
Yep. Once we burn down their house, we can plead "temporary insanity".
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