By Victor Davis Hanson
Tuesday, July 19, 2016
Hillary Clinton has outspent Donald Trump in
unprecedented fashion. Her endorsements bury Trump’s. The Obama administration
is doing its best to restore her viability. The media are outdoing their 2008
liberal prejudices. And yet in John Connally delegate fashion, Clinton’s vast
expenditures of $100 million plus have so far earned her only a tiny, if any,
lead in most recent polls. If each point of approval is calibrated by dollars
spent, Trump’s fly-by-night campaign is ahead.
Nor has Trump matched Clinton’s organization or
voter-registration efforts. He certainly has blown off gifts from a number of Clinton
gaffes and misfortunes, usually by gratuitously riffing on off-topic
irrelevancies, from the Trump University lawsuit to the genocidal Saddam
Hussein’s supposedly redeeming anti-terrorist qualities. Pollsters, gamers,
insiders — everyone, really — have written his political epitaph for over a
year. Rarely have conservative voices at mainstream-media outlets vowed not to
support the Republican nominee. And yet the longer he stays viable, the more
likely it is that Trump has a real chance at winning the presidency, which may
already be a veritable 50/50 proposition. So why is the supposedly impossible
at least now imaginable?
1. Not a Typical
Populist
When critics are not slurring Trump as Hitler or
Mussolini, they write him off, in sloppy fashion, as a dangerous populist — at
worst an hysterical, demagogic Huey Long, at best a quirky Ross Perot: in other
words, a flash in the pan who capitalizes on occasional but brief surges of
Neanderthal isolationism, protectionism, nativism, xenophobia, and collective
insecurity among the lower middle classes.
That diagnosis is rehashed groupthink. By any definition,
Trump is not a classical populist.
His traction derives from opposing unchecked and cynical illegal immigration, not diverse and measured legal immigration.
And he is rebelling not so much against a flabby, sclerotic status quo as
against a radical, even revolutionary regime of elites who are now well beyond
accustomed norms. It is hardly radical to oppose the Confederate doctrine of
legal nullification in more than 300 sanctuary cities, or a de facto open
border with Mexico, or doubling the national debt in eight years, or ruining
the nation’s health-care system with the most radical reconstruction in the
history of American health-care policy, or systematically running huge trade
deficits with an autocratic China that does not adhere to international norms
of free trade and predicates expanding political and military power in the
South China Sea on its commercial mercantilism. Trump seemed incendiary in the
primaries, but as he is juxtaposed to the official Clinton extremist agenda, he
will likely be reinterpreted increasingly as more mainstream — a probability
enhanced by his selection of Mike Pence as his running-mate.
2. Obama Nihilism
Do not underestimate the volatility of Barack Obama’s
popularity. As long as Obama keeps silent and out of the limelight, he nears 50
percent in approval ratings. The moment he returns to the fray (and he always
does, as a June bug to a patio light), he instinctively reverts to his natural
divisive and polarizing self, as evidenced in his disastrous reactions to the
Dallas police shootings, and his politically suicidal post-Dallas courting of
Al Sharpton (who used to call on supporters to “off” police) and of the architects
of Black Lives Matter. It is likely that Obama, to cement a hard progressive
legacy in the next four months, will only double down on his gratuitous
pandering, and therefore will see his poll numbers return to the low or
mid-40s. That may help Trump seem an antidote rather than an obsequious
continuance.
3. Two Sorts of
Elitists
Both Trump and Clinton are elitists in an anti-elitist
year. But elitism is not all the same. The popular furor is not directed at the
rich per se, but rather at the perception of cultural snobbishness and
hypocrisy among those who romanticize the always-distant poor, as they favor
the always-proximate rich, and caricature the despised middle class that lacks
the taste of the latter and the appeal of the former. Trump’s in-your-face
tastes and brashness are vulgar in the pure Roman sense, and his accent and
demeanor are not those of the cultural elite, or even of the dignified Mitt
Romney–type moneyed bluestockings. In contrast, Hillary, like Obama, talks down
to Americans on how they ought to think, speak, and act. Trump seems to like
them just as they are. In turn, middle-class hatred of the elite is not aimed
at Trump’s garish marble floors or the narcissistic oversized gold letters
plastered over the entrances to his buildings, but rather at the rarified
self-righteous. Like it or not, Trump can square the ridiculous circle of a
raucous billionaire as man of the people far better than Hillary can handle the
contradictions of a Wall Street–created crony multimillionaire pandering to the
Sanders socialists.
4. Election
Formulas
It is not assured that Clinton can replicate Obama’s
formula of record-high minority-voter turnout and bloc voting. More
importantly, in a few key states Trump may win 25 to 28 percent of the Latino
vote and perhaps 10 percent of the black vote, while Clinton might not capture
even 35 percent of the so-called white vote. A surprisingly high minority of
blacks and Hispanics do not feel Trump is a nativist or xenophobe, given that
illegal immigration is often perceived as putting a strain on scarce social services,
imperiling already poor schools, and driving down both wages and the
availability of entry-level jobs. Trump’s El Jefeism plays well when juxtaposed
to Clinton’s suburban namby-pamby falsity or her unhinged demonization of coal
miners and gun owners. The numbers of minority voters in key states who quietly
vote Trump need not be great, but rather only must top by 2 or 3 percentage
points the disastrous McCain and Romney levels of 2008 and 2012, given the
likely historic percentage of white voters that Trump may win. Media elites are
in denial over this possibility. Racial hyphenation and bloc voting, along with
prophecies of continual white irrelevance, should by their reckoning have long
ago doomed Trump in the general election.
5. Crimes and
Misdemeanors
Trump struggles with embarrassing misdemeanors, Clinton
with high crimes. She may be delighted at not having been indicted, but FBI
Director Comey confirmed to the nation that she was an inveterate liar,
paranoid, conspiratorial, and incompetent. That she was not charged only made
the FBI seem absurd: offering a damning hooved, horned, pitchforked, and
forked-tailed portrait of someone mysteriously not a denizen of Hell. Add in
the Clinton Foundation syndicate and the fact that lies are lies and often do
not fade so easily, and Hillary in the next 15 weeks may average one “liar” and
“crooked” disclosure each week — at a rate that even the Trump tax returns and
Trump University cannot keep up with.
6. Four Months
until the Election
The tumultuous news cycle — Dallas, Paris, Turkey, Baton
Rouge — creates anxieties and a general sense that the nation and indeed the
world are in chaos — and without any guidance from the White House. Such a
vague foreboding that something has to give to avert catastrophe may favor
Trump abroad and at home — especially if he can muzzle himself in times of
enormous gift-giving from the Clinton campaign. Obama is a lame-duck president
who is perceived as weak, vacillating, and ambiguous about his own country’s
role in the world — a world that includes Russia, ISIS, China, North Korea, and
Iran. The odds are even that at least one of the above in the next few months
will feel that it has a rare opportunity to readjust the regional status quo,
or at least will have a psychological impetus to try something stupid to
humiliate Obama and the U.S. as payback for seven years of his empty
sanctimoniousness. Either way, Trump could benefit, given that Hillary is a
perceived tool of Obama’s therapeutic foreign policy. Tragically, at home, in
the next few months ISIS may re-emerge, and racial relations are not likely to
ameliorate, as Hillary straddles a politically correct tiger that she can
neither dismount nor safely ride. Self-described leftists are cannibals who
always end up devouring their own, given the never-enough trajectory of their
equality-of-result creed.
7. Extremism
Trump seems extremist in speech, but as the campaign
wears on, Hillary may confirm that she is more extremist in fact. It may well
be that voters would prefer a brash-talking pragmatist to sober and judicious
ideologues. Sloppy talk about temporarily limiting immigration from the Middle
East is not so injurious as contrived efforts never to utter the phrase
“radical Islam.” Clinton, Obama, and Sanders have moved the Democratic party
radically to the left; Trump in some areas has pushed the Republican party to
the center. The voter terrified of ISIS, record debt, the spiraling cost of his
health care, perceived U.S. decline, and the seemingly violent racial Balkanization
of the country — but not terrified of gay marriage or tough trade talks with
China — may find Clinton, not Trump, the true radical.
8. Polls
If the polls are off a bit in this warped election year,
they are more likely to err on Hillary’s side. Republicans who will vote for
Hillary or no one rather than Trump will do so in part out of perceived moral
principles, and thus they will not be so shy in showcasing their not-in-my-name
ethos. But those who see themselves more as pragmatists, who will eventually
hold their nose and vote for the embarrassing Trump, are more likely, in Brexit
style, to keep quiet about it and stay under the polling radar. I think that to
be truly ahead on Election Day Hillary will have to top Trump by 1 or 2 points
in the polls — even with traditional Democratic massaging of voter rolls.
9. Converts and
Apostates
The relative closeness of polling in key swing states
already suggests that the Reagan Democrats and other Trump converts may either
be more numerous than the Never Trump establishment or at least more numerous
outside of coastal, and electorally irrelevant, blue states like California and
New York — and thus more significant as swing-state adjudicators. In addition,
traditional media, in which Never Trump views are most frequently aired, are
themselves growing ossified and do not reach voters to the same degree as
outlets like the Drudge Report, Breitbart News, and talk radio. In my rural
California community, when I meet pro-Trump welders, farmers, and tractor drivers
of all races and backgrounds, I try to ask them just one question: Did you vote
for Romney? So far 0 percent of that cohort of probably over 100 Central Valley
residents said they had turned out for Romney in 2012. Again, the new Trump
voters may not be numerous nationwide, but they may be able to swing one or two
purple states. Also, it may be more likely that a Never Trumper will weaken and
quietly vote Trump in November as he grows aghast at the weekly Clinton circus.
The Trump buffooneries may well be more than matched by Clinton’s ideological
insanities.
10. The
Screech-Owl Factor
For all his lack of discipline, the media-seasoned Trump
is still the better and more robust campaigner. His liabilities — bouts of
outer-space incoherence, unfamiliarity with basic issues, sloppiness in
diction, a personal cruel streak — are balanced by a TV host’s sense of
audience, timing, and cadence.
Hillary is the far more disciplined politico, but she is
not so much uncharismatic as downright off-putting. Even on those rare
occasions when she listens to her new voice-coach handlers and speaks quietly
and deliberately, she still comes off not as reassuring, much less engaging,
but rather as artificially trying her best not to revert to her natural
screech-owl elocution. Heartfelt recklessness can sometimes wear better than
packaged sobriety.
* *
*
Finally, it is suicidal to descend into the muck to
battle Trump. Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, and Ted Cruz all tried and failed, despite
the fact that they had every moral justification in hitting back in like kind.
Elizabeth Warren is trying to be an anti-Trump street-fighter; but her
incoherent venom suggests that Harvard Law professors should stick to academic
jousting in the faculty lounge.
Brawlers know the rules of the street far better than
establishmentarians. The Senate is not The
Apprentice, and politics is not New York real estate. Ask the trash-talking
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg if she came out on top in dueling with Trump — or
whether she virtually destroyed a quarter-century’s reputation in minutes and
ended up no better than an elderly version of Rosie O’Donnell in a Supreme
Court Justice costume. Hillary is stepping up her crude attacks on Trump. But
as in the past, such hits are more likely to make the Trump mode suddenly seem
normal, and to make Trump a target of those who claim they are more sober and
judicious but in extremis prove no more measured than Trump himself.
We have a long way to go till November 8, and the odds
are still with Hillary’s establishment money, influence, power, and media.
There will be dozens of Trump meltdowns and gaffes to come and always more
slams at “crooked” Hillary. And never count out what narcissists like Bill
Clinton and Barack Obama — or Vladimir Putin — might do, or Obama’s
Chicago-like warping of the electoral process. Nonetheless, for a variety of
reasons, an unlikely Donald Trump has become a liberal’s worst nightmare, not
so much for what he says or represents, but because he still could win — and
win in a way, along with the Congress and the prospect of a new Supreme Court,
that we have not witnessed in 80 years.
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