I guess we’ll have to call the 2016 presidential campaign a battle of Teleprompters and tweets.
It all kind makes me wish for more “horse-race” coverage with media pundits fixated on who’s up and who’s down asĀ the race for the White HouseĀ unfolds.
Not this time … maybe.
Much of the coverage over the past few hours of Republican nominee-to-be Donald J. Trump’s Richmond, Va., rally speech dealt with how he ditched the Teleprompter and veered wildly “off script.”
Trump used the device in a previous speech after he won all those primary battles the same night that Democratic presumptive nominee Hillary Rodham Clinton clinched her party’s nomination.
The punditry critiqued Trump’s Teleprompter performance as “staid,” “uninspired” and a few other not-too-flattering terms.
So, he went on the attack again — free-wheeling it without the device. It wasn’t “staid.” It was typical Trump, full of stream-consciousness riffs about the success of his businesses and his various name-calling, referring to Sen. Elizabeth Warren as “Pocahontas,” and of course to “Crooked Hillary.”
He’s becoming the Twitter champ as well.
The day that Clinton gave that blistering critique of Trump’s supposed “foreign policy,” she mentioned how he likes to send out tweets and said he probably was doing so as she spoke. Sure enough, that’s what he did.
Sen. Warren also is pretty swift with the Twitter method of communicating. Clinton’s probably going to get the hang of it, too.
The deal with the Teleprompter analysis, though, is that Trump brought it up. He’s the one who keeps chiding other candidates for relying on the device. Some are good at using it. Others are, well, not so good. Trump is one of the latter category of public speakers.
Then again, his aimless, scatter-shot extemporaneous delivery of his applause lines aren’t so hot, either.
Let the campaign continue.