Tag Archives: Donald Trump

Social media have become a campaign curse

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I think I’ve discovered an undeniable truth.

Social media are to blame for the ghastly decline of intelligent political discourse in this great country of ours.

It’s not a big-time flash. Others likely have drawn similar conclusions and written about it.

I am now going to refer to the Twitter War that’s going on between Donald J. Trump and Rafael Edward Cruz. Donald vs. Ted. It’s getting childish in the extreme and it’s lending nothing whatsoever to any kind of intelligent discussion among Republicans over which of these men should be their party’s nominee for president of the United States.

The crux of the Twitter fight centers on their wives. Melania Trump and Heidi Cruz are now being kicked around like the proverbial footballs that they are not.

It’s sickening me.

A pro-Trump super-PAC put something out there about Mrs. Trump appearing in the nude. Trump tweeted some threats to Cruz about it, threatening to say something mean about Mrs. Cruz.

Ted Cruz denied having anything to do with the ad. Trump ain’t buying it. Now it’s Cruz calling Trump a “coward.”

Back and forth they go.

And voters are supposed to make intelligent decisions — based on this petulant patter — on which of them should carry the GOP banner forward against the Democratic nominee this fall?

Give me a break!

Maybe the mainstream media — and I don’t mean as the conservative epithet the term has come to mean — is responsible. By “mainstream,” I refer to the major broadcast and cable news networks and the print media who keep reporting this stuff.

Heck, bloggers all along the political spectrum have weighed in on it — as this blog is doing at this moment.

So … I’ll accept my share of the blame for this social media craze and its alleged “contribution” to the quality of our national political debate.

I’m not proud of myself.

My only recourse is to ignore this social media sniping.

Therefore, I will.

 

Now the spouses have become targets

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When did Melania Trump and  Heidi Cruz become candidates for president of the United States?

Oh, wait! They merely are married to men who are running for the office. Now, though, they’ve become subjects of social media messages fired by one of the Republican presidential candidates.

Let’s hold on for a wild ride, shall we?

A super PAC not associated with U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz’s campaign apparently posted an ad that contained a picture of Melania in the nude. Donald J. Trump responded that “Lyin’ Ted” needs to be careful or else Trump would reveal something about Cruz’s wife.

These attacks are getting tiresome, not to mention way, way off topic.

Trump took down the tweet he put out there about Mrs. Cruz. However, as we know, social media’s impact is immediate, as in instantaneous. It’s like trying to unhonk a horn; it cannot be done.

As for the British GQ article and the picture about Mrs. Trump, well, that’s apparently been out there a good while, having been published in 2000.

I’m just one individual living out here in Flyover Country.

I’d like to offer a suggestion to these two men — neither of whom ever would get my vote for president.

How about avoid talking about your wives? You guys — not the women you married — are running for the presidency. It is your views on the issues that interest me and, I presume, millions of other Americans who are paying attention to this campaign.

The rest of this baloney is tawdry and unbecoming of the office you are seeking.

Then again, so are some of the things the actual candidates for president have said about each other.

 

Negative campaigning: It still works

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Political operatives have a name for it.

Opposition research.

Every major political campaign dating back to, oh, most of the previous century has featured it. The organization hires teams of researchers to do one thing: look up negative aspects of an opponent’s record to use against them.

Why embark on this mission? Because it works. Every single time. Voters eat this stuff up, no matter how much they complain how they dislike negative campaigning. They respond to it.

The potential Hillary Clinton-Donald Trump presidential campaign that looms not too far into the future is going to provide “oppo research” teams a veritable trove of negatives.

If I were willing to wager my recreational vehicle, I’d say that Clinton’s team is facing what one could call a “target rich environment.”

Remember the time her husband ran for president in 1992? His campaign famously developed what came to be called The War Room. It developed a quick-hit strategy to answer every negative attack leveled at Gov. Bill Clinton by President Bush’s re-election team. The Bill Clinton team learned the lessons taught by the 1988 campaign of Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis, which allowed the Bush team to “peel the bark” off of Dukakis, as the late campaign strategist Lee Atwater said famously.

I’m willing to presume that Mrs. Clinton’s team has resurrected that notion for her campaign this fall.

More to the point, though, will be the opportunities that the presumed Republican nominee, Trump, will present to the newest Clinton version of The War Room.

Trump has littered his GOP primary campaign with countless public utterances worthy of outright ridicule, not to mention condemnation.

It makes me recall the era not long after the 9/11 attacks. Those of us in daily opinion journalism were handed so many opportunities and topics on which to comment that we faced the editor’s prized dilemma: What can I set aside for tomorrow or another day even later on which to offer an opinion or perspective. Take it from me: It is far more preferable to have too much from which to choose than not enough.

Team Clinton is going to have that kind of “problem” staring it in the face once the GOP nominee’s identity becomes clear.

Yes, I know that Trump’s team will have its chances as well. Which one of the campaigns, though, will have the resources available to them to do the kind of research they’ll need to skewer their opponent? My hunch: the edge goes to Clinton.

Donald Trump already has demonstrated his ability to “go negative” when the other candidates have fired broadsides at him. He does so in amazingly crude ways. He’s criticized opponents’ physical appearance; he has denigrated a journalist’s physical handicap; he has chided an opponent for the manner in which he perspires. All of this, though, has endeared him to the Trumpsters who have glommed on to his message — whatever the hell it is.

And those examples comprise a tiny fraction of Trump’s much-touted business, personal and political history.

And it’s that crudeness that, by itself, is going to present the Clinton team with much of the opposition research material it figures to use against their expected foe.

You want negative campaigning? We’re about to get it.

It won’t be pretty. We’ll bitch about it.

Bring it on!

 

Remember when The Gipper was a pushover, too?

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Let’s play this election season out, theoretically, to the end.

The Democrats will nominate Hillary Rodham Clinton as their presidential candidate; the Republicans will select Donald J. Trump as their standard bearer.

Clinton is the one with the experience: a policy-wonk first lady; a twice-elected U.S. senator from New York; a secretary of state. She’s well-schooled on the nuance of foreign and domestic policy. She’s articulate and is a cool customer under fire.

Trump is none of that. He’s a hot-headed reality TV celebrity. He made a fortune in real estate development. He’s married to his third wife. He has boasted about his sexual exploits with women who were married to other men. His campaign has featured little substance and virtually zero political philosophy — but a whole lot of insults and outrageous proclamations.

Clinton’s the favorite. The prohibitive favorite. She’ll win in a landslide while making history as the nation’s first female president.

Hold on a second.

Thirty-six years ago, the Democrats nominated a former one-term Georgia governor. He was a U.S. Naval Academy grad. He was a policy wonk. He was a smart guy, although perhaps a tad self-righteous. Republicans nominated a former movie actor who starred in those films with Bonzo the chimp; and oh yes, he made that film in which he portrayed Notre Dame football player George Gipp. Sure, he was a two-term California governor.

The Democrat was supposed to win, right?

It didn’t turn out that way. The Republican, Ronald Wilson Reagan, carried 44 states and blew President Jimmy Carter out of the White House.

It’s that history that should tell Democrats to take this upcoming election very seriously if it plays out the way it’s projected to play out.

By any normal measure, Donald Trump should be an easy mark for Democrats. This campaign, however, hasn’t gone according to the form sheet in almost any measure.

Clinton wasn’t supposed to be challenged so seriously from within her party. As for Trump, no one took him seriously when he announced his intention to seek the GOP nomination; his “fellow Republicans” are taking him seriously enough now — so much so that they’re staying up at night trying to concoct ways to derail his political juggernaut.

Both candidates are going to carry a large amount of baggage into a fall campaign, if they are the nominees. They both are packing a lot of negative feeling from within their respective parties.

Of the two, Trump’s negatives — from my perspective — far outweigh Clinton’s.

That doesn’t give the Democratic opposition any reason to fall asleep at the wheel.

The Gipper was supposed to lose big, too.

Wondering if Trump will bolt the party

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Peter Wehner doesn’t strike me as a wacked-out Republican loon.

He writes pretty well, if the essay in today’s New York Times is an indication.

The man is frightened at the prospect of Donald J. Trump becoming his party’s next presidential nominee. And he expresses that fear — right along with a lot of other Republican wise men and women — with profound eloquence.

Check out his essay here.

He says the Founders were afraid of people such as Trump. They feared strongmen rising to the top of the political heap. As he says in his NYT essay:

“The founders, knowing history and human nature, took great care to devise a system that would prevent demagogues and those with authoritarian tendencies from rising up in America. That system has been extraordinarily successful. We have never before faced the prospect of a political strongman becoming president.

“Until now.”

I’ve been reading and listening to a lot of commentary in recent weeks about the Republican strategies being devised to deny Trump the party nomination. And as I take it all in I remind myself of things Trump said earlier in this campaign about how he would respond if he’s treated badly at the GOP convention this summer.

He’s suggested, then recanted, and then suggested again that he might launch an independent bid for president if Republicans aren’t nice to him. He wants to be treated “fairly,” he has said.

If I were advising Trump, I’d be examining all these efforts to wrest the nomination from my guy and I would conclude: Hey, these guys flat-out don’t like Trump; they aren’t being nice, fair, even-handed … none of it.

If Trump is true to his word, that he wants fair treatment and would resort to other means to win the White House if he’s mistreated by his party moguls, then my strong hunch is that he might be cooking some plans to strike back at those Republican honchos.

After all, he’s already exhibited a serious mean streak all along the campaign trail so far.

Does anyone really think this fellow is incapable of creating maximum chaos?

And if you do believe he never in a million years would do anything to stick it in the GOP’s eye, check this out.

Then … get back to me.

Bernie has won the war of ideas … if not the nomination

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So much of our national attention has been focused during this political season on the Republican Party presidential primary campaign.

After all, it features a glam king, TV personality, real estate mogul and showman who appears headed for the Republican presidential nomination.

Donald J. Trump has broken all the rules of normal decorum, good manners, class and grace.

Oh yeah! There’s a primary in the other party that’s taking place, too.

Democrats are fighting with themselves over whether to endorse Hillary Rodham Clinton or U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders.

The dynamic there also has been somewhat unconventional, albeit not to the degree the GOP race has become.

Sanders is getting his clock cleaned in primary states. He’s been close in many states and he did win Michigan and New Hampshire’s primaries. However, Clinton is now — once again — the shoo-in for the Democratic nomination. To get there, though, she’s had to do something quite extraordinary: She’s had to change her positions on issues to where she now agrees with Sanders.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership? Clinton once favored this trade agreement; now she opposes it.

The Keystone XL pipeline? She once favored it; today she opposes it.

The Iraq War? She voted for it in 2002; she says now that she has changed her mind.

Sanders opposed all those issues from the beginning.

Clinton now has taken up the cause for wage inequality. She’s vowing to take on the big banks. She is sounding more populist than mainstream than when the campaign started.

By golly, she’s sounding like Bernie!

Has Sanders won the war of ideas in the Democratic primary? It’s sounding as though he can declare victory. He well might do that — but he won’t go home quietly.

All this change of mind/heart, of course, brings to mind the issue of Clinton’s authenticity. It has become the source of “Saturday Night Live” skits that skewer the former secretary of state, first lady and U.S. senator over the manner in which she crafts certain images to please whatever audience to which she is speaking.

Sen. Sanders has no serious hope of becoming the Democratic nominee. He does have some hope, though, that the message he’s sought to convey has become part of his opponent’s campaign.

All along, Sanders has sought to tell his party’s base that the campaign “isn’t about me.” If he believes it, then his campaign has been about his ideas.

Stand tall, Sen. Sanders! You’ve won!

Trump brings one positive: big voter turnouts

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I am about to do something that gives me the heebie-jeebies.

I’m going to write something positive about Donald J. Trump.

The man has boosted voter turnout in these Republican Party presidential primaries. He’s boasted about it, which is no surprise.

As one who for decades as a print journalist bemoaned the lack of voter participation, I will say that the turnout we’ve seen in the GOP side of the primary battle has been inspiring.

Trump’s tapping into that voter anger has brought people to the polls, which is a good thing. Yes, it is a good thing!

None other than John Cornyn, has said so, too. The senior U.S. senator from Texas — who says he’s remaining neutral in the primary fight — has lauded the result produced by Trump’s presidential candidacy.

According to the Texas Tribune: “The Republican primary has been surprising in a lot of ways, but one of those ways is the tremendous voter turnout that we’ve seen across the country, while the turnout in the Democratic primary has been lackluster,” Cornyn said. “That’s going to be really important in November, and my view is that I will support whoever the nominee of the Republican Party is.”

Cornyn is right, as well, about the “lackluster” Democratic turnout so far. It’s worth speculating, though, that Democrats just might re-discover their turnout “luster” if Trump becomes the GOP nominee and we are going to decide between Trump and Hillary Rodham Clinton in the fall election.

Again, if the turnout this fall sets records and many millions more Americans go to the polls than ever before, we ought to thank Donald J. Trump for that, too.

That’s it. That’s all the niceness I can spare for this guy.

 

PBS discussion sheds great light on campaign ’16

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I feel compelled to begin this blog post with a disclaimer.

I am a freelance blogger for Panhandle PBS, the publicly funded television station based at Amarillo College here in the Texas Panhandle.

There. That said, I now want to say that the discussion that was broadcast Friday evening was one of the most intelligent I’ve heard yet about the state of the race for the presidency.

This discussion featuring liberal syndicated columnist Mark Shields and conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks covered three critical points:

The Republican primary campaign, the Democratic primary campaign and, in a related matter, President Obama’s nomination of Garland Merrick to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Shields and Brooks occasionally spar when they appear each Friday on the PBS NewsHour. They disagree on substantive matters from time to time. They were in agreement on several critical issues, though, this week.

Hillary Clinton will not be denied the Democratic nomination; Donald Trump is the likely Republican nominee; Judge Garland deserves to have his hearing before the U.S. Senate.

The most interesting aspect of what was said, though, came in the discussion of Trump and Garland.

Shields noted that Trump has won everywhere. He smoked what is left of a once-huge GOP field in Florida, Shields said, where opponents spent millions of dollars in negative TV ads. They didn’t make a dent in Trump’s juggernaut. Whatever it is that Trump has mastered, he has turned it into an unbeatable — so far! — formula for political success.

As for Garland, Shields also believes that the Republican leadership in the Senate is going to pay a price for refusing to consider the judge’s appointment to the Supreme Court. Brooks agreed that Garland deserves a hearing — and deserves to take his seat on the court — he doubts there will be hell to pay in the campaign for Republicans.

Both men also believe that Garland is the best candidate for the court the Republicans are likely to get — particularly if Trump is the GOP nominee for president. Trump will lose the election to Hillary Clinton, who then will be free to appoint someone of her liking — and could present that nominee to a Senate led by Democrats.

And so it will keep going throughout this crazy election cycle.

You’ve got to relish — and share — intelligent discussion whenever you hear it.

That’s what I’m doing here.

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If you’re of a mind, please accept my invitation to look at my blog at PanhandlePBS.org; it’s called “A Public View” and it focuses on public affairs programming aired on Panhandle PBS.

http://www.panhandlepbs.org/blogs/public-view-john-kanelis/

 

 

 

Dr. Carson may be a tad too candid

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Man, you have to hand it to Dr. Ben Carson.

When politicians switch their allegiance and make surprise endorsements, they usually waffle, wiggle and weasel their way out of answering direction questions as to, “Why?”

Not the doc.

He said he endorsed fellow Republican Donald J. Trump because he couldn’t find another candidate to back, meaning another candidate who (a) could win and (b) fit his own political world view.

There’s another reason: Trump has offered him a spot in a possible (gulp!) Trump administration.

Yep, Carson said so. Out loud. For the record.

Don’t you just love it? I surely do.

Carson’s candor seems to have caught the attention of some legal experts as well. Some have suggested that Trump might have broken federal election law by flat-out “buying” an endorsement by offering a paid position within his administration in the even hell freezes over and Trump is actually elected in November.

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie is the only other former GOP presidential primary foe to endorse Trump. His own explanation for his switch was so standard. He sought to tap dance all around the fact that he once declared Trump “unfit” to be commander in chief. Now, according to Christie, Trump is, um, “fit.”

Dr. Carson’s candor is refreshing in its way. Politicians are schooled on evasiveness. If you ask a trained pol a direct question about, say, a statement they or someone they support has made, they’re going to revert immediately to a rote response.

It’s as though they’re under some sort of post-hypnotic spell: Ask them a tough question and you trigger a telepathic switch that makes them say what they’re programmed to say.

The good doctor isn’t like that.

I appreciate that he answered so directly: Trump isn’t really my guy. I would have preferred to back someone else. But heck, he made me an offer I couldn’t refuse.

Awesome!

 

It’s time to start providing some detail, Mr. Trump

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I am acquainted with a young woman who has decided that Donald J. Trump should be elected the next president of the United States.

I didn’t know precisely what drew her to climb aboard Trump’s bandwagon. So, I did what I thought was the correct thing to do: I asked her directly.

I’ll refrain from identifying her. It’s true she’s just one person, but she seems to sound like countless other Trumpsters who’ve thrown in with the real estate tycoon/reality TV celebrity.

I just want to share her written response to my query.

“First, I have believed that our country should be run by a businessman/woman who understands profit/overhead/dealmaking/etc., as opposed to career politicians who have no problem freely spending tax money and demanding more.

“I am also I am also vehemently opposed to Political Correctness. It is both a false way to live and a maniacal way of attempting to force others to tow your chosen line, not their own. I detest racism with a passion, but I firmly defend the right of the Black Lives Matter movement to spew their prejudices …

“I believe, and always have, in a strong military. To me, the main objective is to protect our borders and citizens. Welfare, Planned Parenthood, etc., are all fine ventures, but should be privately funded, in my opinion. I truly admire that Trump says what he thinks and does not “sugar coat” in an effort to appear “perfect” because nobody is perfect and I hate that Politician Fakeness.

“The funny thing is, when Trump first announced I laughed him off as a joke looking for attention. But, I slowly realized that, love him or hate him, he speaks from his heart with no care for what others think. He has failed and rebounded more than once. Most people never achieve great success because they fear failure. He is an Alpha Male and I prefer that to a milquetoast.”

The thing that jumps out at me as I have studied her answer is  absence of any policy analysis. She has joined others in backing Trump because, as I read this, he hates “political correctness,” and has the kind of background, acumen and savvy that would enable him to run the country like a business.

How does he intend to build that wall along our southern border? How does he intend to bring back all those jobs? How is he going to negotiate with Russia, with Iran? With what will he replace the Affordable Care Act? How does his tax plan work? How will he reduce the national debt? What is his view of the ideal Supreme Court justice? How — precisely — is he going to win the war against international terrorism?

These are the things Trump ought to spell out. He’s not doing any of that. Instead, he tosses out innuendo and insults. He demands apologies from media outlets that criticize him, such as what he demanded this week of the Wall Street Journal for publishing a critical editorial.

But it’s OK with those who have signed on because, they say, he speaks for them. He says what others are thinking but don’t have the guts to say out loud.

He “tells it like it is.”

My question is this: What is the “it” he’s talking about?

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