Some of us have lamented the horse-race emphasis on the media’s political coverage.
The media become much too focused on polls and on who’s up and who’s down.
Donald Trump is clearly “up” in the Republican presidential primary campaign. All 16 of the other GOP candidates are “down.”
But as in an actual horse race, the GOP campaign is turning suddenly into a match race — featuring just two candidates.
They are Trump and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush.
The rest of them include some serious and intelligent individuals. I would rate Gov. Bush in that serious and intelligent category. Trump? He’s in another category altogether. He’s intelligent. He’s also inarticulate and doesn’t possess an ounce of nuance, decorum — or an understanding that the presidency is not an oligarchy, that it contains far less power than Trump seems to suggest it does.
The two of them are resorting to some serious character attacks. Trump calls Bush a “low-energy candidate.” Bush counters that Trump isn’t a “true conservative.”
Indeed, it fascinates me that conservative Republicans are taking the gloves against Trump, accusing him of being a RINO, aka Republican in Name Only. As Jeb Bush said, according to the Texas Tribune, of Trump’s proposal to build a wall along our nation’s southern border: “Mr. Trump’s plans are not grounded in conservative principles,” Bush said. “The simple fact is his proposal is unrealistic, it would cost hundreds of millions of dollars, it will violate people’s civil liberties, it will create friction with our third largest trading partner, it’s non-necessary, and I think he’s wrong about this.”
It’s also interesting to me that Democrats have been oddly silent as Trump goes after Bush, and Bush returns fire against Trump. They’re leaving the anti-Trump rhetoric to the rest of that increasingly anonymous Republican field.
I remain amazed that this year’s GOP campaign has become so entertaining. I thought the 2012 Republican field set the entertainment bar so high that no future primary campaign in either party would reach it.
Silly me. The 2016 GOP field has exceeded my expectation.
However, right now it’s just the two “leaders” — Donald Trump and Jeb Bush — providing the entertainment.