The Donald J. Trump Referendum Democrats figure they can bait the Republican into blowing himself up.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-donald-j-trump-referendum-1470093759
With the party conventions wrapped up, the contours of the final 100 days of the general election are becoming clearer. The country wants change, which should help Republicans. But Democrats are confident that Hillary Clinton will win if they can make the election about Donald Trump, and Mr. Trump seems happy to oblige.
Democrats revealed in Philadelphia that they’ve decided not to make the campaign a typical left-right ideological battle. Instead, they will try to disqualify Mr. Trump as temperamentally and morally unfit for the Presidency. From now until November, expect to hear a lot about three-a.m. phone calls and nuclear winter—and on the occasional lighter note, Mr. Trump’s well-documented vulgarity.
President Obama put this strategy crisply when he noted that “what we heard in Cleveland last week wasn’t particularly Republican—and it sure wasn’t conservative.” For eight years the worst thing Mr. Obama could say about somebody is that he’s a Republican. So calling Mr. Trump worse than a conservative Republican is, for him, really harsh.
The public desire for change is nonetheless real and growing, and Democrats know that Mrs. Clinton is the least convincing “change maker” in American politics, to quote her husband’s phrase. But they have built formidable money and organizational advantages, and they figure they can win with even a candidate as flawed as Mrs. Clinton as long as 2016 is a referendum on Mr. Trump, not on the Clinton-Obama agenda or the last eight years.
Meanwhile, Donald Trump seems thrilled that Democrats are trying to make the election about his favorite subject—Donald J. Trump. Were he as shrewd a politician as he claims to be a businessman, he’d explain how Clinton-Obama policies have failed and why his would be superior. Above all, he’d work overtime to reassure undecided voters that he is a risk worth taking. He can’t tap into dissatisfaction with the status quo if Americans can’t imagine him sitting in the Oval Office.
Comments are closed.
