11-Alarm Fire What if the dangers of Trump are overstated? James Taranto

Posted By on November 4th, 2016

http://www.wsj.com/articles/11-alarm-fire-1478280600

“I’ve got Republican friends who don’t think or act the way Donald Trump does,” President Obama said Wednesday at a Raleigh rally for Hillary Clinton. That’s totally believable except the part about his having Republican friends. The president continued: “This”—meaning Trump, not Mrs. Clinton—“is somebody who is uniquely unqualified. I ran against John McCain. I ran against Mitt Romney. I thought I’d be a better president, but I never thought that the republic was at risk if they were elected.”

National Review’s Charles Cooke finds Obama’s remarks vexatious. “Democrats really have limited their ability to credibly warn against the dangers posed by Trump,” he argues, noting that Obama and his supporters treated Romney quite viciously in 2012:

Then? Romney was dangerous and represented a departure. Then? He was no John McCain, that’s for sure! Now? Pah. Romney was a gentleman. A scholar. A safe pair of hands. Sure, in 2012 Obama ran a commercial arguing that Romney wasn’t “one of us.” Sure, Obama was so worried about Romney’s being in the White House that he tried to impose restraints on the drone program that he had run without restrictions. Sure, Joe Biden said that Romney would put African Americans “back in chains.” Sure, Harry Reid accused Romney of being a tax-cheat and a scoundrel. Sure, Obama’s campaigners repeatedly claimed that if Romney were elected he would continue his dastardly spree of killing people with cancer. Sure, the Atlantic characterized Obama’s approach toward Romney as being “My Opponent Is a Dangerous Radical (with a dash of My Opponent Is a Strange Weirdo thrown in).” But in retrospect? He was fine. In fact, he was no threat at all. Chill.

If we understand Cooke correctly, he is frustrated with liberals because he largely agrees with them about Trump—note he accepts the premise about the “dangers posed” by the GOP nominee—and finds the case more difficult to make persuasively because their lack of credibility tends to discredit his argument. To put it in fabulous terms, liberals cried wolf, and now that there really is a wolf, nobody is listening to Cooke’s cries.

To judge by the Twitter exchanges we read yesterday, Cooke did not find a receptive audience on the left. Some detractors argued that Romney was a dangerous radical, which illustrates Cooke’s point without conceding it. Others claimed that the anti-Romney rhetoric then was not actually as harsh as the anti-Trump rhetoric now. CONTINUE AT SITE
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