We can hardly wait for Thursday night. Dianne and I plan to sit down in front of the TV with a big bowl of popcorn ready to be wowed.
It’s the first Republican presidential debate, and for late summer entertainment, it’s as good as it gets. The star of the show, of course, will be Donald Trump. I’d predict that he’ll blow up, except that he already has, more than once, and it just doesn’t seem to matter. He smears illegal Mexican immigrants as rapists and murderers (contrary to the evidence), and he goes up in the polls. He says John McCain is no hero, even though McCain spent years in a North Vietnamese prison while the Donald ducked service altogether because his foot hurt, and he goes up in the polls. Whatever he says on Thursday night, no matter how stupid, silly or outrageous, you can bet it won’t hurt him.
Now, this won’t make him president or even the Republican nominee, no matter how much Democrats pray and chant that he carries the GOP banner in November. Trump has enormous negatives (the biggest negative ratings of any candidate in the history of politics, to use Trump’s own preferred brand of overstatement), and his hair will hit the ceiling of his popularity about a week before his skull does.
But in the meantime, Trump is providing some useful instruction to the other candidates about what the voters are looking for — and the candidate who should pay the closest attention is Hillary Clinton.
What Trump has going for him is that he doesn’t sound like a politician. He also doesn’t sound intelligent, thoughtful, statesmanlike or in any way prepared to be president of anything, much less of the United States, but that’s not my point at the moment.
My point is that voters are hungry for politicians who don’t pander, condescend or obfuscate. That’s why Bernie Sanders is having his smaller moment on the Democratic stage while Trump has his big moment in conservative-land. That’s how Jesse Ventura got elected governor of Minnesota (and didn’t do a half-bad job — he was a big supporter of rail) and how Ross Perot got about one in five votes in 1992.
But when it comes to pandering, condescending and obfuscating, nobody does more of it than Hillary Clinton. A woman who has never been anything but affluent for her entire life is trying to sell herself as someone who can relate on a personal level to average Americans, just like her husband could.
Well, she can’t, and she should top trying. She could take a lesson from Trump, who not only doesn’t apologize for his success, but flaunts it. Or better yet, she could learn from people we can actually respect, like Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt and the Kennedys.
The Roosevelts and Kennedys were rich, and they didn’t pretend to be anything else. Their strategy wasn’t to pose as if they were regular folks, but to honestly try to understand the lives and ambitions of those regular folks and to use their privileged backgrounds and the education and experiences that wealth bought for them to serve the interests of the common good.
So, for example, when Bobby Kennedy was confronted in 1964, as he ran for U.S. senator from New York, with the charge that he was a rich kid dabbling in politics, he shot back with humor and brilliance. "I have had really two choices over the period of the last 10 months [since his brother was assassinated],” Kennedy said at forum at Columbia. “I could have retired. And my father has done very well, and I could have lived off him. I tell you frankly I don't need this title because I could be called General, I understand, for the rest of my life. And I don't need the money, and I don't need the office space...and maybe it's difficult to believe in the state of New York — I'd like to just be a good United States senator. I'd like to serve."
So, maybe Hillary Clinton could gain points for honesty if she just dropped the pretense and said what she is apparently thinking, which is probably something like: “Look. I spent years in a governor’s mansion and eight years in the White House and didn’t bake a single cookie in either place. I was a close adviser to my husband in both offices, and he was pretty successful. Then I was a United States senator and then I was Secretary of State. So, I understand state government and I know how the presidency works from the inside and I’ve worked effectively in Congress, and nobody else running for president has an ounce as much knowledge as I do about foreign affairs. I’m just, frankly, by far the most qualified person to be president of the United States and, yeah, I know I’m not warm and cuddly, and it doesn’t seem like I can really feel your pain the way Bill does. But the truth is, I’m trying to understand your lives and what works for you, and nobody is better equipped to improve things both domestically and internationally for average Americans than I am. So give me a chance.”
The opportunity here is to combine the flat-out unvarnished candor of Donald Trump with some actual qualifications and intelligence. If Hillary doesn’t step up to that challenge, Joe Biden might be just the kind of guy who could do exactly that. Hillary either has to take a page out of Trump’s book or risk losing the nomination to somebody who can combine competence with a sense of genuine empathy.
