By Conrad Black
* * *
As I suggested when I gave readers a rest from me five
weeks ago, the Republican convention successfully celebrated the complete
rejection of the post-Reagan Republican party: The Bushes, McCain, and Romney
weren’t present or mentioned, or much missed. Cruz, as I wrote in my last piece
here, and the otherwise amiable John Kasich made asses of themselves, and
opinion has moved on.
The Democratic convention’s orgy of self-praise and
joyous continuity generated enough jollity for the Trumpophobic media to open
up a [momentary and fleeting] five-point to seven-point lead for Mrs. Clinton.
But... Donald Trump already [had] the 40% of Americans
who share Archie Bunker’s dislike of political correctness, vote-buying with
welfare, fiscal incontinence, and a feeble foreign policy; and there has been
no further need to serve them up more raw meat. [Therefore] he has just
disappointed, week after week, the frenzied media lynch mob that had implied he
was a racist, a misogynist, an inciter of violence, a vulgar buffoon, a member
of the Flat Earth Society, an advocate of an automatic firearm for every white
seven-year-old American, and probably an enemy of fluoridated drinking water.
(*GUFFAW*)
Of course, it was almost all nonsense, and as Trump has
been uncontroversial, it has been Mrs. Clinton who has made the gaffes (Trump’s
followers — now half the voters –are “deplorables”) [while inciting concerns]
about her health as well.
Peggy Noonan, who doesn’t much care for either candidate
but whose innate fairness and seasoned expertise as a judge of political talent
prevent her from joining the chorus of the hysterics, detected (on September 5
in the Wall Street Journal), as the Clinton lead eroded, that anxiety (over
Trump) was less negative than depression (at the thought of the return of the
Clintons).
* WELL... I'LL LEAVE TO MR. BLACK HIS OPINION OF MS.
NOONAN. SUFFICE IT TO SAY... I'M NOT 100% ON BOARD WITH THE "INNATE
FAIRNESS" LEAD-IN.
I think that is only half the story.
Noonan is probably correct that anxiety about a
candidate’s performance in office is less destructive to a candidate’s chances
than the depression induced by, in this case, thought of another binge of the
Clintons at the public trough, pandering to the aggrieved with the money of
those who work for a living, flat-lining the economy with new taxes, and
entrenching the dictatorship of political correctness.
But an acceleration in the tilt of the scales in Trump’s
favor is already under way because Trump the nominee, unlike Trump in quest of
the nomination, is not saying anything worrisome or even in questionable taste.
* AND SERIOUSLY, FOLKS... NOTE HOW ALL OF HILLARY'S
COMMERCIALS ATTACKING TRUMP FOCUS ON THE TRUMP OF 2015.
(*SHRUG*)
The amiable husband and father of an exemplary family
has, like a skilled driver shifting gears, deftly recalibrated.
Trump was very plausible in his meeting with the president
of Mexico, and now appears as he does to those who know him: good-humored,
sensible, and moderate, if not altogether self-effacing.
* HILLARY CLINTON, ON THE OTHER HAND, REFUSED AN
INVITATION TO MEET WITH MEXICO'S LEADER.
The unutterable rubbish of Democratic claims that he is
temperamentally unsuited to high office (like the Republican revelations that
1968 Democratic vice-presidential nominee Edmund Muskie had repeatedly torn his
cottage telephone off the wall in anger) has vanished without a trace or an
echo.
The Clinton campaign is being exposed every week as a
tired pastiche of faded feminism (when Hillary was, as Trump pointed out, the
greatest facilitator of male sexism in U.S. political history), an
undistinguished tenure of high offices, and the enforced conventional wisdom,
already punctured to shreds by Barack Obama’s insurgency eight years ago, that
it is somehow Hillary’s right and her turn.
Hillary's whole campaign was [and still largely is]
Trump-scare and Trump "blundering;" it isn’t happening, and the
nation is turning its disappointed eyes on her.
Her campaign of “my turn” might have worked against someone
representing the inanimate submissiveness of the also-ran Bush-McCain-Romney
loyal opposition. But it is unlikely to work on an heir to strong
Republican-party leadership, however outside the mold he may be stylistically.
To follow the apparently disinterested soldier-statesman,
Eisenhower, and the agile bridge between the Goldwater Right and the
Rockefeller Left, Nixon, and the artist of Morning in America, Reagan, comes
now the man who will recapture the party of Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt from
the faint and ineffectual dissenters and from the Clintons and Obama of the
post-Reagan years.
* AND, YES... TRUMP IS MORE "PROGRESSIVE" THAN
I'D LIKE; BUT I'LL TAKE A TEDDY ROOSEVELT OR IKE "PROGRESSIVE" OVER A
LEFTIST EACH AND EVERY DAY OF THE YEAR!
The one bright moment of Marco Rubio’s presidential
campaign was when he departed, after being drubbed by Trump in his home state,
and said he and the others had all “missed the tsunami” of resentment at what
the Bush-Clinton co-regency had done to the country.
(Though they aren’t really dynasties; they were
incidental upon Reagan’s retirement at 77 and Ross Perot’s splintering of the
Republican vote to the benefit of Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996.)
The pyrotechnics of the primaries, like smoke over a
Civil War era battlefield, is now clearing and reveals Trump in possession of
much of the center of the field.
Clinton has the Left, but... not all the forces of
discontent... given Trump’s robust pan-ideological iconoclasm.
The [self-described] "intelligent Right" is
slowly crumbling in its huffy apostasy.
(It is increasingly unclear why George Will and Bill
Kristol left the ship, certainly not from nostalgia for what George Will
derided 25 years ago as George Bush the elder’s “tinny arf . . . of a lapdog.”)
These men and their "brainy and articulate"
little cohort are now in an open boat on the great ocean, like Captain Bligh
(except they disembarked voluntarily), with nothing but a few oarsmen and a
compass. They are eventually going to ask themselves why have they done it.
My dear and very intelligent friend Laura Ingraham
pointed out on her LifeZette site last week that there is no excuse for serious
conservatives to sit out an election between Trump and Clinton.
This is not the United States where an overwhelmingly
Democratic Congress rebelled against an immensely popular Franklin D. Roosevelt
who had just won the greatest landslide in the history of contested U.S.
presidential elections, in 1937, and rejected his plan to add more Supreme
Court justices. The dangers to a conservative with a Clinton victory are
obvious, whatever the peppier conservatives think of Donald Trump.
* IN OTHER WORDS... IF ELECTED... HRC WILL BASICALLY
"RULE" AS AN UNCHECKED DICTATOR.
However deficient his conservative credentials, Donald
Trump is the last line of defense for America’s...
* FOR AMERICA'S REPUBLIC! FOR AMERICA'S CONSTITUTIONAL
SYSTEM! FOR THE RULE OF LAW!
The fact, which as far as most of the media is concerned
dares not speak its name, and which infuriates the Right, is that Trump was
never very far off the center, apart from on a few trade deals and illegal
immigration, which the leadership of both parties kept punting forward with
their cowardly twaddle about “comprehensive immigration reform.”
As daylight illuminates the post-convention battlefield,
Mrs. Clinton is still in an unspontaneous, unsought embrace with the Eugene
Debs of the new century, Bernie Sanders. Both nominees did the necessary to
keep their parties out of their own end zones, but to capture the center that
always decides American elections, Trump has only to modulate the polemics, not
really change course. Clinton has to walk backwards on her hands toward the
center while dragging a cartload of ethical and legal baggage and ardently
praying for a Trump relapse into reactionary gaucheries – exacting acrobatics,
even for a lady in a neon pantsuit.
Trump has no further need of the tactics the Democrats
assumed would drive the moderate majority into their arms. There is no evidence
that Mrs. Clinton yet realizes that she can’t rely on her opponent to discharge
a verbal blunderbuss into his own cloven feet.
Mrs. Clinton's vast train of bearers and beaters and
cheerleaders and silent helpers, Bushies, Cruzites, the Sanders Left, the
Hollywood claque, the largely leprous press corps, President Obama (in one of
the most hilariously cynical professions of affectionate continuity in American
political history) — all have only eight weeks to escape oblivion.
* TRUMP...! TRUMP...! TRUMP...! TRUMP...! TRUMP...!
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