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发帖数: 3206 | 1 The Donald J. Trump Referendum
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.
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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.
But that’s not the Trump way, and he can’t seem to help himself. The New
Yorker is as easy to read as the giant Trump signs he puts on his buildings,
and Democrats have figured out they can bait him into self-destructive
behavior.
Mr. Trump is so thin-skinned that he can’t let any criticism pass without
lashing back in ad hominem fashion. Thus Mr. Trump has spent the last three
days trading insults with Khizr and Ghazala Khan, whose son was an Army
captain killed in Iraq in 2004; Mr. Khan spoke against Mr. Trump at the
Democratic convention. Mr. Trump could have shown statesmanship and made an
expression of sympathy and gratitude for the Khans’ sacrifice. If he had to
make a political point, he could have mentioned that Mrs. Clinton voted for
the Iraq war and then turned against it when the going got rough.
Instead, Mr. Trump made himself look small and hurt his own claim to be
Commander in Chief. Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan were compelled to issue
statements distancing themselves from Mr. Trump by commending Humayun Khan’
s service to the nation. John McCain was even blunter (see nearby). Memo to
Trump Tower: Hillary Clinton isn’t trying to rebut Patricia Smith, who
blamed the Democrat at the GOP convention for her son’s death at the U.S.
mission in Benghazi.
Mrs. Clinton’s other advantage is that Mr. Trump knows little about the
world and can’t be bothered to learn. In an interview with ABC’s George
Stephanopoulos on the weekend, Mr. Trump seemed to suggest that Russian
proxies had not invaded Crimea. “He’s not going to go into Ukraine, all
right? You can mark it down. You can put it down,” Mr. Trump blustered.
Last week he floated the prospect of officially recognizing Russia’s
annexation.
A two-page briefing document could have acquainted Mr. Trump with the
Crimean reality, but that would have required doing a high schooler’s
amount of homework. Maybe it could have even instructed him that a
Republican who wants to win an election can’t let a Democrat look more
hawkish toward U.S. adversaries like Vladimir Putin.
Mr. Trump’s indiscipline managed to drown out Friday’s dismal economic
report and another burst of Clinton dissembling about the classified
material on her private email server. In rookie candidate school, they’d
called this political malpractice.
Mrs. Clinton appears to be getting a bounce from her convention and by next
week may have solidified her lead in the polls. She and Democrats must be
amazed that they’re drawn an opponent who so easily plays into their hands. | V*****2
发帖数: 7930 | 2 TRUMP是很二，但是希拉里很黑心，捞那么多脏钱。都不是啥好东西。 | m**c
发帖数: 7349 | 3 碜沙子，搞统战，别说Trump不是希拉里对手，就是我党习总也够呛 |
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