Please Proceed

With all the stuff about emails and the Clinton Foundation and probably BENGHAZI BENGHAZI BENGHAZI, this really should have been a terrible week for the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign. Instead, she's stretched her lead to match the highest levels it's been at since the post-conventions general campaign began.

So far I haven't really minded the fact that the Clinton campaign's animating principle seems to be the old (probably but maybe not) Napoleon Bonaparte quote: never interfere with an enemy when he's in the process of destroying himself. Or to put it another way, it's a grand strategic position extrapolated from a tiny tactical one employed by President Obama in the second presidential debate in 2012, summed up as: "please proceed, governor."

You can take or leave either point individually. If you're not an Obama person and want to write off his body-shot to the Romney campaign as "arrogance" or "disrespect" because you're a racist, that's fine. Or if you're not comfortable with anything attributed to Napoleon since he's an entirely fictional character inserted into historical narratives by Nazis in an effort to make their own failed invasion of Russia seem less unprecedentedly stupid, I get it. But the principle is the same and you have to admire the Clinton campaign's message discipline to keep to it, which is basically: if you need us for anything, we'll be over here, not saying anything, keeping warm by the light of the Donald Trump trash barge fire.

I mean, just in the last 48 hours he's managed to aggressively alienate the core constituency of his virulent, influenzal appeal by appending a sincere "j/k, lol" to his previously unattainably batshit immigration plan to deport pretty much all of the brown people. If you're the Donald and all he purportedly stands for, you can't be having a good day if you've given Ann Coulter a sad.

On the surface at least, it's possible to trace where this shift in policy... or, er, "policy"... comes from. He's got new campaign staff who aren't in any obvious way Manchurian Candidate-style sleeper agents for foreign governments, so they're taking the novel approach of trying to figure out how to actually draw new voters. Hey, we know! Let's try sounding less Third Reich-y! Which is always a good direction to go... unless red arm bands and skull pendants are the theme of the party you've been throwing for the last twelve months and you're trying to retroactively explain it away after most of the partygoers have already left, many with that magnetic sex-god Gary Johnson.

If you like consistency though, it's not like the only thing the campaign is doing is trying desperately to tear apart the sole defining feature of its own message; they're also maintaining the integrity of the previous campaign staff's record of baffling incompetence. Say, by a) spending any time or money campaigning in Mississippi, a state Donald Trump could only lose if it came out before November that he was actually a black person AND a cannibal AND a Muslim and b) making a major speech ostensibly to appeal to African-American voters to crowds of almost all white people while c) refusing to meet with major African-American constituent groups or visit minority neighborhoods.

What should the Clinton campaign be doing in the face of the Trump turd tornado? Probably bolting the cellar door and stay underground as it uproots and discolors everything around it, pledging to forego all sunlight until the day she has to come out and take the oath of office.

So I was a little worried when I saw her come out and take a giant, haymaker swing at Trump, his campaign and the modern GOP overall. I mean, at this point, how could engagement really help? Is it possible for things to to better for her in late August? Did I already mention 12-point lead?

Look, it was a good speech. And, more sadly to the point, an accurate one about the merging of fringe thinking and racial resentment into the mainstream "conservative" political establishment. But none of that is new, really. This is just the electoral expression of the terror and bruised entitlement that's been in place in about 20% of the population since we elected a black president. And yeah, it's scary to actually see something like that gain any kind of foothold in the Land of the Free and Home of the Braves,* but this will all be historical curiosity after Hillary wins the election in November. Provided she can stay out of her own way. Or, more importantly, out of her dumb opponent's.

---

*Shout out to my readers in Atlanta (or, starting next year, Cobb County)