Teleprompter Ex Machina

After the Democratic convention, I was hoping for some kind of a bounce for Hillary Clinton, partly for my own sanity and partly to take the pressure off those poor people at fivethirtyeight.com. I know it's self-inflicted given the type of work they've elected to take on for themselves, but I remember the amount of emotional heavy lifting they were asked to do in 2012 when things were a little too close for comfort between Obama and Mitt Romney and his goal to roll back four years of recovery and progress even though some of the major cornerstone pieces of legislation behind it were cribbed from him directly. National emotional pacifier is a big ask for a website run by a sabermetrics nerd, but when you end up predicting all fifty states correctly, the mantle of responsibility falls on you whether you want it to or not.

I haven't had to worry much as Donald Trump has since proved himself to be an historically tone deaf and self-destructive politician, reflecting as much in the trend line of his poll numbers since the end of the DNC (during which he had begun to creep to level, or even slightly ahead, by some tallies), on so steep a slope of decline it's the type that would be likely to leave a crater when it hits bottom, if only Trump would slow down enough to make it clear that there even is a bottom. He seems to be determined to push presidential horse-race polling into existential territory, where we'd be forced to ask: if someone is drawing zero percent support, can it be accurately still be called a poll result?

It'll never actually be zero of course, no matter how precipitous the drop, as there seem to be a certain percentage of the American voting (or at least poll-responding) populace that is just racist and self-loathing enough to support his struggle.

Donald Trump won about 14 million votes in the primary campaign and finished, if I recall correctly, in first place over an incredibly weak field that included a minor, Christ's vessel on earth (NOTE NOTE NOTE: self-appointed) and a guy whose most pressing ambition seemed to be to have James Gandolfini play him in the retrospective HBO TV movie about the election cycle.* Trump seems eternally and renewably chuffed by his showing in his first ever foray into elective politics, so much so that he seems to have chosen to stick with the blackjack hand he's been dealt because he survived holding a deuce and a six when the other sixteen doofuses at the table all hit on 18 and busted. There's still one other player at the table, but he's chosen to not only to stick with what he's got, but to refuse to acknowledge the existence of any other possible cards. He's got the best cards. They're unbelievable cards, just tremendous.

It takes about 65 million votes to win a national general election in the United States. So far Donald Trump has yet to make a single appeal to Vote #14,000,001. I'm sure SOMEone has tried to explain to him that 45% of primary voters means less than half of one party's total votes, exclusive of the whole other second major party and all the independents. But I guess I can see the resistance to outreach as Democrats are basically traitors and independents, those are the vegans of the American political system: sure, it's a noble thing to be in theory, if only we could get them to shut up about how noble it is. Are those the kind of people you'd want to sully yourself with by getting them to consider voting for you?

Hillary Clinton, mind you, independent of anything else, didn't really have a great week. Also, people kind of already hate her. But Trump keeps managing to turn a speech by the family of an American military hero into a two-week rolling tire fire he adamantly refuses to try to put out or even just stop suggesting that maybe it's secretly an al-Qaida truck bomb.

And a whole list of other things, including most recently sort of suggesting someone should shoot his opponent and then insisting Obama founded ISIS. I can't help thinking that this is someone with no political skills at all, which is confounding in itself as to why someone like that would find themselves in a political contest.

But then I thought: maybe this is the point. Maybe he realizes his ONLY appeal--he can't after all point to his experience as a leader or as a foreign affairs expert or as a Christian or a family man or even really as a businessman--is that he's NOT a politician. He's not "one of them." He certainly doesn't SOUND like a politician. Even given a chance to soften and contextualize, he always, always doubles down because, as far as he can tell from the couple of hundred people who show up to his speeches and rallies, that's what "the people" want:

But after all of [Hugh] Hewitt’s prompting, Trump finally nodded vaguely to Obama’s “bad policies” and how “if he would have done things properly, you wouldn’t have had ISIS”—but even with those caveats, he made it clear his conclusion hadn’t changed: “Therefore, he was the founder of ISIS.” Hewitt then countered one last time by suggesting that he personally would use “different language” to communicate the same criticism. Trump’s response was remarkable for its awareness. “But they wouldn’t talk about your language,” he told Hewitt, “and they do talk about my language, right?”
The emphasis is mine, but only because I bolded it on the page. The rhetorical emphasis is pure Trumpism. The plan, to the extent it's conscious and thought-out at all, is to look unprofessional because that's what gets free play in the press, which I guess would constitute a strategy if your poll numbers over the last three months didn't look like an upside-down check mark.

I'm not sure what the planned consequence would be in a situation like this. The actual one might be: given all her baggage and the negative image and the tendency to shoot herself in the foot (without any help from the Second Amendment) over otherwise avoidable mini-scandals, a Trump candidacy, something this profoundly dysfunctional-bordering-on-nonfunctional, might have been the only way Hillary Clinton could ever have been elected president.

In which case: I'll take it. Especially since it makes the loss by Ted Cruz--oily goo-monster that he is, at least he understands how to function in a campaign works--even funnier. That shit-heel might have actually had a shot.

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*It doesn't seem like the fact that James Gandolfini is dead would actually be much of a hindrance.