Bloomberg
By Mark Halperin
July 9, 2015
No
matter how glittering the political resume, getting elected U.S.
president remains one of the great challenges on the planet. As Bill
Clinton explains it, presidential
candidates must not only make voters see them as a plausible president,
but as an actual president, leaping resolutely and inexorably over the
hurdles of the election process until it is time to stroll the stage to
the tune of “hail to the chief.”
Another
favorite Clinton adage is that candidates have a better chance to win
over voters by being strong and wrong than by being right and weak. What
links the two is
the concept of strength. Strength defines, as much as anything else,
the terms of winning the American presidential contest, and as such it’s
an integral part of the tactical arsenal. Veteran Republican strategist
Alex Castellanos says that candidates must
constantly be on the lookout for opportunities to show “moments of
strength,” which effectively allow the public to imagine a White House
aspirant truly occupying the Oval Office, and managing the myriad
burdens thereof.
Indeed,
strength might be the defining factor in the 2016 presidential cycle so
far. Scott Walker, who surged early in 2015 and has maintained a sturdy
standing in an
increasingly crowded field, has built his entire narrative around the
theme of staunchly standing up to unions and other liberal interests in
Wisconsin, including battling for election, recall survival, and
re-election.
Anything
that he says is instantly national news, which, for his rivals, makes
attacking him an extraordinarily risky proposition.
Dr.
Ben Carson’s biography has innumerable compelling elements, but for
many voters his identity as both an outspoken conservative and
African-American (along with his
high-profile confrontation with President Obama over health care) show
implicit and impressive strength. The low-key Carson (who has not been a
conspicuous daily presence on the campaign trail, to say the least),
continues to maintain support from about 10
percent of the Republican electorate nationally.
Ted
Cruz and Rand Paul each make relentless plays to show strength by
challenging not just Democrats, but GOP leaders as well. Both senators
owe some of their national
success to the muscular political risks they have taken in defying the
status quo.
Carly
Fiorina has received some of her most favorable press coverage and
reactions from voters when she has used aggressive rhetoric to take on
Hillary Clinton and when
she has talked about how the power of her personal faith has seen her
through her life's hardest moments, including the death of her daughter
from drug abuse.
Rick
Perry has received a slew of favorable notices, including a stirring
and laudatory editorial in the Wall Street Journal, for a speech he gave
last week in Washington
in which he called out his party for failing to assiduously seek
support from African-American voters and lead the way for inclusion and
understanding. Perry’s move was bold, aggressive, mostly unexpected –
and thus made him the campaign’s strongman of the
day.
On
the Democratic side, Bernie Sanders’ recent colossal success has been
driven by an accumulating series of self-propelling moments of might:
supplying straight talk
on the stump, standing up to special interests, displaying clarity and
confidence—all of which has led to big crowds, increased media
attention, higher poll numbers, more exposure, and still bigger crowds.
Nothing looks stronger than an underdog having sustained
success against a frontrunner.
Which
brings us to Donald Trump. Much (but, paradoxically, not enough) is
made of the phenomenon by which Trump has been able to attract oodles of
news coverage, over
the course of decades, in the realms of business, entertainment and
politics. In past election years, when he seemed to be flirting with a
presidential bid, his every interview drew more spin-off coverage than
many White House aspirants draw in a month, or,
in some cases, their entire campaigns.
Now
that Trump is an official candidate, his capacity to drive the news
cycle is even greater. Stipulated that Trump is very far from a perfect
person. But when much of
the commentariat focuses on his flaws, they often neglect to address
his genuine gifts as a 21st century politician. Watch Trump spend time
with voters and you can’t miss that they respond not just to his fame,
but to his flashy confidence, his bullish desire
to stand up to anybody who crosses him or crosses the US of A. Haters
will hate, mockers will mock, but his brash declarations that he and
everything he touches are the Best is—for his supporters, which a CNN
poll last week put at 12 percent of the Republican
electorate—the embodiments of success through strength.
To the other candidates, therefore, Trump should represents a target of opportunity‑because there’s no better way to show strength than by attacking a potent rival. And with Trump, of course, there’s much to attack. Politically, he’s given financial support to Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, flirted with single-payer health care, supported tax increases, embraced the birther movement. But that’s not even half of it. More businessperson than politician, more celebrity than authority, more bluster than substance, more ego-trip than leadership—or so goes the standard (and semi-blind) dismissal of his candidacy. Take down the pompadoured giant with the glass jaw and look like the powerful king of the world.
But
it’s not so simple. When he was a businessman and pure tabloid fodder,
hitting Trump condemned you to an onslaught of sticks and
stones--annoying and perhaps distracting
but generally not a threat to one’s professional advancement. But as a
presidential candidate, he has an even bigger megaphone. Anything that
he says is instantly national news, which, for his rivals, makes
attacking him an extraordinarily risky proposition.
No
major candidate has yet shown him or herself willing to face a mud
wrestling match with one of the world’s great mud wrestlers (a spectacle
that would drown out not
just a substantive message, but pretty much every other political story
imaginable), nor risk incurring a potential multimillion dollar
negative TV ad campaign fueled by Trump’s billions or his wrath on the
debate stage. And once he’s brushed off the blow,
he’ll head straight to Twitter and to his welcoming friends on FOX News
and inform an audience that has enjoyed him for years, just what a
loser you are.
Until
Trump implied in his announcement speech a few weeks ago that a
significant number of illegal Mexican immigrants are criminals sent to
the United States by their
native government, his Republican rivals did their best to ignore him,
basically offering up mild, gracious pleasantries about his entry into
the race, sidestepping media invitations to belittle Trump’s candidacy
as a lark that undermined the overall seriousness
of the field.
Even
after Trump’s immigration comments blew up as a major controversy (even
as his poll numbers have ticked up in the aftermath), most of his
Republican rivals have stayed
relatively quiet. Three candidates – Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, and Rick
Perry – took him on aggressively, and derided his remarks (things got
personal for Bush, whose wife Columba is from Mexico), but without
incorporating a wider repudiation of Trump and his
candidacy. Even Chris Christie, no stranger to seizing moments for
self-aggrandizing shows of strength, has chosen to praise his friend
Donald, despite rejecting his immigration stance. (Former New York
Governor George Pataki has been uncompromisingly outspoken
in criticizing Trump’s comments, but his low-visibility campaign means
you probably don’t even know that this happened.) Trump has retaliated
against all his critics with potshots, demonstrating his skill at
playing the “strong” card and never letting chance
pass to grab the upper hand—or at least the louder mic.
For
the Republican Party, the problem of what to do about Trump is not a
new conundrum. Four years ago, Mitt Romney took great care to ensure
that The Donald was inside
the tent rather than lobbing missiles from the outside. Romney allowed
his campaign to sign off on an elaborately staged endorsement event,
held at Trump’s opulent Las Vegas hotel, highlighting Mitt and Ann
Romney’s respect for the mogul.
But
now that he’s a candidate, Trump is much harder to placate, and many
believe, with his immigration position and the general circus
environment he carries with him,
that he’s causing the party real damage. Democrats have been gleeful
about his rise, and the Clinton campaign and her party have stepped up
their efforts to yoke the whole GOP field to Trump on immigration, to
advance their own standing with Hispanics and
put Trump’s rivals on the spot.
Some
restive and concerned Republican donors and some commentators
(including Charles Krauthammer and Pete Wehner) are calling for the
current crop of candidates, and
the GOP more generally, to stand up to Trump, even making noise about
barring him from the formal debates next month, despite the fact that
Trump’s current poll standing would qualify him for entry. Concern has
risen high enough that the chairman of the Republican
National Committee, Reince Priebus, called Trump on Wednesday, urging
him to tone down his rhetoric on immigration.
These
last few weeks, it has been truly remarkable that in a field of
senators, governors, and seasoned presidential contenders, Trump has
generated a big portion of the
2016 conversation, dominating social media, spicing up roundtable
discussions, and crowding out other political messaging by both
Democrats and Republicans.
Which
makes Trump a bigger target than ever. Possibly, the calculus of
attacking him is changing. The risks are huge for anyone who makes a
frontal assault, a full repudiation
that goes beyond just challenging Trump on his immigration comments, a
truly epic mud war. But a candidate who undertook it might be seen as
both a party savior and pillar of strength, definitely prepared to be an
Oval Office occupant. Even Bill Clinton might
be impressed. Will any of them seize the moment?
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