Democrats making case for competence, sanity
Mobs can grow. No one watching politics worldwide this year can count out Donald Trump and his avuncular, aw-shucks running mate, Mike Pence, before the votes are tallied.
Democrat Hillary Clinton could squander this historic opportunity. She could become embroiled in some metastasized super-scandal arising from her stupefying difficulties with email while she was U.S. President Barack Obama’s secretary of state. She could implode in a televised debate. She could be too tepid and her running mate Tim Kaine too lacklustre and earnest for Americans to bear.
But even so, there is no avoiding that revulsion for Trump across the spectrum has effected the nigh impossible. Senator Bernie Sanders is now on Clinton’s side. His Sandernistas, though deeply unhappy in Philadelphia this week, will eventually follow his lead.
Sanders sings Clinton’s praises through clenched teeth and with tears in his eyes, but he speaks the magic words: “Hillary Clinton must become the next president of the United States.”
So does, with considerably more enthusiasm, the billionaire entrepreneur and former Republican mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg, who Wednesday offered the most devastating takedown of Trump I have yet heard, making a case essentially that the latter is neither competent nor sane. Clinton he painted as a pragmatic workhorse, less interested in ideology than she is in solving problems. This puts Sanders to the social and economic left, Bloomberg to the economic right, and Clinton in the centre, just where she wants to be.
Since the convention’s opening hours Monday, the roster had leaned heavily towards energizing the Democratic party’s activist base, with a preponderance of black, Hispanic, female and show-business speakers. If one purpose was to contrast with the Republican convention in Cleveland last week, which featured a full complement of aggrieved, white, male former Navy SEAL commandos, mission accomplished.
The programming gap, until Wednesday, was in going explicitly to where Trump has drawn most of his political energy: Mainly white, lower middle-and-working-class voters in the Rust Belt, where offshoring and outsourcing have decimated heavy manufacturing. Joe Biden aimed his Wednesday speech squarely at this demographic, undercutting Trump’s xenophobic pitch.
That left to Obama the task of delivering the grace notes and the coup de grace, which he did, with consummate skill. In line after pointed line he demolished Trumpism, contrasting it with his own, distinctly Reaganesque brand of Democratic populism. “We don’t look to be ruled,” Obama said at one point, highlighting Trump’s incipient authoritarianism. Obama drew the crowd to him, then handed them off to Clinton, in a passionate endorsement that seemed heartfelt.
Which brings us back to the potential great power in this moment for Clinton and the Democrats, which Trump and his demagoguery have midwifed. Several commenters noted Wednesday that the charisma and political talent on display in Philadelphia would make Thursday night’s keynote by Clinton herself a greater challenge. How could she possibly match Obama, even Biden?
But Clinton is not banking on charisma, of which she has not that much, but on her reputation for competence, reliability and simple sanity. With his enraged rhetoric and almost continuous stream of bizarre pronouncements, Trump has made a frame within which American voters can sensibly conclude: “Flawed she may be, but she can do the job. That guy? No way.”
The Republican nominee is closing the deal for the Clinton machine. Twitter.com/mdentandt