Simple sanity can clinch it for Clinton

Republicans will now begin to perceive the scope of the looming disaster wrought upon them by their spineless leaders, Donald Trump enablers Paul Ryan, Chris Christie, Marco Rubio et al. It will have struck them, not through a glass darkly but like a twoby-four between the eyes, sometime in the wee hours Thursday morning.

Here’s the short version, flowing from three days of Democratic National Convention speeches in Philadelphia, headlined by President Barack Obama and Vice-President Joe Biden Wednesday. Hillary Clinton, warts and all, stands at the head of a Democratic party representing as broad a swath of American society as may have ever sheltered beneath the single tent of a single political organization anywhere. Trump, in relative terms, stands at the head of a small, terrifically angry mob.

Mobs can, of course, grow. No one watching politics worldwide this year can count Trump and his avuncular, aw-shucks running mate, Mike Pence, out before the votes are tallied in November. Clinton could squander this historic opportunity. She could become embroiled in some metastasized superscandal arising from her stupefying difficulties with email while she was 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. Sen. Bernie Sanders, whom Clinton outmanoeuvred and defeated for the Democratic nomination by hook and by crook, is now on her side. His Sandernistas, though deeply unhappy 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. Bloomberg 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; four months before the vote, just where she wants to be.

But Bloomberg is now one among several. Since the convention’s opening hours Monday, the roster had leaned heavily toward energizing the Democratic party’s activist base, with a preponderance of black, Hispanic, female and showbusiness 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 workingclass voters in the Rust Belt, where offshoring and outsourcing have decimated traditional heavy manu- facturing. Biden aimed his Wednesday speech squarely at this demographic, undercutting Trump’s xenophobic pitch, without saying that in so many words. “He is trying to tell us he cares about the middle class,” said the vicepresident. “Give me a break. That’s a bunch of malarkey. This guy doesn’t have a clue about the middle class.” Huge roars from the audience.

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. Like Biden, Obama drew the crowd to him — then handed them off to Clinton, in a passionate endorsement that seemed, to this cynical viewer of political speeches, quite heartfelt. And why would it not be, given the spectre of a Trump White House?

Which brings us back to the potential great power in this moment for Clinton and the Democrats, which Trump and his demagogy have midwifed. Several commenters noted late 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, or even Biden? How could she not look weak in comparison?

But that is a misreading of the strategy, for this reason: Clinton is not banking on charisma, of which she has not that much, but on her reputation for competence, reliability and, as Bloomberg pointed out, simple sanity. With his enraged rhetoric and almost continuous stream of bizarre pronouncements (the latest an exhortation to Russia, an American strategic adversary, to find his opponent’s missing emails), 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, in this strangest of political seasons, is closing the deal for the Clinton machine.