Morning Ed: Politics {2016.06.07.T}

Burt Likko in reply to Mo says:

Yeah, Heer’s thought strikes me as very much not correct. She needs to stay the course she’s been on since about Super Tuesday — right down the middle of the road. That’s a natural place for her to be (simultaneously a strength and a weakness for her, IMO).

What she shouldn’t do, because she’s not good at it, is pretend to be someone she isn’t. She’s basically a technocrat, she’s basically a centrist who fades left on marginal decisions, a Democrat because of partisan affiliation rather than ideological affinity, someone who wants to deploy her intelligence and willpower rather than some sort of a grand vision, someone who would rather implement incremental changes rather than dramatic sweeping ones. She tried a couple of sweeping maneuvers early in her career and got bit, badly, and she’s smart enough to have learned that lesson. That’s just who she is.

She’s fortunate that
a) she’s managed to draw an exponent of a new (new to the American national scene, new within living memory) sort of ideology on the other side so she can offer technocracy and competence as an alternative to the new, weird, and untested platform of her opponent;
b) she’s managed to draw an opponent whose personality is initially amusing in its outrageousness and later tiresome to the point that a lot of people, having been saturated with it, will prefer to simply turn it off and make it go away — her rather more bland appeal is calculated abd sculpted to be inoffensive to a large number of people;
c) associated with an outgoing President who also, for the most part, has governed as a technocrat rather than an ideologue, whose dramatic policy changes are many years behind from early on in his administration, and whose policies have created a better-than-baseline economy and a sense of (if not the reality of) overall peace, making being associated with the incumbent a net advantage.

Here’s how Trump gets around that: he needs a black swan event. Some shithead somehow smuggles in a nail vest into a concert in some major American city, shouts something scary-sounding in Arabic, and kills himself and a few dozen innocent kids nearby. America panics, demands retaliation and visible signals of safety. Or a major investment house fails, or a hedge fund gets embroiled in a scuzzy scandal. Populist railing against a corrupt Wall Street overpowers a generalized sense of “Hey I finally got my retirement account back in order.”

Those are the sorts of things that change the game enough that the centrist, steady, unspectacular technocracy Clinton offers will seem less desirable than the mercurial populism of Trump. Something sudden, visceral, and scary. Stuff we wouldn’t want to have happen anyway separate from political effect.Report