Taibbi writes: "On the campaign trail in Iowa, Donald Trump's antics have
forced the other candidates to get crazy or go home."
Matt Taibbi hit the road with the Republican Party circus. (illustration:
Victor Juhasz)
Inside the GOP Clown Car
By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
12 August 15
On the campaign trail in Iowa, Donald Trump's antics have forced the other
candidates to get crazy or go home
The thing is, when you actually think about it, it's not funny. Given what's
at stake, it's more like the opposite, like the first sign of the collapse
of the United States as a global superpower. Twenty years from now, when
we're all living like prehistory hominids and hunting rats with sticks,
we'll probably look back at this moment as the beginning of the end.
In the meantime, though, the race for the Republican Party presidential
nomination sure seems funny. The event known around the world as
hashtagGOPClownCar is improbable, colossal, spectacular and shocking; epic,
monumental, heinous and disgusting. It's like watching 17 platypuses try to
mount the queen of England. You can't tear your eyes away from it.
It will go down someday as the greatest reality show ever conceived. The
concept is ingenious. Take a combustible mix of the most depraved and
filterless half-wits, scam artists and asylum Napoleons America has to
offer, give them all piles of money and tell them to run for president. Add
Donald Trump. And to give the whole thing a perverse gravitas, make the
presidency really at stake.
It's Western civilization's very own car wreck. Even if you don't want to
watch it, you will. It's that awesome of a spectacle.
But what does it mean? Or to put it another way, since we know it can't mean
anything good: Is this enough of a disaster that we shouldn't laugh?
I went to Iowa to see for myself.
Rockwell City, Iowa, evening, July 30th. I've just rushed up from Des Moines
to catch my first event on the Clown Car tour, a stump speech by TV
personality Mike Huckabee, whom the Internet says was also once governor of
Arkansas.
Traditionally, in these early stages of a presidential campaign, very little
happens. Candidates treat their stump work like comedians practicing new
material between the lunch and dinner hours. In the old days, they tiptoed
their positions out before small audiences in little farm towns like this in
an effort to see what minor policy tweaks might play better later on in the
race, when the bullets start flying for real.
That's what one normally expects. But 2016 is very different, as I found out
in Rockwell City right away.
Two factors have combined to make this maybe the most unlikely political
story of our times. The first is the campaign's extraordinary number of
entrants. As The Washington Post noted last fall, this is the first time in
recent memory that there is no heir-apparent candidate (like a Bob Dole).
For some reason, during the last years of the Obama presidency, the national
Republican Party chose not to throw its weight behind anyone, leading a
monstrous field of has-beens and never-weres to believe that they had a real
shot at winning the nomination.
So throughout this spring and summer, a new Human Punchline seemingly jumped
into the race every week. There were so many of these jokers, coming so
fast, that news commentators quickly latched onto the image of a parade of
clowns emerging from a political Volkswagen, giving birth to the "clown car"
theme.
But the more important factor has been the astounding presence of Donald
Trump as the front-runner. The orangutan-haired real estate magnate entered
the race in mid-June and immediately blew up cable and Twitter by denouncing
Mexicans as rapists and ripping 2008 nominee John McCain for having been
captured in war.
Both moves would have been fatal to "serious" candidates in previous
elections. But amid the strange Republican leadership void of 2016, the
furor only gave Trump further saturation among the brainless nativists in
his party and inexplicably vaulted him to front-runner status. The
combination of Trump constantly spewing crazy quotes and the strategy
actually working turned his campaign into a veritable media supernova,
earning the Donald more coverage than all of the other candidates combined.
This led to a situation where the candidates have had to resort to
increasingly bizarre tactics in order to win press attention. Add to this
the curious dynamic of the first Republican debate, on August 6th, in which
only the top 10 poll performers get on the main stage, and the incentive to
say outlandish things in search of a poll bump quickly reached a fever
pitch. So much for the cautious feeling-out period: For the candidates, it
was toss grenades or die.
Back in the Rockwell City library, the small contingent of reporters
covering the day's third "Huckabee Huddle" was buzzing. A local TV guy was
staring at his notes with a confused look on his face, like he couldn't
believe what he read. "Weirdest thing," he said. "I was just in Jefferson,
and Huckabee said something about invoking the 14th and 5th amendments to
end abortion. I'm really not sure what he meant."
A moment later, Huckabee sauntered into the library for an ad-hoc presser,
and was quickly asked what he meant. "Just what I said," he quipped. "It is
the job of the federal government to protect the citizens under the
Constitution."
He went on to explain that even the unborn were entitled to rights of "due
process and equal protection." The attendant reporters all glanced sideways
at one another. The idea of using the 14th Amendment, designed to protect
the rights of ex-slaves, as a tool to outlaw abortion in the 21st century
clearly would have its own dark appeal to the Fox crowd. But it occurred to
me that Huckabee might have had more in mind.
"Are we talking about sending the FBI or the National Guard to close
abortion clinics?" I asked.
"We'll see when I get to be president," he answered.
Huckabee smiled. Perhaps alone among all the non-Trump candidates, Huckabee
knows what kind of fight he's in. This GOP race is not about policy or
electability or even raising money. Instead, it's about Nielsen ratings or
trending. It's a minute-to-minute contest for media heat and Internet hits,
where positive and negative attention are almost equally valuable.
Huckabee launched his campaign on May 5th, running on a carefully crafted
and somewhat unconventional Republican platform centered around economic
populism, vowing to end "stagnant wages" and help people reach a "higher
ground."
But emphasizing economic populism is the kind of wonky policy nuance that
doesn't do much to earn notice in the Twitter age. After an early bump
pushed him briefly up to fourth place, Huckabee began a steady slide in the
polls as the unrestrained lunacy of Trump began seizing control of the race.
By late July, Huckabee's numbers had fallen, and he had to be worrying that
he would land out of the top 10.
But then, on July 25th, Huckabee gave an interview to Breitbart News in
which he shamelessly invoked Godwin's Law, saying that Barack Obama's deal
with Iran "would take the Israelis and basically march them to the door of
the oven."
The quote hit the airwaves like a thunderclap. Virtually everyone in the
English-speaking world with an IQ over nine shrieked in disgust. The
Huckster's "ovens" rant brought MSNBC host Mika Brzezinski to near-tears on
air. Huckabee even prompted an Israeli transportation minister to exclaim,
Dirty Dancing-style, "Nobody marches the Jews to ovens anymore."
Even in Huckabee's own party, he was denounced. Jeb Bush, anxious to cast
himself as the non-crazy, Uncola Republican in a field of mental
incompetents, called on everyone to "tone down the rhetoric." Wisconsin Gov.
Scott Walker, known as one of America's most dickishly unscrupulous hate
merchants, said, "You're not hearing me use that sort of language."
But far from being deterred by all of the negative attention, Huckabee
shrewdly embraced it. Much like the Donald, Huckabee swallowed up the
negative press energy like a Pac-Man and steamed ahead, and was soon
climbing in the polls again.
Huckabee had stumbled into the truth that has been driving the support for
the Trump campaign: That in this intensely media-driven race, inspiring
genuine horror and disgust among the right people is worth a lot of votes in
certain quarters, irrespective of how you go about it. If you're making an
MSNBC anchor cry or rendering a coastal media villain like Anderson Cooper
nearly speechless (as Trump has done), you must be doing something right.
In Rockwell City, it seemed like Huckabee was consciously trying to repeat
his "ovens" stunt. He smiled as the media in attendance filed out of the
presser, surely knowing we would have the "we'll see" quote up on social
media within minutes.
At the event, he was glowingly introduced by Iowa Republican Congressman
Steve King, who revved the crowd by bashing the Supreme Court ruling
clearing the way for gay marriage. King had apparently been told on good
authority by a lawyer friend that Obergefell v. Hodges meant that only one
party in a marriage had to be a human being. "What that means," he said, "is
you can now marry my lawn mower."
A reporter next to me leaned over. "King's lawn mower is gay?"
I shrugged. In the modern Republican Party, making sense is a secondary
consideration. Years of relentless propaganda combined with extreme
frustration over the disastrous Bush years and two terms of a Kenyan Muslim
terrorist president have cast the party's right wing into a swirling
suckhole of paranoia and conspiratorial craziness. There is nothing you can
do to go too far, a fact proved, if not exactly understood, by the madman,
Trump.
Huckabee's speech tossed plenty of red meat into the grinder, explaining
that America was divinely created by "providence of almighty God," which is
the only explanation for the extreme longevity of the Constitution. He
stepped down to hearty applause, giving way to a performance by a group of
Rockwell City Republican women, who sang what they called a "rap song."
There was no beat and each of the 10-odd singers was off from the next by a
word or two:
People want the freedom
To make medical and personal choices!
And we want representatives
To listen to our voices!
Listening, I suddenly worried that the International Federation of Black
People would detect this "rap" performance from afar and call in an air
strike. Sneaking out the front door, I checked my phone to see how Huck's
abortion-clinic play was doing: He'd already set off a media shitstorm.
Within 24 hours, he was being denounced across the blogosphere, but he was
soon riding up in the polls again, one of the few shoo-ins to get on the
main stage of the August 6th debate.
It was astounding, watching the other entrants try to duplicate Huckabee's
feat. Former Texas Gov. Rick Perry was last seen on the national stage
choking on his own face in an infamous 2011 debate performance, when he was
unable to name the three federal agencies he himself had promised to do away
with. He returned to the race this year basically the same gaffe-spewing
yutz he was four years ago, only dressed in preposterous "smart" glasses, a
deadly error in a fight with a natural schoolyard bully like Donald Trump.
"He put glasses on so people will think he's smart," Trump croaked. "And it
just doesn't work!"
Perry was so grateful to even be mentioned by Trump that he refocused his
campaign apparatus on an epic response, apparently in an attempt to draw the
Donald into a Drake/Meek Mill-style diss war. He tossed off a 3,000-word
speech denouncing "Trumpism" as the modern incarnation of the Know-Nothing
movement (one could almost hear Trump scoffing, "What the fuck is a
Know-Nothing?"). He decried Trump himself as a "barking carnival act" and a
"cancer" that the party should "excise" for its own sake and, one
supposes, for Rick Perry's.
Trump, too busy being front-runner to notice Perry's desperate volleys,
basically blew the Texan off. A week later, Perry was in a tie for 10th
place in the polls. Asked if his campaign was finished if he didn't make the
debate cut, Perry replied, in characteristically malaprop fashion, that
making the debate was "not a one-shot pony." He ended up missing his shot,
or his pony, or whatever, and was squeezed out of the debate.
Many of the entrants tried nutty media stunts to re-inject energy into the
race. Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul attempted to revive his flagging
libertarian-niche campaign by putting out a video. In it, the candidate
appears dressed in shop goggles and jeans, curly hair flying, chain-sawing
the tax code in half. He looks like Ryan Phillippe doing a Billy Mays ad.
Then there was South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, one of the few candidates
with a sense of humor about how much of a long shot he is. "I do bar
mitzvahs, birthday parties, weddings, funerals call me, I'll come," he
cracked. Once in the race, though, Graham immediately trolled Trump by
calling him a "jackass," then briefly enjoyed some press limelight when the
furious front-runner gave out Graham's telephone number to the public.
Graham responded to the blessing of a Trump insult by putting out a video
celebrating his Trump-victimhood. In it, the candidate chops up his
cellphone Ginsu-style, mixes it in a blender in a foul-looking yellow
liquid, and whacks it with a nine-iron, or maybe a wedge (note: the Graham
camp says it was a nine).
All of this actually happened. Can we be that far from candidates putting
out dueling cat videos?
In late July, in a cramped conference room of a Marriott in West Des Moines,
Graham showed up to introduce himself to voters. In person, he's an odd
character, like an oversize ventriloquist's dummy, with too-bright eyes and
cheeks frozen in a half-grin.
He calls his event a "No Nukes for Iran" rally. Clearly gunning for a
Cabinet post in Defense or Homeland Security, Graham is running almost a
one-issue race, campaigning on being the candidate who most thinks Barack
Obama's Iran deal sucks.
Of course, all 17 of the Republican candidates think Obama's Iran deal
sucks, but Graham wants you to know he really thinks it sucks. Part of his
stump speech is ripped straight from Team America: He thinks the Iran deal
will result in "9/11 times a hundred." Actually in Graham's version, it's
9/11 times a thousand.
"The only reason 3,000 of us died on 9/11 and not 3 million," he said, "is
they could not get the weapons."
Graham would seem to be perfectly suited for this Twitter-driven race,
because he has a reputation in Washington for being a master of the
one-liner and a goofball with boundaries issues who not infrequently crosses
lines in his humor. "Did you see Nancy Pelosi on the floor?" he reportedly
once quipped. "Complete disgust. If you can get through the surgeries, it's
disgust."
But in person, Graham is a dud. His nasal voice and dry presentation make
Alan Greenspan seem like Marilyn Manson. Still, it doesn't take too long for
him to drift into rhetoric that in a normal political season would
distinguish him as an unhinged lunatic, which is interesting because pundits
usually call Graham one of the "sane" candidates.
First, he firmly promised to re-litigate the Iraq War. "I'm gonna send some
soldiers back to Iraq," he said. "If I'm president, we're going back to
Iraq."
Promising concretely to restart a historically unpopular war is a solid
Trump-era provocation, but Graham then took it a step further. He pledged to
solve the Syria problem by channeling Lawrence of Arabia and leading an Arab
army in an epic campaign to unseat the caliphate.
Graham, a politician who reportedly once said that "everything that starts
with 'al-' in the Middle East is bad news," insisted he was just the man to
unite the Saudis, Egyptians, Jordanians, Turks and other peoples in battle,
and also get them to pay for the invasion (getting dirty foreigners to pay
for our policies is another Trump innovation). "We're going into Syria with
the Arabs in the lead," Graham said. "They will do most of the fighting, and
they're gonna pay for it because we paid for the last two."
I looked around the room. No reaction whatsoever. An old man in the rear of
the hall was picking a cuticle off his middle finger, but otherwise, nobody
moved. There were reporters, but Graham's hawkish bleatings don't rate much
in an America obsessed with Caitlyn and Rachel Dolezal and the Donald.
Instead, later that same day, news leaked out that a Trump political
adviser, Sam Nunberg, had once referred to Al Sharpton's daughter as a
"n-----" on Facebook. This is news. It virtually obliterated all other
campaign information.
Within a day, polls showed Trump surging like never before. One Reuters poll
released on August 1st showed him scoring nearly 30 percent of the vote. The
second-highest contender, Jeb Bush, was now nearly 20 points off the lead.
When Trump completed the news cycle by giving Nunberg an Apprentice-style
firing, his triumph was total.
If the clowns who engaged Trump mostly came out looking awful, the ones who
didn't engage him came out looking even worse, including several of the
ostensible favorites.
Jeb Bush was supposedly the smarter Bush brother and also the presumptive
front-runner in this race. But on July 4th, just a few weeks after entering
the race, Trump basically ended the fight in one fell swoop with a single
kick in the balls, retweeting that Bush has to like "Mexican illegals
because of his wife."
With a wife's honor at stake, most self-respecting males would have
immediately stalked Trump and belted him in the comb-over. But Bush stayed
true to his effete Richie Rich rep and turtled. He said nothing and instead
meekly had an aide put out a statement that Trump's words were
"inappropriate and not reflective of the Republican Party's views."
It was such a bad showing that the Beltway opinionators at Politico ran a
story asking, "Is Jeb Bush turning into Michael Dukakis?" Game, set, match!
Bush has been plunging in the polls ever since.
A similar fate befell Marco Rubio, the boy-wonder Republican. Rubio cruised
through the early portion of the race, when voters were impressed by his
sideswept, anal-retentive, Cuban-Alex-Keaton persona, rising as high as 14
percent in the polls. But then Trump entered the race and blasted the
clearly less-than-completely-American Rubio for favoring a pro-immigration
bill. "Weak on immigration" and "weak on jobs," Trump scoffed. "Not the
guy."
He battered Rubio with tweet after tweet, one-liner after one-liner. Trump
aides hit Rubio for having "zero credibility" and being a "typical
politician" who favored a "dangerous amnesty bill." Rubio meanwhile defended
Mexicans in general after Trump's "rapists" line, but has passed on engaging
Trump's personal attacks. As a result, Rubio's support for a path to
citizenship for the undocumented has stood out like a herpes sore, and he's
plummeted to five percent in the polls.
The only candidate to really escape Trump's wrath has been Texas Sen. Ted
Cruz, and that's because Cruz has spent the entire political season nuzzling
Trump's ankles, praising the Donald like a lovesick cellmate. The Texas
senator, whose rhetorical schtick is big doses of Tea Party crazy (his best
line was that Obama wanted to bring "expanded Medicaid" to ISIS) mixed with
constant assurances that he's the most Reagan-y of all the candidates, even
reportedly had an hourlong "confab" with Trump. "Terrific," he said of the
meeting, calling Trump "one of a kind."
The subterranean Cruz-Trump communiqués are a fantastic subplot to this
absurdist campaign, hashtagClownCar's very own Nazi-Soviet nonaggression
pact. It could mean the two plan to run together, or it could mean Cruz will
plead for Trump's votes if and when the party finds a way to beg, threaten
or blackmail Donald out of the race. Whatever it means, it's a microcosm of
the campaign: simultaneously disgusting and entertaining.
It's not surprising that Trump's most serious competition will likely come
from Wisconsin's Walker, who is probably the only person in the race
naturally meaner than Trump.
A central-casting Charmless White Guy who looks like a vice principal or an
overdressed traffic cop, Walker traced a performance arc in the past year
that was actually a signal of what was to come with Trump. Back in February,
when addressing the Conservative Political Action Conference, Walker
answered a question of how he would deal with Islamic terrorists by saying,
"If I can take on 100,000 protesters, I can do the same across the world."
Like Trump's Mexican remarks, Walker's gambit comparing American union
workers to head-chopping Islamic terrorists seemed like a bridge too far
even for many Republicans. He was criticized by the National Review and
future opponent Perry, among others. But instead of plummeting in the polls,
Walker, like Trump, gained ground.
The irony is that this was supposed to be the year when the Republicans
opened the tent up, made a sincere play for the Hispanic vote, and perhaps
softened up a bit on gays and other vermin. But then the lights went on in
the race and voters flocked to a guy whose main policy plank was the
construction of a giant Game of Thrones-style wall to keep rape-happy
ethnics off our lawns. So much for inclusion!
Waterloo, Iowa, August 1st. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie showed up at
Lincoln Park downtown to attend the Cedar Valley Irish fest, a multiday fair
with street cuisine, tents full of hand-made crafts, live music and a 5K
road race. In a state where a more typical event is a stale VFW hall buffet
or a visit to the world's largest truck stop (the I-80 meet-and-greet is a
staple of Iowa campaigning), the Irish fest is a happening scene, featuring
good food and sizable numbers of people under the age of 60.
Two years ago, Christie's arrival at an event like this would have been a
major political event. Back then, Christie was a national phenomenon, a
favorite to be dubbed presumptive front-runner for 2016.
Christie's the type of candidate political audiences have come to expect:
Once every four years, commentators in New York and Washington will fall in
love with some "crossover" politician who's mean enough to be accepted by
the right wing, but also knows a gay person or once read a French novel or
something. In the pre-Trump era, we became conditioned to believe that this
is what constituted an "exciting" politician.
Christie was to be that next crossover hit, the 2016 version of McCain.
Washington's high priest of Conventional Wisdom, Mark Halperin, even called
him "magical," and Time called him a guy who "loves his mother and gets it
done."
But two years later, Christie has been undone by "Bridgegate," and the buzz
is gone. When he showed up at Cedar Falls, there were just a few reporters
to meet him. One of the Iowa press contingent explained to me that with the
gigantic field, some of the lesser candidates are falling through the
cracks. "We just don't have enough bodies to cover the race," the reporter
said. "It's never been like this."
Christie and his wife, Mary Pat, made their way patiently through the crowd,
shaking hands and talking football and other topics with a handful of
attendees. It was old-school politics, the way elections used to be won in
this country, but it was hard not to watch this painstaking
one-person-at-a-time messaging and wonder how it competes in the
social-media age.
After the event, I asked Christie whether the huge field makes it difficult
to get media attention. "Well, I've never had any trouble getting
attention," he said. "I just think it's differentiating yourself. I think it
plays to our strengths, because we've always worked really hard."
Right, hard work: that old saw. Later in the day, back across the state in
Rockwell City, former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum played the same tune
at the town's "Corn Daze" festival. Dressed in jeans, a blue oxford and a
face so pious that Christ would be proud to eat a burrito off it, Santorum
rushed through a speech explaining that it is in fact he who is the
hardest-working man in politics.
"I just want to let you know that we've gone to about 55 counties," he said.
"Last time, we went to 99. We'll probably have 99 done here in the next few
weeks."
I asked how anyone can distinguish himself or herself in a field with so
many entrants? "Win Iowa," he answered curtly.
Right, but how? "What happens in August stays in August," he said
mysteriously, then vanished to his next event. He had, like, 11 events in
three days, far more than most other candidates.
Santorum actually won the Iowa race four years ago with his overcaffeinated,
kiss-the-most-babies approach. But watching both he and Christie put their
chips on the shoe-leather approach to campaigning feels like watching a pair
of Neanderthals scout for mammoth. In the Age of Trump, this stuff doesn't
play anymore.
Not that the old guard will go down without a fight. The much-anticipated
inaugural Clown Debate in Cleveland was an ambush. Fox kicked off the
festivities by twice whacking Trump, Buford Pusser-style, asking him to
promise not to make a third-party run (he wouldn't) and sandbagging him with
questions about his history of calling women "fat pigs" ("Only Rosie
O'Donnell," Trump quipped). After the show, Fox had Republican pollster
Frank Luntz organize a focus group that universally panned Trump's
performance. "A total setup," one of Trump's aides complained on Twitter.
Trump didn't seem to care. Hell, he didn't even prepare for the debate.
"Trump doesn't rehearse," an aide told reporters. All he did was show up and
do what he always does: hog everything in sight, including airtime. As hard
as Fox tried to knock him out, the network couldn't take its eyes off him.
He ended up with almost two full minutes more airtime than the other
"contestants," as he hilariously called them on the Today show the morning
after the debate. It's the scorpion nature of television, come back to haunt
the "reality-makers" at Fox: The cameras can't resist a good show.
Politics used to be a simple, predictable con. Every four years, the money
men in D.C. teamed up with party hacks to throw their weight behind whatever
half-bright fraud of a candidate proved most adept at snowing the population
into buying a warmed-over version of the same crappy policies they've always
bought.
Pundits always complained that there wasn't enough talk about issues during
these races, but in reality, issues were still everything. Behind the
scenes, where donors gave millions for concrete favors, there was always
still plenty of policy. And skilled political pitchmen like Christie, who
could deftly deliver on those back-room promises to crush labor and hand out
transportation contracts or whatever while still acting like a man of the
people, were highly valued commodities.
Not anymore. Trump has blown up even the backroom version of the
issues-driven campaign. There are no secret donors that we know of. Trump
himself appears to be the largest financial backer of the Trump campaign. A
financial report disclosed that Trump lent his own campaign $1.8 million
while raising just $100,000.
There's no hidden platform behind the shallow facade. With Trump, the facade
is the whole deal. If old-school policy hucksters like Christie can't find a
way to beat a media master like Trump at the ratings game, they will soon
die out.
In a perverse way, Trump has restored a more pure democracy to this process.
He's taken the Beltway thinkfluencers out of the game and turned the
presidency into a pure high-school-style popularity contest conducted
entirely in the media. Everything we do is a consumer choice now, from
picking our shoes to an online streaming platform to a presidential nominee.
The irony, of course, is that when America finally wrested control of the
political process from the backroom oligarchs, the very first place where we
spent our newfound freedom and power was on the campaign of the world's most
unapologetic asshole. It may not seem funny now, because it's happening to
us, but centuries from this moment, people will laugh in wonder.
America is ceasing to be a nation, and turning into a giant television show.
And this Republican race is our first and most brutal casting call.
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
Matt Taibbi hit the road with the Republican Party circus. (illustration:
Victor Juhasz)
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/inside-the-gop-clown-car-20150812h
ttp://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/inside-the-gop-clown-car-20150812
Inside the GOP Clown Car
By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
12 August 15
On the campaign trail in Iowa, Donald Trump's antics have forced the other
candidates to get crazy or go home
he thing is, when you actually think about it, it's not funny. Given what's
at stake, it's more like the opposite, like the first sign of the collapse
of the United States as a global superpower. Twenty years from now, when
we're all living like prehistory hominids and hunting rats with sticks,
we'll probably look back at this moment as the beginning of the end.
In the meantime, though, the race for the Republican Party presidential
nomination sure seems funny. The event known around the world as
hashtagGOPClownCar is improbable, colossal, spectacular and shocking; epic,
monumental, heinous and disgusting. It's like watching 17 platypuses try to
mount the queen of England. You can't tear your eyes away from it.
It will go down someday as the greatest reality show ever conceived. The
concept is ingenious. Take a combustible mix of the most depraved and
filterless half-wits, scam artists and asylum Napoleons America has to
offer, give them all piles of money and tell them to run for president. Add
Donald Trump. And to give the whole thing a perverse gravitas, make the
presidency really at stake.
It's Western civilization's very own car wreck. Even if you don't want to
watch it, you will. It's that awesome of a spectacle.
But what does it mean? Or to put it another way, since we know it can't mean
anything good: Is this enough of a disaster that we shouldn't laugh?
I went to Iowa to see for myself.
Rockwell City, Iowa, evening, July 30th. I've just rushed up from Des Moines
to catch my first event on the Clown Car tour, a stump speech by TV
personality Mike Huckabee, whom the Internet says was also once governor of
Arkansas.
Traditionally, in these early stages of a presidential campaign, very little
happens. Candidates treat their stump work like comedians practicing new
material between the lunch and dinner hours. In the old days, they tiptoed
their positions out before small audiences in little farm towns like this in
an effort to see what minor policy tweaks might play better later on in the
race, when the bullets start flying for real.
That's what one normally expects. But 2016 is very different, as I found out
in Rockwell City right away.
Two factors have combined to make this maybe the most unlikely political
story of our times. The first is the campaign's extraordinary number of
entrants. As The Washington Post noted last fall, this is the first time in
recent memory that there is no heir-apparent candidate (like a Bob Dole).
For some reason, during the last years of the Obama presidency, the national
Republican Party chose not to throw its weight behind anyone, leading a
monstrous field of has-beens and never-weres to believe that they had a real
shot at winning the nomination.
So throughout this spring and summer, a new Human Punchline seemingly jumped
into the race every week. There were so many of these jokers, coming so
fast, that news commentators quickly latched onto the image of a parade of
clowns emerging from a political Volkswagen, giving birth to the "clown car"
theme.
But the more important factor has been the astounding presence of Donald
Trump as the front-runner. The orangutan-haired real estate magnate entered
the race in mid-June and immediately blew up cable and Twitter by denouncing
Mexicans as rapists and ripping 2008 nominee John McCain for having been
captured in war.
Both moves would have been fatal to "serious" candidates in previous
elections. But amid the strange Republican leadership void of 2016, the
furor only gave Trump further saturation among the brainless nativists in
his party and inexplicably vaulted him to front-runner status. The
combination of Trump constantly spewing crazy quotes and the strategy
actually working turned his campaign into a veritable media supernova,
earning the Donald more coverage than all of the other candidates combined.
This led to a situation where the candidates have had to resort to
increasingly bizarre tactics in order to win press attention. Add to this
the curious dynamic of the first Republican debate, on August 6th, in which
only the top 10 poll performers get on the main stage, and the incentive to
say outlandish things in search of a poll bump quickly reached a fever
pitch. So much for the cautious feeling-out period: For the candidates, it
was toss grenades or die.
Back in the Rockwell City library, the small contingent of reporters
covering the day's third "Huckabee Huddle" was buzzing. A local TV guy was
staring at his notes with a confused look on his face, like he couldn't
believe what he read. "Weirdest thing," he said. "I was just in Jefferson,
and Huckabee said something about invoking the 14th and 5th amendments to
end abortion. I'm really not sure what he meant."
A moment later, Huckabee sauntered into the library for an ad-hoc presser,
and was quickly asked what he meant. "Just what I said," he quipped. "It is
the job of the federal government to protect the citizens under the
Constitution."
He went on to explain that even the unborn were entitled to rights of "due
process and equal protection." The attendant reporters all glanced sideways
at one another. The idea of using the 14th Amendment, designed to protect
the rights of ex-slaves, as a tool to outlaw abortion in the 21st century
clearly would have its own dark appeal to the Fox crowd. But it occurred to
me that Huckabee might have had more in mind.
"Are we talking about sending the FBI or the National Guard to close
abortion clinics?" I asked.
"We'll see when I get to be president," he answered.
Huckabee smiled. Perhaps alone among all the non-Trump candidates, Huckabee
knows what kind of fight he's in. This GOP race is not about policy or
electability or even raising money. Instead, it's about Nielsen ratings or
trending. It's a minute-to-minute contest for media heat and Internet hits,
where positive and negative attention are almost equally valuable.
Huckabee launched his campaign on May 5th, running on a carefully crafted
and somewhat unconventional Republican platform centered around economic
populism, vowing to end "stagnant wages" and help people reach a "higher
ground."
But emphasizing economic populism is the kind of wonky policy nuance that
doesn't do much to earn notice in the Twitter age. After an early bump
pushed him briefly up to fourth place, Huckabee began a steady slide in the
polls as the unrestrained lunacy of Trump began seizing control of the race.
By late July, Huckabee's numbers had fallen, and he had to be worrying that
he would land out of the top 10.
But then, on July 25th, Huckabee gave an interview to Breitbart News in
which he shamelessly invoked Godwin's Law, saying that Barack Obama's deal
with Iran "would take the Israelis and basically march them to the door of
the oven."
The quote hit the airwaves like a thunderclap. Virtually everyone in the
English-speaking world with an IQ over nine shrieked in disgust. The
Huckster's "ovens" rant brought MSNBC host Mika Brzezinski to near-tears on
air. Huckabee even prompted an Israeli transportation minister to exclaim,
Dirty Dancing-style, "Nobody marches the Jews to ovens anymore."
Even in Huckabee's own party, he was denounced. Jeb Bush, anxious to cast
himself as the non-crazy, Uncola Republican in a field of mental
incompetents, called on everyone to "tone down the rhetoric." Wisconsin Gov.
Scott Walker, known as one of America's most dickishly unscrupulous hate
merchants, said, "You're not hearing me use that sort of language."
But far from being deterred by all of the negative attention, Huckabee
shrewdly embraced it. Much like the Donald, Huckabee swallowed up the
negative press energy like a Pac-Man and steamed ahead, and was soon
climbing in the polls again.
Huckabee had stumbled into the truth that has been driving the support for
the Trump campaign: That in this intensely media-driven race, inspiring
genuine horror and disgust among the right people is worth a lot of votes in
certain quarters, irrespective of how you go about it. If you're making an
MSNBC anchor cry or rendering a coastal media villain like Anderson Cooper
nearly speechless (as Trump has done), you must be doing something right.
In Rockwell City, it seemed like Huckabee was consciously trying to repeat
his "ovens" stunt. He smiled as the media in attendance filed out of the
presser, surely knowing we would have the "we'll see" quote up on social
media within minutes.
At the event, he was glowingly introduced by Iowa Republican Congressman
Steve King, who revved the crowd by bashing the Supreme Court ruling
clearing the way for gay marriage. King had apparently been told on good
authority by a lawyer friend that Obergefell v. Hodges meant that only one
party in a marriage had to be a human being. "What that means," he said, "is
you can now marry my lawn mower."
A reporter next to me leaned over. "King's lawn mower is gay?"
I shrugged. In the modern Republican Party, making sense is a secondary
consideration. Years of relentless propaganda combined with extreme
frustration over the disastrous Bush years and two terms of a Kenyan Muslim
terrorist president have cast the party's right wing into a swirling
suckhole of paranoia and conspiratorial craziness. There is nothing you can
do to go too far, a fact proved, if not exactly understood, by the madman,
Trump.
Huckabee's speech tossed plenty of red meat into the grinder, explaining
that America was divinely created by "providence of almighty God," which is
the only explanation for the extreme longevity of the Constitution. He
stepped down to hearty applause, giving way to a performance by a group of
Rockwell City Republican women, who sang what they called a "rap song."
There was no beat and each of the 10-odd singers was off from the next by a
word or two:
People want the freedom
To make medical and personal choices!
And we want representatives
To listen to our voices!
Listening, I suddenly worried that the International Federation of Black
People would detect this "rap" performance from afar and call in an air
strike. Sneaking out the front door, I checked my phone to see how Huck's
abortion-clinic play was doing: He'd already set off a media shitstorm.
Within 24 hours, he was being denounced across the blogosphere, but he was
soon riding up in the polls again, one of the few shoo-ins to get on the
main stage of the August 6th debate.
It was astounding, watching the other entrants try to duplicate Huckabee's
feat. Former Texas Gov. Rick Perry was last seen on the national stage
choking on his own face in an infamous 2011 debate performance, when he was
unable to name the three federal agencies he himself had promised to do away
with. He returned to the race this year basically the same gaffe-spewing
yutz he was four years ago, only dressed in preposterous "smart" glasses, a
deadly error in a fight with a natural schoolyard bully like Donald Trump.
"He put glasses on so people will think he's smart," Trump croaked. "And it
just doesn't work!"
Perry was so grateful to even be mentioned by Trump that he refocused his
campaign apparatus on an epic response, apparently in an attempt to draw the
Donald into a Drake/Meek Mill-style diss war. He tossed off a 3,000-word
speech denouncing "Trumpism" as the modern incarnation of the Know-Nothing
movement (one could almost hear Trump scoffing, "What the fuck is a
Know-Nothing?"). He decried Trump himself as a "barking carnival act" and a
"cancer" that the party should "excise" for its own sake and, one
supposes, for Rick Perry's.
Trump, too busy being front-runner to notice Perry's desperate volleys,
basically blew the Texan off. A week later, Perry was in a tie for 10th
place in the polls. Asked if his campaign was finished if he didn't make the
debate cut, Perry replied, in characteristically malaprop fashion, that
making the debate was "not a one-shot pony." He ended up missing his shot,
or his pony, or whatever, and was squeezed out of the debate.
Many of the entrants tried nutty media stunts to re-inject energy into the
race. Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul attempted to revive his flagging
libertarian-niche campaign by putting out a video. In it, the candidate
appears dressed in shop goggles and jeans, curly hair flying, chain-sawing
the tax code in half. He looks like Ryan Phillippe doing a Billy Mays ad.
Then there was South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, one of the few candidates
with a sense of humor about how much of a long shot he is. "I do bar
mitzvahs, birthday parties, weddings, funerals call me, I'll come," he
cracked. Once in the race, though, Graham immediately trolled Trump by
calling him a "jackass," then briefly enjoyed some press limelight when the
furious front-runner gave out Graham's telephone number to the public.
Graham responded to the blessing of a Trump insult by putting out a video
celebrating his Trump-victimhood. In it, the candidate chops up his
cellphone Ginsu-style, mixes it in a blender in a foul-looking yellow
liquid, and whacks it with a nine-iron, or maybe a wedge (note: the Graham
camp says it was a nine).
All of this actually happened. Can we be that far from candidates putting
out dueling cat videos?
In late July, in a cramped conference room of a Marriott in West Des Moines,
Graham showed up to introduce himself to voters. In person, he's an odd
character, like an oversize ventriloquist's dummy, with too-bright eyes and
cheeks frozen in a half-grin.
He calls his event a "No Nukes for Iran" rally. Clearly gunning for a
Cabinet post in Defense or Homeland Security, Graham is running almost a
one-issue race, campaigning on being the candidate who most thinks Barack
Obama's Iran deal sucks.
Of course, all 17 of the Republican candidates think Obama's Iran deal
sucks, but Graham wants you to know he really thinks it sucks. Part of his
stump speech is ripped straight from Team America: He thinks the Iran deal
will result in "9/11 times a hundred." Actually in Graham's version, it's
9/11 times a thousand.
"The only reason 3,000 of us died on 9/11 and not 3 million," he said, "is
they could not get the weapons."
Graham would seem to be perfectly suited for this Twitter-driven race,
because he has a reputation in Washington for being a master of the
one-liner and a goofball with boundaries issues who not infrequently crosses
lines in his humor. "Did you see Nancy Pelosi on the floor?" he reportedly
once quipped. "Complete disgust. If you can get through the surgeries, it's
disgust."
But in person, Graham is a dud. His nasal voice and dry presentation make
Alan Greenspan seem like Marilyn Manson. Still, it doesn't take too long for
him to drift into rhetoric that in a normal political season would
distinguish him as an unhinged lunatic, which is interesting because pundits
usually call Graham one of the "sane" candidates.
First, he firmly promised to re-litigate the Iraq War. "I'm gonna send some
soldiers back to Iraq," he said. "If I'm president, we're going back to
Iraq."
Promising concretely to restart a historically unpopular war is a solid
Trump-era provocation, but Graham then took it a step further. He pledged to
solve the Syria problem by channeling Lawrence of Arabia and leading an Arab
army in an epic campaign to unseat the caliphate.
Graham, a politician who reportedly once said that "everything that starts
with 'al-' in the Middle East is bad news," insisted he was just the man to
unite the Saudis, Egyptians, Jordanians, Turks and other peoples in battle,
and also get them to pay for the invasion (getting dirty foreigners to pay
for our policies is another Trump innovation). "We're going into Syria with
the Arabs in the lead," Graham said. "They will do most of the fighting, and
they're gonna pay for it because we paid for the last two."
I looked around the room. No reaction whatsoever. An old man in the rear of
the hall was picking a cuticle off his middle finger, but otherwise, nobody
moved. There were reporters, but Graham's hawkish bleatings don't rate much
in an America obsessed with Caitlyn and Rachel Dolezal and the Donald.
Instead, later that same day, news leaked out that a Trump political
adviser, Sam Nunberg, had once referred to Al Sharpton's daughter as a
"n-----" on Facebook. This is news. It virtually obliterated all other
campaign information.
Within a day, polls showed Trump surging like never before. One Reuters poll
released on August 1st showed him scoring nearly 30 percent of the vote. The
second-highest contender, Jeb Bush, was now nearly 20 points off the lead.
When Trump completed the news cycle by giving Nunberg an Apprentice-style
firing, his triumph was total.
If the clowns who engaged Trump mostly came out looking awful, the ones who
didn't engage him came out looking even worse, including several of the
ostensible favorites.
Jeb Bush was supposedly the smarter Bush brother and also the presumptive
front-runner in this race. But on July 4th, just a few weeks after entering
the race, Trump basically ended the fight in one fell swoop with a single
kick in the balls, retweeting that Bush has to like "Mexican illegals
because of his wife."
With a wife's honor at stake, most self-respecting males would have
immediately stalked Trump and belted him in the comb-over. But Bush stayed
true to his effete Richie Rich rep and turtled. He said nothing and instead
meekly had an aide put out a statement that Trump's words were
"inappropriate and not reflective of the Republican Party's views."
It was such a bad showing that the Beltway opinionators at Politico ran a
story asking, "Is Jeb Bush turning into Michael Dukakis?" Game, set, match!
Bush has been plunging in the polls ever since.
A similar fate befell Marco Rubio, the boy-wonder Republican. Rubio cruised
through the early portion of the race, when voters were impressed by his
sideswept, anal-retentive, Cuban-Alex-Keaton persona, rising as high as 14
percent in the polls. But then Trump entered the race and blasted the
clearly less-than-completely-American Rubio for favoring a pro-immigration
bill. "Weak on immigration" and "weak on jobs," Trump scoffed. "Not the
guy."
He battered Rubio with tweet after tweet, one-liner after one-liner. Trump
aides hit Rubio for having "zero credibility" and being a "typical
politician" who favored a "dangerous amnesty bill." Rubio meanwhile defended
Mexicans in general after Trump's "rapists" line, but has passed on engaging
Trump's personal attacks. As a result, Rubio's support for a path to
citizenship for the undocumented has stood out like a herpes sore, and he's
plummeted to five percent in the polls.
The only candidate to really escape Trump's wrath has been Texas Sen. Ted
Cruz, and that's because Cruz has spent the entire political season nuzzling
Trump's ankles, praising the Donald like a lovesick cellmate. The Texas
senator, whose rhetorical schtick is big doses of Tea Party crazy (his best
line was that Obama wanted to bring "expanded Medicaid" to ISIS) mixed with
constant assurances that he's the most Reagan-y of all the candidates, even
reportedly had an hourlong "confab" with Trump. "Terrific," he said of the
meeting, calling Trump "one of a kind."
The subterranean Cruz-Trump communiqués are a fantastic subplot to this
absurdist campaign, hashtagClownCar's very own Nazi-Soviet nonaggression
pact. It could mean the two plan to run together, or it could mean Cruz will
plead for Trump's votes if and when the party finds a way to beg, threaten
or blackmail Donald out of the race. Whatever it means, it's a microcosm of
the campaign: simultaneously disgusting and entertaining.
It's not surprising that Trump's most serious competition will likely come
from Wisconsin's Walker, who is probably the only person in the race
naturally meaner than Trump.
A central-casting Charmless White Guy who looks like a vice principal or an
overdressed traffic cop, Walker traced a performance arc in the past year
that was actually a signal of what was to come with Trump. Back in February,
when addressing the Conservative Political Action Conference, Walker
answered a question of how he would deal with Islamic terrorists by saying,
"If I can take on 100,000 protesters, I can do the same across the world."
Like Trump's Mexican remarks, Walker's gambit comparing American union
workers to head-chopping Islamic terrorists seemed like a bridge too far
even for many Republicans. He was criticized by the National Review and
future opponent Perry, among others. But instead of plummeting in the polls,
Walker, like Trump, gained ground.
The irony is that this was supposed to be the year when the Republicans
opened the tent up, made a sincere play for the Hispanic vote, and perhaps
softened up a bit on gays and other vermin. But then the lights went on in
the race and voters flocked to a guy whose main policy plank was the
construction of a giant Game of Thrones-style wall to keep rape-happy
ethnics off our lawns. So much for inclusion!
Waterloo, Iowa, August 1st. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie showed up at
Lincoln Park downtown to attend the Cedar Valley Irish fest, a multiday fair
with street cuisine, tents full of hand-made crafts, live music and a 5K
road race. In a state where a more typical event is a stale VFW hall buffet
or a visit to the world's largest truck stop (the I-80 meet-and-greet is a
staple of Iowa campaigning), the Irish fest is a happening scene, featuring
good food and sizable numbers of people under the age of 60.
Two years ago, Christie's arrival at an event like this would have been a
major political event. Back then, Christie was a national phenomenon, a
favorite to be dubbed presumptive front-runner for 2016.
Christie's the type of candidate political audiences have come to expect:
Once every four years, commentators in New York and Washington will fall in
love with some "crossover" politician who's mean enough to be accepted by
the right wing, but also knows a gay person or once read a French novel or
something. In the pre-Trump era, we became conditioned to believe that this
is what constituted an "exciting" politician.
Christie was to be that next crossover hit, the 2016 version of McCain.
Washington's high priest of Conventional Wisdom, Mark Halperin, even called
him "magical," and Time called him a guy who "loves his mother and gets it
done."
But two years later, Christie has been undone by "Bridgegate," and the buzz
is gone. When he showed up at Cedar Falls, there were just a few reporters
to meet him. One of the Iowa press contingent explained to me that with the
gigantic field, some of the lesser candidates are falling through the
cracks. "We just don't have enough bodies to cover the race," the reporter
said. "It's never been like this."
Christie and his wife, Mary Pat, made their way patiently through the crowd,
shaking hands and talking football and other topics with a handful of
attendees. It was old-school politics, the way elections used to be won in
this country, but it was hard not to watch this painstaking
one-person-at-a-time messaging and wonder how it competes in the
social-media age.
After the event, I asked Christie whether the huge field makes it difficult
to get media attention. "Well, I've never had any trouble getting
attention," he said. "I just think it's differentiating yourself. I think it
plays to our strengths, because we've always worked really hard."
Right, hard work: that old saw. Later in the day, back across the state in
Rockwell City, former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum played the same tune
at the town's "Corn Daze" festival. Dressed in jeans, a blue oxford and a
face so pious that Christ would be proud to eat a burrito off it, Santorum
rushed through a speech explaining that it is in fact he who is the
hardest-working man in politics.
"I just want to let you know that we've gone to about 55 counties," he said.
"Last time, we went to 99. We'll probably have 99 done here in the next few
weeks."
I asked how anyone can distinguish himself or herself in a field with so
many entrants? "Win Iowa," he answered curtly.
Right, but how? "What happens in August stays in August," he said
mysteriously, then vanished to his next event. He had, like, 11 events in
three days, far more than most other candidates.
Santorum actually won the Iowa race four years ago with his overcaffeinated,
kiss-the-most-babies approach. But watching both he and Christie put their
chips on the shoe-leather approach to campaigning feels like watching a pair
of Neanderthals scout for mammoth. In the Age of Trump, this stuff doesn't
play anymore.
Not that the old guard will go down without a fight. The much-anticipated
inaugural Clown Debate in Cleveland was an ambush. Fox kicked off the
festivities by twice whacking Trump, Buford Pusser-style, asking him to
promise not to make a third-party run (he wouldn't) and sandbagging him with
questions about his history of calling women "fat pigs" ("Only Rosie
O'Donnell," Trump quipped). After the show, Fox had Republican pollster
Frank Luntz organize a focus group that universally panned Trump's
performance. "A total setup," one of Trump's aides complained on Twitter.
Trump didn't seem to care. Hell, he didn't even prepare for the debate.
"Trump doesn't rehearse," an aide told reporters. All he did was show up and
do what he always does: hog everything in sight, including airtime. As hard
as Fox tried to knock him out, the network couldn't take its eyes off him.
He ended up with almost two full minutes more airtime than the other
"contestants," as he hilariously called them on the Today show the morning
after the debate. It's the scorpion nature of television, come back to haunt
the "reality-makers" at Fox: The cameras can't resist a good show.
Politics used to be a simple, predictable con. Every four years, the money
men in D.C. teamed up with party hacks to throw their weight behind whatever
half-bright fraud of a candidate proved most adept at snowing the population
into buying a warmed-over version of the same crappy policies they've always
bought.
Pundits always complained that there wasn't enough talk about issues during
these races, but in reality, issues were still everything. Behind the
scenes, where donors gave millions for concrete favors, there was always
still plenty of policy. And skilled political pitchmen like Christie, who
could deftly deliver on those back-room promises to crush labor and hand out
transportation contracts or whatever while still acting like a man of the
people, were highly valued commodities.
Not anymore. Trump has blown up even the backroom version of the
issues-driven campaign. There are no secret donors that we know of. Trump
himself appears to be the largest financial backer of the Trump campaign. A
financial report disclosed that Trump lent his own campaign $1.8 million
while raising just $100,000.
There's no hidden platform behind the shallow facade. With Trump, the facade
is the whole deal. If old-school policy hucksters like Christie can't find a
way to beat a media master like Trump at the ratings game, they will soon
die out.
In a perverse way, Trump has restored a more pure democracy to this process.
He's taken the Beltway thinkfluencers out of the game and turned the
presidency into a pure high-school-style popularity contest conducted
entirely in the media. Everything we do is a consumer choice now, from
picking our shoes to an online streaming platform to a presidential nominee.
The irony, of course, is that when America finally wrested control of the
political process from the backroom oligarchs, the very first place where we
spent our newfound freedom and power was on the campaign of the world's most
unapologetic asshole. It may not seem funny now, because it's happening to
us, but centuries from this moment, people will laugh in wonder.
America is ceasing to be a nation, and turning into a giant television show.
And this Republican race is our first and most brutal casting call.
http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
