Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Maybe New York Values Don’t Work in Iowa After All!
Even saints – especially saints! – must have their nights in Gethsemane. Saints are, after all, human. And humans from prince to pauper have to suffer through trials and setbacks in this mortal coil. Donald Trump, who is certainly no saint, will doubtless have his Gethsemane tonight.
Is this – Iowa – therefore the end? Will the Trump campaign fold like a cheap suit? Is the air of invincibility all there ever was to the Trump candidacy?
Well, this is one Trump supporter who, while temporarily daunted, does not think so. I could list a string of technocratic justifications why not – Cruz was especially suited to Iowa, Rubio had a good night but Kasich will beat him in New Hampshire and Bush is never going to get out, Carson held valiantly on to his slice of the rebel vote (more power to him) – but ultimately it is the issues and Trump’s clarity on them, especially immigration and terror, that have gotten him to where he is and it is the issues that will carry him forward.
But the challenge presented to Trump now is whether he and his team can flesh out his policies to the satisfaction of more voters. Bluster has blown Donald Trump to the front of the pack. Maybe some in his campaign were just looking for a wire-to-wire race. That dream is over now. What Trump needs to do henceforth is to deepen his appeal. He has to explain how he plans to send illegal aliens back to their home countries. He needs to think through what he means when he says we should ban non-citizen Muslims from entering the United States “until our government officials can figure out what the hell is going on.” He has to state more elaborately what he will (and will not) replace Obamacare with.
I think there is little threat that Trump will transmogrify into a Paul Ryan-esque policy wonk. And having been to several Trump events, trust me, there is enough enthusiasm that if Trump chooses to throw a few more vegetables (with healthy vitamins and iron) into the Wild Meat barbeque he is serving up, his followers will start piling it on their plates.
Mmmmm, hey this spinach is great!
Brussels sprouts! I always loved Brussels sprouts!
But here is the important point: Trump has been cast as a bully. He has bloodied several noses along the way to Iowa and he hasn’t looked pretty doing so.
According to every existing shred of American mythology, the Bully, once he has his nose bloodied, invariably slinks away sullenly and turns into an obeisant toad. If Trump does that, then he will justify much of what his detractors (including especially the GOP elite) have said about him.
If, on the other hand, as I suspect he will, Trump shows the grit without which you can never claim to be a true winner, then he may find that when he does win the nomination he will have concomitantly won some grudging admiration from those who are so viscerally opposed to his policies.
This will be just as well, of course. A wire-to-wire win is not fun even to the winner.
Published in General
I predict the GOP race will come down to who prevails in the Super Tuesday primaries on March 1.
Trump was exceedingly gracious in defeat, and he gave a wonderful speech congratulating Cruz. Some had speculated that he might be a sore loser, but in reality, he was the opposite of a sore loser. This could work to his advantage.
Even if Trump doesn’t win the nomination, if he keeps getting 25% of the vote, that is a serious chunk of people, and he could be very influential for a long time to come.
On the one hand it’s Trump’s clarity on the issues that’s got him where he is. On the other he needs to clarify what his positions actually mean.
And Trump’s win is a good thing because winning too easily is no fun.
OK.
Jeb Spends $2,884+ per Iowa Vote.
I wonder if Mike Murphy is from New York.
As in Iowa, Trump will go into NH at the top of opinion polls. He’s popular and he draws huge crowds seeking to be entertained. For some reason, many of those fans stood him up at the caucuses. It will be entertaining to see how he plans to remedy that in NH.
The Iowa caucuses turnout was on the high end of expectations which some observers thought would benefit Trump. It’s not clear whether Trump supporters defected to Cruz (and Rubio?) or if the specter of a Trump victory motivated a large number of Iowans who might not otherwise have participated.
I’d say that Trump’s commanding lead in the polls suggest that he might win NH, albeit with a far lower percentage than those polls suggest because his campaign faces three problems: turnout, maxed-out appeal, and defections.
What can Trump do in NH about his turnout problem other than to pump up his base? Unfortunately for him, base-pumping tactics are precisely what repels those not already in the fold. I also expect defection of some conservative Trump supporters to Ted Cruz, who has emerged as the clear alpha-male of conservatives.
In the end, I’m guessing that Trump will end up with about the same percentage of the vote that he garnered in Iowa; and that should be enough to take NH given the fractured nature of the field. But NH, in my estimation, will represent the pinnacle of the Trump 2016 campaign.
And Massachusetts and Arizona values haven’t done to well in Iowa either. Trump did about the same as Romney in 2012 and much better than McCain in 2008. Iowa doesn’t tell us much about the election as a whole.
I am very nervous about this upcoming election. I am far more concerned about what is happening on the left than I am about the right.
I do not think Cruz is the candidate best able to convince the country to pull back from the socialism ledge we are on with Sanders and Clinton. I just don’t think he is. I think he will scare people.
There is a great battle in front of us right now. I think we may need our own crazy person–Trump–to defeat the other side. Trump has a way of understanding what people are thinking and responding in a way that resonates with them. He hangs out with Democrats and socialists. He knows how they think. He may be able to break the socialist spell the left is under right now. He may not be conservative in some ways, but he is a capitalist for sure. We need someone who understands the difference between capitalism and socialism. And someone who can explain it. Because right now, the left is selling socialism as just like capitalism with a little twist. Relax, you won’t feel a thing.
Seeing Bernie Sanders’ results is more alarming than anything I have seen in a long time. It means we may be past the point of no return. Rush Limbaugh talked about this during the ObamaCare debates a few years ago. If we go this way, it will forever change our country.
I think maybe it has.
I keep wondering if there is a serious generational factor in play right now. People in their thirties and younger have lived with soft socialism for so long it feels normal to them, it feel civilized. It’s what all of our cousin countries are doing–Canada, western and eastern Europe, South America.
Trump knows how we got here and, most importantly, where we started.
We need a pithy sentence to get people out of this trance they are in. Something that will click for them.
It will come down to the national debates between our candidate and Sanders or Clinton. Rubio might be okay–he is easy to listen to, he might be effective in talking to the socialist left, but I think Trump is more likely to get their attention simply because he is funny. This is the flippant Colbert generation.
This is between conservatives and socialists, not Democrats and Republicans.
“There is a great battle in front of us right now. I think we may need our own crazy person–Trump–to defeat the other side.”
There’s a lot of truth to this. In this case, “crazy” means not being possessed of an inhibition mechanism that prevents you from making self-evident observations because the truth doesn’t happen to work the way some people want it to.
Just returning after a day of reading others’ comments about Iowa:
I guess I am the only person freaking out about Bernie Sanders’ results.
It really threw me for a loop last night that he did as well as he did. :) :)
But then I spent the summer working on two manuscripts about education reform over the last fifty years in China, and it has really spooked me about socialism. The Chinese communists see themselves as “socialists”–not “communists”–who worship Karl Marx. So if we want to avoid the perils of communism, we need to be careful about sliding into socialism.
It is a weird way to live. The Chinese government intrudes into every area of Chinese life, and it gets most of its money by trumped-up fees and fines and licensing. Taxes are hard to get installed; fees and fines are a piece of cake. Sounds a lot like U.S. Democrats.
Do you have a source for this?
I haven’t heard anything about Donald Trump’s deep understanding of how we have strayed from America’s founding vision toward socialism and how that’s a bad thing.
That could tilt me a bit more toward The Donald.
No, just pure speculation. :)