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Manaford Down, Bannon and Conway Up
Via the WSJ:
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is bringing two new managers to the top of his campaign in a bid to recover ground he has lost in recent weeks. Stephen Bannon, executive chairman of Breitbart News LLC, an outspoken Trump supporter and a former Goldman Sachs banker, will assume the new position of campaign chief executive. At the same time, Mr. Trump also is promoting Kellyanne Conway, a veteran GOP pollster and strategist, to become campaign manager. Ms. Conway has been a campaign adviser for several weeks. Longtime Republican operative Paul Manafort, who joined the campaign late in the primary season, remains campaign chairman. But the reset is designed to bulk up a structure that many Republicans have complained wasn’t adequate for the rigors of the general-election campaign.
More:
Published in GeneralMr. Trump’s campaign has fallen further behind Democrat Hillary Clinton in most national and battleground-state polls in recent days, and some Republicans had been hoping for a course adjustment before the traditional Labor Day kickoff of the general-election race. “I want to win,” Mr. Trump said in an interview Tuesday night in which he disclosed his hires. “That’s why I’m bringing on fantastic people who know how to win and love to win.”
[…]
It isn’t entirely clear what changes the new management will bring, though they are expected to ramp up digital and advertising efforts.
Mr. Trump said he would begin “substantial advertising” this Friday. “Hillary Clinton has spent $100 million on ads, and I’ve spent nothing,” Mr. Trump said. “But I’ve raised a lot of money and put in my own money, and now I’m going to start ads in three days.”
I saw a headline on the TV in lobby yesterday that Trunp didn’t want to pivot. I guess this what he meant.
I guess Trump didn’t like pretending to convince people that don’t already support him that he should be President.
It’s more fun to preach to the choir
Mr. Trump said he would begin “substantial advertising” this Friday. “Hillary Clinton has spent $100 million on ads, and I’ve spent nothing,” Mr. Trump said. “But I’ve raised a lot of money and put in my own money, and now I’m going to start ads in three days.”
Wasn’t the whole point of the front loaded primaries, the winner-take-all approach, and early convention to get the nomination out of the way so that we could engage in the general campaign earlier and not stand around like a punching bag all summer and get kicked around and defined by the opposition like Mitt Romney?
This is a campaign that can’t learn the basic lessons from the last round.
For decades we’ve told ourselves that we needed to get a CEO in the Oval Office who can run the government like a corporation. This is what a company looks like when it’s flailing – not changing course but bringing in consultants and extra layers of executives to make it look like you are doing something different when making the decision to stay the course.
I’m especially skeptical of Bannon. I don’t know the guy or anything about him other than what’s in this article. But Breitbart has been a ceaseless cheerleader for Trump from the beginning and what Trump does not need around him right now is another circle of yes-men. If he was bringing in Jack Fowler from National Review, then I’d be impressed that he’s actually looking to take hard advice, get his act together, and do something different.
The strategy of the campaign remains: Let Trump be Trump
So it seems Trumpbart really is official now. Pathetic. After this failure of an election, this alt right element is going to continue to be a problem against the conservative movement.
Conway seems somewhat tethered to reality. Bannon is one of the reasons for Trump.
Is this campaign reset 2? or 3?
Either way not a good sign even if it was needed.
Pivot commencing in 3…2…1…
This has been your weekly Trump pivot. Please come back next week for further pivots.
Trump has felt “boxed in” for weeks now
Apparently we’ve been seeing “boxed in” Trump… don’t worry though, he’ll get to really be himself now.
That’s a quote from a Trump aide. Buckle up indeed
Further down hill from here…
This is, of course, Trump’s best chance at victory. He was never going to convince the American people that he’s fit for the office. He’s never going to be “Presidential”. His best chance is dragging Clinton, the media, and the whole system down to his level. His best chance is to make the office fit for him.
Being a wrestling fan has made this election much easier to understand. Often, a WWE character will be introduced with a gimmick that’s pretty lame, and the audience is bored, rolls their eyes, etc. When this happens, the wrestler can either change to a different gimmick, or double down. The latter usually works better: take everything that annoys the audience, and do it bigger, louder, and more often. Because once the audience actively loathes a wrestler, they’ll start to appreciate how good he is at being bad, and eventually he’ll become the beloved antihero, and then just the hero.
Trump’s best chance is getting people to think, “This Trump guy is ridiculous, and I want to see more.”
I sat through all (or nearly all) of the debates last year, and I think there is a lot of truth in this. The first 2-3 “debates” were absurdities all swirling around what Trump said about this or that. I think you have to get to the Fox Business debate (4th or 5th) to start getting questions on substance. By then no one cared what Trump was saying as it was all about the spectacle and celebrity.
I know this sounds unfair to Trump fans, but the presidency needs more than hitting the right note on a handful of issues and his weaknesses were manifest from the beginning. Campaigns are about winning elections; they are not about punishing your own side or being angry or making a point. A majority of Democrats voted to win and a plurality of Republicans voted to get angry. You can see where it goes from there.
So, Idiocracy
Yes. We’ve had that to some extent since Jackson, and we got one VP who became President due to his name working in the campaign slogan (Tyler, of Tippecanoe and Tyler Too). The tight control of early radio and then TV stations by highbrow liberals made our election process more cerebral for a while, but now that cable TV and the internet have given the people what they want, we’re sliding back nicely into celebrity. Witness how noncontroversial Bill Clinton’s “boxers-or-briefs” answer would seem today versus in 1992.
Unfortunately, I can’t post the gif of Camacho’s state of the union speech (I did once and the Editors pulled it as a violation of the CoC).
It’s funny.
That whole movie is funny. The first time I saw the explanation as to why Joe was forgotten I nearly died laughing. I’m not even exaggerating – I was on the floor.
There were pretty cerebral pre-radio. I was listening to a debate between Taft and Bryant …
… Okay, perhaps a note of explanation. I was listening to a series of recordings made by Taft and Bryant which toured in the 1908 election as a sort of roaming debate …
… and they were dealing with very substantive issues and were each very dignified. I don’t recall any insults of Mary Todd Lincoln during the debates with Douglass. Politics has always had its share of goofiness, but there were expectations of decorum and good manners in the necessary settings.
The problem is that the tenor of our public discourse is uniformly in the toilet, and especially since the end of the Bush ’41 term. It’s not just boxers-and-briefs, but “it’s the economy, stupid” and “the 80’s called and they want their foreign policy back.” Trump is just taking it to the next level down. The problem is that voters keep rewarding this behavior. Maybe we could say that this used to be a problem particularly for the Democrats, but not any more.