The Republican Convention debacle
Last week was filled with good news for progressives. It started Monday in Cleveland with the disastrous kickoff to the Republican National Convention that would officially elect Donald Trump the party’s nominee for the presidency.
Clouds were hanging over the event even before it started as Republican stalwarts, like the entire Bush clan and John Kasich, the governor of Ohio where Cleveland is located, expressed their disdain by just not showing up.
On the floor, the trouble started early with credential challenges and verbal sparring that showed that not all of the hard-core Republicans who did attend were resigned to a Trump candidacy. Any last ditch maneuver to deny Trump a victory was opposed by the vast majority of delegate and was doomed to fail. Still, the very attempt as well as the fact that establishment Republicans in the audience sat in on their hands when they would have normally applauded that even the appearance of party unity was not going to be achieved at this convention. A divided GOP automatically makes the nightmare of a Trump presidency even less likely than it was before.
It only got worse as the night progressed. Donald Trump’s wife, Melania, delivered a polished speech designed to help humanize the candidate. The delegates loved it. The only trouble was that big sections of the text were taken line for line from the speech delivered by Michelle Obama at the Democratic National Convention in 2008.
The plagiarism instantly became the story of the convention. Social media and late night comedians had a field day ridiculing the gaffe. The mainstream media jumped on the story too and got ever changing stories from campaign staff, from initial denials to a belated admission by a speech writer who blamed herself. Whatever message the Trump campaign intended to send voters on opening day got lost in the controversy.
The media was still talking about the story when Texas Senator Ted Cruz dropped a bombshell. In his prime time speech pointedly declined to endorse Trump, a brazen departure from tradition and the theme of party unity. Trump supporters booed Cruz off the stage but the damage was done. Cruz stole the show which was supposed to go to Trump’s vice-presidential candidate’s Mike Pence featured speech.
Trump’s campaign shot itself at the through spoken and unspoken. The visuals were bad too. They showed the audience was almost all white. Republican conventions have looked like a meeting of the South African parliament before Mandela, but this was the palest in a long time. Few blacks would have voted for Trump regardless. More importantly, the lily-white images could not have been missed by other minorities, including Latinos and Asians and the kind of progressive whites who had gone with Bernie Sanders in the primaries. Any hope of casting Trump’s GOP as not only united but also inclusive was a blatant failure.
This all means that general will show a starkly divided electorate along lines color, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, education and age. Politically, the United States has effectively become two countries. One is made up of the rising tide of diversity and the young who lean left. The other is composed of the white population whose demographic dominance will continue to shrink. The core of this Titanic is composed of white males, especially less educated, older white males.
Trump’s rise should be read is as a reaction of the previously entitled to their ever-diminishing privilege. When the country was founded, only white male property holders held the franchise. Now a black man is president and a white woman may follow him. The frustration was exacerbated by the fact that during the last two losing GOP campaigns for the presidency the white male vote went overwhelmingly for the Republican candidates. Making America great again, Trump’s mantra, is code for taking back the lost privilege. Alas, that it’s gone for good, and that’s good news.
But the god news didn’t end with the convention. June 20 the New York Times published an analysis of which candidate would likely win the election. The piece, carried in the Times Upshot, which tracks the race, is based on a carefully crafted methodology. It takes account of all the recent polls and a range of other variable. Upshot concluded that Hillary Clinton has a thumping 76 percent chance of prevailing.
Cheers too for the news that Roger Ailes, the who founded Fox News as an exclusive media platform for the right, is out of a job after an internal investigation prompted by a law suit showed a pattern of sexual harassment. Good riddance to the man who made False News and whose actions are despicable at the political and personal level.
Finally, the courts brought welcome news to. One court ruled against the Republican tactic of passing state ID laws to prevent minorities and the poor from voting. Any court found that Texas could not outlaw the presence of Syrian refugee in the state.
It was a very good week. Of course, not all the news was good. The worse news was the wanton repression unleashed by Turkey’s autocratic leader Recep Tayyp Erdogan after a coup against him failed.
New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman saw an interesting resemblance between Turkey’s tragedy and the tragedy that would unfold in this country if Trump were elected. I close with Friedman’s words:
“America is not Turkey—but in terms of personality and political strategy, Erdogan and Donald Trump were separated at birth.”
“And the drama playing out in Turkey today is the story of just how off track a once successful country can get when a leader who demonizes all his rivals and dabbles in crazy conspiracy theories comes to believe that he alone is The Man—the only one who can make his country great again—and ensconces himself in power.”
