February 6, 2016

Let Us All Take a Random Walk Through New Hampshire

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I’m feeling a little bored, and that means all of you have to listen to me regaling you with a bunch of random political tweets from my timeline. This is, truly, the best way of getting a real feel for the campaign trail from afar. First up is Donald Trump, who canceled an event today because airports were closed in New Hampshire:

Apparently so. CNN reports that Trump’s operator at LaGuardia was open for business, and the operator in Manchester says it is “always open for business, 24 hours a day.” And even if Trump did have airport trouble, it was only because he insists on going home to New York every night. Apparently the man of the people just can’t stand the thought of spending a few nights at a local Hilton.

This whole thing cracks me up because of Trump’s insistence that he’s a “high energy” guy. But he can’t handle a real campaign, the kind where you spend weeks at a time on the road doing four or five events a day. He flies in for a speech every few days and thinks he’s showing real fortitude. He’d probably drop from exhaustion if he followed the same schedule as Hillary Clinton or Jeb Bush.

Next up is Marco Rubio:

This is what makes it hard for me to figure out Rubio’s appeal. To me he seems like a robot: he’s memorized a whole bunch of virtual index cards, and whenever you ask a question he performs a database search and recites whatever comes up. The index cards aren’t bad, mind you, and I suppose they allow him to emulate a dumb person’s notion what a smart person sounds like. This is despite the fact that he normally talks with the same kind of hurried clip employed by nervous eighth graders reading off actual index cards.

Of course, this is just a specific example of a more general problem. Every four years, it looks to me like none of the Republican candidates can win. They all seem to have too many obvious problems. But of course someone has to win. So sure, Rubio reminds me of an over-ambitious teacher’s pet running for student council president, but compared to Trump or Carson or Cruz or Fiorina or Christie—well, I guess I can see how he might look good.

And now for some old-school Hillary Clinton hate:

Well, I’ll be happy to credit the Intercept, but I can hardly say it reflects well on them. This is yet another example of hCDS—Hillary Clinton Derangement Syndrome.1 I mean, has any candidate for any office ever been asked for transcripts of their paid speeches? This is Calvinball squared. Besides we all know the real reason Hillary doesn’t want to release the transcripts: she gave the same canned speech to everyone and happily pocketed an easy $200 grand for each one. Hell, who wouldn’t do that? Plus there’s the obvious fact that the hCDS crowd would trawl through every word and find at least one thing they could take out of context and make into a three-day outrage. Hillary would have to be nuts to give in to this.

Who’s next? How about Ted Cruz?

Cruz really pissed off Ben Carson in Iowa, just like he seems to piss off nearly everyone who actually gets a whiff of him up close. This is bad for Cruz because he’s trying to appeal to evangelical voters. Unfortunately, Carson has apparently decided that as long as he’s going to lose, he might as well mount a kamikaze attack against Cruz on the way down. And evangelicals listen to Carson. If he says Cruz bears false witness, then he bears false witness.

Finally, some good news for Bernie Sanders:

As it turns out, the Quinnipiac poll is probably bogus. Sam Wang points out that the median post-Iowa bounce was +6 percent in New Hampshire and +4 nationally—in Hillary’s favor. So everyone should take a deep breath.

Still, the big Bernie bounce is what people were talking about today, and it will contribute to an irresistible media narrative. And let’s face it: Hillary Clinton has never been a natural politician. Most Democrats like her, but they don’t love her, and this makes Sanders dangerous. What’s more, since Clinton already has a record for blowing a seemingly insurmountable lead to a charismatic opponent, he’s doubly dangerous. If Democrats convince themselves that they don’t have to vote for Clinton, they just might not. She has lots of baggage, after all.

Is this fair? No. It’s politics. But Clinton still has more money, more endorsements, more superdelegates, more state operations, and—let’s be fair here—a pretty long track record as a sincerely liberal Democrat who works hard to implement good policies. Sanders may damage her, but she’s almost certain to still win.

And that’s that. Isn’t Twitter great? It’s practically like being there. I can almost feel my shoes crunching on the snow drifts.

1This is a good example of a retronym. At first, we just had CDS. But then Hillary ran for president, so we had to make up a new term for insane Bill hatred: bCDS. And that, of course, means we also need hCDS. It’s like brick-and-mortar store or manual transmission.

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