Donald Trump: Come Kiss the Ring

Just FYI, Reagan won in two of the biggest landslides in presidential election history. I don't think it was just conservative voters who bought his message.

 

Reagan had 50.9 percent of the popular vote in 1980. Something less than one of the greatest landslides in history.

 

What percent did the incumbent Democratic president get?

 

They were in a bar, right? They probably were arguing whether less filling or taste's great were liberal philosophies.

 

41 percent, cut into by a *Liberal Republican* (such a thing was actually allowed to exist at the time) who took 8 percent .

And of course Carter was also sunk by the conspiracy between Team Reagan and the Ayahtollah to keep the Tehran hostages in captivity long enough to swing the election. Of course the payoff on that deal came a few years later with Iran-Contra.

 

I thought Ryan Lizza's piece this morning made a lot of sense. He examines Trump and others, going back to Reagan, through the lens of David Mamet's book, "Three Uses of the Knife" (which I will now have to read).

http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/donald-trump-may-not-have-a-second-act


But the political press demands drama. If it is not given a plot, it will create one. As Mamet argues, this is hardly unique to reporters. Humans are hardwired to turn mundane experiences into dramatic ones. “It is in our nature to dramatize,” he writes. “We dramatize the weather, the traffic, and other impersonal phenomena by employing exaggeration, ironic juxtaposition, inversion, projection, all the tools the dramatist uses to create, and the psychoanalyst uses to interpret, emotionally significant phenomena.”

A political campaign that is organized around a drama has an immediate advantage over one that is not. Mamet argues, and he’s right, that politics “sticks closer to traditional drama than does The Stage itself. A problem is stated, the play begins, the hero (candidate) offers herself as the protagonist who will find the solution, and the audience gives its attention.”

Which of the candidates has done that this year? Trump—and, to some extent, Bernie Sanders—has provided a plot and fared well. Trump has identified a clear problem to which many Republican voters respond: America doesn’t “win anymore.” And he has offered a simple solution that only he can provide: Trump “will make America great again.”

The fact that the problem and solution are laughably vague is a virtue. Hillary Clinton’s campaign has been forgettable exactly because she has insisted on promoting a myriad of highly specific solutions to very concrete problems before she has laid out the one big problem she wants to solve. (In fact, it’s not so different from how Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign of “hope and change” crushed Clinton’s campaign of policy white papers.) Mamet argues that a politician “who promises drama and then delivers only social concern” rarely excites the public. That’s why it’s “essential to the healthy political campaign that the issues be largely or perhaps totally symbolic—i.e. non-quantifiable.” He recites a long list of slogans from recent American history, to which Trump’s could easily be added: “Peace with Honor, Communists in the State Department, Supply Side Economics, Recapture the Dream, Bring Back the Pride.” The less detail, he argues, the more engaged the audience will be: “A loose abstraction allows audience members to project their own desires onto an essentially featureless goal.”

 

Time out. As you acknowledge, the third guy in the race was a Republican, and you want to pretend his votes cut into Carter's vote.

LOL.

If anything, his votes were anti-Carter votes, by people who also didn't want to vote for Reagan, but in a two man race, they weren't voting for Carter. Any Dem who voted for Anderson knew what they were doing. A vote for Anderson, by a Dem, is a vote for Reagan.

And, Anderson certainly did get some Republican votes from people who thought Reagan was too Conservative.

As for the "allowed to exist" bit, where are the conservative Dems? Where are the strong on defense Scoop Jackson Dems? Where are the pro-life Dems? Are they allowed to exist?

This is great too. I'm supposed to be embarrassed by any Republican who thinks Obama is a Muslim, but Starman thinks Reagan cut a deal with the Iranians -- despite no proof ever being offered -- and no one is embarrassed. No one even makes fun of him, which is what he deserves.

This position is as sad and pathetic as any birther, 9/11 truther, or Kennedy conspiracy theory.

 

This doesn't describe Reagan's conversion to the Republican party in any way.

Do you know anything about Reagan at all?

 

It's not even 2016 yet.
YF is just warming up.

 

Please Devil, educate me about Ollie North.

Starman's theory is that Reagan did a deal with the Iranians prior to the 1980 elections. He wasn't referring to Iran-Contra, which obviously happened while Reagan was president.

The charge is that Reagan conspired to keep the hostages held in Tehran until after the election, to further humiliate Carter. It's a charge for which there is no evidence.