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Politics : The Obama - Clinton Disaster -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: calgal who wrote (73164)	5/30/2012 10:18:16 PM
From: calgal	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 103300

Julie Jacobson/Associated PressDonald Trump endorsed Mitt Romney in February.Just because a sentiment is honest, though, doesn’t mean that it’s correct. “I’m running for office, For Pete’s sake, I can’t have illegals” was both a cynical read on Romney’s undocumented landscaper problem and an entirely accurate one. But “I’m running for president, and I need Donald Trump in my corner” manages to be at once cynical and stupid. It’s stupid because none of the arguments for Trump’s supposed usefulness to Romney make any kind of sense. One narrative, advanced by David Brody of the Christian Broadcasting Network, is that Trump is useful for firing up the base, inspiring the kind of right-wing voters “that Romney doesn’t connect with” because he eschews the Donald’s “flamethrower” attacks. A related possibility, suggested to Robert Schlesinger of U.S. News by an anonymous Republican strategist, is that Romney doesn’t need Trump’s friendship but can’t afford his enmity. More specifically, he fears seeing that enmity translated into a third party campaign. Both of these arguments confuse the existence of a fan base (which Trump certainly has) with the existence of a meaningful constituency (which he almost certainly does not). For the Brody argument to be correct, for instance, there would need to be a pool of conservative voters who are persuaded that Barack Obama is not only a failed president but an illegitimate Manchurian candidate, and yet whose motivations to vote against Obama in November are weak enough that they need an orange-haired reality television star (with no conservative bona fides to speak of) to flog them into action. This seems mildly implausible: Anyone who thrills to Trump’s slashing attacks on the president probably isn’t sitting this election out. Nor are they likely to throw their vote away on a third party candidate. For the Trump third party peril to be a real threat to Romney, the Donald would need to cobble together a coalition of the non-ideological and the disaffected of the sort that lifted celebrities like Jesse Ventura and Arnold Schwarzenegger into political office. This scenario is modestly more plausible than the idea that Trump’s fusillades might somehow be crucial to turning out the Republican base. (At the very least, he’s closer to the profile of a typical third party spoiler than a genteel establishmentarian like Michael Bloomberg.) Except that everything we know about Trump suggests that there is no possibility whatsoever that he would put his boasting to the test of an actual election, given the likelihood that he’d come away with an embarrassingly small percentage of the vote. His third party rumblings are like his birther bluster – sound and fury, signifying only ego. Indeed, precisely because Trump’s highest goal is so transparently the perpetuation of his own celebrity, his latest attention-seeking stunt offers Romney an almost cost-free chance to repudiate a figure who’s notionally to his “right” (though in reality lacks any ideological commitment whatsoever) without risking any kind of sustained conservative revolt. Trump isn’t Rush Limbaugh or Sarah Palin: His conservatism is feigned, his right-wing fans are temporary admirers with no deep commitment to his brand or cause, and hardly anyone in the conservative media is likely to rise to his defense. Given the bad publicity he’s obviously capable of generating for Romney’s campaign, then, giving Trump the stiff-arm would not only be the right thing to do but the crafty thing as well. The fact that Romney thinks otherwise suggests that underneath his public cynicism lurks something more troubling: A deep miscalculation about which votes he needs to win and how.