You have to question the unbridled nerve of those European elitists when the London Times can describe a U.S. presidential candidate as “so blatantly out of touch with reality, so wild in his foreign policy, so backward in his domestic ideas and so inconsistent in his thinking.” No, not 2016 Republican nominee Donald Trump – 1964 GOP nominee Barry Goldwater. It’s a description that the Democrats might well trot out with their other distorted assessments, if the Hillary Clinton machine wasn’t so ardently busy focusing on the outrageous caricature of Donald Trump as rapacious sexual stalker and failed businessman.
Clinton meanwhile is increasingly seeing herself as Goldwater’s opponent in that faraway election – Lyndon Johnson. Johnson trounced Goldwater, who didn’t quite received 39 per cent of the popular vote. His numbers are eerily reminiscent of some of the skewed polling that is appearing right now that reassuringly promises Democrats that Trump is interminably stuck at 40 per cent support and that Clinton is not only destined for a landslide but will take a large portion of the Congress with her, taking the House and Senate on her coattails.
Clinton has no coattails nor does she even wear the clothes of any political conviction.
If Hillary is beginning to see herself as a political comet to whom luckless Democrats can attach themselves, she is living in a world of abject denial. This lifetime political schemer remains a viscerally unpopular and unloved politician with a very limited reserve of charm. She has lived her political life devoted only to the promotion and ascendancy of Hillary Clinton and no one else. And she couldn’t be more unlike LBJ, who, love or despise his appeal to Big Government, knew why he wanted to become president and possessed an oversized and exuberant personality that charmed voters.
Clinton possesses neither of the above: completely at a loss to explain what she wants to achieve in the White House and wielding the awkward manner of a reception crasher who knows she wasn’t invited.
She has also apparently fallen under the spell of her own propaganda and is beginning to believe in the inevitability of her own candidacy.
Which is precisely where Trump wants her right now in this final stretch. If you saw the Second Gettysburg Address over the weekend, you could not but be struck that this man, so eschewed and ridiculed by the so-called conservatives of the GOP elites, has really hit his ideological stride and become as much a champion of individual liberty as Goldwater ever was.
If you don’t think he articulated a Lincolnesque “new birth of freedom,” he certainly succeeded in attaining some vital common sense in an increasingly psychotic world of U.S. politics.
Goldwater famously declared that “extremism in the defence of liberty is no vice” at the 1964 Republican convention. Trump is saying: liberty in the defence against Democratic extremism – on the environment, on government spending, on no-holds barred abortion – is no vice. You could see and hear the optimism building in Saturday’s Gettysburg crowd. When he promised to stop sending more protection money to the United Nations for their climate change racket, people enjoyed a moment of sheer political clarity and thanked God that someone finally understands their sheer frustration with and profound grievances with this Obama administration and its threatened Clintonian clone.
Trump would do well to cease discussing the fruits of the Hillary smear machine and keep talking about individual liberty and how it will be a shrinking commodity – along with a host of other economic factors – in a Clinton presidency.
The day has dawned for unthinking “conservatives,” who, in their contempt for Trump, are securing the ascendancy of Clinton, to start thinking what how potentially catastrophic is their rancor and resentment.
It is time to emerge from the ramparts of their dying and increasingly irrelevant conservative periodicals and join the fight for freedom.
Follow David on Twitter @David Krayden
