One of two things is about to happen.
Donald Trump could win a close election. Republicans will heave an enormous sigh of relief. During the summer, Trump offered to make John Kasich his running mate, offering to put Kasich in charge of both domestic policy and foreign policy. (What’s left? Outer space policy?) There’s no reason to believe he didn’t offer the same deal to Mike Pence.
Trump only wants the prestige and the media attention. He doesn’t want to do the work. He wants to live in the White House with Melania, jet around in Air Force One, and make everybody who hates him say “President Trump.”
That means Pence would effectively be the shadow president. And that wouldn’t be a bad thing. Ted Cruz might mount a primary challenge in 2020, but he’d be better advised to wait until 2024.
More probably, Hillary Clinton is going to win a close election. Her propaganda bureaus in the so-called “news media” will ensure that she wins re-election. So for the next eight years we’ll see more corruption in the White House. Hopefully Bill will be more discreet about his sexual escapades this time. House Republicans will impeach her sometime around 2022, just like Bill. Democrats in the Senate will prevent her removal from office, just like Bill.
Hillary will replace Scalia, Ginsburg, Breyer, Kennedy and Thomas with 50-year-old ideological clones of Kagan and Sotomayor. The extreme left will control the Supreme Court with a 7-2 majority for the next 25 years.
Jerks have won elections before? But Trump, a billionaire, is also a cheapskate.
He doesn’t have a Get Out The Vote (GOTV) operation. This ensures that Republican voters get to the polling place and vote, or get absentee ballots. Hillary has a massive GOTV effort, particularly in critical swing states like Ohio and Florida.
He refused to hire more than a tiny handful of professionals to run his campaign and, as a result, an enormous number of mistakes have been made. The absence of a GOTV effort was just the biggest mistake. Following are a few of the others.
- He’s wasting scarce advertising dollars on billboards and TV ads in states that are either safe Trump states, or safe Hillary states. All of this money should have been spent in swing states.
- He ignored the swing state of Nevada until it was far too late. Nevada does a lot of early voting: possibly 80% of the total votes this year. But he dropped everything and flew out to Nevada for a rally this Saturday after early voting had closed. Time is an even more precious resource than money. That time, effort and money was wasted.
- In some of the swing states, Hillary is outspending him 40-to-1 on TV advertising. This is just plain stupid.
- Trump walks into rhetorical traps laid for him by the Hillary campaign. The only intelligent response to the Democratic National Convention speech of Khizr Khan, a Muslim American whose son served in the US Army and died in Iraq, was to thank him for his sacrifice. Instead, Trump said exactly what Hillary wanted him to say.
- Trump has consistently alienated Latino voters with his rhetoric about illegal immigrants. Like his response to Khizr Khan, this could have been more sensitive and vastly more effective. Republicans need to drive a wedge between legal Latinos and illegal immigrants. This isn’t the way to do it.
- Trump is reaching out to African-Americans and he is on target, since the Democratic Party is treating urban blacks as if they were slaves on a cotton plantation. Anyone who makes the police worried is treated like an escaped slave. But his efforts are, once again, rhetorically clumsy.
More money would have prevented most or all of these mistakes. Trump said early in the campaign that he was going to run on his own money. And of course, he’s a billionaire. If he had spent the money he promised to spend, and if he had spent it wisely on staff, on a GOTV effort, and on advertising in the swing states, this race wouldn’t even be close.
Because Hillary Clinton and her husband are criminals, and it becomes more and more obvious every week. They’ve been running a pay to play political machine that makes the Daley machine in Chicago look like a Boy Scout troop holding a bake sale, dating back to the Marc Rich pardons. (As Dennis Miller said, savor the flavorful irony of this: a Democratic president pardons two oil billionaires …. named Rich and Green ….. for tax evasion.)
As FBI Director James Comey has confirmed, Hillary’s unsecured private server contained hundreds of classified documents. As the New York Times has confirmed, it was probably hacked by hostile foreign powers. Comey said she was “extremely careless” with our national security. I call it “reckless and irresponsible.” And on the few occasions she’s been asked a tough question about it, she looks straight into the nearest camera lens and lies like a rug.
Bill Clinton has been accused of sexual assault and sexual harassment by roughly a dozen women. He is the Gropemaster In Chief. Comparisons with Bill Cosby are appropriate. And Hillary became his Enabler In Chief, by attacking the credibility of his last accuser so that he can move on to the next one.
It should have been an easy win. But Trump is a cheapskate.