The 2020 campaign is going to be so ugly
by digby
Ed Kilgore wrote an interesting piece on Trump’s (non) strategy. He points out that the normal approaches would be to try to expand his 40% by doing some outreach to the more moderate factions of the GOP to try to broaden his appeal. But he simply won’t (or can’t) do that so they are stuck trying to recreate a 2016 style victory through cheating, enabling foreign help and a full blown character assault on the opposition.
He concludes with this:
The more you think it through, the likely Trump strategy will be to do everything imaginable to drive down the positive sentiments associated with their Democratic opponent, perhaps enlisting those hated godless liberal news media assets who are driven by “fairness” to reinforce negative narratives about the candidate they are presumed to favor. The virtual certainty of a Trump campaign that exceeds in sheer savagery anything this country has ever seen before should serve as a warning to Democrats about how they think about their own nominating process. I argued earlier this year that Democrats should look for an unbreakable nominee — one with no obvious vulnerabilities in age, background, ideology or character that an absolutely unprincipled Trump campaign might exploit to drag her or him down to his level of unpopularity. Breaking his opponent by any means necessary looks to be Trump’s only avenue for extending his unlikely and heinous hold on the presidency.
He’s right. In order for Trump to wage a campaign at all he’s going to have to try to bring the Democratic opposition down to his level. And he will. Joyfully. I don’t think anyone’s unbreakable by the right wing. When they set their minds to it they can degrade anyone’s reputation. These days they have a fully operational propaganda machine dedicated to false narratives.
But the Democrats can try to find someone who doesn’t have the years and years of baggage that someone like Clinton brought to the table. I don’t know how much it will help but it might around the edges. If they are a strong candidate it might not be quite as easy to give the mushy middle such qualms about voting for the Democrats.
But no matter who it is, they’re going to have to have a very, very thick skin. The GOP has been deft in the dark arts of dirty tricks and personal destruction for decades (can you say Canuck letter? Willie Horton?) and they’ve rached a new level of simple crude character assasination with Trump and the vast army of bots deployed to spread it far and wide. No one will be immune.
We are living through important times. I’m trying to document it, analyze it, keep my sense of humor and perspective even though it is anything but easy. And if you find what we do here to be helpful in understanding what’s happening around us in this wild political era, if stopping by here from time to time gives you a little sense of solidarity with others who are going through their days as gobsmacked by events as you are, I hope you’ll find it in your heart to drop a little something in the Hullabaloo stocking to help me keep the light on for another year so that Tom, Dennis, tristero and I can keep the lights on for another year.
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As always I am immensely grateful for your continued loyalty and interest in my scribbles.
And I wish all of you Very Happy Hollandaise!
cheers — digby
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