So Really, Who Among Them is Ready for Campaign 2020?

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I’ve taken a few days to digest what the paid pundits digested immediately after last week’s Democratic debates. And now I’m telling anyone who listens that the quality I’m looking for among the 20+ candidates shouting, “Me! Me! Me!” is assurance that they’re aware and prepared enough for the unconventional-to-berserk campaign that is coming at us like a freight train in a mountain tunnel.

Here’s an example of what I mean. It’s something the cable news pundit class mentions a lot. Namely, “How will [Candidate X] look standing up there on the debate stage next to Donald Trump?” To which I say, like the crazed old geezer ranting at his TV, “Why should we assume Trump will show up for a debate?”

After everything else he’s done since riding down that gilded escalator, is it really so implausible to imagine him looking at poll numbers that never poke up above 42%, along with non-Fox media’s drumbeat incantation of his wooze-inducing corruptions and lies and say, to paraphrase the great Walter Sobchek of “The Big Lebowski”, “[Bleep] it dude, let’s go hold a rally.”

And yes, I’m serious.

Throughout 2016 Trump was the irresistible novelty object that cable news couldn’t get enough of. (They gave him $5 billion in free advertising.) The public regarded him as “fresh” and “entertaining”, even if they also knew he was a fraud and a buffoon. He wasn’t taken seriously.

In 2020 the “charm” of novelty is long, long gone. Trump’s 42% will harden around him. But the antipathy toward him from everyone who isn’t grazing on the droppings of Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity is as hardened and intense as an extruded obsidian boulder.

Trump may be “a [bleeping] moron” to quote his former Secretary of State, but the one thing he knows fer sure is how to protect his brand, and that doesn’t happen when you walk out in front of 60-70 million people and take A: Questions from people who aren’t named Tucker and Laura (Ingraham), and B: Be exposed to accusation, follow-up and cross-examination from a Democrat who, unlike Hillary Clinton and everyone else on the planet, believes they’re coasting to an easy victory.

As I also keep saying — call me Nostralambertus — it is entirely likely, if not fully inevitable, that we are entering a campaign cycle unlike anything we have ever seen. A heretofore unimaginable [bleep]storm of hysteria, duplicity and sabotage.

Not only do we — and the Democratic candidate — have to prepare for Trump saying and doing anything to win reelection, (and avoid a torrent of criminal indictments), but we have to bake in the reality that Mitch McConnell, who notoriously refused to cooperate with the U.S. intelligence agency’s plan in the fall of 2016 to warn the public about Russian election interference, and since than has stifled every election-security measure pushed up toward the Senate, will pull every lever he can to protect Trump from himself, (and McConnell’s Senate majority from Trump.)

The long-standing agreement that major party presidential candidates submit to televised debates? I have two words for you: Merrick Garland. (Candidates are not required to debate.)

Any out-of-left field legal challenge on the trifling debate business can, like everything else, be shuttled off into the court system … which McConnell and his capos have been carefully stocking for years now. Hell, in that system we might even get a decision by Inauguration Day 2021.

So yeah, I watched the debates last week and constantly asked myself, “Can this guy/gal beat Trump and McConnell at their game? Are they savvy and, frankly, cynically-minded enough to anticipate how foul and nefarious the 2020 race will (not ‘can’) become?”

Besides all the vanity candidates — Marianne Williamson, Bill DeBlasio, Eric Swallwell, Jay Inslee, John Hickenlooper, Andrew Yang, Tim Ryan, John Delaney, Tulsi Gabbard — this personal criteria of mine also red-lined Joe Biden.

Joe’s game, a lot like traditional media outside New York and D.C., is so deeply invested in respect for tradition and the imagery of institutions, he is nowhere nimble or open enough to innovation to respond adequately — much less preemptively — to unprecedented cynicism, recklessness and border-line criminality.

So “who then” you may ask?

Next time: The premiere of Nosatralambertus’s “2020 LameHorse Power Rankings.”

Don’t you dare miss it.


9 thoughts on “So Really, Who Among Them is Ready for Campaign 2020?”

  1. Good outside the box thinking. I agree this is a distinct possibility, and that if Trump felt that it would help his re-election, he’d be willing to go for it.

    The problem would be his ego. He thinks he is a great debater (and negotiator, and….etc.), and I am certain he believes that he could best any and all of the Democrats.

    Would he be able to resist being called a coward by Kamala? (or any woman, or man).

    But you are absolutely right, the thing that he loves more than anything are the rallies. He bathes in the adulation of the crowd. He loves having people surrounding him and telling him how great he is which explains the turnover in his White House).

    Maybe he’ll do one debate, and then quit, because he was disrespected. I don’t know, but I do see all sorts of parallels between Trump and Jesse Ventura. Saving face, not being a loser, being constantly surrounded by his sycophants–these are the things most important to him, the things he will try to preserve at all costs.

  2. Warren, Buttigieg, and Harris. Please. Let it be one of them. Buttigieg, either at the top or bottom of the ticket, is likely to bring in a large energized voting bloc that could carry the Senate as well.

    • A recent poll said 75% of voters 35 and younger are voting Democrat … when they vote. The Democrats better make sure the eventual candidate excites that crowd at least as much as old, familiar white guys thrill 55 year-old blue collar dudes in NE Ohio.

  3. Trump may be unpopular, but if the Democrats continue to promote immigration policies far to the left of what the majority of Americans are comfortable with, they may have a problem. Although most Americans are not in favor of open borders, the candidates were talking about policies which would functionally be just that if they were put in place. Trump could do an ok job debating them by seizing that Achilles’ heel.

    They should be pitching to the broader electorate, not the SJW crowd, and their failure to do so exhibits just as much hubris (or stupidity) as Hillary showed when she thought she was a shoe-in. Unless, of course, they are working from some grand strategy I don’t know about — like faking to the left before faking to the right.

    • The progressive position … this summer … requires everyone to be more or less in favor of free everything. Nuance and qualifiers are the enemy if you want to rabid anti-Trumpers in your caucus corner. Buttegieg is right when he says illegal immigrants will still get treatment in emergency rooms and we, the insurance-paying public, will pay for it just like we would if we gave every “illegal” free preventative care. But, come on, is it really so tough to talk to voters — interested enough 16 months before the election — about how proper hi-tech border security and other common sense immigration issues must be in place, simultaneous with a “path to citizenship” or more work visas — whatever — before newcomers get medical care at gummint expense? It’s an eye-roller.

      • I am waiting for one of the candidates to make an impassioned, nuanced, glowing case for immigration. I think that there is a case to be made, one that could reach a majority of Americans, even crotchety baby boomers! Make Immigration Great Again!

        Trump has an overwhelmingly negative, gloomy aspect. We need a candidate who can turn that against him. A candidate who can say that America is not going to hell in a handbasket, and immigration is one of the things that makes America great!

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