![]() ![]() But here’s the thing: None of that is new. There will be race-baiting and misogynistic and/or homophobic insults, and howls of protest about how anybody who mentions those things is the real racist and sexist and America-hater. (Yeah, we’ll get to what Thomas Jefferson or his flunkies said about John Adams.) That fact is certain to ramp up the melodrama, and drive the discourse deeper into the gutter, in more ways than we can possibly predict. And let’s not underplay the fact that for the first time in our history, the campaign will involve candidates known to be of different sexes. ![]() A Trump-Clinton debate will be like Room 217 in the Overlook Hotel: You know it’s teeming with unspeakable eldritch horror, but you can’t stay away.īut will the 2016 general election campaign really be the ugliest and nastiest in American history? I mean, there’s definitely a chance of that - and, as l’affaire Taco Bowl indicated, in the social-media age the ugliness can be spread more thickly and widely across the cultural landscape, and with greater speed, than ever before. My immediate reaction is to claim that even for someone who was watched as many gruesome, awkward and interminable films as I have that sounds too awful, and I couldn’t possibly. The prospect of televised debates between those two … I’m still not ready to think about that. Our impending Taco Bowl campaign between Trump and Hillary Clinton - OK, fine, Bernie loyalists, you still have a minuscule mathematical shot - is likely to be alternately dismal and terrifying. It’s really going to get fun now, as long as your idea of fun involves a certain degree of masochism, along with the humiliation of our entire country in the eyes of the world. So let’s not pretend that the 2016 primary campaign was no fun. But he’s so doggone decent about it! Kasich’s failure to attract Republican voters in the real world caused actual, physical pain to David Brooks and other steakhouse blowhards of his ilk, and has provoked numerous and hilarious bouts of introspection about how the Brooks Brothers crowd could so badly have misunderstood the mood of a nation they have barely visited. Sure, Kasich wants to ban abortion, cut taxes on the rich and abolish the minimum wage. He’s this year’s winner of the Jon Huntsman Award, for most perfect embodiment of what the insufferable pundit class wishes the Republican Party were like. But compared to the guy John Boehner recently described as “Lucifer in the flesh,” Tricky Dick was pretty much Winston Churchill wrapped in Captain Kangaroo.Īs for Kasich, he was basically a troll, both in the newfangled information-economy sense and the Brothers Grimm sense. I know that’s an impossibly high standard, but seriously - who else you got? Richard Nixon was a devious and damaged person, who quite likely suffered from mental illness. He was quite possibly the most loathsome person ever to run for president of the United States and be taken somewhat seriously. We’ve all spent the week beating up on Cruz, and for good reason. He loves Hispanics! Was that a stupid racist gaffe or a stupid strategic masterstroke? In 2016, is there any difference? And how would we know?Ĭruz and Kasich both richly deserved their fates, so let’s start there. And it was the week when Donald Trump, now universally described as the “presumptive” Republican nominee (a pompous and thoroughly unnecessary coinage), launched his fall campaign with the infamous Taco Bowl tweet. It was the week when Ted Cruz and John Kasich crashed into the unavoidable orange iceberg of Trump-ness from opposite directions. Last week was a strangely gratifying one if you believe that politics is always a ruthless and dirty affair, and that it does no one any good to pretend otherwise. ![]()
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