Stamp Out the H8!

America's Worst Political Consultant on Donald Trump

from the WSJ

Trump Is the Democrats’ Dream Nominee
He could win the primaries but would get creamed in the presidential election.
By KARL ROVE
Dec. 9, 2015 6:48 p.m. ET

Donald Trump’s call on Monday for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” is unlikely to blow up his campaign. No matter how outrageous his statement seems to most Americans, his supporters apparently eat up stuff like that.

Forty-six percent of Mr. Trump’s backers say that their minds are made up and won’t change before the primaries, according to a Dec. 2 Quinnipiac poll. Only 33% of Ted Cruz’s supporters, and 23% of Marco Rubio’s, say that they are sure of their choice.

Apparently no matter what Mr. Trump does, he continues to poll generally in the mid- to high-20s, with an occasional survey putting him in the 30s. In mid-August he dipped to 22% in the Real Clear Politics average, but he hasn’t fallen below that mark since. This high floor, however, is matched by a low ceiling.

His antics—calling his GOP competitors “losers” and “clowns,” insulting Sen. John McCain for having been captured in Vietnam, mocking a reporter with a disability, crudely attacking Fox News’s Megyn Kelly—have made it difficult for him to grow his base. Almost as many Republicans (26%) told Quinnipiac that they will “definitely not support” him in the primaries as said they back him (27%).

The picture for the general election is even bleaker. The Donald’s favorability rating in the Quinnipiac survey was the worst of the 12 Democratic and Republican candidates tested: 35% favorable to 57% unfavorable. That was lower even than Mrs. Clinton’s 44% to 51%. Dig into the demographic breakdowns and Mr. Trump’s numbers look abysmal. Sixty percent of independents dislike him, along with 69% of voters aged 18-34, 84% of Latinos and 87% of blacks.

He and Mrs. Clinton were the only two of six candidates to be upside down on Quinnipiac’s question about honesty. The pair were nearly tied: 35% found the real estate mogul trustworthy and 59% did not; 36% trusted the former secretary of state and 60% didn’t. A Nov. 22 Fox News poll showed similar results. Mr. Trump was seen as honest and trustworthy by 41% of voters, and not by 55%. Mrs. Clinton’s numbers were marginally worse, at 38% honest, and 58% not.

But Mrs. Clinton beat Mr. Trump in the Quinnipiac poll on three important characteristics: By 67% to 32%, voters thought she has “the right kind of experience to be president.” His numbers were almost the reverse: 34% to 63%.

When Quinnipiac asked whether each candidate “cares about the needs and problems of people like you,” 46% said Mrs. Clinton does, and 51% said she doesn’t. If that sounds bad, take a look at Mr. Trump’s figures: 36% said he cares about people like them, and 59% said he doesn’t. Among Hispanics his numbers were 14% to 83%, and among blacks 9% to 88%.

When asked if each candidate “shares your values,” 42% of voters said Mrs. Clinton does, and 55% that she doesn’t. This might be problematic for the likely Democratic nominee, depending on who winds up as her Republican opponent. But, again, Mr. Trump’s numbers were worse. Only 35% said he shares their values, and 61% said he doesn’t.

All these numbers combine to make Mr. Trump the weakest Republican tested by Quinnipiac in head-to-head matchups against Mrs. Clinton, to whom he loses 41% to 47%. Among young voters, he loses by 20 points, 32% to 52%. He receives only 13% of Hispanic votes—less than half of what Mitt Romney did in 2012—to Mrs. Clinton’s 76%.

The Donald doesn’t compensate by beating Mr. Romney’s nearly 20-point margin among whites: He leads Mrs. Clinton among whites by only 12 points, 50% to 38%. So although Mr. Trump’s antics may not drive away his current supporters, they make him unlikely to win the White House.

Yet if the Republican field remains large and splintered through mid-March, Mr. Trump could become the Republican nominee by winning states with 25% to 30% of the vote. Then Democrats would attack Mr. Trump, a target-rich candidate, with an endless stream of ads.

Perhaps they would open with his immortal line from the Cleveland debate—that he had “taken advantage of the laws of this country” in having his companies declare bankruptcy four times. This footage might be followed by compelling testimony from contractors, small-business people and bondholders whom he stiffed. America has never elected a president with that kind of a dubious business record.

Donald Trump would be the dream opponent for the Democratic Party. We’ll see in the next four months whether that matters to Republicans.

Mr. Rove helped organize the political-action committee American Crossroads and is the author of “The Triumph of William McKinley: Why the 1896 Election Still Matters,” just out from Simon & Schuster. He also blew hundreds of millions pushing unelectable establishment candidates and RINOs.

The "Narrative" is Never Wrong....

Naval lookouts in the last century were advised not to stare directly at dim objects in the dark because the human eye's night vision receptors were clustered away from the center of the retina. If they looked to one side they would more clearly see what was in the center of the field of view. By analogy, the best way to examine events in America might be to look off indirectly -- at the elections in Venezuela perhaps -- in order to see dead ahead more clearly.

This is especially true because the political receptors of many pundits are getting jaded. Peter Wehner at Commentary, for example, is almost shellshocked by the president's repetitiveness. Wehner is tired of listening to the same old, same old and has nearly tuned out. "If you want to witness an adamantine mind at work, you could do a whole lot worse than observe the 44th president of the United States. Barack Obama is the most rigidly ideological president of my lifetime, a man who has a nearly blind adherence to a particular ideology (progressivism). It’s a disturbing, if at times a psychologically fascinating, thing to witness."

Wehner knows the stock responses to every terrorist attack: nothing to do with Islam; "don't do stupid shit"; "don't be racist." Or that all-purpose retort to every demand for power: "you didn't build that." Why talk to a man with a mind as closed as Obama's, Wehner's article asks.

You talk in order to maintain the illusion a conversation is still possible. The voters in Venezuela, after 17 years of voting Chavismo into power, believe they can vote Maduro out of office. The opposition may now have 113 seats in a 167-member assembly, a two thirds majority. Maduro gone, right? Well not necessarily. As the Chavista president reminded the voters: voting out socialism is no ordinary matter. Whatever you do, you can't stop the revolution.

Maduro's arguments are another way of asserting what we hear from time to time. When the "gains" of a messianic system become too great to reverse, they become too important to ever be given back. Other projects of equal weight, like the formation of the European Union, are of such importance that they adhere to the principle of "vote until you get it right." For example, Ireland and Denmark were put through two referendums until they accepted the desired result. In the things that really matter, the moral arc of history -- not uninformed public opinion -- gets the last word.

Nowhere is this more true than of Islamism. As Recep Tayyip Erdoğan so memorably put it: democracy is like a bus. “Once I get to my stop, I’m getting off." If Maduro is riding on the Bolivarian express, Erdogan is on the Caliphate Special. You can't stop the music. Nobody can stop the music.

In reality we don't have a conversation, we have a monologue.

Having looked indirectly at peripheral objects like Venezuela, the EU or Turkey, it may now be possible to see Barack Obama's speech on the San Bernardino terror attack more clearly. For here the adamantine mind of the president is on full display. His superficial message is the same reassuring theme as always, along FDR's lines of "the only thing to fear is fear itself." Terrorism is not "between America and Islam." Just give him more power and rest easy at home.

Muslim-Americans are our friends and our neighbors. Our co-workers. Our sports heroes. And, yes, they are our men and women in uniform who are willing to die in defense of our country. We have to remember that. ...

It is our responsibility to reject religious tests on who we admit into this country. It's our responsibility to reject proposals that Muslim-Americans should somehow be treated differently. Because when we travel down that road, we lose. That kind of divisiveness, that betrayal of our values plays into the hands of groups like ISIL.

Yet having coated his remarks with that syntactic sugar, Obama gets down to a very grim business. And what a contrast it is. He ticks off a program at cruel variance with the outward message. What we need to do to stay alive, he says, is control guns, clamp down on social media, review the visa-waiver program. The fine print of the speech is such a negation of the soaring rhetoric that it might as well be from another speech.

A moment's consideration of the speech makes it apparent that "the only thing to fear is not fear itself." The main thing to fear is falsification. The administration is deathly afraid of admitting it got it wrong from the beginning. Or worse yet, admitting where it was going all along. That would ruin its aura of benevolent omniscience. Hope and Change in conflict with Islamism can neither be explained nor managed within the framework of the Narrative. The result is two messages in the speech: the pablum of the Narrative overlaid with the creeping fascism of the details.

But here again one needs to look away to see things clearly. It's not just Obama who is putting the fist in the velvet glove. Across the Atlantic, France's state of emergency could be extended indefinitely. Europe is creating a central border force with authority to override any national sovereignty. If we're surrounded by "friends and neighbors" then we better leave the neighborhood.

Bit by bit the world is both shutting down and boarding up. For the first time in history, online sales to each in his atomized individual home outpaced sales from stores. "Friends and neighbors" no longer seek excitement in crowds, they hide and arm up, Obama's assurances notwithstanding.

Opinions are only spoken in code -- ask Loretta Lynch why. In a bizarre, almost surreal process we are told there are no enemies to fear even as we are warned to lower our voices lest we provoke that which does not officially exist -- yet of which we are afraid.

The administration's attempts to square the circle are almost ludicrous. In a classic opening paragraph disculpating Obama from his inaccurate Thanksgiving prediction of safety just days before the San Bernardino attack, the New York Times invoked presidential ignorance as the excuse for error.

The day before Thanksgiving, President Obama reassured Americans there was “no specific and credible intelligence indicating a plot on the homeland.” Seven days later came an explosion of gunfire and the deadliest terrorist attack in America since Sept. 11, 2001.

What may be most disturbing is not that Mr. Obama was wrong, but that apparently he was right. By all accounts so far, the government had no concrete intelligence warning of the assault on Wednesday that killed 14 people in San Bernardino, Calif.

It's as frank an admission of failure as ever graced the pages of the Gray Lady. The article quotes sources who say that only by curbing the Fourth, Second and First Amendments can the administration make up for the shortcomings of the FBI, CIA and NSA. "Unable to curb the availability of guns at home or extremist propaganda from overseas, the authorities may have to rely more on encouraging Americans to watch one another and report suspicions. Federal and local governments already have programs urging friends, families and neighbors to identify people targeted for recruitment."

Pavlik Morozov, meet Barack Obama. The only question is, who does little Pavlik monitor: ISIS or the NRA?

It's quite a price to pay for a bill to fend off a danger which doesn't exist, but it is only the first of many down payments that will be made to maintain the false illusions of the adamantine mind.