Watching the Democrats’ smoothly staged, potently scripted convention last week, voters could easily think that Hillary Hillary has this election in the bag.
The critiques of Donald Trump made devastatingly clear that he’s a preposterous, dangerous candidate for the presidency. The case for Hillary was compelling, and almost every party leader who mattered showed up to make it.
That included United States President Barack Obama, who answered Trump’s shockingly gloomy vision of America with a stirring assurance that we have every reason to feel good. Hillary forcefully amplified that assessment. She peddled uplift, not anxiety.
But in 2016 is that the smarter sell? Are prettier words the better pitch? They made for a more emotional, inspiring convention, so much so that many conservatives loudly grieved the way in which Democrats had appropriated the rousing patriotism and can-do American spirit that Republicans once owned. But Trump has surrendered optimism to Hillary at precisely the moment when it’s a degraded commodity, out of sync with the national mood. That’s surely why he let go of it so readily.
Hillary has many advantages in this race. I wouldn’t bet against her. But she nonetheless faces possible troubles, and the potential mismatch of her message and the moment is a biggie. She has to exploit the opportunity of Trump’s excessive bleakness without coming across as the least bit complacent. That’s no easy feat, but it is a necessary one. The numbers don’t lie. In a Gallup poll two weeks ago, just 17 per cent of respondents said that the country was on the right track, while 82 per cent said it was on the wrong track. In an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll shortly before that, the corresponding figures were 18 per cent and 73 per cent.
Exploiting the horror
And while that degree of negativity is unusually pronounced, a general pessimism about America has persisted for well over a decade, paving the way for Trump. If it has now crept considerably higher than that, it’s no wonder, and it’s not because Trump is talking so much trash. It’s because the world is presenting so many nightmares, each fast on the heels of another.
In early July, five police officers were assassinated in Dallas, followed by three more in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. In the last two months, there was the massacre in Orlando, Florida, followed by the massacre in Nice, France, not to mention the massacres in Afghanistan and Syria and Iraq or the French priest whose throat was slit last week. Many Americans sense that they are living amid pervasive, random terror. And yet terrorism went entirely unmentioned on the first day of the Democratic convention.
The Republicans of course took a different, darker tack — Trump in particular. Much was made of how he cherry-picked his crime statistics for the most rancid fruit, warping reality to fill the streets of America with as much blood and foreboding as he did.
But if he got the particulars largely wrong, he got the apprehension mostly right, and Democrats’ rebuttals since then have failed to grasp how strongly his panicked portrait of America resonates with many Americans.
His incessant vows to “make America great again” have prompted Democrats’ increasingly frequent insistences that it’s plenty great already, an outlook that may well seem dismissive to some Americans and just plain out of touch to others. Trump’s stormy word cloud complements their emotional weather.
Trump seized on her convention-speech optimism and used it against her in a series of tweets last Thursday night and Friday morning, complaining that she forgot “to mention the many problems of our country” and refused “to mention Radical Islam”. He also tweeted this bulletin: “Two policemen just shot in San Diego, one dead. It is only getting worse. People want LAW AND ORDER!”
I’m doubtful that a majority of them want it in all capital letters, followed by an exclamation point, from an egomaniac with as little intellectual as typographical subtlety.
But to guarantee his defeat, Hillary needs to calibrate her voice more deftly than she typically does. She’s right that we’re “stronger together”. But she can’t forget how weak many Americans feel right now. Yes, “love trumps hate.” But the hateful currents running through America are powerful ones, and they’re born of a disillusionment that she minimises at her peril.
— New York Times News Service
Frank Bruni is a writer and author of Born Round and Ambling into History.
