America is now barrelling towards a general election between a former United States secretary of state and a former judge of Celebrity Apprentice.
In the blue corner, a candidate who started her career at the Children’s Defence Fund. In the red corner, a candidate whose legal defence fund is fighting claims of a fake university.
One candidate dotes on her granddaughter. The other says he would date his daughter. One watched the Osama Bin Laden raid unfold in the White House situation room. The other has watched Wolf Blitzer’s Situation Room on CNN. It’s time for political realism to meet reality TV.
“Our commander-in-chief has to be able to defend our country, not embarrass it,” Hillary Clinton said in her victory speech on Tuesday night, as she turned decisively towards the general election. “Engage our allies, not alienate them. Deter our adversaries, not embolden them.” She railed against Donald Trump’s plans to deport 12 million undocumented immigrants and ban Muslims from travelling to the US. “To be great, we can’t be small,” she said, making no mention of Trump’s fingers.
Her leading GOP rival has not yet got his child-sized hands on the nomination and the self-destruct button of the Republican party. There is a slender chance he could be denied a first-round win at the party’s nominating convention in Cleveland in July. If that happens, he could happily deny the GOP any chance of victory and unity by urging his supporters to stay at home in November. “The fact is that we have to bring our party together,” Trump said, after revealing he had recently talked to the House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell. “We have to bring it together.”
In the meantime, he could take plenty of comfort in denying the dreams of the candidate he respectfully referred to as Little Marco. Rubio, who barnstormed futilely through his home state with an armful of establishment endorsers, liked to campaign by talking about an optimistic new American century of prosperity, motherhood and apple pie. But his own party decided they much preferred the last century of racial resentment, fist-fighting rallies and flirtations with the Ku Klux Klan.
Rubio collapsed under the weight of his own charming contradictions. His defeat speech was a curiously defiant and nonsensical combination of hope and dismay. He lamented the Trump-style “politics of resentment against other people”. Then he made it painfully clear he resented the very Republican establishment that had rallied to his campaign in recent weeks.
Rubio claimed the establishment was more interested in winning elections than standing on their conservative principles. Somehow he contrived to run a campaign that neither won elections nor stood on its principles.
“I want to congratulate Marco Rubio on running a really tough campaign,” Trump said without a hint of sarcasm. “He’s got a really great future.”
With his departure from the race, Rubio leaves the John Kasich campaign to stand alone against the sucker-punch Trump campaign. Kasich is a decent-sounding man with a tendency to gesticulate wildly with his hands and his emotions. He told the story on Tuesday how he had tried to sneak into a Cleveland restaurant for dinner, but found instead a crowd of diners cheering him on. “Please don’t do that,” he said, “because you’re going to make me cry.”
If that was his victory speech, this is not a fair fight. The only thing that could make Trump cry at a restaurant is the taste of one of his own steaks. “Look,” Kasich said as he celebrated his big win in his home state of Ohio, “this is all I got”. At this point, he held open his suit jacket to reveal no counterfeit watches, concealed weapons or wads of cash. It’s a wonderful testament to today’s Republican party that you can measure a candidate’s credentials by the lack of contraband. However, you can also measure Kasich’s grasp on reality by his promise to run all the way to Cleveland. He might have been talking about the convention, or he might have been thinking about that restaurant again. The Ides of March are a fine day to let the delusions and wishful thinking come to end.
The polls were correct: The front-runners are running away with the race. It’s time to count real delegates, not measure some notional concept of momentum. The numbers don’t lie, even if the candidates accuse each other of doing just that. Bernie Sanders’s lopsided losses on Tuesday night drove yet another nail into the coffin of his die-hard fans. His defeats were so crushing in Florida and North Carolina that he dropped at least another 100 delegates behind Hillary in just those two states. Those defeats wiped out the combined delegate leads he took out of every state he won across the US to date. To put that into context, once Hillary fell that far behind in 2008, the nomination contest was effectively over.
It took the political philosopher known as Donald Trump to distil what Tuesday means for the presidential candidates left standing. “If you get to the end, you can handle a lot of things, including pressure,” he said, “because there’s nothing like it: Lies, deceit, viciousness, disgusting reporters, horrible people.” For the party of Ronald Reagan, it’s mourning in America.
— Guardian News & Media Ltd
Richard Wolffe is a Guardian US columnist, as well as chief digital and marketing officer at Global Citizen, a non-profit organisation dedicated to ending extreme poverty.
