The Donald

This blog has been organized around the idea that I have a contribution to make to public discourse.  I try to find topics where what I have to say is different and hopefully more informative than what you can find elsewhere.  But this post is an indulgence.  I am doing it because I want to.  At best it will contain a few gems but I would characterize them as semi-precious at best.  This is substantially below the standard I try to hold myself to when I am writing a post  But I just can't stop myself.  I have to remark on the fact that Donald J. Trump has entered the race on the Republican side for the nomination to become the next President of the United States.

Various pieces of legislation have been facetiously characterized at "the Accountant full employment act" or "the Lawyer full employment act".  The Donald's entry into the race can be and has been characterized as "the Comedian full employment act".  As just one example, David Letterman, who only recently retired from his CBS "The Late Show" gig, popped up on stage a few days ago.  He said that The Donald's announcement had convinced him that his decision to retire was a mistake.  He then read off a The Donald oriented "Top Ten List".  One of the things I am really bad at is comedy so that's all I am going to have to say in a comedic vein.

I welcome The Donald's announcement.  It represents the culmination of a trend that is more than 50 years in the making.  It dates back to at least the 1960 election.  That year John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon squared off in the first presidential debate to be carried live on television.  On paper Nixon was the much better qualified of the two.  He had served in the House of Representative before moving on to the Senate.  From there he moved on to become Vice President for two terms.  Along the way he acquired considerable expertise on both foreign and domestic issues.  Kennedy, on the other hand, had spent only a short time in the Senate and had no obvious in depth expertise on either foreign or domestic issues.  So if the contest was a "battle of the resumes" Nixon should have won in a walk.

But it was not a battle of the resumes.  And conventional wisdom is that in a very close race the deciding factor was Kennedy's performance in the debates and, more specifically, on TV.  The debates were covered simultaneously on both TV and radio.  The consensus among the radio audience was that Nixon won in a relatively close contest.  However, the TV audience rated Kennedy a clear winner.

We saw pretty much of a rerun in 1992 with George H. W. Bush, a man with a long and distinguished resume that was capped by a term as President.  He was challenged by a small state Governor named William Jefferson Clinton with no obvious national credentials.  Again, a battle of the resumes would have put Bush well ahead.  But Clinton impressed the TV audience (by this time no one paid attention to radio any more) and went on to unseat him.

We saw the same sort of thing in 2000 when a Governor with a weak resume (George W. Bush) squared off against a man with a resume almost as impressive as that of Nixon or George H. W. Bush (Al Gore). To a lesser extent we saw the same thing in 2008.  Obama had an extremely thin resume.  And while McCain's resume was not as impressive as others I have mentioned it was definitely more impressive than Obama's.  We definitely do NOT pick our Presidents based on who has the best resume.  So how do we pick the winner?

Back in the day the story was "by some kind of deal between the power brokers in a smoke filled room".  The Primary system was put in place to do away with that system.  We would have a separate mini-election for each party in each state using the Primary system.  A small vestige of the "smoke filled room" system is present in the Caucus system.  The party faithful meet but no longer in secret in a smoke filled room.  Instead a long series of meetings are held in public where everyone can watch and many can participate.  After a winnowing process a public state convention selects delegates pledged to specific candidates that go on to the national convention.  At the national convention the first candidate to 50% plus 1 gets the party nomination.  This complicated process requires a large expert staff, it is said, that knows all the ins and outs of each step so that at each stage the candidate's interests can be protected.

So ok, this is a complex system but at heart it is just a bunch of elections.  How does a candidate win these elections?  It turns out this has been complex too.  You need money to hire all that expert staff.  But you also need more money and more staff to identify supporters and people who can be convinced to become your supporters.  Then you need more money and more staff to engage in an elaborate advertising campaign.  You design, print, and mail targeted messages.  You design produce and air TV commercials.  In the old days you also needed newspaper and radio ads but they have become far less important.  Finally, there is GOTV (Get Out The Vote).  You need more money and more staff to get your supporters to the caucus or primary and make sure they support your candidate. But what about volunteers?  If you are lucky, you have a large and energetic volunteer organization.  Aren't they free?  Volunteers are free but you need more money and more staff to organize and direct them.  That's how it is supposed to work.

What is interesting is that so far The Donald has done none of this.  He personally has a lot of money.  But I expect that it will turn out that he is spending very little of it.  And he is not raising money.  "I'm rich.  I don't need to fund raise.", he says.  And there is no evidence so far of any kind of serious fund raising effort by his campaign.  So what about the rest of it?  Does he have an organization, consultants, a "ground game" operation, ads up on TV, and so on?  Nope!  None of it.  So he is doomed to failure, right?  Again, nope!  He is doing fine, actually better than fine.  He went from being down at one or two percent in the polls and well back in the field to about 15% in the polls and in second or first place.  So what's happening?

I talked above about this candidate or that candidate having a great resume.  It turns out that The Donald has a terrible resume as measured by the standards of yesteryear (experience, expertise, etc.).  Instead what he has is a great resume as measured by modern standards.  He is a whiz at marketing and particularly at marketing himself and most particularly at marketing himself on TV.  He is not doing all the things candidates did (and most candidates still do) to get themselves the nomination (and presumably eventually win the general election).  He is instead "the very model of a modern major candidate", to paraphrase Gilbert and Sullivan.

We have been going down this path for a long time.  I quoted example after example above where the most qualified candidate lost out.  In every case the winner beat out his more qualified (at least on paper) opponent by coming over better on TV.  People just liked (or at least trusted) the winner more than they liked the other guy.  Over time this had a profound influence on how the political media acted.  In the olden days you had a cadre of political reporters who prided themselves on their expertise.  It might have been policy expertise ("so and so has a good/bad foreign policy because of . . .") or electioneering expertise ("so and so is winning/losing the farm/blue collar/etc. vote because of . . .").  This has been totally replaced by "horse race" coverage ("so and so is up/down in the polls").  And the "because of" part has been dropped as being boring.

The fact that "because of" is no longer part of the coverage has had a perverse effect.  Politicians can say whatever they want.  The question is not whether it is true or not but whether it moves the polls in the right direction or not.  The modern definition of "truth" in a political context is "if it moves the polls in the right direction it is true;  if it moves them in the wrong direction it is false".

Now let me state the obvious.  Politicians have always lied.  The '50s featured a lot of talk about a non-existent "bomber gap".  This was replaced in the '60s by talk of an equally non-existent "missile gap".  I pick these examples because one (bomber gap) was successfully used by Republicans against Democrats while the other (missile gap) was successfully used by Democrats against Republicans.  Politicians on both sides of the aisle could only occasionally get away with an outright lie.  They could get away with lying about these particular issues because in both cases the evidence that would have exposed the lie was highly classified.  In other words, the truth would not, and in this case did not, come out until well after the election.  But situations like this used to be fairly rare.

And that's how the game used to be played.  Mostly politicians would exaggerate or cherry pick the evidence.  Only occasionally would they flat out lie.  They only lied if they were confident they could get away with it.  And these safe situations were a fairly rare occurrence.  Mostly they felt that if they strayed too far or too consistently from the truth they would eventually be caught out and pay the price by losing the next election.  That started to change when it became more and more obvious that the press had completely abandoned any interest in content.  In that environment you could tell almost any lie you wanted to and be pretty sure you would be able to get away with it.

The mission of the political press had changed from knowing what was going on and reporting it to the much narrower mission of knowing who was up and who was down and what the trend was.  Now their responsibility to the truth started and ended with verifying that the quotation was accurate and that the poll numbers were correct.  So who was now responsible for pointing out any lies or exaggerations?  The other side.  But the other side was just another bunch of politicians.  They were susceptible to the "don't believe them because they are just trying to score political points" tactic.  All disagreements quickly devolved into "he said - she said" because there was no longer a credible referee around.

We have seen an increasing number of instances of politicians taking advantage of their newfound freedom from accountability.  Wildly untrue charges are now a dime a dozen.  Still most politicians have felt the need for at least some restraint.  But the Donald is not a politician.  He is a "reality" star on TV who is famous mostly for being famous.  In short he is a celebrity.  He has had a couple of decades to hone his craft.  He has exited (at least temporarily) his old reality TV gig in order to move on to his new gig, being a Presidential Candidate.  He made the switch when he was at the top of his game.  And he is applying the very same rules that worked so well for him for so long to his new gig.  So far that has turned out to be a very smart move.  The cardinal rule of being a celebrity is "always be entertaining".  Truth doesn't enter into the equation.

And a recent change to the traditional rules of the political game has played straight into The Donald's hand.  You used to have to run a long complicated gauntlet to get your party's nomination.  You still do.  The first gauntlet you needed to surmount used to be as to make a big splash in the "early" states.  It still is.  Iowa and New Hampshire have adroitly maneuvered to position themselves as "critical early states".  First comes the Iowa Caucus.  Next comes the New Hampshire Primary.  If you don't have enough success in at least one of those two events you are dead.  (After these two events it is a free for all with South Carolina maneuvering vigorously to maintain its "first of the rest" position.)

Iowa and New Hampshire have convinced everyone that any candidate that does not spend a lot of time in state doing small one-on-one "retail" events is doomed to failure.  They have turned the associated circus into a nice tidy little industry in each state.  And, of course, voters in each state love the extra attention.  It doesn't matter if it is true that you must do well in one or both states to have a chance.  It only matters that candidates and their staff believe it.  And historically everyone has believed it.  It is an article of faith that a successful candidate absolutely must shake hands and kiss babies for months in Iowa, New Hampshire, or both.  So serious candidates "do what you gotta do".  Any candidate that doesn't is branded as "not serious".

It is only possible to do this kind of retail politics in a few small states.  For the rest of us it's seeing the candidates on TV.  And one of the most popular TV shows for this has been the candidate "debates".  (The events rarely feature any actual serious debate.)  Heretofore this didn't change the overall trajectory because you still had to win in Iowa and/or New Hampshire.  A bad debate performance could hurt and a good debate performance could help but sufficient "shoe leather" effort in the early states was critical.  In fact, a good or bad showing in one or both states could balance out a bad or good debate performance.  The Donald has now called this  received wisdom into question and he has gotten a big assist in doing this from Fox TV and the GOP.

The Iowa Caucus is the traditional kick-off event for the official election process.  It typically takes place in February of the election year.  That means February, 2016 this time around.  But there will be several debates before then.  The first one is set for August 6, 2015.  It will be televised on Fox TV and Fox has decided to restrict the number of candidates that will make it on stage to 10.  But there are at least 15 "serious" candidates on the GOP side.  If you are not on stage you may be out before Iowa.

How is Fox deciding who to put on stage?  By averaging "national polls".  All of a sudden spending a lot of time in Iowa or New Hampshire is a bad idea.  Instead you want to raise your profile with the general public so that they will select you an a poll.  You need to spend your time in New York City or Los Angeles because that's where the national media is.  You need to be all over the interview shows.  And not just the Sunday politics shows.  Now you need to be on The Today Show or The View or even the even the late night shows like Kimmel or Fallon.  And the more appearances on the more shows the better.

These shows reach millions of viewers at a time giving them real impact.  In a typical retail stop in an early state you may get in front of a dozen or so people.  That's not going to move a national poll . Any viewer in any part of the country might be polled. And what's the secret of getting on these shows?  Be good for ratings.  Now who has spent literally decades mastering the skills necessary to have a high national profile?  The Donald.  And it shows.  He has been all over the TV machine.  Why?  Because he knows how to get shows a ratings bump that is tied directly to his appearance.  At this point he has more invitations than he has time to accept.

We have already seen The Donald's strategy work to perfection.  Before he made his tightly choreographed announcement in the major media market of New York City he was sitting at one or two percent in the polls.  He wouldn't have made the cut.  I think part of this was that frankly no one thought he would actually run.  The announcement made his candidacy real.  And what did he do next?  It was not spending time in Iowa or New Hampshire.  They are small media markets.

Instead he made and continues to make the rounds of all the national media.  And he made sure to make outrageous statements at every opportunity.  That's what a reality star does.  Would anyone watch "real housewives of wherever" if those ladies didn't regularly do outrageous things?  No!  Does anyone care whether what they say is true?  Of course not!  Any fool knows that's not how reality TV works and The Donald is not a fool.  He just plays one on TV.

There used to be something called "free media".  This was news coverage by the major TV networks.  It is now called "earned media".  How do you earn coverage on earned media?  By being outrageous.  The Donald has gotten more earned media that all his competitors combined.  He deserves the coverage.  He has worked hard for it and performed at the top of his game.

Any producer of a reality TV show knows that you must understand your audience.  You have to provide outrage they want to watch.  They have to be entertained without actually being outraged.  (Fake outrage is just part of the fun.)  The Donald has done his homework here too.  His outrageous statements have been carefully crafted to be exactly what his target audience wants to hear.  The proof that The Donald has done his homework is in his jump in ratings, ah, er, polls.  And his polls are through the roof.  So far The Donald has not put a single foot wrong.

I am not a fan of dishonesty in politics.  I would be a hypocrite it I did not acknowledge that Democrats frequently engage in dishonesty.  But I think that Republicans have raised the bar on dishonesty to a new level, one far higher than Democrats have even aspired to.  What The Donald has done is to blast past the previous exalted mark set by Republicans and put the bar into orbit.

As a result of his superior work I want to finish up this post by enthusiastically endorsing The Donald.  I am one million percent behind Donald J. Trump in his quest for the Republican nomination for the job of President of the United States.  He is a shining beacon illuminating the core values of the modern Republican party.  What more can we ask from a candidate?