The SOTU itself was completely predictable. Nothing new or unexpected. The Rs had telegraphed weeks ago exactly what their strategy was going to be. Write a somewhat toned down speech for Trump and get him to stick with it, so that the day after a performance not nearly as horrifying as what he says unscripted, most of the media would declare that he had pivoted, that "tonight, he became president", or whatever. They even staged a little test of this strategy by sending the idiot out to Pennsylvania two weeks ago. Trump showed in that mini-tour that he's getting better at simulating being a non-demented non-racist, as long as he sticks to the script and just reads off the teleprompter.
I guess I should by now be equally unsurprised that our politicos did absolutely nothing to counter this strategy, to play off it and/or throw a wrench into it. What the Rs would try to do was completely predictable. It was also ridiculously easy to counter.
Game theory is only useful in understanding games so ridiculously simple that no one of normal cognitive ability would be interested in playing such a game. But with Trump playing the game of politics, we are indeed in the middle of a game that simple. Trump's history of unhinged word and deed is so clear and commonly agreed, not just something our side thinks of his and his party's positions, but something even his own side has to acknowledge and deal with, that the Rs had only two strategies possible for Trump to play the SOTU:
A. unhinged
B. less unhinged
Sure, there are all sorts of other dimensions than the less unhinged vs unhinged axis, matters of tone and style and matters of content, to bring in that might define many SOTU strategies for the Rs that might give good payouts or avoid bad payouts. But Trump's unhinged behavior has made the hinged-unhinged axis the dominant one. Any strategy that helps them get people to see Trump as less unhinged is dominant over all other strategies they might choose. Whatever side-benefits they might get, or side-penalties they might avoid, in other dimensions, are unimportant in comparison. Whatever else they were going to do with their SOTU, the Rs had to address the question of the president's unstable non-genius, and had to do whatever they could to lessen the impression of unhingedness.
So the Dems knew that the Rs were going with B, less unhinged. Our side had therefore this really no-brainer choice of strategies for our side's SOTU response:
A. make Trump appear unhinged
B. do anything else
The Rs correctly identified the dominant issue, the issue they needed to address in their choice of strategies, and we all knew that they were going with strategy B., make Trump appear less unhinged. Our side knew exactly what they were going to do, yet decided to avoid the one dominant strategy our side had available, make Trump appear more unhinged.
Of course our side did not have the ability to make Trump appear less unhinged by writing his speech for him. But we know by now, it is painfully obvious by now, that the one thing that will always provoke him to an unhinged response is to point out that he is unhinged and/or cognitively impaired. Letting it be known ahead of time that our response to the SOTU was going to prominently feature a discussion of his unhinged word and deed would have maximized the chances that he would have insisted on addressing that issue in his SOTU, to disastrous effect. Nothing makes it more clear how unhinged he is than the way he tries to establish the opposite.
But even if Trump had been able to discipline himself to stick with strategy B in the scripted SOTU itself, no way would the Trump we have grown to know and love even less over the past year have been able to keep himself from an unhinged rage tweet response to what our responder had said in questioning his stable genius. The almost insurmountable challenge any SOTU response has is that very few are paying it any attention. But a SOTU response that questioned Trump's mental competence and stability would have had one guaranteed very attentive person in the audience, Trump himself. And Trump himself could have been relied on to make that SOTU response the story, not Trump's supposed pivot, but the questioning of his competence that provoked a Trump response that highlighted just how serious that question of his competence is, just how clearly he had not pivoted at all.
Our strategy A, a SOTU response centered on questioning his competence and stability, would have been the dominant strategy also in this sense, that it wouldn't matter whether the Rs went with their A or their B. If Trump insisted on their A, an unhinged prepared text, or if he ad-libbed into stark unhingement, then our response would simply have had one more obvious example of what we are claiming, he's unhinged. If he went along with their B, and he delivered the most hinged response imaginable -- if he had writers capable of something like Lincoln's Second Inaugural, and if Trump could deliver such a speech without sending himself into the 25th dimension -- then the contrast of that performance with his entire prior history would also make the case itself of just how unhinged he has been this past year. Contrasting the new-found lower degree of unhingedness in this SOTU with his prior history would have made the point that of course the SOTU was deeply insincere, a desperate attempt to appear stable and competent by handlers who clearly know just how unstable and incompetent he really is.
I am certainly not any sort of genius, at politics or at anything else. But my point is exactly that none of what I'm saying is even a little bit subtle or difficult. Trump's mental competence and stability is what the other side is worried about. They know they're vulnerable on that question. They act on that belief. My claim isn't that those dumb D strategists were too stupid to see the obvious and went with some third or fourth tier strategic consideration in the SOTU response, that we should present a fresh face or some such frippery. My point is that our D strategists aren't even in the game. They chose Kennedy, a third term Congressman with no leadership position, for the response precisely to avoid saying anything, to avoid deploying any strategy. To criticize them for poor strategic choices is beside the point. It would be like criticizing Lear for not having any car chases, or the latest Fast and Furious movie for not having any sense or reason or emotion.
Our side's strategists are trying to avoid deploying any strategies because they look at the poll numbers right now and like what they see. They have decided that the right thing for us to do is to sit on our lead. Don't do anything , because anything we might do might blow our lead. Lord knows, this might work. It worked for us in 2006 and 2008. We didn't deploy any strategy but the fresh face of Obama. We offered no plan for change, and otherwise just sat back and let Dubya misrule make the electorate so sick of the Rs as to throw those bums out and gamble on our side.
But, at the risk of seeming unhinged, I would like to leave some caveats about that strategy of sitting back, doing nothing and saying nothing, and just letting the Rs run the country into a ditch as our path to winning the next election.
Even if it works, it leaves us without an agenda to enact once we are returned to power. What we got from the trifecta last time the electorate entrusted us with it was half-assed stimulus and watered-down Romneycare.
But worse, much worse, a strategy that relies on Rs running us into ditches at regular intervals is inherently unstable. A crisis is an opportunity for the fascists, because people want to rally around the Commander-in-Chief in a crisis, because desperate measures seem necessary. Dubya lacked the will and the work ethic and the talent to start the Fourth Reich after 9/11. Trump almost certainly lacks the work ethic and the cognitive ability to be the Fuehrer himself. But he could be the Hindenburg, the figurehead for the Leader who will emerge to get us out of the ditch.
To get the nation to look to a Leader rather than our traditional democratic institutions to get us out of a ditch, requires two things that our passive strategy encourages:
1) The nation gets run into ditches on a recurring basis by Rs, because that's our only strategy for getting the trifecta back for our side
2) The voters lose hope that our traditional democratic institutions are capable of anything positive and active.
The Rs can be relied on to do their part towards 1), and thereby 2). I still vote D, and will always vote D, because we don't do 1), and not running the nation into a ditch is definitely an immediate priority. But I get less sure every year that our side's behavior is not even worse at 2). Long-term, passivity by the side that has common sense and common decency on its side, refusal by that side to fight the party of the senseless and indecent by any means other than letting them do enough destruction that the electorate turns to us in desperation, is going to blight the hope that people need in their despair in the next crisis that there is any way out but a dose of desperate atavistic tribalism. We depend on the electorate to make the right choice, to not give in to the temptation to go for a quick fascist solution to whatever ditch Trump will get us into, but we systematically destroy their hope that a better way exists, that demnocracy is viable because there is a party that stands for that better way, has a reasonable program that we all know it will implement if put in power because it fights for it now when it is out of power.