I got the idea for this image (from Star Wars ad) from the front page title on Huffington Post linking to their article about how Trump had many unstaffed or unopened campaign offices: THE PHANTOM MENACE: TRUMP CAMPAIGN BARELY EXISTS! It links to the article "Donald Trump Heads Into The Convention With Barely Any Campaign At All: Many of the numbers listed for his state offices don’t even work."
Trump’s story reminds me of a small movie about a self-effacing housewife in Great Britain who goes from being a village activist to being prime minister. She never really ran for the position, she just got so popular she won by acclamation. (I don’t remember the film’s name and can’t find it on Google — let me know if you remember it.)
Trump is doing pretty much the same thing except he is formally running for president like a banshee chasing a Hogwarts wizard, and he is a bombastic egotist; but he’s doing so by making up his own rules.
There’s a real attraction to people who can do this. By far most of us go through life adhering, sometimes reluctantly, to the rules society sets. We admire people, in real life or in fantasy, who succeed by ignoring or breaking the rules as long as we like what they achieve and don’t offend our personal moral and ethical codes.
If you take away all the horrendous things Trump says, and the endless laudatory self-references, and the unhinged word salad of his stream of thought verbiage, we’d admire any politician who could run a campaign without well-staffed - or even staffed - offices in every state.
We’d be glad to see a candidate who didn’t need notes, let alone a teleprompter, to speak for an hour by talking spontaneously with conviction about “how” he or she would make all the things happen that you want to happen. Okay, I admit us liberals would rather that our candidates actually explained how they would make these things happen. But then, we’re a pretty smart lot and don’t get bored by details.
We be pleased that our candidate wasn’t flooding the airwaves with endless commercials.
We enjoy seeing how close our candidates were with their families and how involved they were in the campaign.
Considering that Trump says he only needs to sleep four hours a night, ignoring the fact that his brain might need a full eight hours, we might say that a president who gives the country an extra four hours a day is a bonus.
I admit that my perfect liberal candidate would be someone like my old top-of-his class as McGill family doctor, a shoutout to Frank Finkelstein, who was a “doctor’s doctor.” Many of his patients were also doctors. When he sent you to a specialist because he thought something was amiss, he was always right. My candidate would be like Dr. Finkelstein who, one of his nurses told me, was reputed to be able to keep a rock alive when he was a chief resident.
I’d want my candidate to be a wise, compassionate, humble genius who would get elected just by being themselves.
I’d want them to attract the absolute best and brightest people into government at all levels.
I’d want them to inspire bright and ambitious young men and women to eschew striving for big-bucks jobs and work in public service.
What can I say? I’d want my candidate to be like George Washington without the slaves.
As for whether the diary is a joke, not really. If you take away the noxious fetid gases and vomit inducing malodorous effluence emanating from the mouth, indeed, the very anatomy, of Trump, there are things we would welcome in a progressive candidate.
Comments are closed on this story.