Half of the last four contests for president were decided in their eleventh hours. Twice in four presidential cycles has the vote been decided on the weekend before Election Day, "weekend" there being invoked expansively to refer to the Thursday evening through the Monday evening before the Tuesday vote.
It was the Thursday before the Tuesday in the first week of November 2000, unless I misremember, that Joe Trippi -- now of Fox News but then of the Gore campaign -- let loose the Democrat "oppo research" that Bush had been slapped with a DUI in his dissolute youth of the dissolute 1970s. The DUI had been expunged long since and Bush hadn't volunteered it, but for some part of the Christian conservative core of the Republican base who in that time were unpersuaded of Bush's wholesomeness, the DUI and Bush's not disclosing it were affirmations of their worst estimations of the man, and they were persuaded to sit on their hands come Election Day.
And because the story broke at the eleventh hour, by design, there was not time for its absorption, not to mention this was 2000, i.e., our holiday from history, when too many of us imagined we had the luxury of deciding the presidency of the United States on such trifles as an ancient, expunged DUI. As the Left never tire of observing Bush won the electoral college but lost the popular vote, but the polling and the conventional wisdom had it that if the popular and electoral votes were to split then it'd be Bush claiming the victory and not the presidency, until that fateful final weekend when the popular vote tipped to Gore.
The vote in '04 was decided in those days following September 11 of '01 when the American people saw in President Bush the man for the hour, and that decision was affirmed on whatever day it was in the summer of '04 that the Swift Boat Vets for Truth ran the first of their TV ads and repudiated unanswerably Kerry's principal claim to the presidency, namely his months in Vietnam. Then '08 was decided on September 15 in the Panic of '08, with the graph plotting the polling per the Real Clear Politics average showing a crossover as of September 17, I believe it was: McCain's red line submerged by Obama's blue line, and those lines never again to cross.
And then in 2012 and what was probably the winnable-est challenge to an incumbent president since 1992, Romney led Obama by something like five points deep into October in the gold-standard Gallup Poll, and Gallup found Romney up over Obama as late as election eve, albeit by a solitary point. But in time for the terminal weekend of the campaign came Hurricane Sandy. The press might've reported Sandy as they had done Katrina, for all Obama and his administration managed by way of relief and recovery, but let no man number among Obama's failings as a president that he's a poor hand for a photo-op, and Gov. Christie of New Jersey where Sandy hit hardest swooned like America's cheapest date, "Barry gave me his personal number and told me to call him if I needed him," or words to that effect.
It was the least Obama could've done, and all that he need have done: the press passed over the disaster that was Sandy in favor of Obama's photo-op and Christie's swooning, and carried Obama to Election Day like so many worshipful coolies bearing their master on his rickshaw. And it didn't hurt that Romney -- whose fire-in-the-belly as it turns out is for sabotaging his successor as Republican presidential nominee and not for the fight of his life against Obama -- stood down his campaign and thus conceded to Obama and the Obama-ist press the final furlong of the race.
I write this not in the expectation that it'll make it back somehow to Donald Trump or his campaign, but because in this existential war which is the 2016 presidential election I'm perfectly powerless, except to post to my modest blog. And to pray. So I offer herewith that half of the last four contests for president were decided in their eleventh hours and so it mightn't be ill-advised if Trump and his campaign were to plan for the contingency that November 8 is decided sometime between November 3 and 7, and more than that to force the decision onto those last days, with something big.
And as to that "something big", my proposition for whatever little it's worth would be that Trump smash through the press -- who per WikiLeaks are not prejudiced for Clinton so much as colluding with her campaign -- in a paid, primetime, televised address, Donald Trump in a room with a camera, speaking into the camera and through it to the average American, in a single, unedited take, and explaining plainly, "I'm for this, Clinton's for that; There's what's broken and here's how I propose to fix it; And whatever my faults as a man, if I'm not president of the United States come January 20 then the republic is buried."
It was the Thursday before the Tuesday in the first week of November 2000, unless I misremember, that Joe Trippi -- now of Fox News but then of the Gore campaign -- let loose the Democrat "oppo research" that Bush had been slapped with a DUI in his dissolute youth of the dissolute 1970s. The DUI had been expunged long since and Bush hadn't volunteered it, but for some part of the Christian conservative core of the Republican base who in that time were unpersuaded of Bush's wholesomeness, the DUI and Bush's not disclosing it were affirmations of their worst estimations of the man, and they were persuaded to sit on their hands come Election Day.
And because the story broke at the eleventh hour, by design, there was not time for its absorption, not to mention this was 2000, i.e., our holiday from history, when too many of us imagined we had the luxury of deciding the presidency of the United States on such trifles as an ancient, expunged DUI. As the Left never tire of observing Bush won the electoral college but lost the popular vote, but the polling and the conventional wisdom had it that if the popular and electoral votes were to split then it'd be Bush claiming the victory and not the presidency, until that fateful final weekend when the popular vote tipped to Gore.
The vote in '04 was decided in those days following September 11 of '01 when the American people saw in President Bush the man for the hour, and that decision was affirmed on whatever day it was in the summer of '04 that the Swift Boat Vets for Truth ran the first of their TV ads and repudiated unanswerably Kerry's principal claim to the presidency, namely his months in Vietnam. Then '08 was decided on September 15 in the Panic of '08, with the graph plotting the polling per the Real Clear Politics average showing a crossover as of September 17, I believe it was: McCain's red line submerged by Obama's blue line, and those lines never again to cross.
And then in 2012 and what was probably the winnable-est challenge to an incumbent president since 1992, Romney led Obama by something like five points deep into October in the gold-standard Gallup Poll, and Gallup found Romney up over Obama as late as election eve, albeit by a solitary point. But in time for the terminal weekend of the campaign came Hurricane Sandy. The press might've reported Sandy as they had done Katrina, for all Obama and his administration managed by way of relief and recovery, but let no man number among Obama's failings as a president that he's a poor hand for a photo-op, and Gov. Christie of New Jersey where Sandy hit hardest swooned like America's cheapest date, "Barry gave me his personal number and told me to call him if I needed him," or words to that effect.
It was the least Obama could've done, and all that he need have done: the press passed over the disaster that was Sandy in favor of Obama's photo-op and Christie's swooning, and carried Obama to Election Day like so many worshipful coolies bearing their master on his rickshaw. And it didn't hurt that Romney -- whose fire-in-the-belly as it turns out is for sabotaging his successor as Republican presidential nominee and not for the fight of his life against Obama -- stood down his campaign and thus conceded to Obama and the Obama-ist press the final furlong of the race.
I write this not in the expectation that it'll make it back somehow to Donald Trump or his campaign, but because in this existential war which is the 2016 presidential election I'm perfectly powerless, except to post to my modest blog. And to pray. So I offer herewith that half of the last four contests for president were decided in their eleventh hours and so it mightn't be ill-advised if Trump and his campaign were to plan for the contingency that November 8 is decided sometime between November 3 and 7, and more than that to force the decision onto those last days, with something big.
And as to that "something big", my proposition for whatever little it's worth would be that Trump smash through the press -- who per WikiLeaks are not prejudiced for Clinton so much as colluding with her campaign -- in a paid, primetime, televised address, Donald Trump in a room with a camera, speaking into the camera and through it to the average American, in a single, unedited take, and explaining plainly, "I'm for this, Clinton's for that; There's what's broken and here's how I propose to fix it; And whatever my faults as a man, if I'm not president of the United States come January 20 then the republic is buried."
