rigorousintuition.ca

82_28 » Sat Jan 16, 2016 5:03 am wrote:Thinking further is that Trump has perhaps no supporters at all.

oh good, the rare topic where I can claim expertise at - I've been a political organizer for most of a decade, interned for a member of federal congress, have worked campaigns on every level in every position, and spend about the equivalent of a full time job doing this in addition to my actual full time job (sleep is for the weak)

In 2000, the team was assembled and run -- from the presidential candidate down -- by Dick Cheney. Who is Trump's Cheney?

You are looking in the wrong place because you are making the wrong comparison.

If Trump wins you don't want to compare him to the Bush administration for a whole host of reasons - not the least of which that the "W was a moron, Cheney was the puppet master" meme is completely wrong and was a convenient political fiction.

The example you probably want to look at if Trump wins is Maine and governor LePage. You had a notable outsider come in to power an ran headlong into fact that politics takes some skill, knowledge, and manoeuvring. His administration has basically consisted of him saying outrageous things that play well with the id of rural Maine, while his actual agenda goes nowhere because he has no idea how to run the government, doesn't have or doesn't listen to those who could tell him, and has been getting his ass kicked up and down the court by the legislature who knows all the procedural ins and outs to get things done.

The OP analysis misses the big mystery this go around and the large factor that has thrown off so many conventional expectations - that the establishment hasn't put up a fight against the fools and nuts. By that I don't mean the candidates who are vying for the establishment mantle, like Bush, Christie, and Kasich, I mean the larger structural forces, organizations, and intersections of power have refused to come out and push back on the outsiders. They have been silent - we are weeks from the Iowa caucus and there is no bug spending push against the race leader; never mind the lack (outside of Virgina at the state party level; where one suspects they learned the lesson in the last gubernatorial race) at ratfucking him.

Instead it appears that the establishment has looked at the fact that top polling frontrunners have all been outsiders and nuts and wrote them off back in August (ignore the press hyping Rubio as "the establishment choice"; a good chunk of them are on payroll and instead look at the the complete absence of support for him from power players). None of them "smell right" in the sense that they aren't "one of them"; they don't have the establishment faith in their competence, agenda, or skill.

Instead the establishment is going to congress (the House, which they have a lock on) and going there for the new locus of power in the coming government. Paul Ryan is going to be the one setting the agenda for whomever is president. It was the proposal of the establishment a few weeks ago; this past week's retreat has basically solidified it. Paul Ryan will be laying out the policies and agenda for the President.

And I mean that for both sides, Clinton is already touting her ability to "work with Republicans" after calling them her enemies at the 3nd debate.

Nordic » Mon Jan 18, 2016 9:47 pm wrote:

"Despite People's comprehensive online content archive, we found no interview or profile on Donald Trump in 1998"

Understatement didn't get him where he is today. As he tells it, he lives in the penthouse of "the most successful building in the world." He wants to build the tallest building in the world on "the best piece of land" in "the hottest city in the world," meaning his native New York. Donald Trump, the boy billionaire, turned 41 this year, but the only mid-life crisis he is likely to confront involves deciding which empire is worth conquering next.

He is a creature of our time. Earlier generations venerated saints, war heroes, astronauts; in the Age of the Yuppie, a hugely successful real estate tycoon has become the living symbol of can-do America. His grinning image suggests that there are no problems that might not be overcome by the application of his brains, brash-ness and money. His parties, projects and palaces are chronicled everywhere. And such is the potency of his reputation that, though Trump is a Republican, Speaker of the House Jim Wright made a personal pilgrimage to try to turn him into a Democrat.

But how much of the man's image is real and how much is a reflection of our own wishful thinking? Trump admits to using what he calls "hyperbole" to sell us his vision of Donald. Yet he is not precisely the self-made man of our folklore, since his father built a multimillion-dollar real estate empire before Trump ever cut a tooth or a deal. Now, in the wake of the October crash (Trump maintains it never laid a finger on him), the twilight of the yuppie may signal a dwindling of his own special magic. He has parted company with NBC, which would have been a major tenant of his proposed massive development project in Manhattan that community groups are savaging.

But even if his dream is deterred, Donald Trump will not likely retreat to the quiet life. He prefers to cast shadows rather than live in them, and the monuments to his ambition—the casinos, the hotels, the soaring urban towers—stand as a testament to his formidable presence. Say what you want about this specter of Barnum, the man knows how to put on a circus.

Harvey » Tue Jan 19, 2016 4:41 am wrote:Snopes say that quote is false.

"Despite People's comprehensive online content archive, we found no interview or profile on Donald Trump in 1998"

The "apparently spurious" quote first crossed their radar in October 2015.

I note that everyone is using the same phrase, "we find no evidence" indicating that it sounds like something he might have said. A search on the exact quote in entirety yields surprisingly few results, just a few hundred according to Google, probably because the 'quote' was distributed as a jpeg.

I couldn't even find People's archives but I am intrigued. Does anyone know anyone who has a complete collection of the print magazine from 1998 or a library which has them in archive? Now is the time to have a flick through it if you can find such a thing.