* The more you watch this campaign cycle, the more you see what a scam these political consultants are running.
I see these “experts” on TV just pulling out predictions out of thin air. They’ll be wrong and come back next week and say “Well, I’ve been wrong on Trump this far, har, har, har, but I really think next week is the end.”
Where do they get their ideas about what does or doesn’t work in elections? Do they use statistical methods and publish in peer review journals? Do they engage in any form of hypothesis testing? Not a single one of them does from what I can see.
Jeb! blew everyone out of the water when it came to fundraising. This was supposed to be his “shock and awe.” Imagine in sports, if you had the highest payroll in the league, and you found the best players and coaches. Yet you were the worst team in the league. That doesn’t happen because sports has objective measures of excellence.
Political consultants serve two functions. First, it’s lining their own pockets. Second, it’s about convincing everybody, through your “expertise,” that whatever policy you want is good politics. You get immigration reform by convincing every candidate that they have to support immigration reform, because if they oppose it they’re never getting elected anyway.
* Donald Trumps biggest expenditure is jet fuel and airport fees. Then comes for hiring the auditoriums he speaks at. Just me guessing. And right now jet fuel is cheap! If Trump get elected he will have a deflating and deflationary economy to deal with in 2017. This is what it is looking like.
And during the 1930 deflation-depression Roosevelt threw out a million or two Mexicans. Deflations are not kind to illegal immigration.
* Here’s a story on Mike Murphy, Bush campaign consultant:
“Over the past 35 years, he has been a cutthroat operative in campaign war rooms, a prophet of big-tent conservatism in cable news green rooms, and an aspiring filmmaker in TV writers’ rooms. Along the way, he has elected a slew of high-profile Republican governors like Mitt Romney and Arnold Schwarzenegger, and made enough money to buy himself a house in the Hollywood Hills, apartments in Manhattan and Miami, 38 square miles of land in Nova Scotia, and an array of pricey toys, from a Mercedes-Benz to a private Piper Meridian plane that used to shepherd him back and forth from Sacramento.”
I’m really curious about those 38 square miles of land he owns. Even if the land was dirt cheap, that’s a lot of land to buy.
There sure is a lot of money to skim in all of those political campaigns. When the mob skims from the casinos, that’s bad, but skimming from political campaigns sure looks like a safer way to get rich.
* A Dem consultant I follow on Twitter was miffed at a Trump comment. Trump said he didn’t understand why campaigns paid for internal polling when the networks did it for free. Trump really is threatening the political order here, potentially killing off the political science industry or at the very least exposing it as not being all that scientific.
* He’s proven the consultants are just sucking up money like banksters and producing about as much useful services. I can’t wait to see the Overton window get shoved towards air-launched catapults to return the criminal invaders back across the border.
He wins in a couple of big states and immigration won’t just be on the table, it’ll be ‘what’s for dinner’. Any and all politicians will have to address the issue like it or not. It’ll be sitting on the table like a Christmas ham come November.
* The political consultants are frauds. They raise and spend money, keeping a healthy percentage for themselves.
Which is why they hate Trump. He has proven they are dopes who are completely unnecessary. That’s the real reason they are furious.
* The public will flock to restrictionism once it’s presented as one of the acceptable options. In fact, the Eisenhower option already has plurality support:
http://www.vox.com/2015/8/15/9159117/donald-trump-moderate
If there’s a fight over immigration, and you have a restrictionist Donald Trump on one side, and Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan on the other, the people will support the anti-immigration alpha male over the two open borders stiff. The only question is how much Trump will change after the primaries are over.
* It’s been interesting watching the professional Right go berserk over Trump. A big part of it is the fact he is viewed as an existential threat to their racket. The massive nonprofit industry here in the Imperial Capital exists in large part on the claim that they pick the candidates and develop their positions. Therefore, no one outside the business can ever be allowed in without permission.
They don’t see it that way. Talk to any of these people off the record from either side and you quickly see they are blinkered to the point where they may as well not be “us” anymore. I call them pod people because they are so immersed in their world of petty politics, red team versus blue team, they have lost all contact with the rest of us.
There are a lot of similarities between now and the late 70′s and early 80′s. The Great Progressive Awakening is on the decline. The old guard is being challenged by people they used to think of as undesirables. The party coalitions are breaking apart. The difference is the lack of a Cold War and the new threat of mass migration, but maybe those are interchangeable.
Historical analogies are not perfect. Forty years ago global capitalism did not exist as a driving force in politics. Mass communications is another huge difference. Anti-racism and egalitarianism were not religions that defined the ruling elite. Reagan was brought to power by elements of the ruling class, while Trump is backed by outside elements.
