Quote:
Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop
Everything you say here is mostly stupid, but what is particularly stupid is the idea that people who are really opposed to Trump are somehow strengthening him. You play at repeating variations of this without ever explaining how it might be true. Neither you nor anyone else ever suggest that right-wing whackos somehow strengthened Obama (for example) in the opposite way.
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It's really stupid to assume that each Presidency is an analogue for the next or the previous one, but since this is the kind of middle minded analysis you offer, I'll play. (Why not?)
The resistance to Obama actually did help Obama. The more they alleged crazy shit about him, the more he ignored them and motored along in the center.
As the crazy went crazier, he stayed cool and detached. The loons who called him a socialist were marginalized, ignored. They got no traction against him. He effectively looked at them and, as if he'd a magical remote, turned the channel. Or hit the mute button.
By his second term, even those who disagreed with him politically thought he was a respectable statesman and gave him credit for shepherding us through the economic crisis.
So yes, Obama was strengthened by the crazies. He looked like one of the few adults in the room more and more as the Fox news nuts frothed around him.
Trump is strengthened a bit differently of course, as unlike Obama, he is as crazy as the crazies who attack him. He isn't able to trade on being the statesman who is above the lunacy of the rabble at his ankles. But he still has a decent trade on which he capitalizes, and it's this: "I'm a bull in a china shop, no doubt. But I'm shaking shit up. And these people who are after me are a mix of deranged social warrior idiots on one side, and sleazy swamp bureaucrats on the other." And let me tell you something - something Less and Icky have hinted at but won't say directly to you because you're an insufferable person to debate with - That Message Resonates. And it resonates most in the old Blue Wall states that matter, Florida, and Texas.
I'll repeat it, in the hope that it permeates the concrete between your ears: Trump's argument that he's a change agent up against bizarre and clueless progressives and "swamp" people is, in marketing terms, "sticky." It works. It works really fucking well. And the progressive counter message - yelling about alternatively overheated and nebulous concepts like "saving democracy from fascists," or "justice for abuses of power" - however true and noble those aims might be (along with being alternatively deluded and naive), Does Not Stick the Same Way. It's in the bin with Things Ignored, like the Never Trumpers' messaging in 2016.
You don't know what "stupid" is because you measure it incorrectly. Stupid and smart are measured in results. Nothing else counts.
ETA: The Velvet Underground is bit of an exception to that last rule. Once can be smart too early or at the wrong time, and Wall Street types will tell you that's as bad as being dumb. But Lou Reed wound up quite well off in the end.
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