We are at the start of the Democratic National Convention, and it has not, let's say, started off well for the party of the left. As you are aware unless you read the Sunday newspapers from New York and Washington, emails have been leaked from the needling outfit Wikileaks, that paint a difficult picture for the Democrats.
We had never doubted, at least those of us with half a brain or more, that the Democratic National Committee had a thumb on the scales for Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders, and maybe a few more fingers as well. And a lead weight. And a bowling ball. And a couple of bags of rocks. We knew the DNC was in the tank for Hillary; now we at least cannot be argued with.
We knew that way back, when there were hardly any debates set up among the Democrat candidates, and those that were had been scheduled on nights chosen when people don't watch. We knew that they felt that debating would not help the unpleasant-to-listen-to Hillary Clinton, and could get people actually interested in one or more of the other candidates. The fix, as they say, was in.
I think every one knew, which is why the word "rigged" kept getting bandied about during the campaign. But now there is hard, hard evidence, in the form of DNC staff people, under the now-defunct Debbie Wasserman Schultz, exchanging messages about how to subvert the campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders, the old socialist who had attracted gargantuan support among youthful leftist types and would win a ton of primary states along the way.
The messages were contemptible, not just for their existence as proof that the DNC had no intention of allowing a successful challenge to its anointed Clinton, but for their nature -- discussing, for example, ways of capitalizing on Sanders's nominal Judaism or presumed atheism, to attack him with voters from certain states.
As I write this, Sanders has addressed the convention, so he played the good party soldier (for the party he wasn't even a member of), rolled over, whimpered, and made a speech just saying nice things about Hillary. In a better world, Bernie would grow a pair, stand up and condemn the corrupt actions of the DNC, and tell his supporters to stay home or maybe write his name in, at least until his podium and the floor beneath him slowly lowered and his mike was turned off. This is Hillary, remember.
Aside -- it just occurred to me that after dealing with the presidential candidacy of a 74-year-old socialist in 2016, if Hillary Clinton were to win, God forbid, then in 2020 we would have a 73-year-old socialist as president. Ironic. And frightening.
And this piece is not about the Democrats.
I would think it is fair to say that the Republicans had their own primary contention, don't you agree? We understand that instead of 3-4 candidates, the Republicans had 17-18 or so (it was never clear -- that's an estimate). We saw a dozen on stage at the same time early in the campaign. Plus, the very presence of Donald Trump from the start was a media driver and, in its own way, a paradigm shift in the way candidates presented themselves and their ideas.
Reince Priebus is the chairman of the Republican National Committee, as you of course know. Now, I would not want to be a professional shark-petter, or a professional hot-stove tester. And I would not want Reince Priebus's job. Many times in the last year I'm certain that Reince Priebus didn't necessarily want Reince Priebus's job either. I can only imagine what he was thinking as he watched the contention among the candidates in this debate or that one.
But ... and this is the big "but" -- somewhere during the campaign, Priebus made a decision and somehow was able to make it stick. It looked something like this:
"Donald Trump appears to be the plurality choice of the voters in the primaries. We have implemented a system in our Party that values and respects the primary system and its outcomes. Unlike the Democrats, it is not up to the RNC to decide for the voters whom they get to vote for, and we are going to make it our job to let the candidates themselves make their cases to the public.
We will let them debate and debate, as long as we can. Where we have to touch the scales somehow, such as in positioning candidates on stages, we will defer to the candidates' performances with the voters to date. And ultimately, the candidate achieving the required number of votes will become our nominee."
Reince Priebus, at some point, decided that the Party would be best served by yielding to the will of its voters and, as importantly, he decided that not yielding to the voters' wills would look very bad in the eyes of the voters in November.
He will not get sufficient credit for conceding that the RNC was going to have to get behind its nominee, no matter what Priebus or anyone else might have thought of him. He will not get enough credit for letting the convention properly be Donald Trump's convention, dominating the speakers list as any other impending nominee would have been expected to. And he will not get enough credit for getting much, most or all of the Party apparatus reoriented to become Trump's apparatus.
Priebus became the statesman in all of what happened with the Republican campaign in its second and third trimesters leading to the convention. At a time when the Democrats manhandled the whole process from start to finish; at a time when the Democrats' chairman had to be forced to resign for presiding over the corrupt process, we can look immediately backward to the performance of Reince Priebus as RNC chairman and see an honorable execution of his duties -- leadership in the best meaning of the word.
The RNC chairman realized at the right point that Donald Trump was whom the voting public wanted, and it would become his job to confirm, affirm and facilitate that candidacy. If it wasn't easy, if he might have personally preferred a different candidate, he buried that because it was his job to lead, not to oppose.
This will all ultimately fade into history, and Donald Trump will take his campaign wherever the voting public lets him. But he (and we) should be grateful that we in the public were allowed to make our choice. Out of many options, the RNC should be thought to have made the right choice when it selected the current chairman.
He did his job.
Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
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