[COMMENTARY] It's presidential improv as Trump surges on

STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. – It's what we've always wanted, isn't it? A totally unscripted White House race? No more predictable politics as usual?

If nothing else, Donald Trump has at least given us that.

He may not be the best person for the job, but Trump has saved us from the play-it-safe, poll-driven, stage-managed, social media-drenched tedium that passes for presidential politics. And in an era where White House campaign cycles have gotten longer and longer, and ever more vacuous, we can be thankful for that.

Even better: The political ruling elite can't stand it.

Trump, of course, was supposed to have been long gone by now. If you listened to the pundits, the Trump for President effort wasn't supposed to have gotten off the ground at all. Trump was a buffoon, a cartoon. A blowhard. A TV huckster. A soulless 1-percenter.

And that hair.

He wasn't even qualified to get in the ring.

But Trump not only ran, he became the favorite on the GOP side, and is gaining on Hillary in head-to-head polls. He has owned this presidential summer.

Along the way, he's had more lives than Rasputin.

Trump was supposed to be dead when he snarled about illegal Mexican immigrant rapists and thieves. But his poll numbers continued to rise.

He was supposed to be toast when he bashed Vietnam War hero John McCain. Nope. Trump went right on surging.

It was going to be a Waterloo when Trump took part in the first GOP presidential debate on Fox News. He would surely fold in the company of all those experienced pols and debaters.

But Trump was the star that night, the reason why many people tuned in. His ongoing battle with Fox host Megyn Kelly has done him no harm. And why should it? It's just one rich, well-coiffed TV celebrity going up against another.

The funnest part of all this has been watching Hillary Clinton, Jeb Bush and the rest trying to appropriate little pieces of Trump's damn-the-torpedoes, "straight talk" shtick while not tipping all the way over into Crazyland.

Hillary pokes fun at her email foibles by cracking wise about self-vaporizing messages on Snapchat. And Jeb has been out there shaking his finger at "anchor babies."

But they can't do it, because they've got too much to lose, they want the job too badly. Their whole lives have led up to this moment. They can't take too many chances.

Trump, meanwhile, has already won and has nothing to lose. If he's not elected president, he'll go back to his billions, however many he actually has. His presidential run will make for a great reality series. His brand will be more valuable than ever. New business opportunities are no doubt already raining down on him.

American culture and politics are all about money and celebrity, and Trump's got both.

Trump has also been a Great Unifier. He has the professional pundits and the career pols, on both sides of the aisle, making palaver with each other as they try to figure out how to stop Trump in his tracks while at the same time trying to divine the secrets of his political success.

Suddenly, the Beltway pols and the pundits have a lot in common: We can't let Trumpwin, can we? If nothing else, it's proven that they're all part of the same hypocrisy, Michael Corleone would say. They have been exposed. It's been particularly entertaining to watch.

There is no playbook here. Nobody planned on the Trump Factor, so there's no way to counter it. This isn't how Jeb and Hillary drew it up. The TV talking heads spent months telling each other that the Trump Surge wasn't happening, and now that Trump has legs, they have no Plan B, except to try and goad Joe Biden into the race.

Welcome to presidential improv.

Via: SI Live

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Baltimore Cop, Activist Slams O’Malley’s Civil Rights Record

Democratic presidential hopeful Martin O’Malley’s credibility is coming under attack from an unexpected source, a long-time friend and African-American civil rights advocate in the Baltimore Police Department.

Sgt. Louis H. Hopson, who has worked at the Baltimore Police Department for 35 years and is a board member of the Vanguard Justice Society, an influential association of Baltimore African-American police officers, charges that O’Malley didn’t know what to do about race relations when he was the city’s mayor from 1999 to 2007. O’Malley was then elected Maryland governor twice.

Hopson blames many of Baltimore’s current racial problems on O’Malley and says many in the city’s African-American community fear an O’Malley presidency.

Hopson made Baltimore civil rights history in 2004 when O’Malley was mayor and trouble was brewing within the police department. White supervisors were accused of improperly sanctioning African-American police officers.

Hopson became the lead plaintiff in a landmark lawsuit, “Hopson v. The Mayor.” The city awarded $2.5 million in 2009 to more than a dozen African-American police officers and required an independent monitor to oversee the department’s disciplinary practices.

“Here’s his problem,” Hopson told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “Martin doesn’t know what to do when it comes to the race issue. And like a lot of people, they will just ignore it and hope it goes away,” he said.

“Martin exposed corruption, but he didn’t do anything about it when he became mayor,” Hopson charges. “That’s where the animosity began with African-American officers and African-Americans in the city. Martin O’Malley is not a finisher. We wouldn’t be in the position we’re in today had Martin done something about this.”

Hopson’s comments could spell trouble for O’Malley, who is positioning himself as the more progressive alternative to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential Democratic race.

Via: Daily Caller

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The Presidential Skill Set

What you want in a leader won’t show up on the résumé.

Former Texas governor Rick Perry is gearing up for another presidential run and recently fired a shot across the bow of some of his competitors. In an interview with The Weekly Standard, Perry said that while he had “great respect” for senators Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, and Rand Paul, they were not ready to be president:

I’ve had more than one individual say, “You know what, if you want to be the president of the United States, you ought to go back to your home state and be the governor and get that executive experience before you go lead this country.”

Perry’s record as governor of the Lone Star State is impressive. During his tenure, Texas was an economic dynamo while the rest of the country lagged behind. Republican voters will no doubt give him a careful look this time around.

Regardless, his suggestion is wrong. There is no correlation between presidential greatness and professional background.

Presidents are almost always governors, senators, or generals. We have seen good and bad versions of each. Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter were both governors; the former had an intuitive feel for the demands of the office, while the latter was out of his depth from day one. Similarly, Lyndon Johnson was a former senator who was incredibly effective at getting Congress to do what he wanted, while John F. Kennedy’s domestic program mostly stalled. George Washington and Dwight Eisenhower demonstrated a keen understanding of the political process, while Andrew Jackson and Zachary Taylor were capricious and imperial. Ulysses S. Grant was arguably the single geatest military commander this country has ever known, yet he was an inartful president.

Moreover, the country has had several polymath presidents who turned out to be disappointments. John Adams, James Monroe, Herbert Hoover, and George H. W. Bush had done a bit of everything by the time they became president. And yet none is in the top tier. Few men have been as qualified for the job as Richard Nixon, who was forced to resign because of Watergate. On the other hand, nobody has ever been elected president with as slender a résumé as Abraham Lincoln’s; nevertheless, he is widely regarded as America’s finest leader.

Political scientists have tried to explain such incongruity, but few explanations are satisfying. In the 1970s, James David Barber offered a psychological account of presidential greatness, but his approach was too reductionist and has been abandoned. More recently, Stephen Skowronek has argued that a president’s position in the broader political cycle is crucial. Yet like most analyses built on the concept of “political realignments,” this analysis falls prey to the fallacy of post hoc ergo propter hoc.

Presidential greatness is such a mystery because, while it depends on some predictable factors like the size of a congressional majority, a necessary ingredient is prudence. This ineffable quality enables a leader to make the best determination in light of the practical constraints he faces. Edmund Burke wrote:

Nothing universal can be ration­ally affirmed on any moral, or any political subject. Pure metaphysical abstraction does not belong to these matters. The lines of morality are not like the ideal lines of mathematics. They are broad and deep as well as long. They admit of exceptions; they demand modifications. These exceptions and modifications are not made by the process of logic, but by the rules of prudence. Prudence is not only the first in rank of the virtues political and moral, but she is the director, the regulator, the stand­ard of them all. ­Metaphysics cannot live without ­definition; but prudence is cautious how she defines. 

Prudence is the essential virtue of presidential greatness. It is the bridge that connects the unlimited expectations we have of the president to the slender formal powers we have granted him. 

Via: The Weekly Standard

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CHURCHES USING 'SOULS TO POLLS' TO RALLY VOTE

It's not just the collection plate that's getting passed around this fall at hundreds of mainly African-American and Latino churches in presidential battleground states and across the nation.

Exhorting congregations to register to vote, church leaders are distributing registration cards in the middle of services, and many are pledging caravans of "souls to the polls" to deliver the vote.

The stepped-up effort in many states is a response by activists worried that new election rules, from tougher photo identification requirements to fewer days of early voting, are unfairly targeting minority voters _ specifically, African-Americans who tend to vote heavily for Democrats. Some leaders compare their registration and get-out-the-vote efforts to the racial struggle that led to the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

"In light of all this, we are saying just let our people vote," said the Rev. Dawn Riley Duval, social justice minister at the Shorter Community A.M.E. Church in Denver. "The people are being oppressed by these measures. It has ignited a sense of urgency and collective power that we can take by engaging in the process."

In key swing states such as Florida and Ohio, proponents of the new election rules deny they are aimed at suppressing the minority vote in hopes of helping Republicans win more races. Reasons for their enactment vary between rooting out fraud and purging ineligible voters to streamlining the voting process.

But to some African-American leaders like the Rev. F.E. Perry, a Cleveland-based bishop in Ohio's Church of God in Christ, it's as if the 1960s barriers to black civil rights have returned all over again.

"We've come too far to sit idly by and watch that happen," Perry said. "We want to get souls to the polls. Whatever it takes to get them there, that's what we're going to do."

Via Breitbart

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