By Dan Calabrese ——Bio and Archives--January 8, 2016
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I'm finding myself engaged in a moronic exercise, and I should know better, but I'm still doing it. Every time the media gloms onto one of these Trump-is-doing-politics-wrong-and-it's-going-to-cost-him stories, I wait for the inevitable result in which the whole issue either has no effect at all on Trump or, as seems more likely, actually helps him. That happens every time. That's not the moronic part.
The moronic part is what I expect will happen next, which is that the political media finally, at long last, smacks itself in the forehead and says, Holy crap, these stories are idiotic because a) no one cares; and b) Trump not only defies political conventional wisdom on just about every score, but he's proving to other candidates that they don't need to follow them either, thus rendering the whole Trump's-not-following-the-rules huffing and puffing self-evidently absurd. And they will stop doing the stories.U.S. presidential candidates are spending long days on the campaign trail and their nights in a succession of budget hotels, often in small towns. Not Donald Trump. After nearly every rally, the billionaire real estate developer hops into one of his planes or helicopters and returns to New York so that he can sleep in his own bed in his marble-and-gold-furnished Trump Tower apartment in Manhattan. . . . Trump's determination to sleep at home every night raises eyebrows among election campaign veterans, who say it could cost him. Voters in Iowa and New Hampshire often want more personal attention; they feel they play a special role in choosing presidential nominees because their contests are held first. . . . Strategists said Trump not only risks alienating potential supporters but also the political operatives in states that can help turn out the vote.
"Not everything in a presidential campaign can be accomplished with a speech or a rally," said Matt Schlapp, chairman of the American Conservative Union, a grassroots conservative political group, and a former White House political director for President George W. Bush. The group has not endorsed a candidate. "You attend a family event of a supporter in a key state: weddings, funerals, graduations, Christmas parties - these have an important psychological impact," he said. Trump said he has stayed in Iowa "numerous times," but a campaign source who did not want to be identified said he remembered Trump staying overnight only once in Iowa and once in New Hampshire.So this is what we've come to - campaign operatives requesting anonymity so they can dish juicy dirt on how many times the candidate stayed in a hotel in a given state in a given month, much to the disapproval of "campaign veterans" whose job it is to disapprove of such things. Here's what the political media have such a hard time getting their brains around: Trump has a job, and unlike officeholders who have the freedom not ignore the current jobs while they run for another one, Trump actually has to do his. So he takes advantage of his wealth - the wealth that gives him access to a jet and a helicopter - and he makes one-day round-trip journeys that make it possible for him to be at his home base in the morning while being anywhere he needs to go later in the day. Political media were similarly scandalizes some months back when Trump skipped a campaign appearance to close an important business deal. This icky man apparently doesn't understand that politics is the be-all and end-all of life, and that it's simply not done to choose any other priority when the scribes' pens are getting itchy. When you read that something is raising eyebrows among political operatives, there's a very good chance that means someone is acting like a normal person, and the heads of political people are exploding over it.
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Dan Calabrese’s column is distributed by HermanCain.com, which can be found at HermanCain
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