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US2016: Hillary’s anti-Trump speech forces sanity back to the game

US2016: Hillary’s anti-Trump speech forces sanity back to the game

Hillary Clinton’s San Diego speech on Donald Trump’s flaws as a candidate, especially with regard to foreign policy issues, has given her an opening in the campaign ahead. But much remains. J. BROOKS SPECTOR takes a closer look.

For months now, Hillary Clinton’s supporters have been hoping she will finally figure out how to render an attack on Donald Trump in a way that works – and that sticks to him, redefining him away from a man who tells it like it is, to someone who tells it like it isn’t.

Now, finally, in San Diego, last Thursday, she rolled out a sustained assault on Trump’s lack of knowledge, temperament, skills and honesty – and most especially about foreign policy issues. This speech has heartened her supporters with the feeling that, once she is finally freed of Bernie Sanders’ campaign for the nomination and that once she finally has that Democratic nomination locked up, she can go toe-to-toe with the Donald and beat him up. But good.

Watch: Hillary Clinton’s San Diego speech

As Brookings Institution scholar Thomas Wright explained in an analysis he posted after her speech, “The most important thing that Hillary Clinton had to accomplish in her speech in San Diego on Thursday was to prove that presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump was uniquely dangerous in his worldview. Before Thursday this was not particularly straightforward. For several months, Trump’s advisers and supporters – including leading figures like Bob Corker of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee – have been arguing that Trump is an internationalist but wants allies to do a little bit more; that he wants a better deal on trade; and is sceptical of humanitarian intervention.

They frame his worldview in this way because they know there is a significant market in the electorate for a foreign policy of modest retrenchment. Many Americans are disillusioned after 15 years of war and a financial crisis. They want the United States to do less in the world. If Trump’s team could turn the election into a choice between increased engagement and a prudent form of nationalism, they may be able to unite Republicans and scoop up some Democrats and Independents. The problem that Trump’s advisers and supporters have is Trump himself. Trump does not just want a modest retrenchment or renegotiation of America’s commitments. He wants to take a wrecking ball to US foreign policy….

While a significant number of Americans may be receptive to a foreign policy of prudent restraint, it is very unlikely that they want to run the experiment of deliberately and proactively destroying what Dean Acheson called America’s ‘situations of strength’ around the world. There is no evidence that they want to dismantle Nato or the US-Japan alliance. They may be sceptical of trade but there is no appetite for a trade war with some of the world’s largest economies. They may be frustrated that America’s allies don’t spend more on defence, but they don’t want Japan, South Korea, and Saudi Arabia to acquire nuclear weapons. They don’t want a demolition man.”

At least that is the hope of Clinton and her advisers, supporters – and not a few Republicans who still have that old bipartisan, internationalist bone in their bodies. Of course it also remains to be seen if this election will be cast as one in which foreign policy is a predominant narrative, or if domestic issues are the key to victory.

The Clinton presentation, her supporters and campaign staffers now also hope and pray, was effective in forcing Trump to wash his hands of all those incendiary, wild and crazy promises and thus do a volte face pivot to demonstrate that, contrary to what the former Secretary of State said in San Diego, yes, he really and truly is a responsible steward of American foreign policy after all. Or, put another way; that Trump will give a version of the “pay no attention to that man behind the curtain”, to borrow an enduring image from The Wizard of Oz.

They want him to suddenly say, yes, he, Trump, really does “get” the criticality of alliances, despite all his previous screaming and ranting. And that, yes, he does understand why the US defines its national interests broadly (as opposed to a Scrooge-esque shopkeeper’s monthly balance sheet). And, most of all, he does, after all, really and truly intuit why the American economy thrives best when others are doing well.

But, for Trump to do that would also mean he must thereby disavow his core foreign policy beliefs. He has said a thousand times already that he is convinced the rest of the world is ruining the US and that America will only succeed if it retaliates by exploiting and beating up on other countries. Moreover, he has repeatedly said – in all kinds of formats and equivocations – that America must shed itself of any international commitments that cost any money, time or energy so that this disastrous path can be fixed and that he, Trump, can make the country “great” again. But if he choses to reiterate that version of policies in rebuttal to this newest Clinton speech, Trump – or at least so her team hopes – will be caught in a fatal pincer movement that only serves to reinforce every one of the points she made about his foreign policy madness and personality deficiencies in her recent California speech.

For this writer, at least, since he has been saying this very same thing for months, Clinton’s point about voters needing to keep in mind that this man’s temperament is just wrong for the presidency was best expressed when she summoned up the possibility that a victorious President Trump would have those nuclear missile launch codes on his person from the stroke of noon on January 20th, 2017. For people old enough to remember, this comment has a direct link back to 1964 with the Lyndon Johnson campaign’s devastating political commercial that pictured a child pulling the petals off a daisy as a voiceover counted down to zero – and as the screen then dissolved into a thermonuclear explosion.

They only aired it a few times, but in a more innocent age regarding political ads, it seems to have been enough to serve as yet one more death knell for the Republican challenger, Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater. If such an image of The Donald deciding to launch nukes mounted on missiles in a fit of pique when some nation or ruler gets under his “thin skin” doesn’t help shape the electoral dynamic for 2016 a bit, not much else will.

All of that, of course, only truly matters as strategy if Trump’s current and would-be supporters are looking for intellectual or logical consistency in their leader. But Clinton’s speech is clearly the set-up to an effort that takes on and dissects each of Trump’s positions in her future speeches and in those inevitable candidate debates in the final weeks of the general election campaign. She will be demanding he decide where he stands, specifically, and in not letting him get away with the usual rowdy arm waving, his snide name calling, his sniggering and smirking, and the hurling of those bits of metaphorical red meat to his raging crowds.

But perhaps the most extraordinary part of her speech was not in its content, but, rather, in its delivery. For virtually the first time since she became a candidate for the Democratic nomination, Hillary Clinton didn’t scream or yell in that flat, Midwestern cheese grater of a voice she affects. Instead, she spoke almost conversationally to the microphones, almost as if she were engaged in a dialogue with each member of her audience. As she spoke, she paused for emphasis at the right spots. She smiled and she even laughed a bit – putting away the verbal hammer she has used so often to drive home her points. And in doing this, she let the contents of her text speak more effectively for themselves. Somebody has been working with her oratorical style – and it may have paid dividends.

The other day the writer was reminded that while being a natural orator like Barack Obama or Franklin Roosevelt is, well, a natural phenomenon, some speakers’ delivery may be improved with the right kind of coaching so as to help them make their points more emphatically and effectively, as with the storyline in the recent film, The King’s Speech. The ancient Greeks have told us that their famous politician and orator, Demosthenes, in order to purge himself of a stutter and to make his speech more fluid, would walk on the beach and practise speaking above the roar of the crashing surf, while he had put pebbles in his mouth to make himself focus on enunciation. And Winston Churchill is reported to have developed his characteristic dramatic pauses when he was advised to replace nearly compulsive “uhm’s” with a bit of silence instead, achieving a compelling verbal signature that was embedded in so many of the wartime prime minister’s rousing speeches. Yes, somebody has got to Hillary Clinton – and it has been a serious improvement.

Watch: Donald Trump responds to Hillary Clinton in Rally in San Jose, CA

Now, of course, the challenge confronting Clinton this week is to – finally – nail down that tantalisingly close nomination. This Tuesday represents the final day of primaries (save for one on 14 June in the nation’s capital, for 20 delegates). This week, the key states are New Jersey and California with 126 and 475 delegates respectively. Also on 7 June there will be primaries in North Dakota for 18 delegates, Montana with 21, New Mexico with 34, and South Dakota with 20. However, those two big states are the key – especially since the delegate numbers in Democratic Party primaries are split proportionally between candidates.

With Clinton’s current total of 2,323 delegates, versus Sanders’ 1,547, and with 2,383 needed to lock down a majority and thus the nomination, Clinton’s capture of any reasonable share of the remaining delegates, to go with her 1,776 pledged and 547 super-delegates, will almost certainly mean she is – finally – the Democrats’ choice. Unless, of course, the convention is somehow thrown into turmoil by last-ditch efforts from Sanders supporters or if, unlikely though it may be, that nagging e-mail controversy generates FBI charges sufficient to result in a criminal indictment. (However, this remains unlikely, given that the State Department’s Inspector-General’s report criticised her, but did not specifically call for punishment.)

As a result, coming off her San Diego speech on Donald Trump’s fundamental flaws as a candidate, the real task for Hillary Clinton is to continue to press this charge until it sticks. But, while she is doing that, one can be certain Trump will keep at his own efforts to make his “crooked Hillary” trope become a de facto truth in the campaign. The old adage in politics is that a candidate must define him(her)self first, before the opposition does it for you – and to their advantage and your detriment. We now get to find out which one of these two people owns the best dictionary. DM

Photo: US Democratic Presidential candidate and former Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, speaks at a campaign rally at Camden County College in Blackwood, New Jersey, USA, 11 May 2016. New Jersey will hold primary elections on 07 June 2016. EPA/PETER FOLEY

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