Reasonable minds can differ but in my view that is a harder punch than "It’s a betrayal of the most sacred duty we bear as a nation–protect & equip our troops..." lol
They roll over Trump like a tsunami, wave after wave after wave of attack. It’s all he can do to just keep his head above water—he cannot counterattack. In boxing that is how you defeat a great counter puncher. If you hit your opponent Fast & Furious, Shock & Awe he can only go into a defensive crouch. He cannot counter punch and Trump is the best counter-punching politician of our lifetimes. The Times story came out very late Friday evening. By Sunday morning Lincoln Project is back at him while he's playing golf. That's not much time between rounds. No rest for him! He can ignore or tweet or attempt to just survive but he cannot counter punch.
I wrote in 2016 that Democrats should adopt this tsunami strategy--hound Trump, wherever he goes, you go. Overwhelm him with numbers. I used a photograph of a lion, his back to water's edge, hemmed in by a pack of hyenas, this one nipping at his tail, this one feinting, this one daring to lunge at his throat as the lion turns his head in distraction, pressing, pressing, moving closer and closer... Every day give your most effective surrogates—Liz Warren I particularly had in mind—daily attack points. Every day a different attack from a different person. It would overwhelm any one creature.
And this is what you see today. Trump overwhelmed, dazed and fatigued--"Fatigue makes cowards of us all," Vince Lombardi said. And when you start as a coward...Trump has given up—on COVID-19, on the election.
The Biden campaign has its admirers. One of them is Trump, who has described their strategy of keeping their candidate largely hidden, "beautiful." Pick your adage: run out the clock; don't get in your opponent's way when he's making a fool of himself; if it ain't broke, don't fix it. And by God, Joe Biden is up 9%. Why quibble?
I do think the Biden campaign has been shrewd to keep Biden hidden. in an epidemic he is practicing social distancing and is masked up--that shows he's responsible, a welcome contrast with Trump. The strategy keeps Biden from missteps verbal and physical. It contrasts well. It shows that Biden will not rise to every hooked bait thrown in the water, while Trump is constitutionally incapable of not striking at it. It cedes the sidewalk to Trump to find every goddamn shit puddle to stamp his feet in, and when the sidewalks are dry to squat and take a dump and then step in one of his own making. Which Trump has done with alacrity. I can admire such a strategy and I do, cautiously. I would be more admiring if when Biden does attack he throws his weight behind every punch. Biden did not do that yesterday. I did not admire that strategy yesterday, I was contemptuous of it.
Democratic strategists, a critical mass of the active ones, it seems, believe that the Lincoln Project's ads are all to no effect in moving voters from the fence or from Trump to Biden; that's it's all good and at times amusing theater but that's all. They might be right, I don't think so, "Bounty" has racked up 9.1 million views in half a day, but it might be that no strategy, rope-a-dope or Shock & Awe or anything in between can change the facts on the ground: two symbiotic national crises—a health epidemic and a recession/depression— whose solutions are mutually exclusive, and another, overlapping, completely separate, police brutality/race crisis, both in an election year, both of which the generic president badly mishandled and exacerbated, and that these twin terrors would have sunk Trump or Obama or Abraham Lincoln regardless of opposition strategy. And/or Democratic strategists are just constitutionally unsuited to Attack. We cannot ever know for sure, but a whole lot of somebodies watching those Lincoln Project ads, Trump is overwhelmed, literally and figuratively in over his head, and he has given up. That we know. All of us must in our own way stand vigilant guard over the grave.
