Campaign 2016 Turns Into a Twitter Fight
As presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump got into a Twitter fight with newly crowned presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, any hope for reasoned discourse in Campaign 2016 seemed to fly out the window.
"Obama just endorsed Crooked Hillary," tweeted Trump, leading the tweeting as he does daily. "He wants four more years of Obama -- but nobody else does!"
Ah, he only wishes that were true. Every campaign, it is often said, is a contest between "change" versus "more of the same." That's particularly true in our current contest. Clinton is not only running toward policies and programs of President Barack Obama, she's sticking to them like a life raft in a stormy sea.
And why not? Obama's approval ratings have been running higher than Clinton's or Trump's, who both happen to have the highest disapproval ratings of any presumed major-party candidates in modern history.
Instead, the leading Republicans who these days are derided as the party "establishment" are stuck in a pickle: They don't want to run with Trump if he constantly is going to shoot from the lip in ways that offend the voters the GOP is trying to woo -- and they can't run without him. His antics are too beloved by the rank-and-file Republicans and right-leaning independents who turn out for Trump's rallies.
But let's get back to the fight. This time, on the day after the Associated Press declared that she finally had clinched enough delegates to win her party's nomination, Clinton joined in the fun with a short, sweet and stern reply to Trump: "Delete your account."
Ah, it's on now. Trump, who dishes out insults better than he takes them, sounded a bit miffed as he fired back with a mini-rant: "How long did it take your staff of 823 people to think that up -- and where are your 33,000 emails that you deleted?"
Clinton might well have responded in the manner I might have chosen: asking, "Where are the tax returns that you refuse to show us?"
Or I might have asked, "Where are the tens of thousands of dollars in life savings that you fleeced from customers of the former 'Trump University'?"
And I might add, "... which the New York attorney general says never was a university?"
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