Campaign 2016 Turns Into a Twitter Fight

By Clarence Page, Tribune Content Agency on Jun 12, 2016

But I'm not a candidate. Clinton did the smarter thing by refusing to dwell one millisecond longer than necessary on Trump's Twitter turf. Just sting and go. Leave a sharp message that Trump should not go anywhere near Bill and Hillary Clinton's scandals unless he's ready to face a new dredging up of his own scandals, old and new.

Besides, Clinton shouldn't have to do that dirty work herself. Like most mortals, she is an amateur at the art of bullying insult-dog tactics compared to Trump -- and that's not a bad thing.

Zingers are what surrogates are for -- and who would have guessed that she would have a rising star on her side in the personage of Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat and, like Clinton's rival candidate Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, a darling of their party's progressive wing.

She stayed neutral during the primaries, but after Clinton clinched the nomination she came out swinging in speeches, TV appearances and toe-to-toe with The Donald on Twitter, calling him a "loser," "weak" and a "small, insecure money grubber."

And she's just getting started. Welcome to Campaign 2016. It's not going to be for the squeamish.

But Clinton hasn't done badly with the zingers, either. "Donald Trump's ideas aren't just different," she said in her recent foreign policy address that could have been called her "Stop Donald" speech, "they are dangerously incoherent. They're not even really ideas, just a series of bizarre rants, personal feuds and outright lies."

She also raised the possibility that Trump could lead America into a war because some foreign leader "got under his very thin skin."

To which Trump responded in an interview with CNN's Jake Tapper with a line that sounded like a parody of his famously self-congratulatory style: "Well, I don't have thin skin," Trump protested. "I have very strong and thick skin."

He then went on to explain how his thick skin and "good temperament" enabled him to have "one of the best-selling books of all-time" and a successful television show, "The Apprentice." Of course, he did not mention that his famous tag line on that show was "You're fired," which might not be the sort of message that voters seeking an upbeat economic message are looking to hear. But that's show biz.

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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@tribune.com.)