Two rules:
1.) Winners don’t whine.
2.) Whiners don’t win.
OK, maybe that’s just one rule, expressed in two different ways. But I bring it up because over the past couple of weeks, we’ve seen so much whining from Donald Trump, more whining than you ever thought possible. So much whining as to make you almost sick of whining, enough to make you say please, no more whining, we can’t take any more whining!
Trump has whined about the delegate selection process in Colorado, where he got outmaneuvered and allowed the Ted Cruz campaign to take all 34 delegates. He has whined about the outcome in Louisiana, where he beat Cruz by less than 4 percentage points in the popular vote but where Cruz, by deftly working the system, has come away with more delegates.
“I end up winning Louisiana and then when everything is done I find out I get less delegates than this guy that got his a… kicked, OK?” Trump whined Monday. “Give me a break. Really disgusts me. So it’s a very sick system.”
And of course, he whines endlessly about the possibility that he could end up losing the nomination in an open convention in Cleveland. The longstanding GOP rule that a candidate must win a majority of delegates, not just a plurality, amounts to “crooked shenanigans,” as he puts it. “We should have won it a long time ago,” he complained in New York. “But, you know, we keep losing where we’re winning.”
Welcome to real life, Mister Trump. Running for a major office, like running a government, requires more than spouting off in front of a TV camera. It requires organization and attention to detail, and no, there’s nothing unfair about it. To the contrary, it is essential to the process of winnowing out the weak and unqualified.
It’s like this: If you can’t master the rules of the Republican Party, then your chances of mastering the more complicated intricacies of the federal bureaucracy are nil. If you can’t attract and keep top staff people to your campaign, then you have no chance of forming an effective White House. If the complexities of politicking are too great for you, or if you lack the discipline and commitment to master them, then no, you are not capable of being president of the most powerful government in world history.
Take 2008. In the popular mind, Barack Obama won that year’s Democratic nomination and general election largely through the power of his message and strong personal appeal. But the truth is that behind the scenes, Obama built a campaign organization that was far superior to that fielded by the Clintons and then by the Republicans, staffing his organization with top talent and deploying cutting-edge technology that opponents today are still trying to duplicate.
For example, there was no chance that the ’08 Obama campaign would have named a complete, unvetted incompetent such as Sarah Palin as his running mate, and whatever you may think about their policies, the Obama people have governed with the same diligence, discipline and attention to detail as they showed on the campaign trail.
We can likewise expect that a Trump administration would also govern as they have campaigned, which is why the only way they ought to get close to the White House is with a tour guide.
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