The Devils You Know

 I've had this quote from a Washington Post story rattling around my head all day. It goes:

 "When the true Hillary Clinton and the real Donald Trump are revealed to Americans, there is no way the American people are going to pick the petulant 12-year-old,” said Bill Burton, a former senior Obama strategist."

And that, to me, reveals a fundamental flaw in how the Democratic Party is approaching this election. Clinton and Trump have both been in the public eye and pop culture symbols for decades, there is nothing about either of them to "reintroduce" the public to. That statement, and the ad of Donald Trump talking about women, shows that the Democratic strategy here will be to bring up all the shit of Trump's past to show him as an unserious, ill-prepared, living calamity waiting to be inflicted on the American people. If that sounds vaguely familiar, it's because that is exactly what the 16 other Republican candidates tried once they realized Trump's campaign wasn't a promotional tour for whatever cockimaney thing Trump was hawking at the moment. Obviously, it was a resounding success, so Clinton and the Democrats making use of the exact same playbook will of course be seen as evidence of their keen political acumen.

A campaign between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton is going to swing on how each of them can use their past to project a brighter future for the country and how deeply people buy that projection. This isn't unusual in a Presidential election, obviously, but it has added significance this time around given that you know, the general feeling that the country is going to absolute shit is pretty pervasive on all sides.  

For the campaigns to sell their story they'll need a pretty intimate knowledge of how the spin cycle works, and how to manipulate it to their narrative's advantage; especially since both of the major players here have decades of history and everyone who knows their name will already have concrete beliefs about who they are, what they represent, and how they'll perceive the spin work done for their narratives. On one side, we have a guy who just got people to speculate over whether he pretended to be his own publicist (and, consequently, get people to speculate about how this will be the thing to kill Trump's campaign.  Which reminds people of all the other things that were supposed to do that before, but haven't.)  On the other, you have someone who has to get one of their super PACs to spend $1 million to hire professional internet trolls.

Yeah, this all bodes well.