South Carolina Gov. Nikkii Haley told the AP that Donald Trump is serious about running for President: he called her and she predicts this is not being done for name recognition. She said “he’s convinced he can win.”
I also believe the conventional wisdom is often wrong and that those who spread it later try to discreetly pretend they never insisted what would turn out to be true turned out to be wrong. Trump winning the nomination or the White House?
And why not? As I’ve noted here, what I call the “talk radio political culture” now permeates American politics in the way people talk to and treat each other. So perhaps we are now seeing a shift to where we’ll see politics dominated by the reality show political culture.
Snookie for the Senate?
UPDATE: First Read has two pieces of analysis fitting in with this:
*** What Donald Trump says about the GOP: As Donald Trump’s 15 minutes extend to 15 days — and possibly 15 weeks, if he does end up running for president — the inevitable question is getting asked: Why is someone who’ll probably never be president, let alone the GOP nominee, receiving so much attention? Part of it is Trump’s celebrity (remember that Warren Beatty attracted a considerable amount of buzz when he was mulling a White House bid). Part of it is the media (that have zeroed in on him the same way they did to Sarah Palin and even Christine O’Donnell). But most of it has to do with the Republican Party. As Politico’s Martin writes, Trump is filling an appetite of a particularly vocal part of the GOP base that wants a presidential candidate who will offer “who will offer no-holds-barred criticism of Obama.” Martin adds, “With no other Republican hopefuls gaining traction, Trump has become a blinking neon stand-in for a candidate who will go beyond mainstream boundaries and make the case for why Obama isn’t just a bad president presiding over a declining America but perhaps an illegitimate one.”
*** “No one in the field excites me right now”: Conservative writer David Frum makes a similar point, describing the type of Republican voter who would find Trump appealing. “What you want is a candidate who will take the fight to Obama. Really fight him. Mitt Romney? He’s no fighter. He’s a CEO, and you’ve had it with CEOs. Mike Huckabee? Seems like a nice guy, but if you want a sermon, you’ll go to church. Now this guy Donald Trump, he’s kind of a blowhard. But he hates Obama just as much as you do. You don’t take the birth certificate thing seriously, but if it annoys the liberals, what the hell.” (By the way, the latest New York Times/CBS poll finds that 47% of Republican voters believe, incorrectly, that Obama was born in an another country.) Another component fueling Trump right now: a lack of enthusiasm for the entire GOP field right now. South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley (R) summed it up in an interview with the AP: “I’ll tell you, right now: No one in the field excites me right now.”
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.