Reading about Andrew Jackson, the last President who ran against the entrenched power elites in Washington, as a man of the people, while owing 300 slaves, running a plantation for profit and speculating in land, a portal to victory for Donald Trump emerged.
Of course, as any fan of West Wing will know, events can intervene to throw Mr. Trump an advantage--another 9/11 magnitude attack at the first game of the World Series, or a series of attacks in high profile, scary succession which make a tough guy, damn the civil rights, let's protect the people look better.
But even absent such "good luck" for Mr. Trump, he can simply enter the debates and pivot hard toward amiability and wave away all those "metaphors" about the wall with Mexico and the religion test for admission to the USA and say:
" Look, as my supporters have understood, and as the effete media has completely missed, all I'm saying is we have to open our eyes to reality, and try to do some common sense things to protect ourselves.
Police in big cities concentrate their patrols and attention to high crime areas. We say we are in a "war" against ISIS and terrorism, but wars end and this "war" is not really a war at all. It's an eternal struggle, in which every successful, prosperous nation has to engage because our success and our wealth makes us the envy of the world, a target, a prize ship in seas thick with pirates.
How do we do that? Do will vilify Muslims? No, we embrace them. We embrace people with the family of Captain Khan and we celebrate them. But as Captain Khan's father himself admits, the Muslim American community has a special role to play in protecting their countrymen now, just as Black communities once had to lead the healing after the struggles of the Civil Rights era.
If we learned anything from the experience of Japanese Americans during World War II, we learned it's to our great advantage to draw on our diversity and use the language skills, the knowledge of culture to understand those who wish to harm us.
I agree with Secretary Clinton about one thing: Our greatest strength is, in fact, our diversity. That means it's absurd to think every Muslim American is loyal to ISIS. No. In fact our Muslim American countrymen have the most to lose if ISIS succeeds. Can you imagine all those women Muslim doctors having to give up their practices because ISIS institutes Sharia law?
It's a lot like our Jewish American countrymen: Love for Israel, a desire to protect Israel, doesn't mean they love America any less. Every man has many threads from which his character is woven, and the whole cloth is the strength of each person, not the individual threads.
When I said I liked the guys who did not get captured, I was not saying John McCain was a coward or a fool. The fact is, as we all know, as all my supporters understood, John McCain showed more fortitude in captivity than any of us are ever called upon to show.
And John's been a good Senator. I'm big enough to admit that. He's been a good Senator. He's just not what I would call a "war hero," because that's just being politically correct and I'm sick and tired of people telling lies and spinning fantasies when in fact the truth is different. See, being a hero has to do with being a success, with winning, not losing, not getting shot down, with shooting other warriors down.
I was talking about the neglect of the idea of success. All my life I've pursued success, winning. A hero wins. A great competitor may be admirable in many ways, but he is not a hero, unless he wins. That is what the Democrats don't understand. President Obama, Hillary Clinton, they are all about process. As long as we follow the rules, as long as we follow the process, that's the important thing, not the outcome.
Well, I disagree. If we stick to the rules of the treaty and that means closing every steel mill in Pennsylvania, every coal mine in Kentucky, every automobile plant in Michigan, every paper mill in Maine, every furniture factory in North Carolina, well that's just fine with the Democrats, but that's not fine with me. I think as President, my job is winning these jobs for Americans, and if that means re negotiating treaties, changing the rules, then I'll do it.
Look, this has been a long campaign, but I have been trying to do something new and different and change is never easy. The fact is, these are troubling times. But we've come through worse times. Nobody is trying to dissolve the union, or enslave our fellow citizens. The threats we face can be met, with determination and smarts. But we have to be tough and not afraid to speak the truth. "
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