COMMENTARY

BRUMMETT ONLINE: Fear and President Trump

The pasta and salad and fruit of the vine were good and the political conversation better.

The pasta and salad and fruit of the vine are long gone. But I will share the conversation.

There were about 20 gatherers, politically wired and mostly liberally inclined, friends and acquaintances from the local political beat since the 1980s.

My role by special invitation to this long-standing dinner and discussion group was to begin the conversation and let the spontaneity from active brains commence.

It occurred to me that readers might benefit from what was said — without my giving away identities of the former Clinton aides and current and former lobbyists sitting around me and saying it.

Here’s how I began: Presidential races are about prevailing public moods. The current prevailing public mood reflects an uncommon — indeed unprecedented — aversion to politics as usual, giving rise to Donald Trump, Ben Carson and, in a way on the left, Bernie Sanders.

The Republican establishment is desperate to restore order, but Trump demonstrates more staying power than anyone thought, and the once-designated inevitable nominee, Jeb Bush, is a free-falling disaster.

So it may be that no Republican will lock down the delegates to secure the nomination, setting off perilous negotiations on the GOP side.

On the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton is inevitable, and pretty strong, but a consummate establishment figure at risk of running afoul of the prevailing public mood — though contending seriously to be the first woman president ought to count as something new and exciting.

Never in my lifetime has a presidential race been this fluid, this unsettled, this volatile and this unconventional, I concluded.

Wrong, I was told by a man on the left — physically, I mean, not philosophically.

The prevailing public mood is that ISIS just took its terror to Paris and closer to us and thus made the anti-immigrant wall-builder — Trump — stronger, he said. Look out for Trump, he said, especially as Hillary is forced to play defense as the chief foreign-policy official of an Obama administration that will stay under attack as the terrorist worry lingers or grows.

Others scoffed. Surely not, they said.

Those words — surely not — have been applied inconsequentially to Trump for months.

Another fellow said you couldn’t possible define today a prevailing mood because a terrorist incident on our soil between now and the election could change everything — as could, he said, a military offensive undertaken by the French whose president may not be messing around.

A woman to the right — and I’m most assuredly speaking physically and not philosophically — said the prevailing mood was that 96 percent of the Americans’ minds are made up in an unalterably polarized way — 48 percent for the Democrat and 48 percent for the Republican — and that the race will hinge on independent appeal and turnout, which ought to favor Democrats and Clinton.

Yes, said another, which means the Hispanic vote will deliver victory to the Democrats because the Hispanic vote grows, and the Republicans have firmly alienated it.

That’s not necessarily so, said a couple of people who speculated that the dramatic nature of the Republican primary and the fearful mood could drive interest and thus turnout for Trump.

Were we saying Trump would win the Republican nomination?

Oh, no, said a veteran Clintonite, who stressed that we should not underestimate the lingering power of the Bush machine to prevail even for Jeb in a brokered convention.

But isn’t the GOP establishment pivoting as fast as it can to Marco Rubio, who, by the way, might relieve the Republicans’ Hispanic problem?

He’s a lightweight to be revealed as such, said one man.

Maybe, said another, but he is the strongest GOP matchup against Hillary.

Yes, he is, said another, as a kind of lamentation.

Ted Cruz came up a few times, always to groans.

I sought to summarize by saying we seemed to be formulating this conceivable scenario: The nation could well wake up post-election next November saying that of course things turned out the way they did, for a President-elect Trump — because the nation was uncommonly weary of conventional politics and consumed by fear of terrorist incursion, which made the zany and xenophobic and demagogic and superficial and irrational candidacy of a mass deporter and wall-builder the perfect if dangerous fit for the time.

No, they said in near-unison. We’re not ready to say that.

They were not ready to fathom that, more precisely.

One more thing: A fellow said he’d been on a conference call with UnitedHealth Group and that the giant insurer was saying it was losing money in the Obamacare exchanges and might pull out. If so, he speculated, the exchanges would become weaker — thus more expensive — and Obamacare would emerge as a policy failure that would burden Hillary.

The general reaction was that the gentleman was making a valid policy point — that, in truth, Obamacare was predicated on expanded Medicaid that the U.S. Supreme Court allowed states to reject; but that, politically speaking, the current mood of disaffection and fear would likely overpower the actuarial nuts and bolts of health insurance.

If only other states would emulate Arkansas, I said, and use Medicaid expansion money to put Medicaid enrollees on the exchanges.

At any rate, the point seemed to be that we might wake up after next November’s election to a President-elect Trump and news that, oh, by the way, while we were otherwise engaged, Obamacare had collapsed.

And that brought me back to the fruit of the vine. Was any left?

John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers’ Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.

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