Hillary Clinton can't seem to put down Donald Trump by style or even substance. Yet that failing poses no great problem for her so far, because others are doing for her what she can't.
On her own, she lacks the ability to persuade. She doesn't possess the skill to relate and connect.
She admitted the other night that, when it comes to public service, she likes the service part but not the public one. That would seem a prescription for volunteer work, not electoral pursuit.
Her ambition conflicts with her nature.
Substantively, she mitigates her overwhelming advantage in policy command with a transparently expedient political synthesis. She tries to blend big speaking fees from Goldman Sachs with an appropriation of Bernie Sanders' near-socialist message. No one can much decipher what element of that political synthesis might be more real than the rest.
Meanwhile she epitomizes the deplored establishment class of American politics.
And yet all of the aforementioned pales against the fact that she currently faces no personal requirement to beat Trump. That's because others are drubbing Trump very effectively in her stead.
Her job Thursday night in her nomination acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention merely was to hold serve. A preceding succession of much better speakers and persuaders, meaning both Obamas and Joe Biden and Michael Bloomberg and a Muslim American and Harvard-educated lawyer named Khizr Khan, had broken serve for her.
She indeed managed to hold serve. She hit no aces. There were a couple of unforced errors by her opponent. She hit a couple of decent volleys, such as that a man you can bait on Twitter is not the man you want with his finger on the nuclear trigger.
Meanwhile no one--no one--is beating Trump for her more effectively than Trump himself.
The man apparently is bereft of sensitivity or decency or grace, all of which seem trapped behind a wall of megalomania and a short attention span.
More likely it's the incessant barrage of his personal affronts--the slur against prisoners of war, the sexist attack on a female cable news anchor, the racist attack on a judge--that keeps him around 40 percent and gives Hillary a good chance to ride to an ugly default victory on the backs of surrogates.
But now we confront this latest atrocity. As before, we are given to wonder if Trump hasn't gone too far this time.
Generally, it's not good to insult the mother of a slain war hero. Nor is it good to liken your farcical concept of your own sacrifice to another's loss of a loved one in military combat.
Moments before Hillary spoke Thursday night, the Democratic convention heard from a Pakistani Muslim immigrant named Khizr Khan, a Harvard-educated lawyer now living in Charlottesville, Va. He was accompanied at the podium by his wife, Ghazala, who said nothing. They honored their son, Humayun, a slain American Army war hero in Iraq in 2004.
The powerful moment did not occur when Khan assailed Trump for wanting to exclude Muslims such as his family from the country.
It did not occur when Khan wondered whether Trump had ever read the U.S. Constitution, then reached into his pocket to retrieve a copy to say that Trump could borrow his.
The real power came a few sentences later, after the cheering, when this grim-faced Muslim father said the privileged Trump had sacrificed "nothing and no one."
It was a dire and true indictment of Trump. He escaped Vietnam because his foot hurt. (He had bone spurs.) His children have been called into service only to give a talk for their mega-rich daddy now and then.
Trump was presented with only one option for an appropriate response: Express his sorrow for the Khans' loss, relate his admiration for them and their son and agree that he had never made any comparable sacrifice.
But did Trump possess that instinct, that sensitivity, that decency, that wisdom to cut losses, that surrender of egomania? No.
Instead he wondered why Mrs. Khan didn't speak and whether it was because her speaking was forbidden, presumably by Muslim religion. And he said he had sacrificed plenty by working hard to create jobs and build great buildings--a process begun long ago with a million bucks handed to him by his daddy.
Ghazala Khan responded that she hadn't been confident of her composure. She said Trump might not understand, considering he hadn't lost a child.
Thus the Khans accomplished in a couple of short sentences the seemingly easy evisceration of Trump that had long evaded other Republican presidential contenders, and now seems to evade Hillary.
All of that is to say Clinton doesn't need to beat Trump right now.
She has surrogates who are doing the job for her. I'd rank them at the moment in this ascending order of value: 5. Bill Clinton. 4. Barack Obama. 3. Ghazala Khan. 2. Khizr Khan. 1. Trump, of course.
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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.
Editorial on 08/02/2016