Donald Trump is a businessman, television star, and a newcomer to campaigning for public office. Running for president as your first elected office is highly unusual. A few have tried before, but in the last hundred plus years, only Dwight Eisenhower, a highly decorated World War II general, has succeeded. There were 17 Republican candidates who made it to the debate stage this year, and only Trump and Ben Carson had never run for office before. Carly Fiorina, despite having never held office, did run for the U.S. Senate in California.
Trump, with his victory in Indiana, appears at this point destined to be the winner of the GOP nominating process. His campaign over the past year has been an unusual one, to say the least, and could not have been more different than that of his all but certain opponent in the general election, Hillary Clinton. Clinton, a product of more than 40 years of obsessive political campaigning for herself and her husband on both the state and national level, is one of the most scripted candidates ever to run for president. Clinton holds morning conference calls with as many as dozens of campaign aides to review her talking points for the day. If there was ever a consensus candidate whose themes have been tested with her handlers, and poll tested by her large campaign staff, it is Clinton. Clinton spent most of her two years after leaving the State Department mapping out her future campaign, warehousing future campaign team members at the Clinton Foundation and speaking before likely future campaign contributors and supporters. The lives of both Clintons has been all about politics at every stage.
Clinton’s goal for both the primary and the fall campaign, which she has viewed as a sure victory, has been to stay on message. Despite this, her message has been impacted by the leftist populism of her primary opponent, Bernie Sanders, Vermont’s junior senator, who has proved profoundly resilient and therefore extremely annoying to Clinton. Sanders has pushed Clinton leftward, at times even to Sanders’ left (gun control), and she has on occasion made some unusually foolish remarks for someone so experienced in the business of politics. One of these remarks was her promise to put out of business a lot of coal companies and coal miners. Today, she was forced to eat crow and explain to some West Virginians that she can not really explain what prompted her to say something like that:
“I don’t know how to explain it other than what I said was totally out of context from what I meant, because I’ve been talking about helping coal country for a very long time,” Clinton said. “And it was a misstatement, because what I was saying is that the way things are going now, we will continue to lose jobs.”