Running a Fever: the Virus That Is the 2016 Campaign

The 2016 U.S. election campaign resembles something on the order of a virus — a kind of flu that starts out as a vague little cold complete with a manageable slightly high temperature, the itchy but not yet dripping nose, the random cough here and there. It’s an odd bug, hard to quantify or identify, but surely nothing to be worried about.  It’s just in the beginning, a vague discomfiture in the middle of the night, which could just be the a summer heat or the last tendrils of a slightly unnerving dream.

These little bugs and viruses have come around before, about every four years or so, and begin usually in stately, predictable fashion. A number of people, most of them men of varying degrees of experience or ability, almost dutifully, walk up to a podium in some big city, or their hometown of Small Beginnings, USA, or a state capital, and announced that they have a fever.

They are surrounded by loved one,  including wives, husbands, children, old friends and new donors, and some former senator, vice president whom many people were surprised to find alive and breathing who will endorse them.   To a man and woman, they tell the world that they — and only they — are qualified and perfectly formed to be president of the United States at this perfectly wonderful, awful, peaceful, perilous, happy, horrible, dandy or dangerous, hopeful or hopeless historic moment in time because . . . well, just because. The surrounding media each time will note what this means for the future of you know what, and parse like baseball writers at an off-season meeting of baseball writers, who will most likely get to say at the end of it all: “I fill-in-the-blank do solemnly swear . . . ”

Imagine this: “I, Donald Trump — believe me, it’s going to be huge — do solemnly swear to make America great again.”

And I know that none of us are laughing or sitting there with jaws dropped to the floor.

The idea that Donald Trump, who is, as he often tells us, not a politician, but a tycoon and television celebrity, could win the Republican nomination for president is no longer even implausible — by the evidence so far, it’s entirely likely, if you’re big on data.  He has won two: the New Hampshire and South Carolina primaries, finished second in the Iowa caucus and is leading big in Nevada and a good many primaries of the states on Super Tuesday, March 1.

It’s true.

Just ask Jeb Bush, the third member of the Bush family who wanted to be president, and the odds-on GOP favorite not only of the so-called GOP establishment but most of the media experts, who officially and with a little rancor, suspended his campaign, an unlikely development. Dr. Ben Carter, on the other hand, running dead last in what remains of the original 17 GOP wanna-bes, has not suspended his campaign, which also is an unlikely development, especially to another GOP  hopeful Ted Cruz, first (or maybe runner-up) in the hearts of evangelicals and a bi-partisan last in the hearts and affections of his Senate peers. Or, as Mr. Trump so elegantly put it, “Nobody likes him.”

We are not forgetting here the presence of Bernie Sanders, although we should all prepare ourselves to forget him, after he fell rather resoundingly in Nevada, to the once-and-future-presumptive Democratic Party first-woman-to-be-president (if-Bengazi-her-e-mails-didn’t-Bern-or Bill’s past-don’t-get-her-first) Hillary Clinton who may after all be inevitable, in a diminished kind of way.

We should mention that the bounding, youthful Florida Senator Marco Rubio, who finished in a virtual tie for second in South Carolina with the aforementioned Cruz has turned into the campaign’s magician.  He has so far won not a single primary or caucus, but many victories: a third place finish in Iowa which was a resounding triumph, a New Hampshire fifth place finish, plus Chris Christie’s boot marks on his face, which was a resounding triumph over political death itself and the near-tie — at 20 percent of the vote with Cruz — which he interpreted as the triumph of a new generation of GOP leaders, of which he was the leader. It is entirely plausible that Rubio could come out of Super Tuesday without a single win, but 55 endorsements and an unsigned selfie of Lady Ga Ga, plus being named the presumptive favorite of the faceless GOP establishment.

I have a fever.  The country is feverish, after last week, which saw Trump win handily, even after doing an impossible trifecta of calling George W. Bush, who remains very popular in South Carolina, a liar, getting into a verbal brawl with the pope and a member of the Jackson brothers — and telling a grisly urban-legend from history story which no one could verify. Trump, celebrating with a certain amount  self-control, said that campaigning “was exhausting, painful . . . and beautiful.”  “Winning,” he said with a grin, “is beautiful.”  So was his family — Trump certainly wins the sweepstakes for number of beautiful family members on stage.

The campaign, which continues Tuesday in Nevada, has become the dominating context for almost anything else that happens in our lives. I’m guessing the debates, at least the GOP debates, are probably the highest rated show on television, certainly bigger than the Duck Dynasty, the head of which Trump suggested might make a good UN ambassador.  This is the campaign in which Trump hosted Saturday Night Live, and Bernie Sanders showed up on an SNL episode, hosted by his grumpy doppelganger Larry David.

Consider for a moment Supreme Court  Justice Anthony Scalia, the scholarly and big-personality justice who died suddenly at a Texas resort Friday and think how quickly the body politic, and therefore the press, turned to the sordid partisan combat taken up not only by the presidential candidates but by the nation’s political leaders of whether President Obama would or could or should nominate a successor, a subject that would now become a permanent part of the campaign.

Scalia, a devout Catholic, was also a devout social conservative and had a life big enough to accommodate the return of some humanity to our daily lives.  Agree or disagree on his stands and politics, and decisions, he was also a noted scholar, a man with an intellect coupled to a sense of humor, a man with a large ego, no doubt, but also a large and self-evidently loving family. His son, the Rev. Paul Scalia, celebrated the funeral Mass with warmth and humor at a packed gathering at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. The justice’s tastes and heart were big enough to fit a devoted friendship with Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg over a shared passion for opera.   

It’s fair to say, though, that the election results, and the on-going, non-stop blather over its meaning, as they say, “moving forward,” while they did not manage to blot out the dignity of Scalia’s ceremonious remembrance, took some of the sheen off, given the acrimonious, yield-not-an-inch hysteria over his successor. Nor will the rampage shootings in Kalamazoo, Michigan, of six persons, allegedly by an Uber driver prevent heated and outrageous bile over the Second Amendment on the campaign trail.

This is the virus that is Campaign 2016.  We’re all running a fever, followed by cold sweats.