Back during the1988 campaign,Saturday Night Live had parodied the country’s pious streak with a skit featuring a Democratic presidential aspirant – former Arizona governor Bruce Babbitt – who shamefacedly admitted to going through the express checkout at the local supermarket with 14 items in his basket rather than the requisite 10.
In the age of Donald Trump,not even 91 criminal charges – which,remember,is 91 more than his predecessors combined – puts him out of the presidential running. On the contrary,Trump’s grand slam of criminal indictments in New York,Miami,Washington,DC,and now Atlanta – all in the same calendar year – has solidified his lead in the Republican primary race. What explains the change?
That Clinton campaign in 1992 is a fitting place to start because the then governor of Arkansas managed to weather a super-storm of scandal before the first primary contest in New Hampshire. His candidacy was imperilled not just by allegations of drug use during his student days at Oxford but of dodging the Vietnam draft while so many of his peers had been conscripted. There were also revelations from Little Rock cocktail lounge singerGennifer Flowers,a longtime paramour,who spoke of her affair with the smooth-talking southerner known in those days as “Slick Willie”.
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Ordinarily,just one of those scandals should have forced Clinton from the race. But as his campaign was imploding,he developed a survival manual which enabled him to become “the Comeback Kid”.
First,he portrayed himself as the target of a “Republican attack machine”. Second,he vowed to “fight like hell” and not to grant his opponents an easy victory. Third,he tried to shift attention away from his own problems to those of the voters of New Hampshire,nurturing a sense of shared victimhood in the process. Clinton protested that he was being singled out precisely because he was the candidate who most felt their pain. A year later,he was president.
All of this now finds an echo amid this flurry of indictments. Trump’s equivalent of the “Republican attack machine” are the Democratic prosecutors,Joe Biden and the Justice Department which has handed down the indictments. “Fight like hell” are the exact words Trump used on January 6,2021,as he urged his moshpit of MAGA diehards to march on the US Capitol. Trump has also used the charges against him as a bonding mechanism with his base.