Nanky ?!
http://www.wsj.com/articles/a-nation-at-half-mast-1469056389" A Nation at Half-Mast "
" The torrent of tragedies before the GOP convention may affect the electorate’s choice of a president. "
By DANIEL HENNINGER
" The Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll reports that 73% of the electorate believes the United States is on the wrong track, a level normally associated with national crises, such as the 2008 financial meltdown. Amid the GOP convention in Cleveland and with the Democratic mother ship landing next week in Philadelphia, one has to wonder: Are the campaigns of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton also on the wrong track?
As recently as a week ago, the election’s narrative was set: Donald Trump, an apolitical outsider, represented the mad-as-hell vote—immigrants, trade, political correctness, whatever you’ve got.
Hillary Clinton, possessed with a lifetime of political experience, would not only extend the Obama presidency but expand the federal government’s hand of help to whatever problem you’ve got.
And for those done with the details, it’s simple: NeverTrump versus Crooked Hillary.
Then, just days before the GOP convention, the world snapped.
On Tuesday, President Obama and former President George W. Bush spoke at the memorial service for the five cops gunned down in Dallas.
Some 48 hours later, an Islamist terrorist in Nice, France, drove a tractor trailer across and over men, women and children, slaughtering 84 of them.
On Friday evening, a military coup erupted in Turkey, a nation of 78 million, NATO ally and key state in the war on Middle Eastern terror.
Sunday morning, a lone gunman shot to death three cops in Baton Rouge, La. Just the week before, two black men had been killed in separate incidents with the police.
The compression of these nearly unimaginable events is knocking the 2016 election off the familiar narrative of economic anxiety, terrorism, the border and Washington dysfunction.
Driving past a suburban city hall in Cleveland last weekend, a relative of mine said, “It seems like the flags are always at half mast now. They go up and then they come back down.” She’s right. The U.S. has become a nation at half-mast.
What the week’s events has pressed into people’s minds is the feeling, correct or not, of the absence of answers or explanation. Voters are starting to feel trapped with no apparent exit.
That was the silent scream discovered on the Facebook page of murdered Baton Rouge police officer Montrell Jackson, a 32-year-old black man: “I swear to God I love this city but I wonder if this city loves me. In uniform I get nasty hateful looks and out of uniform some consider me a threat. I’ve experienced so much in my short life and these last three days have tested me to the core. These are trying times.” Effectively speaking for the entire country, he wrote: “I’m tired physically and emotionally.”
I’m not suggesting people are looking for some sort of can’t-we-all-just-get-along moment from these two candidates or “toning down the rhetoric.” The word that comes to mind is gravitas—a candidate whose seriousness rises to the electorate’s.
Up to now, the content of these two campaigns, and that includes the unconventional Donald Trump’s, has been by the book: Divide the electorate with wedge issues—immigration on the right, police abuse on the left—and build from that base to victory.
At the GOP convention Monday night, Alabama’s Sen. Jeff Sessions, a key Trump adviser, delivered a base speech bleeding with red meat on the immigrant threat.
The Democratic convention has scheduled speeches by seven Mothers of the Movement, mothers whose children were killed in confrontations with the police. This notwithstanding the fact that the legal system has cleared the accused officers in several cases. In an open letter to the police Tuesday, Mr. Obama said, “We have your backs.” Too late. The politics of his party on the police has been set.
Inside both these issues one may find disagreements on substance, but let us be cynical: The politicians, pundits and activists have been scapegoating immigrants and cops to produce votes.
That strategy, kept aloft with populist demagoguery, always carried the risk that the reality might get worse than the rhetoric. Now, for the cops, it has.
Like Ted Cruz, originator of the anti-immigrant template, Donald Trump’s strategy has been to divide the electorate, animate his side and win. It is, or was, a plausible political calculation. I wonder, though, as last week’s numbing events settle into consciousness, whether enough voters in the decisive battleground states—Florida, Ohio, Virginia, Wisconsin, Colorado, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and the rest—will think the Trump strategy is still the basis for a presidency equal to the times.
It is impossible here not to note the obvious—that most voters find Hillary Clinton’s constant claims of presidential seriousness wholly implausible.
The acceptance speech Donald Trump will deliver Thursday night is his chance to rise from the level shared now in the public mind by both him and Mrs. Clinton. To date, the electorate has heard payback, blame and promises. After the events of the past week, they’ll be looking for something bigger than that. "
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