Doesn’t everybody know this already about the delegate process?
A senior Republican National Committee official fired back with a thinly veiled response, writing in a Friday memo to reporters that “each process is easy to understand for those willing to learn it.”
“It ultimately falls on the campaigns to be up to speed on these delegate rules,” wrote RNC communications director Sean Spicer. “Campaigns have to know when absentee ballots are due, how long early voting lasts in certain states, or the deadlines for voter registration; the delegate rules are no different.”
Apparently not. OK, OK, I admit: I have been breathing in this stuff since 2003, 2004. And there is still much in the way of delegate allocation arcana that I am not familiar with. But it’s not freaking HARD to understand. If it was hard to understand they would have thrown it all out and replaced it with something that the average politician could grasp. I’m just saying, that’s all.
Via @LPDonovan.
Moe Lane
OK, OK, I admit: I have been breathing in this stuff since 2003, 2004.
On the other hand, you haven’t been running for office. The stakes are a lot higher for candidates than for spectators.
Imagine someone who had never bowled enrolling in a tournament, then putting on hobnailed boots and running down the lane to the pins before releasing the ball … and then squealing “It’s not fair! How was I supposed to know the rules?!”
All this requires is being smarter than the average politician. Isn’t that Trump-mania’s whole *point*? And thats a really low bar to clear.
So that brings up a point – I haven’t been bothered by Trump’s obviously insane statements as some. The reason is fairly simple. I’ve been doing software development now for something close to thirty years, and over the years I’ve sat in a ton of meetings with various c-staff, from very tiny companies, to being on the peripheral in meetings with very large ones. So I can generalize a bit about CEOs.
.
1. They think they’re the smartest guy in the room.
2. They like to hear themselves talk.
3. When you get to be a company over a certain size, they’re not detail-oriented people, but big-picture ones. They hire the detail-oriented ones.
.
Incidentally, #3 is one of the reasons that the founders in startups inevitably get pushed out – their inability to let other people handle the details constrict growth, so the investors fix the problem.
.
Anyways, in literally dozens of meetings I’ve heard CEOs just take random thoughts into the weeds, only to have the staff they’ve hired steer them back into reality. The successful ones hire good staff, who are able to sort these random thoughts into ones that need to be gently (or not so gently) steered away from, and the occasional gem that leads to something that’s a positive, and good thing. And there will be some of those, because as for #1 above, while they may not actually be the smartest guy in the room, typically they’re at least above average.
.
So when I hear Trump say, “We’re going to build a wall, and make Mexico pay for it”, my brain translates that to two action items – build the wall, and the wall’s financing, which are separate, which would be handed off to staff to plan and implement, and honestly, both sound doable to me, although both would require congressional support.
.
When he says ‘stop letting muslims in the country’, what I hear is the desire to screen better, and staff will quickly be able to put a list of actual legal options in front of him, some available via executive order, some via congress. When I hear him say something about judges signing bills, well, see #3 above.
.
Now, having said all that, this does still indict Trump, because he absolutely has not hired the right minions for the political arena. All this arcana about delegate selection? He should have hired the right wonk to wrangle them. But he didn’t. And that doesn’t really bode well for a Trump administration. But it is a fixable problem.
people are so paranoid and this delegate drama just plays into that.
Roger Stone and another adviser told Trump early on he needed to put an actual ground game into the field, they were fired. Trump like most wealthy people I’ve known is incredibly cheap, as in watch to make sure they don’t stick you with the bill for lunch, cheap. It would have cost money he didn’t want to spend and now he’s whining cause the bill for his stinginess is coming due. I wish I could say I’m surprised but I’ve seen this play before.
The instructions were in the box…Trump can’t credibly blame others when he chose not to read them and has a pile of leftover parts he doesn’t know what to do with.