Right from the get go you know that Boston Globe columnist Joanna Weiss is not a bit serious in her ridiculous suggestion on how to defeat Donald Trump. Her not at all subtle goal is really to compare Trump to former Klansman David Duke so as to smear him as a racist without actually saying so.
So much for the establishment’s efforts to stop Donald Trump. So far, nothing’s working — not a thousand earnest think pieces or Jeb Bush’s gripes in the latest debate. Not the wrath of news anchors and late-night hosts, who still can’t resist booking Trump on their shows, but have started to get ornery during the interviews.
So maybe it’s worth looking back to 1991 Louisiana, when establishment Republicans and Democrats banded together to defeat a popular, populist, problematic gubernatorial candidate named David Duke.
I spoke this week to some veterans of the anti-Duke battle, who told me they’ve been talking up this very idea, while noting that the parallels aren’t exact. As hard as it is to divine Donald Trump’s motivations — as much as his Bulworth act can sound like bigotry, and possibly is — he’s no David Duke, who had a verifiable history with the Nazi party and the Ku Klux Klan.
You say Trump is no David Duke but (Wink! Wink!) that is what you are very obviously suggesting without saying it out loud. Weiss now draws more parallels between Duke and Trump as if we haven't already gotten her shouting out loud hint:
This leads to an important point about Duke’s supporters, and Trump’s: Most weren’t moved by bigotry or ill will. “The majority of Trump supporters, and the majority of Duke supporters, were good Americans expressing reasonable frustrations with decent motivations,” Hillyer said.
There is actually one little comedy nugget in Weiss' unsubtle smear job. It is the unintended parallel between crooked gubernatorial candidate Edwin Edwards and Hillary Clinton:
Kirby Newberger, a financial adviser from the New Orleans suburbs, cooked up the slogan “Vote for the Crook. It’s Important,” and had it printed on 1,000 bumper stickers. (It became the ’90s equivalent of a viral meme: Edwards sent an operative to get one, and put it on his car.)
So if you want to draw an equivalency between Donald Trump and David Duke Ms Weiss, would the crooked Edwin Edwards in this election cycle be Hillary Clinton? And would she have as much sense of humor about herself as to place a "Vote for the Crook. It's Important" bumper sticker on her Scooby van?
