The plight of the 鈥減oorly educated鈥�
We can’t be fooled by P.T. Barnum. The time for the clowns and the acrobats and the dancing bears has passed.
Texas Sen. and presidential candidate Ted Cruz, last Wednesday
Ted Cruz wants us to know, without coming out and saying it, that Donald Trump is better suited for the big top than the White House.
He’s not the only person who thinks that.
Unfortunately for those people, many of the nation’s voters think otherwise.
The Donald’s shtick, as predictable as it’s been, has produced enough votes, and primary election wins, to have confounded his opponents or anybody else who follows national politics.
Trump grasped full control of the Republican’s presidential race by doubling the vote totals of both of his nearest opponents in the Nevada caucuses.
Trump’s victory speech contained the following nugget.
“We won with the highly educated. We won with the poorly educated. I love the poorly educated,” he said, without a hint of irony.
His admission that many of the people who supported him in Nevada are “poorly educated,” was strange, but true
According to entrance polling at the state’s voting places, 57 percent of Trump’s voters have a high school education or less.
But there’s further polling data that reflects a troubling trend among Trump’s devotees.
Trump has never discussed the Civil War on the campaign trail, but according to research by Public Policy Polling (P.P.P), 38 percent of his supporters in South Carolina wish the south had won it.
Another national poll asked potential Republican voters if they disagreed with the Emancipation Proclamation – Abraham Lincoln’s executive order that freed slaves.
Almost 20 percent of Trump’s voters, disagree with the freeing of the slaves. That’s four times more than those voters who support any of the other Republican candidates.
Seventy percent of Trump’s voters in South Carolina believe that the Confederate battle flag should have never been removed the statehouse grounds.
In fact, Trump’s voters, more than voters for any other candidates, are more likely to want all undocumented immigrants to be deported, a temporary ban on Muslims entering the country, or even a ban on gay men or women from migrating to the United States.
So it really doesn’t matter to them that Trump’s rhetoric, sometimes, borders on the ridiculous. Or that he avoids fleshing out his proposals with real specifics.
Ask The Donald a question, any question, and he’ll avoid the giving an answer to it, on his way to explaining that he’ll “make America great again.”
His supporters don’t seem to care about answers.
To them, Trump represents a 21st Century Bull Connor, but in a finely-tailored business suit.
The increasingly grotesque way that Trump has consumed the spotlight during this campaign season is confounding mainstream Republicans, because they’re finally coming to terms with the possibility that he can’t be stopped.
There isn’t an hour that goes by on cable news, when somebody isn’t talking about ways to thwart Trump’s appeal.
Even Mitt Romney, who gained Trump’s tepid endorsement in 2012, has jumped into the fray.
Romney’s call for Trump to release his income taxes is nothing more than a call-to-arms to his fellow Republicans, so they can circle the wagons and be prepared for the impending melodrama that will accompany a Donald Trump nomination.
It all smells like desperation to me.
When Jeb Bush dropped out of the race, and he took with him any hopes that an establishment Republican would win the presidency, it upended any notions that the party would increase its majorities in the U.S. Senate, and in statehouses across the country.
In the words of Ted Cruz, Republicans are now forced to reign in a billionaire “P.T. Barnum” who acts the part of a “clown,” while he increasingly becomes a magnet for the intolerant.
Far be it from me to offer Republicans suggestions about ways to throttle Trump’s political blunt force trauma.
No Republican would listen to me anyway.
Although it seems obvious to me that they could try one thing -perhaps they could make a play for the “poorly educated.”
Edward A. Owens is a three time Emmy Award winner and 20-year veteran of television news. E-mail him at freedoms@bellatlantic.net