Smarter Than Thou!

AN ODD NAPOLEONIC CAMPAIGN

    NAPOLEON had a different army than his enemies. They had professional soldiers, career men trained to obey and die without thinking. Napoleon relied upon dedicated revolutionaries, who were ideologically committed to new ideas. Most of the time the new version defeated the old. A similar technique may be being attempted.

    I once again comment on the current political campaign for president. The campaign has been quite---shall I say?---different. Its single major theme can be summarized as the following. “I am not the other person.” I doubt if many people, even those who paid attention, could identify more than two or three policy positions for either candidate.

    This lack of conventional professionalism, in this case, is not necessarily a bad approach. The main reason is that neither candidate can present himself as being pretty good. Both have (to say the least) questionable backgrounds and characters. However, Trump seems to me to have avoided certain advantages. For example the issue of transgender locker rooms was an easy home run. All Trump had to do was to denounce it. Instead he made an ambiguous comment, severely disappointing his followers. The federal government is still at war, legally, with the Little Sisters of the Poor. Trump could have pressed Hillary on this, forcing her to support an attack on nuns, or to denounce her president/boss. Yet he has failed to do so. He could, literally, have been on the side of the angels, and ignored the opportunity.

    I offer a possible theory to explain this odd behavior. I have no inside information, or fact based insight. I have simply a desire to be able to explain how a man, who seems to have intelligence and ambition, could be so foolish in these and other particular situations. I hold that he does it intentionally. That is, he is not interested in pleasing his supporters. He wants to irritate them, although rather mildly. Napoleon demanded more of his troops, working them hard. He forced them to commit themselves, as individuals, to battle.

    The Trump supporters, often unable to defend their choice directly, are forced to think for themselves. They need to speculate, and to fabricate, reasons to support him if and when they discuss politics and explain their choice. This is NOT the normal behavior of mere supporters. It is the normal behavior of campaign employees, that is the people who work (for pay) for the campaign. Normally the candidates simply expect the citizen to show up on Election Day. The workers and volunteers do the labor. By essentially eliminating the professional campaign worker Trump has created a relatively dedicated volunteer revolutionary army.

    If the turn out is reduced, and I believe that it will be, then these people can make all the difference. They will show up not so much because they approve of Trump. It is that he has forced them to commit and they would feel foolish to change their minds now.

    As odd as this seems at least it explains a good deal.

TIGER SPACE CAMPAIGNING

    I enjoy reading military history. There is an interesting aspect to it. There are some standard rules involving tactics and strategy that comprise the art of war. However, they do not always work. For example, it is terribly dangerous to divide one’s forces when near the enemy. Of course, many battles have been won when generals did this… successfully. For example Napoleon fatally divided his forces before the Battle of Waterloo. So he lost. The Duke of Wellington’s forces were already divided, so he won. Is this all clear? That is, the historians explain how dividing forces is (and is not) a successful tactic. In other words, this being history, the experts can look back and decide, retroactively and infallibly, what was prudent and what was rash.

    In other words, they are like the rest of us. We can all decide afterwards what should (not) have been done. After the race any of us, expert or not, can pick the winning horse.

    I plead guilty to having this type of intelligence. I have, I believe, a high degree of perception, but, usually, only after the fact. However, as the title of this effort testifies, I do claim to see things that others do not, even when they are well after the fact. I have a retroactive wisdom, sort of. I employ it with regard to first the Trump/Clinton debate. I consider myself to be too much of an “expert” to be able to judge it as the average guy did. However, I conclude that almost all the Trump supporters (and maybe a few neutrals) considered it to have been a missed opportunity. That is, he had opportunities to attack and to damage Hillary and he failed. This was against the conventional rules.

    I offer the following hypothesis. I am not certain, but if my theory were correct then it would explain a lot. The first part is completely counter intuitive: Trump did NOT want to please his followers. He wanted to disappoint them. I go back to warfare. In Chinese strategy there is a concept of “Tiger Space.” This is when the general places his troops in a hopeless position. The only way they can survive is to fight like tigers… and, coincidently, win the battle. By “failing” in the debate he causes his followers to worry, and to work harder, and to increase their dedication. He did not expect to change the minds of voters. He did want to motivate his own people to try to change the minds of other voters. We wanted them to feel the fear of defeat, as if they were in Tiger Space.

    The second part of the thesis is that he wanted to deny Hillary time on networks. He may have worked on the show business maxim that all publicity is good; period. When he says something “odd” Hillary is totally ignored. Who knows what she says? Who cares? His statements are discussed, analyzed, repeated, even laughed at. But it is he who is the subject. Is this an advantage? It can be. He has run an unconventional campaign. In the primaries it worked, even when every expert said that he was doomed. Maybe it can work again. Maybe it is working.

    Stranger things have happened… maybe.