Day 2 Analysis: Job One? Beating Clinton

There were some politically effective speeches on Tuesday, but inattention to detail and sloppy clock management hurt Team Trump. (Frame grab from Washington Post livestream)

Day 2 at the Republican National Convention was billed as jobs night: “Make America Work Again,” in Trump-speak.

But there only seemed to be one job that convention speakers cared much about: Donald Trump’s.

More precisely, the theme was to make sure that one American is unemployed come January: Hillary Clinton.

Benghazi, Lucifer, Clinton emails, Harry Reid, Barack Obama, even recycled 1960s radical Saul Alinsky. “Lock her up,” the delegates serenaded Hillary Clinton, again and again.

A long night of primetime speeches, but not a single plan from Trump to create American jobs. Except at Trump Winery in Virginia.

That led a former Ted Cruz staffer to tweet this:

Unless Trump is going to make America work again by making Republicans prison guards for Democrats, I don’t know what the big jobs plan is.

— Amanda Carpenter (@amandacarpenter) July 20, 2016

Some establishment speakers such as Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker Paul Ryan  barely mentioned Trump. (Maybe that’s part of the reason why they were booed by many Trump delegates.)

From New York Times live feed

The ongoings in Cleveland led Erick Erickson, founder of RedState.org, to write that GOP establishment Trump apologists have been reduced to declaring that their nominee is “better than Clinton.”

More to the point, they mean “less bad than Clinton.”

Time management of the convention continues to be dreadful. Some of the most effective speakers — Tiffany Trump (who used anecdotes to humanize her father), National Rifle Association lobbyist Chris Cox (who built a policy case for why electing Trump matters) and McConnell (who skewered Clinton time and again with embarrassing examples from her past) — were pushed out of the live-TV 10 p.m. hour for a soap opera actress and 2016 also-ran Ben Carson. And the winery woman. That looked more like an infomercial than a political convention.

“Whoever organized this event would be fired from a regional sales conference,” tweeted Andrew Sullivan.

By the way, did I forget to tell you that Donald Trump and Mike Pence were officially nominated for president and vice president?

That got lost in the ad hoc scheduling stew.

It’s important to note that candidates are only graded by the media for hewing to political traditions. Trump is unlike any other presidential nominee ever, so it may not be fair to judge him by historical standards. After all, he has turned history on its head over the past year. So I think it’s necessary for all of us to put ourselves inside the heads of undecided voters or reluctant Republicans.

What is the best way for Trump to defeat Hillary? It’s to destroy her. He’s the most unpopular presidential nominee in the history of polling, so he’s not going to convince the doubters that he’s a good guy. That’s why he’s enlisted Rudy Giuliani and Chris Christie and Shelly Moore Capito and Mitch McConnell and Scott Baio and many more, to try to shred what’s left of Clinton’s credibility.

That process takes more than one speech. It is an accumulation of days (or weeks) of disciplined attacks.

Does Team Trump have the skill and the discipline to pull it off? Can establishment figures such as Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Preibus and McConnell play constructive (or is it destructive) roles? That’s what the rest of Trump’s convention week is about.