Why Hillary Clinton's in trouble. Again.

People don’t like being told what to do. Americans in particular. We don’t like “presumptive” candidates and inevitability. Yet that’s what both major political parties have tried to hand us in the current presidential race: candidates who are heirs apparent to political dynasties.

At the start of this election cycle, the powers that be were telling us about the near inevitability of a fall campaign between Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush. They had the money, they had the name recognition. It was all over but the shouting.

Now here we are at the start of 2016, and Clinton’s lead over a self-described socialist independent (Bernie Sanders) for the Democratic nomination is shrinking dramatically. Bush is struggling to even maintain a viable candidacy, far behind Donald Trump – who’s anything but a lockstep Republican dogmatist. In fact, you’d be hard pressed to find two people who have behaved less like party loyalists over the past couple of decades than Sanders and Trump.

Meanwhile, former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg is weighing an independent run.

It’s amazing that political operatives haven’t caught on to what’s happening and, more importantly, why it’s happening. This isn’t your typical election cycle, in which populist candidates emerge, gain brief traction, then are cowed into submission by party machines spinning retread propaganda. Here’s why this is happening.

Lesson No. 1: You don’t win by running out the clock. Any sports fan knows this. How often have you watched your team try to sit on a lead or switch to a “prevent defense,” only to see hungrier opponents seize the opportunity to steal the game. They sense your team’s fear. They smell blood. And they pounce.

This is what happened to Hillary Clinton when she willingly donned the mantle of “presumptive” nominee back in 2008. She tried to sit on her lead, milk her “aura of inevitability” for all it was worth … and watched a hungrier Barack Obama sprint past her like the Roadrunner to claim the nomination.

The pragmatic Clinton wants to continue Obama’s policies; the revolutionary Sanders wants to build on them. Guess which sounds more exciting to the Democratic voter?

Lesson No. 2: You don’t win if you can’t learn from history. If the definition of insanity is “doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results,” Clinton’s halfway there (while, ironically, seeking to present herself as the most rational of candidates). She’s following the same kind of strategy that lost her the nomination in 2008 and expecting it to work better against Sanders than it did against Obama. Perhaps she assumes Sanders to be a weaker candidate than Obama was. But it’s helpful to remember that she didn’t view Obama as a major threat early in 2007, either.

As Lao Tzu said, “There is no greater danger than underestimating your opponent.” She appears to have done it again.

Lesson No. 3: Like it or not, it’s a game. Some might take offense at my use of sports analogies, but the candidate who loses sight of the fact that politics is blood sport does so at his or her own peril.

Regardless of what you think of him or his policies, Trump seems to understand this perhaps better than any other candidate in the race today: “Money was never a big motivation for me, except as a way to keep score,” he once said. “The biggest excitement is playing the game.”

Many of us complain, in high-minded fashion, about negative campaigns and the horserace aspect of politics, but we still watch – just as we still gravitate toward negative headlines in print and online. There are times we say one thing because we’re embarrassed to admit the truth in polite company. If everyone else is high-minded, we want to appear that way, too.

But not if someone is telling us we need to appear that way. The same people who give in to peer pressure on a regular basis will balk at “going along to get along” the minute someone comes right out and tells them what to do. Once the pressure shifts from subtle to overt, from suggestion to expectation, we do an about-face and tell the self-proclaimed authorities and experts where to stick their presumptions.

Yes, elections are more than Monday Night Football on a debate stage. Policies are at stake that can change the course and quality of lives across the nation and beyond. But whether it be the NFL or the stock market, Americans have been brought up to believe that competition weeds out the less fit and creates the kind of success that benefits us all.

We declared our independence from a monarchy, and we don’t want to go back. Sure, we like all the pomp and circumstance surrounding our idols and icons, but we want to be the ones holding the crown at their coronation. We don’t like arriving late to the show and finding someone else has made the decision for us.

If people try telling us who we’re supposed to support, we’re likely to flip them the bird and vote the other way. That’s one reason Obama won in 2008, and it’s the same reason Trump and Sanders are seeing such strong support as we enter 2016.

People are telling us, “You can’t support him,” at which point we tune them out and refuse to hear them tell us why. Their reasons might be valid or not, but we don’t care. What we care about is that someone has presumed to try to tell us what to do.

Lesson No. 4: The familiar may be comforting, but if we perceive our lives to be less than what they should be, we’ll look elsewhere for answers. Fresh faces will trump (pun intended) staid guardians of the status quo when the deep flaws in that status quo are on display.

In the past, the status quo usually carried the day. But two things have changed that have upended the conventional wisdom behind running traditional “safe” campaigns.

1. The Great Recession. Many Americans still feel as though they’re caught in it, either because they have yet to recover financially or because things have gotten better so gradually it’s hard to notice an improvement. The status quo hasn’t been nearly as attractive as it used to be since 2007. That’s almost a decade now, and the longer the situation persists, the more deeply an aversion to “good enough” becomes in our psyche. Running a safe campaign won’t work the way it once did until/unless the middle class is firing on all cylinders and prosperity touches a broad swath of economic sectors.
2. Social media. Our immediate, online connections to one another have empowered us like never before. We don’t get our news exclusively from “authoritative” sources anymore, but from each other. The more effective social media are at providing an alternative voice for the voter, the more attractive alternative voices will be among candidates for public office. We vote for people who reflect our values, and those values are shifting right along with our level of connectivity. We’re realizing that, more than ever before, we can circumvent the “system” and call the shots ourselves now. People spouting rehearsed lines sound less and less authentic because we’re talking more to people who “go from the gut” and “tell it like it is” – each other.

Old-school politicians are still playing by the old rules. But once the game start to change, those rules matter less than they used to. Eventually, it becomes a whole new ballgame.

At this point, traditional candidates like Hillary Clinton still have a lot of tools at their disposal: party backing, deep-pocketed backers, ballot access, etc. Clinton may well win the Democratic nomination, but if she continues to "sit on her lead," she may find herself without a lead to sit on. On the other side, Trump has maintained his top-dog standing in the polls far longer than any of the "experts" predicted he would.

Whoever the nominees are and wherever we are in the course of our political evolution, it will be fascinating to see how it all plays out - both this year and long-term.

Let the games begin.

Our addiction to outrage is destroying us

"I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore." - Howard Beale (Peter Finch) in Network

Outrage. Rage directed outward. As a society, we seem to have become addicted to it. But as with almost any addiction, it's sapping our strength and distracting us from living our lives together in some semblance of community.

There was a time when crime and natural disasters topped the local news. "If it bleeds, it leads." But that principle seems to be giving way, increasingly, to a new trend, with prominence being placed on stories that either 1) create new outrage or 2) pour salt on the still-open wounds of past indignities be reporting on new offenses of the same sort.

Addictions can sap our strength, demoralize us, make us feel like prisoners, and our addiction to outrage does all these things. We're demoralized because outrage takes an enormous amount of emotional energy to sustain. We tell ourselves this is necessary because of the magnitude of the offense, and sometimes it is. If we weren't outraged at things like the Japanese internment, racism, sexism, the Holocaust, it would call into question our sense of compassion - and open the door for similar abuses in the future.

But an addiction to outrage is different. It demands that, when one issue is dealt with, we find a new object on which to focus our indignation. For most of us, this can be draining and produce a sense of despair if we don't get our way. As drug addictions progress, the highs fade and the level of dependence rises. The same thing happens with an addiction to outrage: "Victories" are often difficult to achieve, and each one seems less significant as we find some new affront that demands our attention.

My way is the only way

The word "righteous" is so often paired with "indignation," and with good reason. Outrage is based on a firm conviction that the other side is wrong. And this conviction can lead to the kind of arrogance that cuts off dialogue and ends any possibility for peaceful resolution. The outrage itself, rather than the reasoning that inspired it, becomes the motivation for pursuing first one cause and then another. "Because I believe it strongly" becomes "because it's right," which becomes "because I said so" and sometimes, ultimately, "because God says so." 

Those who are addicted to outrage adopt a sense of tunnel vision, just like any other addict. The high becomes the only goal; nothing else matters. This is why addicts break laws, trample on others' freedom and strive to control others, either by manipulation, threat or force and outright tyranny. Drug addictions often lead to an increase in crime and violence; an addiction to outrage can, in the same way, lead to violations of those and other boundaries.

The ability to focus one's attention intently on a cause can be transformational. We need activists who channel outrage into a force for needed change. What we don't need is an entire nation of outrage addicts shaming and shouting at one another, fueled by such high levels of dependence and frustration that their outrage has become hatred. Contempt. Vindictiveness. And that's what we're rapidly becoming, on both sides of an increasingly daunting ideological chasm.

Used properly, outrage can be a prescription for change. But like any prescription drug, it can cause severe damage if used without any kind of prudence or restraint. Channeling outrage into fighting for a cause is one thing. It's quite another to go out looking for something to feel outraged about in the hope that we can "change the world" and thereby soothe our damaged egos.

I'll be honest. I've done that. And judging from the behavior of more and more Americans, I'm far from the only one.

Can we put the outrage genie back in the prescription bottle where it belongs? I can't answer that, but I believe our future as a nation may depend on it.

You're irreplaceable, no matter what they tell you

Something touched me deep inside the day the music died. - Don McLean, "American Pie."

The past few days have been difficult. 

It didn't affect me directly when David Bowie died, but  it did affect me personally - as it did when Alan Rickman passed away a couple of days later. I didn't know either of these men. I wasn't a member of any fan club. I never dressed up like Ziggy Stardust, and I wasn't a Rickmaniac.

Both men were British, both were 69 years old and each was profoundly successful in his chosen field. Both died of cancer. But they shared something more than all that, an intangible something that made them, in a word, irreplaceable. Each was unique - fearless in ignoring, stretching and ultimately redefining the boundaries of their chosen professions for the sake being true to themselves.

"Actors are agents of change," Rickman once said. "A film, a piece of theater, a piece of music, or a book can make a difference. It can change the world."

"I don't know where I'm going from here," Bowie said, "but I promise you it won't be boring."

The sadness I felt at their passing had nothing to do with the fact that I'll never hear Bowie perform "The Man Who Sold the World" again or that I'll never see Rickman reprise his role as Severus Snape in some hypothetical "Harry Potter" prequel. It stemmed instead from the realization that I'll never witness them explore new creative challenges, which I have no doubt they would have met with the same finesse and originality they displayed in their previous work.

When a creative soul dies, it's as if creation folds back in on itself, curls into a fetal position and weeps. That's what I felt like doing because, in a sense, the music died again with Bowie. Just as it had with Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens in that plane crash 57 years ago. Just as it did again on Dec. 8, 1980, when John Lennon was shot. And when Freddie Mercury died. And Elvis. And so many others.

I can tell myself it's resurrected every time their songs are played and it's reimagined every time a new, vital artist comes along to stretch the boundaries in new and undreamt-of directions.

But that doesn't make the loss any less painful. Any less personal.

As if those losses weren't enough to deal with this week, I also learned that some people I knew had been laid off. They aren't celebrities, like Bowie or Rickman, but when I heard they'd lost their jobs, it felt no less  profound to me.

I imagined them going to exit interviews and being being fed that same old half-excuse, half-apology: "Don't take it personally. It's just business."

I have no idea whether these words were spoken in their cases, but they've been used often enough that they've become a cultural cliche, a way for us to console ourselves when we hurt someone. When we leave a relationship. When we hand someone a layoff notice. When we cut someone from the team. We tell them not to take it personally because we don't want to feel personally responsible for the pain we're inflicting.

But just what are we implying?

That to us, the person on the other end of our rejection was never a person in the first place. He or she was just a position, an impersonal cog in a malfunctioning machine that needs to be removed for the sake of efficiency. An obsolesce at best; a mistake at worst. And now it's time to get "leaner and meaner," with the emphasis on "meaner."

I can't think of anything meaner than treating someone as less than a person, more cruel than chastising him or her for having the audacity to take it personally when you've turned their personal lives upside down.

Of course, it's personal.

And here's the thing: Each of those people - each and every one of us, in fact - is irreplaceable. No less so than David Bowie or Alan Rickman. Each of us has it within ourselves to stretch boundaries, to imagine new vistas, to change at least some part of our world forever. And each time we tell someone, "It's nothing personal," we spit in the face of a unique, creative soul with boundless capacity to make a lasting impact on the future.

As a creative person, an author, I feel we have a basic obligation to nurture one another's artistry and to affirm each individual's personhood.

On the other hand, I count it a tragedy when we dehumanize people to assuage our own guilt or protect our bottom line. It's as if we're thumbing our noses at the people like David Bowie, Alan Rickman and all the other artists who've challenged and inspired us. By depersonalizing them in our own minds, we're eating away at our own humanity, our sense of empathy, our very souls.

All of this makes me very angry; I think I have a right to be.

And yes, I take it personally.

L.A. Rams' return: The good, the bad and the ugly

There's a lot to like about the Los Angeles Rams coming home. I say "Los Angeles Rams" not because of the NFL's decision to return them to Southern California, but because that's what they'll always be to me ... and what they always have been.

The Raiders have always been associated, first and foremost, with Oakland, the Chargers with San Diego, and the Rams with ... Los Angeles. Not St. Louis, and not Cleveland, where they played for the first few years of their existence, but Los Angeles.

I was an L.A. Rams fan before Merlin Olsen was Father Murphy, when their helmets were blue and white, when they went into the fourth quarter of the Super Bowl leading the Pittsburgh Steelers. I was an L.A. Rams fan back in '78, when Warren Beatty starred in a movie called "Heaven Can Wait" about a Rams quarterback who died and came back to life in the body of a heartless tycoon. 

So I love the fact that the Rams are going back to L.A. But I've got to admit, there's also a lot not to like about how they got there. Here's a rundown of the good, the bad, and the ugly of the NFL's decision (Tuesday, Jan. 12, 2016) to put the Rams back where they've always belonged.

The Good

In a word, history. In a name - or names: Norm Van Brocklin, Elroy Hirsh, Bob Waterfield, Jack Snow, Merlin Olsen, Deacon Jones, Lawrence McCutcheon, Jim Everett, Henry Ellard, Eric Dickerson, Flipper Anderson, Jack Snow, Tom Mack, Tom Fars, Les Richter, Jackie Slater, Jack Youngblood. 

If history were the deciding factor, there never would have been a discussion about which team belonged in Los Angeles. The Rams were there for 48 years (if you count their time in Anaheim), four times as long as the Raiders and Chargers combined. They were the first major team in the city, arriving from Cleveland more than a decade before the Dodgers, Angels and Lakers showed up, and they were the first NFL team on the West Coast.

Speaking of the West Coast, if geography were the deciding factor, allowing the NFC West would never have been transformed into the NFC 3 West + 1 Midwest and the natural San Francisco-Los Angeles rivalry would have been preserved.

If fans were the deciding factor, it would have been just as much of a slam dunk worthy of Wilt or Shaq. Poll after poll showed the Rams were the fans' overwhelming favorites to make an encore appearance. A Facebook page called "Bring Back the Los Angeles Rams" had been operating for some time, and fans rallied in Los Angeles to show the NFL their support. There was no such clamor to bring back the Raiders, despite their Super Bowl win with former USC great Marcus Allen, or the Chargers, who spent all of one season in L.A. compared to their subsequent half-century in San Diego.

The bad

But, ultimately, the deciding factor was - as it always seems to be with the NFL - money. A billionaire developer with marital ties to the Walmart fortune beat out a group backed by the Walt Disney Company CEO for dibs on L.A. It wasn't about football, it was about playing hardball. It was almost as if Leo Farnsworth - that heartless tycoon from "Heaven Can Wait" -  was somehow involved.

What would the unprincipled Farnsworth have done if he'd owned an NFL team? Maybe he would have threatened to leave town unless taxpayers anted up millions toward a new stadium. Maybe he would have insulted his team's fans for failing to support a second-rate product or its city for refusing to go along with his demands. 

One good thing you can say about Rams owner Stan Kroenke is that at least he's paying his own way to Los Angeles. But don't expect that to become a trend. Most of the NFL's other owners aren't as rich as Kroenke and prefer to extort money from working class taxpayers to build new stadiums that aren't really needed. They do this by threatening to move somewhere else.

In fact, the NFL has supported this tactic for the past 20 years by dangling Los Angeles like a poison pill in front of fans from Seattle to Minneapolis to Jacksonville and allowing its owners to say, "If you don't pay, we'll move to L.A."

But when the L.A. Clippers basketball team sold for an outrageous $2 billion, it became apparent that even this time-honored sword of Damocles wasn't as valuable as the pot of gold underneath the Hollywood sign. Kroenke recognized this and decided to cash in. He could move quickly because he had the money in hand; the Chargers and Raiders had to team up in order to challenge him, but even together they couldn't match his monetary muscle.

The ugly

L.A. may be out of the picture, but owners still have plenty of other teamless cities to use as bait in the "we want a new stadium now" game. Now there's St. Louis and, probably, San Diego to go along with such oft-mentioned sites as San Antonio, Toronto and London.

Kroenke was probably the only owner out there willing and able to spend all his own money on a new stadium, so the bluff-and-threat stadium sweepstakes is likely to continue unabated. Kroenke doesn't care now that he's got his. If the NFL had denied his petition to move, he could have sued for the right to do so or just ignored the league altogether. He knew this. The NFL knew this.

The Chargers and Raiders should have known it, too.

But now, after losing this high-stakes game of chicken, Chargers owner Dean Spanos finds himself between a rock and a hard place, having thumbed his nose at both Kroenke and the city of San Diego. Now, he's got to choose one or the other. Either Spanos will be a small fish in the big Los Angeles basin, playing second fiddle to the Rams in Kroenke's world, or he'll be one big ugly blowfish in San Diego, where there's plenty of resentment over how he turned his back on that city and its fans.

Spanos has zero leverage now with Kroenke, whose relocation to L.A. has already been approved and can afford to offer Spanos little more than the scraps that fall from his dinner table now that he has nothing to lose.

Raiders owner Mark Davis is in even worse shape, because his lease is up in Oakland and his stadium is one of those that actually should be replaced. (It's the only NFL stadium to double as a baseball park.)

But I don't feel sorry for either of them. The people I feel sorry for is the fans, who have become innocent bystanders in this game of chicken between the NFL and its cities. And in a game of chicken, when one tries to cross the road, he gets hit coming and going.

I think I'll go watch "Heaven Can Wait" now. The hero dies, but at least it has a happy ending, and it's a lot cheaper than a ticket to a real NFL game. I'll watch that on TV. And I'll root for the Rams. The Los Angeles Rams. That's all they ever should have been, and whether it be thanks to God or the devil or Leo Farnsworth, they're finally back where they belong.

Acting from Kindness, not Political Correctness

I'm not a fan of political correctness for one essential reason: It's a form of peer pressure. And peer pressure has produced everything from harmless fads such as Beatlemania and pet rocks to horrific realities such as segregation and the Japanese internment.

Like any other form of peer pressure, political correctness is, in its raw form, pure majority rule: a social construct for reinforcing behavior without the crucial safeguard of a constitution.

Unless, that is, we use our conscience.

Our conscience and personal ethics function as just such a safeguard - a personal constitution, if you will - in the face of peer pressure. Any peer pressure, from fan mania to institutional bigotry. That includes political correctness - which, by itself, is just as susceptible to whim and abuse as any other form of bandwagon thinking.

No substitute

One of the worst things anyone can do is substitute political correctness for the bedrock principles of conscience that come from within - to rely on it as the sole means of regulating society. Political correctness without conscience is like majority rule without a constitution. In a word, it's scary.

Two core elements of conscience are kindness and respect. People who display these attributes do so because they genuinely believe it's the right thing to do. It's an authentic expression of who they are.

Political correctness, on the other hand, is imposed from without - sometimes by force. It's a concept that says, "If you don't comply with what we've decided is appropriate, we'll shame you, we'll hold you up to public ridicule, we'll punish you for what we consider your bad behavior."

Necessary, not sufficient

Authenticity, in itself, is not the ultimate virtue. People can be authentic bullies, racists, sociopaths and jackasses. Some of those people deserve to be exposed and, yes, even shamed. But if we settle for political correctness as a substitute for authentic kindness, we do ourselves a huge disservice.

Personal ethics are our best line of defense against bigotry and hatred precisely because they're authentic. If we substitute a socially enforced and punitive system of peer pressure such as political correctness, we can never be sure whether the actions of those under this system are authentic or not. Are they acting voluntarily, or simply because they're afraid of being exposed, shamed and sanctioned by the majority? And if the system changes, can they be relied upon to continue their positive behavior?

Then again, what if the behavior isn't positive at all? Peer pressure can be - and has been - used just as easily and effectively to reinforce bigotry as to fight it, and public sentiments can turn on a dime when circumstances change. Someone who acts merely from fear of punishment can just as easily choose the opposite course when such a threat is removed.

Fear of Punishment

Political correctness works (insofar as it does), because it invokes this very fear of punishment. People walk on eggshells rather than acting with the genuine grace of authentic kindness. True respect requires no fear of retribution but, on the contrary, demand the fortitude to maintain one's principles even in the face of the same sort of fear political correctness seeks to harness.

Isn't it better to act on conscience than to work in behalf of another's agenda? To motivate respect rather than capitulate to fear?

Authentic kindness  should always be our goal. Political correctness is a poor and fickle substitute for the courage of our convictions. 

Trump's sideshow: Smoke, mirrors, pomp and circus tents

I try not to wade too deeply into the snark-infested waters of political commentary - partly because they're so badly polluted and partly because I'm afraid I'll just add to the snark.

Too many politicians are unscrupulous narcissists  who throw out promises like they're beads at Mardi Gras, hoping we'll expose ourselves so they can get a cheap thrill out of it. For us, the thrill isn't quite so cheap. The quid pro quo for those broken-beaded promises usually amounts to campaign contributions and votes (but mostly campaign contributions).

Which brings us to Donald Trump. 

Unscrupulous? Repeated bankruptcies and more flip-flopping on the issues than your average bear, donkey, elephant or RINO. (Now a Republican, he not so long ago supported gun-control, said he believed in "universal health care" and was even a registered Democrat from 2001 to 2009.)

Narcissist?  Hey, I don't trust anyone who talks about himself in the third person and brags about how he's supposedly a magnet for female attention. (He not only said he'd date his own daughter if they weren't related, he also claimed that every woman who appeared on his TV show "The Apprentice" flirted with him, "consciously or unconsciously.")

But this isn't a piece about the seedy side of politics or even about that guy who has the audacity to call himself "The Donald." It's about us.

What do we, the electorate, see in this guy?

When asked what they like about Trump, people repeat the same thing time and again. It's his bluntness. His directness. His supposed willingness to "tell it like it is," polls and political correctness be damned.

Getting away with it

I suspect it all comes down to this: Many of the people who like Trump wish they could say the things he does and get away with it. Some of them would love to demean women, dismiss their critics as a bunch of morons and build a wall to keep anyone "not like me" on the other side of everywhere. 

Trump's supporters revel in the fact that he can get away with things they'd never dream of trying. Because he's rich. Because he's famous. Because he feels like it. But here's the irony: They're the ones who allow him to get away with it by refusing to ever call him on his you-know-what. It doesn't matter how often he flip-flops, how many people he mocks and scorns or even why he's disrespecting them. It barely even matters what he says at all. What matters is that he can say it. 

Whatever "it" is. And that's the scary part.

Litmus tests

Anyone who knows me knows I hate political checklists, litmus tests and interest group ratings, whether they're issued by the NRA or the NAACP. They're the swords of Damocles that political "purists" hold over the modern candidate's head.  Politicians - and voters - who dare to defy them by thinking for themselves are thrown under the bus routinely because they don't toe the party line, an attitude that's helped create the severe polarization seen in government today.

The political highway is littered with the wreckage of candidates who crashed and burned because they didn't toe the party line. The slightest deviation from the accepted platform is greeted by impassioned calls off "Off with their heads!" - after which donations typically slow, campaigns struggle and candidacies flame out.

Not so with Trump, a tycoon who acts like he doesn't need to placate donors because he can fund a campaign using his personal fortune ... even though he's actually accepted millions of dollars in donations. Regardless of how much cash he's raking in, he perpetuates the idea that he "can't be bought," and with it the  impression that he can say whatever  he wants without any consequences.

Cult of personality

Voters are attracted to rich candidates because they're supposedly not "beholden to special interests." These "mavericks" seem like a breath of fresh air in an age of litmus tests and political dogmatism. Buy do they really change the status quo?

Hardly.

The modern climate of rigid political doctrine (groupthink), doesn't encourage voters to think for themselves. It's all about conformity. Yet the advent of Trumpolitics isn't necessarily an improvement, because it hasn't encouraged voters to think for themselves, either. Instead, it has created a cult of personality in which followers are encouraged to parrot whatever comes out of Trump's mouth, like the "dittoheads" or "clones" who call talk radio programs to regurgitate whatever rant the host happens to be spewing.

What he's saying doesn't matter nearly as much as the fact that he's saying it.

Image is everything

A quarter-century ago, tennis star Andre Agassi did a camera commercial with the tagline "Image is everything." It was a nice play on words, and it worked well with the photogenic Agassi, who then sported not only an athletic figure but a leonine mane of hair that made him something of a sex symbol.

Trump could have come up with that tagline himself. 

He's spent years building up his cult of personality, in which substance is unimportant - or even a drawback. The name "Trump" has become iconic; name recognition has always been a big advantage in politics, but Trump has taken it to a new level. 

The catchphrase "You're fired!" from his TV show has become almost as recognizable. Is it any coincidence that Trump's ability to kick people off that show at his own discretion (whim?)  parallels talk radio hosts' propensity for cutting people off before they finish making their point? 

The phrase, along with Trump's status as host of the show, established him as an authority figure in households across America. Authority on what? It didn't matter. Nor did it matter that many of the people who appeared on his show were intelligent, more creative and even by some measures more successful than he was. What mattered is that Trump set himself up as the authority figure and America bought it, regardless of whether he had anything to back it up.

Now he's doing it again, and the stakes are a whole lot higher than Nielsen ratings. 

Fantasyland

He's not even trying to hide what he's doing.

His own words: "The final key to the way I promote is bravado. I play to people's fantasies." 

Why?

"People want to believe that something is the biggest and greatest and the most spectacular. I call it truthful hyperbole. It's an innocent form of exaggeration - and a very effective form of promotion."

Trump's open secret: He's essentially giving people a blank slate set against a backdrop of audacity and allowing them to project their greatest hopes and dreams onto it - onto him. Then he takes credit for making them come true before even bothering to lift a finger on their behalf. 

This is nothing new in politics. Voters in every election cycle become excited by some new face on the scene - often an outsider or celebrity who's made a name in some field other than politics. John Glenn, Ross Perot, Fred Thompson, Herman Cain and, most recently, Ben Carson are examples. When they announced their candidacies, they, too, were blank slates. People got excited about who they might be, and their poll numbers spiked. But the voters soured on each these candidates as they discovered more about who they really were. Either they were too boring, too mercurial or too willing to believe that pharaohs built the pyramids as granaries. 

Information was their undoing.

Teflon Trump

Pundits expected the same thing to happen with Trump, who by himself may have said more outlandish things than the rest of the 2016 candidates combined. But as of this writing, his poll numbers remain solid and people keep supporting him for one simple reason: It's not about what he's saying but the fact he can say "it" and get away with it.

Information is no antidote to that, because information is irrelevant in a cult of personality. All that matters is the cult figure's name, fame and salesmanship. He's everyone's instant, ready-made "me I wanna be." Trump doesn't talk about the issues beyond vague generalities because he doesn't have to. He's a celebrity, not a policy wonk. Kim Kardashian doesn't need talent to be popular. Trump doesn't need ideas. Same principle.

The Republicans have spent the past 27 years searching for the new Ronald Reagan, and Trump's the closest thing they've found. Reagan, like Trump, was a showman and converted Democrat with high name recognition and a lot of self-confidence. But even Reagan's ability to promote himself pales in comparison to Trump's. (Agree with him or not, Reagan did actually take specific policy positions on a number of issues, and he never referred to himself as "The Ronald.")

Barnum, not Oz

Trump's invulnerability (so far) to his own foot-in-mouth disease has makes Reagan's legendary "Teflon Presidency" look like a caked-on, baked-on kitchen disaster by comparison. Carson's odd notions on the pyramids sounded ridiculous, and they cost him plenty in the polls. But Trump? He can degrade women, threaten religious liberty - a supposed cornerstone of Republican dogma - spout unsupported stories about Muslims cheering the 9/11 disaster and absurdly claim the current president was born on foreign soil. Yet none of it, so far, has mattered.

That's because Trump has succeeded in convincing a sizable number of people that he's the embodiment of their fantasies - just as he bragged he would. He's not some two-bit circus magician from Kansas hiding behind a curtain and some phony projection; he's a used-car dealer who's spent the past three decades bragging about his ability to sell you a lemon. A fantasy. "The art of the deal," he calls it.

The astonishing thing is, after all this time, that so many people are still buying it.

Trump's no statesman, he's a salesman and a master of self-promotion who's preaching the gospel according to P.T. Barnum (as preserved by one of his critics): "There's a sucker born every minute."

And he's got plenty of us paying to see his sideshow.