MARK STEYN Reviews the Ignorance at Republican Headquarters Regarding the Donald

NOTES ON A PHENOMENON….. by Mark Steyn at Steynonline

“On Tuesday night, my daughter and her friends went down to Claremont, New Hampshire to see Donald Trump in action. She and her chums range from the not terribly political to those with the usual enthusiasms of youth, so they went mainly because Trump’s a hot ticket, and we don’t get a lot of those in the Granite State. Her only other candidate encounter this season was at the North Haverhill Fair last summer when Lindsey Graham pounced outside the 4-H barn, no doubt with an eye to recruiting her for one of his “rotating first ladies”.

At any rate, after hearing my daughter’s account of the night, my sons said they wanted to see Trump, too. I wasn’t particularly enthusiastic, having wasted far too much of my time in New Hampshire on campaign events, going all the way back to the oxymoronic “Dole rallies” of 1996. But they persisted. So we checked out the schedule and discovered that he was due to be in Bernie Sanders’ socialist fortress of Vermont on Thursday. Which is how we wound up crossing the Connecticut River and traversing the Green Mountain State, and eventually found ourselves in an unusually lively Burlington. Herewith, a few notes on what I saw:

~THE VENUE: When was the last time a GOP presidential candidate held (in the frantic run-up to Iowa and New Hampshire) an event in Vermont? Every fourth January, Republican campaigns are focused on the first caucus and the first primary states, as Bush, Rubio, Christie, Kasich, Huckabee, Fiorina et al are right now. But in fact the Green Mountain primary is on March 1st, and its delegates count as much as any other state’s. In recent cycles, the American electoral system has diminished and degraded itself by retreating into turnout-model reductionism and seriously competing only over a handful of purple states. Even if he’s only doing it as a massive head-fake, Trump understands the importance of symbolism: By going into Berniestan, he’s saying he’s going for every voter and he’s happy to play down the other guy’s half of the field.

~THE PROTESTS: On the closed block of Main Street outside the Flynn Theatre there was something of a carnival atmosphere. On the south side the thousands of Trump supporters snaked down the sidewalk and round the corner. On the north side the hundreds of protesters waved the usual signs: “DUMP TRUMP”, “TRUMPISM IS FASCISM”, “TRUMP: AMERICAN IDIOT”, etc. Marginally more inventive were “TRUMP IS THE REAL TERRORIST” and the elliptical “TRUMP – THE OTHER WHITE MEAT”. My older boy ran into high-school pals who were variously there to attend the rally and there to protest it. The media like to play up the anti-Trump demonstrations, but even this works to his benefit, since they come almost exclusively from the leaden clichés of college-debt social justice. For a six-year bachelor’s degree in orientation studies, you’d think these fellows could work up something other than chants that were stale back when Pete Seeger was wondering where all the flowers went. A couple of straggle-bearded hipster dweebs…….” Please continue reading…..there is only one Mark Steyn!

http://www.steynonline.com/7408/notes-on-a-phenomenon