By MARSHA MERCER
Alice Roosevelt Longworth would have loved this week’s
Republican National Convention.
Teddy Roosevelt’s daughter had a throw pillow in her
sitting room embroidered with the line: “If you can’t say something good about
someone, sit right here by me.”
Republicans in Cleveland richly rewarded viewers who
wanted to hear nothing good about Hillary Clinton. She wasn’t just the wrong
choice for president; she’s a criminal, they charged.
“Lock her up! Lock her up! Lock her up!” delegates at
Quicken Loans Arena shouted, leaping to their feet and shaking their fists. And
when New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, a former federal prosecutor, indicted
Clinton’s performance and character in his speech Tuesday night, the crowd
bellowed “Guilty!” after each new charge.
Republicans will see how it feels starting Monday,
when the Democratic National Convention opens in Philadelphia and attempts to turn
Republican Donald J. Trump’s into Public Enemy No. 1.
Character assassination has a long, colorful history
in presidential politics. A newspaper editor who supported Thomas Jefferson in
the bitter election of 1800 wrote of John Adams that he had “a hideous
hermaphroditical character, which has neither the force nor firmness of a man,
nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman.”
But the sustained attacks on
Clinton were a new level of mudslinging.
“She lied about her emails, she lied about her server,
she lied about Benghazi, she lied about sniper fire – why she even lied about
why her parents named her Hillary,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell
declared.
The name claim stems from 1995 when the then-first
lady said her mother always told her she was named for Sir Edmund Hillary, the
first man to conquer Mount Everest. But Clinton was born in 1947; Sir Edmund
made the climb in 1953. Her presidential campaign conceded in 2006 it was just
a “sweet family story.”
The GOP convention also showed rare disunity among the
party faithful. Ohio Gov. John Kasich, a former presidential contender, refused
to attend, as did other Republican leaders. Some conservative delegates erupted
in anger after party leaders stifled a rules change that would have permitted
delegates to vote for candidates other than Trump.
On the convention’s first day, the chairman of the
Virginia delegation and former state Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, a Ted
Cruz supporter, threw his credentials on the floor and marched out.
House Speaker Paul Ryan, who boarded the Trump train
late, sounded plaintive as he tried to unify Republicans. Only with Trump and
his running mate Indiana Gov. Mike Pence “do we have a chance for a better way,”
he said. Hardly a ringing endorsement.
“Let the other party go
on and on with its constant dividing up of people, always playing one group
against the other, as if group identity were everything,” said Ryan, the GOP’s vice
presidential nominee in 2012. “In America, aren’t we all supposed to be and see
beyond class, see beyond ethnicity and all those other lines drawn to set us apart
and lock us into groups?”
Cruz infuriated some delegates when he used his time
at the podium Wednesday night not to endorse Trump but to give what sounded like
his first presidential campaign speech of 2020. Delegates booed Cruz and
shouted, “Trump! Trump! Trump!” as the presidential nominee walked in.
The most peculiar knock on Clinton came from former
GOP presidential contender Dr. Ben Carson, who said one of Clinton’s heroes in
college and the subject of her senior thesis was radical organizer Saul Alinsky.
In the forward to one of his later books, Alinsky acknowledged Lucifer as the
first radical organizer.
“So are we willing to elect someone as president who
has as their role model somebody who acknowledges Lucifer?” Carson said. “Think
about that.”
Clinton, perhaps previewing her attacks next week, insisted
that Trump has nothing to offer the American people so he had to attack her. Trump’s
“business model is basically fraud and abuse,” she said. “He talks about America
First but his own products are made in a lot of countries that aren’t named
America.”
At their convention, Republicans found one thing on
which to agree: Hillary Clinton is their enemy. Democrats also agree on
something: Trump is theirs.
Even before he endorsed Clinton, rival Bernie Sanders
said he would work to defeat Trump. And when he finally did endorse her, Sanders
said he wanted to make one thing clear: “I intend to do everything I can to
make certain she is the next president.”
© 2016 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.
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