Here is Conrad Black writing at National Review:
Trump is the clear choice for conservatives.
As I suggested when I gave readers a rest from me five weeks ago, the Republican convention successfully celebrated the complete rejection of the post-Reagan Republican party: The Bushes, McCain, and Romney weren’t present or mentioned, or much missed. Cruz, as I wrote in my last piece here, and the otherwise amiable John Kasich made asses of themselves, and opinion has moved on. (It was not entirely sane for Kasich, who did not utter a negative word about any other Republican during the primaries, and on his one winning night advised his countrymen to “hug a stranger at the mall” — which advice, if followed, would have quintupled the number of assault charges in the country — and to “take a widow to dinner,” to stay away from the Republican convention in his home state, Ohio.)
The Democratic convention’s orgy of self-praise and joyous continuity generated enough jollity for the Trumpophobic media to open up a five- to seven-point lead for Mrs. Clinton. But Donald Trump already has the 40 percent of Americans who share Archie Bunker’s dislike of political correctness, vote-buying with welfare, fiscal incontinence, and a feeble foreign policy, and there has been no further need to serve them up more raw meat. So he has just disappointed, week after week, the frenzied media lynch mob that had implied he was a racist, a misogynist, an inciter of violence, a vulgar buffoon, a member of the Flat Earth Society, an advocate of an automatic firearm for every white seven-year-old American, and probably an enemy of fluoridated drinking water.
Of course, it was almost all nonsense, and as Trump has been uncontroversial, it has been Mrs. Clinton who has made the gaffes (Trump’s followers — now half the voters –are “deplorables”) and has incited concerns about her health as well. Peggy Noonan, who doesn’t much care for either candidate but whose innate fairness and seasoned expertise as a judge of political talent prevent her from joining the chorus of the hysterics, detected (on September 5 in the Wall Street Journal), as the Clinton lead eroded, that anxiety (over Trump) was less negative than depression (at the thought of the return of the Clintons). I think that is only half the story.
Read more: National Review
Image credit: The Trump campaign.
