Mark Salter
RCP
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In 1869, two men digging a well on the farm of William Newell in Cardiff, N.Y., unearthed what were purported to be the petrified remains of a 10-foot-tall man. The find was believed (by the especially gullible) to be the corpse of a prehistoric Goliath. But the “Cardiff Giant” was actually a statue that George Hull, an enterprising tobacco farmer and Newell’s cousin, had commissioned stonecutters in Iowa to carve from a block of gypsum. He then conspired with Newell to pay the well-diggers to exhume it.
Hordes flocked to the Newell farm and paid 50 cents per person to see the giant. Hull subsequently sold it for $23,000 (over $400,000 today) to a group of investors led by David Hannum, a minor rival to legendary impresario, Phineas Taylor Barnum. Hannum put the giant on display in Syracuse, where it continued to draw large crowds of the credulous and curious, despite it having been pronounced a fake by an eminent paleontologist and other scholars who had, among other things, noticed the fresh chisel marks that scarred the stone man.
Enter P.T. Barnum himself, a sort of 19th century entrepreneurial precursor to Donald Trump, only with a less ridiculous hairdo, better taste and more tact. Hannum rebuffed Barnum’s offer to purchase the giant for $60,000, an immense sum at the time. So, Barnum simply had a plaster copy of it made and displayed in his museum in New York City, marketing it as the real Cardiff Giant and dismissing Hannum’s as the fake.
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If The Donald is a 21st century plaster replica of Barnum and his curio, Sen. Ted Cruz is a political version of Hannum. That’s what I thought anyway, as I watched Cruz refuse to criticize Trump’s latest nonsense in the hope of eventually inheriting the billionaire huckster’s supporters. Cruz demurred, he claimed, because he will not be goaded by the liberal press into criticizing a fellow Republican. Fidelity to Ronald Reagan’s famous 11th Commandment is something Cruz conspicuously ignored last week when he denounced Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell as a liar and when he routinely castigates his fellow Senate Republicans as cowardly and unprincipled.
Like Hannum, Cruz is sure to be outdone by the one candidate in the race who has longer and more successful experience with shameless self-promotion and political flimflammery. Were Trump in some epic misfortune to become the GOP nominee with his toxic favorable-unfavorable ratings and general repulsiveness, he could be the first candidate to lose all 50 states. Although his outsized ego may prevent him from realizing that, Republican leaders and the other 2016 candidates certainly do.
But Trump is not playing to win an election or to promote certain political priorities or policies. He is by far the most left-leaning Republican frontrunner of the post-World War Two era. No definition of conservative is elastic enough to include Trump’s past views -- high taxes, big government, massive debt, single payer healthcare, protectionism, and an aversion to conservative social values. His demagogic appeals to people’s sense of resentment and victimhood are intended to promote his brand -- the boorish billionaire version of a Kardashian.
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more here:
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2015/07/30/donald_trump_pt_barnum_with_bad_hair.html?google_editors_picks=true
