Sis Boom Bah

No, this has nothing to do with exploding sheep.

Linking a Powerline article on the election at Hot Air, Ed Driscoll takes issue with one of its points:

I’ll disagree with my friend John a bit here. There has been a cult of personality around Trump, which is what happens with charismatic figures in politics. There was a cult of personality around Obama too, which Obama purposefully cultivated, and one around Reagan that came together more organically.

Hinderaker doesn’t deny a cult of personality, he just says correctly that personality did not drive Trump’s campaign.  “[H]e ran on the issues. He talked relentlessly and effectively about inflation, the border, and war and peace.” Other candidates with personality cults also ran on issues. The hip, personable Bill Clinton (the last fun Democrat to run for Prez in the general) ran on blaming Bush for the recession, whose root cause was undoubtedly the S&L crisis (in which the Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan played a tiny part). The quasi-Messianic Obama ran on War on Terror criticisms and on blaming the Republicans for the Great Recession.

Recall the pep rallies of high school, and their outrageous taunts of the opposing team. People from all factions bring this spirit into politics. It seems that scarcely anyone other than the right applies the other key element: over-the-top aggrandizement of the home team. This looks weird to many leftists and to many conventional schlubs on the right because their approach to their own candidates is more subdued; to them hilarity must directly deprecate the other candidate. As a larger-than-life personality facing outlandish political enemies, Trump is a magnet for pep rally treatment. He is seen in memes as comically heroic, riding an eagle or wearing a superhero outfit or leading dogs and cats to safety away from the clutches of migrant diners. 

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