I have simply got to get myself into the rackets … either the racket of focus-grouping — "My intensive grilling of 12 likely voters seated on folding chairs revealed that Hillary Clinton is seen as 'untrustworthy'; now, do you hand or mail me a check?" — or the racket of political "image crafting," whose breezy artistry is revealed by Paul Manafort to HuffPost's Howard Fineman — "One [challenge] is to make the American people look at [Donald Trump] and say, 'He can fill the chair.'" This challenge is met, in part, by bilking The Donald $200,000 a month (or whatever, I'm flexible) for offering advice he'll ignore. "You don’t change Donald Trump,” said Manafort in a truism that, logically enough, holds for most anyone. "You don’t 'manage' him," added Manafort, even though managing him (or whomever) is the cardinal task of image crafting.
When I say the art of "image crafting" is breezy, by that I mean one merely sets intellectual integrity — all of it — to the winds. That's the personal challenge of this racket, unless of course one is already sociopathically inclined to advise "foreign tyrants," as Mr. Manafort is, and has. However for $1.2 million dollars — six months worth of offering unheeded advice — I just might be up to it. Rationalizing the seedy is one of humanity's less appealing attributes, but it pays well. And rationalizing outrageous pay from some seedy buffoon who isn't going to take my advice anyway? For fuck's sake, as Nate Silver would put it, let my self-canceling image crafting begin.
My guiding professional template, as I'm sure you've guessed, would be the magnificent Mr. Manafort — the absolute Platonic Ideal of intellectual disingenuity. His sit-down with HuffPost's Fineman is a marvel of otherworldly verbal sleaze, all in the service of crafting the wholly imaginary for an uncraftable candidate. Post-integrity-trashing, the only trick, I gather, is not to laugh.
Whom might The Donald desire as a running mate? We can, most likely, rule out a woman or any person or color — since choosing either one, said Manafort, "would be viewed as pandering, I think." Insert rimshot here. Manafort added that Trump "needs," as a running mate, "an experienced person to do the part of the job he doesn’t want to do." OK, so Dick Cheney is available.
As for Trump's wretched unfavorability among women, Manafort insisted that “Our numbers even now are not that far out of whack…. Hillary is the one who’s got a gender gap." Hispanics? "The national polls are distorted"; what's more, Trump doesn't need two-fifths of the Hispanic vote to win the White House, as every conscious psephologist says he will. (Trump currently polls a catastrophic one-fifth of the Hispanic vote.)
"Does [Trump] know enough?" asked Manafort. "Yes," he answered, "because he knows he has more to learn. And he is constantly doing that" — not, heaven forfend, by reading briefing papers, but by "read[ing] the newspapers, and he talks on the phone and to office visitors in a never-ending stream. You’re sitting there in his office and you realize that he is constantly picking up stuff as he goes."
"Stuff" is one of those vastly interpretable words used by professional image crafters who haven't the vaguest idea of what in God's name their candidate is learning, if anything.
Oh, and talk of past or lingering GOP divisions was and remains "all B.S.," all "overblown." And the "only people who want [to see Trump's] tax returns are the people who want to defeat him." In that last statement there might be, at long last, some truth. What Manafort left unsaid was that the people who want to defeat Trump constitute the great majority of the American electorate.
But what does image-crafter Paul Manafort care? Like the seedily buffoonish Donald Trump, he's got his.
What a racket.