I made one very bad called about the 2016 election, which I quickly confessed! It was the same bad call most other people made: that Donald Trump’s lack of experience and knowledge would make him the Herman Cain of this campaign cycle, and he would not make it this far in the race.
To be fair, I made a very good call two cycles ago concerning the Trump of that era, Sarah Palin. As soon as her selection was announced as John McCain’s running mate, I wrote in this space (in the middle of the night, from China) that despite her then-red-hot popularity she would be a huge liability for the ticket. Why? Because running for national office is a lot, lot harder than it looks. And if you come to it with no experience, you are simply guaranteed to make a lot of gaffes.
Let’s go to the charts:
Unless you have seen it first first-hand, as part of the press scrum or as a campaign staffer, it is almost impossible to imagine how grueling the process of running for national office is… The candidates have to answer questions and offer views roughly 18 hours a day, and any misstatement on any topic can get them in trouble. Why do candidates so often stick to a stump speech that they repeat event after event and day after day? Because they've worked out the exact way to put their positions on endless thorny issues -- Iraq, abortion, the Middle East, you name it -- and they know that creative variation mainly opens new complications.
You can see where I am going with this, after Trump’s misadventures of the past week: