Campaign 2016 (Growing Time)

"The Donald" is in.

Mrs. Clinton sure hopes so,

not begin, but grow.

Gandhi's battle cry of "First they will ignore you. Then they will laugh at you. Then they will fight you. Then you will win!" has seen Donald J. Trump three fourths of the way to victory.

The political pundits and other candidates at first thought they could simply ignore him.

Then they thought they could make fun of him as "just an entertainer." "The guy with the funny hair (and it was a bad dye job.)

Next it was "gang up on him" and "reach a contested convention" or "challenge him to open up his tax returns" and "make an exposé of what his lovely wife looked like years ago when she was a professional model!"

Well, now we have been there, they have done that, and we have five months left to see who the American voters want with their "one man, one vote" decison process.

The latest fun poking was a photo of Mr. Trump with his famous hair in disarray and the title of "Well Comb, Mr. Trump!"

When push comes to shove....

If Campaign 2016 wasn't extraordinary enough already, with some of those deciding voters asserting that Hillary R. Clinton is as undesirable as Donald J. Trump, the campaign now enters the candidates' "growing time."

So far, only an important but small fraction of American voters have expressed their personal preferences as to Mrs. Clinton or Mr. Trump, while even fewer have expressed a preference for anyone else, including for Cruz, Rubio, Sanders, Kasich, and the rest of the castaways.

It is almost a year since Mr. Trump declared his candidacy for the nomination of the Republican Party in June 2015. At the time, few took him seriously.

It is not a stretch to say that Mrs. Clinton has been an undeclared and finally a declared candidate for the Democrats in nearly two years or more.

What is most interesting about Mrs. Clinton's candidacy is not the obnoxious amount of money she has raised so far for running a classic campaign against Mr. Trump who claims to a form of "self-funding" for his own campaign, but rather how much trouble Mrs. Clinton is having with shaking off fellow Democrat Senator Bernie Sanders from the small State of Vermont.

The Pundits claim that Mr. Trump's candidacy will leave the staid Grand Old Party (GOP) in shambles, but there is an almost equal chance that Senator Sanders' obstinate candidacy will leave the Democrats in a disarray of their own when, and if, Mrs. Clinton seeks to co-opt the enthusiasm of Senator Sanders' youthful Democrats at the Democrats' party convention.

So far, Mrs. Clinton Is Shadow Boxing

While Mrs. Clinton has been made to define her stand on issues Senator Sanders is counting on, Mr.Trump has been free to be wishy-washy as to his own stand on key issues.

As much as Mrs. Clinton would like to refocus her campaign to start taking on Mr. Trump as her likely adversary, all she can do at this point is to try ridiculing Mr. Trump for his lack of substance on key issues. She is finding it hard to land telling blows as long as she is only shadow boxing her as yet poorly defined GOP opponent.

Mr. Trump's Republican rivals never had the media attention that Mr. Trump has had, and continues to have. At present he continues to bask in the klieg lights' glare of media attention at a time when Mrs. Clinton desperately wants that attention for her bare knuckles fight with the resurgent Senator Sanders, and is forced to buy media time fighting Senator Sanders with funds she would prefer to devote to a future Clinton/Trump contest.

Mr. Trump's position is enviable. He has nearly two months to prepare for his party's convention in July. He could stagnate and go to the convention with the nomination assured, but doing little to define his party's platform. Or, he could spend time humanizing his campaign, defining his future positions, surrounding himself with the qualified advisers he will need to listen to in order to unify his party for the long four months that will follow his formal nomination.

That Mrs. Clinton has the added distractions arising from the FBI"s ongoing investigation of her mishandling of automatically classified emails to and from her personal computer server during her tenure as America's Secretary of State, should give any intelligent voter an understanding of her diverted focus at the very time when she needs to concentrate her energies in assessing her November foe.

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© 2016 Demas W; Jasper All rights reserved.