Bad vibes at Madison Square Garden

"Rum, Romanism, and rebellion" redux

As I noted yesterday, Kamala Harris’ campaign is no longer giving good vibrations. It’s now giving bad ones.

By contrast, the Trump campaign has been a bad-vibes operation from the beginning. The only exception was the Republican National Convention, where the vibes were good until Trump spoke, at which point they turned mediocre.

Yesterday’s Trump rally at Madison Square Garden probably felt good to the MAGA faithful who showed up. But most ordinary voters who watched it on television or read the reports probably feel differently about it.

The worst part was the opening act, comedian Tony Hinchcliffe. He insulted Puerto Rico (where many Pennsylvanians have their roots), calling it a “floating island of garbage.” He also poked fun at Latinos in general, with this off-color remark:

These Latinos, they love making babies, too, just know that. They do. They do. There’s no pulling out. They don’t do that. They come inside, just like they did to our country.

I’m all for edgy comedy and I consider ethnic jokes to be among the funniest forms of humor. Hinchcliffe’s jibes are very poor specimens of the genre, but if he wants to use them in comedy clubs, I say go for it.

But they had no place at a political rally — least of all at a rally for a candidate who is constantly being called a racist and who is relying in part on weaning Latino voters away from Democrats.

To no one’s surprise, Democrats are not only seizing on the rally to attack Trump, they are using it to support their ridiculous claim that he’s a fascist. With all of the subtlety we’ve come to love from the Dems, Tim Walz and others are comparing yesterday’s Madison Square Garden event to a Nazi rally held there in 1939. (For all his fake Midwestern geniality, Walz gives Trump a run for his money in the nastiness department.)

As Rich Lowry points out:

[The Nazi rally narrative] skips over FDR’s consequential speech in the arena in 1936 and JFK’s birthday party in 1962, as well as the Democratic conventions in 1976, 1980, and 1992, and George W. Bush’s highly effective convention in 2004.

That the Garden is an inherently fascistic venue is among the dumbest things we’ve heard in this campaign. Amazingly enough, Hillary Clinton has repeated this line, apparently assuming that it will never be brought to the attention of MSNBC viewers that multiple Democratic conventions have been held there, including that of her husband in 1992.

If the Democrats are in a hopeful mood, they might compare yesterday’s event to remarks delivered in New York during the presidential campaign of 1884. In that race the Republican, James Blaine, appeared to have a slight edge over the Democrat, Grover Cleveland. New York state was thought (correctly, it turned out) to hold the key to victory.

On October 29, Blaine attended a reception in New York City hosted by Protestant ministers. At that event, Rev. Samuel D. Burchard of the Murray Hill Presbyterian Church said that he and others like him "don't propose to. . . identify ourselves with the party whose antecedents have been rum, Romanism, and rebellion." 

The “rum, Romanism, and rebellion” remark was widely reported. In the final days of the campaign, it became a rallying point for Cleveland’s supporters.

Cleveland won the popular vote by 23,000 out of almost 10 million votes cast. The electoral college split was 219 to 182. New York state went to Cleveland by only 1,149 votes. Had Blaine picked up New York’s 36 electoral votes, he would have been President.

Thus, it’s quite possible that the “rum, Romanism, and rebellion” remark — which, again, Blaine did not make — cost him the presidency.

I very much doubt that Hinchcliffe’s jokes will have a similar effect. But if the election is close enough, they might.

I’m beginning to think this year’s race might come down to which candidate and his/her surrogates make the fewest unforced errors. The Trump campaign made one yesterday.