William Weld just announced he is a candidate, running against Trump.
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| William Weld |
He isn't really a candidate.
Weld is a patrician critic, scolding an ignorant, low-class meddler and vandal, who is upsetting a complex diplomatic status quo.
Weld entered the room slowly and graciously.
He walked from table to table, nodding approval, smiling, softly saying "thank you," getting handshakes and warm greetings. William Weld is Old Money. An ancestor came on the Mayflower, another signed the Declaration of Independence, his family funded buildings at Harvard before the Civil War. He graduated summa from Harvard, studied at Oxford, then returned to Harvard Law School. He speaks Latin, Greek, and when describing the fire at Notre Dame, French.
He knows everyone, has been everywhere. He is an expert. He doesn't just like the bipartisan, global, diplomatic and economic status quo, he represents it.
William Weld is everything Donald Trump rode to victory by campaigning against.
The event was a gathering of the New Hampshire World Affairs Council, a group that encourages world trade, student and professional exchanges, peace and understanding. Weld had just announced his candidacy. There was media in the room. There were about a hundred people in attendance.
It was an opportunity to give a campaign speech. Instead, he gave a lecture. It was a good one, well received, It was exactly the kind of talk a retired Ambassador or Distinguished Emeritus Professor of International Relations might give to students at the JFK School of Government, where the great man would share the broad sweep of American diplomatic relations from 1919 to the present.
He simultaneously, wordlessly, revealed his campaign plans. He is playing, enjoying the attention. That's all.
He was never going to win the GOP nomination. He knows this. Everyone knows this. He is not even going to disrupt Trump. He is not calling him out, not accusing him, not even sharply criticizing him. He is just serving as a bookmark, a reminder that Trump represents disruption and change.
Weld is presenting dismay over Trump--but doing it in such a way that the vast majority of people might hear him, even in short sound bites, would conclude that people like Weld are why we actually needed Trump to shake things up. Weld is gracious, but so cocooned as to be clueless.
Weld said that free trade was wonderful, and that it created more jobs and greater wealth--but said not one word about the people whose jobs are displaced by it. Their votes were essential to Trump's election.
He spoke of the value of immigration and workers entering the country--but said not one word about the people who consider themselves to be in job competition with them.
Weld said that NATO was essential and that the dissolution or even weakening of it was Putin's wildest hope, but then said that, it was indeed true that Europe wasn't really pulling its weight there, what a shame, something should be done.
Weld said that we needed to work delicately with China and that sensitivity to their needs was essential, a proud nation, but that, yes, they were "monstrously" unfair in their theft of technology, and we should attempt to curtail that, perhaps indirectly, but not with tariffs, goodness no.
The big message: the old guard experts were tired, weak hand-wringers. The unsaid message is that those well bred, highly educated, polite, self-satisfied, comfortable elites had had their turn, and now it was time for someone like a Trump to disturb their in-group, on behalf of the forgotten American whose job had moved to China or Mexico, and who themselves were a proud people.
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| Happy to do selfies |
William Weld is very impressive. I liked him. That is not the point of a campaign. It is to send a message that the candidate is the new leader, not the old critic.
Weld does not intend to have the effect of helping Trump, but that is what he does. Trump should troll and criticize Weld every chance he gets to keep him talking. Weld is the foil against which Trump would best solidify his base in the GOP and demonstrate his populist credentials.
These brief video clips will give readers a taste of Weld's manner and message:
Weld experience: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_LvDq2czPr8
The postwar order: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4Ywx8djM71s
Trump the disrupter: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Iru6uye7SqQ
2 comments:
Hold on...how about the ONLY Republican with enough of a conscience to even challenge what's happening to his party and the Republic?
It has to start somewhere. The minority who think they are going to create some kind of white evangelistic enclave walled off from the rest of the world and have made a deal with the Devil to accomplish it are delusional, and many Republicans are regretting embracing them for the sake of their corporate and old money base.
I'll vote for him in the primary, as I hope all Democrats will.
It will be a true vote of conscience.
IMHO, spot on analysis of the aging Brahmin and how Trump will use him, Peter.
Andy Seles
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