After 40 years, the ruling political class gets its outsider in Trump

UNIONTOWN, PA — William Jefferson Clinton made his way through three events in Western Pennsylvania last Friday in an effort to win over support for his wife’s bid for president in November.

One stop was in the predominantly black Pittsburgh neighborhood of Homewood, and the other two in the rural blue collar counties of Washington and Fayette. His pitch was different in each place, but the message was the same: Hillary Clinton has the experience to lead the country on day one.

{mosads}It was fascinating to watch the one-time Arkansas governor, who ran as an “outsider” for president in 1992, give a sales pitch to voters to support his wife, the ultimate insider for president.

For forty years, the political class has been telling voters through ads, speeches and rhetoric that voters need to elect the outsider for president. It began, in the wake of the successive insider presidencies of Lyndon Baines Johnson and Richard Nixon, when Georgia governor Jimmy Carter came out of nowhere to win both his party’s nomination and the presidency.

The peanut farmer gimmick worked. The press ate it up and penned folksy stories about fishing trips, Sunday School and pick-up trucks. But the truth is, he had been an elected state senator and a governor. He was no more an outsider than Ronald Reagan, the guy who defeated him four years later, who was also pegged as an outsider.

In fact, Reagan not only ran as an outsider (never mind that he had been a two term California governor), but he also began the rallying cry to run against Washington, warning that the government was not to be trusted as a beacon of good management, or much of anything else.

The outsider-anti-government notion stuck, and our congressional mid-term election cycles began to be as anticipated and celebrated as much as who was in the White House. By 1994, 14 years after Reagan first took office, a majority shifted, largely on the premise that outsider congressional candidates running against incumbents with long ties to government programs were what America needed for progress.

Each presidential election cycle has escalated ever since, with the political class (pundits, strategists, establishment) hammering home to voters to elect the outsider. And each time, both parties eventually go with the “safe” establishment person as their nominee.

That is, until this year.

Enter Donald Trump. His run in the primaries was not particularly ideological, his personality was blunt, his background was a combination of celebrity and business and his method of winning broke seventy shades of political science orthodoxy. But he did possess that one thing: he was the authentic outsider that the political class had been harping about for decades.

In short, the political class owns the candidacy of Donald Trump. You don’t spend forty years telling people to vote for the outsider young governor, or the outsider young senator for president or outsider businessmen for House and U.S. Senate seats, and not expect all of those homespun, glossy ads and finely crafted messages to not eventually penetrate the psyche of the American voter.

And voters have finally become so tired of sending to Washington a message through their votes and then Washington misreading that message that they have decided en masse to do exactly what Washington has told them to do for years. Go with the outsider, go with the guy who plans to fundamentally fix bad government and to Hell with the consequences.

Voters have soured on Washington and elected officials, partly because they are so economically and culturally different than Main Street (my brief appearance at a very “Washington” party last week reminded me of that in less than thirty seconds). But also because the political class has been telling them essentially “we suck, elect new people, pick an outsider.”

It is why we have had four change elections in a row ( 2006, 2008, 2010 and 2014), each time punishing the incumbent president and his party. And it is why the Republicans picked Trump and the Democrats flirted seriously with Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders.

Washington has no obligation once this cycle is over to be better stewards of good government, or any obligation to send the message that being an insider in Washington does not necessarily mean that, that should be a burden or impediment to electing good people to higher office.

But that lack of restraint in a better message will only continue the revolt that Washington has led the voters towards for many years to come.

Salena Zito is a veteran political journalist and editorial columnist. Reach her at szito@gmail.com.

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