Like the clean up hitter in baseball Donald Trump was in the number four position. It was his job to deliver something big on the fourth and final night after three troubled days at the Republican National Convention.
The Convention shone a bright light on the Republican Party, inadvertently exposing the deep fissures that still exist after a bruising Primary campaign.
At some point this week in Cleveland it seemed every delegate had something to be upset about. The stop-Trumpers were angry twice when they couldn’t get rule changes on Monday or the roll call on Tuesday to go their way. And the pro-Trumpers were just as upset with Ted Cruz for torpedoing the nominee on Wednesday.
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Over those same three days the Trump campaign mis-managed the staging of the convention, allowing Trump’s wife Melania to use Michelle Obama’s words as her own, and then fumbling the explanation of what happened for another two days.
Some knowledgeable Republican analysts think the failure to unite delegates at this error-prone convention does not bode well for Trump. An old George W. Bush aide, Michael Gerson, blamed the convention woes on the ineffectiveness of the campaign, adding, “they proved they couldn’t do crisis management when it really mattered”.
Alex Conant from Senator Marco Rubio’s campaign suggests the party under Trump is missing its opportunities to unite the party and says bluntly, “This is a campaign that is on a trajectory to lose in November.”
I spoke with two long time journalists today, both of whom have covered conventions going back to the 1990’s. Each believes the last Republican Convention that was truly united was George W. Bush’s in 2000. Bush just happens to be the last Republican to have gone on to win the Presidency.
And while the Democrats had deep divisions between the Obama and Clinton camps in 2008, by the time the convention rolled around in Denver, the two sides were united, excited and committed to getting Obama elected, which they did.
Next week’s Democratic Convention will be an important test of whether the Bernie Sanders faction of the party will or will not get behind Hillary Clinton.
One thing that should encourage them to do so was the splintered spectacle at the Republican convention.
Which brings us back to Trump the clean up hitter. His acceptance speech succeeded in one important way — the problems he described in America do make the controversies within his own party seem insignificant.
But even if Trump hit a home run – it was a solo shot. He can’t win this election swinging for the fences. He needs his teammates to start getting on base.
Eric Sorensen is Global National’s Senior National Affairs Correspondent and former Washington Bureau Chief.
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