Donald Trump: the Hardee's candidate

I love the Hardee’s television commercials. I’m not going to link to any of them here, but I trust you know the ones I mean. They’re defiantly and gleefully politically incorrect, abandoning even a limp pretense of doing anything but moving burgers with sex. I doubt the Katherine Webb one would have even made it to TV ten years ago.

I love the ads partially because the people who scream the loudest about them, and things like them, generally do an excellent job of pissing me off.

Political correctness pretends to be about courtesy and manners, but it’s really about telling people what to do. PC’s arbiters don’t care about actual actions nearly as much as they do squawking and shrieking when someone dares to color outside their lines.

(And demanding that said someone color inside the lines.)

I’m not a tacky guy. Well, I am, but I exercise discretion effectively. Time and a place, blah blah blah. I behave myself when I should. I think there are probably millions like me who trust their own judgments about standards of behavior, and resent those who would dictate their own as the only acceptable path.

I think such thinking goes a long way toward explaining the success of Donald Trump’s campaign to this point. His ostensible candidacy is unfolding on Bizarro World. Every brash and tasteless thing he says or does is only more evidence of his genius. He sneers at those who cluck about what “just isn’t done” and such. The electorate, who doesn’t want to have a “national conversation” or fret about who’s offended when a football player prays, is definitely plugged into that.

Burgers aren’t presidential campaigns, though. Trump is demonstrably thin on specific policy proposals, and there is nearly nothing in his long history to indicate a genuine conservative or libertarian bent. His wanton “offensiveness” has garnered him most of the attention to date. But as the field thins and discussion becomes more substantive, I suspect he’ll find less and less helium in that particular balloon.

It’s still thirteen months until we vote. I love a good burger, but you can’t eat them exclusively for over a year and expect a positive outcome.

“Peak Trump”? It’s here. It might have even been several days ago.

Donald Trump: the Hardee’s candidate

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