Watch Out for August! | City Journal
We have just lived through the most volatile, unpredictable, and wild month in the history of presidential politics. In July, we saw a shocking breach in presidential security enabling the near-miss assassination of a former president; his bloody rise from the ground, fist pumping in the air; and a third consecutive convention nomination by his party.
Meantime, establishment forces in government and media flipped their story concerning the health and mental fitness of the incumbent president, leading to an unprecedentedly late change at the top of the ticket. Through a steady barrage of negative headlines and party maneuvering, a president who had spent a half century working in Washington was forced to withdraw so that his party could ignore the results of its own primaries and put forward a younger candidate, launched with an ecstasy unseen (or so we re told) since Kennedy s Camelot. Belatedly, the incumbent president addressed the nation to justify his change of heart but wound up explaining little, while demonstrating what everyone already knew.
Whew. That s a lot.
But could there be more? According to presidential history, August is the month we should really worry about, most especially our incumbent president, who has just implicitly admitted that he is not up to the job. This could be a real problem if August does what it often does deliver the big, the strange, and the unexpected.
Tevi Troy.