Chris Cilizza is a good reporter, but wow, is this explanation of Donald Trump's rapid rise wrong:
But, that doesn't mean the Trump saga — and, it was a saga — is without lessons to be learned by the Republican candidates who will run for president in 2012.The most important lesson? Confrontation is good. Confrontation works.
"Donald Trump was an anti-establishment figure who demonstrated the importance of taking the debate right to Obama — frontally and hard, which the the eventual GOP nominee mist do daily to win," said Scott Reed, a senior Republican strategist.
I have no trouble believing that Republicans believe this. After all, partisans like fightin' candidates. Sometimes that is indeed what your party needs, and sometimes it isn't. But did Donald Trump rocket to the top of primary polls because he was the only candidate willing to really stick it to Barack Obama? I don't know if you've taken a listen to Mitt Romney, Tim Pawlenty, Newt Gingrich, Herman Cain, or Michele Bachmann lately, but they really, really don't like the president, and they aren't shy about saying so. No, the reason for Trump's swift rise was that he's a celebrity. As a consequence, when he started toying with a run, all the nation's media outlets began to salivate. Let's take a look at some numbers from the Project for Excellence in Journalism's News Coverage Index from a couple of weeks ago:
Funny, I don't see any other Republican candidate on that chart. Trump is famous, and when he was grabbing all the press coverage, Republicans who responded to a poll asking them whom they were leaning toward didn't say to themselves, "Now, what do I really think of that Pawlenty fella?" At this stage, if you're in the news, you matter, and if you aren't, you don't.
