A PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE WALKS INTO A BAR...

Donald Trump gave out Lindsey Graham's cell number today. It's a childish and irresponsible stunt, though there's no reason to believe that it upset Trump's fans -- they loved it at Free Republic, as I learn from an FR thread in which Graham is repeatedly called "Linda" and one commenter posts this:



Meanwhile, The Washington Post's Jonathan Capehart got Al Sharpton's take on Trump. Sharpton recalled something he'd heard from an old friend, James Brown:

First time, I went to Vegas ... [James Brown] took me there. And [he] said to me, “Reverend, let me tell you something. ... There’s a difference between the lounge act and the acts that play the main room.” We’re at Caesar’s Palace. I’m about 19 – 20 years old.

And I said, “What do you mean?” And he said, “When you’re in the lounge, you’re competing with the bars and the barmaids and the slot machines and people gambling. So you do whatever you can to get attention. But when you’re in the main room, they paid to see a show. You’ve got to be ready. You gotta have choreography. You gotta be rehearsed. You gotta have polish.” He says, “When you get on the main stage, Reverend, whatever you did to get out the lounge don’t do that on the main stage.”

Capehart notes that Trump may be doing an unpolished lounge act, but a lot of people seem to like it:

The latest Post poll shows that Trump has surged to a big lead in the GOP pack with support from 24 percent of Republican primary voters. Given that standing, I asked Sharpton, is there a danger that folks like the lounge act? He highlighted another significant number from the poll. The one that shows 62 percent of Americans said they wouldn’t vote for Trump for president. “Folks like the lounge act ... because they’re sittin’ around drinkin’ a beer and laughing,” Sharpton said. “But if you go upstairs to get your wife to go to dinner, she’s going to want to go to the main room.”

But how many people in America are truly excited about the acts who are polished enough to seem worthy of the main room? Jeb Bush? Marco Rubio? Hillary Clinton? They have too much choreography, too much polish. The guy in the lounge is much more entertaining.

Another analogy: It seems to me that Trump is like a young guy in a bar who's getting attention for obnoxious but funny stunts -- some people are disgusted, but that blonde over in the corner keeps laughing, and Trump wants her, so even though he doesn't know what the hell he's doing, he's going to just keep doing it. He wants to go home with the blonde, and she really might keep laughing the more obnoxious he gets.

Are they going to mate for life? Not very likely. But for now this is working. So Trump's going to keep going.