There's been a fair amount of coverage of The Donald's messy announcement of his vice presidential nominee, Gov. Mike Pence of Indiana. A lot of it is focused on the...sheer awkwardness...of the process involved in selecting and announcing the candidate., which ended up being pretty anti-climactic (a simple tweet saying he had chosen Pence, rather than the staged event that had been planned to get maximum political mileage out of the opportunity followed the next day by a Saturday press conference that generated little excitement or enthusiasm because his selection was already known and...it was on a Saturday in mid-July, when most people are actually out doing stuff).
Looking beyond the question of whether Trump blew his first major opportunity to demonstrate what kind of a presidential decision-maker he might be (not a good one if this is any indication) is an even larger question.
Trump has had more than two months since he virtually sewed up the nomination in order to consolidate his base and pivot to the general election, necessary steps for any successful presidential candidate in order to free them up to focus on expanding their base for the last phase of the general election campaign.
Unfortunately for Trump, not only did he fail to successfully “pivot” to any kind of general election mode but he also failed the preliminary step of shoring up his base.
After taking a step back and wondering why, of all people Trump could have chosen to be his vice presidential running mate, he chose someone who added very little, if anything to the ticket, someone who is simultaneously radically right-wing, policy-wise, but pretty ho-hum personality-wise, it occurs to me that there is really only one good reason: Pence was selected to help Trump shore up his support among the right-wing, which loves tone-deaf, right-wing zealots regardless of their executive or managerial capabilities (or lack thereof).
In other words, the only thing Pence really adds to the ticket is to help Trump with Republicans and conservative-leaning independents. And while that may be a necessary thing for Trump, it doesn't bode well for the overall state of his campaign.
The reason is simple: It’s beginning to get pretty late in the campaign to have to focus time, energy, effort and resources on just getting your base lined up. That alone is proof that Trump's so-called “pivot” to the general election over the past two months has been an abject failure.
Yes, he has had some modest successes in “pivoting,” such as finally (and belatedly) getting some kind of rudimentary organizational structure into place in order to start actually raising funds for the fall campaign. And, yes, he has succeeded in putting together a convention, although the process for doing so seems almost as messy as the pathetically inept vice presidential nominee roll-out and the outcome is yet to be determined.
What Pence's nomination actually means, therefore, is...failure. Failure by The Donald to do what he said he planned to do two months ago: pivot to the general election. He, obviously, hasn't done so if he is still having to focus his attention on pandering to the Republicans’ conservative base.
It could well be that the Pence announcement was a fluke caused by a news cycle involving yet another international act of terrorism. If so, the messy selection and announcement of Pence might not end up being too problematic for the Trump campaign in the long run. If, on the other hand, his handling of his running mate selection is a preview of what we can expect at the Republican National Convention...well maybe changing his mind about his running mate might be in order after all, for no other reason than to distract attention from an even larger potential debacle in Cleveland. We’ll see next week.