Hmm. If I was Trump running against Sanders I would capitalize on the natural resistance that Americans have to Socialism and Communism to paint him as a naïve idealist. Pretty easy job really since he is a Socialist Idealist. For a quick side-trip to elaborate on that let's look at how Senator Sanders plans to pay for his "College for All" plan, one of his most successful campaign promises. From his own site, the paper he cites to explain his FTT (financial transaction tax, or the actual term for 'taxing Wall Street speculators') has this excellent disclaimer. I'm not exaggerating, this is literally under the heading Caveat Emptor in the paper: "We assume that, due to the imposition of the FTT at the rates we propose above, trading

volume will fall no more than 50 percent relative to current levels of trading. As one of us (Bob) has explained over the phone, in fact, it is very difficult to establish the answers to your questions on the basis of serious analysis and references to evidence and credible research. To begin with though, again, we emphasize that our conclusions are not based on anything close to the type of solid foundation in research and evidence that one would normally expect in considering such an important question. Unfortunately, to our knowledge, such research and evidence are simply not available, to us or anybody else."

So the researchers who provided the research for this whole plan working STARTED with the assumption that it will wreck stock market volume by 50%. Now, I understand that volume is not profit. Nor is a reduction in trading volume due to per transaction taxes going to end the world. But there are a lot of people who are going to be very disappointed in the rate of returns dropping by 5% when they buy, and 5% when they sell. Especially since the rate of returns on the stock market has been 5.8% over the last 15 years. So you just made the stock market a negative investment for a lot of people, and that's a big deal for a lot of reasons that don't affect stock market 'billionaires'. The stock market is where people's 401k is. It's where pensions are. When you take the return out of that equation, you just ruined a lot of people's retirement savings to pay for college.

So Bernie is dead in the water as soon as someone with business sense and a marketing pitch gets ahold of him. And I'm not saying that any of these ideas are actually untenable, or even trying to argue the merit. I'm just saying that if I was a political consultant with 10 minutes of free time, I could have already wrecked Bernie's campaign with the information that he gave me.

Here's the pitch: 30 second spot. Voiceover:"Bernie Sanders' own sources say that paying for his college plan will cut the stock market in half." Red line graphic down a growing stock market and newspaper economic recovery graphics implying that unemployment will rise and America will begin another recession. VO:"He says he wants to try something new." Bernie video of him saying something like 'we've never tried this here before and it's time' Graphics of Greece protests and EU Bailouts (the one of dumping the Swedish Kroners that they did for the universal income protests would be an awesome one!) VO: "Well it has been tried Bernie, and Europe is still digging it's way out. This November stand with a leader whose business know-how will Make America Great Again! Stand with Donald Trump." Trump: "I'm Donald Trump and I approve this message."

So why isn't the RNC doing that? Because they want Bernie to succeed so that they can harpoon him when he's most vulnerable and Hillary is out of the picture. It's brilliant. It's like letting your opponent with a tank (Hillary) continue to be flabbergasted when people are picking up bows and arrows instead because they don't like the tank driver. And then when the tank driver runs out of gas because everyone waited too long, boom, you run them over.

This whole article is based on the premise that Trump is ineffective when he goes political. He doesn't have to go political for himself if he can be successful going political against Sanders. He has people on his team who are paid to be really good at that. It's not rocket science.