Is America Bored with Winning?

By Heather Wilhelm Published on September 10, 2015

If you enjoy mawkish, politician-sponsored spectacles, boy, was this your week. We’ll start with the first to grace our nation’s weary eyes: On Tuesday, embattled Kentucky county clerk Kim Davis was freed from jail for refusing to authorize gay marriage licenses. Within approximately 30 seconds, thanks to the high-pitched squeal of some top-secret politician-luring whistle, Davis was promptly dragged onto a pep rally stage by the beaming presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee, who has never met a camera or microphone he didn’t like.

Needless to say, spectacle followed: Reluctantly stepping up to the lectern to the oddly-chosen tune of “Eye of the Tiger,” and coaxed on by a gallant Sir Huckabee, an emotional Davis cried, then slowly raised her hands, facing a sea of bobbing white crosses.

The event’s optics, to put it kindly, were not kind: The triumphalism seemed forced and out of place. The crosses, jabbed into the air, brought pitchforks to mind. The song, like all politician walk-on songs, was bizarre. Also, Davis’s husband might be a wonderful person, but he also has an unfortunate penchant for wearing overalls and a giant straw hat on national television, making him look like a jolly extra on Hee Haw and allowing him to steal the visual show.

This is all a bit shallow, of course: Mrs. Davis’s religious convictions seem genuine, and it also seems reasonable to call for reforms, like the state of North Carolina has already enacted, to provide conscience protections for government employees. At the same time, she’s an elective official, not a private citizen, and there are obvious legal complications with her stance.

Unfortunately, these real and important issues tend to get drowned out when your political “champions” are more interested in self-promotion than persuasion, and can’t appear anywhere without ginning up a hog-the-limelight political circus. This particular three-ringer ended, rather appropriately, with Texas Sen. Ted Cruz — another camera/microphone aficionado/presidential hopeful who just happened to be in Kentucky for the day — looking flabbergasted as he was reportedly blocked from the stage by a Huckabee staffer. Sadly, we live in a world of scarcity; in this case, apparently, there was not enough “Eye of the Tiger” to go around.

But wait, there’s more. Also on Tuesday, Hillary Clinton, everyone’s least favorite “front-running” Democratic presidential hopeful, told ABC’s David Muir that she was “sorry” about her use of private e-mail while secretary of state. This followed Monday’s hilarious news that the Clinton campaign had carefully and methodically planned to be more spontaneous.  Clinton’s “apology” also followed months of alternate stonewalling, denial, feigned ignorance, and irritation surrounding what she framed as an insignificant story. This, as we have been repeatedly told, is because sending state secrets and classified information on insecure, flim-flam digital networks is really no big whoop.

How can Clinton be sorry for something that didn’t occur, doesn’t matter, is over-inflated in the public imagination, and that she had nothing to do with? Well, first of all, come on. We all know she’s not really sorry. We also know, thanks to news reports released on Wednesday, why she’s pretending that she is: focus groups, which are the go-to resource of every spontaneous, principled, and backboned individual since never in the history of the world.

Speaking of bad politician “walk on stage” music, let’s not forget Wednesday’s rally against the wildly unpopular Iran deal in Washington, D.C. Ted Cruz was there, too, along with Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, and Mark Levin. But the highlight, per usual, went to Donald J. Trump, who emerged on stage to the R.E.M. song “It’s the End of the World As We Know It.”

Let’s assume the irony was intentional, although maybe Trump also knows something we don’t.  Still, there was also something strangely profound in his remarks, or at least in this very Trumpian one-liner: “You’re going to have so much winning if I get elected,” he yelled, “You’ll get bored with winning!”

Here, one inevitably thinks of Charlie Sheen, who got so bored of winning a few years back that he sabotaged himself, lost his job, got high on something or other, and then ran around the country, bellowing to anyone who would listen about how he was still “winning.” As ridiculous as it sounds, people do get bored of winning, and it’s not just disaffected television stars. It’s human nature, paired with an inversion of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs: When people run out of problems, they can easily concoct new ones.

For years — and despite massive foot faults — America has been “winning.” By all accounts, we’re still the most powerful country in the world. Immigrants still dream of coming here. We have natural resources and freedoms unheard of in other countries, and yet, strangely, we have a growing victimhood culture, even among the materially and socially comfortable. We’ve also assigned such power to politicians — amidst a politics that often resembles a carnival of the absurd — that we can’t help but feel distressed at every unaccountable twist and turn from on high.

Donald Trump has no fear, which is undoubtedly a huge part of his appeal. He also seems to utterly lack the gift of introspection, but that’s a topic for another day. His “bored with winning” line may be truer than he knows. Now that the real world has come knocking at America’s door—as it is with the rise of ISIS in the Middle East, the refugee crisis in Europe, and faltering financial markets—we might even get jolted out of our boredom, whether we like it or not.

Heather Wilhelm is an Austin-based writer. Her work can be found at www.heatherwilhelm.com and her Twitter handle is @heatherwilhelm.

This article originally appeared on RealClearPolitics.com September 10, 2015 and is reprinted with permission.

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