Nothing Beside Remains

It is all the chattering classes can talk about.  How did Calista's presidential campaign implode so suddenly and in such spectacular fashion?

In my view the question misses the point.  A year ago her campaign was widely treated as a joke and no one would have given her more than a 5% chance of winning.  So the real question is not why she crashed, but why she climbed so high in the first place.  And why did almost no one predict her meteoric rise?

In a sense, everything was telegraphed well in advance.  Calista had been hinting at a run for years, using her Twitter feed to excoriate politicians "who neither see nor feel nor know,/But leechlike to their fainting country cling."  Still, it was commonly assumed that Calista was too busy running her highly lucrative business (she owns the Sometimes a Great Lotion chain of cosmetic stores) to consider a run for the White House.  McKay Coppins even wrote a mocking Buzzfeed profile accusing Calista of continually dangling a candidacy in front of the media, only to shy away when the time came to put her money where her mouth was.

And so it came as something of a shock when Calista, declaring that she had "balanced all, brought all to mind," launched a run for the White House.  Her bombastic announcement speech shocked the world with her controversial claim that "good fences make good neighbors" and that she would make Mexico pay for it.  But her campaign quickly seemed to founder when she attacked John McCain with a gratuitous smear:  "An aged man is but a paltry thing,/A tattered coat upon a stick."  Rick Perry declared that the attack made Calista "unfit to be Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. Armed Forces" and said that she "should immediately withdraw from the race for President."

But the unexpected happened:  Calista's poll numbers didn't fade away, but instead continued their steady climb.  Maybe it was her oft-repeated promise to "get rid of Time's worst statute on Day 1 #FullRepeal."  Or maybe it was her evocative campaign slogan, "Let America Be America Again!"  Whatever the source of her appeal, she had soon built a durable coalition of white, less-educated voters that would remain loyal even through her erratic debate performances and questionable retweets.  She even survived an extended quarrel with Megyn Kelly of Fox News, which started when Kelly asked a scathing debate question and escalated the next day when Calista suggested that "The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere/The ceremony of innocence is drowned."  Calista denied that she was referring to menstruation, but her remarks were considered over the line by almost everyone, including Red State founder Erick Erickson, who revoked her invitation to a conservative conference.  Still, the affair put only a small, temporary dent in her poll numbers.

What brought her down in the end was not her crudeness, her Twitter account, or the hapless #NeverCalista movement, but rather a cell-phone video of a closed-door session with major campaign donors.  The video is grainy, but Calista can clearly be heard responding to a question about the "47%," the "takers":

I have met them at close of day
Coming with vivid faces
From counter or desk among grey
Eighteenth-century houses.
I have passed with a nod of the head
Or polite meaningless words,
Or have lingered awhile and said
Polite meaningless words,
And thought before I had done
Of a mocking tale or a gibe
To please a companion
Around the fire at the club,
Being certain that they and I
But lived where motley is worn.

Confronted with the video, Calista insisted, "That is not it at all,/That is not what I meant, at all."  For a brief time it seemed as though she would weather the scandal.  It's true that the video was taken out of context, and that in view of her complete answer, it appeared that she was actually expressing solidarity with the workers, however inelegantly.

But soon more footage came out, showing Calista describing voters as "petals on a wet, black bough."  This was the final straw.  Her campaign came crashing down, with her opponents delivering the coup de grâce in the Connecticut primary.  And so she announced the suspension of her campaign from a peak in Darien.