Audio Script
Presidential election 2016 update: Unprecedented and unusual. June 17, 2016 Ken Bickers It’s still one month away from the Republican Convention and yet the Democrats are ramping up their attacks on Republican presumptive nominee Donald Trump with a two-pronged attack that seems to be working. Ken Bickers, a political science professor at CU-Boulder, says the “tag-team” tactic of Hillary Clinton and President Barrack Obama, though effective for now, is very unprecedented. CUT 1 “This president is yet one more thing that is unprecedented about this election cycle. We haven’t ever had a president play such an interventionist’s role in the campaign cycle, at this level, and certainly this early in the campaign cycle. (:15) So you would expect a president of the same party to make an appearance and make a strong statement on behalf of whoever his successor will be. But to have a president play such a direct role in a kind of ‘tit-for-tat-messaging-counter-messaging’ sort of way, this is truly extraordinary.” (:32) Bickers says so far this tactic has been working. It has pulled Donald Trump away from his messaging platform and onto Democratic turf. CUT 2 “Candidates do better when they are talking about the issues that their party owns and right now the Democratic presumptive nominee and the president are really on Democratic turf – gun control, the culture wars and things like that. Issues that are associated with the Democratic party and they’ve pulled Donald Trump on to that turf. (:21) Donald Trump could be talking about the economy, about the latest jobs report, talking national security where it’s more of a Republican kind of issue. But now he’s talking about gun control, which is a democratic party issue not a Republican Party issue.” (:30) And that could be a big problem for Trump, says Bickers. CUT 3 “What we know is that candidates generally do better when the debate is on their turf - when they’ve chosen the ground on which they are going to fight. (:12)And right now Donald Trump has been pulled over off of traditional Republican ground where he could be fighting but now he’s moved over and he’s fighting on Democratic turf. I think that’s part of his problem right now.” (:26) But in analyzing why the president is so keen on jumping into the election battle so soon, Bickers says he believes the president might have a more personal motive rather than just working for the Democratic Party. CUT 4 “You can imagine that part of it is that he has a legacy that he wants to hold on to and the Republicans have been running now to undue most of the policies that he pushed through - most notably ‘Obama Care’ - but also regulations of the financial world and consumer products and climate change and so forth. (:20) So I think he feels that there are very large stakes and making sure that a Democrat gets elected that will institutionalize these changes.” (:30) This tag-team tactic may be having a real impact on Trump. Recent reports indicate he’s having trouble raising campaign funds and the Washington Post today reported that a dozen Republican convention delegates are working together to block Trump at the convention – upset by “Trump’s recent comments on gun control, his racial attacks on a federal judge and his sinking poll numbers.” -CU- 
