You see what's happened, don't you? We've been set up for an 80-day narrative about Donald Trump closing the gap.
It's a self-fueling narrative bestowing momentum on him and defensiveness on Hillary Clinton.
She has experienced the best three weeks she could have envisioned, and he the worst he could have imagined. So the current standing reflects an extreme situation, not a static one.
Clinton leads by the biggest margin of which she seems capable--about 47-41 by a national polling average, and by five points in Florida and Ohio and 11 in Pennsylvania and 13 in Virginia and five in North Carolina and 10 in Colorado.
At midweek Nate Silver put her at an 88 percent chance to win.
So Clinton is at her zenith and Trump is at his nadir. There's only one way to go from a zenith, and only one way to go from a nadir. And that's closer together.
Clinton has drawn some of her three-week strength from her well-done convention. But she's drawn a greater measure from Trump's blundering after her convention.
Her strength is mainly his weakness, which means she's been stout lately.
It also means he'll sap her strength if he stops blundering so much. It's hard to imagine that he won't get a little better than insulting the parents of a slain war hero or seeming to invoke gunfire as a way to keep Clinton from nominating federal judges.
Meantime, he has spent not a penny on television advertising while she's gone through millions for brutally effective attacks on him--brutally effective in using his own words and displaying his own behavior.
For those reasons, he has plummeted precipitously in polls among two vital Republican constituencies--the two most reasonable ones, meaning suburban voters and white college-educated voters.
Clinton's six-point lead in an averaging of national polls reflects on her a tad poorly.
If Tim Kaine was the Democratic nominee, presenting a fresh face and pleasant manner and blank slate, he'd probably hold a double-digit lead. If Joe Biden was the nominee, extracting Trump's hide as he did so expertly for Clinton first at the convention and then the other day in Pennsylvania, and burdened with no email or foundation baggage, he might lead by double digits as well.
Trump seems now to have conceded, to the extent his ego allows, that he needs help and a new direction.
He brought in a guy named Stephen Bannon, the head of the combative, Clinton-hating Breitbart Report, mainly to direct his media message. So he will remain highly combative toward Clinton.
But he also brought in a veteran Republican pollster, Kellyanne Conway, to make sure those attacks are the right poll-tested ones. She will travel with Trump, presumably to try to keep him from feeding off an angry crowd's energy and saying something spontaneous that he shouldn't.
His tone probably won't change. The idea probably is to direct his fiery words more surgically and shut up just in the nick of time.
Meantime, he will start running attack ads to do battle with Clinton in the arena she's had to herself.
TV advertising is like a Cold War nuclear arms race. It is not determinative if balanced between combatants. It's highly determinative when only one side is doing it. You must match your opponent, not to gain ground, but to keep from losing it.
In the days of Ronald Reagan, the Republicans made famous their careful control of messaging and imagery. That service is available to Trump if he is chastened enough to realize he needs it.
Already we're seeing some of that. Last week the Trump campaign let the media bring in a camera to view Trump at the center of a supposed roundtable discussion with experts about fighting terrorism. The candidate was gazing on some sort of document, then raising his head as if to listen presidentially to a presentation.
The significance was that the Trump campaign had thought to contrive the image and Trump had attempted to perform it.
A Democratic win depends on turnout, which depends on energy, which is fueled by fear of losing. It is bad for Clinton when Democrats sit around looking at Silver's comforting data.
That's at least until the debates, when it's always possible Trump could make an utter debacle of his megalomaniacal self and wind up back in the ditch where he's put himself the last three weeks.
It's not over until it's over, unless it's over when Trump goes all Trump-y at the debates.
But if he survives the debates, the narrative of the narrowing gap will get a little more self-fueling and gripping.
Finally, and notably: The newly coachable Trump told an audience Thursday night that he regretted some of the hurtful things he'd said. From the worst of times to better times--it was the opening sentence of the 80-day narrative.
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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 08/21/2016