CARLTON FLETCHER: Trump, Bernie bring life to presidential campaign

Look in my eyes, what do you see? The cult of personality.

— Living Colour

Unless something drastic happens — and this is politics and America, so that is a very real possibility — it looks like Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are going to win their respective parties’ nominations and face off for the White House.

Both will be bringing lots of baggage — the figurative and literal kind — into the showdown, which promises to be one of the most entertaining in recent history. (Quick note: Not sure if entertaining is what America needs right now, but we’re getting what we’re asking for.)

But before we anoint any candidate — and put on our “liberal” or “conservative” battle armor — one element of the campaign for the presidency deserves a closer look. No matter anyone’s opinion on the candidates themselves, their base of supporters or their tactics, no one can deny the amazing impact both Trump and Bernie Sanders have had on the race.

Risking the venom of Trump true believers, who are ready and willing to sucker-punch — again, both figuratively and literally — anyone who refuses to see the light, I must say the candidate who now stands on the threshold of GOP victory and the failed TV host/businessman of dubious shady practices who first entered the race are worlds apart.

Quite frankly, Trump was the punchline to a number of jokes when he declared what most assumed would become his quadrennial candidacy, but he has managed to ride his brash, say-whatever-comes-to-mind strategy to once unfathomable heights. He’s insulted women, minorities and old-line Republicans alike; engaged in an open debate about the substantiveness of his … ahem … manhood, and he’s used his absurd promise to build a wall to keep Mexicans out of the country as the primary basis for his platform.

Trump has admitted to using the screwed-up American bankruptcy system to beat businesses and individuals out of billions of dollars in building his own empire, and he’s rankled with his comments pretty much every foreign leader — both friend and foe — paying attention.

In the past, Trump’s political mistakes would have buried his candidacy. Now, though, every new absurdity seems to win him more fans.

(An interesting side note: The media, which have made every tidbit of Trump’s campaign a breaking-news story, can’t wait to tell their audiences about each new Trumpism that arises. But most are reporting only the sensationalistic verbal outrages. What they aren’t reporting is Trump’s campaign platform — and he doesn’t help in that regard because he’s so intent on the platitudes that his audience loves. But a little digging actually turns up some ideas that are very sound, dare I say, very presidential. Trump’s no fool. He knows his chance of winning centers on building what Living Colour called his “cult of personality.” More emphasis on his policies, though, would win him approval away from his base.)

And then there’s Bernie. Let’s be honest here. When the campaign kicked into high gear, Hillary Clinton was the anointed Democratic candidate with no viable challenger on the horizon. Sanders’ entry into the race was brushed off as another ho-hum Quixotic exercise in self-delusion.

But a funny thing happened on Clinton’s way to the nomination. Even after describing himself as a “socialist” (and changing that to “democratic socialist” in midstream was obviously some PR nerd’s idea), which once would have been a campaign death sentence, Sanders caught fire. Young people — ironically, it would seem, given his curmudgeonly personality — fell in love with Sanders, and Clinton quickly learned that she had work to do before stamping her name on the Democratic ticket.

Under financed and without the political connections of a Clinton, the junior Vermont senator started attracting larger and larger crowds. Then he started winning primaries and climbing from an almost 60 percent deficit in opinion polls. And Clinton’s strategy to save her campaign capital for the run against the Republican nominee was tossed. She’s had to use a large portion of her war chest just to withstand the challenge of the man initially considered an afterthought.

And don’t think that Trump’s not overcome with glee with each dollar Clinton’s having to spend to hold off Bernie, who also did the GOP nominee the favor of exposing Clinton’s weaknesses.

The Bernie and Trump show has been an interesting sidebar on the 2016 path to the White House, and Sanders is bound to soon fade into obscurity, only a footnote to the bigger picture. But for a while, he was a viable part of the “Big Two” who became the surprises of the political season. And while Bernie searches for his inevitable stepping-off point, the Trump train rolls on.