Barack Obama is delivering that line masterfully in his speeches to help Kamala defeat Trump. “Have you seen grampa lately?” is a powerful line coming, as it does, right after Obama has conjured up some examples of Trump acting like a senile old man.
It comes up as Obama says, sympathetically but also mockingly, if your grampa acted like this, you’d call up your brother or your cousin and ask , “Have you seen grampa lately?” We get the image: these people are concerned that the old man has lost it because he’s behaving in such bizarre and “unhinged” ways.
That question presents an image of Trump that is the very opposite of the one he tries to sell of himself.
- He claims to be the “Stable Genius,” not the cognitively impaired and even demented “Grampa” the younger generation is worried about.
- He’s the “I alone can do it” guy, not someone too exhausted to do the job, and too confused to be competent.
- He’s the macho man, not the guy too exhausted to conduct a normal presidential campaign.
The election will be decided by how the late voters vote, and (I believe it was) Claire McGaskill who said that late voters are voting on the basis of their feelings. When they think of Kamala, how do they feel? When they think of Trump, how do they feel?
“Have you seen grampa lately?” can headline an ad campaign that affects how people feel when they consider him for President. If your grampa was acting that way, you’d mobilize the family to address the problem of grampa’s deterioration. You certainly wouldn’t make him President.
(We’d be fools to put great power in the hands of someone who can’t speak — or therefore think -- coherently.)
When the people who have seen this ad campaign go to the polls, the name “Trump” will be less likely to conjure up any desire for such a guy to be president.
Here’s the brief video about all this, about why I think that Obama’s line, “Have you seen Grampa lately?” — put into ads that use clips from Obama’s highly effective oratory -- can be used to drive voters away from that senile, sociopathic mobster and would-be-dictator.