JAY ROSEN TRIES TO EXPLAIN WHY DONALD TRUMP HASN’T FLAMED OUT:

To an extent unrealized before this year, the role of the press in presidential campaigns relied on shared assumptions within the political class and election industry about what the rules were and what the penalty would be for violating them. This was the basis for familiar rituals like “the gaffe,” which in turn relied on assumptions about how a third party, the voters, would react once they found out about the violation. These assumptions were rarely tested because the risk seemed too high, and because risk-adverse professionals — strategists, they’re called — were in charge of the campaigns.

The whole system rested on shared beliefs about what would happen if candidates went beyond the system as it stood cycle to cycle. Those beliefs have now collapsed because Trump “tested” and violated most of them— and he is still leading in the polls. (Rob Ford in Canada was there before Trump.) There has been a cascading effect as conventions that depended an one another give way. The political press is pretty stunned by these developments. It keeps asking: when will the “laws of political gravity” will be restored, or have they simply vanished?

“The question now is whether Candidate Trump is immune from the laws of political gravity or soon will be isolated and regarded as an object of scorn or curiosity rather than of presidential seriousness,” wrote the Washington Post’s Dan Balz back in July. (Other uses of that phrase here, here and here.) But what the press describes as “laws” were never really that. They were at best conventions among the political class, in which I include most Washington journalists— though they would not include themselves.

This is much like Obama’s strategy of governance, in which he has ignored many of the unwritten rules of American politics, trampling on custom and tradition. And mostly gotten away with it, leaving politicians (mostly GOP politicians) as mystified as Dem pundits are by Trump. You can get away with a lot, if you don’t care what people who don’t like you think, only if they can stop you. Whether it’s a good formula for the country over the longer term, of course, is a separate question entirely.