Just go ahead and say 'CACKLE!!!'

OK, if your question is "Does the Times have its thumb so far up its own ass it could pick its nose from inside?", the answer is an unqualified "yes." But it's not as bad as it looks! National Review editor Rich Lowry is actually trying to offer some theory-based advice:

For as long as Mr. Trump has been in the ascendancy in the G.O.P., he will go off on some pointless tangent and Republicans will urge him — perhaps as they hustle down a corridor of the U.S. Capitol* — to talk about the economy instead of his controversy du jour.

A close cousin of this perpetual advice is the admonition that Mr. Trump should concentrate more on the issues in this campaign. Neither recommendation is wrong, but they are insufficient to making the case against Kamala Harris.

Presidential races are won and lost on character as much as the issues, and often the issues are proxies for character. Not character in the sense of a candidate’s personal life, but the attributes that play into the question of whether someone is suited to the presidency — is he or she qualified, trustworthy and strong, and does he or she care about average Americans?

Time out for a quick summary of Bill Benoit's functional theory of political communication. Campaigns are about winning, and campaign messages are focused on making the audience compare you favorably with the other guy. Messages do this with one of three functions -- acclaim (why you're good), attack (why the other candidate is rotten) or defense (why you're not as rotten as the other candidate says you are) -- using one of two topics: policy or character. Comparing how function and topic proportions vary by incumbency, ethnicity, gender, level of office, national political culture and so forth can be a pile of fun.

Presidential races, in this sense, are deeply personal; they usually involve disqualifying the opposing candidate, rather than convincing voters that his or her platform is wrongheaded.

But this gets things confused. Attacks aim to "disqualify" the other candidate, but they're not definitionally more effective -- or more attack-y -- if they aim at character rather than policy. Attacks can address qualifications ("my opponent spent a mere six months as dog-catcher") or personal shortcomings ("my opponent is a felonious old sex offender"). And Lowry hasn't explained how he would support his claims about the empirical world of measurable data.**

... Mr. Trump isn’t going to beat Ms. Harris by scoring points in the debate over price controls or the border.

Everything has to be connected to the deeper case that Ms. Harris is weak, a phony, and doesn’t truly care about the country or the middle class.*** The scattershot Trump attacks on Harris need to be refocused on these character attributes.

To wit: Ms. Harris was too weak to win the Democratic primary contest this year. She was too weak to keep from telling the left practically everything it wanted to hear when she ran in 2019. She is too weak to hold open town-hall events or do extensive — or, at the moment, any — sit-down media interviews.

None of which bear on the idea of fitness for the high office once held by (ahem) Donald Trump. But there's more!

… Mr. Trump isn’t ever going to become a buttoned-up campaigner who sticks closely to script. There will inevitably be lots of static and wasted time and opportunities. But there’s plenty of room for Mr. Trump, as he insists he must, to do it his way, and still get a better handle on the campaign.

One of his talents as a communicator is sheer repetition, which, when he’s on to something that works, attains a certain power. Everyone knew in 2016 that he wanted to build a wall and have Mexico pay for it. It would be quite natural for him, if he settled on this approach, to call Ms. Harris “weak” 50 times a day.

For (ahem) empirical analysis, those would be acclaim/policy and attack/character. This coding scheme doesn't get into whether a policy claim is an out-and-out lie, but you may draw your own conclusions about Lowry's values on that question. 

He has also, in the past, been able to pithily and memorably nail core weaknesses of his opponents. His nicknaming may be a schoolyard tactic, yet it has often been effective tool, whether it was “Crooked Hillary” (underling Hillary Clinton’s ethical lapses) or “Little Marco” (diminishing a young primary opponent who lacked gravity). Even people who don’t like Trump or his nicknames would end up using these sobriquets.

The Times is right, in its own little way: Trump can't win by saying "nonfarm payroll job creation," but he could win by bellowing "CACKLE!!!" -- or "PANTSUIT!!!" or "MARXIST!!!" -- as often as the moderators let him. And that seems to be the point of Lowry's advice.

* I didn't say Lowry was going to magically turn into a good writer overnight, did I?
** Or that he was no longer prone to randomly making things up.
*** Or that Bill Buckley wouldn't slap him upside the head for the parallel structure fault.