Who Will Win in November? Think Bugs vs. Daffy - Jeff Greenfield, WSJ

[question everything]

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Forget them. To know who will win, keep in mind one clear, consistent irrefutable rule: Bugs Bunny always beats Daffy Duck. That is, the candidate who exudes the cool, savvy confidence of Bugs beats the one who projects Daffy’s tightly wound anger. Sure, economic concerns, divisive social issues and foreign wars matter. But just as the decisive factor in an election can be which candidate seems like someone you’d want to have a beer with, it helps to figure out which would triumph in a Looney Tunes classic.

Bugs is at ease, laid back, secure. His lidded eyes and sly smile suggest that he knows how things work. Bugs never raises his voice, never flails at his opponents or at the world. He is rarely an aggressor. When he is pushed too far and must respond, he borrows a quip from Groucho Marx: “Of course, you realize, this means war.”

Daffy Duck, by contrast, is ever at war with a hostile world. He fumes, he clenches his fists, his eyes bulge and his entire body tenses with fury. His response to bad news is a sibilant sneer (“Thanks for the sour persimmons, cousin!”). Daffy is constantly frustrated, sometimes by outside forces, sometimes by his own overwrought response to them. In one classic duel with Bugs, the two try to persuade the hapless Elmer Fudd to shoot the other—until Daffy, tricked by Bugs’s wordplay, screams, “Shoot me now!” (“Hmmm,” he adds a moment later in a rare bit of self-scrutiny. “Pronoun trouble.”)

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For one thing, candidates sometimes change personas over time. The McCain of 2000, happily barreling through the New Hampshire primary on his bus, was on the Bugs spectrum; the angrier McCain of 2008 had gone over to the Daffy side. The backslapping, shoulder-squeezing, bad-joke dispensing Biden of 2020 had clear Bugs-like tendencies (captured in a meme of a grinning Biden in shades driving his Corvette Stingray), although his garrulousness suggested more than a touch of Foghorn Leghorn. The Biden of this year’s high-decibel State of the Union speech, mixing humorous jabs at Republicans with angry denunciations of his “predecessor,” had both Bugs and Daffy moments.

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Yet no other candidate has campaigned on a platform so filled with grievances, so laden with promises of vengeance and retribution. Indeed, if Trump blends Bugs and Daffy, he also resembles another member of the Looney Tunes cartoon family: Yosemite Sam, whose temper is always on the verge of exploding, with his guns blazing and an outsize red mustache as prominent as Trump’s comb-over.

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