Campaign 2016 Turns Into a Twitter Fight

As presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump got into a Twitter fight with newly crowned presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, any hope for reasoned discourse in Campaign 2016 seemed to fly out the window.

"Obama just endorsed Crooked Hillary," tweeted Trump, leading the tweeting as he does daily. "He wants four more years of Obama -- but nobody else does!"

Ah, he only wishes that were true. Every campaign, it is often said, is a contest between "change" versus "more of the same." That's particularly true in our current contest. Clinton is not only running toward policies and programs of President Barack Obama, she's sticking to them like a life raft in a stormy sea.

And why not? Obama's approval ratings have been running higher than Clinton's or Trump's, who both happen to have the highest disapproval ratings of any presumed major-party candidates in modern history.

Instead, the leading Republicans who these days are derided as the party "establishment" are stuck in a pickle: They don't want to run with Trump if he constantly is going to shoot from the lip in ways that offend the voters the GOP is trying to woo -- and they can't run without him. His antics are too beloved by the rank-and-file Republicans and right-leaning independents who turn out for Trump's rallies.

But let's get back to the fight. This time, on the day after the Associated Press declared that she finally had clinched enough delegates to win her party's nomination, Clinton joined in the fun with a short, sweet and stern reply to Trump: "Delete your account."

Ah, it's on now. Trump, who dishes out insults better than he takes them, sounded a bit miffed as he fired back with a mini-rant: "How long did it take your staff of 823 people to think that up -- and where are your 33,000 emails that you deleted?"

Clinton might well have responded in the manner I might have chosen: asking, "Where are the tax returns that you refuse to show us?"

Or I might have asked, "Where are the tens of thousands of dollars in life savings that you fleeced from customers of the former 'Trump University'?"

And I might add, "... which the New York attorney general says never was a university?"

But I'm not a candidate. Clinton did the smarter thing by refusing to dwell one millisecond longer than necessary on Trump's Twitter turf. Just sting and go. Leave a sharp message that Trump should not go anywhere near Bill and Hillary Clinton's scandals unless he's ready to face a new dredging up of his own scandals, old and new.

Besides, Clinton shouldn't have to do that dirty work herself. Like most mortals, she is an amateur at the art of bullying insult-dog tactics compared to Trump -- and that's not a bad thing.

Zingers are what surrogates are for -- and who would have guessed that she would have a rising star on her side in the personage of Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat and, like Clinton's rival candidate Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, a darling of their party's progressive wing.

She stayed neutral during the primaries, but after Clinton clinched the nomination she came out swinging in speeches, TV appearances and toe-to-toe with The Donald on Twitter, calling him a "loser," "weak" and a "small, insecure money grubber."

And she's just getting started. Welcome to Campaign 2016. It's not going to be for the squeamish.

But Clinton hasn't done badly with the zingers, either. "Donald Trump's ideas aren't just different," she said in her recent foreign policy address that could have been called her "Stop Donald" speech, "they are dangerously incoherent. They're not even really ideas, just a series of bizarre rants, personal feuds and outright lies."

She also raised the possibility that Trump could lead America into a war because some foreign leader "got under his very thin skin."

To which Trump responded in an interview with CNN's Jake Tapper with a line that sounded like a parody of his famously self-congratulatory style: "Well, I don't have thin skin," Trump protested. "I have very strong and thick skin."

He then went on to explain how his thick skin and "good temperament" enabled him to have "one of the best-selling books of all-time" and a successful television show, "The Apprentice." Of course, he did not mention that his famous tag line on that show was "You're fired," which might not be the sort of message that voters seeking an upbeat economic message are looking to hear. But that's show biz.

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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@tribune.com.)