Perry should attend the Donald Trump event

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 12/7/11

They come in twos, it is advised in Star Wars, but which is the emperor and which is the sith? And there are still today two New Yorks, the high brow brahmins and the broad shoulders of the working class. Everything else is precariously perched in the in between. Jimmy Breslin and Norman Mailer. The gut brain and the ethereal. But New York today as always gets its power from the broad shoulders. And say what else you like about Donald trump, he's down with the people. And he represents New York, still the center of the world, in its gut. All candidates should attend his debate.

The Bloomberg/Washington Post debate was supposed to be the high brow event in this race, featuring Charlie Rose as moderator, bow tie wearers and Al Hunt. Good for the people who read the New Yorker and dine at The Leopard at des Artistes. But are you likely to run across Rose at the Frazier/Foreman fight? You might have run across Norman Mailer there with his bud Donald Trump.

Particularly among conservatives, that which we used to proudly call working class, as working class hero John Lennon did, has been commandeered today by ideologists, religious fanatics and the dangerously disturbed like Glenn Beck. Trump today is quintessentially New York, although Tom Wolfe snarks at his tacky architecture. That is part of it. This is New York, not Versailles. Let Trump ask the questions.

All who attended the Dartmouth debate should go to this one as well as more than any of the others in our times it is likely to be the people's forum. Especially those who took the free meal; Rick Perry, Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich and Michele Bachmann and didn't slip out the back door. It's the Donald buck. He should not let that one back in.