MANCHESTER, N.H.—On Sunday night, it was the turn of New Hampshire's Democratic Party to hold its annual Slave Raper-Genocidal Madman Dinner. Katherine Prudhomme O'Brien stood with a small knot of like-minded individuals at a corner on Elm Street in downtown Manchester, just down the block from a huge and noisy gathering of Bernie Sanders supporters. They chanted. They sang. They cheered every chant and every song. O'Brien did not chant or sing. She held her sign against the gathering chill of the winter's evening.

"HILLARY ENABLES RAPISTS," her sign said. "I BELIEVE JUANITA BROADDRICK."

"How many people remember? I think that's a good question," O'Brien said. "It's too bad. I still think it's relevant. I mean, just last week, Juanita Broaddrick released another letter saying that she thought Hillary Clinton was an enabler. And if she's an enabler in this rape situation, she's really betraying the core values of feminism, and I'm deeply offended by that.

"After the situation that happened with Bill Clinton and Juanita Broaddrick, Juanita Broaddrick went to a party that she couldn't get out of—it had something to do with the campaign—and she met Hillary Clinton there, who made a beeline for her and she grabbed her in a threatening manner. She believes she was threatened by Hillary Clinton."

It was as though, suddenly, there were spectral presences from the recent past, alive and dancing in and out of the glow of the newly draped Christmas lights. Juanita Broaddrick was the woman who accused Bill Clinton of having raped her. The allegation came out of the same Arkansas fever swamps that produced a number of stories about Clinton. She sat for an interview with Lisa Myers of NBC, and NBC sat on the interview until (among other dubious primates) Fox News shamed NBC into airing it. The interview popped in the middle of the extended and futile impeachment proceedings against Clinton. Broaddrick filed a lawsuit against Clinton that eventually was dismissed in 2001. Now, with Hillary Rodham Clinton running for president, the specter Juanita Broaddrick turns up on the campaign trail like Banquo's ghost. It is as though we are living through a ghost story.

Fabulism has become something of a conspicuous feature in this campaign. From Donald Trump's dancing Muslims on a rooftop in Jersey City to Ben Carson's buckle-foiled attempt to cut a motherfcker in his wayward youth, we seem to have crossed over an invisible border from the ordinary narrative bullshit that is customary to presidential campaigns into a strange shadowland in which bizarre (and easily—and, occasionally, previously—debunked) tales have come to define candidates, and to define them, if not positively, then not entirely in a negative way, either. To stick with your story about Muslims on the rooftops in the face of all the available evidence is a way to demonstrate that you "won't back down" or that you're not "politically correct." The logic seems to be that, if you stand firmly behind your hogwash, and the wilder the hogwash the better, then you will face down Vladimir Putin before breakfast and frighten Daesh to death just after lunch. Apparently, if you're bold enough to tell obvious lies in public, and then stick to those lies when you get called on them, you are brave enough to be president.

As with so many things, this all began with Ronald Reagan. Those people who claim that Donald Trump is sui generis in this regard are very much the same as those people who find him a unique political phenomenon, instead of the logical end product of almost 40 years of conservative politics. Reagan was as full of crap as the Christmas goose, and in the same way that Trump and Carson are. Trump has dancing Muslims. Reagan had the fictitious welfare queen in Chicago. Carson had his attempt to stab a classmate. Reagan had his march into Auschwitz to liberate the death camp there. The difference is that Reagan slung his hooey with a smile and a wink. Trump has weaponized Reagan's fabulism and that seems to make a difference to some people. But nothing that has happened in this campaign, up to and including the latest spasm of outright bigotry and fear-mongering, is new in the recent history of Republican politics. It always is the person who tells the best ghost stories who wins.

How do you run against this kind of thing? All three Democratic candidates tried out newish campaign themes on Sunday night, many of them oriented around hanging Trump around the Republican Party's neck. Martin O'Malley was the most direct, summoning up the refrain, "You can start with me," in reference to a litany of implications about the authoritarian nature of a Trump presidency, some of them quite comical ghost stories in their own way.

"When you send out your security police to round up anyone who believes the earth is actually round, and that climate change is real…you can start with me!"

For her part, Hillary Rodham Clinton weaved between thwacking attacks on any political party that can produce Donald Trump as a frontrunner for anything, and tweaking Bernie Sanders as the purveyor of utopian schemes that can never become policy. Occasionally, the two tracks merged, as when she took a thinly veiled shot at Sanders's proposal for free tuition at public colleges. "I won't spend your tax dollars to send Donald Trump's kids or some other billionaire's kids to college."

Strangely, for all his outsider cred, Sanders now seems to be the candidate on the Democratic side least encumbered by ghosts, and also least likely to rely on ghost stories to sell his campaign. He sticks resolutely on message; his attacks on Wall Street sharpers cast them as villains, not the supernatural bogeymen of some sort of handy urban legend. Recently, in his stump speech, Sanders has honed his foreign policy proposals to a fine edge on the subject of demanding that the other Middle East satrapies—Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, and the UAE—pony up in the fight against the terrorism that too many of their citizens are more than happy to help finance.

"Saudi Arabia has the third-largest military budget in the world, but they'd rather use it to oust Iran-backed rebels in Yemen. Kuwait, whose ruling family was returned to power by U.S. troops, has been accused to helping to finance ISIS. Qatar will spend $200 billion to host the 2022 World Cup. Two-hundred billion to host a soccer tournament, but very little to fight against ISIS."

It is Trump, abetted by the initial cowardice of his fellow Republicans and by the pure bumfuzzlement of the elite political press, who has made this a campaign of competing ghost stories. American politics has been slouching toward the supernatural for three decades now, since Ronald Reagan marched into Auschwitz in his mind. The whole system is clogged now with corporate money and ectoplasm. Nothing moves. All ghosts are essentially spirits who find themselves trapped.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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