Story highlights Gloria Borger: This presidential election might be about sea-change

Donald Trump flouts the conventions, plays to fears, Borger writes

(CNN) It seems almost quaint, really, to go back to the start of this presidential campaign when the question du jour was whether Chris "just-sit-down-and-shut-up" Christie was too much of a bully to become president. Temperament, it seems, was a requirement.

Or even go back to Hillary Clinton's 2008 derision of Barack Obama as not ready to be president and take that 3 a.m. phone call about a national security crisis. Experience and depth of knowledge was also an issue.

But that's ancient history. Somehow, the notions of temperament and experience have been overtaken by the desire -- at least according to the polls so far in the GOP race -- for what passes as a show of strength, unbound by convention and unattached to complexity. Donald Trump, the undisputed frontrunner, reigns supreme, no matter what the half-formed solutions. As in: Muslims are trying to kill us, so let's keep them out. Illegal immigrants are "raping" and taking our jobs, so let's keep them out. Civility -- now called political correctness -- is ruining our national conversation, so let's abandon it.

The cliché is that presidential elections are about change, and that's true. Only this one may be about sea-change.

This is not something that comes from nowhere, out of the blue. Americans are, with good reason, truly afraid. According to our CNN polling , nearly two thirds believe an act of terrorism is likely in the homeland -- and that poll was taken before the carnage of San Bernardino. Eighty-one percent are convinced that the terrorists are here, living among us -- a completely rational conclusion.

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