Sweet: Trump’s campaign raises questions about governing

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CLEVELAND – Even the Texans were taking off their cowboy hats and dancing on the convention floor to the strains of “New York New York” when Donald Trump went over the top on Tuesday and, with the votes of 1,267 delegates, became the GOP presidential nominee.

Presumptive no more, Trump, on the night he clinched, was presiding over a campaign – once again — in an uproar.

No one knew for sure – or was saying — who and how plagiarized passages from first lady Michelle Obama’s 2008 Denver convention speech found their way into the address Melania Trump delivered on Monday night.

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When then Sen. Barack Obama was running for president in 2008, he knew his thin record in the short time he was in the Senate raised questions about his experience. The freshman Illinois senator tried to remedy that by running a disciplined presidential campaign that prided itself on being “no drama.”

For Trump, the New York real estate tycoon and reality show star, it’s high drama.

Trump’s seat of the pants campaign gets credit for bringing him the GOP nomination and the White House — if he beats Hillary Clinton.

But the question is, how does Trump’s chaotic campaign — the messy push out of now former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, the leak of his Gov. Mike Pence vice presidential pick, the Melania speech cribbing — demonstrate he can govern?

The latest is the eruption of the very open public feud between campaign manager Paul Manafort over the Melania fiasco.

Trump is used to “executive ordering,” Sen. Shelly Capito, R-W.Va., told me when we talked outside the Quicken Loans Arena .

Capito, one of the Tuesday convention speakers, said Trump “needs to gather a good team around him” staffers who can help him tell lawmakers about the “bigger vision I hope he will present.

“The other thing I think he needs to do is hone his communication skills better, which I think he is trying to work on. … Once you become president you have to be a little more circumspect, I would think,” she said.

Former Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio,once represented downtown Cleveland, where the convention is being held. When we talked about governing he recalled talking to President Jimmy Carter in the Oval Office in 1978.

“I asked him, ‘what was it like to be president? And he told me, ‘you can give an order, but once it gets into the bureaucracy, you never know if it’s going to get done.”

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