Featured
US Presidential Election: One Year Away, Several Rivers To Cross
Campaign season enters full swing in the United States. Its presidential election is less than a year away. The Republican candidate is, for the time being, undisputed. The intemperate Donald Trump holds tightly that mantle.
Even if he rankles much of the Republican establishment, few summon the courage to utter a public word against him. Most Republicans know their fate is tied to his. They are relegated to privately murmuring unkind things behind his back while following his mercurial lead. They must basically shut up and get on with it.
This is an untidy and, to some extent, forced arrangement. But such is the price paid by politicians who prefer the Republican brand. At times, the ambitious feel compelled to sell their souls to the devil to attain that which they so desire. In this instance, many Republicans have forfeited their souls to the House of Trump. They have handed themselves over to a political oddity better suited to be the court jester than reigning monarch. They have given themselves over to the uncharted mind of a human storm in desperate search of things to wreck. Seems America’s stretch of good fortune may be coming to a close. With such a tempestuous leader, that nation is perhaps beginning to pay the hard price for the hardships and wantonness its power lust has elsewhere across the globe caused.
On the Democratic side, a cackle of people vie for the nomination. This contest is important though, thus far, the performance of all the candidates has been less than stellar. So far, the campaign seems more a matter of attrition than of political mastery. To this, point the candidates seem more interested in not losing the nomination than in aggressively winning it.
The frontrunner is the perennial Joe Biden. The former VP leads the pack simply because he served as President Obama’s understudy for eight years. But his challengers are a plentiful dozen; some are serious and formidable.
The contest within the Democratic Party is more than a contest of personalities and personal ambitions. While the Republicans have sold their soul, the Democrats are in search for theirs. The process of discovery will be vital; it will largely decide whether the Democrats subsequently sell the soul they fought each so hard to acquire and define.
On one side, there are the establishment candidates led by Biden. They are tied to big business and the behemoth financial houses that dominate Wall Street. There is no war they dislike or US-sponsored coup against a duly elected leftist government of which they disapprove. They seek confrontation with Russia at every turn and their vocabulary of epithets against that nation is endless yet still growing. This Russo-phobia seems triggered more by reasons akin to secular religion belief than the product of rational statecraft or the traditional balance of power calculations that have guided relations between powerful nations for half a millennium. These Democrats are enamored by increased defense spending and will use any rationale to support it.
When it comes to spending on poor people or to alleviate the struggles of a diminished middle class, they feign sympathetic. Then in the next second they claim there is not enough money to go around. Thus, the masses of people should be satisfied with sparse government funding but the insincere sympathies of these politicians who have no compunction doling out trillions of dollars to big banks and big defense. Trillions for the powerful but not a dime more for the poor. This is at the masthead of their working papers. This is the goblet from which they drink.
In this, their views on economic policy and foreign policy differ little from those of the Republican Party. Their differences with the Republicans are narrowed to social issues such as abortion and gun control. Concerning the control of the poor and weak at home and abroad, mainstream Democrats are at home with the elitist philosophy of the Republicans. This metamorphosis of the Democrats may be the greatest tragedy to descend on American politics in the past fifty years for it dwarfs any damage that Trump brings.
This is the Democratic Party of the Clintons and Barak Obama. In a 2012 interview, Obama admitted his Republican affinities. He stated that his views were those of the Republican Party of the 1980s. Obama basically proclaimed himself a Reaganite in progressive’s clothing.
Sadly, Obama took much of the black population along on his Republican excursion without them realizing it. Today, three black candidates are in the Democratic hunt. Before Obama blacks were strongest muscle of the party’s progressive wing. Today’s three black candidates are mainstream milquetoasts who babble establishment emptiness. Their hope is that their skin color will make the average Democrat, especially black ones, see them as more progressive than they are. Thus far, their scheme to repeat Obama’s electoral deception has not fared well.
Obama proved to be ultimate political Siren causing whole constituencies to lose their bearings. Blacks gave him abiding loyalty even though his policies were indifferent, at times disloyal, to their interests. Conservative whites disliked him, racists detested him, although he dedicated most of his two terms and energies to carrying their water. The current black trio are more like a group of back-ups in search of a lead singer. They lack Obama’s dynamism. Obama had the maestro’s ability to appear sincere. These three are obvious panderers. Their attempts to play to the gallery are awkward and painful to witness. As such, they are minor candidates whose chances wane even before the conduct of the first primaries early next year.
From the progressive or anti-establishment wings of the party come Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Tulsi Gabbard and Andrew Yang. Sanders is the leading advocate of universal medical care. He believes in a wealth cap so that no person can be or remain a billionaire. Championing tax reform to curtail the power of the billionaire class but not seeking to abolish that elite class, Warren is a milder, more ambivalent version of Sanders. Her hands are on the plough with the progressives but her head constantly turns to give a wink and a nod to the establishment as if she would rather be working their fields. Thus, she has backtracked on universal heath care. Her record on military aid and her support for a bellicose foreign policy is as robust as those who walk the establishment line.
Gabbard is the most outspoken candidate on foreign policy. She advocates less war and less military spending. Because of her forays against the war industry, she is the candidate most reviled by the establishment. She generates more bile in the gut of the mainstream than even Sanders. This shows how militaristic the party and America have become.
Before, the Democrats were the peace party.
Now they are as much a war party as the Republicans. To oppose war is to open oneself to ridicule and the defamation of being less than patriotic. This intolerance for peace and exultation of the military and war smacks of the Junkers in 19th century Prussia. This spells long-term danger to American democracy and omnipresent injury to global peace.
Meanwhile businessman Andrew Yang warns that artificial intelligence (AI) will reduce the need for human labor and thus human employment. Increasingly, growing numbers of people will become superfluous to the economy. First, the poor will find it harder to obtain get jobs. Then, this dilemma will assault the middle class. Yang proposes a guaranteed minimum income to counter this trend. In this, yang is probably more right than wrong.
If polling is accurate, the four progressives collectively represent roughly half the party. Their appeal to independent voters is also profound. If they could be melded into one candidate, America would have its best answer. This is but the thought of a wishful mind. They remain individuals with their own attributes and flaws.
Thus far, the top four candidates are, in descending order, Biden, Warren, Sanders and Pete Buttigieg, mayor of south bend, Indiana. Biden and Buttigieg are both establishment centrists. Warren tries to position herself somehow as 2/3 Sanders, 1/3 Hillary Clinton. This is quite a hybrid to be sure, as if one can manage to be part dove, part hawk or part sky and part ground at the same time. Sanders is the truest leftist reformer on the American political scene. Unless there is a seismic political event, a person from this quartet will gain the Democratic nomination.
Joe Biden is in front but he is a frail and stammering candidate. His answers to simple questions border on the incomprehensible at times. Biden is a bundle of the prejudices held by his aging generation and of generations past. There is no racist or sexist stereotype that he does not embrace to some degree. Ironically, his strongest support comes from black people. They support him because he was Obama’s deputy. Here, the irony compounds. Blacks stand with Biden due to some residual loyalty to Obama. However, Obama refrained from endorsing Biden and tried to coax the man from entering the race. Obama tolerated Biden as his vice president; he never brought Biden into his closest confidence for he never considered Biden of presidential ripeness.
Four years ago, I expressed the outlands claim that Trump could win the 2016 contest. Today, I say Trump should lose the coming election. Today, because of the work of Sanders and others, Americans are more left leaning than in the past forty years. Thus, Trump must hope for is a low voter turnout on the left if he is to have any chance. If that happens, the election will come down to how votes the so-called pragmatic middle. However, Trump may have burned his bridges with this many in this group.
For many in the center, his abrasive rudeness and obvious lack of care for anything but himself have estranged them. There is a deeper aspect to this discord over style. For a decisive slice of the electorate, Trump’s worst sin is that his uncouth style has revealed the venal underbelly of American governance. Americans want to see themselves and their government as exceptional paragons of the great social virtues.
The shameless Trump makes no allowance for this false but important face-saving nicety. He has exposed the government as a land-grabbing, profiteering imperial enterprise. Americans don’t want to see this aspect of their existence and prosperity. They would rather return to the fiction that their government performs an honest mission, that the economic bounty of the nation is all a function of that propriety. They really don’t mind if America robs from poor and weak nations any more than they care about the poor and hurt across town. They simply do not want to be witness to the wrongdoing. They care not for the harsh truth their current president as exposed. While Trump has avid supporters, enough Americans want to return to that time in the recent past where fake decorum obscured real skullduggery. For these people Trump is a derelict haunted house and they prefer Disneyland.
However, a few caveats must be issued. If Biden gains the nomination, all bets are off. He is a maladroit campaigner of the same vintage as Hillary Clinton. Perhaps even worse. He does not enjoy his time on the campaign hustings. Such events expose his verbal incoherence. He is a weak debater who easily rattles. In a one-on-one contest against Trump, Biden cannot hide as he often does now in the crowded Democratic field. Biden might likely fumble the ball before reaching the goal line. Because of Biden’s flaws, billionaire former mayor Michael Bloomberg and former Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick belatedly entered the fray.
Both men hope to snatch the centrist baton from Biden’s hand should he stumble. They ought not to have bothered. Neither has Biden’s appeal to the working class voter, the beer and potato chip set. These new entrants’ appeal is largely with the wine and caviar set of voters who are but a small sliver of the electorate. Moreover, the two men have all the charisma of slowly-drying cement.
Second, by mishandling the impeachment process, the Democrats might give Trump a lift he could never have generated himself. So far, the inquiry has not hurt Trump politically. This should concern Democrats. The firework they hope for have, thus far, been a damp squib. The Democrats in the lower House will likely impeach Trump. This will embarrass him to no end. But people already expect it so it will not unduly shock the observant. Then the process shifts to the Republican-controlled Senate. The Republicans will turn the matter away from Trump and into an investigation of Biden’s unruly son’s relationship with a criminal billionaire in Ukraine. Any evidence suggesting misconduct or unjust enrichment of Biden’s son might allow Trump to slither off the hook. Quite possibly, Biden might be hurt more by all of this than Trump.
Related to this is the imminent report of the Justice Department Inspector General. Talk circulates that the report contains criminal referrals for several Trump nemeses. If so, Trump’s political position is strengthened and his impeachment will encounter increased skepticism. Public opinion of the Democrats will suffer a large setback. Many people will conclude the Congressional Democrats, not Trump, abused the power of their office to manufacture reasons to oust a duly-elected president. As such, the Democrats are juggling a few sticks of dynamite and an unsealed flask of nitroglycerin. They better be adept handlers; if not, their own tricks will explode hard against them.
Last a troubling factor for Democrats is their internal unity. Centrists and progressives are united in their disdain for Trump. Yet, the ideological gap between these two camps is yawning. Progressives believe the establishment cheated Sanders of the nomination in 2016. Evidence of unfair play exists; whether it altered the final result of the nomination process is more than unclear. However, this belief in a stolen victory is an article of faith with many progressives. Additionally, they were asked to back the centrist Clinton in 2016. Fair play dictates that centrists must back a progressive this time, they say.
If an establishment figure like Biden emerges, many progressives will stay home come Election Day. Likewise, many establishment Democrats have loudly hinted they would rather a Trump reelection than a Sanders’ presidency. If these centrifugal dynamics within the Democratic Party are not tamped, then Trump’s chances improve materially. At the moment, the candidate best positioned to bridge the widening gap is Senator Warren. She has craftily placed herself among the progressives while constantly signaling to the establishment her affinity for their core concerns.
I almost forgot another consideration. Hillary Clinton recently proclaimed she was under tremendous pressure to enter the race. I dare presume the pressure of which she speaks is of the self-generated variety. If she succumbs to her desire and somehow manages to wrangle the nomination, this would detach progressives from the party as if tenants running from a house afire, causing them to consider joining a third party. Many progressives would rather keep Trump where he is than help the mercenary Clintons return to the White House. Such infighting within the opposing party would cause Trump to dance a jig, being the best news he could have. With a fair amount of confidence, he could start ordering the new furniture for his second term in office.
The Nation
Advertise or Publish a Story on EkoHot Blog:
Kindly contact us at [email protected]. Breaking stories should be sent to the above email and substantiated with pictorial evidence.
Citizen journalists will receive a token as data incentive.
Call or Whatsapp: 0803 561 7233, 0703 414 5611
