Dear America,
I didn't think the Republicans would leap into internecine politics so early this time after what happened in 2008 and 2012, but I guess you really can't teach an old dog new tricks. We are well over a year away from the next presidential election, and more than six months from the first primaries, but the bombast and blather have begun in the Republican field of more than ten already. The Democrats, on the other hand, have only three declared candidates at this point, and two of them are quite civil about it. Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders have been subdued, though Sanders isn't shy about pushing Clinton to take positions on issues like the impending Pacific trade pact that President Obama is getting considerable resistance over. But the issues of income and wealth inequality are at the core of that issue...as will be the entire Democratic platform as it will ultimately be debated among the suitors for the loyalty of the Democrats who vote. Thus, the choice of a candidate for 2016 will probably hinge on what each of them says about a very tight circle of specifics like international trade, banking and finance and taxes. The Republicans, on the other hand, seem like a gang of thieves looking for a way into the vault, none of them really having any particular plan but all of them focused on only defeating one another...and Hillary. Their problem is that they haven't had anything to say since Barrack Obama took office. They just keep protesting what is without proposing anything that should be, and now they are doing it at one another's expense with a kind of sophist abandon that is at best unseemly. Lindsey Graham claims that he has more foreign policy experience than Hillary Clinton even though his experience is only as a committeeman in The Senate while Clinton ran foreign policy for the entire nation for the first four years of The President's administration. The claim is preposterous, but Graham makes it with his bare face hanging out as if no one will notice his grandiosity, bombast and conceit. Rand Paul is taking a dogmatically libertarian position on more and more as he goes on, apparently unable to restrain himself from slipping toward the edge of the flat world he would have us all live in. Of course, Ted Cruz has nothing good to say about anyone, but his John Birch tendencies are there for all to see, and no one but the Tea Party will be anything but frightened by them. Of course there are also several second...and third tier competitors as well, and they have no potential to be anything but spectacular flame outs, so the only other serious candidate to talk about is Jeb Bush, and he hasn't really done much to distinguish himself.
Bush is a Bush, after all, and despite his attempts to separate himself from his family without seeming perfidious, his brother, George W, is a perpetual drag on Jeb's efforts to gain ground. He is no longer the front runner;Scott Walker is, but he isn't breaking away from the pack, and the Republican Party looks as fractious and bumptious as it has been for the rest of the past decade. Not that there is no high rhetoric on the Democratic side. Former Maryland governor Martin O'Malley has joined the race and he seems at the outset to be a little edgier than Sanders and already more frenetic than both Sanders and Clinton, and he does make some points for the benefit of the left leaners among Democrats. He, like Sanders, will play the same role as Cruz and Paul play for the Republicans, that is they will be forces pushing Clinton to the left, but the difference is that the left for Democrats includes raising the minimum wage, reigning in corporate executive compensation, controlling our finance industry so that we don't have a repeat of 2008, much less 1929, and taxing the super rich, in which they are not hindered by the supply-side myth to which the Republican establishment has had its wagon hitched for the past three decades since the Reagan administration. There are very few rich people to vote for the next presidential candidate, but a lot of working poor. They need the insurance that they have gotten out of the Affordable Care Act, and they see the Republicans trying to eradicate the benefit that over ten million people now have taken advantage of. And even in states like Texas, where over a million poor people are being denied the security of the ACA's Medicaid expansion, conservative values won't overrule the practical reality that if you have no access to medical care, you die. Add the Republican refusal to rule out a round two for American fighting forces in Iraq and you begin to see a pattern of self-destructive obduracy based on failed, but faithfully advocated policies.
I still don't think that Hillary Clinton will be the Democratic candidate, probably of her own volition. And between O'Malley and Sanders, I would have to say that O'Malley is the more credible, though in our state's primary, I almost certainly will vote for Sanders because he is a true liberal rather than a pragmatic one. In the end, however, the next president of the United States hasn't yet declared in my opinion. I saw an article about 21 Democrats who are reasonable prospects, and there are some names among them...names that could get a lot of votes...but only time will tell who actually has the fortitude to brave the icy waters of presidential politics and emerge without turning blue and shriveling up in the process. Any way it goes for the Democrats, it seems to me that they have a better chance than any Republican in 2016. Whoever the Democrats elect, it will be someone who looks forward, and the Republicans have only denizens of the past as of this moment. We've all been there, and had them do that.
Your friend,
Mike
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