Dear America,
The Iowa caucuses are done, and it's good news for Democrats all around. Ted Cruz beat Donald Trump in a fashion adequate to take Trump's nomination out of the realm of certainty and to siphon off some of the winners only luster with which he has burnished his ruddy cheeks. I don't think Trump could be elected president, but then I don't understand why he got even one vote, never mind millions, so I'm not sure my opinion on the subject has persuasive value. Cruz however has less of a chance than Barry Goldwater, and Goldwater had virtually no chance even when he was alive, and I feel very comfortable opining that someone whom no one likes outside of those in distant right field can't become president regardless of lunatic fervor. (Goldwater wanted to drop atomic weapons in Vietnam to defoliate the trees so that we could see the Viet Cong, just as Cruz wants to "carpet bomb" ISIL controlled areas to kill them all, not to mention every civilian around, whom we are trying to protect from ISIL by carpet bombing them.) On the Democratic side, Sanders and Clinton finished up in a virtual tie with Clinton winning what I would call a TKO in the case of the Iowa caucuses. That's only slightly more than nothing considering that the state of Iowa is not reflective of American sentiments generally, and the caucus system is so susceptible to manipulation based on personal presence, that is, showing up for coffee more than anyone else, Iowa's vote of confidence is meaningless, and I believe that electoral history demonstrates that proposition. So now, the last real poll has been taken, meaningless as it is, and we get down to brass tacks. There will be more polls, taken over the phone by everyone from Quinnipiac University to the Pew Trust, but as to a poll in which people actually have to do what they think they should, Iowa was the last there will be in 2016. So, where are we now.
I think we are getting closer to the probability of a Democratic president as of 2017, though there is still a long way to go; we've got a good start on it with the Republican outcome in Iowa. It showed that Trump can be beaten, and it reiterates the point made by the aforementioned Goldwater in 1964...inadvertently: it's hard to get elected if you represent the lunatic fringe. But, let's assume that a Democrat will win only if the party picks the right Democrat. Hillary Clinton could probably beat any Republican, emails, Wall Street connections and Benghazi not withstanding. For all her failings, she is middle left in her thinking except when it comes to money, of which she has plenty. So, she would probably be as good for most of us as her husband was, though while Bill likes to make himself out to be the people's man, he did plenty for the monied few as well. What passed for "welfare reform" was really the gutting of the program itself for the people who need it most and longest as well as for some other programs, like unemployment insurance. That's what he gave to get tax reform, such as it was. Before Clinton, a person who was chronically unemployed could try to get work, but he wouldn't have to worry about starving after trying for a given period of time. Now, once hard times create unemployment that persists for more than a year, the continuingly unemployed have to rely on the warm heartedness of congress, which is an oxymoron when the Republicans are in control, for renewals of unemployment compensation eligibility. As to tax reform, it is true that he presided over the return of marginal tax rates on earnings to pre-Reagan levels, but he left those who live on capital gains--that is the now-infamous 1%--untouched as to their taxation rate of approximately half the rate of the average American and a quarter of the rate of the upper-middle class, which creates most of the jobs in this country. As to Hillary, when Martin O'Malley got into the race and said in his announcement that he advocated the reenactment of the Glass-Steagall Act I thought that his point would become a battle cry and Hillary, assuming she emerged as the number one of the party, would have to pick up the standard, but I have heard almost nothing about reenactment since then, and if no one mentions it, I doubt that Hillary will, which brings us to Bernie Sanders and the possibility--seemingly real now--that he could be the Democratic nominee.
At almost seventy years old, I don't see seventy four as old enough to be an issue in presidential politics, but most of America is younger than me, so I see age as being a problem for him. Of course, if he chooses a vice presidential nominee whom everybody loves, that probably won't be a problem. But then there's the whole "democratic socialist" thing. That phrase will hang on him like an albatross, which means that dyed-in-the-wool Democrats will still vote for him, and of course Republicans won't, but neither will a substantial portion of the independents, and they will decide who our next president will be. How a committed socialist, democratic or not, will appeal to them is anybody's guess. Of course, most of them are like us down here in the bottom 80%, and Bernie says all the right things from our perspective, so if he could get 80% of the independents, well, it's President Bernie for us, America. But the Republicans managed to turn the country--we've favored a single payer system of health care for decades with the exception of the four years just after the passage of the Affordable Care Act--against "Obamacare," which was the closest thing to single payer that they couldn't prevent a Democratic president from accomplishing. So they could possibly turn a majority against some form of equality in taxation, and that is the key to income inequality because only government programs can have the desired effect. The top 10% aren't going to cut us in on prosperity if they don't have to, and they're the only alternative government action.
I'm still going to vote for Bernie in our state primary, and I will still talk him up whenever I get the chance, but I have to admit, we Democrats have a choice to make. Do we want certainty or do we want what we believe in. What a world. What a country.
Your friend,
Mike
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