Preparing For A Presidential Election

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By Judith Gayle | Political Waves

How’s the political pulse, you ask? It’s racing. The usual suspects have fallen by the wayside, the outliers have cap​tured our imagination, and the situation remains fluid, no matter what established wisdom insists is true. ​All that and it’s not even summer ’til we smell the smoke from the barbecue (grab yer weenies, we’re almost there!).​

There are still three candidates in the race, although the attempt to marginalize Sanders has — from the very beginning — been substantial. While Donald Trump may prove the most dangerous candidate world wide, Bernie remains the most threatening to the political machine that feeds at the trough of big money and fiscal skullduggery.

The particulars of the race are, frankly, fascinating once you get past your personal desire, disgust, and despair. The Donald has rallied the right to gleefully anticipate and approve  his every small-minded and self-serving comment, sure it’s the utterance of the man who will save them from decades of decline foisted upon them by small-minded and self-serving liberals. The majority of his voters — those plagued with night terrors regarding  their own ‘small hands‘, apparently — are not swayed by facts, but the right has been comfortable with that scenario since inception.

The Clintonistas are pushing their boulder uphill, fighting against Donald’s smear campaign featuring the Billary years, his casual ability to ‘rename’ his opponents — Crooked Hillary —  and the unfortunate stream of ​revelations regarding the Clinton Foundation and Hil’s private e-mail server. With Clinton attempting to pivot towards the general and take on Trump, she’s still facing a very real populist movement that is threatening her super-delegate lead — especially worrisome as the polls show her in a dead heat against Donald, while Bernie beats them all with ease.

The Sanders campaign, meanwhile, continues to shake the bushes for new voters, despite the scathing accusations of establishment politicians that it threatens a Dem presidential win by remaining a loud and active counterpoint to same-old neo-liberal politics. Comes as no surprise, since the majority of Sanders supporters consider themselves Independents. That’s not a political party but a description of political independence, one that has become more anti-establishment with every revelation of corruption and example of plutocratic collusion over these last several decades.

I will admit my personal bias here, in that I have considered myself an Independent for more than thirty years, and — as you’ve noticed — that’s not been to move toward the middle in support of Pub policy, but to blast past the constipation that has brought full-throated democratic principle to a halt in the District of Columbia. Coming to this place and time has been a long, frustrating journey for us all.

Over the years we’ve continued to wander down ideological side roads, strolled down alternative political paths, unable, or perhaps unwilling, to open the larger can of worms that has to do with the machinery behind the governmental machine. But the worms are out and crawling now, and some of us are trying to deal with this worm-riddled system, while others are trying to stuff them back in the can.

So the left finds itself — declared Democrats or not — with dueling philosophies in Sanders and Clinton, who are not peas in a political pod: they are apples and oranges. The notion that Bernie could easily fold himself into a Clinton presidency ignores the essential, dramatic difference in their political visions for the nation. His is as close to a third party contest as possible without that declaration, and since it’s still a primary election and not the general, it continues to have the capacity to inform national politics without harming them.

Taking a calming breath is good advice. But gotta say, I’ve never seen anything quite like this, even as it echoes the passion of ’60s politics. It isn’t a traditional party split, as happens regularly among national voters. It isn’t even the right-left divide that was widened during the years of Bush the Lesser. This is more the birth pangs of a reality-based political spin off, although — like most creative acts — it may take longer than we’d like to take shape.

Outcome remains uncertain. Republicans are traditionally emotional creatures, nursing grudges and licking wounds. They vote for personalities, and Lord knows Donald Trump has a level of narcissim and inflated self-opinion for the fraidy cats to embrace, enough hot air to keep their worst fears warmed while protecting against harsher demographic truths.

Lefties care less about personality than they do about legislation. They are the larger umbrella that seeks the public good, or at least retains the capacity, having spent thirty or more years courting the moneyed class rather than dancing with those what brung ‘em. They’re policy people, and Hillary is a policy wonk. She tells us what she would do for us as a formidable, and stern, candidate.

Bernie is a policy wonk as well, more general than Hil, less specific in legislative details. He tells us — as he did to a chanting crowd in California — “It’s not Bernie, Bernie, Bernie. It’s You, You, You!” Bernie employs the all-inclusive ‘we’ in most all that he promotes. The grass roots has an authentic champion. The old paradigm meets the new, the divide widens, and, as Eric Levitz writes in Daily Intelligencer, “Politics ain’t beanbag. Neither, presumably, are political revolutions.”

With California coming up quickly, and the last of the primaries, we will know the outcome soon enough (although probably NOT soon enough for the Clinton campaign). Those Clinton loyalists who are concerned about the Bernie or Bust movement need to think back to Obama versus Clinton and the PUMA movement (party unity, my ass!) which was even louder and more angry than that of the Bernie Bro’s.  That worked out all right in the end, with everyone uniting against the possibility of McCain keeling over and leaving us with Sarah Palin at the helm. Of course Obama and Clinton were on the same page politically, giving voters less agita about coming together than today’s candidates.

Meanwhile, those who are afraid Bernie’s giving Trump an edge have decided that Elizabeth Warren’s twitter-war with Donald is the poison pill keeping him from pivoting toward hard core presidential politics (like appointing Newt Gingrich as his running mate, and I’m serious!). And now that Donald has dropped “goofy” as nickname for Warren to replace it with “Pocahontas” (because of a college application that included her Cherokee heritage,) Elizabeth seems to be taking a good bit of pleasure in becoming the interpreter of Trumpisms that illuminate Donald’s true elitist motives and ideals.

Donald would be a disastrous president, Hillary an efficiently calculating one, and Bernie? Who knows. He’s not as crusty as he appears, but he’s no ‘no-drama-Obama,’ either. Of the three, Sanders is the one I trust not to cover up, power-grab, or distort, which doesn’t mean I will go down with the ship on the Bernie or Bust summer cruise.

Robert Reich, a dedicated public servant, has been taking a bruising from those who refuse to consider what comes after the presumptive is chosen. It should be said that he echoes the people I trust — Moyers, Chomsky — who know that politics is compromise OF THE MOMENT in order to protect against worse (like ANY SCOTUS nominee from the Donald’s list of coathanger candidates, for instance, or total decline of American leadership in the free world), ​until a better opportunity comes along.​

Although we still have a way to go — and we haven’t even gotten to the presidential campaign, fer gawd’s sake — the real loser in this event is establishment politics. Republican leadership is farther along in this than their opposition. They’ve swallowed the bile that comes with losing control of their party. They don’t like it, but they understand Trump’s coat-tails are the only ones left to ride at this point, even if into oblivion.

On the left, I’m amazed and dismayed at how tone deaf the Dems are in getting honest with themselves over a system that’s been neutered in its ability to provide for the average citizen, while making the wealthy wealthier. This read from Politico on the possibility that Clinton could win the necessary delegates while getting whipped in California is full of quotes that make me shake my head at how clueless the political establishment has become to the pain of the people left behind.

But as long time activist, Jim Hightower, tells us, populism isn’t going away any time soon. That cat’s out of the bag, and we’ll see where it wanders, as cats are known to do. With the ‘free market’ a sham as result of corrupt trade agreements — capitalism gone the way of all vampiric creatures, glutted on life-force not its own — and the foot soldiers of the elite doing all they can to snuff out the sparks of anger that will light, God/dess willing, torches to go with the pitchforks held by disenchanted citizens, there IS no solution to this socio-political problem without a revolutionary shakeup to free the natives from their illusions and prompt a demand to re-draw the public contract.

This Memorial Day, let’s visualize the eventuality of a day when our veterans service to their country can be celebrated without a headstone — and the appreciation of the nation is for those who serve in ethics and honesty, rather than in blood.