JOE BIDEN AS MIGHTY MOUSE, OR MAYBE BR'ER RABBIT: SOMEBODY’S READERS ARE NOT SURPRISED

5/30/16

Now that the major party nominees have been more or less decided, or as decided as anything can be in this year’s madcap presidential selection process, the talk has turned to running mates (See HILLARY WON’T PUTBERNIE SANDERS ON THE TICKET; INSTEAD, SHE’LL SELECT…, 5/21/16) and “what if?”s.  The most intriguing “what if” surrounds the albeit distant possibility that Hillary Rodham Clinton gets into legal trouble either before or after the convention.    Most of the talk of late has centered around Vice-President Joe Biden’s being drafted, doubtless kicking and screaming in the tradition of Br’er Rabbit, to save the day by carrying his party’s standard.

When my readers hear this “suddenly emerging” talk of Mr. Biden’s being called into service, they merely yawn and move onto the next story.   This is old news to them.   See

IS JOE BIDEN A POLITICAL GENIUS OR WHAT?

that yours truly wrote back on October 28, 2015.    The most telling, and prescient, paragraphs in that now seminal piece are as follows:

Mr. Biden’s only hope of winning the Democratic nomination was for Hillary Clinton to somehow stumble, either over a scandal or over her own words, which she seems to have some difficulty selecting of late, but I digress.   At this point, the chances of such a stumble seem remote (See my 10/16/15 piece  WILL HILLARY BE WILD AND CRAZY…LIKE BILL?), but not completely out of the realm of possibilities.   And if she does, who has just set himself up perfectly for a draft?   Of course…Joe Biden.   While the appearance on 60 Minutes may not have had as its primary objective making Mr. Biden the obvious choice if Mrs. Clinton somehow blows it, setting such a table had to be a secondary objective.  In any case, surely the masterful interview had the result of making Joe Biden the obvious relief pitcher should Hillary start throwing the game away.

Yes, it’s a long shot that Hillary stumbles and Joe emerges.   But Mr. Biden’s candidacy was always a long shot, thoroughly dependent on Hillary dropping the ball.  That hasn’t changed.   What has changed is that now Mr. Biden will not have to go through the time, expense, and risk of running a campaign to merely place himself in the wings.   Especially after his and Mrs. Biden’s appearance on 60 Minutes, Joe Biden is firmly in the wings without having to spend brobdingnagian amounts of money and without running the risk of saying something, er, subject to misinterpretation, always a big risk in Mr. Biden’s case.

Bold emphasis added by yours truly.   But do read the entire piece; it is rich with nuggets of wisdom.

It’s still a very long shot that Mr. Biden somehow gets the big prize, but, so far, the effort has cost him nothing so the payoff would approach infinity.   Say what you will about the man, but Mr. Biden knows his craft. 

HILLARY WON’T PUT BERNIE SANDERS ON THE TICKET; INSTEAD, SHE’LL SELECT…

5/21/16

Yours truly was tempted to start this post with “Now that the nominees of the two major parties have been decided….”   However, given the near other-worldliness of this election season, perhaps it is unsafe to assume that GOP and the Democrats have decided on their standard-bearers.   Given what has transgressed so far in this campaign, anything can happen.    While it is a reasonable, and only a reasonable, certainty that Donald Trump will bear the Republican standard, one suspects that there might be more, but still not much, suspense of the Democratic side.   That is grist for another mill.

Whether or not the tops of the tickets have been decided, the political punditocracy and other assorted political junkies have taken to speculating regarding the second spots on the tickets.   While I find this largely a pointless exercise because the guesses are usually wrong and really don’t matter anyway, we may, and only may, be running out of other things to talk about until the conventions have been put to a merciful end.   So why not join in the fun?

Peggy Noonan, who is among my favorite and most respected columnists, put forth the case in this morning’s Wall Street Journal (“Clinton-Sander:  Maybe That’s the Ticket, 5/21-5/22/16, page A11) for Bernie Sanders to be the man whose most important task over the next four years will be inquiring after the president’s health.    Ms. Noonan cited party unity and nipping any efforts of the Trump camp to poach Sanders supporters (an effort, by the way, which has great potential despite the punditocracy’s out-of-hand dismissal.   The punditocracy has gotten everything else wrong this election season (See NOBODY SAW THIS TRUMP THING COMING, RIGHT?   WELL…SOMEBODY DID…, 5/4/16); why should anyone be surprised that it is dropping the ball on this one as well?) as reasons that it might make sense for Mrs. Clinton to choose Mr. Sanders as her running mate.    Ms. Noonan also cited desperation on the part of Mrs. Clinton, which is perhaps the best of all reasons she might ask Mr. Sanders to join her on what would be the oldest ticket in American history.

Yours truly, however, has a better idea, and a more likely outcome, for Mrs. Clinton’s veep deliberations.   My advice, and prediction, or about as close as I come to prediction, has its roots in a post from October of last year, WILL HILLARY BE WILD AND CRAZY…LIKE BILL?   In that post, I argued that Bill Clinton did something bold by breaking all the rules regarding veep selection and choosing virtual carbon copy Al Gore to join him on the 1992 Democratic ticket…and it worked.   Might Hillary, I asked, so something equally unconventional and select a woman running mate, producing the first all-woman major party ticket in American history?   I’m more convinced that she will do just that by selecting Senator Elizabeth Warren as her running mate.

Why Elizabeth Warren?

·         Mr. Trump was clearly wrong when he stated that the only thing that Mrs. Clinton has going for her is the “woman card” and that she wouldn’t even be considered for the Democratic nomination if she were a man.   Few people have more impressive public sector resumes than Mrs. Clinton.   But one would be a fool to deny that the “woman card” is among the strongest cards in her hand.   Why not strengthen that hand a bit by doubling down?

·         Ms. Warren’s selection for the ticket will accomplish the same things a Sander selection would accomplish:  she’d keep the loon-toon (er, sorry, “progressive”) wing of the party in the Democratic camp and would reinforce the fiction that Mrs. Clinton is not one who plays footsy with Wall Street and other bogeymen of the left.   A Warren selection, and especially an early Warren selection, would thus much of the remaining air out of Mr. Sanders’ sails.

·         Ms. Warren, at 66, is two years younger than Mrs. Clinton and eight years younger than Mr. Sanders.   These aren’t big differences, and this reason pales in comparison to the above two, but on what would increasingly look like a geriatric ticket, a few years might help.

You were probably expecting me to cite as a fourth reason for choosing Ms. Warren instead of Mr. Sanders the Clintons’ distaste for making nice with people who have made their lives difficult by standing in the way of their ambitions.   While it is tempting to make this argument, it is far too glib.  The Clintons may indeed be as ruthless as people make them out to be and, beneath the smiles and the feigned graciousness, probably seethe at Mr. Sanders for spoiling Mrs. Clinton’s coronation.   However, the same could have been said regarding the Clintons’ feelings toward then Senator Barack Obama in 2008, but they managed to forgive, but probably not forget, because there was something in it for them.    With the Clintons, ambition and self-interest trump all, even personal pique at people who have interfered with their sense of manifest entitlement.    This, by the way, describes all politicians, but the Clintons practice their art with more aplomb than most politicians.   More properly, one of the Clintons practices his art with more aplomb than most politicians.

So while I don’t like to make predictions, I will at least say that it would make a lot more sense for Mrs. Clinton to select Ms. Warren, rather than Mr. Sanders, as her running mate.    Mrs. Clinton gets at least a two-fer, and maybe a three- or a four-fer, by doing so. 

THE NEOCONS JOIN THE LIBERALS IN THEIR CONTEMPT FOR THE MIDDLE CLASS

5/14/16

The April 22 edition of the Wall Street Journal approvingly quoted Emmett Rensin castigating liberals for being smug and condescending toward the working and middle classes.   In response, I sent the following letter suggesting that the glass house residents on the Journal editorial staff should perhaps refrain from throwing stones.   The letter was never published, but I thought you’d like to read its now often replicated message:

4/22/16

Oh, the irony of the Wall Street Journal, reliable champion of the Republican establishment and perhaps Donald Trump’s staunchest opponent, so approvingly quoting Emmett Rensin’s observations on the smug and condescending attitudes of the modern American liberal!   (“Notable and Quotable:  Liberals and the Working Class,” 4/22/16)

Mr. Rensin is entirely correct in his observation that the liberals of today have lost the working class because the bi-coastals who run the Democratic Party look on those who toil in the hinterlands as hopeless rubes who don’t know what’s good for them.  But doesn’t the Journal see that the Republican establishment feels the same way about the working class that is supporting Mr. Trump in droves?   The Journal and the Republican establishment for which it serves as a mouthpiece were utterly baffled that the GOP rank and file did not brim with enthusiasm for the neocon likes of Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio…until the establishment and its mouthpiece concluded that Trumpism “was not a political ideology at all” and that “the stupid hacks didn’t know what’s good for them”…like near religious fealty to “free trade” and perpetual, counter-productive wars in places in which we have few interests and fewer friends.

Perhaps the Journal is in need of a good, imported, “free trade” mirror.

NOBODY SAW THIS TRUMP THING COMING, RIGHT? WELL…SOMEBODY DID…

5/4/16

That Donald Trump is now the presumptive nominee of the Grand Old Party comes as a surprise to the punditry class, the group that makes so much money opining on things about which it knows so little.   But that Mr. Trump is now, barring something really bizarre even by standards of this bizarre election season, the standard-bearer of the Republican Party, did not surprise yours truly, and his faithful readers, one whit.   Unlike those who amass fortunes doing so ham-handedly what I do so skillfully for free, and who will doubtless try to tell you that they saw this coming all along, I present proof that I was on to “this Trump thing” a long time ago.

My most telling pieces on the Trump phenomenon were

WHY TRUMP IS SO POPULAR WITH THE MIDDLE CLASS, 12/26/15

and

DON’T KID, OR REASSURE, YOURSELF; DONALD TRUMP CAN BECOMEOUR NEXT PRESIDENT, 3/4/16

Also notable were

DONALD TRUMP:  “HE’SA SCARY MAN, KAY…A VERY SCARY MAN.”, 4/6/16

ONE REASON PEOPLE LIKE TRUMP:  “IT’S NOT THE MONEY…IT’S THE MONEY”, 3/24/16

IF TRUMP WINS TONIGHT IN IOWA…, 2/1/16

CHRIS CHRISTIE GETS “IT”; CAN HE GET THE NOMINATION?, 1/5/16

TRUMP, THE “REVERSE BRADLEY EFFECT,” AND THEMAN’S UPCOMING LOSS IN IOWA, 12/23/15

Hmm…yours truly even called the Iowa loss.   Amazing.

Why am I not at all surprised that Mr. Trump is the GOP nominee?   It’s quite simple.   The country is falling apart.   The economy is lethargic at best.  Real wages are stuck in neutral, but those with high incomes (Note that I didn’t say “the rich;” quite different concepts.) earn still higher incomes and insist on rubbing it in the noses of those who are just barely making it by engaging in excesses that would make the suzerains of old blush. We have spent ourselves into oblivion and now are facing debts that will be nearly, if not actually, impossible to service if interest rates ever get back to anything approximating a “normal” level.  Our schools are in disarray.  Our students aren’t learning the things that need to be learned if we are to become a great nation again.   Families are falling apart, much to the approval of the ruling classes.  Crime, while not at ‘70s levels, is still endemic and more real due to the immediacy of modern media.   The old mores that made this country great are laughed at and ridiculed.   We are spilling the blood of our young people, and spending billions we don’t have, fighting wars in places in which we have no business. The middle class is constantly being told to pony up for solutions that don’t work, that indeed exacerbate the problems they are supposedly designed to address, but that most assuredly increase the incomes of the feckless, self-assured, and self-centered political class.   

Yet the political establishment tells us that if we just continue on the same “mainstream” path, things will get better.    Then these professional clingers to the public mammary gland add insult to injury by righteously opining that “America’s best years are ahead of us.”  The typical middle class voter sees this condescending drivel as the utter nonsense that it is and is so fed up with the obtuseness of the mainstream that s/he is willing to embrace a champion as imperfect as Trump, a man who embodies more than a few of the aforementioned problems that are eating away at American society, as a backlash against the downright silliness and self-obsession that permeates the political class.   After all, the voters figure, how could Mr. Trump possibly be worse than the pack of poltroons and popinjays that has run this country into the ditch? 

That the voters should react in such a manner is surprising only to the media and political classes, which stand agape that the sociological curiosities they consider the voters to be have not acted as the punditry’s Ivy League educations and inbred circle of friends and associates say they should.   Why does anybody listen to these people whose most salient attribute is an amazing ability to so misunderstand the areas in which they purport to be experts?