1/9/20
I promised to get back to politics after a hopefully more
regularly occurring excursion into more general, and less depressing, topics,
so here is a random selection of thoughts on the presidential race:
·
President Trump is in trouble for 2020 anyway,
but if Senator Amy Klobuchar comes out of Iowa with any kind of
momentum, the President is in even deeper trouble. Steve Chapman, a Chicago Tribune
columnist who shares some of my libertarian instincts, wrote a column last Sunday
arguing that Senator Klobuchar may be just the “normalizing,” for lack of a
better term, president the country needs to elect in 2020. While I’m not prepared to share the argument
that Senator Klobuchar would be the president the country needs, I have long thought
that she’d be a great candidate. A, by
modern Democratic standards, moderate woman from the upper Midwest, even
without a long record of legislative accomplishment (The spinmeisters can
always concoct a record of accomplishment, even if out of whole cloth,
sufficient to convince the typical American voter.) would easily defeat President Trump in the
general election, or at least it looks like it at this juncture. Since Senator Klobuchar is from Minnesota,
a state that borders Iowa geographically, culturally, and economically, the Hawkeye
State would be an ideal place for her to get the boost she will need to
move into the top tier of an unimpressive Democratic field. It goes without saying, though, that if
Senator Klobuchar crashes and burns in Iowa, she is through and the crazies,
and consequently President Trump, will have achieved yet another victory in the
Democratic contest.
·
As mentioned in the last bullet point, at least
at this juncture, and without having looked at the numbers in the detailed way that
resulted in yours truly’s nailing the 2016 outcome, it looks like President
Trump cannot win in 2020. But the
Democrats can lose, primarily through their nearly Orwellian devotion to the
latest ephemeral fascinations of the modern American left, along with several
other political gaffes that they persist in committing; see the next few bullet
points.
·
Regardless of what one thinks of the wisdom of
taking out Quds Force mastermind General Qassem Soleimani, Americans
love it when our military gets a bad guy.
Despite all the nuance the Democrats are trying to employ in this
matter, they still manage to come off, with some help from the GOP spinners, as
opposed to the disposal of General Soleimani.
That won’t help the Democrats in November.
·
Unless something of a substance comes out of
this one-ringed circus, what the voters will most remember from the impeachment
theatrics the Dems seem to be wisely holding in abeyance for now is that Hunter
Biden made millions from his father’s political connections and, even more
importantly, if not yet saliently, that
his father continues to insist that young Mr. Biden has done nothing
wrong. Joe Biden’s protestations
that his son did nothing wrong will be incessantly cited by GOP political
mercenaries as yet another example of the Washington political establishment’s,
against which Mr. Trump will again be running, operating under not only a sense
of entitlement but also a set of moral and ethical rules that are bewildering
to the average person. And Chelsea
Clinton’s reportedly having made over $9mm from positions on the boards of Barry
Diller’s businesses will be thrown in to reinforce the point.
·
A losing issue for the Republicans, and
especially for Mr. Trump, will be their ongoing efforts to destroy Obamacare. Yours truly gets the sense that Obamacare is
not as unpopular as the Republicans seem to think it is, largely because of the
large number of people who would not have had health insurance, and a smaller
number of people who consequently would be dead or destitute, without Obamacare. People understand that Obamacare is deeply
flawed, but the GOP has yet to come up with an alternative, other than “trust
us,” when it comes to, among other things, not leaving those of us with pre-existing
conditions to either, literally, no future, at least in this mortal coil, or a
future of poverty. Given that choice,
Obamacare looks pretty good; people know enough not to trust politicians regardless
of said pols’ party label.
That having been written, the
Democrats will not be able to exploit this issue if they insist on nominating a
candidate who favors gutting Obamacare in favor of “Medicare for All” or
some such abominable manifestation of the modern left’s desire to bring every
human activity under the control of the political class. They can’t attack Mr. Trump for wanting to
gut Obamacare when they, too, insist on gutting Obamacare.
·
If one need evidence of how polarized, politicized,
and hyper-partisan politics have become, consider George McGovern and Ronald
Reagan. In 1972, Mr. McGovern was
the crazy, left wing lunatic tree-hugging pal of pot-smoking hippies who supposedly
couldn’t get elected because he was so far to the left that people questioned his
patriotism despite his admirable service during World War II. In 1976, and again in 1980, Mr. Reagan was
the crazy, right wing lunatic nuclear cowboy who supposedly couldn’t get
elected because he was so far to the right that people wondered if he had a few
screws loose and would vaporize the world in a fit of pique at the people in
Moscow with whom his Republican predecessors were playing footsy only a few
years earlier. Both would, at least
rhetorically, in most instances, be mainstream moderates today.
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