**Formerly titled "Sheldon Moves East".
February 2016
"And tonight, while the results are still not known, it looks like we are in a virtual tie."
I have to work tomorrow but I'm up late anyway. How could I not be? Bernie Sanders has taken the Democratic Party by storm; I've never been so fired up by a presidential candidate. I've even given him money, a step I've never taken before in my life. I knocked on doors for Obama in 2012, but that was more because I had a strong dislike for Mitt Romney than any Obama adoration. But Bernie, he's the real deal. He speaks clearly, passionately and almost exclusively about the two-tiered economic system in this country, and about how more and more people are on the second tier, and how even though more and more people are on this second tier, more and more money is accumulating in the first tier. Economic dignity and health care, he is clear, are not privileges or even something that's earned, but fundamental rights that the state can and should provide.
His opponent for the Democratic nomination, the person with whom he "virtually tied" is, of course, Hillary Rodham Clinton. Before Bernie got in the race, and even for a good while afterward, it was widely assumed that Hillary had a virtual lock on the nomination. After all, she had performed admirably as Secretary of State, and Obama had let it be known in subtle ways that he thought she would be the ideal person to cement his legacy (notwithstanding his defeat of her in the 2008 primaries). And Bernie, as so many people are quick to point out, is not even a registered Democrat: he is an Independent who caucuses with the Democrats in the Senate; he calls himself a "Democratic Socialist".
Many people are of the opinion that someone who describes himself in that way could never win the presidency. This, I disagree with. "Socialism" does not carry with it the stigma that it did during the Cold War years; in my admittedly amateur opinion, "capitalism" probably carries with it just as much negativity as "socialism". Many Bernie people suspect that the institutional Democratic Party is taking action behind the scenes to make sure he doesn't win the nomination; I'm not sure how plausible that is, although there is an odd lack of high-profile debates, supposedly the work of the Democratic chairperson, Debbie Wasserman Schultz. And I gotta admit, that all these superdelegates declaring for Hillary before the first caucus/primary are pretty off-putting. At least let the race play out!
No matter. I'm proud right now to be a Democrat. Bernie is fighting for everything I strongly believe in, pushing NAFTA-promoting, welfare-reform-instituting, I-give-$200,000-speeches-to-Wall-Street Hillary Clinton to the left in key areas. Bernie and Hillary are not talking about email servers; they're not denigrating entire groups of human beings (besides Wall Street CEO's, perhaps); they agree that more can be done to help the poor, working and middle classes. Their differences rest in how to get there: Hillary is a self-described "incrementalist", while Bernie speaks of his campaign as a "revolution".
Contrast this with the Republicans. Oh my God! Seventeen candidates, although that should change after tonight. They've had lots of high profile "debates", probably better described as "debacles", and in each one they swim further and further to the bottom, trying to find the lowest common denominator. They seem focused on three things: lowering taxes (mainly for those with enough money to pay them); scapegoating immigrants (while oddly not worried about why people hire them); and of course, ridding the country of Obamacare, without any clear idea of what to do in its place.
Books could--and have already--been written about the Obamacare battles, but I'm pretty sure it all comes down to this: the Republican Party in 2016 doesn't think everyone should have health care. They won't come out and say this, of course, but the bottom line of it all is that only the "deserving" should have health care. Obamacare is designed after Romneycare, which came straight from the Heritage Foundation. The freaking Heritage Foundation! If Republicans really wanted people everyone to have health care--which they say they do--they should be jumping up and down in joy that the conservative, market-based solution was implemented, and not a more socialist system like virtually every other industrialized country. If anyone should be complaining about Obamacare, it's Democrats--which, incidentally, Bernie Sanders is doing.
And, then of course, there's the elephant (no pun intended) in the room: Donald Trump. "Make America Great Again". Ol' Donald came in second tonight to Ted Cruz, whose religious conservative credentials carried him in much of the state, like my hometown of Sheldon. Nobody ever stops talking about Trump; he seems almost as loathed by institutional Republicans as Democrats. Yet, he draws huge crowds and is set to win New Hampshire next week. All the "experts" keep asking why, but I'll tell you why: last August, Dana Point, California, site of the Koch brothers' so-called "Koch Primary". Every Republican hopeful was there, eager to secure the approval of the billionaire, libertarian brothers.
Every Republican hopeful, that is, except Donald Trump.
Donald gleefully (rightfully?) mocked the money grab by the other candidates. He bragged about not needing their money, therefore not being beholden to their agenda. He guarantees access to health insurance even while blasting Obamacare. He isn't hell bent on "modernizing entitlements". Poor, working class, middle class Republicans noticed. These Republicans are not particularly concerned about free-market orthodoxy, and they can't quite understand why the Paul Ryans of their party are so obsessed with taking on Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. They vote Republican for religious reasons, cultural reasons. They grew up being told America was great. They weren't told it was great because of low corporate tax rates, because of health savings accounts, because of Ayn Rand. They just know America is supposed to be great, and it isn't anymore, and for some reason, they think that the Donald is the one to do it.
I don't agree, of course. Trump is the phoniest populist I can conceive of. I've seen real populism. Hugo Chavez, he was a populist. Chavez grew up poor in the country and joined the military to play baseball. Chavez attempted a military coup against entrenched powers. Chavez went to jail and when he got out he criss-crossed the country in old cars, crashing on people's houses, building popular support. Whatever you think of his politics, Chavez definitely felt passionately about Venezuela. Trump is a billionaire with a new hobby.
While I don't believe he is personally xenophobic or racist, he sure as hell is exploiting those tendencies in a lot of Americans in building his "movement". This, more than anything, seems to be what drives my liberal friends crazy: the man just isn't nice. But these xenophobic impulses are nothing new to the Republican party; they've been using them since Barry Goldwater in 1964, thirteen years before I was even born. Hell, Mr. Establishment himself, Mitt Romney, suggested "self-deportation" of "illegal immigrants" in 2012. The only thing Trump's doing different is, he's using a regular whistle instead of a dog whistle.
Personally, Trump doesn't scare me as much as most of the candidates. Ted Cruz, he's a snake. Marco Rubio couldn't be more bought and paid for. Rand Paul thinks everyone was born with money and wants to go back to the gold standard. Mike Huckabee would have been more comfortable in the 1950's. The only Republican, really, that doesn't scare me a little is John Kasich. Don't get me wrong, I won't be voting for him, he's too fiscally conservative, but he at least seems to be the sort of Eisenhower Republican who understands he'd be serving the people, not corporations or the Family Council.
And another thing I don't understand, is the media's constant comparison of Trump and Bernie. Both of them are drawing huge crowds, but past that I honestly cannot see any similarities. The media keeps referring to them as "outsiders", but that is only the case for Trump; Bernie was a mayor, then a Representative, and he's been a Senator for several terms. He is, I suppose, an outsider in that he's an Independent; but he's been in government a long time, longer than Hillary Clinton, in fact, has been. I would argue he's more Democrat, at least FDR Democrat, than Hillary herself: Bernie was in the March on Washington, he stood on a picket line in Cedar Rapids, he isn't taking any money from corporations in his bid for President. You might say, as Walter Mondale famously said, that Bernie represents the "Democratic Wing of the Democratic Party".
And if you wanted to vote for, say, a fiscally moderate Eisenhower Republican? Well, I think you have a candidate there for that, too. Her name is Hillary Rodham Clinton.
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