Bernie's Battle

An old grey-haired man steps onto the stage leaving his comb somewhere lost in the 1970's.  It seems like a town square of prophets professing their views of social reform onto thousands of uninterested passersby.  He looks out on them claiming that we could climb out of the hole we're in.  We could break out.  All we have to do is distribute the pie a little better and ask that the rich help the poor.

Socialist.  Radical.  The opposite coin to Donald Trump.  Too old.

To wrap it up, he's freaking nuts!

These are the things that many would like to think about Bernie Sanders.  Actually, he's what Republican strategists are hoping that the fervency of democrats will push through to their nomination.  Recently I was watching an interview with the all-believable and most genuine candidate out there, Ted Cruz, blatantly put against the secretive liberal Chris Matthews.  The senator was pushing and pushing with a smirk on his face for the legitimacy of liberals to nominate Bernie Sanders.  Chris Matthews immediate sniffed out this plan and tried to pull out a true explanation from the innocent-looking southerner.  He only smiled and professed his love again.  Why does Teddy like Bernie?  It's because he believes that any Republican candidate would smash the Vermont Senator right back in his current place of being a non-president.

Why does Bernie have this immense battle to be seen as a moderate fighting for the middle class and not as a welfare king seeking to make America into a freaky-deaky stepbrother of Sweden?

You always have to remember this: politicians will only try to bat something down when they see it as a threat.  Republican strategists see Bernie's candidacy as exactly such.  A $15 dollar minimum wage?  Higher taxes on the rich?  More racial justice (Sanders seems to be the only candidate giving this any real thought)?  12 weeks of paid family leave?  Signing a law that legalizes 11 million undocumented workers?

God, this sounds like a paradise!  A Swedish paradise that would make any red-blooded Republican puke at the very smell of it.

First things first.  Let's take off our political hats and just look at these things.  Bernie wants to cut up the pie by taking more from the rich and passing it down to the poor.  Is this scary?  It should be to anyone who is on the upper border between being upper and middle class.  I get that.  What I don't get is how anyone else could be against these policies.  Are we scared of being called socialists?  News flash: we already are socialists.  We just suck at being them.

One of the best things about democracy is how we all can come together to divvy up the spoils.  We've seen a lot of recent anger in the form of Occupy and other movements about how these spoils are divided up, but did you know really how much more we give handouts to the rich than the poor?  Corporate welfare, yes that is CORPORATE welfare and not just welfare, is WAY more than just plain old social welfare.  Our current government says that we should give more free money to corporations (already extremely profitable ones at that) than to social welfare programs.  Would most Americans agree to this if they knew about it?  My guess is no.

Again, we suck at being socialists, and Bernie is trying to make us realize this.

Bernie Sanders has a lot of support.  He's not the opposite of the coin to The Donald.  Far from it, he's a man trying to wake people up from the bliss of ignorance to the way their government cuts up the pie.  Trump is just a man spitting epithets.  Bernie wants a more equally cut up pie, but can he de-stigmitize the word "socialism" enough to grab enough of the middle class?  If Bernie loses, will Hillary or Biden (if he does decide to encroach on The Bulldog's territory) benefit from Sander's attempt to bring social equality back into the political debates?

Tune in next time for answers.  Same bat time.  Same messed-up democracy.

The Donald

I couldn't resist writing about this.  He's like one of those mosquitoes that you think will finally go away when the sun comes up, but he doesn't.  He says things like that once-removed uncle of yours when he's a little too liquored up, but he doesn't apologize in the morning.  In all, he's a hot mess steaming his way through the political scene right now.

The one.

The only.

The Donald.

Many pundits have tried to discredit him.  Expose him for the true man under the animal pelt.  Rather, they have only fueled the fire behind his poll numbers and the fervor of his rhetoric.  It seems that every week what we would expect to happen to him has not, and there's only one question on everyone's mind.

What is the future of Trump?

We all know the eventual fate.  Donald Trump will never be president of the United States of America.  What everyone is trying to guess is how he will drop out of the political scene between now and then.  Will he run as a third party candidate?  Will he actually win the Republican nomination.  Won't that just be like that Ross Perot thing back in 1992?  In this post I'm going to try to predict the future for Republicans while trying to tackle these conundrums.

No.  The Donald will not win the Republican nomination.  Force against him will amount once the lower end Republican candidates start dropping out.  Once that happens, Republicans, hopefully rational ones, are going to realize that their most likable candidates who have the best chance of grabbing those purple states are Bush and Kasich.  It won't be instant gratification.  It's going to be a slow process of voters throwing support to the better candidates.  My personal recommendation for any Republican caucus would be Kasich.  Watch out for him over these next 11 months towards the convention.  His poll numbers are pretty low right now, but I believe he's the most likable candidate out of the laundry list that moderate voters would go for.  If he does win the nomination going against Hillary Clinton, it will be a pretty interesting fight for 2016. 

No.  He won't run as a third party candidate.  Donald Trump is boisterous but not stupid.  Trump will of course talk to his people and realize that a third party run, although it would be fun and probably take up the boring hours of his day, would not be productive.  If third party candidates do have any role, it's getting their views heard by the most like-minded party.  We already know his positions on immigration and trade.  His views have already been heard, LOUDLY.  Doing the third party thing would be like calling the ex-girlfriend to remind her that it's over.

We understand, honey.  We'll do something about that immigration thing.

Also, wouldn't that third party situation be like Ross Perot stealing votes away from the true Republican nominee?  First of all, Ross Perot was NOT the reason why the Republicans lost back in 1992.  Bush was going up against Bill Clinton (THE BILL CLINTON), and the exit polls after the election showed that Clinton would have ROCKED Bush even if Perot wasn't in the race.  So we shouldn't do the dirty mistake of comparing these two cases (although they do have a lot in common) because the story doesn't help the Republicans' argument for Trump not to third-party it.

The Reality is that Trump has captured about 1/5 of the Republican vote.  That's 20%ish depending on which poll and week you look at.  Although he has the most votes, what we need to repeatedly remind ourselves is that this is not a majority of Republicans.  Some on the left would use his front-runner position to say how far off the deep end the Republican party has gone, but what I think is that Trump's bravado, balls, and name recognition have shocked Republicans enough to cut off a fifth of their pie to him.  It's respectable, and in a sense, well deserved. Will Trump's piece of the pie get bigger when other candidates drop out?  Probably, but it won't be a big enough slice gain for him to continue on once others start grabbing the other juicy pieces.

Trump is not going away soon like our 24-hour news cycle hopes he will.  However much we hate or like him, his candidacy will be a gradual decline going all the way into 2016.

Then again, I could just be another pundit, like the countless others fooled by the rise of The Donald, who only the future will put in his place.