How the Clintons helped pave the way for Trump

I never thought I’d look back fondly on the days when a political campaign could be crippled by the public’s reaction to a snowflake that looked like a teardrop.

We used to have so little tolerance for anything that even hinted of scandal in our public servants that even the slightest (perceived) imperfection could disqualify them.

In 1971, Edmund Muskie was the Democratic frontrunner for the presidency until his reaction to a published letter attacking his wife tested his composure. He appeared to wipe away a tear at a news conference, and that was all it took to send him on a downward trajectory in the polls. Muskie himself said he was wiping away a melting snowflake that landed on his face, but it didn’t matter. He was done as a viable candidate. Just like that.

In 1987, Douglas Ginsburg withdrew his name from consideration for the U.S. Supreme Court after it was revealed that he’d used marijuana “on a few occasions.” Around the same time, Gary Hart went from early favorite to also-ran in the Democratic presidential race based on accusations of an extramarital affair. Both he and the woman in question, Donna Rice, denied (and continue to deny) the accusations, but that didn’t matter. Hart was finished.

Compare Hart’s alleged dalliance with the numerous accusations against Bill Clinton, who became president a few years later – including one that involved a White House intern and a blue dress. Clinton survived in what may have been the turning point in the public’s perception of political faux pas.

What changed?

Instead of going on the defensive, Clinton acted as though he was the victim of some affront, declaring forcefully that he “did not have sex with that woman,” while his wife, Hillary Clinton, proclaimed that her husband was the victim of a “vast right-wing conspiracy.” Republican lawmkers’ insistence on pursuing impeachment charges, when it was already clear that the Democrat-majority Senate would never convict Clinton, only added to the impression that they were out to get him.

The great story here for anybody willing to find it and write about it and explain it is this vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced for president. - Hillary Clinton

Suddenly, the Clintons, not Lewinsky, were the aggrieved parties. Never mind that Clinton’s actions were, at best, highly inappropriate and, at worst, a flagrant abuse of power. But those actions became obscured by the Republicans’ determination to make him pay, come hell or high water, for their own political purposes.

To this day, supporters of the Clintons routinely answer any criticism against them by maintaining it’s all merely part of a Republican strategy to discredit them. Of course, Republicans do want to discredit them – often with accusations so blatantly partisan that they border on the ridiculous to most objective observers.

But the flipside of the coin is this: The public has become numb to serious accusations against the Clintons that don’t stem from Republican sources at all. Is Bernie Sanders, a self-described socialist, really at tool of the Republican party? It’s hard to argue that. Yet his campaign’s charges that the Democratic National Committee sought to tilt the playing field in Clinton’s favor are hard to deny in the face of recently released emails.

What it comes down to is this: The public is so fatigued at wading through the he said/she said morass of accusation, denial, conspiracy theory and high dudgeon that they’ve thrown up their hands and stopped paying attention. They don’t want presidents to do … that … with White House interns, but they don’t want interminable impeachment hearings that distract Congress from addressing the issues facing the nation, either.

The Bengazi hearings proved the Republicans hadn’t learned their lesson from the impeachment debacle. The biggest winner was Hillary Clinton, who wound up looking like the victim of a ridiculously expensive partisan witch hunt.

He’s not a war hero. He (John McCain) was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured. - Donald Trump

Which brings us to Donald Trump, who, if anything, has upped the ante to unprecedented levels. He can insult a former POW (John McCain), claiming he wasn’t a real hero. He can falsely accuse Barack Obama of being a noncitizen. He can make crude and demeaning comments about women, do the same thing about immigrants and falsely claim that thousands of American Muslims cheered the collapse of the World Trade Center.

And nobody cares. They don’t care about his bankruptcies, Trump University or, really, anything else he does.

They don’t care because they’re tired of the blame game that’s been going on between the Clintons and Republicans for decades now. Some even call Trump “refreshing” because he “tells it like it is” and doesn’t lock everything up so tightly no one can tell what’s real and what’s not. They’re so sick of pervasive secrecy on the one hand and the endless investigations on the other that Trump seems like a breath of fresh air ... no matter what he actually says.

The irony is that the Clintons – along with congressional Republicans – paved the way for Trump’s success by making it possible to do or say virtually anything with impunity, because so many people stopped caring.

Just eight years ago, our presidential ballot presented us with the choice between a law professor and a war hero. Today, we have a matchup between a pair of candidates who behave very much like Huey Long and Richard Nixon, the two most unpopular candidates in modern history.

What I wouldn’t give for a wayward snowflake now.

Welcome to Political Babylon

We, the people of Political Babylon ...

I’m taking a timeout from talking about presidential candidates online. That’s not to say I’ll never do so, but I’m going to try to refrain – and here’s why.

It’s not that I don’t care about the election or have a preference. I have a strong preference and, yes, I do care. What I don’t care for is how this election has started to look like everything that’s wrong with organized religion.

It’s not the candidates but their supporters who have led me to this conclusion, just as it isn’t any deity that makes me wary of religious fervor. It’s the us-vs.-them fanaticism that drives people to turn against one another and feel as though it’s acceptable – even noble – to become backbiters, kitchen sink dumpers and even suicide bombers.

All for the sake of some cult of personality; for the privilege of following some Pied Piper.

The way people hurl abuse at one another in the name of one candidate or another is nauseating. It’s gotten to the point where one can’t make a reasoned observation about any candidate without one of his/her supporters shouting the political equivalent of “Blasphemy!” or “Heresy!” Facebook and Twitter have become venues for verbally re-enacting the Spanish Inquisition using less physical implements of torture: bullying, accusation, name-calling and the full gamut of fallacious arguments.

People defend “their” candidates like they’re Jesus, Gandhi and Martin Luther King all rolled into one.

They’re not.

Partisans and true believers go around throwing money into campaign war chests as though they're making offerings at some sacred temple. They refuse to risk upsetting any of the money-changers’ tables for fear one might topple over on their candidate and he/she will lose the advantage. The end justifies the means. Sure it does. Keep telling yourself that as your credibility disappears down the toilet. Do you even care?

Nearly everyone decries the tenor of the candidates’ rhetoric as unbecoming of a president. Well, look in the mirror. How's your rhetoric sounded lately? These politicians are putting on a show you’re paying to see, so kindly stop paying for it or stop complaining.

We the voters have personalized these candidates to such an extent we've adopted them as symbols of our own psychosis. In psychological terms, there's more projection going on here than you'll find at a 20-screen multiplex, and the image on the screen is just as two-dimensional.

No, I’m not joining the chorus of “let’s get along for the sake of party unity.” Party unity be damned. It’s just an excuse for people to act like one party or the other (or the two-party system) is “the one true church” and everyone else needs to be excommunicated. Whatever happened to voting your conscience? Whatever happened to staying civil for civility's sake? That concept seems to have disappeared down the toilet as well.

In the meantime, we’ve stopped talking about the issues. We’re so busy defending “our son of a bitch” because he’s our son of a bitch, it's as if we’ve forgotten why we started supporting him (or her) in the first place. This is what happens with personality cults: They become all about the person, while the issues are neglected and forgotten. The result is paralysis at best, demagoguery and despotism at worst. We get what we pay for with our 30-second attention spans.

Wonder why we tolerate people who flip-flop on the issues - who obfuscate, lie and spin everything under the sun? Then read that last paragraph again. We care more about party affiliation, name recognition and our own projections in this theater of the absurd than we do about the plot lines, the substance, the issues.

It’s what we want. It’s what we allow. If we don't have a Pied Piper, but we'll create one to follow. If we believe hard enough, these candidates will be everything we want them to be, right?

Be careful what you wish for, because the reflection in that mirror ain’t pretty. If we really want a candidate who looks just like our own psychoses, it won’t be long before we come to regret it. Then we’ll blame our savior: We’ll sacrifice him or her on the altar of our own denial, and we’ll start the ugly cycle all over again.

Welcome to Political Babylon. 

Bernie Sanders no slave to the McGovern Effect

Some Democrats are still scared of George McGovern. They look at Bernie Sanders, and they see someone “too far to the left” to win the general election.

That’s the conventional political wisdom. But keep in mind that this same “conventional wisdom” all but guaranteed that Hillary Clinton would be the nominee in 2008 and dismissed the notion of Donald Trump being anything but a flash in the pan this year.

Even Nate Silver’s analytics-driven FiveThirtyEight was flat wrong (along with a lot of other pundits) in predicting that Clinton would win this year’s Michigan primary handily – probably the most badly bungled prediction since “Dewey defeats Truman.”

Political punditry isn’t exact, and it’s not a science.

Sometimes, it’s nothing more than spin: advocacy disguised as analysis.

Other times, the pundits are so full of themselves they believe their own “infallibility” hype. They get cocky, and they get it wrong.

And often, they’re wrong about the future because they’re wrong about the past. Certain assumptions are just repeated ad nauseam on cable TV until they become a sort of political gospel.

This is where the McGovern Effect comes in.

Ever since the Democrats nominated “peace candidate” George McGovern in 1972 – only to watch Tricky Dick Nixon annihilate him in the General Election – they’ve been deathly afraid of history repeating itself.

Nominate someone too far to the left, and it’ll be another massacre. So the conventional wisdom says. Just look at liberal Mike Dukakis, who failed to work any Massachusetts miracles against George Bush I.

It’s the gospel truth.

And because a lot Democrats today have accepted that gospel, they look at Bernie Sanders and see George McGovern staring back at them. They look in the other direction, at Hillary Clinton, and they see a last name that’s shared by a relatively moderate two-term Democratic president.

No brainer, right?

Go with what works.

Except they’re so worried about history repeating itself that they’re ignoring a more recent, more telling precedent. All they have to do is look across the aisle.

Reagan's revolution

Four years after McGovern lost in that landslide, a Republican challenged the incumbent president from the right and nearly beat him. That challenger was, of course, Ronald Reagan – who scared establishment Republicans out of their wits. He was too conservative, they thought. They remembered what had happened to Barry Goldwater in ’64 when he won the nomination from the far right: LBJ had destroyed him in the general election, just as Nixon later buried McGovern.

The GOP establishment breathed a sigh of relief when they saw incumbent Gerald Ford hang on by the skin of his teeth to defeat Reagan … only to watch him lose to Jimmy Carter in the general election.

We all know what happened four years later: Reagan won the nomination on his second try and defeated Carter for the presidency.

Historically speaking, Sanders resembles Reagan a lot more than he does McGovern. Or Goldwater. Or Dukakis.

For one thing, like Reagan, he’s generating the kind of excitement his primary opponent can’t match. Hillary Clinton is about as exciting as Gerald Ford was – without the clumsiness but with a whole lot more political baggage. Would Reagan have carried enough enthusiasm into the general election to beat Carter in ’76? We’ll never know. But we do know he beat him four years later.

By then, Ford was out of politics and Carter was a wounded president, crippled by a sluggish economy and the Iran hostage crisis.

That made him vulnerable – in much the same way the Republicans are vulnerable this year. Will the Republican nominee be Donald Trump or Ted Cruz? It hardly matters. In either case, the Democrats will face someone with the kind of anemic approval ratings that resemble Carter’s a lot more than Nixon’s.

The opposition

This is where the McGovern Effect breaks down even more.

In Nixon, McGovern faced an incumbent who was highly popular at the time among everyone except the far left. Naturally, the far left voted for McGovern, and everyone else chose Nixon.

The same held true for Goldwater and Dukakis, both of whom were victims of strong opposition far more than their own ideology. Goldwater was up against the heir to a charismatic president whose death was still being mourned a year after his assassination. And Dukakis’ opponent, the first George Bush, was Reagan’s chosen successor. Kennedy and Reagan: the two most iconic presidents of the second half of the 20th century.

Somehow, the names Trump and Cruz just don’t have the same gravitas.

On top of this, Sanders also has an advantage in social media that McGovern could never have conceived of.

Does this mean Sanders’ nascent revolution is destined to repeat the Reagan revolution’s electoral success?

I’m not going there.

What I will say is that anyone who dismisses Sanders as a viable Democratic candidate based on the McGovern Effect is ignoring some powerful evidence that points in the opposite direction.

“Destiny” and “inevitability” are the language of pundits who crow about their predictions and then end up eating it. The crow, that is.

A sparrow might just tell another story.

We’ll have to wait and see.

Standing up to political bullies

Vote for me. Or else.

I'm sure this is not what Theodore Roosevelt had in mind when he coined the term “bully pulpit” in reference to the presidency.

These days, presidential candidates seem hell bent on trying to bully one another – and the voters – into submission with all the gusto of an MMA athlete (minus the peak conditioning and the sense of honorable combat). They talk over one another relentlessly on the debate stage, conduct push polls, call one another names and make implicit threats.

Republican candidate Marco Rubio questions Donald Trump’s penis size, and Trump responds by labeling him “Little Marco.” Others are dismissed as stupid, weak, pathetic or wacko. Trump speaks in sweeping generalizations, declaring that Islam “hates” America and referring to Mexican immigrants as rapists. This isn’t just bigotry, it’s bullying. And Trump - whose most famous quote is, "You're fired!" - isn’t shy about doing it.

He refused to disavow an endorsement by a former leader of the KKK, a racist group that virtually epitomizes violent bullying, eventually blaming his response on a bad earpiece. A campaign rally in Chicago turned violent when fistfights broke out between his supporters and protesters. Trump’s response? Pin the blame on the protesters, whom he labeled as “thugs.”

He also asked supporters at a rally to raise their right hands and repeat a pledge to vote for him on Election Day “no matter what,” then warned them that “bad things happen if you don’t live up to what you just did.”

Intimidation and manipulation

Intimidation is the bully’s stock-in-trade. Candidates often use it in the context of a political protection racket, playing on the public’s fears by warning of a perceived threat, then casting themselves in the role as guardian or savior. Trump did precisely this when he denigrated immigrants and vowed to build a wall to “protect” us from them. But his implicit threat about “bad things” happening to supporters who don’t live up to their pledge takes intimidation to a whole new level.

Vote for me. Or else.

Trump may be the worst, but he’s far from the only bully on the block. His main rival for the GOP nomination, Ted Cruz, sent out an official-looking mailer to Iowa voters labeled VOTING VIOLATION. “Your individual voting history as well as your neighbors’ are public record,” it warned, adding that “a follow-up notice may be issued following Monday’s caucuses.”

So much for the secret ballot. Big Brother Ted is watching you.

And if you think Republican bullies are the only ones in the schoolyard, think again. A piece by Nolan Dalla describes how a caller sought to bully him into voting for Clinton by using a so-called push poll. Such phone calls seek to “push” citizens into voting for one candidate by asking questions that contain negative (and sometimes false) information about his or her opponent.

In this case, the caller labeled Clinton’s rival, Bernie Sanders, “divisive” and declared that he had “blocked” gun-control and immigration-reform legislation (ignoring the fact that no single representative in Congress can “block” anything by himself).

I haven’t been push polled, but I have encountered Clinton supporters who don’t hesitate in attempting to bully others. Some have gone so far as to accuse those who don’t support her of misogyny. (My standard response: Did you support Sarah Palin for vice president in 2008? If not, does that make you a misogynist?)

Clinton herself even tried to bully Sanders on the debate stage by interrupting him – and he had the temerity to stand up to her by saying, “Excuse me, I’m talking,” her campaign responded with an email criticizing his “tone.”

Remember: She interrupted him.

That’s another typical tactic of a bully: accusing the victim. Interrupting someone is universally considered rude, yet the Clinton campaign tried to depict Sanders as the villain because he stood up to her.

Personal experience

Why does any of this matter to me? Because it hits close to home. I was bullied relentlessly in junior high school, and I learned how to recognize it. It’s ugly.

Even when candidates aren’t acting like bullies themselves, they often subject themselves to lobbyists and their sponsors, who practice another form of bullying: offering financial support to those they feel will support their causes. Or they count on their most passionate supporters to act as unacknowledged surrogates who’ll attempt to prod, harass or shame people into voting for them.

Do you want me to support one bully because the other one is worse? That’s not on even on my radar screen anymore. Been there, done that. The idea of being a pawn on a power struggle between two bullies doesn’t appeal to me. I value myself enough not to put myself in that position again, and I suspect plenty of other voters do, too, which is why many of them so often decide to stay home on Election Day or vote for third-party candidates.

I refuse to settle for a nation where bullying is the status quo, where the “art of the deal” is more important than public service, where push polling and influence peddling are par for the course, where I’m pressured to support one candidate out of fear the other option will be worse.

You can’t stop bullies until you stand up and declare, “I will no longer accept this.”

The ends don’t justify the means, and the lesser of two evils isn't good enough. It never was.       

• • •

Incidentally, Theodore Roosevelt, whom I mentioned at the beginning of this article, ran the most successful third-party campaign in the modern U.S. history, winning more than 4 million votes to finish second, ahead of the Republican candidate.

His attitude toward bullying indicates he wouldn't have thought much of today's candidates. "Ridicule is one of the favorite weapons of wickednes," he once said and, on another occasion, "Politeness (is) a sign of dignity, not subservience."

About that phrase he coined: “bully pulpit” … for the record, he used “bully” the way it’s used the in the expression “bully for you” – as a synonym for fantastic, wonderful or jolly good.

None of which, I hasten to add, applies to the state of political discourse in these United States, circa 2016.

 

What if we could vote "no" on candidates?

I want to vote "no" this election.

Not “none of the above.” This is different: I want to be able to actually vote against candidates I don’t like.

The cold, hard truth is there are a lot more politicians I don’t want elected than candidates I can get excited about, and I’m guessing you might feel the same way.

Sure, we can put photos of them dartboards and engage in some friendly target practice, and we can squawk about them on social media. But what if we had an actual, tangible way to express our displeasure — not by voting for some other candidate we might consider the lesser of two or more evils, but by casting a vote directly against that vile carpetbagger, commie or corporate crony we so despise?

Think of the satisfaction! We bemoan the lack of voter participation, yet just imagine how many more people might come to the polls to bury Caesar (under a mountain of “you suck!” chads) than to praise him.

ONE PERSON, TWO VOTES?

Pollsters routinely measure both favorable and unfavorable ratings for candidates. Why shouldn’t we be allowed to express those opinions at the ballot box?

What if voters got to vote twice: Once for the candidate they like, and once for the candidate they wouldn’t want to see in office before hell freezes over or a Led Zeppelin reunion tour — whichever comes second. (If I were a betting man, I’d put money on permafrost in hell over “Stairway to Heaven.”) Each vote would count equally, so you’d subtract the nays from the ayes to arrive at a net score. Imagine if the winner got 3 net votes instead of 3,000 or 3 million. We wouldn’t hear much talk of a mandate then!

Well, maybe we would. These are politicians we’re talking about.

If we wanted things to get even crazier, we could treat candidates like ballot propositions and vote "yes" or "no" on every one of them!

One complication: We’d have to change “one man, one vote” to “one man, two votes.”

So, as an alternative, we could retain the single vote — but give voters the choice of whether to vote for one candidate or against another?

RELEVANT AGAIN

Either way, the system would likely be a boon to two kinds of politician: moderates (aka centrists) and third-party candidates.

With radicals and true believers on both sides voting against their opposite numbers, the vast American center that’s often drowned out by all the shouting from the extremes might be able to gain a little clout by staying quiet. Third-party candidates would benefit, too, from flying under the radar (which they’re often very good at, despite their aspirations to the contrary.) A modest number of positive votes coupled with almost no negatives might just be enough to win it.

Would such a system result in more positive campaigning, because fewer candidates would want to risk getting too many “no” votes? Or would it give rise to even more vicious smear campaigns against the candidate viewed as the greatest threat?

Those are interesting questions.

CONSEQUENCES

Either way, candidates would have to think even more strategically than they do now, which could be even more fun to watch for political rubberneckers than it is now. We might as well post a traffic sign that reads “Warning: political pileup ahead.” For those who view politics as blood sport, this would be more fun than a trip to the Roman Colosseum in its heyday.

We voters would have to cogitate a little more, too. Do we vote for the candidate we like most or against the candidate we fear most? Or do we vote against someone else because that would be the biggest help to our favored candidate or party?

Delicious, isn’t it? There are all sorts of permutations and possible scenarios to consider.

I’ll leave you to consider the possibilities … and to wonder if this is a serious proposal or whether it’s all just tongue in cheek.

Sorry, but I’m not going to tell you. Instead, I’ll leave you with the same piece of advice that’s given to voters every time they enter the voting booth: You decide.