Trump's secret weapon: The marginalized American worker

Hillary Clinton’s mistake was not taking to heart the phrase that defined her husband's success in 1992: “It’s the economy, stupid.” That was a long time ago, but it’s not as though she hadn’t been reminded of that reality since then – by her opponent in the primaries, Bernie Sanders.

She didn’t listen to the fears and frustrations that working-class Americans were expressing through Sanders, so voters in the general election made her listen. By voting for Donald Trump.

Much has been made about James Comey's email letter, about questions concerning Clinton’s honesty and trustworthiness, about the “baggage” she brought to the race. She was, without question, a deeply flawed candidate with very low approval ratings. But to blame any of these factors for her defeat would be to miss the real message sent by voters who elected Trump.

Don’t forget: Trump’s approval ratings were even lower, and a majority of voters considered him poorly qualified to be president. It wasn’t as though they were ignorant of this and wanted to vote for arrogant narcissist who bragged about groping women and insulted veterans, disabled people and religious and ethnic minorities. Some of them, no doubt, did, and yes, that’s scary. These are the same people who are defacing property with Nazi and anti-immigrant graffiti in the election’s aftermath.

But I’m willing to bet the vast majority of Trump voters didn’t support him because of these views, but in spite of them. Sure, some closet racists have been emboldened by his victory. But I simply won’t believe that half the people in this country are a bunch of bigots with a secret desire to perpetrate violence on anyone who’s different.

A marginalized working class

It isn’t as though the Republican Party machine wanted Trump. They wanted someone who would continue to ignore the working class and kowtow to corporate interests (their initial choice, you’ll recall, was Jeb Bush).  Whether Trump’s campaign rhetoric about improving the lives of the working class was sincere or merely lip-service to America’s blue-collar workers remains to be seen. The proof will be in the pudding. Like most critical thinkers, I’ll believe it when I see it.

But the point is, whether it was sincere or a bunch of B.S., it worked. The Democratic Party apparatus threw its working-class base under the bus by ignoring Sanders’ critiques in the primaries and skewing the nominating process against him, in favor of Clinton. Sanders did such a good job of highlighting their concerns – based on decades of consistently doing so – that by the time Clinton agreed to adopt some of his ideas as her platform, it came across as a halfhearted, politically motivated case of “me too.”

That’s where the trust issues hurt her most. A lot of people simply didn’t believe she was sincere about helping the working class and ignored her ideas to do so – many of them lifted from Sanders’ campaign – because they seemed like just another case of political expediency. Clinton’s (and the Democrats’) credibility on this issue was so low that vast numbers of voters preferred a man from the billionaire class who has exploited his own workers in the past and run a series of apparent con games, such as Trump University.

That’s how low Clinton’s credibility was, because again, it isn’t as though voters didn’t know these things about Trump. It isn’t as though they approved of them. It’s just that they mattered a lot less than the hope, even a faint one, that Trump might actually improve their situation. Clinton failed to inspire such hope and represented the status quo – in part because of her status as the “anointed” establishment candidate and in part because of her record.

Sanders’ endorsement of her held little weight, because it was perceived as “what was expected” politically and more an attempt to stop Trump than a full-throated advocacy for Clinton. The damage had already been done in the primaries and long before that.

Trump makes the sale

The worst thing the Democratic Party leadership did in its nominating process was to actively promote Clinton as its candidate before she got the nomination. Not only did this seem to dismiss Sanders’ concerns about the working class – which Trump later appropriated – it also lent credence to Trump’s later claims that the system was “rigged.” Never mind that a general election is far different (and infinitely harder to control) than a primary election. The impression was there, and Trump exploited it.

He saw an opportunity and seized it.

It’s true that some working-class people are redneck racists. But most of them are just hard-working folks who got tired of going unrepresented by a Republican Party that long ago sold out to corporate greed and a Democratic Party that first stopped listening, then had the temerity to shush their spokesman within the party, Sanders.

Had either party listened to working Americans, we wouldn’t have Trump. Both parties were, and probably still are, tone-deaf to the concerns of the working class. They’re caught up in elitism, ideologies and feeling entitled to the support of people they’ve abandoned. This is what the voters told them by repudiating every establishment candidate in this election cycle.

If you’ve read my earlier entries, you know my opinions of Donald Trump; there’s no need to rehash them here, because they’re not the point. The point is that millions of Americans felt ignored, dismissed and taken for granted by the two political parties. They’re not just a “basket of deplorables,” as Clinton called them, or Mitt Romney’s 47 percent who don’t matter. They’re people with real concerns that the two major parties have failed to address.

This kind of thing has happened before. There have been populist movements under the likes of Huey Long, William Jennings Bryan, Ross Perot and even Teddy Roosevelt – but none of them (not even Roosevelt) won the presidency as populist candidates.

Trump did. That’s not an endorsement on Trump’s character or moral fiber, it’s an indication that Americans today are more fed up with the political establishment than ever before. They got mad as hell, and they weren’t going to take it anymore. That’s why Trump won.

That’s where we’re sitting where we are today: because it really is the economy, stupid. 

Trump’s playbook: Hail Marys and forfeits

On Nov. 23, 1984, a young quarterback from Boston College threw a pass that will be forever engrained in the minds of college football fans.

Trailing by four points and down to his last play, Doug Flutie dropped back to pass, scrambled around, and heaved a Hail Mary pass from his own 37-yard line. Flutie was small for a quarterback – just 5 feet, 9 inches – and he had already thrown the ball 45 times during the game. Throwing into a 30 mph wind, there was no way he could get the pass all the way to the University of Miami’s end zone.

Or so Miami’s defensive backs thought: Three of them moved up in front of the goal line, positioning themselves to intercept Flutie’s pass … which instead sailed over their heads and into the waiting arms of Boston College receiver Gerard Phelan.

The touchdown gave Boston College a 47-45 win on national television, and Flutie went on to win the Heisman Trophy, presented each year to the best player in college football.

After Flutie graduated, he had a chance to sign a contract with the Los Angeles Rams of the NFL, but he chose a different course. There was, at the time, a second professional football league: the United States Football League (USFL), which played its games in the spring, and the man who owned that league’s New Jersey Generals franchise was offering Flutie an $8.3 million contract.

That man was real estate tycoon Donald Trump – the same man who would win the Republican nomination for president of the United States in 2016. He was relatively unknown then, outside of the Eastern Seaboard, and ownership of the Generals catapulted him to national prominence.

Flutie’s folly?

Why did he sign Flutie? Despite his college success, pro scouts tend to shy away from quarterbacks shorter than about 6-foot-2. They have a harder time seeing over the line, and they often have to scramble around a lot – as Flutie did on that Hail Mary play – to get a good look downfield. Seattle’s Russell Wilson, who’s 2 inches taller than Flutie, has been one of the few quarterbacks shorter than 6 feet tall to have success as a pro.)

The Generals’ coach at the time, Walt Michaels, wanted to draft Randall Cunningham, an African-American quarterback out of UNLV who stood 6-3 and was a better quarterback than the scrambling Flutie. He would go on to throw for 207 touchdowns and run for 35 more, winning the Most Valuable Player award twice in a 16-year NFL career.

Flutie, who wound up throwing more interceptions than touchdown passes in just one season for the Generals, only played more than seven games in an NFL season five times, although he did put up some big numbers during eight seasons in the Canadian Football League.

But Flutie had what Trump was looking for (and Cunningham lacked). He had golden-boy looks – think Tom Cruise or Steve Garvey – a marketable name and a reputation for doing the impossible: three things Trump saw in himself. And if you get Donald Trump to look in a mirror, you’ve got his attention, just as surely as if he were the evil queen from “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.”

Trump’s own golden boy looks have faded to orange since then, but he’s defined himself based on those other two qualities he shared with Flutie back in 1984. He’s put his name on everything from steaks to casinos, and he has repeatedly tried to do the impossible.

Far more often than not, he’s failed.

Six bankruptcies related to his resorts and casinos, and a portfolio littered with bad ideas and shuttered businesses. Trump Airlines. Trump casinos. Trump Magazine. Trump Mortgages. Trump University. Trump Vodka. Trump the Game.

Using the USFL

And then there was the USFL. The league had been founded in 1983 on a business model geared toward meeting a demand for football during the spring, after the NFL had completed its season, and using a salary cap to operate on a tighter budget. It made some sense: Don’t go head to head with the big boys, who have more money, an established reputation and a huge fan base. Instead, build your own brand in a different niche.

But some of the league’s owners soon abandoned the league’s frugal model in a race for big-name players, signing them to outsized “personal services” contracts as a way around the salary cap. They paid the price for opening up their wallets when revenues failed to keep pace with salary demands.

About the same time Flutie was making a splash during his senior year at Boston College, Trump was urging USFL owners to abandon the other major component of their business plan and throw a Hail Mary pass of their own by ditching the spring-season format and going head-to-head with the NFL in the fall.

With the red ink already rising on their ledgers, the league was hardly in a position to mount a realistic challenge to the sport’s burgeoning behemoth, so Trump hatched a plan to sue the NFL under U.S. antitrust laws, claiming it was acting as a monopoly.

A jury did indeed find in favor of the USFL, but it also found that the league had switched to a fall schedule, not in order to save itself, but to force a merger with the NFL. The result? The jury awarded the USFL just $1 in damages (trebled to $3 under rules applied to antitrust lawsuits), effectively putting the league – and Trump’s team – out of business.

His Hail Mary had fallen flat. As with his bankruptcies, he had no choice but to forfeit the game.

Shifting the blame

Trump, however, blamed the league’s other owners, writing in The Art of the Deal, “If there was a single key miscalculation I made with the USFL, it was evaluating the strength of my fellow owners.”

Trump’s handling of the USFL became the template for his strategy in business and in life: Promise great things, throw a Hail Mary pass, and hope it works. Then, when it falls incomplete and the clock runs out, blame the referee. Or the other team. Or your fans. Or anybody, except yourself for taking such an outrageous risk in the first place.

No matter how many times we might enjoy watching replays of Doug Flutie throwing that magical pass against Miami, he only did it once. Trump has had successes, but with the exception of TV’s “The Apprentice,” they’ve all been in a single arena: real estate – an industry in which he’s also seen plenty of failure even though his father paved the way for him with both capital and presumed know-how.

Trump knows something about real estate. But he doesn’t know anything about vodka, or universities, or airlines, or football.

Or governing.

The thrill of the hunt

When he entered the 2016 presidential race, Trump was just launching another Hail Mary pass in a game he knows nothing about. All that’s important to him is that it’s a game. “It’s all about the hunt,” he was quoted as saying in Timothy O’Brien’s 2005 book TrumpNation, “and once you get it, it loses some of its energy. I think competitive, successful men feel that way about women.”

It there’s a clearer way of saying that women are a piece of meat without coming right out and using those words, I don’t know what it is.

The quote not only speaks volumes about Trump’s predatory attitude toward women, as reflected in the 2005 tape from Access Hollywood that sent his presidential campaign floundering, it says something even bigger about his attitude toward life. It’s not just women who are trophies; it’s everything. When Trump says he loves women, he’s not lying; he just “loves” them in the same way Teddy Roosevelt loved bagging a lion, an elephant or a black rhino. He “loves” business associates and voters the same way. No wonder he has so few close friends.

It’s noteworthy that his sons have taken after him in the literal sense, becoming big-game hunters.

Trump’s obsession with the hunt explains why he starts ventures that quickly fail: He has neither the patience nor the inclination to see them through to the end, whether they be a marriage, an investment in a football team or an airline. He loses interest, and he’s on to the next thing. He’s like Alexander the Great or Genghis Khan: so consumed with conquest that he undermines any opportunity for lasting success, because he doesn’t really care about it.

Hail Mary presidency

Other than real estate and “The Apprentice,” he’s seldom stuck with anything long enough to make it work. Now imagine that attitude applied to the presidency. If he were to be elected and follow his familiar pattern, he would quickly lose interest and turn his attention to other things … then blame others for his – and the nation’s – failures, wash his hands of the whole mess and go on to his next big promise. His next Hail Mary.

Or maybe he’d use the office of the presidency as the platform to launch his next campaign for conquest, whether it be a war, an overhaul of the Constitution, an assault on civil liberties or his already-stated objective of building a $12 billion wall … and making Mexico pay for it. Sometimes, it’s hard to tell whether his last name is really Trump or Quixote.

But it doesn’t matter how outlandish his goals seem or how impossible. Remember, he’s all about throwing up Hail Marys to prove he can do the impossible. And this penchant is precisely what makes him so dangerous: It actually behooves him, for the sake of his ego, to create crises so he can set the stage for the adrenalin rush he gets if he manages to solve them. The more desperate the situation looks, the better.

Forget me not

This helps explain why Trump isn’t about keeping promises or taking responsibility for his failures. He famously never apologizes, because he’d be doing it all the time – and because he’s too busy looking in the mirror and talking about how wonderful he is.

And he’s so convinced of it, people believe him.

We still remember Doug Flutie, even though he never won a Super Bowl and spent much of his NFL career as a backup, because he threw that crazy pass against Miami and it worked.

“Without the Hail Mary pass, I think I could have been very easily forgotten,” Flutie would say later.

If we watch that pass over and over again and ignore his NFL career, we might come to believe that Flutie was the best quarterback ever to play the game. And if we listen to Donald Trump tell us he can “make America great again” often enough, we might believe that, too.

That’s what he’s counting on. And once we accept his proposal, the hunt will be over. We’ll be just another trophy for his wall – mounted, stuffed and displayed for all to see. Except no one will be looking at us anymore, because Trump demands that everyone look at him. We’ll be forgotten on the sidelines of history, just like the old New Jersey Generals, while Trump is off on the prowl, looking for his next conquest.

In any hunt, you have to have a quarry. We’re it. And if Trump bags us, we might as well be dead meat.

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.

The price of violence — and our only alternative

Guns don’t solve problems. People do. Or we can when we look past our anger, our fear, our prejudice.

Fists don’t solve problems, either. Neither do knives, threats or bullying. This should all seem so very obvious, but we’re losing track of the obvious in a maze of blame and accusation that we’ll never escape if we don’t reverse course soon.

We want easy solutions that aren’t solutions at all. Most often, they only make the problems worse.

Afraid of someone? Shoot him. Easy. Problem eliminated. Right? Except now, all of that person’s friends view you as the problem and probably want to eliminate you. They have guns, too. They can get those easily enough. But more importantly, they have something you gave them: a reason to hate you.

To solve a problem, we must first understand it. But that’s too much work; we want the easy way out. Just exterminate it – or the people we believe caused it – and the repercussions be damned. Understanding is hard because it requires that we educate ourselves, that we try to see things from other people’s perspective even though we may not have experienced their pain, their challenges, their hardships.

They may even tell us, “You can’t understand. You haven’t been what we’ve been through.” But that doesn’t excuse us from trying. At best, we’ll surprise them. At worst, we’ll learn something that will increase our level of knowledge – and more knowledge is always better than less. We won’t be able to solve the problem right away, but we’ll be closer.

If we pull the trigger or dismiss another person’s pain, we’ll be further away. We’ll be promoting the opposite of knowledge, which is ignorance, because those we’ve silenced will never be able to help us understand. Those whose pain we’ve dismissed feel as though they haven’t been heard. And they’ll not only stop trying to help us understand, they’ll stop trying to understand us. And then where will we be? On opposite ends of an armed standoff, trying to blow each other’s brains out rather than using those brains as the best weapons we have against the fear and hurt that divide us.

The alternative

There is another way, if we have the courage and the patience to pursue it.

It’s hard.

When we try to understand, things get complicated, and we don’t like complicated. It’s frustrating dealing with problems you can’t solve right away, with people who don’t trust you, with bureaucracies, playing fields that are anything but level and people who are hell-bent on protecting – and exploiting – their advantages. There’s prejudice and there’s bitterness. But none of that goes away by pulling a trigger or responding with some shallow platitude and going on our merry way.

People who are hurting are hurting for a reason. We can try to shield our tender sensibilities from the hurt by placing a bandage over our own eyes, but that doesn’t make the hurt go away. It only sends a message to those who have been hurt that we don’t care.

The unheard scream, “We matter!” not because they believe others matter less, but because they feel their pain is being ignored or dismissed as unimportant.

Yes, everyone matters. But when you’re hurting and it seems like no one cares, you don’t feel like you do. Then you have two choices. You can surrender to the judgment of others and believe that you really are unimportant. Or you can reject that and say, “I do matter.” And you can take that self-worth and use it as motivation to speak a little louder, try a little harder to be heard. Until someone starts to listen, tries to understand and maybe even helps you change things for the better. Or at least stops hurting you. At least that.

Those who haven’t been heard and those who don’t want to hear have this in common: They lash out. The only way to stop this is to start hearing one another. Hearing leads to understanding, which, in time, can lead to trust.

Building trust is, by its nature, a long and tortuous process that can, tragically, be upended by the frustration and impatience that leads us to pull triggers, call each other names and stop listening. When we do, we put everything right back at square one. Because that’s the reality of this: Not only does the “quick fix” never fix anything, it destroys the entire process of seeking understanding and, ultimately, of building trust.

And it destroys lives along the way.

We have to stop shooting people. But more than that, we must stop thinking we can eliminate problems we don’t understand by invoking brute force or wishing them away. By calling names or building walls. The only way to achieve our goals is by building understanding that leads, ultimately, to trust. That’s hard work; there will be miscommunication and hurt feelings along the way. But obstacles and detours shouldn’t deter us from keeping to the path.

There are no shortcuts.

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.