Tag Archives: Bernie Sanders

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Election 2016: Wherever You Go, There You Are

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English: ‘Down Goes McGinty’, This cartoon par...
English: ‘Down Goes McGinty’, This cartoon parodies a popular comic song about a foolish Irishman who undergoes a series of mishaps culminating in a fall into the sea, where he dies. McGinty here is Democratic presidential nominee of 1900, William Jennings Bryan (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Six months ago, who would have bet on Donald Trump as the presumptive GOP presidential nominee, even given juicy odds? But here we are.

Who would have predicted the last two Republican presidents, the immediate past GOP presidential nominee, and the Republican Speaker of the House declining even lukewarm endorsements for their party’s horse? Yet that’s what’s happening.

Over on the Democratic side, who expected Bernie Sanders to erase Hillary Clinton’s 50-point leads and go toe to toe with her — or for that matter to win a single primary other than perhaps his home state of Vermont’s? Well, guess what?

And then there’s Clinton herself, not just continuing to run but continuing to win. This, even as she faces possible compelled deposition relating to her use of, and an ongoing FBI criminal investigation into mishandling of classified information via, a non-secure, privately owned mail server — a server allegedly hacked by, probably among others, now-incarcerated Romanian hacker Marcel Lehel Lazar, aka “Guccifer.” A confidential source that I just invented tells me Clinton shot a man in Reno just to watch him die. I’m skeptical. But not as skeptical as I would have been a year ago.

Over in third party territory where I live, some activists are convinced that all this  #NeverTrump #FeelTheBern #WhichHillary stuff portends a breakout year for the Libertarians or the Greens. Again, I’m skeptical. Again, not as skeptical now as last Christmas.

There’s a major crackup/realignment going on in American politics, from the parties’ rank-and-file all the way up to leadership. The nation’s transpartisan ruling class is in the throes of something approaching civil war. Maybe, hopefully not,  one as dangerous as the crackup preceding the REAL Civil War.

The pundits, myself included, have been churning out novel theories to make sense of all this for as long as it’s been going on. Each theory enjoys a half-life of a week or so as it decays into the next. Those of us who arrogate to ourselves the job of explaining stuff to the rest of you are at least as lost at sea as you are. Not, as you’re no doubt noticing, that it shuts any of us up.

It’s going to be a long six months between now and the election. Maybe at the end of it we’ll have some kind of epiphany or valuable takeaway to show for it. But I wouldn’t bet on that either.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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Bernie Sanders Won’t Drop Out. Here’s Why.

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Bernie Sanders (I-VT)
US Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Bernie Sanders says he’s taking the Democratic presidential nomination contest all the way to the party’s national convention in Philadelphia at the end of July. Believe it.

With increasing intensity after each primary or caucus he loses — and for that matter after each primary or caucus he wins — party big-wigs call on him to concede the race and get out of Hillary Clinton’s way. Politico‘s informal April survey of anonymous Democratic “insiders” has nearly 90% wanting Sanders out no later than the DC primary in mid-June and only 10% urging him to hold out to the bitter end.

Why isn’t he listening to the 90%? As a Florida Democrat told Politico, “[t]here is no path, and there is no math.” Actually there are at least four paths.

Path #1: Clinton’s health fails in a very big and very public way. She’s had multiple public fainting spells since 2005, including one resulting in a broken elbow in 2009. In 2012, she suffered a concussion and was hospitalized with cerebral venous thrombosis, a life-threatening blood clot condition. Her campaign health statement acknowledges these problems and throws in hypothyroidism to boot, although characterizing the 67-year-old as enjoying “excellent” health.

Path #2:  Clinton is indicted in, or otherwise dragged down over, the “Servergate” affair, in which she appears to have illegally mishandled classified information while Secretary of State.

Path #3: Clinton comes to big legal or political grief over apparent connections between large donations to her family’s foundation on one hand and her actions as Secretary of State on the other. For example, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia donated $10 million to the Clinton Foundation and Boeing donated $900,000. Later, Secretary Clinton cleared a $29 billion arms deal involving the two parties. You can see how that kind of thing looks. There may be some “there” there.

Path #4: The texts of Clinton’s Wall Street speeches, for which she received millions of dollars in honoraria, are leaked. Clinton’s refusal to release those texts tells us that their release would be politically damaging. Everything comes to light sooner or later. If it’s sooner — that is, before July —  we may find out how just how damaging.

Any of these four scenarios might result in Hillary Clinton’s ignominious withdrawal from the presidential race and release of her delegates, followed by the party’s scramble for an alternative nominee. If Bernie Sanders doesn’t quit, he becomes the odds-on favorite for the job.

So he won’t quit. And now you know why.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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Election 2016: The X-Files/Napoleon Dynamite Factor

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As we come around what may be the final curve of the 2016 presidential election, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton look positioned to be the two horses who break free of the pack and make a neck-and-neck run down the final straightaway toward 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. That pairing and the likely outcome tell us some interesting things about America’s voters and their chosen candidates.

Specifically, it tells us that many voters are the political equivalents of Fox Mulder and Dana Scully from Fox’s long-time fan favorite show The X-Files: They want to believe.

Believe in what? Well, that varies.

Trump’s supporters want to believe that, working with him, they can “make America great again.” Nobody seems to really know how that might come about, except that it will involve getting Mexico to pay for a wall. But not to worry: It will be yuuuuge. It will be very nice. They’ll like it a lot, winning so much that they get bored with winning. They want so intensely to believe this that, as Trump himself says, he “could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.” They don’t care whether or not he’s a “conservative” or about his actual policy positions. They don’t even demand that he make any sense from day to day.

Clinton’s supporters want to believe not only that she can win, but that she’s the only Democrat who can. They want so intensely to believe this that they’re willing to ignore her mediocre past electoral record, her dismal performances in elected and appointed office, her yuuuuge (like Trump’s) public disapproval numbers, the significant chance that she’ll be indicted over her mishandling of classified information, and the fact that she’s only been a “progressive” for about a minute, because it came to her attention that that’s what people like about Bernie Sanders.

If the voters resemble Mulder and Scully, the candidates remind me of the candidates in Napoleon Dynamite: Summer Wheatley, the “popular” student the regular kids actually love to hate but apathetically assume will win the student body presidency in a walk, and Pedro Sanchez, the upstart new guy who promises that if his fellow students vote for him “all of your wildest dreams will come true.”

I love The X-Files. I enjoyed Napoleon Dynamite.  But I’m not sure I can take eight more months of watching e-run marathons. Can you?

Maybe it’s time for a crisis of political faith. Maybe it’s time to crank up Netflix and find a new show to follow or a new movie to watch. So, two recommendations:

First, pull up Doug Stanhope’s comedy special Beer Hall Putsch on Netflix.

Second, if you must vote, vote Libertarian.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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