A Lot Unsaid in Still Young Campaign
by paradox
It was with a rather strange, dark wary amusement to read that with poll after relentless poll showing Trump in a commanding lead the GOP Party intelligentsia is finally having to face and say the unthinkable: the 2016 Republican nominee for President will be the racist, xenophobic, ignorant buffoon Donald Trump.
Amusement from the easy victory for Clinton or Sanders would so casually stomp on him, but an acute wariness that such a dangerous person could come so close to the Presidency nonetheless. Our cher Republican cousins have gone bonkers, and as we currently see in House dis-function it significantly harms the country.
Republicans are not alone in leaving uncomfortable or embarrassing truths unsaid, for all the months of campaigning it’s remarkable in some ways that two massively yuuuge issues in the Democratic primary are just ignored: how to deal with a flipped-out GOP House in 2017, and what the national security stance of the United States will be moving forward, will we be still insanely at war in multiple Middle East theatres with an unbelievable $580 billion annual DOD budget?
Perhaps if the New York Times had stopped sniffing Trey Gowdy committee’s chair for any email story they could pass along they’d ask, but at least Paul Waldman of the Washington Post enquired after one part, how are Clinton or Sanders going to handle a fiercely recalcitrant, obstinately stupid GOP House when there’s a country to run?
Badly or not at all, of course, one of the reasons this issue is presently ignored is that of course a GOP House is going to block everything a Democratic President will attempt in 2017, no politician runs a campaign that says vote for me, I won’t be able to pass anything!
Still, it’s an obvious issue and one that Clinton and Sanders will have to address, what’s your 2016 House strategy? Waldman starts from the given point that the House is irrevocably lost, but that’s a bad political and strategic mistake. Every effort should be made to include the House in the national campaign, and if the unsurprising result comes back in a loss keep the campaign moving for 2018 and re-take the House then.
The Presidency and the country can’t move forward with the House completely off the deep end, it’s dishonest to campaign about all this stuff to get done and not acknowledge this basic truth. Throwing up hands in futile defeat won’t work either, Sanders and Clinton owe the country and the Party a strategy on how to handle this.
Huh, if one thinks a Democratic President approaches a GOP nutjob House with political wariness imagine the mental scenario of embracing the nuclear hot mess of failure currently enveloping national security.
The truth is that our $580 billion annual DOD budget and state of official war in Afghanistan and Iraq is a flaming policy disaster of utter failure, a monstrous expenditure of death that has only lead to more failure, more fear, more terrorists everywhere.
This incredible environment of failure persists because there are no political penalties for it, weddings and hospitals blown up are half a world away, Americans are amazingly removed from something that is allegedly so dangerous for them. The nutjob GOP loves endless war and gross defense spending, the press is enthralled with any war story and the Democratic base has distressingly bleated along with all this.
Is that what the Democratic administration of 2017 will look like, fiercely, stupidly at war? We could turn the United States into an Eden if we switched $200 billion DOD cash to infrastructure spending. Are we really going to let that opportunity pass us by again, just for some pipsqueaks in the Middle East? Seriously?
Not only does Clinton and Sanders have to somehow embrace or repudiate this in a viable way, like Heather Parton I fear the ranting, foaming GOP nutjob campaign and media machine around national security acutely, especially if Clinton gets the nomination. The violent, authoritarian misogynistic GOP will embrace militarism fiercely, of course, and how a female candidate for President runs with this will be an interesting evolution to observe.
From a political science standpoint, of course, I am a hippie gardener lover, not a fighter, right, if it were up to me America would have an annual DOD budget of $300 billion and be at peace. We all have our dreams.
Political reality, however relentlessly forces answers to how Clinton and Sanders will handle the House and national security. Even with a laughable loser like Trump to beat the Party and country still needs those answers.