By

LeRoy Goldman

Blueridgenow.com

1-30-2016

The Donald has awakened the force

As an independent, I plan to vote in the Republican presidential primary in North Carolina this year because that’s where the real action is. Although I don’t yet know which Republican I’ll vote for, I doubt it will be Donald Trump.

The explanation is simple: Trump’s campaign thus far is devoid of substance. He has yet to offer, and may never offer, any coherent set of proposals that he would implement if elected president of the United States.

Given the magnitude and complexity of the challenges the nation faces on the home front and internationally, Trump’s unwillingness or inability to articulate how he would overcome those challenges is thus far disqualifying. His repeated assertion that he would make America great doesn’t pass the smell test. It doesn’t pass Ronald Reagan’s Trust, But Verify standard because there’s precious little to verify.

But that said, Trump not only won’t go away, he continues to lead his Republican rivals by large margins. Most of his GOP rivals have chosen not to confront him for fear it would be curtains for their campaigns. A few have now begun to attack him out of desperation. It may be far too few, and far too late.

The Democrats and their allies in the media and academe first ignored Trump, believing his candidacy was a short-lived joke. Now, realizing it’s no joke and that it has had a life of its own, they are at the barricades engaged in an all-out effort to destroy him. Their vulnerability is that they do not adequately comprehend the magic in Trump’s bottle and the threat it poses to the status quo they so desperately wish to maintain.

There’s no mystery about Trump’s magic. The public’s outrage at Washington has at long last hit critical mass. The anger is white-hot and palpable. The fury is Trump’s propellant. Trump’s faithful supporters have gotten the self-serving, deceitful Washington establishment in their cross hairs.

The public’s outrage is increasingly directed at all those inside the Beltway who have convinced themselves that they can flaunt their oath of office and get away with it because the American people are too stupid to tumble to their game.

Trump has indicted the entirety of Washington’s ruling oligarchy: President Barack Obama, Congress, the judiciary, and the unaccountable and invisible monstrosity known as the federal bureaucracy. His rivals, whether Republican or Democrat, can’t lay a glove on him because those who support Trump instinctively understand that virtually all his rivals have something in common, something they abhor, a perpetuation of Washington thumbing its nose at folks like you and me.

Trump’s force and its staying power are elemental and easy to grasp. They come down to this: Folks like Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush are cunning liars. What counts is not what they say they disagree about, things like Obamacare, immigration and ISIS. What counts is what they have in common, unbridled ambition to win an election and then spend the next four years spinning their way to re-election.

When an aroused citizenry makes those connections, the nation is in uncharted and turbulent water. And there’s more. Citizen outrage is not limited only to Republicans. What the pollsters, pundits and political class don’t yet adequately grasp is that there are also millions of Democrats who are ready to jump ship. When the Clinton campaign “Feels The Bern” in Iowa and New Hampshire by Feb. 9, its smug confidence will disintegrate into terror.

The nightmare for those who must find a way to destroy Trump is that their weapon of choice, political correctness, won’t work this time. Calling him a bigot, a racist, a bully, vulgar or a jerk won’t drive him to ground as it has done to so many before him. Remarkably and delightfully, the political correctness crowd has met its match. And that is long overdue and welcome indeed.

I have no idea whether Trump fully understands what his candidacy represents and what propels it. Surely he knows he’s a lightning rod, and he knows that lightning is a force that can’t be harnessed, even by an entrenched and corrupted political class in Washington.

Perhaps The Donald is cagier than most realize. What if he believes he doesn’t need to address substance and policy until after he’s the GOP nominee? What if he’s right?

Who knows? Maybe we won’t have to wait till 2017 for Hollywood’s version of chapter eight of “Star Wars.” Perhaps the awakened force of the American people will be made manifest in 2016 in ways no one could have foreseen. The dark side inside the Beltway trembles!

LeRoy Goldman is a Flat Rock resident. Reach him at:  EmailMe

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Trump’s, Sanders’ success result of anti-PC public

By:  LeRoy Goldman

Special To The Observer

The charlotte Observer

1-27-2016

The 2016 presidential sweepstakes aren’t playing out according to script. Hillary Clinton seems less and less inevitable. Her improbable foe, Bernie Sanders, continues to gather momentum. That momentum comes not from the political class, but from the people, people fed up with those who preach political correctness while profiting from the Washington establishment and its nexus with power centers of immense wealth.

For the Republicans Donald Trump continues to lead the crowded GOP field regardless of what he says or does. The Republican establishment and the party power structure first believed that ignoring him would suffice. They believed his intemperate, politically incorrect tirades would capsize his candidacy. When that didn’t work they maneuvered to get him to sign a pledge that he would not run as an independent candidate. Now they are attempting to destroy him.

But none of the efforts to silence Trump or Sanders is working . Why? Maybe the answer hides in plain sight. What if the power brokers in both parties are guilty of the same blindingly stupid mistake? What if they have taken the whimsical advice of baseball great, Satchel Paige, who said, “Don’t look back. Something might be gaining on you”? They have, because looking back at what’s gaining on them brings into focus a reality so threatening to the perpetuation of their vested self interest that it must be denied.

What’s gaining on both political parties is the fury of the American people. Sanders’ and Trump’s momentum are being propelled by that fury. Washington is about to meet its match, and the 2016 election will be nothing short of unpredictably transformational.

The origin of political correctness decades ago was innocuous enough. Putting boundaries around offensive, hurtful speech and behavior seemed reasonable. But it has been transmogrified by elitists into something so pernicious that most Americans now rightly reject it. No longer sensible or silly, it has become an instrument aimed at not only changing behavior, but also at stifling free speech. Today’s virulent form of political correctness demands conformity to its strictures and shows little mercy in punishing those who dare to challenge its expanding hegemony.

The American people reject the PC strait jacket. A Fairleigh Dickinson University poll last fall found that 68 percent oppose political correctness. More importantly, this view is not held exclusively by hard right Republicans. It is shared by 62 percent of Democrats, 68 percent of independents, 81 percent of Republicans, 72 percent of whites, and 61 percent of nonwhites.

Donald Trump’s appeal is rooted in his opposition to political correctness. What’s now clear is that, if it’s OK for a presidential candidateto confront PC for the evil that it has become, then it’s OK for all of the rest of us to do so too. Trump has let the genie of outright opposition to political correctness out of the bottle. And it’s going to resonate across the entire political spectrum.

When we get into the fall campaign, if it’s Donald Trump versus Hillary Clinton, the political class, the pundits, and those in the media and academe who cloak discrimination in the name of making the world safe for diversity will be in for a rude awakening that will violate their “safe spaces” and arrive without “trigger warnings.”

Regardless of whether Donald Trump wins the GOP nomination or the presidency, his legacy as a trail blazer is already secure. And that’s a very good thing.

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Will Paul Ryan come to the rescue of the GOP?

By:

LeRoy Goldman, GUEST COLUMNIST

Asheville Citicen-Times

1-25-2016

When the President comes to Capitol Hill to deliver the State of the Union message to Congress and the American people, his arrival in the House chamber is announced by the House Sergeant at Arms who cries out for all to hear, “Mr. Speaker, the President of the United States”.

When that next occurs after the election this coming November, where will Paul Ryan be? Will he be seated in the Speaker’s chair on the rostrum, or will he be standing immediately behind Sergeant at Arms, Paul Irving? The answer to that question may not be as apparent as it seems.

Last Sept. 25, House Speaker John Boehner stunned Washington by announcing his resignation. By Oct. 8, the House Republican Caucus was set to vote on Boehner’s successor. It was widely assumed that House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy had the inside track. But that day McCarthy abruptly dropped out. The vote was postponed. Chaos ensued.

Paul Ryan, chairman of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, had intended to give the nominating speech for McCarthy. When McCarthy threw in the towel, Ryan immediately issued a statement saying he was not interested in the job. He said, “I will not be a candidate.”

But on Sept. 20, only 12 days later, the mounting drumbeat for Ryan had grown to a crescendo, and Ryan said he would consider seeking the post if the Republican Caucus would unite behind him and accede to his conditions.

On Sept.29, the GOP Caucus elected Ryan Speaker of the House by a vote of 236-9. In his address to the House that day he said, “Let’s be frank: The House is broken. We are not solving problems. I am not interested in laying blame. We are wiping the slate clean. How reassuring it would be if we finally got our act together...if we actually fixed the tax code, put patients in charge of their health care, grew our economy, strengthened our military, lifted people out of poverty, and paid down the debt.”

Five weeks later Ryan in a speech at the Library of Congress laid out his detailed vision for a confident America at home and abroad. But before he plunged into the substance of his remarks he said, “This country has big problems. If we do not have a President who will work with us, we will not solve those problems.”

To chart a different course Ryan argues the GOP must not only win the White House in 2016, he believes that it must also win a mandate. And he argues that winning a mandate requires the GOP to offer ideas. And that requires them to actually have ideas. In other words, he rejects fully the notion that all the GOP need do is to oppose the Democrats. That won’t work.

Even more striking is the yawning chasm between Ryan’s concept of an inspirational and policy driven Republican agenda and the absence of such an agenda to restore America’s greatness offered by the GOP frontrunner, Donald Trump. Ryan has challenged his party to put up or shut up. Trump has told friend and foe alike to buzz off. They are operating in parallel universes. How much better would it be if they were in direct competition with one another.

However, a year ago Ryan took himself out of the 2016 presidential sweepstakes. He told NBC News, “I have decided that I am not going to run for President in 2016.”

Earlier this month, however, Ryan moderated a policy seminar in Columbia, South Carolina on poverty in America and how to better deal with it. It was sponsored by the Jack Kemp Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute. Some of the Republicans running for President attended. Trump and Ted Cruz did not.

Sometimes events overwhelm intentions. And that is what may be happening now behind the scenes. It is increasingly clear that none of Trump’s opponents is able to lay a glove on him, let alone offer a forward-looking agenda that would result in the election of a Republican president next November.

Ryan surely knows that the agenda he is proposing cannot be implemented by or from the House of Representatives. Only a President with an electoral mandate can do that. Last fall a reluctant Ryan, when asked, rescued the House GOP. At the Republican Convention next summer, Paul Ryan may be asked to ride to a far bigger rescue. He’ll be there. He’s the convention chairman.

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Hillary’s secret weapon - Republican madness

Hillary’s secret weapon - Republican madness

By:

LeRoy Goldman - GUEST COLUMNIST

Asheville Citizen-Times

12-31-2015

It’s one thing for a political party to suffer a humiliating presidential defeat when the stars are aligned against it. That’s understandable. When the Democrats nominated Adlai Stevenson in 1952 and 1956 they knew he never had a chance against Ike. When the Republicans nominated Barry Goldwater in 1964 we all knew that the choice he offered was one that would be resoundingly rejected on election day. The same unavoidable and predictable fate befell Democrats George McGovern in 1972, and Walter Mondale in 1984, as well as Republican John McCain in 2008.

But 2016 is shaping up in a way that promises to break new ground, ground so bizarre that it defies sanity. This election is one that history teaches us the Republicans should win. Call it the pendulum effect. After two terms in office the voters frequently have handed the reins of power over to the opposition party. 2016 should be such a year. President Obama’s favorability rating is in the low 40s, far below the 50 percent minimum that is typically necessary for an incumbent’s party to have a reasonable chance to retain the presidency. In addition, about two-thirds of the American people believe the nation is on the wrong track.

Barring a bolt of lightning, say from the FBI, it’s clear that the Democrats will nominate Hillary Clinton. However, she comes with much baggage. Large numbers of Americans, including Democrats, do not trust her. She is not likable. She’s stiff and wooden on the campaign trail. Thanks to her proclivity for secrecy, she is under investigation by the FBI regarding her use of a private email system while serving as President Obama’s Secretary of State. Finally, she will be hamstrung by the fact that she dare not separate herself too far from Obama’s unpopular policies for fear of alienating African-Americans and Hispanics whose votes she must have in order to win next November.

And yet with the Iowa Caucuses and the New Hampshire Primary just around the corner, it looks like the GOP is on the verge of not only anointing a nominee who can’t win, but also one who will enable the Democrats to retake control of the United States Senate. If that happens, it may well destroy the Republican Party, a fate the Party of Lincoln will have earned and richly deserved.

In a column in the Washington Post about a month ago former Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, described the kind of president the nation needs. Gates is a Republican who worked for eight presidents. He ran the Pentagon for Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, and was the Director of the CIA under President George H. W. Bush. Gates believes we need a president who understands that power in Washington is divided among the three branches of government, a president who is truthful, not a deceptive “spinner”, a president who will be resolute and have the courage to act “in defiance of public opinion” when the national interest is at stake, and, most importantly, a president who will be a unifier of the American people.

The front runners for the GOP nomination, Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, and Ben Carson all fail Gates’ worthy requirements, and they fail them miserably.

In addition, all of them will provide Hillary Clinton with the red meat she requires in order to avert the defeat that otherwise would befall her next November.

The battle for the White House will come down to which candidate wins in the crucial eight swing states of Florida, North Carolina, Virginia, New Hampshire, Ohio, Iowa, Colorado, and Nevada. Trump, Cruz, or Carson can’t win any of them.

Moreover, most of those eight are the states that will also determine which party controls the Senate. The “down-ballot” effect on Republican Senate candidates in the swing states will be devastating, if the GOP nominates one of the certain losers that it has come to adore.

Mitch McConnell, the Senate Majority Leader, recently cautioned his party not to nominate candidates who can’t win the November election. He said, “we’d like to have a nominee who can carry purple states...otherwise he’s not going to get elected”. He then pointed out that the determinative Senate elections will be in those same states: Florida, New Hampshire, Ohio, Colorado, and Nevada, as well as Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Illinois.

The Republican Party stands on the edge of an abyss of its own making. The question is whether it will take the plunge. The GOP’s madness is Hillary’s secret weapon.

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