Trump's ace: He's not beholden
By:
LeRoy Goldman
Columnist
Times-News Online
May 15, 2016
Referring
to China’s elegant rail systems and airports in 2010, President
Barack Obama said, “That used to be us.”
The
following year, authors Thomas Friedman of The New York Times and
Michael Mandelbaum of Johns Hopkins University borrowed Obama’s
quote for the title of their book that documents “how America fell
behind the world it invented and how we can come back.” They do a
far better job with the former than the latter.
The
authors detail how America and its leaders underestimated the
emergence of the global marketplace fueled by the information
technology revolution. That blunder put the nation behind the eight
ball in undertaking education reform, in coping with the burgeoning
national debt and in addressing climate change and energy policy.
With
respect to the latter, they call the Republicans “crazy” and the
Democrats “cowards.” Unfortunately, their terms of opprobrium
have applicability far more broadly than energy policy. For example,
recall the Republicans’ “crazy” votes to repeal Obamacare
without offering an alternative, and recall President Obama’s and
the Democrats’ “cowardly” pants-on-fire flight from the report
by the Simpson-Bowles entitlement reform commission that the
president created.
Friedman
and Mandelbaum brilliantly point out that the Democrats “have
become the most conservative force in American politics. ... Now they
defend every federal program as if each were sacred.” The
Republicans, formerly prudent respecting policy and spending, “have
become the party of fiscal radicalism and recklessness.”
But
Friedman and Mandelbaum’s antidote to the gridlock that grips
Washington is stillborn. The necessary shock therapy they recommend
is a “serious independent presidential candidate.”
Their
prescription flies in the face of American political history. Since
1948, there have been six major independent candidates: progressive
Henry Wallace, Dixiecrat Sen. Strom Thurmond, segregationist Gov.
George Wallace, liberal Congressman John Anderson, consumer advocate
Ralph Nader and businessman Ross Perot. Each was trounced in the
general election.
And
there’s the dilemma. To win, the nominee must be a Democrat or a
Republican. But it’s the Democrats and the Republicans who have
created and maintain the gridlock in Washington. It’s a Catch-22,
seemingly without a solution.
But
what if an outsider pulled off a hostile takeover of either party?
And what if that candidate effected his coup d’etat by refusing to
acquiesce to the party’s power structure, its elected leaders and
its intellectual and ideological Brahmins? Surely that could never
happen. It’s a flight of fancy, right? Wrong!
The
remarkable and hostile takeover of the Republican Party by Donald
Trump is almost complete. And he’s accomplished it without being
dragged to the extreme right, as Mitt Romney was in 2012. It’s the
most compelling and shocking story of the 2016 political campaign.
But
what comes next is far more important because it will determine who
wins on Nov. 8 and, more importantly, whether the next four years are
continued gridlock or something very different.
You
know the GOP is coming apart at the seams when its party leaders and
party apparatus, in an act of suicidal desperation to derail Trump,
cozied up to Ted Cruz, the man former House Speaker John Boehner
recently called “Lucifer in the flesh.” The GOP’s dreaded day
of reckoning has arrived.
For
the Democrats, that dreaded day of reckoning is delayed but not
averted. And that we know because of the stunning success of Bernie
Sanders’ campaign. Just like Trump, Sanders has brought millions of
new voters onto the political playing field. Just like Trump’s
stalwarts who don’t believe or trust the GOP establishment, these
new voters have nothing but disdain for the rigged game the Democrats
play in Washington.
They
understand that Democrats like President Barack Obama, Hillary
Clinton and their lackeys on both sides of Capitol Hill proclaim
fealty to working class Americans while prostituting themselves
before their masters on Wall Street, K Street and Hollywood
Boulevard.
Clinton
will attempt to placate Sanders and his enthusiastic supporters by
throwing them bones in the planks of the Democratic platform that
will be debated and approved at the convention in Philadelphia this
July. Call that legerdemain or bait-and-switch. Everyone knows that
party platforms aren’t worth the paper they’re written on.
Clinton’s
nomination, assuming she stays one step ahead of the FBI, will
continue the fiction that the Democrats are serving the nation well.
But it’s a fiction, and Clinton is a vulnerable candidate with
immense personal and political baggage.
Trump’s
ace in the hole is his unbridled freedom to set a new policy and
political agenda for the nation. But he must do that thoughtfully,
skillfully and quickly before Clinton and her politically correct
fellow travelers successfully define him as a Mexican-hating,
Muslim-hating misogynist.
If
so, he can win. If not, President Hillary, like Obama before her,
will be forced to admit, “That used to be us.”
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