Trump's ace: He's not beholden

By:

LeRoy Goldman

Columnist

BlueRidgeNow.com 

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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