Yet another half president

By

LeRoy Goldman

Guest Columnist

Citizen-Times

June 25, 2016

And then there were two, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Regardless of which one of them you support, there is no doubt that the vast majority of the American people have already cast a vote of no confidence in both. Put another way, most of us are appalled that in a nation of 320 million citizens Clinton and Trump are the best we can do. Not only are they not the best, both are destined to fail. What gnaws at all of us is the sickeningly obvious answer to a simple question. Are Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump the best America has to offer?

Understanding why neither of them has a prayer of reversing the nation’s downward spiral, is essential, not impossible to comprehend, and yet so combustible that it’s rarely articulated. It comes down to this: To be effective, president of the United States must mean president of all the United States, not president of half of the United States.

America is in the process of losing what is at the center of our national experiment in democracy. Simply put it’s the one nation, under God, indivisible notion, and the “a nation divided cannot stand” notion.

There’s a relatively easy way to understand the reality of the danger we face. We all know about the existence of Red America and Blue America. We all know which one we support. We all know who’s right. We are. And we know who’s wrong. They are. Some of us also know how the Red/Blue straitjacket has divided us today in ways that are reminiscent of the divisions that plunged the nation into Civil War about150 years ago.

What is less well understood are the forces that propel and breathe life into what has become the clear sorting out of the American people into two separate nations that no longer trust each other. They are the forces of political correctness that manifest themselves as identity politics. Like an undiagnosed and untreated malignancy, they have taken control of our political life and paralyzed our national government.

Red America is made up overwhelmingly of white men, their wives and Protestants. Blue America consists of most single and divorced women, African-Americans, Hispanics, Asians, Jews, Muslims and LGBTs.

Pandering to those two increasingly intolerant coalitions by career politicians in Washington has reduced civil political discourse to a gender and racial stalemate. Two examples drive home the point.

In 2014 the Supreme Court voted 6-2 in Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action to uphold the state of Michigan’s voter’s 58 percent approval of a referendum that prohibited the state’s public colleges and universities from granting preferential admission based upon race. In a blistering 58 page dissent, Justice Sotomayor eleven times thundered, “race matters”.

Her illogic was that the court should have overturned the will of Michigan’s voters because in her opinion their vote showed that the election outcome was influenced by racism. Let that sink in. Her reasoning would have had the Supreme Court invalidate the vote of the people in Michigan because in her view it constituted racism.

In fact, her repeated bombast that race matters was not what she really meant. Everyone agrees race matters. What she was really saying was that for African-Americans race must matter more. Think of her dissent as a precursor to the Black Lives Matter movement, which does not mean Black Lives Matter, which, of course, they do. It really means black lives matter more than white lives. This extreme version of political correctness has become so ingrained and so pernicious that, If one has the temerity to challenge such a view, the response is assured and lethal. You’re a racist.

And now the nation is attempting to grapple with the carnage in Orlando. Trump and Red America blame Obama and Clinton for complicity and not being willing to call Omar Mateen a “radical Islamic terrorist”. Clinton, Obama, and Blue America have deemed Mateen’s rampage homegrown terrorism, a hate crime against LGBTs, and are calling for the passage of stricter gun control legislation. In the Senate these mutually opposing points of view play out in only one destructive manner that has as its principal purpose the staging of Senate votes designed to protect the backsides of vulnerable senators seeking re-election this November.

Unless and until this nation puts an end to the cancer of political correctness, we are assured more half presidents as far as the eye can see.

LeRoy Goldman lives in Flat Rock and can be reached at:

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 Drain Washington’s Great Dismal Swamp

By

LeRoy Goldman

Guest Columnist

Citizen-Times

June 3, 2016

The Great Dismal Swamp in North Carolina and Virginia is a national treasure and sanctuary. The one in Washington D.C. is a vermin ridden pest hole. Let’s drain it.

America is on the verge of what will be the filthiest and most expensive presidential campaign in the nation’s history. By Election Day it’s a virtual certainty that the two presumptive nominees, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, will have spent (wasted) upwards of $2 billion in efforts to demonize each other. What’s coming is: Hillary, the crooked and trigger happy, versus Donald, the Mexican-hating, Muslim-hating misogynist.

Most of you are too busy and too sensible to spend much of your time reading the blizzard of political columns in the newspapers or listening to the nonstop rants by the biased bobble heads on Fox or MSNBC. But, if you did, you would have learned that either Hillary Clinton will win in a breeze, or that the election will be very close. How helpful is that? It’s not.

But, if this election turns out to be close, as is likely, then here are four reforms that would play a decisive role in determining who wins, what sort of mandate the President-elect will have, and who controls the Senate and the House of Representatives when the 115th Congress convenes next January.

Abolish the Electoral College

We say we believe in majority rule and one person, one vote. We don’t. The Electoral College is an undemocratic anachronism. It makes irrelevant the votes of Democrats for the presidency in many states such as Texas, South Carolina, and Kansas. Similarly, it makes irrelevant the votes of Republicans in many other states like California, Illinois, and Maryland. In 2000 it led to election of a president who lost the popular vote by more than 500,000 votes. Abolish it by constitutional amendment.

Abolish House Rules Committee

Republican and Democratic Speakers of the House use the House Rules Committee to strangle the legislative process. At their direction the Rules Committee routinely issues “closed” rules that circumscribe debate on the House floor for virtually all major legislation. The Closed Rule precludes the Minority party from offering amendments to the legislation. It’s the mechanism that currently enables the radical House Republican Freedom Caucus to subvert the legislative process. Abolishing the Rules Committee would open the legislative process and restore compromise and comity in the House.

Abolish the Senate filibuster

Originally intended to be used rarely and only under extraordinary circumstances, the Senate filibuster has become the weapon of choice for both Democrats and Republicans to paralyze the Senate when they are in the minority. Its automatic use by the Senate Minority makes a mockery of Senate procedure. Its repeated use needlessly fosters enmity between Democrats and Republicans. The beginning of the 115th Congress next January offers the opportunity for the Senate to change its rules and abolish the egregious abuse of the filibuster.

Reform the federal bureaucracy

Like the secret, all-powerful, and corrupt Vatican bureaucracy that does not answer to the Pope, the federal bureaucracy does not answer to the president, regardless of whether he is a Democrat or a Republican. Worse, it’s accountable to no one. And that means it can and does do whatever it wishes.

That’s how you get an IRS that abuses its authority to attack political organizations it opposes. It’s how you get a VA that is willing to murder sick veterans in order to protect its reputation, its leadership and their annual bonuses. It’s how you get the rollout of the Obamacare website that doesn’t work. It how you get a CDC that botches the response to the Ebola outbreak. Its how you get children with elevated blood-lead levels in Flint, Michigan thanks to the incompetence and irresponsibility of the EPA. The next president must have a plan to bring the federal bureaucracy to heel, rather than be its willing patsy.

Don’t underestimate the significance that advocacy for these reforms would have in determining who wins the White House. While they may seem esoteric and prosaic, the candidate who can convince the electorate that he/she is serious about ending the stalemate in Washington and knows how to do it, will win. Advocacy for these reforms will focus voter anger like a laser.

Do you know which candidate is more likely to propose these reforms? Here’s a hint. One of them has lived in and prospered from Washington’s Dismal Swamp for the past quarter century. The other has not.

LeRoy Goldman lives in Flat Rock and can be reached at:

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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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Even now, the elite don’t comprehend Trump’s rise

Even now, the elite don’t comprehend Trump’s rise

By

LeRoy Goldman

The Charlotte Observer

May 11, 2016

When Donald Trump announced his presidential bid 11 months ago, none of the political class took him or it seriously. Not any more. One by one his many competitors have been ground into the dust. Understanding how Trump has accomplished what seemed impossible, and why his ascendancy was missed by the political class is what counts.

Trump’s quest started with a good and bad omen. He had enormous name recognition, but was broadly disliked among Republicans. Last summer Chris Cillizza of the Washington Post reported that two-thirds of Republicans said they couldn’t see themselves supporting him for president. Cillizza went on to provide his readers with, “Why no one should take Donald Trump seriously, in one very simple chart.” Six weeks later Cillizza wrote, “Boy was I wrong about Donald Trump.”

What best and most humorously illuminates the universal underestimation of Trump also occurred last summer when Morning Joe regular Mike Barnicle offered to buy host Mika Brzezinski a new pickup if Trumpwon the GOP nomination. Barnicle owes Mika a truck!

As Trump’s candidacy gained steam, something else began to happen. The narrative from prominent Republican leaders and from respected conservative writers coalesced around a guessing game with respect to when, not if, the Trump bubble would burst. But to their unbelieving dismay, it did not burst. In fact Trump has gone on to win the vast majority of the primaries. He has accumulated more than 10 million votes, surpassing any Republican who has ever sought the presidential nomination.

Once it became clear that Trump was unstoppable, the Party apparatchiks and respected conservative intellectuals began an assault on Trump that has no parallel in modern American political history. Vitriolic condemnation of Trump has come from the likes of Mitt Romney, both Bush Presidents, George Will, Charles Krauthammer and Michael Gerson.

The savage assault on Trump from within the Republican Party and from its intellectual soothsayers is deeply troubling and remarkably revealing. Troubling because it turns its back on that which is at the heart of this nation’s experiment in democracy – that voters get to determine winners and losers, not party bosses and/or elites. Revealing in that the wellspring of their fury at Trump is rooted in an inchoate fear their power and prestige is now in jeopardy.

Donald Trump is where he is today not because of his name recognition, or his media skills, or his wealth, or his brash tactics. While those qualities have helped him, the truth is that he’s won because voters see his candidacy as the vehicle for them to express their unalterable vote of no confidence in the Republican Party’s self-serving leaders. How else does one explain overwhelming voter rejection of Jeb Bush, Mitt Romney, Chris Christie, Marco Rubio, John Kasich, Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, and Scott Walker? It’s just this simple. Rank and file Republicans have called the GOP’s bluff. Donald Trump is simply their vehicle for a bloodless revolution.

More importantly, the Party bosses and their supporters in the media and academe still don’t comprehend the gravity of what’s happened or why. They believe that once Trump is defeated by Hillary Clinton, it will be back to business as usual, especially for them. Not a chance. The Republican Party leaders will either adjust to the new order that is emerging from the chaos of the past year, or they will perish. It’s called democracy.

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Paul Ryan’s Hail Mary

By

LeRoy Goldman

GUEST COLUMNIST

Asheville Citizen-Times

April 22, 2016

Not long ago House Speaker Paul Ryan made it official. He’s not seeking the GOP presidential nomination this year. He said, “Let me be clear, I do not want nor will I accept the Republican nomination... Count me out.”

Some will assume that he’s being coy, and that he really is angling to be the nominee who emerges from a deadlocked Republican convention this July in Cleveland. After all, it was not all that long ago that he repeatedly stated that he had no interest in becoming Speaker of the House. We all know how that ended. Maybe he’s up to the same game again. Don’t think so.

An alternative theory is both straightforward and plausible. Ryan is young, 46. Thus, time is on his side. He can wait, and wait, and wait — until 2036, if necessary. Maybe he’s simply being cautious until the current mess blows over. Don’t think so.

One of Paul Ryan’s many strengths is that he’s really smart about the intersection between politics and policy. Not only does that set him apart and above his Republican peers, it has enabled him to see clearly the depth of the calamity the GOP now faces. The operative question is not who will win the nomination, or whether that person can win in November. The operative question is whether the Republican Party can adapt and reform itself, or die.

Ryan’s “count me out” comment is all about the effort to radically reform and preserve the Republican Party. It’s a daunting task, a Hail Mary like none before. Have you ever seen a Hail Mary where the quarterback not only throws the pass, but also catches it in the end zone? Of course, you haven’t. But that’s what Paul Ryan is attempting to do with the catch of his own pass coming in a year divisible by four sometime between 2020 and 2036.

Ryan understands that, while it might be possible to secure the nomination in a deadlocked convention this summer, it would only make him part of the rubble as the party first implodes and then loses in November. Ryan understands what his nomination in Cleveland would trigger. He knows it would enable both Trump and Cruz to convince their supporters that indeed the GOP runs a crooked craps game. That’s a road Ryan won’t take, and that’s why he said, “count me out.”

But Ryan also knows another truth. He knows that both Trump and Cruz are losers in November. More than anything else their ascendancy illuminates the GOP’s death spiral. Trump is a con man with not a clue about how to govern. Cruz is a modern day Joe McCarthy who will flame out so brilliantly that he may cost the GOP control of the Senate.

Ryan’s strategy is to expand the party, not shrink it. To accomplish that he knows that the party must prove to voters that it is open and welcoming, and that it has workable policies in both realms of domestic and foreign policy. He knows that calling for the repeal of Obamacare with no replacement won’t fly. He knows that bombing ISIS into oblivion isn’t possible. He intends to come forward with alternatives to the GOP’s obsession with blind opposition. If you believe in a two-party system, wish him luck.

It’s not hard to imagine the relish Democrats will have reading this. What a delight! Here they have Hillary Clinton, who is a shrill voice of the past, who is caught between a black president she must defend and millions of Democrats, especially young Democrats, who find a 74-year-old socialist preferable to her, and who is thought to be untrustworthy by two-thirds of the nation. And she’s going to win anyway. It’s a miracle! Don’t think so.

Danger lurks in Democratland. They too run a crooked craps game. The excitement that Bernie Sanders has engendered is not unlike what propels Trump, fury directed at the political establishment. The Democrats’ destructive day of reckoning is inevitable. It will be poetic justice if it occurs during Hillary’s presidency.

Pay close attention to two things. First, will Sanders make nice with Hillary and bury the hatchet by the time of the convention in Philadelphia? Probably so, and, if he does, he will betray the central tenant of his remarkable campaign, the call for a political revolution. More importantly, watch the reaction among his supporters if he betrays them. It likely triggers the firestorm that ultimately engulfs the Democratic Party and Hillary’s presidency.

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Call it America's second civil war

By

LeRoy Goldman

BlueRidgeNow

April 17, 2016

Do you remember President John F. Kennedy’s call for diversity in his commencement address at American University on June 10, 1963? Kennedy proposed new talks with the Soviet Union aimed at reducing nuclear testing. He said, “And if we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity.”

Today we could benefit by applying the lessons of Kennedy’s call for diversity and tolerance to the corrosive polarization that grips American society and government. The Pew Research Center has been meticulously documenting this growing schism for years.

Pew’s research shows that more Americans than ever hold intensely partisan political views. These partisans believe the opposing party’s policies are so misguided that they threaten the nation’s well-being. The 2016 race for the White House doubles down on this counterproductive and dangerous partisanship.

Let’s start with a notion that many will find really hard to accept, especially those who are entrenched Republican conservatives and those who are entrenched Democratic liberals.

Take a deep breath and open your mind. Do you realize that Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders and Ted Cruz are far more alike than they are different from one another? They are. The next president, no matter which of the four, will have no real chance of successfully implementing his or her agenda, and that assumes the winner even has a coherent agenda. So far, all we have are vacuous slogans like “Fighting For Us” from Clinton and “Make America Great Again” from Trump.

The similarity among these four Tweedledees and Tweedledums is real and disqualifying. They all assume you and I are stupid enough to not notice that they have no specific set of achievable policy proposals to address the nation’s many domestic and international security challenges.

And worst of all, each of them seeks the presidency for personal gain rather than for the opportunity it gives them to serve us. Were it otherwise, they would be in overdrive telling us in detail what they plan to do for us and, more importantly, how they would achieve it in stalemated Washington.

None of them deserves our vote.

None of them will run a campaign that reaches out broadly to America. The Democrats will attempt to win by relying upon their stalwarts in Blue Missile Silo America — single women, African-Americans, Hispanics, Jews, Muslims and LGBTs. The Republicans will rely on their stalwarts in Red Missile Silo America — white men, married women, the tea party and evangelicals. We have become a warring nation riven by gender and race. It’s America’s second civil war.

If Clinton or Sanders wins this November, the GOP-controlled House will be the graveyard of major legislation sent to the Hill. If Trump or Cruz wins, the Senate filibuster will produce the same deadly result.

It’s vital to remember that this long-standing stalemate in Washington is not inevitable. It’s not due to any fundamental flaw in the Constitution. It can be fixed, but the fix must come from us, not these Washington slugs.

Come back with me now to the '70s, a time when Washington worked. I had the privilege then to work in the Senate, so I can speak firsthand. At the time, Congress was controlled by large Democratic majorities. Prior to the 1976 election, we had to deal with Republican presidents, Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford.

And guess what? The Senate worked together with them cooperatively on both domestic and foreign policy issues: clean air and water, the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, the war on cancer, health manpower, the opening to China, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and ending the Vietnam War.

How did this happen? For openers, both parties on the Hill were heterogeneous, not homogenous. While most Democrats in the Senate were liberal, for every Kennedy and Walter Mondale there was a conservative like John Stennis of Mississippi. While most Republicans were conservative, for every Bob Dole and Barry Goldwater, there was a liberal like Jack Javits of New York.

That intraparty diversity made an enormous and beneficial difference. It necessarily bred trust and compromise that transcended blind party loyalty.

Moreover, our standard operating procedure on all legislation was to work hand in hand with the Republicans. Amendments they proposed in committee or on the Senate floor that improved the legislation were willingly accepted. Amendments that we could not accept were ones the GOP was nonetheless permitted to offer during floor debate. Thus, use of the Senate filibuster to block legislation was rare. It was never employed on a health care bill out of my committee.

Simply repeating what we’ve done for the past 20 years and expecting a better outcome is madness. Americans must summon the courage to reject their blue and red safe spaces before it’s too late.

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The GOP will fall victim to own angry, evangelical excesses

The GOP will fall victim to own angry, evangelical excesses | The Charlotte Observer

By

LeRoy Goldman

April 6, 2016

Chuck Todd, the moderator of MSNBC's MTP Daily, asked a panel of political experts recently to assess the fight for the GOP presidential nomination. His question was, “Where is the beating heart of the GOP?” None of them answered the question. They all deflected. Why? Because it was the wrong question. Wrong because the elephant's heart no longer beats. The autopsy this November will determine the cause of death was suicide.

The Republican Party has become its own worst enemy – a victim of its angry and evangelical excesses. It can no longer win a national election. That stark reality is hard, if not impossible, for many Republicans to comprehend or change because in Congress and in most states the GOP is ascendant.

The Republicans recaptured the House in 2010, added the Senate in 2014, control 31 Governor's Mansions, and also control 68 of 98 state legislative chambers. In no less than 23 states, including North Carolina, the GOP controls the Governor's Mansion and both chambers of the state legislature. Much of that electoral success stems directly from voter antipathy to President Obama's overreach, beginning with Obamacare in 2009 and culminating with the Iran nuclear agreement last year. Thus it would seem that any suggestion that the GOP is on life support is either wishful thinking by an overly zealous Democrat or simply inaccurate. Neither is the case.

The war to win the GOP presidential nomination – and it is a war – is one that no one would have predicted a year ago. Certainly it was obvious that there would be multiple combatants. It was just as clear that most would be very conservative such as Ted Cruz, Ben Carson, and Marco Rubio and some would be mainstream moderates such as Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, and John Kasich. While the outcome was opaque, the battle lines seemed clear, only because nobody gave so much as a passing thought to Donald Trump. More importantly, the GOP power brokers paid no mind to what fuels Trump's tank – grassroots Republican fury directed at them for being the marionettes of K Street and Wall Street.

And, thus, a field of 17 GOP presidential hopefuls is now down to three, Trump, Cruz, and Kasich. And here's the bizarre twist. It's clear that the GOP nominee will be either Trump or Cruz, both of whom are losers to Hillary Clinton in November based on the Real Clear Politics average of polls by 11 percent and 3 percent respectively. On the other hand Kasich, who has virtually no shot at the nomination, defeats Clinton by 7 percent in the RCP polling. There you have the GOP Death Wish.

Now it is not uncommon or particularly significant for either party to nominate a weak candidate when it knows a loss looms in November.

But this year the GOP should win handily. Obama has been the most polarizing president in the nation's history. His approval numbers have been in the tank for most of the past two years. Two-thirds of the nation believes the country is on the wrong track. Hillary Clinton is distrusted by a majority of voters, including many Democrats. Furthermore, in order to assure herself of overwhelming support among African-Americans and Hispanics, she is forced to embrace Obama and his policies. It's a losing calculus.

However, the GOP, dominated mainly by angry whites and evangelical zealots, is going to elect her as it commits suicide. Disregarding the adage that when you're in a hole stop digging, the GOP has dug one big enough to bury an elephant.

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