Who will be the biggest loser - Clinton, Trump, or us?

 Who will be the biggest loser - Clinton, Trump, or us?

LeRoy Goldman

Guest Columnist

Citizen-Times

July 29, 2016

Only an American TV reality show could make a success out of deeming the biggest loser to be the winner. But that’s the way it works on “The Biggest Loser,” the long-running NBC TV reality show that pits teams of morbidly obese individuals against one another to see which of them can lose the most weight. Although I have never seen a single episode of the show, I’m confident that its staying power has everything to do with the fact that it resonates with the three quarters of the American people who are overweight or obese. For them it’s vicarious weight loss. 

But this year the presidential election has become the political version of the The Biggest Loser. And this one’s not vicarious. All of us get to have a say in determining which of the two losers, Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump, wins. It’s a “Reality” show gone real.

Based upon what you hear on television and read in the newspapers and on the web, Hillary Clinton leads Donald Trump in most polls and appears to be the likely winner on Nov. 8. For example, the Las Vegas betting line makes her the favorite, as does Nate Silver’s 538 statistical model.

But don’t get ahead of yourself. A year ago none of the political elites in either party took Trump’s quest for the GOP nomination seriously. Yet Trump has proven them all wrong.

Clinton’s greatest asset is the structural advantage that the Democrats have in the Electoral College. If you look at the last four presidential elections, the same basic pattern repeats itself. The Democrats can count on winning 19 states and the District of Columbia netting them 247 of the 270 electoral votes it takes to win the presidency. The GOP can count on winning 23 states but only 191 electoral votes.

That leaves the eight swing states with their total of 100 electoral votes. Clinton only needs to win 23 of those 100 swing state electoral votes. For example, were Clinton to win the swing state of Florida with its 29 electoral votes, she’s President. Trump, on the other hand, faces a much more formidable challenge. He’s got to win at least 79 of the 100 electoral votes in the eight swing states.

Clinton’s Campaign is built on the assumption that this year’s election will repeat this basic electoral pattern that advantages Democrats with their concentrations of non-white voters in populous states like California, New York, Illinois, and Pennsylvania. It’s their ace in the hole.

But what if they’ve miscalculated?

The latest Rasmussen poll shows that only 21 percent of likely voters believe the nation is headed in the right direction. An astounding 72 percent believe we’re headed in the wrong direction. Clinton’s Campaign thumbs its nose at the national outcry for change. It proposes more of the same, in effect Obama’s third term, but with her at the helm. But she’s no Obama in at least one crucial respect.

The July NYT/CBS national poll of voters reveals that 67 percent do not believe Clinton is honest and trustworthy. Imbedded in that cohort are many Independents and Democrats. Thus, an untrustworthy Clinton is attempting to sell the same old, same old to an angry electorate. In sharp contrast, Trump has indicted the entirety of Washington’s political class. Hillary Clinton’s past quarter century in Washington makes her the perfect poster child and punching bag for his onslaught.

If 2016 turns out to be a change election, Hillary Clinton will lose. If so, expect significant changes in the “traditional” Electoral College map. If Trump wins, he will carry several normally Democratic states such as Pennsylvania, Michigan, or Wisconsin. And that will negate the Democrat’s Electoral College ace in the hole.

In case you’re wondering, I’ve got no dog in this fight. If the election were held today, I would not vote for either Clinton or Trump.

The tragedy is that America is about to elect an individual who will be unwilling or unable to make and implement the tough decisions necessary to arrest national decline and heal national division. Clinton and Trump in their own unique ways are losers. Electing either of them makes us the biggest loser.

How much better it would be for all of us, if both of them were relegated to being the finalists on the TV reality show. For that they both have way more than enough of the right stuffing.

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

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Campus crybabies, cowards abound

                           

Campus crybabies, cowards abound

By LeRoy Goldman

Columnist
BlueRidgeNow

Published: Sunday, July 17, 2016 

I am old enough to remember when the opportunity to attend college was seen as the best and surest pathway for an individual to mature, learn and live a fuller life. But now political correctness has cast an ominous shadow over all that. 

Political correctness, as it is being practiced on university campuses all across America, is stifling freedom of expression through intimidation. It is the antithesis of what Thomas Jefferson said upon the founding of the University of Virginia in 1819: “This institution will be based on the illimitable freedom of the human mind. For here we are not afraid to follow the truth wherever it may lead.”

Understanding the expanding assault on college life and teaching requires familiarity with three concepts that are not household terms: safe space, trigger warning and microaggression.

A safe space in educational institutions means the institution, its professors or its students will not tolerate anti-LGBT violence, harassment or hate speech. Trigger warnings explicitly state that the content of a text, video, course syllabus or lecture may upset or offend some people. Microaggressions are words that could be deemed violent, such as asking a Latino person, “Where were you born?”

The coercive use of these concepts on campus is not benign. It’s malignant.

In fact, the expanding assault on academic freedom and free speech, led by hysterical students and legions of university diversity police, is powerfully assisted by the federal government through its regulations that implement Title IX of the 1972 Education Act amendments. This assault on free speech by an unholy alliance of college-age crybabies, university diversity bureaucrats and federal regulators strikes at the heart of every university’s raison d’être.

Even worse is the silence of those who could most effectively combat this menace — the university’s faculty members. Their all-too-convenient silence makes them cowards and accomplices in this madness that will not stop until it turns academic freedom into higher education’s passion play.

Here’s a sampler of what university life has become. In The Washington Post several months ago, columnist George Will described how Colorado State University punished the alleged rapist of a woman who said she was not raped. The individuals in question had consensual sexual intercourse. The following day, a classmate of the woman in question noticed a hickey on her neck. She reported an alleged assault to school officials.

Based on inaccurate hearsay evidence, Colorado State University suspended the male who had been falsely accused.

Catherine Rampell, in a column in the Washington Post last March, described how two members of Bowdoin College’s student government will face impeachment proceedings because they attended a party where some attendees wore tiny sombreros. Students and administrators at Bowdoin “went ballistic” and an investigation into ethnic stereotyping was begun. Those who attended the party were reprimanded or placed on social probation.

In a column in The Washington Post in May, Charles Lane reported how Harvard University, in response to gender inequity, is transforming campus culture. Harvard has decided to sanction organizations that only admit men or women. Starting this fall, Harvard will prohibit members of single-gender organizations from holding “leadership positions” in any university-recognized undergraduate organization. In addition, Harvard also will prohibit such people from applying for Rhodes and Marshall scholarships.

In The Washington Post last fall, columnist Kathleen Parker wrote that, based on a survey of 1,100 colleges and universities, only 18 percent require American history or government, where an understanding of free speech and the First Amendment would be taught.

Earlier this month, professor Jonathan Zimmerman, who teaches at NYU, stated that most efforts at the diversity challenge faced by universities have been a failure. Unbelievably, he said, “There’s no strong evidence that these costly efforts have changed anything.”

Thus, he proposes a radical fix. He wants universities to stop allowing freshmen to choose their own roommate. Instead, he wants universities to “generate multicultural roommate pairings.” Call it the next logical step for the diversity empire’s stormtroopers!

Professor Charles Lipson of the University of Chicago has spoken powerfully against this spreading menace in a column for Real Clear Politics last month. He has proposed steps that universities should undertake to protect campus free speech. Failing that he argues, “they will fail in their basic mission of promoting the exchange of ideas, real learning and innovative research.”

He’s right. But until he’s joined by his professorial colleagues, he is a voice in the academic wilderness.

The parents of the crybabies would be better served by diverting their daughter’s/son’s tuition payments to a psychotherapist for services rendered to their enfant terrible. No apologies here to those who just perceived a microaggression.

And the spineless professors should be required to write and rewrite Thomas Jefferson’s UVA mission statement on their whiteboards until they can demonstrate they comprehend its meaning.

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

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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.”

Comments are always welcome !!

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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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