Posted on 02/15/2016 2:02:12 PM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
After a year of speechifying, demagoguery and hasty, misplaced assumptions (ladies and gentlemen, meet presidential front-runner Scott Walker!), something of note has happened: actual voters cast actual ballots to select their candidates for president of the United States.
Ted Cruz handily won the Iowa Republican caucus, a testament to the strength of his get-out-the-vote operation. In stark contrast with his rivals Donald Trump and Marco Rubio, Cruz made an effort to visit each of Iowa's 99 counties, using his religious bona fides (his father Rafael is a Protestant minister) to attract the state's evangelical Christians. And Democrat Hillary Clinton narrowly held off insurgent Bernie Sanders, with his support among young voters and college students boosting him to a better-than-expected showing before a sizeable victory in New Hampshire.
The results were simultaneously startling and something of a non sequitur. The only candidates to be extracted from the presidential race after the Iowa caucuses were the ones, like Rand Paul and Rick Santorum, who were never going anywhere. (Brief tip of the hat to Paul, who sought to overturn sclerotic assumptions about conservatism with blunt talk about the failings of the American justice system and the limitations of US might. Right ideas, wrong year, wrong electorate.)
How much, anyway, could Iowa and New Hampshire truly tell us about the country's preferences? One of the peculiarities of the American electoral system is that the first two states to cast primary ballots are among the least representative of the country's multicultural diversity. Iowa is composed of 3.1 million people, of whom 91 per cent are white and the substantial majority are practising Christians.
For Republicans, who have gone all-in on being the party of white rage and resentment, this does not matter all that much, given that they have all but written off appealing to minority voters. For Democrats, the next swath of states this month will test whether Bernie Sanders's appeal extends beyond the college students and white working class voters of New Hampshire and into the African-American and Hispanic voters of South Carolina and Nevada.
There are four lessons to be learned from the current state of play. First, the era of the rapid-fire coronation of a favourite-son candidate by the proverbial men in smoke-filled rooms, is over, if it ever truly existed at all. American liberals spent much of the autumn indulging in industrial-grade schadenfreude over the Republican elites' inability to guide their preferred candidate (Jeb!) to victory, or even to relevance. But Bernie Sanders's second-place finish in Iowa and victory in New Hampshire, proves that Democratic voters may be just as restless.
Second, voters are angry. Democratic and Republican voters alike are particularly petrified about the state of the economy, which, contrary to much of the hot air blowing in from the various campaign HQs, is actually quite good. Democratic voters are furious about economic inequality and Republican voters believe that creeping socialism, in the form of ObamaCare, has transformed their country into some kind of nightmarish Denmark-by-the-Pacific. Of the top-tier contenders, Trump, Cruz and Sanders all speak directly to this anger, channelling voters' frustrations with immigration, extremist fundamentalism, and the banks, into impassioned support.
Clinton and Rubio, by comparison, are cooler candidates and have struggled as a result. Rubio did well in Iowa by transforming himself into a blustering mini-Trump, boosting his results but undercutting his chances of actually winning an election.
How can Rubio put himself forward as a moderate conservative when he is busy shouting himself hoarse about Obama's buckling to radicalism (in the form of visiting worshippers at a mosque) and promising to crack down on immigration?
Having watched Mitt Romney collect a pitiful 27 per cent of the Hispanic vote in 2012, Republican candidates have agreed to pretend that one can still win elections without Hispanic and African-American support. Pro tip: they can't. Rubio, young and Hispanic, appeared to be the sword that would untie the GOP's Gordian knot, but his dismal performance at the last debate before the New Hampshire primary had him resembling something closer to a malfunctioning YouTube video, impelled by some glitch in the computer code to artlessly repeat the same talking points.
Clinton, meanwhile, has struggled to find her tone. She is the overqualified candidate, the plug-and-play president, but the lack of overwhelming enthusiasm for her has turned into a roar of disinterest. Hillary is the only major candidate who demonstrably lives in the real world, as we know it. And in our frenzied electoral moment, this is to be understood as a weakness and not a strength.
In part, the lack of passion stems from an overwhelming desire not to revisit the politics of the past - the same thing that seems to have strangled Jeb Bush's candidacy in its cradle - but it also speaks to a creeping sexism that still lingers in American politics. Will a majority of voters support a female candidate? The likely answer is yes, but it would hardly be surprising to see Clinton face a degree of scrutiny and hostility that puts Obama's vetting to shame.
Third, Donald Trump is not done yet. The pundits - particularly the ones who are anxious to have called him a fleeting fad last year - rushed to declare Trump's second-place finish in Iowa a sign of his impending doom.
But Trump - a candidate with no political experience, three marriages and a lengthy array of appeals to racism, sexism and religious bigotry - won more votes than any other candidate in the history of the Iowa caucuses, with the notable exception of the night's first-place finisher. Trump's self-sustained air of inevitability was dinged by his failure to win Iowa. But the blustering real estate developer, and the man who has called for the largest population transfer in the history of humanity (take that, Stalin!), still won handily in New Hampshire.
Trump, a ludicrous orange puffball of mock-outrage and bluster, speaks to the disaffection many working class voters feel who see themselves as having been left behind by the 21st-century economy. His proclamations that he will simply beat Vladimir Putin, or the entire population of Mexico, into submission, are nothing more than ludicrous. And yet, he has uncovered a portion of the electorate poorly served by both parties. Profoundly uninterested in the anti-abortion, anti-gay marriage agenda of Cruz and his allies, they are also turned off by the big-government liberalism of Obama. Trump is their strongman, promising a balloon ride to the stratosphere of American greatness through the sheer force of his hot air.
Fourth, the race will go on and on.
Hillary Clinton remains the favourite to take the oath of office on January 20, but the success of Cruz, Trump and Sanders speaks of an electorate ill-suited to her strengths. Clinton is essentially running to serve Barack Obama's third term - a marked contrast with her 2008 campaign, which presented her as running to serve her husband's third term.
Sanders and Cruz may be sitting senators, as Clinton had been, but are notable for their antipathy toward the political process. And Trump has found his groove by offering vague but grandiose plans by which he asserts he will reassert US dominance.
They are all, to greater or lesser extents, projections of unabashed fantasy. Sanders will push through single-payer health care by virtue of a "political revolution"; Trump will have Mexico build a wall to keep its citizens out of the US; and Cruz will be the president of those interested in his punitive Christian utopia.
They are joke candidates-turned-real, one-trick ponies who were surprised to discover that their anger and tunnel vision focus connected with voters. Clinton, with her command of issues foreign and domestic, and the pragmatism honed by a quarter-century in the national public eye, is like the student council president trying to debate the school slackers. Try as she might, she cannot compete on their terms.
You able to find anti trump news from Muslim country.
Unless you’re a speed reader, you can’t have read it yet.
Cool! Now we get to ponder the penetrating insight of American politics from Abu Dhabi Media’s first English-language publication!
I still haven’t figured out why you haven’t posted something from RT.com yet. SURELY Noviya Pravda must have something bad to say about Trump, da?
A guy named Saul writing for an Abu Dhabi publication?
LOL, well, Muslim counties don’t like him! Heavens to me! Now I’ll never vote for him!
From what I read, it was ANTI EVERYONE.
uh... it wasn’t just anti-Trump. It was more anti- EVERY CANDIDATE.
It’s not so much a Trump hit piece as it is a Hillary love-fest. “Plug and Play President?” Only if the plug connects to an reading lamp in a Federal Prison.
You didn't mention who "him" is. Since the author of the article attacked every one of the candidates (Dem and Repub) you'll have to be more specific (well, except for Hillary. She's not a 'him' AFAIK).
Based on the comments here, most just read until they find a sentence that supports their views or angers them, then they post. So.... they only have to read the first sentence or paragraph, in most cases.
It doesn't seem to occur to them they might be missing the point without reading the whole thing.
No one is unstoppable.
3% is “handily”? What’s 19%?
Don’t make the Muslims mad. : )
Who is Saul Austerlitz and why should I care?
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