Photo credit Craig Hulet
With the election hangover slowly fading, my old friend and research associate “Tex” has weighed in on the failure of the Democratic Party establishment, which had swung to the right under Clinton management:
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In 1992 the campaign slogan of the Bill Clinton campaign was:
“It’s the economy, stupid.”
That slogan and that tactic worked well enough to unseat an incumbent president (Bush 1) who had been swept into office on the coat-tails of one of the most successful Republican administrations (at least from the perspective of the RNC and the neocons on the Right) of the 20th century.
Fast forward 24 years and we find the Clinton’s and their band of Washington DC insiders, political handlers and DNC campaign strategists, so disconnected from political reality that they had forgotten what worked in 1992. Just as they abandoned the party’s core constituency after the debacle of Jimmy Carter; a segment of the body politic that at one time was powerful enough to make a FOUR term president out of Franklin D. Roosevelt, in SPITE of his own elitist background.
We are now left with a nation in political ruin and a president-elect who may very well be the single most unqualified individual to EVER step foot in the Oval Office. One who claims that he will gather together “the best people” to solve the nation’s problems and “make America great again.”
Meanwhile his cabal of “the best people” is starting to read like a Who’s Who list of political dunces, malcontents and, oh wait……Washington insiders and Wall Street deal-makers!
Setting aside the sarcasm for the moment, it becomes clear that the election of Donald Trump may well end up being the worst development in U.S political history in terms of several key areas of policy-making: most notably the environment, regulation of banking and financial services and foreign policy. In short, the three MOST important policy arenas within the current political dialectic of the industrialized nations of the world!
The U.S. political establishment, in particular the Executive Branch, has long been viewed as a political comedy of errors by our foreign allies and enemies alike. The election of Donald J. Trump is all but certain to secure this legacy for many decades to come…
The only thing that has kept us in the game in terms of being taken seriously by any of the other industrialized nations on the planet is the BRUTE FORCE that is exemplified by the most expensive and bloated imperial army in human history!
The neoliberals who are represented by the mainstream democratic establishment refuse to admit it. The left and the progressive community don’t want to admit it. While the leadership on the “right” is proud of it!
Among the small handful of public figures who called this election correctly (Prof. Allan Lichtman and Peter Thiel being two examples) have both stated that they felt Bernie Sanders would have made a far more formidable candidate for Trump than did HRC.
Why, you may ask?
Because, the message that both Sanders and Trump brought to the campaign trail was essentially the same message; i.e. that there is a huge and growing percentage of the electorate who have become economically and politically disenfranchised by almost five decades of stagflation, tax policy, trade policy, economic policy and social policy that was ushered into place after the end of the Vietnam War and which has reduced much of the middle class in America to a socioeconomic status that is the equivalent of the peasant class in any Third World country!
Had we allowed two candidates bearing the same message to fight it out for the presidency the debate would have been reduced to matters of policy. Or in other words, “how does each of you propose to solve the same problem?”
At that point it would have become clear who the better choice was due to Sander’s considerable experience as an elected official with 20 years on the Hill and a plan for rescuing the working class from near certain doom that did not include the likes of Newt Gingrich, Chris Christie and Rudy Giuliani, much less another Goldman Sachs insider like Steven Mnuchin to run the economy (Treasury Dept.); or a Lucas Oil executive to head up the Department of the Interior.
http://www.politico.com/story/2016/11/who-is-in-president-trump-cabinet-231071
By selecting Clinton as their candidate, the DNC’s message was clear. From their perspective, things are going just fine. Fine for the political and financial aristocracy who were the true constituency of Clinton and who remain the constituency of the Democratic Party.
Hillary Clinton was very much the candidate of the establishment and make no mistake about it….it was the establishment that was under fire in this years’ presidential election. She could be counted on to do the bidding of party insiders and the political elite who control every aspect of power in Washington DC.
But it wasn’t meant to be….
Instead a high-dollar grifter by the name of Donald J. Trump was able to rally the politically illiterate class in America, along with a handful of self-serving corporatists; take their money, get them to the polling booth and wrestle the reins of power away from the most well-oiled and financially well-endowed political machine in the history of the world.
Anyone who has ever read The Art of War by Sun Tzu knows that one of the most fundamental principles of conflict is to never underestimate the strength of the enemy. We have underestimated the strength of the enemy and the enemy is now among us!
