The Debacle in Iowa

This was supposed to be an analysis of the results of the Iowa Caucus, which officially kicks off the Democratic presidential primary race, but it’s getting very late and no results are yet available. The Iowa Democratic Party blames the delay on “quality checks” to clear up “inconsistencies.”

Which is pretty damned embarrassing for the Iowa Democratic Party, which be able to pull off its quadrennial big event by now. Given the political paranoia of the moment, on the other hand, we can understand why the the party would rather slow and safe than hasty and perhaps sorry. Four years former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton beat Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders by a razor thin margin in the caucus, close enough to leave some Sanders supporters convinced the vote had been rigged.

Sanders’ supporters were right that the state national party establishments preferred Clinton, and they were right that game was rigged with “super delegates” who earned a vote at the convention with their party credentials. Clinton wound up winning a slight majority of the votes cast in the primaries and caucuses, but Sanders’ famously ardent admirers are still seething. As the Republican nominee President Donald Trump fanned the flames of their resentment reduce Democratic turnout for Clinton, which arguably worked to some extent in the states where Trump won his electoral majority by thin margins, and this time around his campaign manager and his son were suggesting that the Democratic bigwigs are once again out to get Sanders.

According to the polls Sanders was the heavy favorite in the race, but the Des Moines Registers usually final poll wasn’t published after someone noticed South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg’s name was left of the list of candidates some poll respondents wee asked about, and there seemed to be a lot of volatility in the standings the late stages of the race, so we can’t blame the Democrats for being even overly cautious.

Still, it’s pretty damned embarrassing for the Democratic Party.

— Bud Norman

The Rhetoric of a Rigged System

President Donald Trump gave another one of his continuing campaign speeches on Friday in Pensacola, Florida, and it was a doozy even by his standards. In the hour-plus extemporaneous oration he warned that his critics are “very, very bad and evil people,” and that “We have a rigged system in this country,” which is pretty unprecedented rhetorical rhetoric, but there was so much to object even before he got to those slanders.

There were the usual exaggerated boasts about his electoral-vote victory and popular-vote loss more than a year ago, and he also boasted that he’s been the most de-regulating president since Abraham Lincoln. Trump always refers to his revered predecessor as the “late, great Abe Lincoln,” just in case you weren’t aware of his greatness and hadn’t yet heard the bad news about him, and early in his term he seemed pleasantly surprised that Lincoln was a Republican, insisting that most people were unaware of the fact, and he seems similarly unaware of the fact that there weren’t a whole lot of regulations to de-regulate back in the 1860s and that Lincoln had more urgent matters. He also took credit for people saying “Merry Christmas,”

Of course there were all the usual attacks on media who persist in reporting news he’d rather not have to hear. He urged any stockholders in his audience to hire a lawyer and sue the American Broadcast Network for a quickly corrected error that resulted in the reporter’s suspension and briefly sent the stock market indices down, and noting other corrections various media have made he said “They’re saying sorry — they’ve been doing that all year,” and in the very next sentence added “They never apologize.” Trump gets things wrong far more frequently, prides himself on never apologizing for anything, but the crowd seemed to love it.

Pensacola is home to the Navy’s “Top Gun” aviation training program and its elite Blue Angels flight team, so of course Trump also boasted about his devotion to America’s veterans, although in the middle of it he wound up riffing about the low ratings that Arnold Schwarzenegger had as Trump’s successor on “The Apprentice.”

The very lovely town of Pensacola is also a mere twenty miles or so away from Mobile, Alabama, and shares a media market with about 20 percent of the neighboring state, so of course Trump also put in a plug for the Republican candidate in that crazy special senatorial election. The Republican candidate is twice-removed Judge Roy Moore, who stands quite credibly accused by numerous women of sexual misbehavior, just as Trump does, but Trump made the argument that Moore is opposed by one of those very bad and evil who criticize his agenda. Of course the crowd cheered lustily, but it’s hard to say how it played elsewhere.

At the mention of vanquished Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton the crowd went into its usual chant of “lock her up,” which is also pretty much unprecedented in the history of presidential politics, and that was prompted the remarks about how the rigged system that somehow prevails in America despite Trump’s landslide victory and his appointees at the agencies he warns are out to get him. That’s pretty much unprecedented, too, and despite the crowd’s raucous response it troubles our old-fashioned Republican souls.

The conservatism we so long ago signed up for sought to conserve the institutions and norms that have been so assiduously built up over the course of America’s imperfect but otherwise glorious history, despite the occasional demagogues on the right and left who have popped up now and then, and we won’t concede it has culminated in a rigged system. Freedom of the press and an independent judiciary are both pillars of what made America great long before Trump came along, as far as we’re concerned, and by now we trust them both far more than we do Trump or that Moore guy.

Trump also said “We need some love in the country. I would love to bring both sides together, if that’s possible. There’s a lot of hatred out,” but that came just seconds after the remark about the very, very bad and evil people who criticize him. All in all, we doubt any of it played well except to sorts of  people who show up at these ongoing campaign speeches. The latest polls suggest that’s a shrinking number, but Trump is insisting that’s “fake news.”

— Bud Norman

So Crazy, It Might Just Work

Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald J. Trump has a penchant for promulgating far-fetched conspiracy theories, from President Barack Obama’s foreign birth to a Republican rival’s father being in on the John F. Kennedy assassination to his likely Democratic rival ordering the assassination of Vince Foster, but he’s lately stumbled on to one that seems at least plausible. Speaking to one of his typical adoring crowds in Anaheim, California, while the typical rioting went on outside, Trump told his audience an intriguing tale about how he might not wind up running against his presumptive Democratic rival and former First Lady and Senator and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton after all.

With his usual stream-of-consciousness eloquence, Trump told his so-loyal-he-could-shoot-someone supporters that “It could be we’re going run against ‘Crazy Bernie,'” a reference to the somehow-still-in-the-race self-described socialist Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who we must agree is actually crazy, and “That could be,” which we also glumly acknowledge. “He’s a crazy man, and that’s okay,” Trump went on to say, adding “we like crazy people,” an admission that is also actually true. He went further on to say that “I hear they want to put (Vice President Joe) Biden in. I hear they’re going to slip Joe Biden in, and he’s going in Bernie’s place,” adding that “the system is rigged against Bernie — 100 percent.” We have also heard “they” want to put Biden in, and from more reliable sources than the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, and at this point even the late night comedians can’t deny that the Democratic party’s system has indeed been rigged 100 percent against Sanders, even if something in our old-fashioned Republicans has to give some begrudging respect to a Democratic Party establishment that at least still resists Sanders’ outright socialism, so it all seems quite plausible even if still seems somewhat improbable.

Trump had already pounced on all the news that even the most polite news media could not ignore regarding the latest developments in Clinton’s ongoing e-mail scandal, which the presumptive Republican nominee quite succinctly described as “very bad.” An Inspector General’s report on her obviously insecure and seemingly insecure e-mail practices as Secretary of State was scathing, a Federal Bureau of Investigation inquiry into that matter and the likely related questions about her family’s phony-baloney “family foundation” and the donations that look to have resulted in favors to foreign governments during her government service is still ongoing, a thoroughly and disgustingly politicized Justice Department seems likely determine if an indictment will be made solely on political grounds, and even the most polite media were acknowledging that it was indeed very bad, and suddenly it doesn’t take a conspiracy theorist to speculate that some other fix might yet be in.

We’re not so bold as to venture a guess whether the hypothetical late entry will be Biden or Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren or some other won’t-come-right-out-and-admit-they’re-a-socialist savior the party comes up with, or even if any of these alternatives will come to pass, and in this crazy election year we won’t venture any guesses how any of these possibilities might pan out. Any non-Clinton candidate the Democrats might come up with would be unburned by the longstanding and still recent scandals so sordid they make even the presumptive Republican nominee’s checkered career as a real-estate-and-gambling-and-strip-joint-and-scam-university-and-reality-show mogul seem pristine, and he or she would start out the race with such scant name recognition that it would take any of them, even the Vice President of the past seven-and-a-half years, months to reach the negative approval ratings of the presumptive Republican nominee, and it would be a plot twist that even the acknowledged master of the post-reality show such as Trump would be hard-pressed to deal with.

We’ll stay tuned, but with no hopes this will turn out well. As much as we’d like to believe that Obama isn’t at legally an American that birth announcement in the Honolulu Observer has always settled the matter, and the Americanism of Texas Sen. Ted Cruz is even less in doubt, and as much as an honest critic might say about how Clinton and her husband handled the provable suicide of their former law partner and administration official only the most crazy sort of conspiracy theorist still believes they ordered his assassination, but at this point there are few other certitudes in this crazy election year.

— Bud Norman