Anyone Can Become President and Everyone is Trying to Prove it
*BBC posted this great article about looking to American presidential elections from the outside.
I think that many people inside might agree with what they had to say which in a nutshell it describes briefly the candidates (all of them) and how crazy they are and we are for allowing them to run. Yes this is a free country but just because I want to be an astronaut does not mean that the government is going to pay for my training and send me up even if I have a heart condition and weight as much as a piano. To be honest in every election cycle we have some crazies and we don’t think much of them. The system takes care of it and by the time they finish in Iowa they would have dropped out. What is different on this cycle is that it seems that all of them including the backers are crazy because they are running on platforms that come from another galaxy.
Some of us know that we can’t afford a free college education for everyone; We can’t make Mexico pay for a wall we construct to keep people from the Caribbean, South and Central America out.
What are we going to do, nuke them? Shouldn’t we nuke Putin first if he doesn’t stop trying to destroy the European Union and bombing and killing the people we are trying to help in Syria? that is since we are in the subject of making people do things against their will. We also know that we can’t deconstruct the social security network and other social programs that keep people alive so we can make the military bigger; And no matter what Rubio says is time we ended the embargo with Cuba.
What are we going to do, nuke them? Shouldn’t we nuke Putin first if he doesn’t stop trying to destroy the European Union and bombing and killing the people we are trying to help in Syria? that is since we are in the subject of making people do things against their will. We also know that we can’t deconstruct the social security network and other social programs that keep people alive so we can make the military bigger; And no matter what Rubio says is time we ended the embargo with Cuba.
I invite you to take a short walk into the BBC page I posted below.
*Adam
With the US presidential election just nine months away, and would-be candidates battling it out in Tuesday's New Hampshire primary, American political satirist, PJ O'Rourke casts a scathing eye over the candidates hoping to make it to the White House.
There's an American saying: "Anyone can become president." And in the 2016 election we've been trying to prove it.
The list of people running for president seemed to include everybody except Beyonce. And there actually was a rumour last October that Beyonce's husband, rapper Jay Z, might run.
The US presidential field has begun to narrow at last. Although, to judge by who's left, this is not because of quality control.
To the rest of the world Donald Trump seems like a joke. And, please, let's hope he is. Trump is a prank the American electorate is pulling on the American political establishment.
Getty Images
Like many jokes, Trump is a manifestation of discomfort and anxiety.
America is a pretty good place. By world-historical standards it's an excellent place. And yet, according to opinion polls, almost two-thirds of Americans think the country is "on the wrong track".
What has got Americans so worried? The technological revolution is unsettling. So are rapid social shifts involving everything from immigrants to gender roles and sexuality. The global economy is shaky. And America's political establishment is so bitterly divided that we can't get bipartisan agreement on whether the sun will come up. (Republicans call predictions of dawn "unproven climate change science".)
So, for a laugh, a lot of Republicans are claiming to support a cartoon character - an over-confident blustery bigot, a self-inflated one-man business boom who claims he can make a deal with the devil that will have the angels of heaven lining up to buy condos in Trump Tower Hell.
Like many jokes, it's not very funny.
Trump's Democratic Party opposite number is Bernie Sanders. Bernie repeats the pieties of the 1960s New Left with a straight face, as deadpan as Trump is clownish.
iStockBernie seems a bit foggy on things that have happened since Woodstock, especially in the realm of foreign affairs. Bernie doesn't know the Berlin Wall fell and doesn't know he's still standing on the wrong side of it.
Most of Bernie's support comes from people who weren't born when his ideas were in vogue. They're too young to know that what Bernie says may sound like it makes sense during the dorm room bull session, but sooner or later you have to put the bong down and exhale.
For the rest of America what's not amusing is Bernie labelling himself a socialist. The word has a particular and peculiar meaning in the US. If you say "I'm a socialist," what Americans hear is, "I'm going to take your flat-screen TV and give it to a family of pill addicts in the backwoods of Vermont."
Bernie is not the right man to break America's political deadlock. It would be worse than electing Angela Merkel prime minister of Greece.
Then there are the serious candidates. Chief among them is Hillary Clinton. She has been seriously trying to become president, one way or another, since 1992.
Getty Images
Hillary is a seasoned, pragmatic, centre-left candidate. Her nomination by the Democratic Party was supposed to be inevitable. But it turns out that "evitable" is a real word in the English language. I checked the dictionary. We should start using it.
In a year when Americans have been willing to go in any direction for the sake of change, Hillary is setting her course by the beacon of continuity, the Lighthouse of Sameness. She's pulling her oar in an opposite direction, the one rower facing the wrong way in the Viking longship.
Now that Ben Carson has faded, the seriously conservative candidate is Republican Ted Cruz.
Dr Carson is a nice man. But he seemed to have no idea why he was running for president. GOP voters wanted him to go back to work as a neurosurgeon, perhaps removing Donald Trump's ruptured silicone brain implant that is endangering Republicans everywhere.
Ted Cruz wants a 10% flat-rate income tax. The US gross domestic product is $18tn. The US federal budget is $3.8tn. Suppose Cruz somehow lops $1tn off the budget. Suppose the 10% tax is somehow applied to the entire GDP. That still leaves a $1tn-plus hole in the national pants pocket.
Getty Images
In American politics, you mustn't say that hardline conservatives don't count. But you may say that they can't count.
Cruz is also a hardline cultural conservative, vehemently opposed to gay rights, drug law reform and so forth. He's still fighting the Culture Wars. He's up on the front line bravely firing away without noticing that the other side has gone home to celebrate victory with legalised marijuana at same-sex wedding receptions.
The remaining candidates - all Republicans - are "The Muddle in the Middle."
Marco Rubio, John Kasich, Jeb Bush and Chris Christie are seasoned, pragmatic centre-right candidates. And Carly Fiorina is the same, plus being a woman, minus the seasoning.
They all face the same problem as Hillary Clinton would, if Hillary were competing with five of herself.
Jeb Bush is the "Great American Failure Story". Here's Jeb with all the Bush influence, all the Bush political connections, all the Bush campaign funding, and he can't get out of single-digit polling numbers. This would be almost impossible for the son of an oligarchic family anywhere else in the world. Isn't America a wonderful country?
Getty Images
John Kasich is the very popular conservative governor of Ohio, a not-very-conservative state.
Ohio is a microcosm of American conflicts - labour v management, nativists v immigrants, blacks v whites, Occupy Cincinnati v the 1%. They all hate each other, but they don't hate John.
Kasich beat an incumbent Democratic governor and was re-elected by a landslide. Before that he served nine terms shovelling important manure in the Augean stables of the House of Representatives - 18 years on the House Armed Services Committee and six years as chairman of the House Budget Committee.
No wonder he's so far behind. Republicans are in no damn mood for competent, experienced politicians with broad popular appeal. Marco Rubio may emerge as the moderate Republican choice. He has a couple of things going for him pro *and against but at least he doesn’t use profanity and he doesn’t talk about the crazier things he went to do.
Comments