The Zeitgeist

Strange Bedfellows: This Florida Republican Agrees with Bernie and Hillary. Trump Must be Stopped So America and the GOP Can Be Saved.

Note: This article originally appeared on The Huffington Post and InauguralClock.com on March 14, 2016, the day prior to the Florida Primary.

It’s an odd day indeed when a lifelong Republican finds himself in agreement with Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. It’s the very definition of “politics makes strange bedfellows.”

Over the weekend Hillary said “Donald Trump is not who we are” and Bernie Sanders asserted that “Donald Trump is a pathological liar.” I wholeheartedly agree with both statements.

Donald Trump has conjured a witches brew of ignorance, belligerence, insults, racism, misogyny and xenophobic jingoism along with quite a (forgive the pun) liberal sprinkling of bald-faced mendacity that is so outrageous that it boggles the mind and the senses.

The Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbles was famous for saying that “the bigger the lie, the more people will believe it.” In the case of Donald Trump, he lies almost all of the time. (when he’s not busy flip-flopping his positions on the issues) Big lies, little lies, sweet lies, mean lies, white lies.

Zombie voters have crept out of their usual stupefied beer-fueled crypts and are reveling in a candidate who appears as ignorant as they are on the issues and is actually proud and unapologetic about it. It’s as though every sweat hog and slacker from high school gathered together to violently expel the principal, faculty and all the honors students from campus and then still expected to graduate and get good jobs.

Intelligence, intellect, accomplishments, facts, manners and even polite speech are derided as pejorative characteristics of “The Establishment,” all those bright Poindexter types who’ve hijacked the country and conspired to keep the average Joe down for their own gain. It’s time for the revolution of the ignorant.

That Trump is a privileged Ivy League graduate born to wealth and privilege is irrelevant to this voter so long as Trump talks the talk of blaming anyone and everyone for the county’s failures – naming scapegoats both foreign and domestic and offering not one coherent, logical or practical solution to what may ail the nation.

All the polls in Florida have Trump beating Senator Marco Rubio by double digits. It just doesn’t matter to me. On Tuesday, this Florida Republican will cast his vote for Rubio to try and stop Trump. In reality, I lean towards Ohio Governor John Kasich but he doesn’t stand a chance in the Sunshine State so I’ll go with the native son. I’ll also be voting for Rubio because I have a conscience, I have to sleep at night, I have to live with myself.

It must be remembered that the Nazis were elected to power in Germany in 1933. All that’s necessary for evil to triumph in Florida is for good Republicans to split their vote between Rubio, Senator Ted Cruz and Kasich. I urge all Florida Republicans to put aside their personal preferences and coalesce around Rubio. If most Cruz and Kasich voters go for Rubio he can beat Trump and beating Trump is the duty of all Republicans who still cherish the values of Abraham Lincoln, of U.S. Grant, of Theodore Roosevelt, of Calvin Coolidge, of Dwight Eisenhower, of Ronald Reagan and of the Constitution. Don’t let Trump be inevitable. Get out and vote. Make your vote stand for something and stand for something right, noble and good.

The Zeitgeist

Fox News' Megyn Kelly and Bret Baier

Crimes of Omission: Primary Election Coverage a Triumph of Superficiality by Broadcast News Media

(Note: This article was written and appeared originally on March 2nd, 2016 on InauguralClock.com)

If one subscribes to the blather emanating from the incessant talking heads on cable TV news one would come away thinking that four states or 11 states or 15 states have already predetermined the outcome of the 2016 presidential season – that it’s unstoppable manifest destiny that Donald Trump will be the Republican nominee and Hillary Clinton at the helm for the Democrats. What’s the point for people in the other 35 states to even vote? National composite polls are presented as a fait accompli even though there is no such thing as a “national primary” and this arguably helps skew actual election results as voters are influenced by supposed “inevitability.”

Declarations to the effect that both Donald and Hillary are “electoral juggernauts,” and are “running the table” never cease, yet the crimes of omission on the part of the anchors, reporters and pundits are stupendous.

Key omission number one – hardly anyone on TV mentions that many of the primaries are “open,” meaning that voters often don’t have to be a registered voter in the party’s primary they’re voting in. In many states Independents can vote in either party’s primary thereby substantially skewing the results and the wishes of the core party members. Voter registrations and party affiliations can be switched pretty quickly, also throwing off the wishes of the party faithful. Why many early voting states allow this kind of open and chaotic cross-party pollination is beyond me. Why should non-Republicans or non-Democrats determine who their respective parties will nominate for the highest office in the land? Primary results are then presented as though they were authentic gauges of party members’ sentiments when in fact they’re often not.

Key omission number two – anchors and reporters for example will say that “Trump is winning in every state” or “Hillary is sweeping the primaries” without explaining how many or how few delegates may come from being victorious in any given state’s race. All state wins aren’t created equal. For example, winning in Texas is worth a whole lot more than winning in Vermont but the TV news folks just tally-up how many states someone won without giving any perspective or reference and based on that a candidate is either inevitable or over. Also, because the cable news guys are all in New York, late-breaking results from the center or the west of the country are given short-shrift in the big picture. For example, on Super Tuesday, Bernie Sanders won in Colorado and Minnesota but all the talking heads had written Sanders off by 8:00pm without those results.

Key omission number three – There’s been few delegate count tally screens (especially on Fox), just screens showing results of who won which state. This is incomplete information because not all states have equal delegates and therefore are not necessarily as significant. You can win small Southern states all day long but if you can’t win in New York, Illinois, Florida, Pennsylvania and California, you can’t be nominated. Context is missing in its entirety. For example, Sanders isn’t “over” when as of March 2^nd he’s only 191 delegates behind Hillary with 35 states to go and 2,383 delegates needed to secure a nomination. Likewise, Ted Cruz is only 90 delegates shy of Trump with the same 35 races still to go and 1,237 delegates needed to win. Ninety is not Mount Everest but if you listen to the cable people you’d think it might as well be Mars. Why they declare the races to be over so early if baffling because you would think it’s in their interest to keep the horse races rolling on and on to generate ratings. The composition of the populations of many state races ahead favor candidates other than Trump and Hillary but you just don’t hear any of that.

Key omission number four – Donald Trump hasn’t even reached 50 percent of the vote in any state or any race anywhere yet his wins by slim pluralities are presented as resounding mandates and crushing victories over his rivals. No one discusses why Trump can’t reach 51 percent and what it means that roughly 60 to 65 percent of GOP voters are voting against him. If you want to see a resounding victory or mandate from the voters look at Hillary’s results in Alabama where she got 77 percent of the vote or Georgia where she garnered 71.3 percent. Likewise, Sanders snatched 86.1 percent of the vote in Vermont. Those are mandates and crushing victories. In other states like Oklahoma, Sanders got 51.9 percent to Hillary’s 41.5. That’s a clear majority because it’s over 50 percent. In Minnesota, Sanders received 61.7 percent. Another clear majority. When Trump gets 38.8 percent in Georgia, this is not any kind of majority. Likewise he got 32.7 percent in Arkansas and just 38.9 percent in Tennessee.

Also omitted are what Trump’s electoral results may mean in a general election (again, limited context) because let’s take one of his best results, Massachusetts at 49.3 percent (with heavy voting by Independents and Democrats in the GOP primary). Since Republicans are just 23 percent of registered voters in the nation, extrapolating his win means that if he got the same support across the GOP nationwide that would translate into just 11.3 percent of the entire American electorate which is a sure way to replicate a Barry Goldwater-like crushing defeat in the general election (Goldwater got 38.47 percent of the popular vote and just 52 votes in the Electoral College). If Trump were racking-up results like Hillary and Sanders in their big wins then it would mean he’s got the backing of the Republican rank-and-file but this context is never mentioned on air.

Key omission number five – no pressing follow-ups – on-air personalities hardly ever press Trump in particular with follow-up questions on any given subject when he evades or ignores the question or gives an obfuscating answer. Most on-air people just move on to the next question hoping for a better answer to that one so he gets away with providing no answers to the American people. A key example of this has been an utter dearth of follow-ups about his releasing of his income tax returns despite the IRS clearly saying that anyone can release their returns even if those returns are being audited and that non-audited returns from earlier years can also be released and Trump gets away with this time and time again.

Key omission number six – Poll results and bandied about with much breathless excitement but hardly ever mentioned are the dates when the poll was conducted, how many voters were polled out of how many registered voters (a quarter percent anyone?), how the poll was conducted (i.e., by landline telephone which is how most polls are done, which is not an accurate way to reach a broad cross-section of Americans in 2016) and what are the demographics of those polled? Yet a poll of 1,000 people reached via landline three days before is presented as the sentiments of the American people and can become self-fulfilling prophesies.

What all this says is that sadly broadcast news is terribly superficial and ephemeral and underscores the essential nature of print and web journalism to provide deeper analysis, context and perspective for the average American voter. Unfortunately, most Americans still get most of their news and information from broadcast and cable news which may partly explain why the country is beset and saddled with the kind of underwhelming candidates we’ve got for 2016 from both parties.

The Zeitgeist

   

 Hillary, The Donald and General William Tecumseh Sherman (right)

Southern Comfort for Donald and Hillary on Super Tuesday; Last Stand Coming for the GOP to Prevent a Hostile Takeover

Most every Super Tuesday poll shows Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton marauding through the Old South like Generals William Tecumseh Sherman and Philip Sheridan in their scorched earth march to the sea.

To paraphrase F. Scott Fitzgerald, “the South is different from you and me.” It may be 151 years since Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox but the South still remains a vastly different place than most of the nation.

There is a bifurcated, bi-polar, segregated world down there notwithstanding the integration of African-Americans into the police forces and into governmental office. This segregation manifests itself not just culturally but especially politically. Blacks are nearly universally Democrats and a plurality if not a majority of whites in some states are heavily Republican.

On the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton will do well in the South on Super Tuesday because a huge proportion of the Democratic electorate is African-American and Bernie Sanders just has no ground game with that group. Breakfast with Al Sharpton isn’t enough. The Clintons have been working the black vote for decades and Sanders, who is the darling of the Northeastern white intelligentsia is too much of an unknown to many of these voters. Black voters in the South are very clannish. Many black Southerners are more conservative than their northern counterparts and Sanders’ socialism is not necessarily an attraction there. Sanders’ Jewishness is also not an asset. Albert Einstein famously said that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction and African-Americans vote as a bloc in the South in reaction to many whites’ self-segregation into the GOP. To advance their interests in the region blacks vote en masse so they have political clout. Only a fellow black like Obama has been able to fracture that monolithic voting bloc.

It’s really only in the last 30 or so years that the Republican Party has been viable or visible in the states of the old Confederacy. Because it was Lincoln, Grant and the Republicans who brutally defeated their secessionist rebellion, white Southerners were religiously Democrats. Because of the subjugation of blacks for more than 100 years whites were able to concurrently be Democrats and conservatives and/or reactionary racists. They were called Dixiecrats and they wielded enormous influence in national politics until the 80s.

Because of voting rights for blacks, integration, desegregation and a general easing of conditions for African-Americans, the liberalism of the national Democratic Party was able to permeate the Democratic Party in Dixie which drove most conservative whites into the arms of the GOP who welcomed the opportunity to finally attain political power in the South and thereby expand their control nationally in the House and Senate.

It should be said that not all Southern Republicans are white and not all white Southern Republicans are racist bigots either overtly or subliminally but there is a large population of registered Republicans in the South who cling to the Confederate battle flag metaphorically if not physically. There is a sizable population there who are heavily xenophobic and who respond enthusiastically to notions of banning Hispanic and Moslem immigration entirely, who also don’t like liberals, who don’t like Catholics, Jews, Hispanics and who are so riled up about the mere existence of Barack Obama that they’ve channeled their rage into support of Donald Trump. Many of these folks are so angry that they’d like to smack someone upside the head. Trump, through his vulgar bellicosity allows them the vicarious ability to do just that. Trump’s evasion of unambiguously condemning and repudiating David Duke and the KKK is a subtle signal to these voters that The Donald shares your anger.

This is why despite all logic which clearly proves that Trump is not really a conservative and despite his flip-flopping on the issues, despite his not releasing his income taxes, his support of liberal positions that Trump is handily leading all the GOP polls in the South. Marco Rubio in the minds of many of these voters might just as well be Barack Obama – a guy with a funny ethnic name who’s Catholic to boot. It doesn’t matter what Rubio actually says or stands for. Ted Cruz, with the exception of Texas (his home state) is not viewed far behind Rubio in the mindset of these types of people. This group comprises probably 35 to 45 percent of the Southern GOP electorate, but with a fractured field comprised of Rubio, Cruz, and the continued windmill-tilting campaigns of Dr. Ben Carson and Governor John Kasich it’s enough to hand big victories to Trump. At the very least, Carson and Kasich should have dropped out prior to Super Tuesday to enable either Cruz or Rubio to emerge as a counter-weight to Trump, but the incredible hubris of all these candidates is still preventing the coalescence of the Republican majority to credibly oppose and stop Trump.

The last stand for both mainstream and conservative Republicans after many Trump victories in the South on Super Tuesday will be the various primaries and caucuses between March 5^th and March 15^th where 356 delegates are up for grabs and in the second Super Tuesday primaries on March 15^th in six big states like Florida, Illinois, Missouri, North Carolina and Ohio. Beyond March 15^th are huge states like New York on April 19^th and Pennsylvania on April 26^th

The only way to stop Trump from attaining the nomination after March 1^st will be for three of the remaining non-Trump candidates to drop out and throw their support behind one guy who can marshal the anti-Trump vote and galvanize rational GOP voters. This can be done but it will require a lot of candidate ego sublimation to salvage the Republican Party and their chances in November. As in some of the Star Trek movies, Mr. Spock says “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few or of the one,” the needs of the many are to stop Trump and the Republican Party needs some self-sacrifice on the part of Carson, Kasich and either Cruz or Rubio. And they need it now.