Joepistole said:
They are betting on it. So if they nominate him, Canadian Ted would run and fail and then go away. In essence they are betting Hillary will win the general election.
This is the interesting part to watch this year; I'll have to find the article because I passed at the time owing to Rubio not having that many voters, but the proposition was that if Rubio didn't make it, his
neoconservative hawk base would migrate to Clinton. Trump and Cruz might talk tough, but when even Democratic supporters are supposed to tremble at the mere thought of Clinton's talons, it's a safe bet that many neocon hawk voters who aren't otherwise entangled with the religious right will, indeed migrate. If Bill Clinton was the Best Republican President before Barack Obama, why not see if Hillary can bring that title home to the family again?
If this is, by a Clinton election, possibly the last of the old centrist presidencies, I wonder what the new center is actually going to look like.
In another context, I wouldn't use this one as a joke: Imagine that the new center manages to find a way to once again tell women to fuck off, and this time their excuse is ... Hillary Clinton. You know, because she's all we've ever heard and a bag of cowchips, too.
Okay, so now that we've chuckled at the idea, what of its device? In heated debates, even pretty regular people are starting to get down to, "Okay, well, I was going to explain it to you, but I don't like your tone, so, no". Our society has been getting a bit more superficially vindictive, lately, and that's kind of what people are hoping to exploit when talking about why Trump is attractive without admitting what's at the core of it. Because we could not achieve such petty vindictiveness
without having twisted ourselves into painful knots in order to coddle the bigotries of our American heritage. How much of the GOP appeal relies on
supremacism? How much more is that than, say, before the Dubya years?
(I know that's reaching back a bit, but it really is unfortunate we encountered this manner of war during the Stupid Period following the successful presidency of a Rhodes scholar.)
Still, though, the bigot wing was the quiet scandal in Republican circles; the Party crafted policies to pitch to Americans that helped distract from these aspects. But at the same time, conservatives widely used some of these tactics. It's one thing to point out that any social justice argument, no matter how correct it might be, will always lose at the ballot box against, "They're comin' for your Bible! They're comin' for your children!" But we also dug ourselves a hole of stagnant wages, regressive tax burdens, constricted class mobility, and even a more conformist than normal education system that eventually proved devastatingly inadequate even when it succeeded, on behalf of an idiocratic cry of, "They're comin' for your wallet!"
No, really. Consider that union representation is way down. Also that conservative politicians can from time to time be heard complaining about lavish, even opulent public compensation packages. (Opulent goes to police departments sometimes, and it's not conservatives who call it out.) The thing is that these compensation packages have followed the economy. They're not lavish, they are
closer to correct compared to the economy. How does this happen? Collective bargaining. Conservatives are complaining about unions protecting their workers against wage stagnation.
We did all this to ourselves.
But we're going to blame the unions, aren't we? You know, societally.
Right now the political center is under siege; and, you know, to some degree well it should be. Centrism brings us torture and crime and bigotry. It brings us war and pollution. It brings us broken hopes because, hey, the first priority of centrism is always to compromise, and the first effect thereof is that we give away the prize.
Another way of looking at GOP bigotry:
They are the Party of Figuring Out Whom to Exclude from the American Dream. I mean, centrism brings us a debate about oral contraception ... in the twenty-first century. I mean, even when it comes to health care, part of the compromise was that we needed to leave someone out. When it came to torture, we needed to find someone to leave out.
And that is, historically, the fundamental conservative mission. Do you know why we have Amendment XIX? Because we were determined to leave somebody out of the Equal Protection Clause. And we have. We've inched around it the whole time, creating disparate valences of test in order to hold this one group out and treat differently. It is the essence of our need to deliberately exclude someone.
Ask Governor Winthrop. It's our American heritage.
So what's going to happen? We've just broken ourselves with all this, and now the fairly unruly masses have finally gotten wind of how badly shit is fucked up. Okay, as dramatic or comedic as that line sounds, it's not exactly true, is it? Yet for all these years, it seems like the fucked up shit this crew is always worried about isn't actually what's wrong. But, you know, reality is, to a necessary degree, in the eye of the beholder. So if the guy who voted for union busting and no taxes is suddenly upset about wages and the deficit,
obviously it's the fault of women and blacks and public schoolteachers; that it makes no sense makes no difference, as this is his reality.
And look at what is devouring the center.
So what do we get? A new center by the midterm? By the next presidential?
Meet the new center, same as the old center?
Or ... you know, what can Americans realistically come up with that could possibly be worse than what we've accomplished so far, and are we about to see it?
Because we can blame the parties all we want, but we voted for it the whole time. Sure, not me, because I voted for this when that other won; whatever. I live in a society where the center is a constant compromise with exclusion, and the things we're expected to take seriously in order to maintain that illusion are well past the insanity threshold. Coming up? Will the center entertain legislating ontology in order to have another go at women? Will center continue to wield "The Ferguson Effect" against blacks even though the thing doesn't actually exist? Will the center ever resolve its feelings about torture? Will the center ever stop lamenting the bad tax schemes it invents, or double down? Will the center eventually acknowledge that maybe equal protection
does require supremacy under law?
Because this is all on the table now. It's stuff liberals have been fending off for years. It's becoming the mainstream of the GOP. And, you know, hey, this is a society that believes "both sides do it" is an axiomatic truth. You've been around long enough to watch it happen. Will the press point out the obvious? That something is torture? Or that it is supremacist? At what point will that become too activist, and not the job of the press? Will the center demonstrate critical thinking skills, so long bemoaned as lost unto the masses? How long before the polite, reasonable thing to do is compromise with the absolutist exclusionary argument? You've seen it before.
Torture?
Birth control?
Really?
After the 1992 election, the Republican Part of Oregon was in disarray. Faced with a potential extremist takeover by the rising Oregon Citizens' Alliance and their friends, Party officials did the only thing they could do.
They dissolved the Party.
And then they rebuilt, but the extremists won out eventually, so they're rebuilding again.
I wonder if the same thing is even possible on a national scale. There will be riots when Hillary Clinton is elected regardless of who the Republican nominee is.
And if you take out all the religious and other tinfoil infecting the Republican Party, and just focus on "defense" and "money", Hillary Clinton is the best shot Republicans have at the presidency.
Clearly, liberals know this, too. I just wonder if the Sanders movement even has sufficient base to properly oppose the right-wing tantrum pitched by hardliners once they realize that the RNC is just fine with President Clinton.
Right now it looks like she's going to win the nomination; we'll see if Bernie can muster the electoral force to take the two-thirds to three-quarters of the remaining primary and caucus votes he needs to accrue enough unpledged delegates; we'll see how hard he's willing to fight at the convention. I get this sick feeling, sometimes, that we're putting the Democratic Party through this right now because Republicans are holding their own tent revolution. It seems clear that, if elected, Hillary Clinton will be the last of this sort of centrist. Well, until eight years later when three Beltway elections have reiterated that voters on the ground want some manner of familiar centrism. Or is that how it's going to go? But something is about to happen. The GOP necessarily must start excising this base bloc, and why would
anyone in the hardliners' position go quietly?
At this point, Hillary Clinton is the RNC's best hope.
Help them, HRC, you're their only hope.
The American people did this to themselves. The question is whether or not we're going to learn anything from this.
Personally, I'm more than simply sanguine with the prospect of her presidency. Besides, she would be a symbol, a marker; we have to break leftward, after, anyway. Also, it's just that time. The question for my bloc is, "One more go, or pitch it now and wait another twenty years?"
But the RNC? I don't envy them.
Still, though, they did this to themselves.
And We, the People, have done this to ourselves.
