It’s Off to the Races!

“It’s off to the races,” as my Dad used to say.  Both political parties in the United States have their candidates and we now have approximately two months to beat each other up, to make unattainable promises, and to perfect the art of nastiness while sounding patriotic.

For a long time, many people have wondered whether the primary system should be scrapped.  The election cycle has become a long ordeal of separate state electoral contests which are supposed to accumulate support for major party candidates, but instead resemble long term bloodletting where the patient is not cured, but rather dies.

In the last Republican primary electoral cycle, the first state seemed to have decided that Donald Trump would be the candidate.  Once New Hampshire was done, all the other states fell in line. Only Nikki Haley hung in there for some strange reason that only she can discern. Perhaps the former South Carolina Governor thought that democracy would win out and that logic together with reason would provide the Republicans with a legitimate candidate.  No such luck.

The Democrats, for their part, took a historical new road to nominating their candidate for president.  President Joe Biden was smart enough to pick an up-and-coming candidate from the most blue of blue states who spoke the language that the leftwing of his party could live with, if not entirely embrace.  Once Biden was ousted by the real leaders of his own party, especially Barrack Obama, there was to be no democratic selection of his successor.  Rather, the men at the top, Biden, Obama and probably Clinton, determined that the public would get Vice President Kamala Harris as the Democratic candidate for president.

Perhaps primaries are a thing of the past. Once upon a time, candidates were picked by older White men in conventions filled with cigar smoke and heaven knows what other toxic substances.  Some of the candidates who survived that process were good and others just a mishmash of political salami, a little bit of meat and a great deal of fat.

The electorate should ask themselves the question as to whether they would be better off letting successful party leaders select the party’s candidate for President.  Presidents Biden, Clinton, and Obama were successful, at least with the electorate.  Regardless of their accomplishments, or lack thereof, they understood what the people wanted and managed to get themselves elected, sometimes repeatedly.  Perhaps they were the best people to pick the Democratic candidate for president in 2024.

Republicans, by contrast, have appealed to the lowest common denominator, and the most extreme elements of their base.  In other words, the squeaking rightwing wheels got the grease, and the candidate is Donald Trump, who, like Joe Biden, should have stepped aside and made someone else great again.  Had Trump decided to pull out of the contest for president, he would have had the supreme power to name his successor, and that person would have had a much greater chance of success than Trump has. However, ego reigns supreme and the Republicans will be running with a highly questionable candidate in terms of his ability to reach beyond his own narrow segment of the electorate.

The Democrats pulled off a great Hollywood event at their Chicago National Convention.  They managed to shut down the voices of dissent, they kept the protestors from seriously disrupting the convention, and they pulled together the center of their party with the leftwing politicians who dominate so much of the American debate in modern times. Never mind that they kept the masses relatively quiet with police, walls and fences.  The Democrats have indeed achieved the big tent, which the Republicans have managed to dodge.

There was Governor Josh Shapiro, clearly spurned as Vice President because of his religion, denying what was obvious to millions of voters and instead supporting the slate that would not admit him to membership to its private exclusive club.  Kamala Harris criticized, correctly, Donald Trump for saddling up to dictators in places like Korea and Russia but then she extolls the virtue of a “cease fire” between Israel and the terrorist groups that seek its destruction.  A cease fire between Israel and the terrorist groups Hezbollah, Hamas, and their terrorist financier Iran, means nothing less than a victory for those who seek the destruction of the Israeli democracy and its variegated citizens.  Yet no one blinks an eye at the inconsistency of the Democratic presidential candidate calling out Trump for supporting dictators, while she supports a policy in the Middle East that would virtually guarantee Israels destruction in the long term.  Is there some reason that Kamala Harris is sucking up to the likes of Sinwar, Nasrallah, and the Supreme Leader of Iran, Ali Khamenei?

In America we never permit inconsistencies and hypocrisy to stand in the way of our favorite candidate.  After all, Trump talked about lower prices and the deficit, while promising that there would never ever be change in social security or in any other entitlement program that may very well bankrupt the United States within the lifetime of even middle-aged voters.

There are those who claim that the upcoming election is a contest between dumb and dumber.  That probably is unfair to both candidates.  “Dumb” they are not.  Politically expedient, they are.  Trump may show his hand more obviously, only because he cannot help being whom he is.  He seems incapable of following a path that would permit even a reasonable ambiguity.  Harris, for her part, knows what she has to promise and to whom.  The people who vote for her believe that soaking the rich, empowering those at the bottom of the economic ladder and making unsustainable promises is the most likely rose filled path to the White House.

The doorway to the White House is adorned not with petals of roses but rather with discarded thorns!  The choice for President may be a difficult one, but the times demand that we look, listen, learn, and vote.