Last week there seemed to be only one 2016 presidential
hopeful, if you can call him that, in the news.
I’m refusing to get in on the frenzy, so will not even mention his
name. I only add that after everyone
sobers up about him, he’ll give his party the DTs by threatening to run independently
and thereby hand the election to Hillary Clinton.
Or will it be Hillary at all?
Bernie Sanders, the candidate now a distant second in media
attention, may be the beneficiary instead.
Radical? Perhaps. But consider what is happening.
First, Clinton is spinning her wheels. She has had very little to say, on jobs or
almost anything else. Even Democrats
have been commenting on how her campaign events are devoid of information. She has been unable to get positive press for
anything specific, and when the subject turns to her it is still often about her
email scandal. Her party is already
starting to think seriously about alternatives; as an example, Salon published an article earlier this
month suggesting they draft Al Gore. More and more swing voters may come to agree
with my view, as well, that what the country needs least from 2017 to 2021 is
another moderate Democrat.
Second, the other declared candidates in her party have
campaigns so moribund – Martin O’Malley seems to be getting no press at all,
Jim Webb got all of his within 24 hours of his joining the race, and Lincoln
Chaffee, with 300 to 1 sportsbook.ag odds against him, is behind three
undeclared and unanticipated contenders – that prediction market PredictWise
actually has Joe Biden in third place.
Third, Sanders has been setting records in two areas. Not only has he been getting the largest campaign-speech
crowds, including 11,000 in Phoenix, but he has collected more money in under-$200
campaign contributions than anyone else.
The breadth of his popularity has been so unexpected even to his
organization that, as of mid-month, they had run out of buttons and bumper
stickers.
Fourth, he has plenty to say, especially on American
employment. In a campaign where almost
half of the contenders are silent on the issue, Sanders’ website has several
pages. He wants to raise the minimum
wage to $15 per hour over a period of years.
He is a strong advocate of unions, wanting card-check membership, in
which workers can form unions if a majority claim they want them. He voted to lengthen unemployment benefits
from 39 to 59 weeks, a good idea when millions of workers have been officially
jobless, which means they have been looking for work and applying for positions
weekly, for over six months. He has been
combining with Obama to get more employees time-and-a-half for overtime, which
I also support – while I do not agree with him on the minimum wage, there is no
place for employers to abuse the definition of salaried and management
positions by underpaying or not paying production workers for extra hours. He recognizes on his site something that
every candidate of either party should but few do, that “the real unemployment
rate is much higher than the “official” figure typically reported in the
newspapers.” He not only supports a
nationwide construction project, but “introduced legislation which would invest
$1 trillion over 5 years to modernize our country’s physical
infrastructure.” That sort of effort,
which Republicans should get behind as well, is probably the best single
readily implementable thing anyone can do to help our permanent jobs
crisis.
Fifth, Sanders offers conservatives something as well, on
gun control, where his words and record are more Republican than Democrat. He comes from a rural area, where firearms
not only serve constructive purposes but are rarely abused. It is hard to find someone otherwise on the
far left who voted to prohibit the use of funds by international organizations
which register or tax guns owned by Americans, wants people to be able to check
firearms on Amtrak trains, and says things such as “If somebody has a gun and somebody
steals that gun and shoots somebody, do you really think it makes sense to
blame the manufacturer of that weapon?,” and “If somebody assaults you with a
baseball bat, you hit somebody over the head, you’re not going to sue the
baseball bat manufacturer,” but Sanders is unique in other ways as well.
Sixth, Clinton may crash and burn. As I have written before, she is no Golda
Meir, Margaret Thatcher, or even Angela Merkel.
If she gets the nomination, she will face verbal and press abuse of the
worst kind. It will not all be fair, and
some will be vicious, personal, and even sexual in nature. In the process of beating her among Democrats
and winning the election, Barack Obama got hit with about everything
imaginable, and stood up to it superbly. If she cannot do the same, she will not
win. Sometime between now and March’s
full-swing primary season, she will find out that, contrary to what she has
been told and almost certainly believes, even the Democratic nomination is not
her entitlement – and that will be hard for her, as it would be for anyone who
has been the prohibitive frontrunner for years, to take.
I say Clinton doesn’t get through it. When she loses her composure, and her support
soon follows, someone will need to take over.
It just may be Bernie Sanders. Don’t you dare rule him out.