On the Democratic Side
I have always admired Bernie Sanders, both as a person and for the principles he espouses. I would love to see his style of Democratic Socialism run this country. He is also doing an enormous service by bringing the word “Socialism” out of the closet and introducing it to the newest generations of Americans who never heard the word misused, misdefined and demonized by generations of right-wing demagogues. One day, probably sooner than seems likely now, Socialism will be a viable political conviction in the United States.
However, we are many years away from the point where the word “Socialism” is not a pejorative and where there won’t be an instinctual aversion to Sanders from a critical mass of people older than Gen Xers, who STILL DO MOST OF THE VOTING. All other things being equal, a Democrat should win this next election, especially with the horrendous clown car of candidates the Republicans are fielding. But his status as a Socialist, not to mention as a non-theist, will make it onerously difficult for Bernie Sanders to win the presidency under any circumstances. In one ugly, loathed word, he is unelectable.
And what if he did win the Presidency? What part of his agenda could he possibly get accomplished with the Congress with which he would be taking office? Nil. A Socialist day may come to the U.S. presidency, but when that day comes, it should come with a wave of Congressional support that could actually allow it to make an impact, not stumble in with the certain obstruction he would be certain to face against the next Congress, and thereby set Socialism back another 50 years. The Republican Party needs to be further down it’s current road of self-destruction before a Socialist president could actually affect some change.
I’m not going to exhaust any energy defending Hillary Clinton to those who have complaints. She is amply qualified to be president. I am not going to engage anyone, particularly Democrats, who point in 12 different directions about how she is compromised and bought and paid for by or corrupted by or lied about (fill-in-the-blank). I don’t think she’s a Progressive. I think she will make an excellent Democratic president by any meaningful definition of that term. I also think she can beat anyone the Republicans put up against her.
She is not a soulless automaton or Lady MacBeth or Wall Street shill or whatever bullshit persona her political enemies try to project onto her. She is much more compelling, much more personally charming, much savvier and much more human than she is commonly caricatured. No, I’m not as excited about what the potential of her presidency could be, compared with Sanders or Elizabeth Warren. But she will be a fine president.
They have been flinging shit at her for 24 years, and she has never looked or sounded better. No one has been readier to be president.
On the Republican Side
Right now, the day after Iowa, there are three candidates who seem to be postured to take the Republican nomination. Of the three, Ted Cruz is the most execrable, and would be the easiest to beat. He has no natural constituency outside of evangelicals. Everyone else hates him to the core. I think at best he’ll win the primary states Huckabee and Santorum won in the last cycles – Deep South, and that’s it.
Suspicions about Trump’s ground game were confirmed in Iowa. When I heard journalists chatting two days ago about how people they spoke with at his rallies didn’t know where they were supposed to caucus, I strongly suspected that those doubts about his team’s efficacy were true. That would NEVER have happened at Obama rallies in 2008.
Obama’s victory in 2008 was the result of state-of-the-art electioneering, all of the old rules and obligations of retail politics reimagined with the most insightful exercise of the latest technologies and with deep wells of committed organizational assets. To win a modern presidency, you must have both a compelling message that resonates with people and a state-of-the-art modern campaign. You have to have both, you can’t have one without the other and expect to win. I will assume – not knowing and not wanting to bother to research it – that Jeb Bush has a strong, modern political team behind him. But nowadays, the medium is not enough of a message to put you over. Jeb can’t articulate a reason people should care about him, and voters aren’t interested enough to fill in the blanks for him. The best political team can’t push a nonentity on the public any more.
Naturally, the strong performances by Cruz and Rubio last night were the result of their identifying and optimizing their potential constituencies with strong modern political engineering. Trump is still completely dependent upon his personality cult to carry him through. He doesn’t understand the science of running an election any more than I understand civil engineering. Everyone I’ve ever seen represent Trump as a talking head on television seems to be a complete tin-eared idiot. They have enthusiasm and talk a great game, but Trump has no one who knows how to run a modern political campaign, and he won’t get that constructed in the next month.
That’s not to say that he’s done. Primaries are less dependent on organizing than the caucuses, and Trump may end up performing better at them. In a crowded field, he may start pulling in pluralities and winning primaries.
Like Cruz, I am not really worried about Trump as a general election candidate. His negatives are so huge, the narrow band of knotheads that love him is nowhere near enough to win a general election. My only hesitation about that is that he has done so well breaking all the rules up to now, he is still a massive wild card. But the political reality that pulled him down to earth in Iowa give some support to the notion that all the rules of politics have not been permanently suspended. The guy is gonna lose.
Rubio worries me. If the rest of the field, all conventional Republicans, drop out, their supporters will likely shift to Rubio (although maybe Carson’s will move to Cruz). This could consolidate a plurality, maybe a majority, of voters to Rubio. And he would be much harder for a Democrat to beat. He plays less extreme than he is in real life, he has a lot of appeal, both personal and political, to those who like that sort of thing.
But if Trump supporters are denied their candidate, they will not support Rubio. If anyone, probably Cruz. But probably nobody.
In 2008, early state primaries were being divvied up by three candidates; Mike Huckabee, who was winning the evangelicals; Mitt Romney, who was winning states in which he owned homes, pretty much; and John McCain, who was winning everywhere else. But that 3-way race doesn’t seem nearly as split as it does now. You’ve got Trump zealots, Cruz evangelicals and an evolving mainstream Rubio constituency. I have no idea if this resolves by the primary process.
This three-way schism is not a freak accident. It is an accurate reflection of how divided the Republican Party is. Evangelicals, libertarians and wack-jobs are through being useful idiots to the Romney class. They’re not going to take any more Romneys or McCains. They want their extremist candidate. It has never seemed more likely that they will finally get it.
Iowa as the First Caucus State
On the Republican side, Iowa has become a simple exercise of measuring evangelical support. It has become useless to that party as a way of choosing a presidential nominee or revealing a viable trend. It doesn’t measure anything useful for them, and candidates exhaust enormous resources on it. If they do not demote Iowa’s status as a first caucus state, it would only be due to the party’s feckless inertia and inability to do the simplest things they need to become a relevant national party again.