While socialist Bernie Sanders and radically left Elizabeth Warren appear to be the top choice of Iowa and New Hampshire voters, both are wrong for our country. Both Warren and Sanders terrify Trump’s base, moderate Republicans and even some Democrats. If either wins the Democratic nomination they will virtually assure Trump’s re-election and four more years of corruption, chaos and lasting damage to American Democracy and its economic viability. Do Iowa and New Hampshire voters really want to be responsible for being the beginning of the end of this election cycle’s very good chances of sending a competent Democrat to the White House in 2020?
What the country needs now is a Democratic candidate who has a real chance of garnering votes from enough disgruntled Trump supporters and moderate Republicans, along with Democrats of all stripes to win the Presidency and begin to unite and heal our nation. The best person to do that is former Vice-President Joe Biden. And Biden’s chances of winning the Presidency can be dramatically enhanced if he chooses the right running mate – such as Amy Klobuchar, Kamala Harris or Cory Booker – someone who can broaden the support for the Democratic ticket, which will also serve to assist down-ballot Democrats in keeping control of the House and retaking the Senate.
What the country needs from this Presidential election is a candidate who can help the country find the right answer to its many challenges, not a Democratic or Republican answer; someone who has a moral compass and the experience and judgment to serve all Americans as President, to stabilize our relationship with our fellow citizens and with our friends abroad. And someone who can elevate a raft of qualified and visionary democratic politicians to senior positions in a Democratic Administration, grooming many of them to be even more viable future candidates for high office.
To unite our country more people need to believe that the President and the Government work for all of us, regardless of race, religion, gender or class. A Democratic ticket which attracts Whites, Blacks, Asians, Hispanics and voters of all stripes from Wall Street and Main Street, has a great chance of winning the 2020 election. Given the great crop of competent, compassionate and visionary Democratic candidates who entered the race, many of them, including Sanders and Warren, can be tapped for senior positions in the Democratic Administration and show voters what it really means to drain the swamp and restore and rebuild America.
Iowa and New Hampshire, get REAL!!! Show the country that you reject candidates who are exciting and passionate in promoting left-leaning ideas that have no hope of ever being enacted for one or more candidates who really has the chops to unite and rebuild our country.
TRUMP AND THE IMPEACHMENT TRIAL: NEITHER PASSES THE SMELL TEST
The newest non-Netflix dramatic series not likely to get an Emmy in 2021 – The Unlikely Impeachment Trial of Donald J. Trump — for all its gravitas, soaring rhetoric and absurd legal arguments, is much simpler than it looks for two reasons. First, everyone in the room and most television viewers know that Donald Trump never did and still does not pass the “smell test” to be elected President of the United States or to continue to serve as President. Second, Mitch McConnell never did and still does not have any interest in running a fair trial, so we already know how this tawdry but revealing shameless sham of a trial is going to end.
McConnell and his Republican colleagues who are terrified of Trump’s vindictiveness has been as good as his word: taking their cues from the White House and rushing to the forgone conclusion that Trump will be acquitted.
The good news is that the majority of Americans are not as dumb as Trump believes them to be, nor is the Democratic Party. As Nixon taught us, the cover-up is worse than the crime. And now Senate Republicans have become part of the cover-up by ignoring all the evidence of Trump’s misconduct revealed in the House Impeachment proceeding and now by refusing to hear any new evidence of any sort that might confirm what is already known.
Republicans are terrified of facts, but they need not worry, because the impeachment trial has revealed unequivocally that Trump and his Republican supporters have no integrity. Even if acquitted in the Senate, Trump and his Republican supporters will go down in history stained by this impeachment. Trump may finish out his term but he is finishing-off what few Republicans have not yet given up by retiring or resigning from office.
While it will probably take our country at least a generation to undo the damage Trump has done domestically and internationally, it probably will take at least a century for the Republican Party to even begin to recover its luster, if that is even possible. It is a fate that today’s Republicans well deserve. But it is a shame that no Republican Senators have the moral courage to stand up to Trump and take this opportunity to wear the mantle of leadership and give the Republican Party the chance of a new life. Mitt Romney, Susan Collins, one or two others, have toyed with courage and integrity, but in the end they have all decided to go down with the ship while prolonging the pain of drowning.
AMBIVALENCE, IRRESPONSIBILITY AND ABSENSE OF LEADERSHIP
We Democrats, for all of our self-righteousness in condemning Trump supporters, Fox News and their ilk, need to take responsibility for setting up the 2016 Presidential election loss to Trump and now setting up the 2020 election for the same result. Case in point: the ambivalent and irresponsible endorsements of Elizabeth Warren published by the New York Times and the Des Moines Register.
The Democratic National Committee also bears responsibility by making the Presidential Debates a reality TV game show intended identify the most plausible Democratic candidates by which ones elicit the loudest applause lines, rather than by which ones have the chops to do the two things the country needs most: First, to unite its citizens in support of a broad-tent Democratic Party that has plans for every existential challenge the candidates talk about – climate change, health care, gun control; and second, to unite our citizens in support of two less discussed but equally urgent insidious barriers to our nation’s strength and prosperity: racism and class warfare.
Sanders and Warren constantly tout their commitments to waging war and fighting the big corporations and the rich in order to lift up the poor and downtrodden. While those two segments of our society need help, killing off all the generals and capitalist titans will not improve anyone’s lot. Do voters really think our country would be better off without the likes of Henry Ford, Andrew Carnegie, Malcolm Forbes, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, Michael Bloomberg and others of their achievements and acumen?
If there are no or very few successful businessmen and managers to organize and employ thousands of people to carry out their vision and invent and monetize ideas into products and services, who will improve our lives and make us the most economically successful and powerful nation on earth?………………………………..