US presidential politics: all bets are off

Until last Tuesday it was almost certain that the presidential nominees would be Republican Donald Trump and Democrat Hilary Clinton. But after last Tuesday’s extraordinary showings in the Wisconsin state primaries by Republican Ted Cruz and Democrat Bernie Sanders, all bets are off. Big mouth braggart Trump is finding that the nomination is not so readily won by insult and gutter brawling. He promises that the heavens will fall if he is denied the nomination. His supporters may indeed riot, and he might even switch to a Third Party, but he is most unlikely to win the presidency.

After George Bush II so thoroughly messed up the country, starting an unnecessary war in Iraq and letting Wall Street greed railroad the world into a global economic crisis that is still not over, America is not likely to elect another Republican president—UNLESS Bernie Sanders turns out to be the Democratic nominee.

Sanders makes eminent sense: he wants to rein in Wall Street, and to bring back America’s manufacturers from their cheap labor havens abroad so they can return the jobs to American workers. He also wants to make higher education affordable for America’s youths.

The other candidates promise some of the same. The critical difference is that Sanders calls himself a “democratic socialist”—and this self-description nullifies his entire message and renders his campaign “dead on arrival.” Already, his Republican rivals are calling him a “Communist”—the dirtiest word not only in the American political lexicon but in the American language as a whole. America makes no distinction between “socialist” and “communist,” and no political candidate can survive the name.

Nominating Sanders will be a disaster for the Democratic Party. The Party youth may not know this, but surely the older members ought to remember 1968 and 1972 when similar visions of liberal and radical reforms led the party to an electoral slaughterhouse, resulting in a conservative Ice Age of 40 years. Obama’s 8 years of intelligent hard labor could not reverse the process; and Ted Cruz, who is sometimes said to be more conservative than the Tea Party, will only make matters much worse for the country and the world. And he would do it too, working as he would with both Houses of Congress controlled by conservative Republicans.

Assuming he got elected by some miracle, how would Sanders move the mountain of Wall Street working with such a conservative Congress? A non-starter altogether. How indeed would Hilary Clinton do so? The liberal/radical vision is exactly what America needs; but the conservative blockade is real. Only Hilary Clinton stands a chance of bucking it at all. And only fragmentary, incremental progress can be expected in America, never any large or sudden change.

The Tea Party was born in racist backlash against the election of a black man in 2008—something that has presumably made the Founders and two centuries of American leaders turn over in their graves. From the first day of his presidency, the conservatives determinedly blocked every move Obama made. If “moderate Republicans” still existed, they went into abeyance, completely cowed and overwhelmed by the “radical right.” Bilateral, across-the-aisle cooperation, which had been the Congressional norm for decades, completely disappeared; the hard-liners, Ted Cruz among the worst, took total control. They would rather close down the government (and did so two years running), than compromise with the black president—as they would have done if the president were white.

It’s a testimony to Obama’s political and leadership skills that he was able to pass into law the national health insurance scheme (“obamacare”), when the Democrats still had some weight in Congress, and even persuaded a mostly Republican-appointed Supreme Court to confirm it. After this major feat (a feat that President Bill Clinton could not pull off in 1993), Obama has been forced to repeatedly bypass Republican Congressional blockade by using Executive Orders to execute important domestic and foreign policy initiatives. The Republicans expected him to “die” from their blockade, and are rabid that he did not “die.” This is what imbues their current presidential campaign rhetoric with so much vitriol.

What may not be so well known is the “dirty tricks” of one party secretly campaigning for the nomination of the candidate from the other party that is deemed “easiest to beat.” This may well be what is behind Bernie Sanders’ surge at the primaries. Many Republicans voted for him in Wisconsin—one of those states that permit cross-party primary voting. If they can get him nominated, then they will wallop him real good at the national election. Nice trick, isn’t it? One thing is certain: if Sanders get the nomination, the Republicans will win the election.

Onwuchekwa Jemie