A long hot summer
LARRY ANDERSON
Larry Anderson
America has entered aghast the next phase of this year’s election.
Hillary Clinton vs. Donald Trump!
That’s it?
OMG!
This election may set a new standard for candidates not respected, not wanted, not trusted, and not liked.
Indeed, many within the parties’ rank and file are unenthused by the choices.
Democrats aren’t smitten with Hillary Clinton; if they were, there would have been no Bernie Sanders, winner of 22 primaries before going reluctantly into the night, trailing the smoky detritus of a “revolution” berned out.
Clinton’s focus now isn’t on firing up her own limp base, but attracting enough Bernienistas to look legit.
That will be a challenge. Bernie’s ticked, you see, about the system he says is rigged via the super delegates Clinton had locked up months ago.
And Bernie is right as rain. The system is rigged, and has been for years. His temporary groundswell was ultimately no match for Hillary Clinton who has been decreed untouchable. Nor could he adequately compete for the big bucks that flow like honey into the coffers of she who sells her influence in a marketplace more corrupt than that of the biblical moneychangers.
Hillary longs to fulfill what she sees as her birthright. She wants to be the gender centric crasher of the glass ceiling. Hers is a personal manifest destiny that was supposed to ring throughout the land with the clarity of a crystal bell. She wants to be the period at the end of our Obama sentence.
It was supposed to be in the bag months ago.
Then along came Bernie, feathery mane blowing breezily, eyes a little crazy, spewing ancient economic aphorisms like a verbal machine gun. Sanders droned on and on about a revolution that existed only in the oligarchic fantasies of one so indoctrinated he made Obama look like a backslider.
Bernie became a burr in Hillary’s britches. He was the pest that couldn’t be swatted and wouldn’t shut his pie hole. Some listened for a while.
Bernie scored by slamming the horrible One Per Cent, the silk tie elitists who spend their days supposedly persecuting the ordinary, but that became tiresome.
What resonated most was the promise of free stuff based on birthright rather than work. That too began to sound undoable.
The numbers didn’t add up, and Bernie began to fade like the funny pages left to sun on a park bench.
Sanders may take his complaints to the Democratic convention, but in the end he will conjoin with Clinton like a trailer to a truck. If he doesn’t, she will destroy him. That is what the Clintons do.
So. Now we have Hillary, triumphant at last, warming up to take on the Donald who neither fears nor respects her.
Trump, however, has problems that reach past Hillary Clinton. For one thing, the Republican party is a reluctant supporter of its own candidate, even though Trump won legitimately by sweeping aside every challenger with a rolling tide of popular support.
Trump collected more Republican primary votes than any candidate in history.
The Left, and some on the Right, despise Trump, but that is because they fear him. They fear him because he does not fear them.
Trump does not have the same type of media support that automatically goes to a liberal Democrat every election, but he does have the curiosity of the public. While his message isn’t brand new, his presentation is.
Trump is brash, politically incorrect, and frames an inconvenient truth about the shape we are in.
Trump gathers attention with his message of opportunity and restoration while Clinton’s droning about social justice sounds the same as Obama’s endless lecturing.
That’s because it is.
People are looking for a new direction for the country which many can see has not been renewed by Obama’s policies and unilateral behavior. The country needs more reassurance that all is well than Obama claiming it so.
It’s not all dandy, and association with that mediocrity belongs absolutely to Clinton, not Trump, who has no political portfolio to defend with spin.
Elections are weird and tiresome, but they remain necessary to the democratic process. Without them, we cease to be who we are.
I sense the exhaustion people are demonstrating isn’t all from summer heat but from a contest that has gone on for way too long. Interest is drifting as the final contestants go to their corners to stitch their wounds and spit.
Hang in there, folks.
It is going to be a long hot summer of politicking and sin.
