May

9

Last fall Pat Caddell did a thorough poll on American attitudes. His findings were interesting:

72% of adult Americans believed that the country was "in decline" 60% of adult Americans thought that their children would NOT be "better off" than than they were; the same percentage thought that their parents had left them better off than their parents had been 86% of adult Americans do NOT think that they can succeed by working hard and playing by the rules; they think the rules are rigged 89% of adult Americans think both political parties are fundamentally corrupt

And yet, somehow, the journalists, commentators and political party leaders and spokespeople are surprised that Donald Trump has won the Republican Party nomination and Bernie Sanders would have won the Democrat Party nomination if Clinton Cash had not been able to buy the Iowa Caucus and subsequent party allocations of delegates.

I like Caddell because he is one of the few people left in American political consulting who knows what it is like to win AND to lose; and he never pretends that the losing did not happen (vide Bob Schrumpf and everyone who "advised" McCain and Romney).

In his interview Caddell compares what is happening to William Jennings Bryan, and that is just wrong. Bryan was a complete unknown, and the Democrat Party was literally being torn apart by the conflict between the Cleveland supporters and the silverites. Bryan was the ideal candidate because he was in favor of segregation and prohibition but not a Southerner. The modern historians who are Democrats have to sweep that under the rug just the way the Schelsingeristas ignored the fact that Jackson's "democratic" revolution had the active support of the New Yorker boys who wanted to take all the Federal bank business away from Biddle's Philadelphians.

You can't look to history for repeats or rhymes, only box scores of past contests of personality and political economic interest and accident.

In terms of personality Trump is clearly Teddy Roosevelt, Sanders is Henry Wallace and Mrs. Clinton is Robert Taft, Jr.

In terms of political economic interest the present contest is between the party of the people who now get money directly from the government and the party of those who don't get money from the government. The Democrats represent most elementary and secondary school teachers, almost all current Federal and most state and local public employees, lawyers, everyone in college and graduate school education, and everyone in medicine whose pay is determined not by what they do but by what their status is. The Republicans represent everyone who works for themselves and the people who get the money from the government but think they earn or earned it (the recipients of Social Security and military and government pensions, people in the military outside the Pentagon, cops, firefighters, prison guards).

If you choose, you can add to the box score the people who provide and handle the graft - the campaign contributors, consultants, et. al. - but they are rarely important. The Unruh rule applies, at least for the electoral winners: "If you can't eat their food, drink their booze, screw their women, take their money and then vote against them you've got no business being up here." 

Money may be the mother's milk of politics, as Unruh also said; but anyone who has children knows that they teeth at a very early age. The voters are the children; and they remain permanently unruly in their attention and inattention.

What remains are the elements of accident.
 


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