It’s Silly Season early this year
Can you believe that the Democrats have dozens of candidates
for President this year? Isn’t this
exactly what the Republicans did 3 years ago?
I am looking forward with great interest to the events upcoming from this
party. Here’s the Rolling Stone link on
the subject. https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/2020-democrat-candidates-771735/
I wrote on this subject in October of 2016 http://sep-11-2001.blogspot.com/
and I am not especially happy to report that my words proved prophetic. Here’s what seems to be happening this
year. Joe Biden appears to be the front
runner, although he is certainly not a shoo in at this point. Nobody seems to be talking about the fact
that he will be 78 when he takes office if he should be elected. Now, your friendly neighborhood scribe is 75
and that’s too old to be president.
Outside of being too old, Biden isn’t a terrible candidate -especially
if you look at the other choices. I am
not going into them individually at this point, I will just point out what I tried
to last silly season. I think it is the
job of the political parties to provide a candidate for President. He doesn’t have to be a wonderful candidate,
just an acceptable candidate. Two people
should wind up with the nominations and they should both be acceptable
candidates. There will be differences,
but they are generally minor ones.
Nobody who wants to make basic changes to the government or to society
is an acceptable candidate. Yes, I know
there are some people who would like to overthrow the government and force
changes on society – but those people are too small a minority to elect a
president.
Let me emphasize this, to make meaningful changes you must
FIRST get elected. Promising things that
there is no way to pay for like Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren just won’t
work because there are too many people who understand that somebody would have
to pay for all this free stuff. In a
future blog I will address the student loan situation because I think it is
drastically misunderstood.
Also on this vein,
I think we should beware of single issue candidates. Far too often splinter candidates get fixated
on one minor issue like student loans, abortion, or minimum wage. If you choose one narrow issue as all
important (such as “save the whales”} you run the risk of electing someone for
the really wrong reasons. We really need
to elect a candidate that has a realistic grasp of the entire world situation
as well as the US economic situation. A
few months ago I would have said there was a 90% chance that the Democratic
nominee would be our next President. Now
it appears that the DNC is in just as much disarray as the RNC was last
election. I don’t see some outsider in
the wings with the public support and the money to swoop in and carry the election
so at this point my prediction is that whoever the Republicans nominate will be
the next president.
And, that’s the way I see it.
