In his examination at Rolling Stone of why young voters are casting their votes overwhelmingly for Bernie Sanders, Matt Taibbi asks what should be crucial questions about Hillary Clinton’s presidential ambitions:
Is Hillary really doing the most good that she can do, fighting for the best deal that’s there to get for ordinary people?
Or is she just doing something that satisfies her own definition of that, while taking tens of millions of dollars from some of the world’s biggest jerks?
but in the handwringing over the horrors of the Republican candidates, at least one of whom can reasonably be numbered among the “world’s biggest jerks, I suspect they’ll receive scant attention.
Let me ask another question that I guess is only tangentially related to those questions. Why is this the best that we can do?
The essential question.
1) Our electoral process weeds out anyone with an ounce of self-respect or dignity. I do book tour a few weeks out of the year – hotels, airports, crowds of various sizes with various levels of interest in what I’m saying. After 3 weeks of it I’m ready to go on a killing spree – I hate the world, I hate people, and I hate the sound of my own voice. The idea of book tour that goes on for a year, and during which I’d have to beg money off car dealers and guys who own a chain of Round Table pizza restaurants, and wear funny hats, and sit there with an idiot grin on my face while rustics bloviate, is nauseating. What kind of ambition-blinded mental defective would choose to do this? Oh, right: the next leader of the Free World. Great.
2) We the People are lousy employers. We the People don’t even get that we are employers or what sort of an employee we’re looking for. Are we hiring an executive to run the world’s sole superpower? Are we hiring a buddy we’d like to drink a beer with? Are we hiring a messiah to lead us to the promised land? Would a rational employer consider hiring as CEO a person who knew fuck-all about the business? No, only We the People are that stupid.
3) The jobs don’t pay enough to justify the effort of getting hired. A Senator earns less than 200k – a very nice salary, don’t get me wrong, but 200k to hold down a job that requires spending half your time giving hand jobs to donors? The POTUS only earns 400k. For that job? For a 24/7, the whole world is watching, people could end up dying kind of job? 400k? What kind of fool would do that? The guy who runs Starbucks makes 149 million, 372 times what the Leader of the Free World gets paid and all he handles is cappuccinos, no nuclear codes involved. If money isn’t the object, you have to look at either lust for power or some bizarre messiah complex for a rationale, and neither of those gets you to competent.
Idiot voters, with no rational criteria in mind, choose among candidates who clearly suffer from various personality disorders. So, yes, this is apparently the best we can do.
Whatever the reason, it appears to be the case that this is the best we can do.
So it begs a question. Here we have this blogs proprietor documenting the clownish and destructive reign of the controlling Democrat party in governing Chicago. We have a frequent commenter laying out the case that an incompetent electorate inevitably hires incompetent reprobates to legislate and administer the government. And yet I think I can safely say that each has historically voted for the party advocating a bigger and more intrusive government, and will continue to do so. Whatup with that?
You know, I went to the doctor and told him it hurt when I did that. He told me to stop doing that………
Well, most people feel that they have little power over their lives. We used to think of this as an unpleasant truth to be overcome. But now the idea of overcoming anything been turned into something flawed and indulgent. You are who you are and the only options are being indulgent or getting with the program. That’s all Hillary Clinton is–the dreary program. She’s the apex of the type who believes that hard-work pays off and then uses every connection in the book to demonstrate the opposite.
This is the fundamental experience of my life in the exurbs of the elite. Everybody gossips and talks about the nepotism and mediocrity at the core of the system while meanwhile being terrified of imagining a better system, because even imagining makes it seem like you won’t be a winner in the end.
Like somebody said about the Rockefellers: we weren’t nearly as rich as they were, but we were rich enough to know how rich they were.
What ails the Democrats seems clear enough — thanks to Republican domination of state legislatures, governorships, House and Senate seats, etc., the number of people who rise to the level of plausible Presidential candidates in the party is pretty damned small. It’s going to take a while to overcome that, and it’s going to take some major effort and expense and a lot of people willing to run for minor elective offices to change things — and the sort of people who become Democrats these days aren’t interested in low level politics. They’d rather Occupy Wall Street and talk on Twitter about how Feel The Bern rather than run for city council.
About the Republicans … that’s more complex. A year ago, I’d have said they had a really thick body of potential national leaders. But that was before half a dozen governors and three or four Senators and several other plausible contenders weeded themselves out of the current campaign. Not many of the 2016 candidates are going to look especially “presidential” when 2020 rolls around.
I choose among the candidates running. That’s about all I can do. In Illinois 85-90% of candidates run unopposed. Just as one example, there was no Republican candidate for mayor in Chicago during the last election. I didn’t vote for Rahm Emanuel but I voted for a Democrat because only Democrats were running.
That big city voters should vote for more Republicans is a common trope among Republicans but for that to happen Republicans have got to run in big cities. And that implies that county and state Republican parties and Republican donors must fund candidates who are running in places where Republicans don’t usually win. And they’ve got to match organizations with public employees’ unions who are fighting a life and death struggle.
What has happened in Illinois and I believe is happening increasingly throughout the country is that the two parties have divvied up the seats. It’s what John Kass calls “the Combine”.
Why is this the best that we can do?
You’ve spent decades voting for candidates that are just marginally less awful than the other available options. In essence you’ve been demanding shitty candidates. You wanted a race to the bottom, and that’s what you’re getting. American politics have become the anti-Miller Lite: “More filling! Tastes like crap!”
So yes, this is the best you can do.
Is it possible this is a systemic flaw? I mean, out of 43 men thus far do we have more than a handful who really did an outstanding job? We are 240 years old, is it possible that a system built that long ago is showing itself inadequate to deal with what is after all an infinitely more complicated country? Maybe the Trump crowd is on to something and it’s time to give cult-of-personality fascism a try. Or maybe Bernie’s right and it’s time to admit that we’re French after all.
I have not heard an idea from either side that seems to me to address the real problems we have in any realistic way. The system seems exhausted. Is there any indication that any of the 5 people left in the race have the first fucking clue what to do about this sense of decline, this national pessimism, this obsessive partisanship? Why do none of these folks have a vision for the future? Do they not understand that the job is leader of the free world?
We’ve got a thin-skinned psychopath who can’t be bothered even to begin to familiarize himself with the real world; a dishonest, repellant religious fanatic; a stolid, triangulating and profoundly uninspiring hack; and the crazy uncle who corners you and rants about the pogroms back in the shtetl.
I was just about to lose my sense of humor about this, despite the bourbon. We keep telling ourselves we’re the greatest nation on earth, and this is what we’ve got. It’s really disgusting. We should be ashamed of ourselves. None of this is the way it should be.
Could be worse. I keep having this notion … suppose Trump is defeated badly. “Practical” Democrats like Hillary take over the White House and one or both houses of Congress, and return us to “sensible” government. Which means, ignoring Flyover Country and its redneck residents. And over some period of time, a bunch of unhappy white Christian guys get to feeling that what works so well for a bunch of Moslem ragheads would probably work for them too … and we get a homebrewed ISIS of our very own to deal with.
Must be a story or two in that.
I feel,your pain, Dave. I first moved to Chicago in 1982. Nothing has changed.
It’s all about picking the least worst alternative. IMHO, and I’m fascinated by this, many people have convinced themselves that somehow all the altruistic pols and govt workers inhabit the large govt philosophical world (except those idiot, wasteful and evil Pentagon types) and the world is only populated with worthy recipients. I think the evidence is clear.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-03-26/marxist-markets-why-robber-barons-are-safer-foes-meddling-bureaucrats
Imagine the opposite. Suppose he wins.
Yes, it’s a systemic failure. But it’s not a failure of the system the Founders put in place. It’s a failure of the system that was put in place a little more than a century ago.
The Founders didn’t want executives who did “an oustanding job”. Basically, they thought that chief executives would be men of stature who were more or less competent administrators, enough so to manage the small federal government.
They didn’t envision the growth of political parties that would come to its fulfillment 50 years later, the conversion of the Senate into a super-powerful version of the House, pensions for legislators, or the enormous insinuation of the federal government into every facet of life.
The actual problem is with the Congress. The Congress now embodies all the worst fears of the Founders, clearly outlined in Federalist.
Additionally, there is a real, vital difference of opinion on something that is crucial to the operation of a republic of the sort that was established in ours. A substantial proportion of the population today does not believe that there is such a thing as human nature or, at least, that human nature is infinitely malleable. The Founders believed it was more or less constant.
I’ve always believed the true genius of the Founders was their. . . well, cynicism isn’t the right word, how about their accurate appraisal and acceptance of man as he is. Any system that starts with, “first, we change human nature,” is doomed. The Founders – lawyers yes, but with a healthy mix of merchants and farmers (and inventors!) – were not college professors. They had dealt with actual humans. The Constitution is a document largely devoted to restricting the ability of humans to behave like the greedy, shortsighted, easily-manipulated swine we are.
In the modern era I wonder if our Congress would be improved by the addition of 100 or so pawnbrokers, taxi drivers, psychologists, bartenders, beat cops, sex workers and parish priests – people who’d had actual dealings with homo sapiens in all his glory. Actually, I don’t wonder. Congress’s approval rating barely edges out ISIS, so pretty much anything would be better.
I think this article from 2004 explains one big reason for why we can’t do better. And I admit I am as guilty as anyone. It’s much more easy to send a check or a tweet than to get one’s hands dirty.