Political Predictions, Nostalgia Revisited and Mencken on Politics

                                                      

Political Predictions

Political predictions are fuzzy things. As circumstances change, their likelihood does as well.  The crystal ball is a foggy one.  But here are my thoughts as of now.

If Donald Trump manages to hang in there and get the Republican nomination, Republicans who oppose him will have to name a third party ticket.  While this will guarantee the election of a Democratic President in 2016, it will enable Republican voters to continue to maintain control of Congressional seats and State legislatures. If G.O.P candidates for such positions appeared on the same line as Donald Trump, they probably would go down to defeat along with him.  At the top of this likely “rump” G.O.P. ticket would be Marco Rubio and Carly Fiorina (See below for an explanation of how this ticket will come about) and that is the line on which most Republican candidates want to be.  The top of the ticket won’t be elected, but local Republicans who would manage to be elected would be indebted to them for “taking one for the Party,” somewhat like a reliever who hangs in there and pitches the last five innings in a ball game in which his team is already trailing by a dozen runs. 

"Establishment" candidates may be required to "take one for the team" to help local G.O.P. candidates in the event of a Trump candidacy or the absence of his supporters should someone else be the Republican candidate.

If “the Donald” does not get the Republican nomination, many of his supporters might stay away from the polls, and not choose to back an “establishment” candidate.  I doubt that he would run as a third party candidate, but the absence of these Trump loyalists from the voting booths would have the same effect, a Democratic victory.  Still, however, an “establishment” Presidential ticket would  be helpful to local Republican candidates, as explained above.  And if it goes down this way, I still see Marco and Carly as being that ticket, pre-destined to failure by the absence of the Trump supporters.

Rubio

I  predict that sometime after the Iowa caucus (Feb. 1) and the New Hampshire primary (Feb. 9) during which not much will change from the way things look today, the G.O.P. “establishment” candidates will quietly get together and agree on one of them to head the ticket, displacing the poll leader, Donald Trump. (Subsequent primaries or caucuses in South Carolina and Nevada during February will not change things either.)  This agreement might not come to light until the G.O.P. convention this Summer, and perhaps only after an indecisive first ballot,  but I still feel the agreement will be made long before then.

Fiorina

At this point, I feel that there are five potential “establishment” candidates:  Bush, Kasich, Rubio, Christie and Fiorina.  While Ted Cruz has significant support, his relationship with others in the party and in the Senate has been a rocky one, so I do not include him as an “establishment” possible choice.  Quickly eliminated are Bush and Kasich who are too “centrist” for the G.O.P.’s right wing to support.  Of the three remaining, Christie has the most negative baggage, leaving the Presidential nomination to Marco Rubio who would select Carly Fiorina as his running mate.  She would have some appeal to anti-establishment Republicans and women, and be a counterbalance to the likely Democratic Presidential candidate.

Of course, and these words are addressed to Democrats, the above goings-on deal with the conflict existing within the Republican Party which represents fewer Americans than does the majority Democratic Party.  To Democrats and independents, any Republican nominee, even those far more "centrist" than Marco Rubio or even Jeb Bush, should be unpalatable because of their adherence to failed conservative social and economic policies.  In a recent column in the New York Times, Paul Krugman said that "not being Donald Trump doesn’t make someone a moderate, or even halfway reasonable. The truth is that there are no moderates in the Republican primary, and being reasonable appears to be a disqualifying characteristic for anyone seeking the party’s nod."  Read his full colunmn on this subject at http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/28/opinion/doubling-down-on-w.html?rref=collection%2Fcolumn%2Fpaul-krugman&action=click&contentCollection=opinion&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=3&pgtype=collection&_r=0
Jack Lippman

                                                

H. L. Mencken Said It

In Presidential elections, most candidates are usual civil with one another.  They generally use polite language and try to stick to issues.  Their supporters, however, often go beyond the limits of civility and do not hesitate to bombard their candidate’s opponent or opponent with senseless and provocative questions.  

Most of the hecklers who turn up at campaign rallies are not gentlemen nor ladies.  The next time you see a heckler asking Hillary about her husband’s infidelities, or questioning Donald’s Christianity, or attacking Bernie’s Socialist background or labelling Jeb’s politeness as wimpiness, think long and hard about what such rantings have to do with the issues with which the 45^th President will have to deal. Really, none!

During this campaign, Donald Trump has encouraged his supporters to behave in this manner by lightly touching upon issues which have nothing to do with the election.  (Hillary Clinton had pointed out Trump's haughty attitude toward women of which his insults directed at Carly Fiorina and Megyn Kelly are prime examples, so he thought that justified his attacking her husband’s sexual behavior eighteen years ago.)  The Trump campaign is a true test of what the late journalist, H.L. Mencken once said: “No one in this world, so far as I know — and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me — has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.”  The intelligence at least the G.O.P. Primary voter is being thusly tested, and if Trump does win the Republican Party’s nomination, the American voter will be similarly tested.

H.L. Mencken, whose heyday was the 1920s

Mencken also said, on another occasion, that “on some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”  

The election of Donald Trump to the Presidency would mean that the expansion of the electorate in this country over the past two and a half centuries from property-owning white males only to almost everyone else was a bad move. It would also mark the failure of the Electoral College system in doing its job of preventing the choice of a President falling into the hands of an ill-informed, mostly uneducated and easily swayed electorate.  It also would warrant adding a giant bust of H.L. Mencken’s head to Mount Rushmore.

JL

                                                        

The Roots of Nostalgia

Here's a posting that appeared on this blog about three years ago.  I still like it; and I hope I retain the ability to write stuff like this.

Nostalgia involves recalling memories of things from the past which were pleasant and perhaps different from the world we live in today.  Somehow, we get a kick out of it.  Music by Tommy Dorsey or Glen Miller and their orchestras, old cars that aren’t manufactured any longer like Packards and DeSotos, advertisements for products you remember and may not be around any longer like Old Gold cigarettes and Spry shortening, daytime radio soap operas like Aunt Jennie and Life Can Be Beautiful, Thom McCann shoes, charlotte russes, and of course, motion pictures like Casablanca and Fantasia; they’re all part of the memory bank on which nostalgia feeds.

 

Jack Armstrong was the all-American boy on the radio just before supper time and there were baseball teams like the Boston Bees, the Washington Senators, the Saint Louis Browns and the Brooklyn Dodgers way back then.  Those were the “good old days.”

Fast forward at least a century from those nostalgic phantoms and see if anyone will still remember them, or will they all have been swallowed up in the maw of history, only there for those willing to become studiously involved in research into the past.   Will they have been replaced by Lady Gaga, Michael Buble, Lexuses and Teslas, Chobani yogurt, smoothies, Homer Simpson, the Duck Dynasty, Michael Kors, the Hobbit, Bill O’Reilly, Bo Diddly, the Dallas Cowboys and the Boston Red Sox as objects of trips back into the past in search of the comforts of days gone by?

The words of Francois Villon, fifteenth century French poet, are often quoted when one thinks of things gone by and now irretrievable: “Where are the snows of yesteryear?”  Well, you’ll find them at precisely the same location where you might look for the things about which we get nostalgic.  And to get to that place is difficult.                                   

                   

                                    Francois Villon

Actually, Villon was referring to women, complaining that “they don’t make them like they used to,” when he wrote the poem from which that line comes, but that thought really applies to all nostalgia.  Just as Villon wistfully dwelt on these long-gone women, so we today take pleasure in memories of things from the past. Here is Villon’s poem as translated by Dante Gabriel Rossetti:

THE BALLAD OF DEAD LADIES

Francois Villon

Tell me now in what hidden way is
Lady Flora the lovely Roman?
Where's Hipparchia, and where is Thais,
Neither of them the fairer woman?
Where is Echo, beheld of no man,
Only heard on river and mere,-
She whose beauty was more than human?.
But where are the snows of yester-year?

Where's Heloise, the learned nun,
For whose sake Abeillard, I ween,
Lost manhood and put priesthood on?
(From Love he won such a dule and teen!)
And where, I pray you, is the Queen
Who willed that Buridan should steer
Sewed in a sack's mouth down the Seine?.
But where are the snows of yester-year?

White Queen Blanche, like a queen of lilies,
With a voice like any mermaiden,-
Bertha Broadfoot, Beatrice, Alice,
And Ermengarde the lady of Maine,-
And that good Joan whom Englishmen
At Rouen doomed and burned her there,-
Mother of God, where are they then?.
But where are the snows of yester-year?

Nay, never ask this week, fair lord,
Where they are gone, nor yet this year,
Save with thus much for an overword,-
But where are the snows of yester-year?

(If you're a purist and want that famous line in the original French, it goes something like this: "Mais ou sont les neiges d'antan.")

JL

                                                         

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