"Especially note the reference to 'Bill Clinton' regarding the evisceration of the Glass-Steagall Act - and people think Hillary would make a good president?"
My friend Ildikó added the following comment --
"HC is not and would not be a reformer. She would not advocate a paradigm shift in politics."
It got me thinking. Does anyone see a candidate for 2016 who is electable who would advocate a political, social, and economic paradigm shift?
I can remember presidential elections as far back as Eisenhower versus Stevenson in 1952. My Aunts Sylvie and Gertrude were huge, very vocal fans of the intellectual Democratic candidate Adlai Stevenson. He was an outstanding orator and a popular governor of Illinois. Sylvie and Gertrude fed my young brain with Democratic propaganda and gave me a bumper sticker for my room. The propaganda stayed with me for many years. I wish I still had the bumper sticker; it would fetch a good price on eBay. Eisenhower was a war hero and the world was deep in the Cold War - he won by a substantial margin.
Political discussion was part of my life from then on. Much of the discussion centered around who was electable. Politics is a strange game. The Electoral College makes it even stranger. Add to that the disparity in political philosophies across the USA and the job of finding an electable candidate becomes extremely difficult. Many people think a good candidate must appeal to a broad range of people. The blander the candidate, the better. This gave rise to candidates making promises to gain favor with segments of society, promises they would not keep after getting elected.
I became disillusioned with most political parties and candidates and registered as a Green Party member several years ago. No matter the name of the party I registered with, I never voted a party line. I always tried to see a shred of honesty in a candidate regarding an issue or issues that were important to me.
See? Right there - "important to me." That's the problem candidates have. I wonder if a truly honest person could be elected president. They want Mark's vote so they will embrace an issue that Mark supports. On the other hand, Joe (fictitious character) has a different opinion, but the candidate wants the votes from Joe and his like-minded citizens. So candidates walk a political tightrope trying not to be too pinned down to any one point of view.
Some of the people in the U.S. political process who I admire will probably never run for president because of the trade-offs they would have to make. I'm thinking of Bernie Sanders (Independent), Elizabeth Warren (Democrat), and Alan Grayson (Democrat). There are many folks who are not politicians with ideas that could radically transform this country like Robert Reich and Bill Moyers, to name a few.
In spite of the interest in a viable third party, the Green Party candidates for president and vice-president in 2012, Jill Stein and Cheri Honkala, only managed to garner about 400,000 votes, less than 0.4% of the total. A Libertarian (Republican?) candidate, Gary Johnson, managed almost 1%.
So, who do you think will run? Who do you think can win? Is it Hillary Clinton? How about Joe Biden? Does any Republican have a chance in 2016? Will Green Party, Libertarian, and Tea Party candidates expand the process beyond the two-party rut we're stuck in?
