Month: January 2016

If Trump wins in Iowa and New Hampshire, the establishment will have a panic attack.  Efforts to identify a single establishment-backed candidate will intensify, but fail until it is too late.  Trump’s momentum is too great to overcome.  He gets the nomination, and the rest of the party falls into line.

It’s the time of year to make predictions.  Over the next week, I will lay out a number of different scenarios for the primaries. This is the first one.

Suppose, for purposes of argument, the last three serious candidates left standing are Rubio, Cruz, and Trump.  One way to predict the outcome of the election is to look at the constituents of the departed candidates and assign them to one of the three survivors.  How does that look?

In my opinion, Trump has reached his ceiling, Cruz would get Carson’s voters, and Rubio would get the rest.  If you add those numbers to their existing polling, what you wind up with is all three candidates with between 30 and 40 percent of the vote.  It is hard to imagine any of them having a majority going into the convention under those circumstances.  My best guess is that Cruz would be the most acceptable compromise candidate and would win the nomination.

The Washington Post has run two articles about Rubio and his brother-in-law over the last few weeks.  The first of them described the drug dealing activities of the brother-in-law during the 1980’s in some detail (he sounds a bit like a character from “Scarface”); the latter discussed Rubio’s efforts to help him get a real estate license after he was released from jail.

I have two reactions to this information:

1. Articles like these don’t appear for no reason; for the opposing candidates, they are a great way to engage in negative campaigning in a very passive-aggressive way.  Since the events in question took place in Florida, it is probably fair to assume that at least some of the inspiration for the articles came from the Bush campaign.
2.  While I’m no fan of Rubio, he didn’t get to pick his brother-in-law.  The families of other candidates in this race have had legal issues, as well.  I don’t think there is anything in the articles that should make any difference to the voters.

In my opinion, the five most important qualities that should be possessed by our next President are as follows (in order of importance):

1. Courage:  I had a dream one night in which a character told me that courage is more important than intelligence  for a head of state, because you can rent brains, but not balls.  In the conscious world, I believe that was correct.

2. Judgment:  This is not the same thing as pure intellect;  it is the ability to make the correct decision in 51/49 situations, and to evaluate people.

3.  Empathy:  You can’t interact successfully with either your friends or your enemies if you can’t put yourself in their shoes.

4.  Communications skills:  No elaboration necessary.

5.  Patience:  In the real world, problems are rarely resolved overnight. Blustering, throwing temper tantrums, and changing course abruptly in mid-stream are not effective management skills.

Who among our current crop of candidates best exemplifies these character traits?  That will be up to the electorate, but if you read the descriptions carefully, you can probably guess, at a minimum, who should be disqualified.

It’s only OK to execute enemies of the regime by hanging them from cranes in public squares.

The Democrat maverick named Bern

For minority votes he did yearn.

But he talked about class

Like a man from the past

I’m guessing he’s too old to learn.

 

There was more than one reason why “White Christmas” was set in Vermont.

The ex KGB man Vlad Putin

For his Syrian clique he was rootin’.

He sent in his planes

You could question his brains

For sure, he’s no Sir Isaac Newton.

(This is the first installment of a new feature:  Foreign Policy Friday.  It will replace Fiorina Fridays, which have become pointless).

As I have indicated in previous posts, the personality of the individual candidate is a better guide to his approach to foreign policy than his party affiliation: hence, Bernie Sanders and Rand Paul can sound pretty similar on Syria.  That said, there are two areas in which the principal GOP candidates all broadly agree that set them apart from the current administration and the two significant Democratic candidates:

1.  The rhetoric will change:  quiet reserve will be replaced by trash-talking.  All of the major GOP candidates can be expected to spout bromides about how great and powerful America is on a regular basis.  While my natural reaction to this is to recoil, I have to admit there can be some advantages to it;  adding an element of arrogance and unpredictability can help you get your way at times. On the other hand, it will unquestionably create friction with our allies, and Americans in general will be viewed as reactionary, irresponsible cowboys throughout the world again.

2.  There will be substantial increases in the defense budget.  We spend as much on defense as the next five nations combined, and there is no practical nexus between the size of our military and our difficulty in dealing with Syria and Ukraine, but the GOP believes that defense cuts that they accepted in the sequester deal have rendered us a pitiful, helpless giant, so major increases there must be.  They won’t have any significant impact on our ability to address the current crises, but if the underlying plan is to become the world’s policeman, the additional funds probably are necessary.  That is a topic for another day.