Wednesday, November 5, 2014

Zombie Apocalypse

So we have a new Congress, dominated by a combination of stupid, ignorant, and insane not seen in the history of the Republic.

When I've said how bad it is, I'll tell you where I believe there may be some hope.

We face enormous problems - economic, environmental, health-related, terrorism-related - for which we aren't at all prepared.  And now we've selected as our representatives the office-seekers least able to deal with those problems.

Congress matters most, but unbelievably bad governors - Paul LePage in Maine, Sam Brownback whose policies wrecked the economy of Kansas, and the exceedingly divisive Scott Walker of Wisconsin may be the very worst of them - were given new mandates to wreak havoc.        

As long as we have a two-party system with one of the parties controlled by corporate interests and self-interested billionaires who want it to be irrational and short-sighted, that party will win when people are sore at the other party.  If Jon Huntsman wants to do something for this country - and to have a chance at the presidency - he can begin a new party that will draw out of the GOP all those who aren't raving loonies.  That would be an enormous patriotic service.

I've never understood Barack Obama.  I don't understand why someone who was inspiring of confidence on the stump should become self-defeatingly uncommunicative and opaque once in office.  This election was successfully nationalized by the Republicult into a referendum on him.

My favorite candidate this year was Shenna Bellows, running for the Senate from Maine.  If not brilliant, she was articulate, likable, and on the mark.  She got swamped by the incumbent Susan Collins, who's supposedly moderate but useless.  What does it take?

Looking around the country, I don't see, aside from Bellows, a single Democratic candidate who strikes me as compelling.  There's Cory Booker, but, while personable, he's a Wall Street Dem of the Hillary type who hasn't had much to offer on the issues, more a celebrity than a leader.   Mark Udall of Colorado put up a fight but only came across as untruthful and desperate.  Mostly you had wimps who tried to be inoffensive and to quibble.

Here's where things look a little better.  It has been pointed out that in two years 30% of the electorate will be minorities.  Given that, a Republican victory is against the odds.  And given that most Americans don't agree with the Republicans and have said so in poll after poll, rallying them should be possible once Mr. Obama is no longer the issue.

The Republicans could nominate Jeb Bush, who may seem competitive; but I don't think they're prepared to go with someone who comes across at least subliminally as rational.  Romney is their other conceivably electable possibility, I'd say, but he has great problems - such as his business record, his offshore money, and his two-faced persona - and would again make a great target.  Rand Paul intrigues some, but he seems a small-timer; for sure the neocons will bend every effort to take him down lest he stand in the way of their next war.

Who have the Dems got?   Let's look again.

~Hillary and her charming hubby proved useless as Dem surrogates this year.  There's no indication that she can transfer support - if she even has it - to other candidates.  I continue to think that after a few attack ads she's gone - and good riddance.

~Joe Biden has this administration around his neck like a millstone.

~Bernie Sanders talks perfect sense.  Whether he can get somewhere, I don't know.  He may be trusted because he's a straight-shooter and an independent.  But the word "socialist" scares people, and I don't know if he has the personality to get us with him and keep us there. I'm not writing him off, but I'm not too hopeful.  In historical terms he resembles the great truth tellers and progressive champions who never made it to the White House, such as "Fighting Bob" LaFolette and George W. Norris.  They were perhaps too right - as opposed to too far right - to be president.

~Governor Martin O'Malley of very Democratic Maryland just got smacked in the mouth.  The speculation will be that he lost his teeth, but I don't think he did.  His chosen candidate to succeed himself - his attractive, youngish black lieutenant governor, Anthony Brown - got swamped by a run-of-the-mill Republican.  But since Dems lost everywhere because of public upset at the Obama administration, O'Malley (who has already been trading pot-shots with the White House) has the option of saying that what happened in his state was a referendum on the president's record and not on his own.  O'Malley could be the likeliest kind of person to emerge as the Dem nominee, as he's nice-looking, smooth, accomplished, and an obvious compromise choice.  I'm not impressed with him, but I'd by no means say he's out of it.

~Jim Webb may or may not go for it.  If he does, he could be a bland, aging dud.  Or he could be the type of fighting Scots-Irishman that he has celebrated in his writings.  I don't know what to anticipate from him.  I'd say that if he were to run to the left of Hillary on income redistribution and the environment, he could run to the right of her on everything else and possibly be in a position to form a national consensus.

 When we've been confronted with enormous national tasks, we've also been blessed with leaders of such magnitude that with their guidance and assurance we were able to meet them:

~George Washington, with his stature and his practical sound sense, saved the new republic from dissolving because of the Jeffersonian hysteria over our having a strong central government.  He made everything that followed possible.

~Abraham Lincoln proved himself up to the challenge of disunion.

~World War I, while I think it could and should have been avoided, required superior leadership of us once we were in it, and Woodrow Wilson gave that.  Prior to the war, his progressive reforms were in sum a big achievement.  He failed to convince Europe to put aside vengefulness and greed for the sake of a viable future, though perhaps no one could have done that.   Today he's thought of mostly as rigid and thwarted, but he was one of our larger presidents and he navigated a tough period.

~Franklin Roosevelt may have been the greatest democratic leader in all of history to date.  His achievements are so staggering that people today won't even look at them because we've taken it into our heads that government is a curse.

What's coming at us now may be harder to lick than any of those problems was.  And we can't always know in advance what we're getting in a national leader.  The usually discerning columnist Walter Lippmann met Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt of New York and thought him a pleasant fellow who always agreed with the last person he had talked with.  Who might we be underestimating now?

Perhaps no one.  Or perhaps one of those I've named.  Or perhaps someone we haven't even spotted yet on our horizon.

Don't give up.   The chances are good that a society with so much to offer will yet offer it if only when worse comes to worst.