LOOKING TOWARD '16

Yesterday I looked at a Fox News video of the prospective Dem candidates for president.  It was interesting mostly because it showed them in action, and that spawned some reflections.

There's Hillary, about whom we continue to read almost daily that she's "inevitable".  Not a single significant rival has announced and no votes have been cast, but these commentators have got it all figured out.  I continue to believe that there's going to be egg on a lot of faces.

You see her speaking and, I think, though you may not dislike her, you don't like her.  She sounds determined and authoritative without saying a lot.  Reportedly she has people ready to advise her on how to appear to care about everyday people.  But I don't foresee her sticking her neck out far enough to alarm her fat cat contributors.

To me she's the new version of the 1948 Thomas E. Dewey: the candidate the media couldn't be wrong about.

Her opponents' unified narrative will be that she's status quo, pro-war, and pro-Wall Street.  Can she answer that and be believable?

It's said now that she's going to emphasize the fact that she's a woman.  How much credit she'll be given for that, I don't know.  She'd be a first as president, except that she's so much like so many presidents: a pushy careerist who wants to profit from how things are in an exceedingly corrupt time rather than reform it.

My guess remains that she'll generate resentment rather than enthusiasm and won't last once she's in the race.

Joe Biden is saddled with the fact that he's coming across more and more as eccentric and clownish. It may be too late for him to emphasize that he's a serious and influential part of the administration with a longer career than Hillary's and not just a stage Irishman with an eye for pretty ladies. Whether he'll go for it is still up for grabs.  His prospects aren't looking good.

But if Mr. Obama's popularity should rise because of his new combativeness and his successes against the Republican Congress, Biden could still be the beneficiary of that.

You see a video of former Senator Jim Webb and he looks like an old duffer who should be on the golf course.  The dye job is obvious, his complexion is sallow, and he looks his age, which is seventyish.  He appears younger when he's wearing glasses, but then he doesn't appear as sturdy and bulldog-like as otherwise.

His narrative is that the Dems have blown it by alienating the white working class.  He could be said to represent the old Hubert Humphrey wing of the party as opposed to the George McGovern wing.
His emphasis would be on unifying national themes, less on cottoning to minorities.  That might put him to the right of the others, except that he has had income inequality as an issue since before talking about it was the thing to do.  That's THE lefty issue par excellence now, and he can claim it without being accused of having undergone a convenient conversion.  And it's an issue that concerns not a minority but the vast majority of us.

On the environment, another issue of massive importance, his record isn't good.  There he had BETTER undergo a conversion.  Since the party expects leadership on that issue from its nominee, and since our human responsibility for a deteriorating planetary situation is now harder than ever to deny, perhaps he will.

He's the military guy, the hard-nosed guy, with an understated charm, and he's ready to talk foreign policy.  There he has some credibility because he was outspokenly against our Middle Eastern adventures from the start.

Not long ago Webb was said to be calling around to see how he could do at raising campaign money. That's the wrong way to begin.  You have to do what Bernie Sanders is doing: travel the country and go before audiences.  If you catch on, the money spigot will turn automatically.

Depending on his political smarts, I think Webb might make it.  His is a good story - independent in his Republican days, independent as a Democrat, tough-minded, a realist who cares, and a new (to most) face who has been around and knows a lot.

Speaking of Bernie Sanders, let's speak of Bernie Sanders.  If you follow him on Facebook, you constantly get his pithy, quotable, dead-right pronouncements on our national state of reaction and our slide into oligarchy.  I don't know how you'd argue with him or who could say these things more pointedly or more persuasively than he does.

So his story is that he's a truth-teller.  And, to go with that, he's downright unfashionable: an elderly guy with uncombed white hair and glasses that are out of date.  He comes across as impassioned but not at all out of control.  All of this makes him easy to respect, whether or not you agree with him.
But is he going anywhere?

He spoke in Iowa the other day to a young audience - and the audience was with him.  His take on the state of the country is the same as that of these young adults and adolescents.  He and they hold to the same developing consensus, the open question being how fast and how far it will develop.

It's said that each generation turns its back on its parents and shakes hands with its grandparents. Sanders is Grandpa.  He represents the Harry Truman generation, when you could tell it like it is and not pull your punches, rather than the pandering, slick, blow-dried postwar generation of warmongering draft-dodgers and cynical bundlers of big bucks.  It could be that he's so out of style that he's coming into style.

We don't know whether he wants it.  Maybe he'd be relieved and stand aside if a Jeff Merkley or a Sherrod Brown were to get into the race.  Or maybe he thinks that nobody but himself can be trusted to follow through.

Everybody writes him off as a Democratic nominee.  I'd be a tad cautious about doing that.  The times are extreme enough that someone improbable may not be ineligible if he can hit the nail squarely on its head.

God knows whether, if he became president, he could retain his popularity and his public influence. But his chances of that would seem to be as good as anybody's because of the sense that he means what he says.

Martin O'Malley, in his early fifties, is the "kid" in this race.  He appears youthful but not immature. He looks good in a T-shirt and maybe ought to campaign in one: he has a strong chest and big, muscular arms.  Maybe he should arm-wrestle critics.

How much credit he deserves for his progressive record in Maryland is debatable, considering that he has wanted to be president and that he would have had to bend over backward to avoid making that record because of his ambitious Democratic legislature.  There doesn't seem to be anything new and imaginative in it.

If this personable, predictable politician is to have a real opportunity to emerge as the nominee, short of rare luck, he's going to have to propose things the others aren't proposing and stand out from them. I think mostly we might like to see a display of guts, not just abs.

So far there's no indication that he has a clue how to proceed; but he isn't dumb and he won't roll over and play dead for Hillary or anybody else.  He's a competitor.

And I'm not convinced that that will be the final field of contenders.  Hillary is going nowhere, and all of those men have drawbacks.  Anyone should be able to see that.

The talk is going to have to be about jobs and a revived economy, as ever.  But my belief is that we're in a post-growth economy and the real, long-term issue is going to be how to deal with that.  The necessity is going to be for us to learn to look out for one another, not just for oneself.  That's the exact opposite of what the Republicans are going to be saying, which is one indicator that it's true.

The biggest question before us may be: Who can best tell us what we don't want to hear and permit us to build a viable future together?  I see no immediate answer to that.