Dan Krotz – The Republican establishment’s panic over the ascendancy of Donald Trump includes a glimmer of understanding that “the base” has finally caught on to their trickle down scam, and now know that the only thing reliably trickling down is misery. The Party isn’t quite sure what to do about it, but it’s fun watching them balance the policy goals of nervous fat cat donors against the mundane but real world needs of irate voters.
It’s also fun to watch them pat Ted Cruz on the head with one hand while holding their noses with the other. If they had a third hand they would use it to slap the snot out of themselves for their blindness to the realities, complexities and hardships of life experienced by working and middle class Americans.
What isn’t fun is watching the Democratic Party get a free pass for their complicity in gutting opportunities for, and the security of, these same Americans. Is it a free pass? It has been, and will continue to be a free pass, until the Democratic establishment solidly, emphatically, rejects the policies and legislation of the Bill Clinton administration… which I knowingly and tediously repeat: the privatization of prisons and higher education, banking deregulation, disinvestment in and neglect of public infrastructure, abandonment of trades unions, and a willful, premeditated ingenuousness about the need for tax code reform. Clinton talked a good game, but doubled down on supply side economics and policies. It is entirely fair to say, and is commonly said among leftist, centrist and moderate economists, that his administration did more than any other to turn us into a nation of Walmart shoppers.
Voters need to hear – and see – that Mrs. Clinton knows that sounding like Lyndon Johnson, but governing like her husband, won’t cut it. This is hardly an encomium for Bernie Sanders; it merely acknowledges that she’ll need bigger and more capable hands than Slick Willie has to gain traction with voters.
And again, with respect to the Republican Party, it is fair – since we are being fair – to say that they are reaping what they have sowed, and will have to live with it. Unfortunately, we do too.