A Three-Way Race, and Other Outcomes

The response of Donald Trump to criticism of his sexual conduct, or proclaimed habits of misconduct has, arguably and unbelievably to many if not those floating the verbal abyss of unconditioned zealotry, masked as political preference, received a stern – I would say unprecedented – rebuke from president Obama, who in no-nonsense terms has proclaimed "democracy itself" to be at stake on the eighth of November. Not for the first time, and for reasons that for the reasons unmentioned should arouse concern rather than sheer disgust, I echo some relief at being unable - as well as reluctant - to cast a ballot in this last of contests of a racket reality show of an electoral cycle - well, unless turning your attention to the senatorial race and its adjoining debate in old King Louis' country - a cycle now depreciated to the utmost depths. Only the further decline of both parties is assured, and with it hopefully the tendency to promote candidates more in line with the popular demand and able to mobilise these in an optimistic as well as zealous effort.

But that these are strange and surprising times must be reassured as well as repeated, and in theory as well as in a future imaginable a third option could herald the possible - I must say I considered "covetable" - defeat of both Clinton and Trump, a challenge from dismayed quarters (RedState.com and Mr. Kristol being my usual suspects) who last August filed papers to put the well-spoken, if politically inexperienced and abysmally obscure 40-year old Evan McMullin, a Mormon and former CIA operative with a neoconservative streak, a TED Talker and worth watching at that, in a late counter-challenge to the seemingly victorious Trumpian effort to subvert the Republican Party.

"The constitution is great, but it doesn't necessarily give us the right to commit suicide... okay?"

You know who said it.
(A question for Justice Scalia's eventual successor to ponder.)

In order to believe the unbelievable you have to accept that McMullin, a conservative Mormon, could win Utah - arguably a bit of a stretch (four points to be precise, or precisely the margin of error). You then have to believe - arguably not so likely, though in light of the polls of late, continued disenchantment with the Clinton campaign, and the stated intentions and substantial efforts of WikiLeaks, it should be noted that it has not too long ago been a reality - the election will be close enough for no party to reach the gloated number 270, an event last occurring in 1824 (despite the best efforts of Governor Thurmond and First Gentleman Wallace to subvert the efforts of the party which did elevate them into office and prominence). If so occurred, the choice otherwise inherent to the much loathed Electoral Collage would be dropped, under the rules of the Twelfth Amendment, into the lap of the even more loathed House of Representatives.

Anything but a landslide for Democratic candidates would leave the House, and thus its fifty individual delegations, safely in Republican hands - of whom sixty-something currently have pledged not to lend Trump a Newton's worth of support. Anything but a strengthened majority for the Grand Old Party, a huge stretch now, would leave the selection at the mercy of a section of self-announced Trump-haters, and with the disapproval of the Republican leadership past seething and utterly lacking confidence in its own nominee, it is safe - perhaps even reasonable - to assume such might be found ub an absolutely unknown Arabic- and Portuguese-speaking Mormon and former CIA operative (two reasons to the this rare condition) and thus elevate the second non-partisan - a nobody of a record-low 40 years, with no political experience from a state, a denomination long on the fringes - to the highest of offices.

Al Wajjah Rayiys? O Rosto de um Presidente?

Sorry... in the tongue of the Prophet; "(is this) the face of a president"?

The real stickler is that even under tight contest, McMullin - repeat the name again, make it stick - would have to break the barrier left unbroken since said Wallace's candidacy in 1968 - if you see the ad, scream loud if any point seems familiar - now (as then) explicitly grasped for this goal, and win a bag of electoral votes for himself, thus qualifying for the select three - a three which, the last and second time the Twelfth Amendment kicked in, included illustrious men such as William Harris Crawford, John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson.

Could this feat be possible? I have just outlined it. (A later poll, I can say now, put McMullin one point ahead of Clinton, one behind of Trump; a still later one in the lead, with four points advantage over Trump, seven to Clinton.) What is arguably more concerning would be the popular mandate of a leader who would poll in single digits, nationally. But as just suggested in above example, where the illustrious, well-travelled and unabashedly intelligent Quincy Adams was carried into his ninety-year old father-predecessor's office on the back of a mere seven states, and given the lack of disenchantment and distrust in Mr McMullin's character and judgment - a quality shared by all otherwise qualified Americans passing the Grand Central Terminal on a good day - a Ralph Nader-unlike scenario, with only consequences far more dramatic in their immediate content, should not be ruled out.

A historic result, regardless of winner. The question is, could it herald the outcome, and a second Independent president, on the national stage? A later poll put McMullin at 31 %, overtaking Trump at 27 points and Clinton at 24, with Johnson collapsed.

In light of the absent agenda of the former Secretary of State, the rebuking of her campaign campaign is amazing, heart-warming, but as hollow as the 26 %-plurality and possible victory in the redder-than-most Beehive State. The outrage over a Twitter rant to repeal the 19th Amendment, a sheer piece of trolling meant to highlight a proposal which would supposedly hand the election to the virtue of male Americans, and thus to Trump (which it would not - presuming congressional approval and no legal interference, the issue would be thrown back to the states and their respective constitutions and Bills of Rights, where mostly female-majority electorates would have to, in most cases by referenda, approve of said limitations separately for the proposed change to take effect - now tell me you are offended) does imply a preference for a high turnout, high on my wishlist, but not even this victory-heralding measure is followed by solid, plausible ideas how to make this effort more likely, in a year of the dreadful.

To those solidly behind the Clinton campaign, my challenge stands; find me a set of policy proposals, say three, issued by and in your view likely to be enacted under Clinton. Exempli gratia; a wall along the Southron border, a redefined, pay-or-we-won't-come-and-play NATO, a strong tariff on foreign-produced manufacturers (did I say Mexico?), a blanket ban on migration from Muslim/terrorist cuntry's, something "far worse" than waterboarding, and every acronym relating to free trade in tatters at the bottom of the dustbin. Again; Glass-Steagall reinstated, a federal tax rate reaching 90 %, Medicare-for-all, free community college, free childcare across the Union, and a moratorium-turned-ban on the federal death penalty. So far, no good answers, no real takers - admittedly, an answer in itself. With Trump and Sanders, the two great outsiders of the year, perhaps of the century, this was easy and often condensed into oft-repeated, if yet robotic or appalling slogans.

Could anyone have expected Donald Trump to receive double digits in a presidential election back in 2012, or 2008? Who will be there in 2020, or 2024? Knowing what you know, who will you rule out from certainty?

The relative unlikelihood of the three-way scenario in Utah, and how it could conceivably alter the result on the national stage, should at any rate give pause for sound reflection. The resounding defeat of elephant and donkey has in some sense been achieved, as signified by the incredible stand of two candidates so widely despised that the early, and well-funded - though not necessarily in the sense of big capital - triumphs of Sanders and Trump seemed to shake the very system in which they could not long ago have expected no shares.

Since his triumph, Trump has been all but excommunicated from the GOP, and Sanders has already slithered out of the hide which he, if yet gratefully and leaving much in return through his audacious effort, tried to fit, and stretch to accommodate his more radical preferences. What remains to be seen after the defeat of the outsiders and the re-demarcation of the two-party system is the rise of a credible third option. I believe, given one more financial meltdown, that Gary Johnson could repeat and keep climbing (an deliberate analogy) into double digits, or second place. Worse, and perhaps more likely, we might see a protectionist, populist candidate in reach of the White House, in a mock repeat of the astounding year 1912.

These labels, I allow, may be applied to Sanders as well, and public pressure on both candidates - made available by the primaries which ought to be the envy of the world, now much its freakshow of smear and superficiality - will inevitably lead either to accommodation of the fortress to fit the mainstream, or the reinforcement to make the mainstream even more peripheral. Whichever course is triumphant, we will see trends of both, tending towards the former. Wilson rebuked Bryan upon returning the Democratic Party to the academics, the snobs, to New York and New England elites, but his eight years saw as wide-reaching, cataclysmic, everlasting impact such as a permanent Federal Reserve; a non-sexist franchise across all the Union; the internationalist-minded policeman, his baton exposed and falling; prohibition of alcoholic beverages (arguably not his achievement, nor more "everlasting" than the others). Roosevelt, rebuked by Taft (arguably with a vengeance - but let us not forget venerable Vermont or Utah) saw his party undergo changes that two presidential races later had seen the rise of a presidential administration almost perfectly antithetical to his own, having seen the beginning of gradual leaching of progressives to the still-segregationist Democrats, and the subsequent geographical re-orientation of the national parties, both so recently completed (and yes, Georgia is still into its first ever Lieutenant Governor).

Sanders and Trump, who if they shared this stage would have been older than any couple yet so close (more than twice as many adult years to Nixon-Kennedy in 1960, a debate often referred to for its groundbreaking superficiality, but which old George rightly pointed to as a seemingly lost era of policy and politeness, and now I will too) will affect the parties they selected - both of whom spurned them - long after they are gone. And though both may have fallen short in their ambitions - at least I hope I can say that, when the last ballot has been cast - they may be far more remembered, as well as memorable, than the institutions they rallied against, or that rallied them against themselves, than the guardians preaching their maintenance in the name of letting a lesser devil out of the box.

Such a journey, so little time. Lincoln, born on the same day as Charles Darwin; two great emancipators, though the fate of the Grand Old Party may lead one to instinctively reject the progress and optimism of Darwin's thesis.

Bryan, who consumed the Democratic Party in full - thrice nominated, never victorious, but the time that saw the then, since-forgotten Populist Party came to change existing parties beyond recognition.

Would anyone have believed it? Will you, the next time, or merely see a single step in a continuing journey? Who will succeed, who did lead?

Trump's Thermidor

What may yet be referred to as the Republican "leadership" – after a long descent through denial, anger, acceptance, bargaining, denial of a different brand and, finally, full-throttled anger and what must be a great swag of depression, if not publicly weathered – was aroused last weekend, with several senators and a multitude of not too colourful, but clearly resenting voices calling for the man chosen by its own National Convention – a compound nearly banished from our vocabulary, not for obscure reasons – to steer the course through a tumultuous contest either to step down at own volition or be forcibly uncrowned and replaced. How well the hitherto obscure Governor Pence would fare in an election once expected to carry Republican favour I cannot say, aside that I would not stake many a penny in his favour. Asides the sordid case of late nominee Horace Greeley in 1872 (and possibly the sordid case of Thomas Eagleton one century later) I can find no comparison to this eventuality. At any rate, the possibility for a peaceful resolution is in vain. The game is now on, the issue of arrest - and, who knows, what else - warranted, the tiny, loyal clique of supporters decidedly shackled to the fate of their leader walled up in a proverbial Hôtel de Ville, awaiting the apparent onslaught as the final, desperate appeal to the people to whom it has posed such an audacious and unique offer is made by a visibly shaken leader – seemingly broken, perhaps prescient of an outcome already occurring. All left now is the shorter way out, to make the exit before the otherwise defining and decidedly humiliating chute. For as the great Anthony said; "When the fall is all that's left, it matters a great deal." The art of a great deal, one might say.

The night is over; the immovable strongman, so recently so cherished, and feared, inexorably moving and rebuking minions and equals alike... now paid undue respects by his just as many detractors.

Because where there was previously discontented silence, and the occasional, not-too-sassy stand on principle, the board of a game thought determined and locked by the National Convention has been violently overwrought in general revulsion from a leadership long willing to act the audience and either fleece from, or isolate the outcome to its sole actor - most cynical stand, and dangerous for the very republican ideal on which the most influential political party in the history of the republic – some would say in history - bears its name. Most sensationally, though perhaps surprising no one, Speaker Paul Ryan publicly disallowed the same actor's presence at the recent event in Elkhorn, Wisconsin. The unlimited amnesia, not to say forgiveness, of social conservative or Evangelical voters towards a man who a generation past could hardly be fathomed as a nominee even with a psychic ability to predict controversy far exceeds my incredulity, but has after this revelation, a deliberate choice of word, now definitely drawn a line between those who demand from their presumed leaders at least a fraction of the piousness they proclaim in themselves, if yet with the burden of proof strongly lodged on the back of their chosen to disprove rather than earn, and those whose pursuit of sheer adulation for the premier office - not just of the first state born from the Enlightenment, but for all humankind - is a matter of spur and emotional, momentary pragmatism. Likewise, the reactions of the most critics is astounding. For anyone to gasp in offense at the last line of quotes repeated and re-issued and suggest a line has now been crossed, there must be either a strong obsession with Donald Trump - a quality I share not, nor do I regard it as particularly useful - or some very elusive form of embarrassment. Nevertheless, that controversy can make strange bedfellows is as true as the opposite, and the current upheaval seems to have made at last a halt in this supreme of contests. With weeks left to the final phase, a party divided against its nominee - a fact long-since known, undercut temporarily as applause drowned out laughter and contempt - now painstakingly stated in unprecedented excommunication. I believe this to be seen as the bullet irretrievably lodged where it is most undesired, from whatever quarter you say it was delivered.

For this halt, which ought have happened far earlier if its power was to be harnessed, rather than an obstacle to the conservative movement, there are a multitude of good reasons - most lately, even promises, on live television, of outcomes which even a special court can make by its own judgment, which subjects the question of Trump's intentions and aims to questions requiring further scrutiny or, in the absence of executive experience - of which he has none - speculation on very hard facts. To believe the "malignant clown" (Mark Kirk's words and, yes, I know of his stroke, but even if you have just posed he thus did conflate the Illinois' own, deceased entrepreneurial psychopath with his party's nominee, the proposal that he might have ought to frighten as much as the term itself) to surrender would, knowing everything about his oft-mentioned temperament, be as presumptuous as his own expectations of the feats of an administration yet to be dawned. With or without a speedy change of captain, the Republican galley seems sure to continue the voyage onto the rocks of resenting popular opinion under the auspices by its disowned figurehead.

The question now is, with the party unleashing a wave of long-held discontent, which of many factions and even more oarsmen toiling the primaries will emerge supreme in 2020? I will not believe that the party which will hold he House for at least two more years is yet to collapse, nor that Democrats will resurge as the unquestioned beacon it once was - that is, when it was a bridge divided between the rantings of Teddy Bilbo and the oratory of Hubert Humphrey - without a convincing turn-around. The results of the eighth is a contest lost rather than won, asides from the supreme title to be inscribed at he top of a resume likely never again to be used - in my contention, the first and last object of "both" candidates. What is left to see which path would be taken, with this greatest of peaks scaled.

Hey, guys? Guys? How are you? Great! Ready to strap anti-tank guns and march into Russia, if I demanded it? I doubt it, just as I doubt he could connive it – except through carelessness.

More than once, by fools and otherwise thoughtful commentators, the Republican nominee's rise has been heralded, near-prophetically (and as I have claimed, there is much reason to distrust prophets, especially those who claim continuity) second coming of Hitler, which seems to hint of a lacking registry of candidates, as well as equating the concept of populism and demagoguery - two attributes present in the Nazi dictator, and also many, many others - with the uniquely positioned existence in history of a movement and a shepherd so convicted, so synchronised that they could be far more beloved, far more powerful, and far more destructive than most good efforts of a century, many centuries of destructive amoral annihilists. Indeed, if one were to level a stronger case against Mr Trump than bigotry, a whimsical repudiation of constitutional restraint and the willingness to turn his critics' most arbitrary or indefensible (and thus useless as arguments) attributes as means of crude verbal assault - self-evidently opportunistic in his case, and wavering as soon as confronted about it - and put them next to more precarious areas such as consistency in ideology, degree of commitment to a genuine cause, and operational knowledge of foreign policy. Whatever else may been, or should be repeated or the German butcher, I would claim all three pendula to swing in Trump's disfavour. Indeed, assuming his mother were an aunt of my preferred Democratic nominee - yes, my views are probably closer to hers (though arguably we will never know, will we?) but you know who I am talking about, and I haven't had to explain why - the Donald's public persona would represent an almost unimprovable stereotype of America Horrida; uncultured, greedy, inconsistent, stupid, of mixed origin and emergent from a culture of management, cheat and deal-making rather than leadership, loyalty and sacrifice. Trump is an echo of Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus (otherwise known as Nero) or conceivably of Shakespeare's hunchback with a callosal commissure brought in level with his spine - not of the Austrian kitsch painter.

Which would be worse? Think carefully, before you let enmity decide who you select for a representative.

The Donald's attempt at a riposte, though not without an astounding weight of Tu Quoque, has indeed a pointed end insufficiently exposed by Trump's critics and hardly ever repudiated by Mr Clinton's defenders, in answer to Mrs. Clinton's attempts to pose as a vindicator of the suppressed, the small, those whose hard-working existence lack the offered hand of lucrative fundraising connections to improve a harsh, struggling existence to a flourishing one. Regard these many elusive yet undeniable facts, the relative silence of the press, or tendency to wave away even substantially documented accusations as mere tools of a pure opportunist - which, as you already note, do not dilute her her claims to be the same title, unlike the kingship one of great collegiality - does pose a disgrace to the two guardians of political freedom; the public and the media, and herald the decline of the wit and strenuousness of both to safeguard these institutions.

The past, the future? I would say the past and the present joined, and ask - with a sordid tongue - what the future is to bring.

The winds of and a reason late awakened are unlikely to turn - and if I were to come with a more audacious, as well as arguably optimistic expectation, I expect the great scion of Bordeaux to come up strong against the Nicolas, and sweep the road into the Elysée Palace ahead of the otherwise second female head of an official nuclear power (and the third greatest arsenal at that) the coming spring. And as the tide will wash again, for the first time since Andrew Jackson, a Democrat to be succeeded after two full terms by virtue of election, there is the painstaking question what this future holds, and what promises it will keep. The campaign, with the former in store as a strong contender, has been the most filthy and "de-issued" in late history, and to relish that the worse of two devils faced a sordid defeat will prove scant consolation once the words and paper of inauguration day has long been lost to bleak and chilling winds.

Watching the times. Please, stay in them.

It is time to think, and stop only to avert disaster, what is to be the future that lies beyond the administration unusually optimistically heralded once - and yes, I remember it - with clamours of "Hope" and "Change". While Obama could deliver passion in abundance alien to the deep and needy days of a financial collapse whose extent we, at the end of his chapter in the book of presidents still ponder – and wisdom yet to be molded and evaluated through the emerging decades - the Barras who now emerges through the halls – seemingly confident, but to the clamour of what, except the relief of what may just have been averted? - may be a beacon of stability and consideration, perhaps even consensus, but marked with a historical importance that will be exhausted before her reign even began. It is time to reflect on the time beyond the laying the groundworks. There is time now for proper thinking, and proper leadership to arise, in the marketplace of ideas if not yet in the halls of temporal power.


If properly weathered in Swedish, please check out my brief conclusion on the two candidates and the prospects as I saw them last summer. With regards to a more precise weighing of the candidates, I think Sam Harris has it right, twice - or near enough to make scant difference. Shaped in my own words and boiled down to a single sentence; if I lived in a state with a substantial Democratic majority, I would sure as as a hot oven is an insufficient metaphor for a place of unimaginable and eternal torment be tempted to put my mark in the box next to Johnson or Stein. That, again, should be construed as something other than preference or confidence in their abilities or qualifications.

And yes, the Joffrey v. Cersei analogy is clear and deliberate. I believe them, from the major characters of Mr. Martin's great series, to best represent the faces of the donkey and the elephant this year. Let us see, and hopefully soon, and in a forum more suitable "for better or for worse", how that preference plays out :P