Sam Smith –
One of my problems is that I can’t figure out why Donald Trump and Hillary
Clinton are running for president. After all, they are already in the top one-hundredth
of one percent of power in the world. This is power that could easily be
maintained totally free of FBI investigations of their emails or public ridicule
of their speech manner and bankruptcies. Further, they both have numerous tales
from the past that running for president could expose and, at the very least,
diminish their standing.
Of course the obvious answer
is ambition, but ambition is meant to improve your status and there seems
little way that Clinton and Trump will emerge from this campaign better regarded than
they are right now. Not to mention the
fact that they each stand a good chance of seriously damaging the reputation
of the parties they represent, something the parties’ members will not
appreciate.
Maybe there are some psychotherapists
out there who can help me with this. Are Clinton and Trump not afraid at all of
being remembered as having wrecked their parties? Does the risk in having their past exposed
not put some limits on their egomania?
If I had gotten away with as
much as this pair has, I would celebrate my success at some grandiose retreat
rather than rising early on Sundays to answer Chuck Todd’s questions.
What am I missing?
6 comments:
"If I had gotten away with as much as this pair has, I would celebrate my success at some grandiose retreat rather than rising early on Sundays to answer Chuck Todd’s questions."
You see, that's it, they have always gotten away it and likely within their reasoning believe they can continue to do so.
"What am I missing?"
Arrogance. Success in those sorts of endeavors breeds contempt. And people like that are driven by an emptiness, a lack of fulfillment and inner deadness that nothing can ever really satisfy so...."I am so good they can never catch me so why not play on."
The short answer to your question: power is the supreme aphrodisiac.
The long answer: power is the supreme aphrodisiac.
It's not psychological. You get in line. Hillary got in line back with Bill and Jeb during Iran Contra. She has too many bets on her to back out now. Trump has no apparent reason to run except that after McCutcheon it's a billionaire club and he's the only one to RSVP. Imagine if LBJ had walked out on J. Edgar Hoover at the famous Dallas prep meeting. Imagine if after extensive planning of which his election was one part, Bush had said I don't have no quarrel with Iraq. There's a lot of pressure on these capos as Hillary clearly demonstrates as opposed to Trump.
McCutcheon has moved the system from an oligarchy to a straight monarchy. Trump or someone like him has the air time and money to dominate all state and federal elections, consolidating control in his family. Clinton is not a billionaire and must launder money through the party. Parties as being representative of voters became obsolete in 1976. But after McCutcheon, they are retainers of the ruling monarchical family, as a competition between two houses. We are past the MacBeth era of 1963-1981 when presidents killed their way to the top.
Voting and sectionalism lend a sense of reality to the myth that the US has a party system. The US has particularized parties in a similar sense that obscenity is determined by particularized community standards. In fact, obscenity is impossible to determine by community standards in the age of the internet, and exists only as a law on the books for those who would challenge it. Similarly Sanders sought to challenge the pseudo-incumbent in a party primary, only to find out primaries don't really exist. The party is a legal money laundering operation, to which he was not invited. The elections themselves are each so tainted by fraudulent accounting that serious litigation over delegate seating would take several years. This is the Bush v. Gore system where elections are won in the close case by secretive electronic or other vote switching, always at odds with exit polls.
Rather than a race of the big banks versus big oil, it is called Dems v. GOP. A landslide is not determined by how people vote, say as with all four FDR elections and Nixon and Reagan's reelections. Rather a landslide happens when typically opposed donors are merged into the same candidacy. This is potentially the result this year as Clinton courts Big Oil to join Wall St. in backing her Bourbon Dem/Strangelove GOP coalition inherited from bi-partisan Obama, versus Construction tycoon Trump. Self-funded Trump speaks for the construction industry sidelined after the crash, a proto-Whig. Big Oil plus Big Banks versus Construction becomes a donor landslide although the voter tally may be close. Here the Oil elite will line up behind the Clinton campaign on promises to continue Obama's oil wars as Bush's 5th term, in fact, Reagan's tenth term, plus no sweeping ideological shift in the Supreme Court, as Garland promises, continuing the Nixon Court of 1976. Trump would collapse the phony GOP into a pre-Lincoln mix of the Whigs and the Know-Nothings, 1852, Millard Fillmore deja vu. If this is the timetable, a civil war is about 2 administrations away.
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