Right in the centre - It’s a pretty grim picture
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- Published on Friday, March 4, 2016
By Ken Waddell
Neepawa Banner/Neepawa Press
My regular time schedule to write my column is Tuesday morning and so it is this week. That means that the Super Tuesday vote in the US presidential nomination election is being held after I write this column. It’s tempting to wait and see how it turns out. But it really doesn’t matter, the whole process is a condemnation of modern day American politics.
If Hillary Clinton, or maybe Bernie Sanders, is the best the Democrats can come up with, it’s indeed a sad day. If the best the Republicans can come up with is Donald Trump, it’s also a sad day!
The United States of America, with all its history, all its wealth, all its experience and all its power can’t come up with better candidates, then they are in big trouble. Come on, Hillary or Donald? What kind of choice is that?
The dominance of these two candidates shows that the United States has lost its mind. Donald Trump has been a successful businessman, albeit his earlier career was spotted with some failures. That seems a common approach to business, seems business people don’t really learn much until they have failed a few times. I can personally attest to that. Trump can be funny, he can be charming, he can be a lot of things. But he’s not a statesman and he’s not realistic in his plans. He won’t be a friend to Mexico or Canada.
So why has Trump been so successful thus far? It’s because people are tired of the Washington Establishment, the pack of governing people who are safe and secure in their salaries, their perks, their pensions and their entitlement. The average citizen is just plain fed up with government intervention in every aspect of life today and to add insult to injury, the people who neither want, nor need, the government intervention, are having to pay for it all. People are just plain angry and tired and Trump has successfully latched onto that sentiment.
On the Democratic side, it can easily be argued that Hillary Clinton isn’t very smart. She has clung to power in spite of some very dumb mistakes. Her husband’s only genuine claim to credibility is that the economy did relatively well when he was president. He doesn’t have a great foreign affairs record and his personal life was a complete mess. The business dealings they have been involved in have led some critics to say Hillary should be in the “big house” not the White House.
For months, I have been asking myself, is this the best America has to offer? Really? Surely, even in the political establishment, the Democrats could find a younger, smarter, more articulate woman to run for the nomination. Do politicians, male or female, all have to be over 60 or 70 years old, dried up and hard? Is there not a 45-50 year old woman or man out there who has a grasp of politics, morality and decency?
Surely, somewhere in the whole of the United States there are 45-50 year old people who have some grace, some smarts and speaking ability, a black person perhaps? Somewhere?
The Republican front runners are all buffoons, even the younger ones.
On either side, can no one talk about what they believe in without attacking the other candidates in a very personal way? The attacks are ridiculous, from how much a person sweats, to how long they take in the bathroom, to hair styles.
Presidential nomination candidates should be talking about vision, without vision, the people perish. The candidates should be talking about hope, as that is what fuels life and endeavour. America has a huge debt problem and nobody is addressing it. America has a huge health care problem, a huge poverty problem and a huge education deficit. The three are all entwined.
The US debt problem is largely due to war efforts. To his credit, Donald Trump has touched on that. He says the war in Iraq was a mistake. It may have been a mistake because if the US had really wanted to control Iraq, they could have bought the whole place for less than the war cost and saved thousands of lives to boot. The US has made that mistake before. In the 1860s, it was proposed to buy out the US slaves. It would have been cheaper than the Civil War and saved thousands of lives. The US has never really recovered from the Civil War. They will be a long time recovering from the Iraq war.
The US has a huge problem of its own making. The only decent candidates for president are either so far down the polls or have disappeared off the ballot. After Tuesday, the already thin prospects will be even thinner. Perhaps more grim is a better description.
