Bob Lord

I managed to get myself labeled sexist twice within 24 hours for Facebook posts about Hillary Clinton. By her supporters, of course. In one post, I brought up a quote of hers praising Walmart from when she served on Walmart’s board. In the other, I actually said that Planned Parenthood’s endorsement of her had less to do with Hillary than it did with Planned Parenthood being in the pocket of the Dem party establishment.

This really has nothing to do with sexism, or even Hillary. What we’re seeing is what happens when those in power, in this case the Democratic Party establishment, feel threatened. They’ll do whatever they think will keep them in power. In this case, it means tilting the playing field in favor of their candidate. And they’ll seek to intimidate, by attacking those who support the anti-establishment candidate and demanding pledges of loyalty should the anti-establishment candidate lose. We actually may see that backfire on the Republican side, where those who pledged to support Trump if he’s the nominee, pledges made solely to extract a reciprocal pledge from Trump, might be called to live up to those pledges.

Will the “sexist” crap backfire on the Dem establishment?

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Logically, a candidate for President should need to clear just two hurdles to get your vote: Identify the most critical challenges we face as a nation and convince you that he or she is the candidate most capable of meeting those challenges.

Do voters consistently get this right, or do they get bamboozled somewhere in the process? I submit they usually get it wrong, but not in their selection of the candidate most capable of meeting the challenges they consider most critical. Rather, it is in the identification of the challenges where voters are led astray.

Voters, it seems, generally suffer badly from ADD. They’re driven to distraction by the news cycle. And by candidates who prey on their fears and prejudices. By the time they cast their vote, they’ve lost sight of what they themselves believe are the challenges we must meet. They’ve allowed the media and the candidates to tell them what those challenges are.

Is it possible for the right leader to break through, despite the glaring systemic shortcoming? My guess is sometimes, but not this time.

Consider the landscape.

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Demagogue: a political leader who seeks support by appealing to popular desires and prejudices rather than by using rational argument.

How closely does Donald Trump fit that description? Any less so than Hitler, Milosevic, or Netanyahu? Hardly.

Yet we still discount him. I shudder. 

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[Correction: The local DNC apologist to whom I referred actually is not a high level Dem operative here]

We’ve now seen two acts of blithering incompetence on the part of Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, chair of the Democratic National Committee.

DWS, who as party chair is ethically obligated to remain neutral in the Democratic nomination process, is thought by many progressives to be working to rig the process to favor Clinton. Progressives point to at least two actions as evidence of DWS’ bias:

1. The decisions to hold few debates, and to schedule several of those few debates at times viewers would be least likely to tune in. The scheduling of last night’s debate on the Saturday before Christmas was Exhibit A on this front.

2. The decision to lock the Sanders’ campaign out of its own database as “punishment” for a staffer peeking at Clinton campaign data when the DNC’s vendor, NGP Van, screwed up and dropped a firewall for 40 minutes. The action was a blatant breach of contract by the DNC, so much so that it capitulated within hours of being hit with a lawsuit by the Sanders’ campaign.

Put allegations of bias aside, however, and consider only the incompetence of these actions.

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