WESTMINSTER WEST — I've been sweating a lot this summer, and not just because of the high temperatures and humidity. It's mostly due to the scorched-earth tones of the 2016 presidential election and what the outcome could portend for our country.
As the famous economist, diplomat, and intellectual John Kenneth Galbraith said, “Politics is the art of choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.” He's long gone, but his words nailed this election for me.
Donald Trump is the disastrous part of the equation. A man whose prejudices, compulsions, insatiable hunger for attention, greed, and arrested development on steroids make for a toxic mix of a man - and a dangerous one, if given power.
Trump has proven again and again that he's not fit to hold any political office, much less the highest one in our country. He's a racist and has been his whole adulthood: from a young real estate developer who used underhanded tactics to block Black people from renting his properties, to the man who lead the “birther” movement against President Obama and conducted a presidential primary campaign whose words have stung and insulted just about every non-white group in the United States.
I believe that Trump's campaign is a continuation of the “birther” movement and that the slogan “Make America great again” is just code for “Make America white again.”
The subtitle of his campaign should read “How dare a man of color become president of our country.”
He's disgusting.
Many supporters deny sharing Trump's racist views, but I don't know how anyone can pull the lever for him without condoning his racism. The fact that there are people of color who support him blows my mind. I just don't get it.
The same for Trump's female supporters. How can any woman vote for a man who grades and consumes women like a piece of meat? Is that how they want their daughters and granddaughters to be viewed? Again, I just don't get it.
What I do get is the dire outcomes that can rise out of the ashes of this election if Trump is elected.
Then there's Hillary Clinton. She is obviously brilliant and a much better choice for president than Trump on each and every level. However, she's the consummate Wall Street Democrat (that's no compliment), and she's very unpalatable to this voter.
In the mid-1980s, she marched in lockstep with her husband and the Democratic Leadership Council to turn the corner away from Main Street America into the lucrative arms of Wall Street and big corporations. The infamous Koch brothers, along with several large corporations, funded the DLC's efforts and Koch Industries served on the DLC's executive council.
The movement - extremely successful for the rich and powerful - all but destroyed the progressive wing of the Democratic party, and it abandoned the poor and decimated the middle class.
The most glaring outcome among many egregious ones was the deregulation of Wall Street, which lead to a scam-laden greed-fest, resulting in the financial collapse of 2008 - another toxic mix.
Throughout the primary, Bernie Sanders forced Clinton to talk progressive, but I highly doubt if she will walk progressive if elected.
Just keep an eye on the Trans-Pacific Partnership issue.
The Clintons are part of the 1 percent, and that didn't just magically happen. They followed the money and long ago planned an “eight years Bill, eight years Hill” strategy.
I hope that my prediction is wrong, but my gut tells me that someone who has fought so hard and long to gain the presidency will not change her stripes once the goal is achieved.
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The corporate Washington media completes this unholy trilogy.
The media have sacrificed the well-being of our country in return for the lucre of high ratings. They have fed the sordid Trump machine with free 24/7 coverage while ridiculing Clinton for her wonky policy proposals and Sanders for thinking big.
In short, they have done their corporate masters' bidding. Their contrite admissions are useless at this stage.
Once again, I wonder how reporters can be truly objective when they aspire to invites for the same cocktail parties and long to have their children attend the same prep schools as the politicians that they cover.
Their self-serving aspirations and sycophantic tendencies to treat politicians as celebrities rather than public servants who should be held accountable for their actions have done a great disservice to our country.
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During the 2008 election, I watched in disbelief as young and old alike projected all their progressive hopes and dreams onto a charismatic but Centrist politician, Barack Obama. His campaign tactic was a textbook classic: move to the extreme in the primary, then move to the center in the general election. And it worked.
Obama was doomed to mediocrity from the start, given the tsunami of hate lobbed at him, highlighted by Senate leader Mitch McConnell's statement that “the single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”
Yet even after that statement, Obama naively thought he could persuade and charm the Congress to work in a bipartisan manner to do the people's business. That misstep, coupled with having to deal with one of the biggest financial crises in our nation's history from day one, spelled disaster.
The part I find hard to reconcile is the squandered opportunity to clean house on Wall Street and rein in those titans of greed.
Instead, Obama aligned himself with them, and they got away with their dastardly deeds scot-free - from the big guys on the top floors to the lowly mortgage brokers who sat across their desks and looked countless people in the eyes as they reassured them that they would love their new home, all the while knowing that by signing those deeds most people would be headed for financial disaster.
Shame on them.
And today, those “too big to fail” banks are even bigger, and the top dogs are even richer.
So much for doing the people's business.
Obama: he is a man of grace, a man who cries with the families who have lost loved ones to war and gun violence and fights so hard to bring an end to the insanity of our gun culture. Yet he's also a man who turns his back on the environment unless it's politically expedient and increases drone attacks to the point where some qualify them as war crimes given all the innocents who have perished.
To many progressives, the Obama years became the Jilted Age as inequality grew and the longtime problems in our country just became more entrenched.
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The deep disappointment and disillusionment of those first-time voters of 2008 have concerned me the most. I feared they would give up their right to protest and vote given the hard lessons of rigged politics.
But many of them didn't give up. In September 2011, Occupy Wall Street captured the world, and the tenacity and smarts of that generation played out on the world stage. The movement was eventually dragged out of public view, but back they came, along with their younger brothers and sisters, to work as hard as they possibly could for a future that they could believe in.
Enter Bernie Sanders, hardly a knight in shining armor given his age and grumpy demeanor. Yet his popularity made the Democratic National Committee, headed by Clinton's 2008 national campaign co-chair, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, nervous.
The DNC threw every roadblock in Sanders' way. The group set few debates and scheduled them at odd hours. Its leaders orchestrated fraudulent fundraisers and claimed that most of the funds would be used for down-ticket races when, in fact, more than 99 percent of the proceeds went to Clinton's war chest. The organization displayed an attitude of insulting mockery.
Their slime machine didn't stop Sanders. This consummate public servant (that's a huge compliment) who speaks truth to power has devoted his whole life to fighting hard against injustice in all of its forms. He lit a fire under those already-hot young warriors and, together, they started a movement that's still Berning.
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I make a public plea to Senator Sanders to quit that chamber of ill-repute and leave Washington, whose stretch of the Potomac River is choked with the lost morals of politicians, lobbyists, and faux reporters.
Come home, Bernie Sanders; the Democrats are just using you, and they will never give you the respect and consideration that you deserve.
Come home and lead these amazing young movers and shakers for a year or two, then let them fly on their own, always serving as a friend and mentor, never a foe.
For many, the young brothers and sisters who fought so hard in your election personify hope in action, so even if it becomes midnight in America with the election of Trump, we can turn toward the dawn of our movement and add our voices, our labor, and our dollars.
We can work toward healing this worn and torn country.
Thanks to you and your movement, I am of one of many who still have hope.
Thank you for helping to keep hope alive.