Vincent J. Curtis
9 Aug 2016
Changing Washington is hard.
Even those with the best intentions and a high head of steam seem to
fizzle out when they get there. The
well-intentioned may not exactly go- along-to-get-along; they just get stifled.
The TEA party revolution that began with a rant on
television by CNBC reporter Rick Santelli promised to reform Washington’s
ways. TEA party supported
representatives took over a quarter of the new Republican house majority in
2010, and it was up to House Speaker John Boehner to keep them in line. These TEA party supported candidates had the
mission of stopping Obama.
The 2012 election saw the defeat of Republican presidential candidate
Mitt Romney by the tried and true means of character assassination. Romney was too decent a man to respond in
kind.
The 2014 off-year election saw a dramatic increase in
Republican House membership and the gaining of control of the US Senate by a
new Republican majority. The mission of
this strengthened Republican majority was simple: stop Obama now.
Still, the Obama agenda rolled forward. True, Obama did not get any new measures
through the congress, but the congress failed to so much as halt funding for
Planned Parenthood as a sign of their fealty to the electorate that sent them
to Washington. They failed to make full
use of the power of the purse to roll back the Obama agenda in the slightest. Deficits under a Republican controlled House
added up to a doubling of the national debt from, $10 trillion to $20
trillion. Last December, the House,
under the new leadership of TEA party favorite Paul Ryan, passed budget
legislation that will ensure the deficit rises to over $21 trillion, and Obama will
not be troubled with a fiscal crisis again.
Then, Donald Trump comes from out of nowhere to win the
Republican nomination for president. He is
not like any of the other Republican reformers of the previous ten years. He is not culturally a Republican, he is a New
Yorker. He is not an off-the-shelf
Republican suit. He is so rich that he
is not dependent upon the usual base of Republican donors; he self-funded his
nomination campaign. He is famous in his
own right, and his personality is quite well known to the electorate. Character assassination would not be as easy
to pull off with Trump as it was with Mitt Romney.
What made Trump attractive to the electorate were his style,
his energy, and his promise to break every political mould in sight. He was a candidate of change to be sure. All other Republican contenders were
conventional and pedantic by comparison.
And Trump won the Republican nomination with over 14 million primary
votes, more than any previous Republican candidate.
In the course of his nomination, Trump broke a few moulds,
not the least of which were decorum and Republican political conventions. He labelled outrageously his opponents: Lyin’
Ted, Little Marco, Jeb Bush was lacking in energy, in defeating them all. Trump was decidedly opposed to free trade
deals that resulted in the loss of American labor jobs, he promised to build a
wall and undertake vigorous measures to fix the illegal immigration and drug
crises. He questioned the decisions
concerning war and peace made by previous administrations.
Trump’s measures were outside the domain of establishment
Republican thinking, and when Trump won the nomination a large segment of the
conservative wing of the Republican Party either left the party or are engaged
in simmering or open revolt against the party’s selection of candidate for
president.
Affirmations of disloyalty to Trump has become a parlor game
among establishment Republicans. The
most recent examples of it are a statement by Senator Susan Collins (R- ME) saying she won't vote for Trump, and
of a letter signed by no fewer than 50 people who held posts related to
national security in previous Republican administrations.
The dissension in the Republican ranks is intended to defeat
the Trump campaign and see to it that Democrat Hillary Clinton is elected
president. Such disloyalty would never
be found in the Democrat Party. Why
would Republicans work to defeat their own, and ensure that the likes of
Hillary Clinton is elected president?
Why is this change so hard?
The reason is that with Hillary, no moulds will be broken. The usual, conventional, and comfortable
lines of disagreement between the two parties in Washington will be
preserved. The Republicans in Washington
can stomach the corruption of a Hillary presidency, while they downright fear
the consequences of a Trump presidency.
The fear is genuine, but is it a fear that their world – a world they
created and lived in going back forty years – will come crashing down. Entirely new ways of thinking will have to be
adopted. And Trump is a powerful enough
personality to push over the columns of the temple.
And that explains why it is so hard to change things in
Washington. The many are disorganized,
and never powerful enough to overcome the entrenched interests in
Washington. The strong are mercilessly
attacked from all quarters, by people who spent a lifetime entrenching
themselves and which lifetime of work threatens to be undone - party and
popular will be damned.
Hillary is the choice of the status quo. There is no doubt of that. Trump inspires fear in the preservers of the basic
status quo, the basic conventions, of Washington. So much so, that Hillary is preferred by
those who ought to hate what she represents.
If real change is needed in Washington, Trump is your
man. But the electorate is going to have
to stay with their man through the fecal-storms ahead. An electorate determined that Washington be
changed are going to have to stay with their man, someone who actually will
change things through force of personality alone, and not allow themselves to
be distracted by the tricks of the establishment, promulgated by the ultimate
Washington interest, the old media.
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