4 years ago, I said that Mitt Romney was the worst presidential candidate I've ever seen in my life
That probably had to do with his incompetent campaign, his utter tone deafness, his cartoonish shtick as the Whitest Man In America and that stick that he had so far up his ass that you could check the oil in his brain with it.
But looking at the the way that the GOP was trending towards a collapse of it's own credibility, I knew that without a shadow of a doubt, that the party would outdo itself by exponential proportions in the following election year. Early in the GOP primary process, I looked for RWNJ pandering, incompetence and shamelessness... Also, I factored in the urge in wingers to respond with their own candidate who would have been seen as an "Anti-Obama."
My first inclination was to see Ben Carson as that person, a black guy that even white right wingers could love. He had it all, including his willingness to incoherently crazy talk every other motherfucker in the room. But alas, his inability to connect to his audiences in a meaningful way had doomed his chances. Not to mention my suspicions that he really wasn't serious about running for office at all. I still think that he only ran to monetize his name brand with a certain segment of the GOP electorate that's willing to finance his extravagant, self-indulgent life-style. Carson, a man with no political experience, no knowledge about how the world, much less the US Government, is supposed to function and who seemed utterly incompetent outside of his medical expertise, seemed like the logical transition in right wing Republican devolution, and the next biggest step to the collapse of a major political party.
Needless to say, it was a lot worse than I thought.
Not only will Donald Trump be the worst presidential candidate that any of us have ever seen in our lifetimes, he's pretty much the worst human being that we've witnessed as well. Rather than simply taking this cretin as he is, we have to consider what he represents. Quite a few times, I've referred to Trump as the "Monster From The Republican Id." Prior to actually running for office, he may have been an small-handed, egotistical, narcissistic, thin-skinned, serial marrying carnival barker with delusions of grandeur, but at least he was operating on his own reprehensible terms.
Clearly, this is no longer the case. Trump owes his success to his ability to mold his own self-image to the worst and most virulent aspects of a political party that's in utter chaos and decline. He is a reflection of his narrow-minded, racist, paranoid and hateful electorate. He's now the purest product of decades of right wing political distillation. A mirror on the most despicable aspects of what it means to be a conservative Republican today... So bad in fact, that many conservative Republicans themselves are unable to even look in that mirror. He is everything that they've ever asked for, but were far too obtuse to even know what they were getting.
They only have themselves to blame.
The question, however, is how successful he's going to be at getting elected. And in this, I have to say, we have some good news based on two continuing trends.
First, despite Trump's ability to bring more Republican voters to the primary polls than every before, if we're to believe the numbers, he's not actually expanding the party. The GOP electorate has been in steady decline for years and that trend is not letting up. Republicans knew that this was happening and their response was to destroy both the voting rights of millions of Americans and the ability for organized labor to raise funds, marginalize voting blocks through gerrymandering, plus make it easier for the American oligarchy to buy elections. The competing of demographics has been mixed, to say the least.
But, in spite of these efforts on the right appearing to be successful in the short run, it's not a long term recipe for success. The Republican voter base is steadily dying off, not to mention the fact that its collapse is turning off a sizable segment of traditional voters who are disillusioned with the way that Republicans have failed them.
The key thing to remember is that Republicans voters themselves are not most of the electorate. Most people would not vote for them more than they would not vote for Democrats. In terms of the popular vote, there have been more of us than there are more of them for quite some time. Unfortunately, we have an utterly undemocratic system of government which values money more than it values people.
Lastly, let's not devalue the impact of the GOP running the most reprehensible cretin ever to be nominated by a major political party. This is a big deal for us, no matter what some of us would feel about our own candidate. Trump out-negatives Clinton by a country mile. You don't see Democratic congress-critters running away from her public statements the way you see Republicans running away from Trump's, do you? In spite of our own messy nomination process, I have no doubt that we're going to back our own nominee, barring any unforeseen circumstances... (Winger concerns about Clinton being indicted over some scandal that they've contrived is inconsequential, in my observation. They're always coming up with baseless nonsense to fling at the Clintons).
All in all, we have this in the bag in November and all we have to do is urge the other side to self-destruct. It's going to happen anyway. After it does, my only concern what's going to happen to our politics once the center-right party no longer becomes viable. That, right there, is something that we all should be concerned about.
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