Why Is Hillary Clinton Struggling to Lead in the Polls?

The great surprise of this election cycle is the trouble that Hillary Clinton has had in clinching the nomination. I realize that the primaries are still far away but I assumed that by now she would dominate the polls and have an easy ride to Iowa and New Hampshire ahead of her.

As if the continued neck-and-neck business with Bernie Sanders was not enough to mystify me, Joe Biden is inexplicably pondering entry into the race and being received favorably by many Democrats. At least with the republicans, I understand why their nomination process is a mess, The Dems have completely mystified me this year. I thought this was a done deal.

How Can Bernie Sanders Have Any Appeal Today?

Bernie Sanders is running for the Democratic nomination but he is technically an independent. In fact, he describes himself as a socialist but is not apparently a member of the Socialist Party USA (which is a sad little affair with something like one or two thousand members).

Now, the last unabashed socialist to run for president several decades ago got a few thousand total popular votes nationwide. Simply put, it has always been impossible for open socialists to win elections in this country. Even the most liberal locales have been allergic to this form of left-wing politics. Certainly, democrats have been justifiably accused of adhering to specific socialist ideas but their politics have always been to the right of major European socialist parties. In fact, liberal democrats in America are often more right wing than some conservative parties in Europe but that is a topic for another time.

So how has Sanders stayed competitive this time around? He is polling only around 20-30 percent support in head-to-head polls against the other democrats but that is far more than any of the others running against Hillary Clinton. Names like Webb and O'Malley get anywhere from 0% to 2% in such polls. I suspect he gets support for a few reasons:

• He is from Vermont and is popular with New Englanders. His higher numbers in New Hampshire (there he nearly equals Clinton with 40% of the vote) are probably due to this factor and they help to give him credibility in other polled locales. 
• People are really fed up with the way that global capitalism has destroyed their hopes. In a related article on my finance blog, I discussed how the economics of this country have been betraying the working class for decades. Maybe they are ready for extreme solutions to their extreme problems. I tend to think that Donald Trump is getting a lot of support on the other end of the political spectrum for the same reasons.
• Perhaps people just don't like Hillary Clinton enough to dismiss her competition so quickly.

Is Hillary Her Own Worst Enemy?

Maybe the explanation is much more simple than I let on. When I saw how even the mention of a run by Joe Biden was enough to upset Clinton's already rocking boat, I was surprised at how easily disturbed the race was on the Democratic side, Perhaps democrats are more fed up with Clinton than it appears.

It could be that the email scandal and Benghazi do resonate with liberal voters. Or maybe people are just sick of the Clintons and want to move on. Of course, it could also be a more prosaic answer. People might just not be impressed with the content of her political proposals. Wouldn't that be pleasantly traditional?

Donald Trump: Reactionary, Liberal or Loose Cannon?

Whenever Trump flirted with the idea of running for president in the past, I was always appalled by the idea. The last thing we needed, I thought, was a rich, political outsider coming in to mess everything up.

How strange, then, that today I see him as the most promising candidate in the field. Maybe that is because there is nothing that I would like more than to see everything in Washington overturned. But I am starting to let my anarchist leanings show and this post is about Trump, not me.

I think that Trump fascinates the public not only with his candor but also with his unusual set of stances on a variety of issues. He at once appears both reactionary and radical to a public brainwashed over the last few decades to only see political issues in terms of conservative republican vs liberal democrat.

Trump the Liberal 

Trump confuses modern voters because he glibly promotes opinions and viewpoints which, as a set, Americans have been taught to see as irreconcilable. Here are some of the "traditionally" liberal political stances to which Trump allegedly adheres:

• He is, essentially, pro-choice. He is not a big fan of it but he does not breathe fire on the issue. He has come out and called himself pro-life in some remarks but he is not really that strong on the issue. In fact. I think that his is a pretty common view among republicans but, in order to win their socially conservative base, they must take a strong pro-life stance in public. 
• He is, at least, content with the present progressive tax system applied by the IRS. I am sure that, like most people, he would love for the IRS to be unnecessary but, as long as there is income tax he thinks that it makes sense to take more from the rich. This is anathema to fiscal conservatives.
• Apparently Trump does not want to make cuts to Social Security or Medicare.
• He has expressed open support for the idea of a single-payer health care system.
• Trump promotes the Second Amendment but has stated acceptance of things such as background checks and even bans on certain types of weapons. For Second Amendment republicans, this type of thing is a shibboleth to aid in culling the weak from the electoral herd. 
• Trump has a pretty relaxed stance on gays. I would guess that he is essentially a live-and-let live kind of guy. I have not heard , though, how he stands on issues such as the well-known wedding-cake business which got sued out of existence just because it refused to make a gay-themed wedding cake.

More than Trump's political stances, his actions mark him out as a liberal. He doesn't mind hanging out with Bill Clinton, for example. I have to think, though, that most men wouldn't mind hanging out with Bill Clinton. It's pretty obvious that guy would be fun at parties.

I think that Donald's wives are actually getting hotter as he gets older.

Most egregious among his sins, though, are Trump's sexual relationships. Not only has he been married three times but his affairs and his trophy wives could certainly be considered scandalous among conservatives. But, then again, old school feminist liberals would also be appalled by these shenanigans.

Trump Conservative

Simultaneously, Trump loudly proclaims allegiance to many traditionally conservative ideas. In fact, his approach in some cases is so conservative that he makes conservatives blush. Here are a few of his more well-known conservative political themes:

• IMMIGRATION. The all-caps presentation was intentional. On this issue, Trump makes Pat Buchanan look reticent when he talks about immigration. He seems quite serious about building a wall from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific Ocean while deporting somewhere on the order of 10 or 20 million people.
• ISIS - Trump apparently wants to reinvade Iraq to handle this problem. That is a much bolder stance than any republican has publicly taken, though it may be that many of them incline toward that solution.
• Climate - Trump has publicly stated that the climate change issue is built on a hoax.
• Drugs - Trump's last known stance on the issue is in favor of legalization and taxation.
• Capital Punishment - Trump sees no problem with sending violent monster's to the chair or to the lethal injection gurney, anyway.

Trump Loose Cannon

A number of people believe that Trump is simply a man with no filter. He says what he is thinking at the moment and is not thinking about which source of financial support an errant remark may cost him.

For his detractors, that is a weakness. The 25% to 30% of republican voters who support him, though, seem enamored of his penchant for calling a spade a spade. Either they are showing a willingness to overlook the other issues on which he is less conservative due to this appealing trait or they themselves have never been that devoted to those issues.

What I like about Trump is the possibility that he presents for breaking down the two-party system. I am less interested in his views than I am in the way that many supporters openly admit that he offends them on one or more points but they forgive him for one reason or another. Some excuse his faults because he so fervently supports their favorite issue, which is often immigration. Others are just angry and simply want somebody to kick some ass in Washington.

Anyone my age or older, though, knows that this opportunity has presented itself before. Ross Perot tried something similar in 1992 and there are other examples in American history before him. Some people do not take him seriously simply because those prior efforts failed.

I think though, that hope springs eternal and that the Internet age may make possible a paradigm shift in American politics. Perot made his venture when his access to the public was almost entirely controlled by three television networks. No one can stop an interested public from hearing what Trump has to say between now and election day 2016.

Firefox rocks!

I just installed Firefox. I am used to waiting five or six minutes for each page to load. Firefox is like internet explorer on amphetamines! I love it!