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The circus is in town

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Old and young, everybody loves the pageantry of the circus –although in this year’s presidential race we are witnessing a circus whose performers are sub-par.

By the time of the publication of this editorial, votes for the presidential primary in Rhode Island will have already been cast. Of course, supporting delegates to a political party’s nominating convention may, in this turbulent year, not have the same staying power as in election years past. Especially on the Republican side, where it is likely that businessman Donald Trump will fall a bit short of garnering the 1,237 delegates needed to capture the GOP nod. Thus, it is possible that on a second or third convention ballot someone other than the bombastic New Yorker could become the nominee.

To secure Rhode Island’s favor, former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton (D), her rival Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders (D), the earnest but minimally successful Ohio Gov. John Kasich (R), and the popular clown Trump have come to the Ocean State to make their case of viability to be the chief executive. Missing from the candidate circus in Little Rhody was the severe far-right tea party devotee, Canadian Ted Cruz (also Republican senator from Texas).

Although the overall impact of our state’s number of contributable delegates in either party’s convention is nominal, to win a majority in a Northeast state is significant in appearance when one evaluates how much of a chance a candidate may have to continue in the race for the nomination.

So, the political gladiators Clinton, Kasich, Sanders, and Trump came to the Ocean State and obsequious local supplicants otherwise known as our elected officials gathered in sycophantic servility to express their awe.

Clinton verbally foreshadowed her schematic for the general election campaign at Central Falls High School this past Saturday. She seems to be reaching past the nominating contest and cultivating her attack plans on whomever will be the Republican nominee. Slights against Sanders were noticeably less than in prior speeches while attacks against Trump and Cruz were numerous, taunting, and acerbic. Of course, in regular Clinton style, the former secretary of state played fast and loose with the truth.

Expectedly, Hillary also displayed an uncharacteristic ease in the company of Rhode Islanders that has not been evident elsewhere on the stump.

After a succession of glorifying introductions by Sen. Jack Reed, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, Gov. Gina Raimondo, and Central Falls Mayor James Diossa, Clinton complimented our state and expressed her level of comfort. “I love this little state” and “I have so many friends here” were her oh-so-pleasant initial utterances. And why wouldn’t she feel at home here? In the 2008 presidential primary, Hillary won over President Obama 58 percent to 40 percent. And Rhode Islanders have practically deified her husband Bill Clinton.

As opposed to previous speeches where she centered her focus on ripping down Sanders’ various policies and promises, in Central Falls she mostly hammered him on his proposed college reform. “Now, I have a difference with my esteemed opponent, who wants free college for everybody.” “I have to tell you, I don’t want free college for people who can pay for it – like Donald Trump. I think we have to focus on where the need is.”

However, Clinton’s statement here is disingenuous. Sanders had said time and time again that he wants to make public college tuition free. Upper class people usually send their children to private colleges, therefore they would be excluded from Bernie’s plans. Her twist of this proposed policy is rhetorical slight of hand.

She also implied that the Vermont senator was over-reaching in his political promises by saying, “I am not making promises I can’t keep.” There are not many politicians who have straddled the fences on issues better than Hillary.

On the economy, she bragged about her husband’s years in office. “The economy does better when you have a Democrat in the White House. I kind of like what happened in the 1990s. We had 23 million new jobs and incomes went up for everybody not just people at the top, but middle-class families, working families, poor people.” Therein lay the main blueprint for the general election campaign. Remember when another Clinton occupied the White House, times were good!

In order to demonstrate the connection between Republican presidencies and downtrodden economies, Clinton made the following assertions. “I’ll tell you what happened – a Republican presidency happened.” “I was in the Senate arguing against, voting against, the return of trickle-down economics.” She furthered her self promotion with: “Look what happened: they cut taxes on the wealthy, they took their eyes off the financial markets and mortgage markets, and we ended up in the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.” This statement is perhaps the most incredulous one thus far because it was her husband who signed into law the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, which dissolved the dividing wall between financial purposes. Hence, Bill Clinton’s action was the checkered flag to the sub-prime mortgage crisis, the dubious asset class crisis, and most of the abuses in commercial banking and the securities markets, and the eventual Great Recession.

The more Hillary spoke, the more noxious and accusatory she became. In regard to Trump and Cruz she said, “What they say about the world is not only offensive, it’s dangerous.” “You know loose cannons tend to misfire, and what we have with him is the loosest of all cannons.”

Furthermore in her demonization of the Republicans, she criticized Cruz for his call for extra vigilance in the monitoring of Muslim communities in the United States. She also lambasted Donald Trump for his wish of a temporary ban on all incoming Muslims into America.

But the rhetorical pugilism did not stop there. She stated that Trump has been insincere in reference to his plan toward the restoration of American jobs.

Pandering to unions in our bluer-than-blue, union-dominant state, she said: “We cannot revive the American middle-class unless we do revive the American labor movement, because you are trying to get the kind of fair wages and benefits that workers deserve if they don’t have power at the negotiating table.” In Rhode Island, that statement is ridiculous. We have endured union centered government since the Bloodless Revolution of the 1930s. More appropriately, it is municipal leaders who have lost the taxpayer’s shirts in negotiations here at home.

She continued with her well-spun fiction. “I intend to use the bully pulpit of the White House and the Department of Labor to enforce the labor laws already on the books.” In other words, do not even think of encouraging any domestic manufacturing because we are going to resurrect the same rampant unionism that destroyed our manufacturing sector in the first place.

Similarly, in regard to Trump and Cruz’s comments on restoring the economy she stated: “And now Republicans are coming back with the same snake oil that is what Trump and Cruz are peddling.”

While Hillary was spewing her caustic nonsense in Central Falls, the best candidate still competing for the nomination was addressing 500 to 600 people at Bryant University in a Town Hall Q-and-A. In the face of increasingly daunting odds, Kasich was upbeat. He described himself as still “energized” about the campaign. He said he was buoyed by the fact that he captured Manhattan in the New York primary. Since Manhattan is more educated and cosmopolitan than all other regions of the Empire State, Kasich believes that this performance might be a microcosm for future primaries. He feels his chances are viable. “It is interesting because it is so volatile. You’re going to the convention and nobody’s going to have enough delegates. And they’re going to have to look at two things – one, who can win in the fall, and two, who can be president of the United States?”

Kasich may be overly optimistic. His current delegate count upon the date of this writing is 148 delegates, while Cruz has 559 delegates, and Trump has 845 delegates.

Ominously, a brokered convention in which the second, third, or perhaps fourth ballot may determine the nominee will result in an uproar in the party and the nation. However, the alternative of a Trump nomination will inevitably result in the loss of many down-ticket races, a landslide loss for the presidency for the GOP in November, and at least four years of perhaps the worst prevaricating politician in United States history occupying the Oval Office.

Sanders, at Roger Williams Park on Sunday, spent the bulk of his time defending against Hillary’s Saturday indictment of his college tuition plan. Sanders spouted his usual themes with less gusto than he has previously. With 10 states to go, Hillary’s control of the superdelegates and her growing majority in regular delegates spurs the likelihood that Bernie’s chance at the nomination is waning. Sanders was conspicuously less enthusiastic in his speech and less varied in his emotional cadence.

Unquestionably, lions, tigers, bears, elephants, and three rings of entertainment have always endeared the circus to most people. However, the political circus of this primary election season has been quite less fulfilling. Now that the circus has come to us, we have witnessed firsthand how lackluster these three rings of rhetoric have really been. In a country of approximately 310 million people, I can’t stop wondering, are these the best we could find to perform at the Big Top in Washington, D.C.?

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