Op ed: Sen. Bernie Sanders mastery of caucus races is raising hopes among his followers that he can someone defeat Hillary Clinton. The fact that he has stumbled in primaries and trails Clinton badly in raw votes, is ignored. “Including caucus results, Clinton leads Sanders by almost 2.4 million raw votes, 9.4 million to just more than 7 million,” according to the Green Papers. Who understands caucuses better than Sanders? The website 538 reports less than 4 percent of voters in states with caucuses turned out. He realizes, that as in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, a caucus race has no end because it has no beginning. Alice tries several methods to get her animal friends after they went through a storm in rough water. This causes “the Dodo to suggest a Caucus race. The Dodo marks out a course, sets everyone in place, and yells ‘go.’ The animals run around haphazardly until the Dodo declares half an hour later that the race is over. The Dodo says that all of them have won the Caucus race and elects Alice to confer prizes. Alice passes mints to all the animals, leaving herself without a prize. Finding a thimble, she hands it to the Dodo, who in turn presents it back to her as her prize. Alice solemnly accepts the thimble but cannot help feeling that the gesture is absurd.” Sanders idea is just as absurd. Somehow he can grab a hold of “super delegates” and defeat Clinton despite her lead in the popular vote; 538 finds it unlikely that Sanders can catch up let alone overtake Clinton in votes. Perhaps Sanders can emulate George W. Bush’s victory over Al Gore in 2000. The former vice president got half a million votes more than Bush. Bush had more votes in the Electoral College. That took a Supreme Court intervention to declare a winner. With the court equally divided among conservatives and liberals that solution might not work this time.
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Op-ed: Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump ignited violent opposition that could be compared to numerous uprisings in the past, including the Prague and April springs. But Trump doesn’t have a strong army to send in to shut down opposition. There are hundreds of millions of guns in the country and millions suffering from mental illness, both partly a result of the Republican Party’s support for the NRA. Also, the social media now available for organizing disruptions are vastly superior to what brought down several Arab governments. Of course people who try to break up Trump rallies are organizing, and it is very easy to do it these days. They can study other uprisings and learn techniques. Attack one rally at the start; attack the next one near the end. Stay away from one. Or just shout outside. Don’t give away your plans. Mislead. Fly false flags. Trump himself is at threat of an attack. There has already been on case when a man nearly got next to him. He was easily within distance of shooting Trump except he did not have a gun, and it is not clear he wanted to hurt the candidate. There also are millions of soldiers trained as marksmen. Dare Trump go to a theater? Is Bernie Sanders inciting his people? It doesn’t matter. They do not need to be pushed. They have been dumping on Hillary Clinton since the campaign began. Just as Trump can say he cannot stop his supporters from attacking his opponents, Sanders can say he can’t stop people from venting their frustration. This election is becoming increasingly like the 1968 race. The assassination of Robert Kennedy led to the election of Richard Nixon and the quagmire of the Vietnam War. People dissatisfied with Democratic nominee Hubert Humphrey stayed home. They did not want the lesser of two evils. Some say Trump is hoping for a repeat of the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. |
Robert Weller
2016 US election news and other news from the USA
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Worked in journalism, including on the Internet, for more than 40 years. Started as a news editor at the Colorado Daily at the University of Colorado, joined a small Montana newspaper, the Helena Independent-Record, and then United Press International. Archives
November 2016
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