Yesterday the Trump Show made fun of how Jeb! looks in contact lenses and insisted that poor Marco Rubio is too sweaty to be president. "I thought he just came out of a swimming pool!," said the odds-on favorite to be the Republican Party's presidential nominee for 2016. In fact, since you mentioned odds...
There dream of the Republican establishment this year-- stopping Herr Trumpf and the hated Ted Cruz with a deadlocked, brokered convention-- looks pretty moribund at this point. It looks like Trumpf is on the way to be able to march into Cleveland with all the delegates he needs for a first-ballot nomination. And the Establishment seems resigned to convincing themselves that the world is wonderful because at least they won't have to deal with Cruz. But deep in their hearts I bet they're longing for another era, when party bosses picked presidential candidates, not primaries and caucuses.
Hillary sees the billionaire class as her benefactors and partners; Bernie has a different perspectiveOne of the problems with the professional political parties based inside the Beltway is that they instinctively discourage primaries. Party bosses hate them because they cost money and tend to cater to the base, making it more difficult to get muddled careerist hacks without vision into office.
Last night saw primary results come in for Florida, Vermont and Arizona and for primary-runoffs in Oklahoma. The only thing that interests me in Republican results is if the right-wing punters pick an extremist or criminal type who will be easier for a Democrat to beat. Otherwise, their races don't interest me. Let's look at Florida first: no surprises.
I knew it was coming but I'll still amazed it came. The teabaggers couldn't even save one of their incumbents, Kerry Bentivolio in the suburbs west and northwest of Detroit in Oakland and Wayne counties. Boehner's Chamber of Commerce wing of the party recognized he was weak and they moved in for the kill. But what was so startling was that the Republicans of the district picked this monstrosity to replace him. Watch that video up top made by some Bentivolio supporters. This guy Dave Trott's going to be the worst piece of crap in the whole Congress.
I knew it was coming but I'll still amazed it came. The teabaggers couldn't even save one of their incumbents, Kerry Bentivolio in the suburbs west and northwest of Detroit in Oakland and Wayne counties. Boehner's Chamber of Commerce wing of the party recognized he was weak and they moved in for the kill. But what was so startling was that the Republicans of the district picked this monstrosity to replace him. Watch that video up top made by some Bentivolio supporters. This guy Dave Trott's going to be the worst piece of crap in the whole Congress.
I've never missed an election in my life-- even while living in difficult to vote places like the mountains of Afghanistan-- and I've never voted for a Republican, although before I was old enough to vote, I was a volunteer for John Lindsay, a liberal Republican-- they had them back then-- running against the conservative machine hack Abe Beame. Lindsay responded to the GOP's inexorable drift rightward by switching to the Democratic Party while he was mayor.
There are quite a few of them but the ones progressives have a stake in, in chronological order, are Hawaii (August 9), Wisconsin (August 12), and then a late super-Tuesday on August 26 for Arizona, Florida and Oklahoma. That same day has primaries in Alaska, Missouri, Oregon and Vermont with interesting races but no races that pit a progressive against a shill from the Republican wing of the Democratic Party.Up top is the brand new video from one of the most grassroots campaigns anywhere, the Tom Guild campaign for the open Oklahoma City congressional seat.
Hawaii's primary is August 9, a week from Saturday. Saturday? Sure, that's how to encourage voter participation in a democracy-- have the elections when people aren't working. Conservatives are generally terrified at the prospect of more people voting-- especially working class people-- so they tend to block legislation like Hawaii's. Hawaii is a pretty progressive state, first to mass a $10.10 minimum wage, first to start the process of marriage equality. The Republican Party is pretty moribund there and the Democratic Party has been in charge since 1962.
Last primary of the cycle pits progressive Angel Taveras against Gina Raimondo from the Republican wing of the Democratic Party in Rhode Island-- September 9Tuesday will see primaries in Maine, Nevada, North Dakota, South Carolina and Virginia but only two states have races that pit progressives against conservatives, Virginia and South Carolina.
