Wednesday, November 11, 2015
I may be missing something
about the contest among the Republican candidates for the Presidential nomination, and about the implausible (to me, at least) popularity of Mr. Trump and Dr. Carson. I remember the campaign and the election of 1952 when General Dwight Eisenhower prevailed mightily over Governor Adlai Stevenson. I was a Stevenson fan and thought he was too good a person to be our President. We didn't deserve Mr. Stevenson. As it turned out, I was right. We didn't deserve him and we didn't get him.
I feel about Bernie Sanders about the same way I felt about Adlai Stevenson. I couldn't understand then why anybody would prefer General Eisenhower as President. I can't understand now why anyone would give even a second's thought about either Donald Trump or Ben Carson in comparison to Bernie Sanders or Hillary Clinton.
What I missed in 1952 was the Korean War. Eisenhower said he would personally go to Korea to work out a peace deal with the two Korean factions. Stevenson didn't say squat about Korea. I didn't care about Korea. I had already been drafted and rejected as physically unfit to serve in the army.
What is it that the people are thinking about today that I am ignoring? Not Syria, certainly. No candidate, Democrat or Republican, has said a word about Syria. It doesn't seem to be an issue in any of the debates. Any other war? No. The Republicans are talking about cutting taxes, especially on people with incomes greater than million dollars a year. With any of their schemes, people with incomes under a million would pay more. They'd have to, unless the government stopped providing expensive services, such as the Military. I don't think the Republicans propose decreasing the military budget.
Mr. Trump has achieved popularity among old white men by his proposal to round up six million or so brown Spanish-speaking people without citizenship identification and carting them to the border and expelling them. Years ago I wrote in a blog that this action would be impossible to carry out fairly because Americans don't carry passports for routine daily identification.
Then, what is it I am missing? Why is Donald Trump's popularity in the same league with that of Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders? Write to me. Open my eyes.
I feel about Bernie Sanders about the same way I felt about Adlai Stevenson. I couldn't understand then why anybody would prefer General Eisenhower as President. I can't understand now why anyone would give even a second's thought about either Donald Trump or Ben Carson in comparison to Bernie Sanders or Hillary Clinton.
What I missed in 1952 was the Korean War. Eisenhower said he would personally go to Korea to work out a peace deal with the two Korean factions. Stevenson didn't say squat about Korea. I didn't care about Korea. I had already been drafted and rejected as physically unfit to serve in the army.
What is it that the people are thinking about today that I am ignoring? Not Syria, certainly. No candidate, Democrat or Republican, has said a word about Syria. It doesn't seem to be an issue in any of the debates. Any other war? No. The Republicans are talking about cutting taxes, especially on people with incomes greater than million dollars a year. With any of their schemes, people with incomes under a million would pay more. They'd have to, unless the government stopped providing expensive services, such as the Military. I don't think the Republicans propose decreasing the military budget.
Mr. Trump has achieved popularity among old white men by his proposal to round up six million or so brown Spanish-speaking people without citizenship identification and carting them to the border and expelling them. Years ago I wrote in a blog that this action would be impossible to carry out fairly because Americans don't carry passports for routine daily identification.
Then, what is it I am missing? Why is Donald Trump's popularity in the same league with that of Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders? Write to me. Open my eyes.
