Jan 2^nd

So now we have Bill Clinton beginning to campaign in support of his wife, Hillary Clinton. Donald Trump says that he couldn’t be happier; that Hillary is making a big mistake to play “the woman card.” I doubt that it matters. Trump’s comments about women would be typical of a ten year old giggling outside a women’s rest room. He apparently believes that Bill Clinton’s notorious womanizing will compensate for his own misogyny. It won’t! In fact Bill Clinton’s womanizing didn’t keep him from being elected Governor of Arkansas twice and President of the United States twice. Then we have the important added fact that Trump’s opponent is Hillary Clinton, not Bill Clinton, so how can Bill Clinton’s record with women compensate for Trump’s behavior?

There is a consensus that the non-politician is “in” this year.  That is wrong; examples follow. Of course Donald Trump has never been elected to public office but his appeal has little to do with that; it has to do with his bombast and, particularly, with his appearance of invulnerability. He has gloried in the fact that nothing he says reduces his appeal and that fact alone operates to increase his appeal. Being an “outsider” has nothing to do with that.

Consider Carly Fiorina: This woman, an outsider, literally vibrates with anger at Hillary Clinton as well as in defense of her wretched record at Hewlett Packard. There she was impolitic enough to joust with the grandson of the company’s founder. That indiscretion found her looking for other work. Then she decided to contest Barbara Boxer’s Senate seat in California which resulted in a thorough defeat and a reputation for stiffing the people who ran her campaign. A current spokesperson for her Presidential campaign claims that the staffers from her Senate campaign against Boxer did not deserve to be paid because Fiorina lost that election. Ms. Fiorina is obviously a Washington outsider in spite of her best efforts to be an insider. Even so she polls in the low single digits.

Dr. Ben Carson is another contender who has never held political office although to reach his current level of professional eminence it surely requires political skill as well as technical skill. Dr. Carson has had difficulty just recently because several of his very senior staff have resigned. They have maintained that while the Doctor is very bright, his closest advisor, Armstrong Williams, is really in control of his campaign. Mr. Williams, primarily known as a talk show personality, is probably not the best person to advise a foreign policy naïf like Dr. Carson on the intricacies of the Shia-Sunni Muslim split and what it means for US policy. The result is that Dr. Carson has, as the expression puts it, taken a header in the polls. Summing up, only one of the non-politicians now running survives as a realistic current contender.

Senator Cruz is a blend; he is a Senator, after all, so that makes him an insider, but this is his first term in the Senate and he has already alienated most of the other 99 Senators. He is one of the very few Republicans not to have something unpleasant to say about Donald Trump. The consensus is that Cruz is angling for many of the Trump fans once Trump flames out. As the primaries get closer and closer and Trump’s poll numbers continue to move up, when will Cruz decide that this strategy isn’t working and what will he do about it? Stay tuned; we’ll know in about a month.