Here’s the big issue facing Democrats at their national convention in Philadelphia this week:
....
Right, there isn’t one.
Hillary Clinton will finally be crowned the party’s presidential nominee, having been snowplowed aside eight years ago by the rookie Illinois senator who thought Canada had a president.
Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia will be nominated as her vice presidential partner. Not exactly Mr. Excitement, the affable, 58-year-old ex-governor could help defrost Clinton’s chilly, privileged persona.
Delegates will also approve what is likely the most liberal platform in history, not that anyone pays attention to those things, except on presidential debate nights.
No fights, no refusals to endorse, no unpredictable nominee; that makes for pretty boring TV, which is just fine with the Clinton crowd this time.
Playing it safe is Clinton’s 2016 campaign plan, because she’s not liked and is not trusted only a little bit less than her loud GOP opponent is not liked and not trusted. So, on Nov. 8, Americans basically will choose the least disliked candidate.
That pain-in-the-PAC Bernie Sanders has already endorsed Clinton. So he can be discarded. Ah, but wait.
How will Bernie’s devoted followers, the ones coming to Philadelphia this week by the thousands, receive the new WikiLeaks documents hacked from the Democratic National Committee? The ones that prove the old Vermont socialist was dead-on right in his wild accusations this spring: DNC staff were indeed quietly conspiring against him all along, just as he charged.
This is the Clintons, after all. Everything is rigged in their favor: the State Department Benghazi report, the unelected super-delegates, the nomination, the FBI email and national security probe that found so much damning evidence but no indictment.
Wait, wasn’t it old fogy establishment Republicans who were supposed to be rigging their primaries against Donald Trump? That worked out well.
All last week in Cleveland, a battalion of the billionaire’s friends and children praised him to the highest penthouse floor. Trump accepted the GOP nomination with a very long speech chronicling the stagnant incomes, the racial divisions, the crumbling military, the amateur foreign policy mistakes, the wars, the crime, the cronyism, those speaking fees, the illegal immigration and more American afflictions these past eight years.
That struck flyover country as awful and just about the right description. And it struck the country’s most prosperous counties living off government in and around the Beltway as way too dark and gloomy. It’s good to be living there as economic royalty. There’s no problem that some more government can’t solve.
Guess who’s out of touch?
Trump is way under-financed and his loud, undisciplined mouth plays right into the hands of Democrats and their many media friends. But if enough people in a few key states buy his portrait of gloom, they could see the loudmouth outsider as the best vehicle to upset a lot of Washington tables and bureaucrats.
Americans have given the same party three consecutive White House terms only once since World War II: two Reagan and one Bush I terms.
Clinton is trying to have it both ways: We have so many things to fix in this flawed, biased land, and President Barack Obama has done such a marvelous job that much more needs doing.
The country has many more Democrats than Republicans. With that head start and Clinton sidling to the left to attract Sanders supporters, she hopes that her experience as first lady, senator and secretary of state will convince voters they want a third Obama term. And remember, she flew a million miles on a government plane.
Americans have given the same party three consecutive White House terms only once since World War II: two Reagan and one Bush I terms.
Clinton and her supporters have already invested $60 million in unanswered attack ads against Trump, much as Obama weakened Mitt Romney in the 2012 summer.
But world events can’t be controlled or predicted. Might another major terrorist event or an ongoing series of lethal lone-wolf attacks like Munich, Dallas, Nice and Orlando tip the balance in the 15 weeks before Election Day?
They could convince a lot of people that the world really is spinning out of control, as Trump described. And that their fear of terrorism and more ineffective government responses outweighs any concern over a Republican candidate who is unpredictable but talks tough and decisively.
The impact of that scenario on Nov. 8 would be, well, unpredictable.
Malcolm is an author and veteran national and foreign correspondent covering politics since the 1960s. Follow him @AHMalcolm.