Looking to 2016 - future candidates for Presidents of the United States

Who will be sitting in this seat in the Oval Office in 2016

Predicting the future is hard. And yet, political anoraks absolutely love it. So while I’m not even 100% sure what I’m doing next Friday, I can’t help but think about how the political terrain will look four years from now.

It might seem strange to be ruminating on that not long after the seats in the convention halls in Tampa and Charlotte flipped back into the upright position, but really there’s no better time. Nobody would have given Barack Obama a snowball’s chance in Tucson of winning in 2008 had he not brought the house down in 2004. Bill Clinton nearly derailed his chances of election in 1992 after a off-par performance in 1988. Conventions matter, not just as a way to big up the candidate, but for the people doing the bigging up, it acts as an audition.

And so in 2016, after which will almost certainly be eight years of a Democratic White House, who will be the dramatis personae? On the Republican side, a drastic change will have to be made. To stand any chance in 2016 they’ll need to steer their rudderless boat back towards Eisenhower, and their current leadership is utterly devoid of anyone capable enough (or magnanimous enough)to take up that challenge, let alone the White House.  John Huntsman might be the man to do it, but he’s persona non grata in the party at the minute, and that’s kinda the problem.

So while it’s likely some fresh newcomer will take up the reins and start rebuilding the GOP for 2016, among the people we know Marco Rubio and Chris Christie look to be the frontrunners so far, with possibly Bob McDonnell of Virginia in the mix too.  Based on the convention speech test Rubio is the best bet of those three, and in spite of his Tea Party credentials seems the most able to reconnect with the public and widening the base of a Republican party too reliant on angry white guys. Not my words, Senator Lindsay Graham’s.

Beyond those early frontrunners interesting choices outside the angry white guy motif would be Ohio moderate Rob Portman, New Hampshire Senator Kelly Ayotte, New Mexico Governor Susana Martinez or even Jeb Bush, who converted to Catholicism and carried a substantial Latino vote when he was Governor of Florida. Or failing that his son, George P Bush, might be worth an outside shot later down the line.

On the Democratic side, the depth chart looks a lot more promising, but that has its own dangers. Joe Biden will be in his seventies by the next election, but after a resonant and genuine speech at the DNC this year all thing staying the same you would disregard him at your peril. Similarly, Hillary Clinton’s profile is as strong as it ever was, and her husband’s star turn on Wednesday night will have done her no harm at all. 2008 may have been her last and best chance at sitting in the Oval Office, but if she thinks she has half a chance, she’ll definitely be in the mix.

Elsewhere Elizabeth Warren’s star continues to rise and if she becomes a Senator at the end of this year she’ll no doubt be on the inside track for 2016 if she wants it. From the ever-plentiful pool of capable Governors, New York’s Andrew Cuomo  is a strong bet and Deval Patrick of Massachusetts could make a decent challenge if his convention speech is anything to go by.  But my personal tip to watch is Maryland’s Martin O’Malley: two term Governor, former Mayor of Baltimore, former Dropkick Murphys-style bandleader and, so the story goes, slight inspiration for Mayor Carcetti in The Wire. He’s bright, he’s ambitious, and he’s definitely one to watch.

But 2016 is miles away, and plenty of time for someone else to surge through. Or, more likely, for one of the aforementioned front runners to slip up.

Healthcare, gay marriage and the right side of history - dealing with our modern pressing social issues

Sometimes, it seems that imagination is a slave of modernity. You can look around you and see the swirl of technological gadgets that assist your living and generally consider the relative ease with which you live and think to yourself: how can we possibly top this? Are there any quantum leaps left? What possible thing could our kids complain in a “back in our day” manner to our grandkids?

Of course, there are plenty. Not just in the technological sphere but in the social, and in fact the intersection between those two will be the ethical battlefield for several generations to come. But in the meantime, we have plenty of pressing social issues to deal with. The first of which is healthcare.

In no sphere of influence is American exceptionalism found more pathetically lacking than with health provision. The notion that a developed country, much less the ostensible greatest in the world, would have such primitive ideals in dealing with their sick and vulnerable is nothing short of macabre. And the fact that so many people kick up such an hysterical fuss at advancing American healthcare so much a mere step in the direction of civilization is just disturbing.

Most of the opposition seems to stem from a fundamental misunderstanding of even the most basic tenets of political theory. Some seem to think that universal health care run, in any form, by the government entitles Vladimir Lenin to emerge from his mausoleum and give you a kick up the arse whenever he feels like it. But they’re not even the worst of it.

The worst are the ones who seem to take “Give me liberty or give me death” a bit too seriously, as if health insurance and freedom are mutually exclusive. More times than I care to admit I’ve heard Americans say “If people can be compelled to buy health insurance, they could be compelled to do anything!” What a terrifying prospect. Imagine a world where a government also compel you to insure your car, force you to apply for a license to drive it and limit the speed at which you travelled in it for fear of sharp punishment? Chilling.

The other hot button issue of the day is of course gay marriage, and curiously a lot of the same people bloviating about liberty when it comes to health care mandates get suddenly prescriptive when it comes to freedom to tie the knot. Thankfully the case for marriage equality is gathering steam, legislative heft and generally large public support, and in the last few weeks alone the US President, UK Prime Minister and Irish Tanaiste and Justice Minister have all stated their support for gay marriage. And yet, the state of North Carolina are digging their tar heels in with a proposed gay marriage ban, the religious right continue their absurd fixation on rounding up/curing gay people, in Africa homosexuality is treated as a real and present bogeyman, and in the Ukraine a new law proposes to clamp down on gay “propaganda”, making discussion of gay rights, talking about homosexuals in general or stating a fondness for Culture Club illegal. In this day and age, it’s just wrong. Hell, it’s wrong for any day and any age.

Thankfully, progress is inexorable, and the line in the sand is being drawn. There will come a time, not all that far away from now, where the notion that a man and another man couldn’t get married, or a first responder to a crisis would have to wait over a decade for rudimentary health coverage, will be preposterous. As preposterous to us as not allowing a black woman to sit anywhere she wants in a diner. Fifty years ago a great many of people would have put up a strenuous fight to stop that black woman sitting there, but those people have been proved to be dogmatically small-minded and stupid. So too will anti-gay bigots and anti-healthcare ideologues. History will prove it. 

Time for a new Munro Doctrine for the press: don't be a git like Obama's Irish heckler

A lot has been made in recent days about...actually, I won’t give his name, because since he’s clearly an attention seeking goon, I won’t give him any. But, the actions of that Daily Caller correspondent on the White House lawn are just the latest symptoms in a corrosion of respect that is currently riddling the American political process.

It’s not something I say lightly, but at the moment it seems the level of debate in United States is as unhealthy as it has ever been. As usual the main culprits are the far right, getting more and more established as mainstream as days go by.  Since Barack Obama took office a shrill, well-organised rump of extremists have hysterically come at him with sticks on a daily basis in a way far above and beyond what other Presidents have had to endure in recent times.

Politicians at the highest level should of course have a thick skin, but what the right have flung at the President in his first term, from calling him a commie/Nazi to insisting he wasn’t born in the country to making thinly veiled jibes at his ethnicity, is nothing short of malevolent bullying. And the right wing media hyenas are judge, jury and executioner in their witch hunt.

While simultaneously crowing about the need to bring America back to a time where authority was respected, people were decent and God was feared, the vanguard of conservative vitriol are deeply unedifying, toxic and unchristian. And while they do all this, they also try and pretend as if they have the moral high ground.

This couldn’t have been more evident than when Tucker Carlson, a man previously most famous for wearing a bowtie and getting his ass handed to him by Jon Stewart on a show that was promptly cancelled, attempted to justify his reporter’s action by claiming he was trying to his job, high-handedly suggesting that his guy is some kind of Dirty Harry-style maverick reporter, the only one who has the guts to stand up to the fancypants, emigrant loving elite. Either Carlson is deluded, cynical beyond all belief or an idiot, and I’m not sure which is worse or more dangerous.

To their credit, a great deal of Fox correspondents decried the reporter’s conduct as disrespectful and impertinent, but by the same token they also have to take responsibility for the fact that people like Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly and Michelle Malkin and Megan Kelly have driven the standard of debate in the US so low into the ground that cheap hacks like we saw last week end up going deeper still to try and get themselves recognised. It’s a race to the bottom with no end in sight.

The prevailing wind among the right-wing media at the minute seems to be that the ends justify the means. The President needs to be opposed and questions need to be asked, and as long as you do that (and get some big attention into the bargain) who cares how sneaky, snide, hysterical, rude or undignified you are while you’re doing it? A bit of pride in method wouldn’t go amiss. Or pride in general, for that matter. 

Newt Gingrich attacking Mitt Romney for speaking French? How gauche!

Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney

I’m under no illusions about the weapons-grade insanity we’re all referring to as the Republican primaries this year, but a recent Newt Gingrich attack ad on Mitt Romney hit a particularly stupid note.

Titled “The French Connection”, Newt puts the hammer to Mitt by tarring him with the Massachusetts liberal brush, but reaches for a curious case in point: He speaks French.

Quoi?! For all Romney’s faults – the fact he is a money-mad robot, for example – picking his ability to speak French is trop bizarre, to say the least. Never the mind the fact Romney learned French as a Mormon missionary, and the clip they showed was a promotional video for the Winter Olympics he was organising in Salt Lake City. I mean, doing things, even speaking a foreign language, to keep Jesus and the investors happy is very Republican indeed.
________________

READ MORE:

'Like' IrishCentral.com on Facebook for a chance to win an iPod Touch

Small Kerry hotel rated 6th best in the world by Tripadvisor.com

Efforts to ‘Save Lennox’ fail - Pit bull lookalike to be put down - VIDEO
_______________

Stranger than the line of attack though is the man carrying it out, the man who is to hypocrisy what Jeff Gordon is to NASCAR, Newt Gingrich. Newt did his doctoral thesis on education policy in the Belgian Congo, a field of study which requires, to say the least, un petit peu de Français. And he carried out his studies in New Orleans, where not knowing French would be like going to Conemara without a cúpla focail. “A Massachusetts moderate cannot beat Barack Obama”, claims his attack ad, but neither can an arrogant Georgian blowhole.

Maybe it’s my Irish aversion to pomposity talking, but I’ve always found American exceptionalism to be an extraordinary dumb concept, especially in the way articulated by the American right and stoked and pandered to by their leaders. Not just Gingrich but throughout the campaign Romney, Perry and most of the rest have all smugly articulated their “The way I love America is the only way to love America” views, like hipsters without the massive headphones or obscure band t-shirt, claiming with varying degrees of falsehood that President Obama apologises for America and such. It’d be laughable if it wasn’t so dangerous.

Being proud of your country is not necessarily a bad thing, but thinking your country is blameless, infallible or exists on a higher level just because is plain stupid. Worse yet, blasting your opponents – or even people who articulate basically the same thing differently or more moderately - is the mark not of a citizen of a great country, but of a barbarian. Americans have of course not been the only transgressors on the world stage when it comes to coarse, unthinking nationalism and have a lot to be proud of too, but a country that purports to be the greatest ever should really have more class and grace.

It may be easy to rip on France or Europe in general, but we’re a continent of culture, history, diversity and broad horizons. The French have a saying: “Qui n'entend qu'une cloche n'entend qu'un son.” He who hears only one bell hears only one sound. High-handed would-be leaders like Newt and Mitt would do well to listen to some of the voices of the people who reside beyond their coasts. They’d also be well advised to take heed of a phrase common round the part of the country I came from: Wind yer’ neck in.

The view from over here: the GOP’s true primary colours

Apart from having a long-term interest in US politics I also have the sleeping patterns of a musician, so that means watching coverage of the Republican Primaries isn’t such a taxing thing for me to do. From a sleep point of view that is, in pretty much every other way it’s tough going.

On one hand there’s something almost cathartic about actually having primaries as it beats the merry band of ruffian nominees ranting into hysterical space, but CNN’s bombastic reportage would nearly make you cry with laughter.

The Best News Team In The Known Universe, or whatever they fancy themselves as, seem to take excessive pride in the extent to which they muck about gadgets, tables, virtual reality rooms and zoom-in maps with colours bursting out of them. Stranger than that though, especially for Irish viewers, is the promethean curiosity with which they treat their “ballot cams”, which watch people counting and then announcing what they’re counting. A tad pedestrian for Irish eyes, who are seasoned hurlers on that particular ditch.Stranger yet though were their overkill squad of reporters, one of whom was reduced to asking a selection of voters and associated hangers-on what their name was and who they voted for, with the grim monotony of a faulty Terminator.
______________

READ MORE:

Hoboken, NJ, cancel St. Patrick’s Day Parade after 26 years - POLL

Immigration reform for Irish American community - current bill must be passed

Do these St Patrick's Day t-shirts depict Irish as drunk and dumb?
______________

But the reporters got a welcome break when the results were declared – as if anyone was in any doubt – and the cameras focused on their victory/heck I’m claiming this as a victory/laughably defiant speeches.

You could tell an awful lot, in fact all you’d ever need to know, about the candidates judging by the speeches they gave on Tuesday night. Mitt Romney is a cross between Troy McClure and Patrick Bateman’s sleazy dad, who will say literally anything to get elected. Ron Paul is a principled and likeable gent but with a polemic speaking style that makes Castro look like the model of brevity, and an issue profile that would send a man in to anaphylactic shock. John Huntsman is the last sane man in the whole godforsaken saloon, and is a man of considerable class.

Rick Santorum is a kind of turbo-Dana, mixing populism with strident, pro-life views. Unless you're an Iranian scientist, in which case he kinda hopes the US government is secretly killing them. He made a point of continually referencing his coalminer grandfather and told of his emigration from Italy to the US in the twenties, which struck me as nice but a bit odd. For starters, my grandfathers were a farm labourer and a jockey, but I couldn’t pretend to have had a life anything remotely like theirs. And its lucky his grandfather wasn’t Mexican in the present day.

As for Newt, I switched off before he started, for the good of my own health. It's going to be a long year. But, God help me, I still wouldn't miss it.

What the Republican Presidential candidates can learn from Donegal teenagers

Rick Perry

The only thing that is preventing the Republican primary race from becoming a complete head bang is the sheer comicality of it. There’s Mitt Romney, who is only marginally more popular than smallpox; there’s Rick “EPA?” Perry, a man who is to memory and general regular behaviour what Mr Magoo is to eyesight; there’s Herman Cain, who I’m not sure could name any more than five other countries in the world; there’s Newt Gingrich, a man whose opinion of himself is in orbit, for no compelling reason. And then there’s the most hilarious of all, John Huntsman, the one sane man among them and the only one who could actually bring a fight to Obama, but his numbers are so low they can only be measured by the Kelvin Scale.

While the Republican base are amped up to stiff peaks of mental at the minute, the last two years in particular have not been good ones for political sanity in the States in general. Warped ideological fidelity has trumped practicality. Bloody-minded obstinacy is now apparently official policy. Every word spoken is either advancing or casting aspersions on some political agenda or other. It’s toxic in the extreme.

------------------------
READ MORE:

Chocolatier Lily O’Brien launches new US website

Silent Night (Christmas 1915) - my song is a gift from above - VIDEO

Certificate of Irish Heritage is now available for Americans of Irish ancestry
-------------------------

Even at home, as election promises are still ringing in our sardonic ears, the feeling that we’ve driven down a dead end is pervasive.

Thank the baby Jesus and his farmyard ensemble cast, then, for the Donegal Youth Council.

Last Saturday I took twelve of the councillors for a politics day, a day where we’d discuss hot-button topics, moral dilemmas and discover what their opinions meant in the context of political groupings, parties and philosophies. The fact they were there on a Saturday morning/afternoon at all made sure I’d leave happy, but the manner in which they took to the issues left me elated.

They have previous form on this sort of thing, having asked questions of election candidates both in the general and Presidential elections earlier in the year questions you wouldn’t habitually expect from 13 to 18 year olds. But just as impressive as their grip on issues as varied as military intervention or economic policy was the method in which they had the conversation. They were measured, reasoned, and all their positions came from a basis in fact. In other words, several times more mature than 90% of the world’s elected representatives. When they disagreed, even on the contentious issues like abortion or drug legalisation, they took each other on earnestly and without animus. Nobody was out to win, or more to the point beat anyone.

I’m not sure what it is that makes so many candidates for high office the way they are, I’m not sure if the system moulds them a certain way or if the kind of people who run for those kind of things are just unusually venal, hysterical or straight-up bananas. But whatever the hell is the problem, maybe it should be young people running branches of government, while the Perrys and Newts of this world take a weekend class or two.