What’s On My Mind?

Americans are trying to figure out how to have a Happy New Year as the White House is about to be vacated by Michelle and Barack Obama. According to media reports, the new President and First Lady, Donald and Melania Trump, are not likely to live there. Rather, they’ll continue living in their penthouse apartment atop the Manhattan Trump Tower, keeping their son in his school in New York City. Dad will use the White House for ceremonial events, and the Secret Service will scramble to secure the new first family, in any of the Trump Towers they may occupy. So much for cost containment.

Many Americans are also trying to figure out what a Trump presidency will bring, especially since so much of the Donald’s campaign rhetoric turns out to be “inoperative,” as Nixon might say. Trump’s dismissive ridicule of women, physically impaired people, immigrants, even the Purple Heart and a Gold Star family, along with his reckless suggestions of expanding rather than contracting the number of nations with nuclear weapons, dishonest five-year “birther” campaign trying to discredit President Obama, bogus charitable foundation, and plan to put Secretary Clinton in jail, all fade with little accountability, rather like his campaign promise to force Mexico to pay for an impenetrable security wall along our shared southern border. Apparently there’s a gap between saying and doing.

A friend of mine has asked me how serious I am about considering a move to Canada, questioning my own election-season rhetoric. I jokingly reply that the Canadians may wall-off our shared border to the north, making my threat “inoperative” as well. Yet I was serious in considering a move to Vancouver: milder than the Twin Cities of Minnesota, closer to the Seattle branch of our family (including our grandchildren), and an opportunity to live where Prime Minister Trudeau is taking Canada in the opposite direction promised (or threatened) by Mr. Trump, a direction I can support with enthusiasm.

I came close to migrating to Canada once before, in 1968. I had applied to my local draft board for Conscientious Objector Status while in college, but my anti-war argument was dismissed. What I needed –and couldn’t provide– was a paper trail documenting active membership with the Society of Friends (“Quakers”), Mennonites, or the Church of the Bretheran, i.e., participation with a historic “peace church.” As a vague Methodist, my appeal didn’t stand a chance (even a serious Methodist wouldn’t qualify for CO status with my local draft board). A scar from leg surgery while in high school caught the eye of the military doc, so I was reclassified from 1-A to 4-Y, draftable to serve behind compat lines as a typist or clerk only under a declaration of war. Our country has fought many a war since WW II but never under a declaration of war. Now I could go to graduate school in the US rather than Canada. My somewhat arbitrary escape from the Vietnam war pushed me further into anti-war activism.

We need to remember that no one need renounce citizenship to become an expat, and many Americans feel a need to take a stand against the nastiness of the recent campaign and the throwback policies Trump seems to call for. Surely we can’t accept any and all political nonsense; we have to draw a line somewhere.

I don’t know whether I’ll be driven to find my way to Canada –or New Zealand, or Jamaica– to try daily living beyond Trump’s America, but I hope Americans won’t simply accept the shift from serious government to Bully-in-Chief or federal leadership as a reality TV show, with the ratings king at the top. With luck, Mr. Trump will be satisfied with having proven he’s “a winner” and bored with doing the hard work of governing. I’m sure he will not enjoy the pay cut and the required distance from his financial holdings, nor will his cabinet employees. I will not be surprised if
he doesn’t run for reelection; actually, he may be disgusted enough with DC gridlock to resign and leave us with Pence. Happy New Year?

The national news media named Hillary Clinton the “presumptive nominee” of the Democratic Party for US President on the eve of the California primary, amid questions of journalistic ethics violations. Did the announcement affect the outcome with some Sanders’ supporters not voting because they were told the race was over? We’ll never know.

The national media’s decision to “call” the race for the nomination before the single largest delegation was chosen by voters surprised only the most rabid Sanders supporters. After all, HRC was anointed “presumptive nominee” by the media years ago. Few expected a serious challenge, and the press, TV news, radio, and internet journalists all repeated frequently that Sanders had no real chance. Did this affect the outcome? Certainly. Why vote for a symbolic candidate interested in raising economic and moral concerns only to push the inevitable nominee to address such issues?

Hillary ran as the candidate who could “get things done” and painted Bernie Sanders as a naive idealist. But Bernie appealed to four out of five millennials who are, after all, the future of the party and the nation. So HRC stressed her experience and her practicality while Bernie stressed Hilary’s connections to big money from Wall Street banks and to establishment politicians like Henry Kissinger.

Of course Hillary Clinton’s now official run for the White House is historic; few women have been candidates for the presidency, and none has been a major party nominee until now. Lost amid gender politics is the historic significance of Sander’s achievement: an aging Socialist jew winning twenty-two states and 12,000,000 votes in primaries, and running very near to Clinton (except for Super Delegates), despite her longstanding hold on this opportunity to represent her party and, perhaps, become the first woman president of the US.

It was the polling of Super Delegates that generated the early call of the nomination, since Super Delegates don’t participate in the process until the party convention. By design, Super Delegates protect the party from being hijacked by an outsider. And Sanders, a socialist-independent, certainly is an outsider to the Democratic Party’s system of nomination despite caucusing with Democrats in the Senate. No doubt some in the GOP will be thinking about reforming their nomination process given the outsider, Donald Trump, beating a dozen establishment Republicans to take that party nomination.
Many dedicated Clinton supporters are clammoring for Bernie to concede the race and go away. But Hillary herself took four days to concede to Obama in 2008, hoping to broker a deal for influence going forward. Sanders has earned his right to take his time in an effort to push the political pendulum to the left. After all, it was Hillary’s husband Bill who stole the Republican agenda from Newt Gingrich and swung the Democratic Party to the right of Richard Nixon (who ran on a negative income tax in 1968, something no candidate could do today).

We do live in interesting and historic times. When the dust settles, most Sanders supporters will vote for Hillary, and Bernie will not run as an independent, his most rabid enthusiasts notwithstanding. I expect millennials to vote — for Clinton — though not with the same enthusiasm Sanders inspired. And I expect Trump to dig as much dirt as he can — even invent some if necessary — and present a “scandal” in mid-to-late October, too late for effective fact-checking and thoughtful consideration. Let’s hope the system, while badly bent out of shape, is not sufficiently broken to prompt an exodus for Canada in the face of President Trump.