Friday, January 29, 2016

The Mathematics Of The Mix

Eleven candidates for the Republican nomination for the U.S. Presidency have been competing with one another. The very mathematics of it - the arithmetic - assures that success is not with them.

Each candidate has ten others doing their best to keep him down. Each feels a need to outdo all ten of the others in jingoism and chauvinism. Each candidate must be more unique than ten others.

Running perhaps for the Republican ticket is Donald Trump, who is having one heck of a time. He has captured about 40 percent of the Republican vote, as of this writing. Ted Cruz, whose foreign birth gives many cause for pause, is next below him at 19 percent. All the other candidates are in the single digits. But they have their supporters.

The Democrats are almost equally tied at this point between two candidates - Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton. Sanders' support is slowly building among the people. Clinton's support is slowly growing among the rich and powerful. Either of them could beat Trump in the general election.

It would not be surprising to see a lot of corporate support switch from Republican candidates to Clinton. She's the more conservative of the two possible winners. At the same time, Sanders may inherit some tea-partiers who believe in "government of the people, by the people, and for the people" - an old Republican motto, not honored in recent years.

The election for President may then be, within the primary of the party most likely to win, a race between corporate institutionalism and populist humanism.