Who Will Be the Democrats Stealth Candidate for 2016?
I’ve been voting in Presidential elections since I was a 19 year old in 1976. Since my first election, I have seen only three Democrats elected to the presidency and as a mathematician I have seen a common thread in their election.
In winning his two elections, Nixon defeated two openly liberal candidates. The second election was, at its time, the biggest landslide by a Republican in US history. Soon the word liberal became a bad name for any Democrat candidate running for office on a national ticket.
When the Democrats in Congress and the media forced Nixon from office and made huge gains in the midterm elections, they had hoped once again to regain the presidential office. Having learned their lessons from the past, they were going to hide the party’s liberal views by running a candidate that appeared to be a moderate.
In January of 1976, few Americans knew who Jimmy Carter was. By the end of that year, he was the president-elect. In a 1974 Harris poll that listed 35 potential presidential candidates for the 1976 election, Jimmy Carter was not even on this list. On December 13, 1973, Jimmy Carter, then governor of Georgia, appeared on the game show “What’s My Line?” After 15 minutes of questioning, the celebrity panelist failed to identify who Carter was. On May 31, 1971, Carter was given a Time magazine cover as a face of the “New South” to contrast the old south controlled by segregationist Democrats.
From the time he was sworn in as governor of Georgia in 1971, Carter had the ambition for national office. At the 1972 convention, he lobbied to be McGovern’s running mate but failed. When the American voter overwhelming rejected McGovern’s liberal campaign, Carter began his own drive for the presidency.
Actively campaigning by attending every small group gathering of Democrat voters Carter began to get name recognition in the states of Iowa and New Hampshire. Soon he gained free publicity from the New York Times, Newsweek and the networks and won both the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary with less than 30% of the vote. Soon thereafter, the entire national media began a love affair with Carter and began to propagandize the American public on Carter’s behalf. Carter won 26 more primaries while his opposition consisted of known liberal Jerry Brown and candidates that only won their state as a favorite son candidate. After winning the nomination, Carter posed as a moderate and a Christian on his way to election victory.
Carter entered office with a heavily Democrat congress. In the congressional elections that year, the Democrats in the House added one more seat to the supermajority they gained after the Nixon resignation and maintained their 61 seats in the Senate. The Republicans only succeeded in gaining a seat by defeating the sitting conservative party senator from New York.
As there are laws in science, mathematics and nature, the political law with the highest rate of certainty is that when Democrats hold the highest executive office and large majorities in the legislature, then the nation or state that lives under this governance immediately goes into a downward spiral. This law proved true during Carter’s sole term and soon the American public began to turn on Carter. In his bid for reelection, Carter lost 44 states to Reagan and began a long tenure as persona non gratia with the Democrat party.
Reagan’s optimistic conservatism won the hearts of the American electorate and in 1984, the Democrats ran Carter’s vice president, a known liberal, who went down to the most lopsided defeat in the history of presidential elections. In 1988, the Democrats ran a Massachusetts liberal, and lost overwhelmingly to Reagan’s vice president in the hope of an extension to the Reagan presidency.
In January of 1992, few people in the United States knew who Bill Clinton was. By the end of the year, he was the president-elect. The Democrats gave Clinton his first spotlight on the national stage at their 1988 convention when he gave the nominating speech for eventual nominee. Clinton’s speech bombed and the Democrats quickly arranged a quick fix with an appearance on the Tonight Show where he poked fun at himself and had the nation get a second look at him. Between national election cycles, Clinton won a fifth term as Arkansas governor, headed the National Governor’s Association and lead the Democrat Leadership Council. The Democrat party was grooming Clinton for the presidency leading up to the 1992 election cycle. During the 1992 New Hampshire primary, skeletons began to come out of Clinton’s closet. The media took the unprecedented step of coming to his defense. Though infidelity sank the candidacy of one popular Democrat contender in 1988 thanks to the media, Clinton got a special segment on 60 Minutes where charges of his infidelity were minimalized. When he placed second behind known northeastern liberal Paul Tsongas, Clinton declared himself the “Comeback Kid”. With the help of the national party and a protective media that overlooked his draft dodging, pot smoking and earlier election losses when he governed to the left of the Arkansas voter, Clinton went on to win primaries in 35 states defeating another known liberal, Jerry Brown, and other favorite son candidates. The media propagandized both Clintons as intellectual superiors and political centrists. During the campaign, the Clinton campaign published 25 campaign promises that, if kept, would have made Clinton a great president. Once elected though, Clinton did not keep any of those promises.
Despite scandals and a failed attempt to usurp the health care industry that cost the Democrats both houses of Congress, Clinton won reelection in 1996 by adopting and taking credit for many of the platforms of the Republican’s Contract With America.
Clinton’s second term was more scandalous leading to an impeachment regarding perjury and obstruction of justice, but not other scandals that jeopardized our national security, caused the voters to reject a continuation of the Clinton presidency by rejecting his vice president, a known liberal and environmental alarmist, in the 2000 election. In 2004, the Democrats ran another northeastern liberal and lost, but this time the election was much closer. While the Republican president at the time was constantly slimed by the media he still won by a narrow margin.
In January of 2008, few people in the United States knew who Barak Obama was. By the end of the year, he was the president-elect. The Democrat party started pushing him to national prominence long before he was even known to most people in his state of residence. In the 2004 convention, Obama, then only a state senator running for a US Senate seat got to deliver the keynote address. Despite an unimpressive voting record in his state’s senate, the media hailed him as a rising star in the Democrat party. Through political manipulation that caused the GOP to change candidates during the election, Obama easily won his US Senate seat by a wide margin.
The national media touted Hillary Clinton as the 2008 favorite candidate for that year’s election cycle. Mrs. Clinton carried a lot of political baggage from her husband’s presidency and as a known liberal. Despite an unimpressive record in the Senate, Obama declared his candidacy with the blessings of several powerful members of the Democrat party. Obama got another introduction to the American public with an appearance on the popular Oprah Winfrey Show. Despite getting fewer popular votes than Mrs. Clinton during the primaries, Obama won more states and more delegates on his way to the nomination. The national media propagandized the American voting public into thinking that Obama was an intellectual superior, a centrist and a messianic personality who could reach across the aisle and unite the nation. The readers of The Patriot Post are one of the few educated to this fallacy as well as the threats to our constitutional republic and our essential freedoms this president has committed.
Obama’s term constitutionally ends with the 2016 election cycle. The Democrats will have to field a candidate that can win the hearts of the uninformed voting public. The Democrats may have a more difficult task of finding a candidate who does not have Obama connections since he is currently polling so low at the time of this writing.
Once again, the media is touting Hillary Clinton as the favorite candidate. Despite one and a fraction terms in the Senate and one term as Secretary of State, Mrs. Clinton still has political baggage and ties to the Obama administration. Also, Mrs. Clinton’s age and health will be factors in determining if she is a viable candidate. Mark Alexander of The Patriot Post published on July 23rd, of the possible candidacy of Elizabeth Warren, the freshman Senator from Massachusetts who has been in that chamber for just 19 months. Mr. Alexander made some good points on why the Democrat party may wish to promote her in the national media. Mrs. Warren is a radical leftist who is the type that rises to national prominence in today’s Democrat party. The two main problems the Democrats would have in promoting her as a national candidate is; will the voting public elect a known liberal today or can they market her as a moderate? They must also determine if the voting public is ready to elect a woman to our nation’s highest office. Mr. Alexander’s article is timely in that the national party has been marketing Elizabeth Warren among their own power brokers as an alternative to Hillary Clinton.
But I caution the readers of this post the fact that three successfully elected Democrats to the presidency during the voting period of my lifetime all came out of nowhere to win the nomination for the office. The 2016 Democrat candidate may be someone who is presently an obscure house member, senator or governor who will suddenly rise to national prominence and be touted as the next political messiah. However, this may not be the surprise of 2016. As I have written in previous posts, Obama has violated practically all elements of our Constitution and he has not given any cause to think he would respect elements he has not yet violated. I pray that I am wrong, but do not be surprised if Obama and his minions manipulates his way into running for a third term or some crisis, real or manufactured, gets Obama to stay in the White House past the expiration date of his term. I would not put this past a man who has committed so many impeachable acts during his administration of our nation’s highest office.