02-19-2019, 12:32 PM
(02-19-2019, 11:02 AM)David Horn Wrote:(02-14-2019, 03:49 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: No go on Pete; his score is only 5-11. He'll never be president. Oh well, another one bites the dust
We'll have to disagree on that. Any young progressive gay guy who can win a mayoralty contest in rock-rib conservative South Bend Indiana has real political chops. That said, I don't see him winning, or even running that hard, this cycle. I can see him as VP and later POTUS, if things work out that way.
Northwestern Indiana includes the industrial wrecks of Gary, Hammond, and Michigan City, and the non-growth area of South Bend. These areas, Greater Indianapolis, Lafayette-West Lafayette and Bloomington are about as liberal as the cities to which they are comparable in Michigan and Ohio (Gary to Flint, Hammond to Dayton, South Bend to Kalamazoo, Indianapolis to Columbus, and the college towns around Indiana University and Purdue University to Ann Arbor. The rest of Indiana is very conservative. South Bend is a college town (Notre Dame) but that aspect of South Bend is small; Notre Dame is a small school even if it has a high profile for its college football teams and for being a fine academic school. (The trick to Notre Dame: South Bend has few distractions, and the winter weather is horrible. You need a car to get to the beaches around Lake Michigan or to the fairly-interesting cities of Chicago, Indianapolis, and perhaps Grand Rapids or Toledo).
I live near South Bend and have been there a few times. It has been an economic wreck since Studebaker went under more than half a century ago, but people have adapted. They use South Bend as a springboard to places like Chicago and Indianapolis where there is some possibility of prosperity. It has dealt better with its economic decline than have such Hell-holes as Detroit, Flint, and Gary. It's more like Toledo, except that Toledo has more to do except to make a living.
America has never elected the mayor of a giant, let alone medium-sized, city who had not since become a US Senator or a state governor. It is a pity, as the mayor of a large city has responsibilities comparable to those of the governor of a small state. Thus Bill Clinton, Governor of Arkansas and not Rudy Giuliani (who was a good mayor, but WTF about his discreditable attachment to Donald Judas-Iscariot Trump?). If I were to pick two Republicans in the recent past who would have been excellent Presidents, I would have picked a former mayor of Indianapolis (Richard Lugar) and a former mayor of Cleveland (George Voinovich) who had also become US Senators. Lugar solved many problems of Indianapolis before they could begin by annexing all unincorporated areas of Marion County to Indianapolis before they could become independent suburbs (so if you work in Indianapolis, you still end up paying the city and county share of sales taxes as well as property taxes to Indianapolis) and Voinovich kept a tough city from rotting faster. As much of my focus is on the 2020 Presidential election which will decide whether America does well in the critical stages (the last ones!) of the current 4T or does badly, I try to be non-partisan in my criticism of Donald Trump.
....The misconduct of Donald Trump suggests that his astrological score is losing its relevance (if one believes in that). It might be possible to find a criminal with high numbers who would do better than someone like Amy Klobuchar, who so far seems to have most of the hallmarks of prior good-to-great Presidents of the past. But that criminal has such crimes as sexual assault or drug dealing in his past, and one would definitely not want someone like that as President. As the Bard says, the fault with most of us does not lie in our stars. Maybe there is a kid from the wrong side of the tracks who, despite having an astrological chart like that of Donald Trump, got in the habit of stealing cars. Even if one has 'good' astrological signs, how one uses the advantage matters greatly.
I would give Donald Trump low scores on emotional maturity and high scores on either pathological narcissism or outright sociopathy, either of which is incompatible with effective and desirable leadership. He might have been tolerable enough in 2016 to people to whom he appealed on their ethnic and religious bigotry or contempt for intellectual elites. I don't pretend to see him with anything other than disdain. I thought that he was a cruel, shallow egoist whose Self lacks much and whose curriculum vitae shows no sign of solid preparation for the Presidency. I still see him as such, and ascribe much of his failure to such. But that is not enough to decide that he should be rejected in 2020. Now we know the consequences, and that should be enough to ensure his defeat in a re-election bid. Although it is a commonplace trait of dictators and despots to create scapegoats from Albigensian heretics and witches in medieval times to kulaks and Jews in the 20th century, such is not good for creating a wholesome society.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.