UNELECTABLE ASYMMETRY [with footnotes]

Following Bernie Sanders’ big win in New Hampshire’s Democratic primary, I expect that Hillary Clinton and her minions will saturate the airwaves calling into question Sanders’ “electability”. Team Clinton will claim loud and long, that the Democrats can’t nominate Senator Sanders because doing so would hand the presidential election to the Republicans.

Perhaps it will. But I have a different question. Why do we not hear talk about electability on the Republican side? Why don’t Republicans worry that their Presidential candidate might have one or another electoral shortcoming that ought to disqualify a person from a dinner invitation, much less the keys, to the White House? Why don’t they worry that such a substandard bearer would lead to certain defeat in November? The answer is as simple as it is depressing. They don’t have to.

The Republicans know that they have a fair chance of winning the presidency regardless of their candidate, or that candidate’s manifest unfitness for the highest office in the land. Donald Trump was the big winner of the Republican New Hampshire primary despite the fact that more of the party’s own voters dislike him than like him. He insists that he will create a Huge number of jobs, even though he is best known for firing people, and the former vice-presidential nominee that he trotted out to endorse him heading into the Iowa caucus has her picture in the dictionary right next to the definition of “unelectable”. Other top contenders for the GOP nomination include one Senator whose own party dislikes the fact that he often doesn’t show up for work and another whose fellow Republicans wish he wouldn’t.

While Hillary will pillory Bernie for lacking a detailed foreign policy strategy, the Republican contenders can’t stop blaming President Obama [1] long enough to point out which of their rivals for the nomination have more growing outside their heads than inside [2]. That’s not because the Republican presidential candidates are thoughtful and considerate of one another, it’s because they know their audience. Seventy-eight percent of likely Republican primary voters, asked whether they would vote for an intellectual lightweight with no meaningful policy proposals who regarded outshouting other contenders as the surest path to the nomination answered, “Which one?”.

Republicans care not at all about whether a nominee might be unelectable, because they have repeatedly elected, and re-elected, Presidents for whom the adjective appears to have been coined. While it is often said that there are no second acts in American politics, the Republican’s 1968 presidential candidate had been dead and buried more often than Freddy Krueger. A chimp named Bonzo once upstaged the Republican front man for 1980 and would have been good casting for the first new President of this millennium , a man whose character and intellect rendered him less qualified for the office than Bonzo’s onetime costar would have been if his original casting as Rick in Casablanca had stuck. Republicans might lose a presidential election, but there is no such thing as an “unelectable” Republican.

This explains why the only electability argument we’ve heard on the Republican side is directed at Ted Cruz for having been born in Canada [3]. That claim is laughable coming from a party that has, in my lifetime, nominated for the Presidency John McCain, who was born in the Panama Canal Zone, and Barry Goldwater, who was born in what was not yet the state of Arizona [4]. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Cruz campaign was behind that Canadian canard. By allowing such a big deal to be made of what may well be the one and only reason that Senator Cruz should not be disqualified from the Presidency, attention is deflected from his being loathsome, vile, and dangerous. The last straw man featured to such an extent was played by Ray Bolger.

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I’m sorry. Obama. They accord him no title.
2. including, but not limited to, comb-overs
3. If only everyone born in Canada were eligible for the American presidency. Former Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm would get my vote (and, if she were into it, more).
4. which I believe was, at the time of his birth, part of Pangea