As
the 2016 presidential candidates belatedly get worked up about inequality,
they're losing touch with reality.
By Donald Kaul
Hardly a day goes by that another candidate doesn’t announce his or her intention to run for the presidency. One day it’s Carly Fiorina, the next it’s Mike Huckabee, Bernie Sanders, or Hillary Clinton, even.
It’s like the circus — when the little car rolls into the center
ring and a clown gets out, then another, then two more, and on and on until the
ring is overflowing with 1,000 clowns, or so it seems.
We won’t get up to 1,000 politicians yearning to lead the “free
world,” or what’s left of it. But we should reach two dozen presidential
aspirants who are asking us voters to take them seriously before we’re done.
It’s still early, but it looks as though the major message of
this election is going to be about closing the cavernous gaps between the rich
and the poor. Democrats have always suspected that the poor are being
victimized by our economic system, but now it seems that the Republicans are
singing that song too.
Former First Brother Jeb Bush, whose family has been rich ever
since his grandfathers got
into oil and weapons 100 years ago, is now excoriating the
“elites” who’ve stifled growth and left the middle class to twist slowly in the
wind.
Marco Rubio, the Florida senator who wants to raise the sales taxes that weigh most heavily on poor people, now urges us not to forget those same people — the workers who do our society’s grunt work. He’s also quick to remind us that he’s the son of a bartender and a maid.
Ted Cruz, leader of the Senate’s loudmouth caucus, does Rubio
one better. His parents, he says, were both drunks.
How’s that for humble beginnings?
Still, it’s hard to beat the unintended irony of Hillary
Clinton.
Who else complains with a straight face that “the deck is still
stacked in favor of those on top” while she’s busy setting up a
super PAC that she hopes will raise $100 million for her
campaign by July?
Bill Clinton isn’t much help either. Asked whether he’ll
continue to make his six-figure speeches to fat cats while his wife runs for
president, he said he’d have to.
“Got to pay our bills,” he said.
Some bills.
Fiorina, who got a $21 million
severance package when she was fired as head of
Hewlett-Packard, is determined to protect workers from minimum-wage
raises, which she says hurt folks hunting for entry-level jobs.
Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, a pastor’s son, wants to
protect workers from unions, in the name of defending the middle class. And Ben
Carson, an African-American neurosurgeon, thinks that the Affordable Care Act
is the worst thing
since slavery.
Do you get the theme here? This campaign is going to be
conducted almost entirely in a parallel universe. It will have no relation to
reality, and what candidates say will have no relationship to anything that’s
actually happening. Black is going to be white and white black.
Not all the goofballs are running for president — or married to
someone who is — yet.
Do you know that there’s a sizeable faction in
Texas that thinks U.S. Army exercises over there are prep work for the
declaration of martial law and the confiscation of all weapons? Governor Greg
Abbott actually tried to deploy the
Texas Guard to ensure that wouldn’t happen.
What’s
happened to this country? It used to be a fairly sensible place.
Maybe
it’s time to send in the clowns.
Oh,
I forgot. They’re already here.
OtherWords
columnist Donald Kaul lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan. OtherWords.org.