Re: Campaign 2016 Part, let's say, X: There's a red moon rising On the Cuyahoga River
Next somebody has to serve as a bridge to the next generation. While millennials are the largest generation out there, until they vote in greater #'s than older people whiny boomers will still have some influence. So its not surprising to see a Hillary type serving two terms. The question will be who she choses as VP as I assume that person will be of a younger generation.
Now stop worrying! We do know what's coming. President Hillary!!!
Nobody's worried. Cassandra's job is to tell the truth. You failing to grasp it is not her department.
The themes that Hillary and the establishment GOP are talking about in this election are irrelevant to the vast majority of Americans. We're at an inflection point and party politics is, at those moments, typically a trailing indicator. Obama was a start down a new road; Hillary is a U-turn. If anything they should have served in the opposite order.
The bridge you think some Veep will be is already long past. The break with the old ways was 15 years ago on 9/11. Cheney instinctively applied the old righty model (swing you dick and pretend you're Tarzan and it's 1955 and America can do what it wants). The complete failure of that approach was the demonstration that the old world was dead. The Middle East has been in flames ever since due to that incompetence.
Now enter Hillary, dragging a 1960s State Department mindset -- one decade less archaic than the right but still hopelessly outmoded and irrelevant. The world has moved beyond us. Europe, as messed up as it is, seems at least to be trying to engage with the world
as it is.
The US' sole genius is stealing ideas and making them more efficient through economy of scale and sheer, dumb, brute force. Somewhere out there in the world on the knife's edge the Poles or the Pakistanis or the Peruvians are figuring it out. If we want to keep running the world (and making a fortune out of it) we'd better be nimble enough to co-opt those ideas for our own purposes.
The trick is to realize that American self-identity is backwards: contrary to what our dullard "patriots" think, America
never leads, and should never lead, for very good reason. We are not truly cognizant of the world as it is, so the best we can do is swagger in late and pick winners and losers from other people's menus. That's what we did with republicanism and industrialization and finance and science; it's how we won WW2. It's what we're good at. Smarter but weaker places come up with a cool idea and then America waddles in like Baby Huey, pulling at it, teething on it, probably wrecking it, but in those rare cases where it's something real eventually belching it back onto the rest of the world in massive quantities (albeit slathered with our spit).
Neither party will do what needs to be done: shoot all of our pundits and think tanks into the sun, listen to the rest of the world, and start picking and pulling at their ideas. The ones that survive, steal. That's the American way.
Tracy Flick didn't even understand that at 43. At 73, she is stale lite beer when what's needed is tequila.
Have you been hanging out with Flaggy?