Establishment Republicans are reportedly pushing
former Gov. Jeb Bush (R-Fla.) to run for president in 2016. Former
Secretary of State and Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) is the only
Democratic candidate anyone can even think of. WTF is going on, I
ask in my
new Daily Beast col.
What is it that Faulkner said in Requiem for a
Nun (1950)? “The past is never dead. It’s not even
past.” Who knew that he was talking about politics in the
goddamned 21st century, not Yoknapatawpha County after
the Civil War?It’s not a mystery why elites would totally dig a retro contest
between two of the nation’s least-appealing families. It would mean
that zombified pundits such as David Gergen, whose lack of cogency
is directly proportional to the number of administrations in which
he served, could push off retirement a few more years and writers
such as [New York Times‘ columnist Maureen] Dowd, who
peaked in terms of what passes for wit and originality during the
Clinton era, could recycle old columns as unashamedly as Cate
Blanchet recycles plastic bags at the local Safeway. GOP and
Democratic apparatchiks and their big-money enablers wouldn’t have
to struggle with the grim and unavoidable fact that fewer and fewer
of us are willing to identify with either party—even to
strangers on the phone.But for the large and growing plurality of us who are
independents, there’s simply no advantage in putting up with this
politics of exhaustion, of the elite’s fixation on characters and
policies from the past. We need a reboot that’s not simply the
same-old, same-old.
First and foremost, that reboot means actually
confronting entitlement spending (especially on Medicare) that is
both unsustainable and immoral. It also means coming to terms with
the absolutely failed foreign policies prosecuted by Jeb Bush’s
brother and Hillary Clinton’s former boss. And it means taking
seriously politicians as different as Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), the
libertarian-leaning Tea Party favorite, and Sen. Bernie Sanders
(I-Vt.), the socialist former mayor of Burlington. At least these
guys are talking about the future, rather than enacting a weird
dance with the past.
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