Surge toward Super Tuesday

Super Tuesday should edify us, if not determine for us altogether definitively, who is who and what is what in the 2016 presidential race — who will and will not be chosen by one’s party as a nominee, and what political platform will and will not dominate the national debate till election day on Nov. 8, when American voters cast their ballots for chief executive, which has been a quadrennial affair in the United States since 1845.
It is a day when the greatest number of states hold primary elections to select delegates to national conventions where each party’s presidential candidate is officially nominated. In 2016, Super Tuesday will fall on March 1, where a total of 14 states are holding contests whose results typically represent a candidate’s test of “electability.” Impressive wins on that day have usually propelled candidates to their party’s nomination.
No one is holding his breath regarding the outcome of the Democratic primaries. Hillary Clinton — barring any unseen scandal — appears to have effectively secured the nomination. It’s a slam dunk, hers for the taking. Neither Bernie Sanders, a crotchety socialist, nor Martin O’Malley, a former Maryland governor who is now an afterthought, has a chance to break through before Super Tuesday.
Yet the Democratic front-runner, who has been a public figure for close to 25 years — as First Lady, Senator and Secretary of State — comes with baggage and glaring obstacles. To start with, many see her as old hat. Though Hillary (“Chillary” to many who resent her waspish hauteur) would love to see the public warm to her personality, and heaven knows she has worked hard at that, in her own contrived way, she does not have anything like the charm, charisma and rhetorical eloquence that Obama projected in 2008, a kind of stage presence that mesmerized not only Americans but countless peoples around the world.
The 2016 Democratic presidential aspirant has another handicap that she has to contend with: The Democrats are vying for a third term in the White House, an event at odds with the American history. Only once since 1952 has a party won three times in a row, the exception being in 1988 when George W. H. Bush succeeded Ronald Reagan. But those were times when Americans were imbued with a national consensus, namely that the country was “on the right track” and effectively they wanted “the good times to roll.”
Today, well, Americans are polarized — on immigration, terrorism, Obamacare, abortion, foreign entanglements and the rest of it. And American Republicans, in particular, are in a bad mood. Or call it an ugly mood. And, yes, these folks hate Obama, Barack Hussein Obama, who they suspect may very well be a Muslim and who may not even have been born in the United States.
And these folks, who have been angry for a long time, initially finding an outlet for that anger in the 2010 Tea Party revolt, have today turned to the toxic bombast of Donald Trump, a man with zilch experience in politics who has become the Republican front-runner, the king of Twitter, with 5 million followers, a man who has alienated, insulted and denigrated everyone in sight, with sweeping attacks on minority groups (Mexican migrants in his lexicon are rapists and criminals), his racially charged language (African Americans are statistically more prone to acts of violence than other ethnic groups), his bigoted observations about Muslims (if elected president, “Muslims are out”) and his unmentionable vulgarities directed at women (Fox News’ Megyn Kelly’s “blood coming out of her whatever,” Carly Fiorina’s ugly visage, and the manner in which Hillary Clinton was “defeated” by Barack Obama in the primary elections).
Here’s a man so infantile as to tell cheering supporters at his rallies, with a straight face, “I’m really, really smart.”
To the best of my knowledge, no one — certainly not a social psychologist that I know of — has yet advanced a solid explanation of the Trump phenomenon. So the question is this: Will this comical figure surge on Super Tuesday? With two months to go, will any of the other Republican contenders catch up with him? Sure as heck, the humorless Jeb Bush, the lifeless Ben Carson and the sphinx-like Carly Fiorina, along with others in the crowded Republican field, will not — with the exception of Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, who are already nipping at his heels.
They may, just may, take him down. And if he does go down, he will be remembered much in the manner as other demagogues in the pantheon of American demagoguery have been remembered, people like Joseph McCarthy, George Wallace and Barry Goldwater — with distaste. About the latter, Rick Perlstein, the American historian who has won great acclaim for his chronicles of the American conservative movement, wrote in his book, Before The Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, “The best measure of a politician’s electoral success (at the time when Goldwater ran for president) was becoming not how successfully he could broker people’s desires, but how well he could tap their fears.”