Iowa and NH to America: We Want Radical Change

People still want change.

There’s really no other way to explain how Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders – two long-time outsiders who have been flouting their noses at the establishment of both parties – have done as well as they have done in both Iowa and New Hampshire.  Anger alone doesn’t explain it. Cynicism alone doesn’t explain it. Ignorance, hate, whatever else you want to call it – that alone doesn’t explain it.

Anger cools, cynicism breeds apathy, ignorance can be cured through education.  They aren’t long-term viable strategies for any campaign to run on, especially a presidential campaign.  There has to be something deeper. And there is – the desire for radical change.

What Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders both have demonstrated is that they aren’t shooting stars.  Even after the establishment media started on the “Trump-lost-Iowa” theme, it didn’t matter. He saw little impact on his vote totals in New Hampshire.  Even after the media tried to downplay Sander’s amazing run in Iowa, claiming that Bernie’s best shot at beating Hillary was to win Iowa and he failed – failed by an amazing streak of coin-flip luck – it didn’t matter. He saw little impact on his vote totals in New Hampshire.  Both Trump and Sanders powered to massive, double-digit wins against their opponents.

There is a palpable anger in the wider electorate at the established order of things – not the mythic “establishment” that some folks love to bash but the entire system at large that demands things be done a certain way because they always have.  People are unsatisfied by the processes in place, they’re unsatisfied with the people running those processes, and they are unsatisfied at the results those people and processes have delivered.  The message from Iowa and New Hampshire is clear – people want radical change.  And they are prepared to upend the entire system in order to do it, putting their trust in two of the most radical change agents in the last half century.

The blame for this, honestly, lies mostly with President Obama.  He promised a tired, bitterly divided country “hope and change” and brought little of either.  His signature policy achievement was designed to solve a problem that was only a problem for 30 million people in a nation of 330 million.  The economy has worked well for those it always works well for, while the rest have had to settle for the economic equivalent of fast food.  The promised change of Washington he was going to deliver never materialized.  If anything, it got worse, and the rise of the establishment media and the TMZing of politics happened on his watch.  Washington is as dysfunctional as ever, and it is made more dysfunctional by the pirate’s crew of egos, charlatans and do-nothings that have been sent there to “clean it up.”

The elections of 2010 and 2014 have filled Washington with a bevy of angry Republicans who can’t figure out how to solve problems, but are good at casting blame.  They are aided in their blame dispersion efforts by a deluge of special interest money, spent by out-of-work bureaucrats who while away their days putting together bullshit voting scorecards designed to generate a few clicks on social media or an angry blog post as they wait for political appointments in the next GOP administration.

The result has led voters on both sides to where they are now – essentially preparing to burn down the entire house because the living room is too dirty to clean.  While it may not be efficient, it does get the job done.

President Obama’s eloquence, appealing to the better angels of our nature, has been replaced with a more profane mob populism.  Here we have a candidate of one party dropping four letter words in public speeches, even going so far as to repeat a supporter calling another candidate a “pussy.”  That alone would have destroyed any campaign in the past, but now he’ll get a couple point bump in the polls.  That’s real change.  Already delivered.

On the Democratic side, you have a guy who has spent most of his life as an independent running as a Democrat, taking on the most powerful political machine that party has seen since Reconstruction, and beating them over and over again.  The potential first woman president is losing the women vote to an old white dude.  The most well known politician in the country is losing to Bernie Sanders. Think about that for a minute.

It would be almost unthinkable except it’s actually happening.  What Trump and Sanders represent to their respective parties is radical change.  Not incremental change, as our system is designed to handle, but the kind of radical change that happens once a generation at best, and rarely without some kind of outside stimulus to force the change.  My generation had 9/11, the previous generation had Vietnam, the one prior to that World War II.  This time, however, the change is being forced from internal sources by people who are convinced that the system is rigged, its rigged against them, and that the only way to fix it is to find somebody from outside the system to change it.

The rational answer to this kind of demand for change is real reform.  The system has to give the people what they want, or the people will sweep the system away.  A lot of things that would have been unthinkable – constitutional amendments and the like – need to be back on the table.  Campaign finance reform is at the top of the list, as it’s an issue that both Trump and Sanders have used effectively.

2016 is now, again, a change election.  Whether the country tacks more to the right or more to the left is the question.  The people do not want the status quo and they are voting for the candidates who represent the biggest breaks from tradition.

That’s the real message from New Hampshire and Iowa.  Ignore it at your peril.

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