Tragedy cast a dark shadow over the first of four Preakness races at the Pimlico course on Saturday, May 21. Homeboykris won the first race at 9-1 odds and promptly died after leaving the winner’s circle. Pramedya collapsed in the middle of the fourth race with a broken left front leg and was euthanized on the track.
Although America’s indolent and incompetent mass media have yet to notice it, many conservatives and left-lurchers view these equine tragedies as flickering rays of hope. Word reaches me from my network of confidential informants and agents that growing numbers of depressed and anxious ideological partisans are beginning to hope for a similar event during this year’s presidential campaign. They see no salvation for their respective causes unless, shortly after Labor Day, Donald Trump trips over his long red neck tie and breaks his neck and Hillary Clinton is euthanized.
Desperate and gruesome as these hopes may appear, they are understandable. The New York Times recently published a letter from Sam Koppelman, a Harvard Crimson columnist who tells us that “defending Mrs. Clinton becomes as unacceptable as bigotry” on his campus. He finds that when he speaks up as a Hillary supporter he is accused of being “privileged, oppressive and stupid…In their eyes, I might as well be a College Republican.”
At Columbia University, another sources writes, “To be 18 or 25 or in your early 30’s and support Hillary Clinton can be compared to loving synthetic wool in New Zealand. It is a lonely and alienating relationship that will leave you vulnerable to accusations that you fail to appreciate the genuine, the authentic.”
Bernie Sanders cultists, already inflamed by the imminent defeat of their vision for erecting a Venezuelan socialist utopia in this capitalist hellhole, are bound to grow incandescent after they fully grasp the implications of the promise Hillary recently made at a Kentucky campaign stop. She told the crowd that, as president, she would put her husband Bill in charge of “revitalizing the economy.”
It’s true that a majority of the Sanders enthusiasts don’t generally remember much beyond the last sticker they pasted on their bumper or the last slogan they bellowed at a rally, but some will remember the horrors perpetrated by Bill Clinton, with the assistance of a GOP Congress.
He cut the capital gains rate from 28 to 20 percent; worked hard to enact the North American Free Trade Agreement and pushed through welfare reform. Hillary has elsewhere renounced any repetition of her husband’s follies. She may be lying, but the Hillary haters have no way of knowing whether she was lying in Kentucky of lying everywhere else.
The dream of a euthanized Hillary intensified when she recently boasted in a television interview that “I will be the nominee for my party. That is already done, in effect. There is no way I won’t be.” This is surely true, but saying it was inflammatory, while serving no purpose. The cultist’s hero has repeatedly denounced Hillary Clinton as the Democratic leadership’s “anointed candidate” and now they hear her anointing herself!
The motives of the conservatives who hope Donald Trump trip over his over-extended neck-tie and break his neck after Labor Day are even clearer. Jay Cost, writing in the Weekly Standard sees “an unprincipled Trump standing at the head of a corrupt political force, flanked on one side by K Street lobbyists who use government to line their pockets and on the other by professional politicians regurgitating Reaganesque talking points but lacking true beliefs.”
Cost, we notice, concentrates his loathing on the Republican leaders who have become Trump’s followers. Other conservatives object to The Donald on more personal grounds. He’s a liar, blowhard, buffoon, cad, vulgarian, demagogue, bully and secret statist according to various conservative critics. Many also object to his hair and suspect him of dying his eyebrows.
We note these opinions as a matter of record. It is also a matter of record that a respected poll reported early this month that 47 percent of Trump supporters said they backed him primarily because they don’t want Clinton to win while 43 percent said their primary motivation was Trump’s political positions. Six percent said they liked him personally.
Over in the Hillary camp, about 46 percent said they would vote for her mostly because they don’t want to see a Trump presidency, while 40 percent said they agreed with her political positions and 11 percent said they liked her personally.
These figures imply that the Clinton campaign will have to rely on Trump to mobilize her base, while Trump will be relying on Hillary to energize his base. Personal charisma and a dollar will buy either one a cup of coffee if they avoid Starbucks.
Is it now clear why so many partisans dream of a “Preakness Solution” to their painful electoral dilemma?
