I noted the dangers of early campaign prognostication in a column a few months ago. And then proceeded to "handicap" the Republican field anyway.
For those who don't remember, I divided the GOP contenders into tiers, with specific odds. In the top tier were Marco Rubio (2-1), Scott Walker (3-1), Jeb Bush (5-1), John Kasich (5-1), and Rick Perry (10-1).
So far, not so good--Perry and Walker have already dropped out, Bush's campaign hasn't got off the ground, and neither Kasich nor Rubio can seem to break out of single digits in the polls.
Among those in the lower tier, I had Carly Fiorina at 80-1, Ben Carson at 150-1, and Donald Trump at 250-1. They are now leading the pack, according to the latest CNN survey.
Failures of prediction aside, what is most remarkable about all this is the GOP electorate's rebellion against career politicians--the only thing Trump, Fiorina and Carson have in common as they seek the nation's highest public office is that they have never held public office.
Trailing the reality TV star, former corporate CEO, and retired neurosurgeon are the current governors of New Jersey, Ohio, Louisiana, and Wisconsin (until Walker dropped out), and the former governors of Florida, Arkansas, New York and Texas (until Perry quit), along with incumbent senators from Florida, South Carolina, Texas, and Kentucky.
Perhaps my biggest mistake, then, was a failure to anticipate the extent of the populist rebellion against the political "establishment." Indeed, in those earlier prognostications I actually came out on the other side--that "amateurs" (like Trump, Carson and Fiorina) would find the going tough because, after suffering through the administration of a president who had perhaps the thinnest resume of any in American history (Barack Obama), voters would seek candidates who had extensive administrative experience, most likely as governors. Like Bush, Kasich, Walker and Perry.
We would steer clear of novices, so the thinking went, in favor of those who had done some actual governing and accomplishing; a certain boring competence might even carry the day (think Walker or Bush on that score).
Donald Trump has already demolished those assumptions, regardless of what happens hereafter. As campaigns come to increasingly resemble reality TV entertainment in a dumbed-down political culture, qualifications matter less and less.
Turning to the Democratic side, what has been most remarkable is the party's continuing lurch to the left. That shift actually began about a decade ago with the anti-war movement over Iraq, accelerated with Obama's election in 2008, and has been more recently propelled by Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter.
The result is a Democratic Party that has likely been pushed further left than the Republicans have been pushed right by the Tea Party, along with a decisive repudiation of the moderate electoral/governance model successfully advanced by Bill Clinton and the Democratic Leadership Council in the 1990s. When a major American political party has a self-proclaimed socialist as its front-runner, it has clearly left the mainstream behind.
The rise of Bernie Sanders--who now leads in Iowa and New Hampshire, and has caused Hillary Clinton to veer rapidly leftward in panicky response--is made even more interesting by comparable developments across the Atlantic, in the British Labor Party, perhaps the closest European left-of-center analog to our Democrats.
By elevating the Marxist Jeremy Corbyn to party leader--a selection immediately praised, out of a sense of ideological fraternity, by Sanders (with Corbyn providing reciprocal admiration)--Labor returned to its pre-1950 radical socialist roots and, in effect, responded to a shocking electoral defeat widely attributed to its having moved too far left by going still further in that direction.
Thus continues the parallel political development of America and Britain--both turned rightward in the 1980s with Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, and were then coaxed back toward a refurbished, moderate left in the 1990s by the "new Democrats" under Clinton and "new Labor" under Tony Blair, respectively.
Labor committed political suicide by choosing Corbyn, but what was even more peculiar than the choice itself was the giddy response to it on the part of Laborites, many of whom didn't seem to care if they had nominated a sure loser so long as he advocated the right things--a 50 percent top tax rate, withdrawal from NATO, unilateral nuclear disarmament, nationalization of key industries, support for Hezbollah and Hamas, etc.
In the words of National Review's Charles C.W. Cooke, the Labor party set itself on fire and "sent a clear message to the public at large. ... That it is happy to lose in perpetuity so long as it can moan and emote along the way."
Seldom has the self-flattering nature of the left been so fully on display; for lefties it might now be more important to feel superior to their loutish fellow citizens than to actually win their votes.
That the Democrats could also march eagerly off the leftward cliff by nominating Sanders now seems less improbable than it did just a few months ago. After all, once untethered from concerns over electoral viability, ideological zeal has few limits.
Put differently, if the loons in the mother country can go full loon, why can't ours?
------------v------------
Freelance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.
Editorial on 09/28/2015