COMMENTARY

BRUMMETT ONLINE: Not ready to hatch yet

It is not nearly time to set the general election matchup.

Let’s not even think at this point of penciling-in Republican Donald Trump against Democrat Bernie Sanders with billionaire independent Michael Bloomberg in the race because of the great gap of electoral opportunity existing between those wild extremes.

It is not nearly time to say that Hillary Clinton faces the real and looming prospect of losing the Democratic presidential nomination. The race now moves to Southern areas with black voters — territory friendlier to her, at least in the context of the alien and socialist Sanders as the alternative.

Nor is it time to say Trump has the Republican nomination locked up. He still must deal with conservative religious zealot Ted Cruz in conservative religious states like Alabama, South Carolina and, well, Arkansas. Some professed conservative Christians might frown — might — on Trump’s vulgarities in public.

But it is time to say all of the following:

First, Hillary Clinton is weak. She has no simple or clear message. She generates no excitement. Competence doesn’t inspire. She is out of touch. She doesn’t connect with young people. She seems like yesterday’s candidate. She lacks warmth in her public manner. She represents politics as usual, even as she contends to make history as the first woman president. She acts like it’s her turn, her entitlement.

Second, Trump is now the odds-on Republican favorite. Marco Rubio’s debate meltdown may have nominated Trump. Until that seismic event, Rubio was set to emerge as the GOP establishment alternative to Trump in a winnowed race. But Rubio went into a late and deserved freefall over three days in New Hampshire. That left a muddled picture for the establishment, one including the nice but weak Jeb Bush and a moderate John Kasich, who is not a natural contender in the South. Thus the field stays crowded, sufficiently dissipated that Trump’s 35 percent, which is probably a cap for him that couldn’t win a two-man race and maybe not a three-man one, can produce winning pluralities in state after state.

The Rubio destruction, performed Saturday by Chris Christie with Rubio’s eerily revealing assistance — I simply cannot tell you how big that was, though I am trying.

Third, Bernie Sanders is for real. He probably is not yet sufficiently national in his appeal to achieve the nomination, as the South and perhaps parts of the West will demonstrate by early March. But he is a campaign dynamo, a debating force, not cowed in the least by the Clinton juggernaut. He leads not a candidacy, but a clearly defined movement, one that is remaking American politics. It’s one in which white people under 30 are saying that socialism is not a dirty word for them, but an irrelevant one, if, that is, Bernie can do what he says. That means upturning an economic and governing system that burdens them with early adult debt and unfairly consolidates in a few hands the wealth they seek only a fair shot at a small part of.

Fourth, the entire political establishment, encompassing the two parties and elites and lobbyists and pundits, is enduring wholesale voter rejection, perhaps generational and transformational. Trump has never been much of a Republican, but maybe more of a Democrat, and Sanders has always been an independent and democratic socialist who caucused with the Democrats only because they were closer to socialists than Republicans were.

A majority of Americans wants to shake things up big time. But some want to shake things up in Trump’s vaguely macho way, and some want to shake things up in Sanders’ newly in-vogue progressive way.

Thus, we have Bloomberg. He has nearly $40 billion. He wants to be president. He is a blend of liberal and conservative elements. He looks at the possibility of a Trump-Sanders contest and figures there is a place for a well-funded eclectic candidate falling broadly in between.

He might be right — if that unlikely matchup occurred.

The problem for strong independent presidential candidates has always been that they can get a lot of popular votes but can’t compete with the party bases to actually win any state in the arena in which the game is played — the Electoral College.

I think Bloomberg looks at Trump versus Sanders and figures they might split 65 percent in several big states, leaving a dismayed 35 percent. And y’all can do the math on that.

John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers’ Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.

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