Two crazy uncles

Whose crazy uncle is crazier? I suggested in this column last September that Donald Trump was like the embarrassing uncle you probably didn’t want at your dinner table. How would you ever know what goofy thing he might say next? Get him out of here, fast. Don’t let him ruin the party. In that case, of course, it was the Republican Party that was at risk.

Well, that was before we started paying attention to the other crazy uncle. Turns out that Bernie Sanders might be threatening the Democratic Party in pretty much the same way Trump is scaring the Republicans.

The big picture has both experts and non-experts bewildered. Who could have believed it? Take a couple of dozen men and women, supposed by training and experience to represent America’s finest and most competent leadership. Give them all the tools of modern media. Give them staffs as big as small armies. Lubricate their efforts by adding several hundred million dollars to the enterprise. And please, don’t hurry them; give them a couple of years, at least, to get it right.

And what do you get?

Can anyone predict—or even guess—what a Crazy Uncle Trump vs. Crazy Uncle Sanders contest might look like?

What you get, after all that and cruising now into the final days before the first votes are cast in America’s 2016 presidential election, is a handful of “leadership” candidates who so far can’t win the substantial support of folks in their own parties! What you get is a package of relative weaklings including Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio. I call them weaklings because even after all the huffing and puffing of the last year, not one of these leaders has emerged as the broad-based leader of his or her own party.

And it’s pretty clear that the spoiler in both cases is the crazy uncle. Trump showed up last summer, and was quickly written off as a goofy and passing fad. No longer. Much smarter than most of us gave him credit for, he showed a remarkable ability to turn on a dime and win a serious argument. Many serious political observers still doubt that he’ll win the Republican nomination. Almost none of them, though, say it couldn’t happen. And they are profoundly worried that such a nomination will hand the November election to the Democrats on a silver platter.

But then came Bernie Sanders, inflicting very much the same sort of concern on his fellow Democrats. Up until late 2015, the Dems had assumed the invincibility of Hillary Clinton as their nominee and her election in November. But Sanders, like Trump for the Republicans, proved to be a more effective campaigner than anyone expected. And, as Wall Street Journal writer Kimberley Strassel noted, “Some of Mrs. Clinton’s struggles are self-imposed. She’s a real-world, political version of Pig-Pen, trailing along her own cloud of scandal dust. Even Democrats who like her don’t trust her. And a lot of voters are weary or unimpressed by the Clinton name.”

Can anyone predict—or even guess—what a Crazy Uncle Trump vs. Crazy Uncle Sanders contest might look like? Will it lead to the formation of new third-party efforts, as suggested by Peter Wehner in a New York Times column in mid-January? Under the title, “Why I Will Never Vote for Donald Trump,” the former speechwriter and adviser for President George W. Bush cites several of the same facts about Trump that I noted in my September column as reasons to reject him as a candidate. Wehner also says his conscience would prevent him from voting for Hillary Clinton.

How many other Republicans might follow Wehner’s example? Or, to make things more complicated, how many Democrats might find it a stretch too far to cast a Sanders vote for a man who wasn’t registered as a Democrat until last year, and has called himself a “socialist”?

Maybe the voters in Iowa will help straighten this out for the rest of us when they head for their caucuses on Feb. 1. Responding to those two crazy uncles is going to take some thoughtful and godly wisdom.

Email jbelz@wng.org

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