The Party of Washington
What is America angry at today? Make no mistake: Americans of both parties and across ideological lines are angry. Consider just how angry Americans are at both of the two major political parties in how people view potential presidential nominees.
The seven most recent national polls – CBS, IBD, USA Today, Pew, NBC News, and Fox News – reveal that the combined total percentage of support for all of the announced Democrats running for the Democrat nomination (Clinton, Webb, Chafee, and O'Malley) is below fifty percent. It is not just that Democrats are turned off by Clinton; they are turned off by all the Democrats officially in the race.
These same seven most recent national polls show that the combined support for the nomination by the three Republicans who have never held elective office (Trump, Carson, and Fiorina) is more than fifty percent of the all respondents. This is true even when "unsure" and "undecided" are included as options for respondents.
If that seems astonishing, and it should, then consider that the office that has long been considered the second most important in our federal system, speaker of the House, is today an office that no one really seems to want. Has that ever happened in our nation's political history?
The division in America is not "Democrat" versus "Republican," but rather a division that places in one camp all the politicians who derive their power and their wealth from the federal government. Let us call the first political party the "Party of Washington," a gaggle not only of politicians, but federal judges and entrenched bureaucrats, as well as the media, which is assigned to cover Washington.
Every time the federal government does anything, these folks get a piece of the action. Legislation is passed, executive orders are decreed, rules are adopted, and judicial orders are pronounced, with all the members of the Party of Washington gaining something, even as so many of them protest that they oppose a particular action.
The Clintons are perfect examples of the Party of Washington. They have grown fabulously rich without really doing anything at all except broker power and rake in hundreds of millions of dollars. Hillary never goes anywhere unless she is surrounded by her Praetorian Guard of Secret Service agents, and she indifferently combines correspondence that is government property with correspondence that is purely private. The federal government is, to these folks, something to use for personal gain.
Because the gravy is so thick and rich, everyone in the Party of Washington gains when the federal government undertakes some task. The counties surrounding Washington are the richest in America – perhaps the richest in the world.
The Party of America is sprawling, disorganized, and united only by the idea that nothing the federal government does any longer works to the general welfare of honest Americans – even worse, much that Washington does is intended to fail. Even those few essentially federal constitutional duties like protecting our borders, defending our nation, and insuring that money is sound are done incompetently and indifferently by the Party of Washington.
The loud and angry murmuring across America to all the politicians in Washington is the spontaneous voice of the Party of America. Those in that party do not trust politicians, especially career politicians and particularly those livelong Washington politicians whose background is in law or academia or some similar pursuit that is a practical appendage of the Washington establishment.
The man or woman who wins the presidency in 2016 and who also wins the presidency with a true mandate for revolutionary reform will be the candidate who runs against the entire Washington establishment and who makes very specific promises about what he will do if elected. The candidate who wins will be the candidate who runs directly against Washington, with its festering carbuncles of power and influence. That candidate will be not so much a politician who promises to "get things done" in Washington, but rather the candidate who promises to "get things undone."
The Party of Washington is the enemy of hope in America today. We are waiting for someone to end its reign of arrogance, larceny, and collusion. That someone will have an army of determined Americans to support this new and needed revolution.
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