Recent calls for Donald Trump to step down as the Republican candidate for president reminds me of Scott Lee Cohen.
For those who don’t remember Cohen, let me refresh your memory. Scott Lee Cohen was a wealthy Chicago pawnbroker who ran for Illinois lieutenant governor in the 2010 Democratic primary. He mostly used his own money to fund his campaign for the nomination, which he won.
He had a rather checkered past: he was divorced, he was accused of assaulting an alleged former prostitute — who was also his girlfriend — he was accused of using steroids and he was accused of having had numerous affairs.
Oh, yes, and he was a businessman, not dependent on the Chicago Democratic machine.
Immediately after Cohen’s primary election victory, the machine bosses discovered that there was something unsavory about their newly minted nominee for lieutenant governor. Let’s be plain: nobody voluntarily bows out of a campaign after running and then winning a primary election, using his own money, only to miraculously see the light of righteousness after victory has been secured.
Simply put, Cohen was forced to drop out by the Democratic bosses, who saw him as a threat.
So now, along comes Donald Trump. He has a checkered past, he won the nomination against a field of candidates stacked with career politicians. Could it be that Trump won the nomination precisely because he was an outsider, just like novice candidate Scott Lee Cohen? The sexual peccadilloes of both Cohen and Trump sound familiar, like those of the 42nd president of the United States whose wife ran to his defense, and now also happens to be running for president herself.
I’m no fan of Donald Trump, and I don’t intend to vote for him, but I think he’s being given the shaft by the political elites and their pals in the media.
First of all, the calls for Trump to step down come from the political elites who were defeated by Trump in the primaries. You remember the sacred primaries, the enlightened replacements for the smoke-filled rooms, the primary elections where the voices of the people supposedly can be heard, (unless of course the people refuse to do as they are told by the political elites—just ask Cohen).
And speaking of primary elections, internal emails released by WikiLeaks just before the Democratic National Convention revealed that Democratic National Committee staffers had their thumbs on the scale during the primaries, favoring Hillary Clinton over insurgent Bernie Sanders. The main idea for having primary elections was to eliminate backroom deals. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, chair of the DNC, and senior staffers didn’t resign because the email revelations exposed some trivial glitch within the party leadership. The emails show that the favoritism toward Clinton was an inside deal, which was concealed from public scrutiny and then put into practice. The fix was in.
So we have one major party in which a bombastic, novice, insurgent won, in spite of furious pushback from the party elite (which want him to step down), and the other party in which the elite rigged the nomination process so the candidate of the party establishment could limp across the finish line.
Possibly the worst part of all of this is primary elections are held at great expense to taxpayers, and for what?
What does the growing population of independent voters get from the primary elections charade, other than paying the bill for providing faux legitimacy to the candidates of the two major parties?
