CENTRAL VIEW for Monday, June 8, 2015

2016: The Hail Mary election?

The Hail Mary pass is the desperation play where the offensive team tosses the ball into the End Zone, hoping a teammate catches it. Apparently, Democrats will toss Mrs. Bill Clinton into the political End Zone next year. The Republican’s Hail Mary tosses up almost 50 shades of conservative candidates in the hope that one of them catches on. But is America headed toward the right End Zone? For almost a decade, 85-percent of those polled have said: No!

Recall, in the late 1960s, Baby Boomers were on the college campuses protesting Vietnam, in particular, and traditional American values, in general. The drug culture, the Pill and penicillin sparked a revolution in personal behavior and a rebellion against the traditional values bequeathed to the Baby Boomers by the Greatest Generation.

Some thought the radicals were a passing fad. But the radicals parlayed the advanced college degrees they received while hiding from the Vietnam draft into seizing many of America’s organs of power: Academia, K-12 public education, and the mainstream media.

Back in the 1950s, few could have imagined the election of someone like Barak H. Obama to the Oval Office in 2008. Few would imagine that Hillary Rodham Clinton, a disciple of Saul Alinsky and his "Rules for Radicals," could almost get the Democratic nomination in 2008 and might even be elected president in 2016.

In 2016, America will decide to continue what the late Democrat Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan called: "Defining deviancy down," or return to the more traditional values of the Greatest Generation that delivered us from the Great Depression and from the twin evils of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.

The GOP candidates range from Right to Center Left on social issues and from Right to Center on economic issues. Meanwhile, Mrs. Bill Clinton, to nail the Democratic nomination, must move even more toward the Far Left.

So, the question arises: If Hillary Clinton wins the Democratic Party nomination will the financial shenanigans of the Clintons have tarnished the Democrat brand beyond redemption? By the same token, if the Republican nominee is Jeb Bush, will Independent voters see the 2016 election as a ho-hum contest between two "royal" political dynasties and fail to vote?

It would be a breathtaking act of statesmanship for Hillary Clinton and for Jeb Bush to step aside and let this next election not be about the Washington Establishment and, instead, be about an open opportunity for candidates who are aligned neither with the Old Order nor with the radicalism of the 1960s. While Jeb Bush might shock the political world on June 15th by supporting Marco Rubio. Mrs. Bill Clinton is not likely to change her course.

As Republicans decide between 50 shades of conservatism, the problems of her checkered past could come back to haunt Hillary Clinton out of the Democratic nomination, forcing Democrats to turn to Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders at Far Left, or former Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley on the Left, or President Reagan’s former Secretary of the Navy, Jim Webb, at Center Left. Conceivably, one of the major parties may be coming to the hour of its death.

Nationally syndicated columnist, William Hamilton, is a laureate of the Oklahoma Journalism Hall of Fame, the Colorado Aviation Hall of Fame, the Oklahoma University Army ROTC Wall of Fame, and is a recipient of the University of Nebraska 2015 Alumni Achievement Award. He was educated at the University of Oklahoma, the George Washington University, the U.S Naval War College, the University of Nebraska, and Harvard University.

©2015. William Hamilton.

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