Since when life really wants to torture you it gives you what you want, I have nothing to do all day but think great thoughts. The result: I've come up with a best-case scenario for today's political mishegas, and thought I'd inflict it on you.
Only some of it is completely implausible.
As the #Occupy movement gains steam, the less well-hinged on the right go completely bananas and start accusing #Occupy of ever more implausible sins, in a rhetorical spiral that straps the rest of the right to its most wild-eyed members.
The press begins asking people like Rep. Eric Cantor what he thinks of said wild-eyed members. Cantor can't say anything without annoying some constituency, so he tries to split the difference and gets pushed farther to the right. Said wild-eyed members get angry at him anyway and their grip on the party actually tightens.
The public recognizes the essential common sense #Occupy represents, and the movement keeps growing.
Among its eventual sympathizers; Tea Party members, whose rank-and-file are already beginning to say they and #Occupy share many of the same perceptions--including the political problem of corporate power, the need to hold finance responsible for today's economic problems, and the belief that government isn't interested in the people's problems and only serves the interests of its campaign contributors. Some in both camps find this really irritating, but the rank and file in both camps keep talking to each other.
Willy-nilly, Mitt Romney gets the GOP nomination, but must accept Herman Cain or Ron Paul as vice president to placate the right. This strikes many rank and file Tea Party members as politics-as-usual--which is what they hate the most. This encourages some to sit out the election, and others to mount a (non-Koch Brothers-financed) challenge to Romney from the right. This drives Romney farther to the right, scaring the bejesus out of the country by reminding it of what the GOP did in August's debt ceiling showdown.
On the other side of the aisle, President Obama, after many meetings with Democratic Party elders and contributors, suddenly discovers he has a rare condition that prevents him from serving a second term.
It won't matter who the new Democratic nominee might be: The GOP's entire story line for the election is shredded. When it finds a new one, the country won't forget the old one, undermining GOP credibility.
Meanwhile the Democrats, shorn of their deep buyer's remorse about the President, get a big boost from Independents willing to give this mystery candidate a shot, if only because said wild-eyed members of the right wing, suspecting the worst is upon them, are getting more agitated all the time. Said Democratic nominee takes office and turns out to be, at a minimum, a less cautious, stronger leader.
Then the country goes to work on our real problems--like Americans. And this scenario sails into dubious waters.
Because meanwhile, I'm thinking, many from the Tea Party, and many #Occupy protestors, recognize over time that they have more or less the same diagnosis for what's wrong with the country, and only disagree on policy issues. And they decide that that's all they're having--a policy dispute. Not a war for the soul of America.
They create a viable third party and push through a Constitutional Amendment repealing corporate personhood. Corporate power in government declines, the nation's various governments go back to ordinary misfeasance, and nothing really bad happens.
I said only parts of it are implausible.
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