The Pundits Were Delusional, by Jeremy Wiesen
This political season the pundits failed to predict that the nonestablishment candidates, Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, would do so well. The pundits deluded themselves into thinking that voters would overwhelmingly stick with establishment candidates, timeworn ideologies, and business-as-usual initiatives. To date, the opposite is true.
I am pleased that my opinion piece in the Aug. 20 Star anticipated that Trump, who is more than an entertainer, and Sanders, seen by many as a savior, not a socialist, would be recognized as viable prospects to be president.
The pundits are wrapped up in their own lives. They have good-paying, fun jobs, and a large number of them still work for establishment politicians, which they should disclose each time they appear on television.
The average American lives with daily financial challenges, serving employers who can hold their family’s well-being hostage. Control of their lives, they have not! They dream of having a successful entrepreneur in the family, a focus of Trump’s, or a major redistribution of wealth, the Sanders aim.
Trump and Sanders threaten the pundits in their pocketbooks. These nonpoliticians do less marketing and advertising, less polling and use of consultants.
All the candidates, however, have failed to generate a completely new win-win-win silver bullet for the economy like the one I suggested previously, in which American companies, with $10 trillion in cash on their balance sheets, consider helping employee housing needs, as well as financing customers, suppliers, and infrastructure projects.
Outside of economic issues, the candidates are delusional about the hundreds of thousands of deaths and the suffering of children and their parents in Syria. It is mystifying that a man with a great heart, Bernie Sanders, says that the U.S. cannot be the policeman of the world. That means almost certain large-scale death and suffering in the Middle East, which our minds hate to absorb so we ignore.
Senator Ted Cruz would destroy an unlimited number of lives and properties on the way to defeating ISIS, while Trump seems avidly behind a safe zone in Syria.
On another front, Hillary Clinton rolled out Bill’s United Nations ambassador and secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, to say, “There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other.”
In 1994, Albright vetoed the U.N.’s 3,000 peacekeepers who would have prevented the genocide of 800,000 people in Rwanda who were hacked to death with machetes in a mere 100 days. I assume 400,000 of the slaughtered were women and girls, and Albright is delusional not to realize she should be in hell.
In last week’s Democratic debate in Milwaukee, Hillary Clinton reprised Bill’s role in Rwanda by taking pride in her part in the recent U.N. Security Council ceasefire in Syria, when, according to Professor Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University, Hillary in 2012 was an “obstacle to a ceasefire . . . only escalating carnage. Clinton bares heavy responsibility for that carnage, which has by now displaced more than 10 million Syrians and left more than 250,000 dead.”
Actually, the current count is said to be 475,000 dead and 10,000 children missing.
In Saturday night’s Republican debate, Jeb Bush relied heavily on “my brother kept us safe.” Trump shot back at this truly insane delusion, pointing out that the 9/11 tragedy was on Bush’s watch, and that the invasion of Iraq started the present threats to the U.S. and world peace.
Trump could have gone further. The last President Bush is a template for terrible leadership. Just look at the national security and foreign policy track record of his top appointees.
Meanwhile, former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s billions have detached him from reality. He is considering an independent run for the presidency, saying, “I find the level of discourse and discussion distressingly banal and an outrage and an insult to the voters.” Bloomberg insults tens of millions of Trump and Sanders supporters who do not feel banal at all.
Predicting the future is crucial in every aspect of life. Each time you have to look outside yourself to get the right answer. In 1990, I made 50 predictions, including: “In the 1990s a new international alliance involving most of the countries of the world will be formed in order to fight a common enemy: terrorism.”
In 2003, I wrote: “Increasingly, it seems that the only fervent Republicans and Democrats are people who stand to benefit from belonging to the party — the candidates, their staff, party employees, and others who have infiltrated the party for business or social gain. . . . Politicians can only win now by claiming not to be politicians.”
It is not that hard to be a pundit if you do not delude yourself.
Jeremy Wiesen, a longtime East Hampton resident, is a retired professor of entrepreneurship at New York University’s Stern School of Business and is part of the U.S. State Department’s Global Entrepreneurship Program.