It is, at this point very unclear who will be the candidate for president with an "(R)" after his name (I can say "his" now, with the unfortunate departure of Carly Fiorina from the campaign). Even, or maybe especially after the debate Saturday night, there is a legitimate opportunity for Donald Trump to win enough delegates to go to the convention with the nomination in hand, but there is still a long way to go, and several of the candidates are funded well enough to stay in for the duration.
It is even less clear, perhaps, on the Democrats' side. Yes, I know that whatever may be the widespread and growing support for Bernie Sanders among actual breathing Democrat voters, Hillary Clinton has an immovable choke-hold on the "super delegates", the Party folks who get a vote irrespective of the voting in their state of residence. The super delegate count is about one-eighth of the total number, enough so that Hillary gets almost one-quarter of the way to the nomination just by having secured most all of the Party types.
Yes, I know all that. I also know that when the FBI has 150 investigators exploring the clearly illegal and probably feloniously illegal receipt and transmission of classified information, it is not ending well for Mrs. Clinton. The FBI will undoubtedly recommend an indictment, given the extraordinary amount of effort -- do you understand what 150 FBI agents cost? The Justice Department, headed by Loretta Lynch, appointed to a previous position by Hillary's "husband", will then decide whether or not to indict her. If they don't, FBI agents will resign in droves -- they're already leaking information on the investigation so that the results can't be spun by their political-appointee superiors at Justice. And that will not look good for Hillary.
All that said, if you had to bet a dollar on the candidate selections, I expect that you would likely bet that Hillary will be the nominee, if she is not in prison by then, and that she will face off against Donald Trump. And there is one aspect of that competition that is worth considering.
Hillary Clinton is reflexively pro-union, by which I mean "pro-union donations to her campaign." She is a big fan of the happy dance, by which government-employee unions donate to the campaigns of Democrats, who then sit down with the same unions and negotiate contracts favorable to the unions who bought their support with campaign donations. Big fan of that, she is.
Donald Trump's relationship with unions is way, way different. He has not been involved working with government-employee unions nearly as much as private-sector ones, particularly construction and trade unions who help build his buildings. Which, by the way, is his business. Working with those guys is not a lot of fun.
I'm definitely not a union guy. I belonged to one in my life, the American Guild of Variety Artists back when I played a little cocktail piano in bars in the '70s. My experience with unions personally is pretty much a blank. But what I do believe is that the evolution of unions in the USA from the early 1900s looks something like this, chronologically:
(1) Business abused employees for long hours, poor conditions and low wages
(2) Unions formed to unite employees and solve the hours, conditions and wages issues
(3) Unions addressed the issues and the issues were neutralized
(4) Lawmakers enshrined in law the worker rights sought by the unions
(5) Having gotten solved all the worst of the problems and abuses, the unions no longer served any function other than legal agency for the workers in their union.
The last is the problem. By the time they had made it decent to be a worker in a unionized or even non-union job, they had accrued huge pension funds and massive political power. You think they would give all that up just because they were no longer needed? I didn't think so, either. Neither did Victor Riesel. Look him up.
So what we have is a huge institution in the union world, which has accomplished all its goals and no longer has a reason to exist in the form that it once had -- yet it does. And by being as large as it is, well, it has power that it no longer needs -- or deserves. The legal balance, if anything, is already in favor of the employee over the employer (trust me).
So if it comes to a debate between The Donald and The Hillary, at some point, the topic will become "jobs." And I want to hear Donald Trump say this:
"We can talk about unionized jobs and union employees all we want. But let's make it clear -- the only experience Mrs. Clinton has is in the mutual back-scratching world of government-employee unions. I, in decades of building in this country, have had a long, long relationship with private-sector unions. I have worked with their leadership to negotiate contracts and, unlike Mrs. Clinton, I have provided real, productive jobs in the private sector for union employees.
"The union leaders may not like me a lot after years of negotiating, but they know me and they know that I respect them -- and they respect me in turn. They respect me because, at the end of the day, their members have more jobs, bring home more money in pay, and pay more back to them in union dues, because I have been successful. There is not one thing that Hillary Clinton can say to compare, because no matter how much pandering she does to organized labor, their members know that she hasn't done one thing to give them work. I have, and the trade unions know it."
Donald Trump could then turn to Hillary Clinton and watch her dissolve into a pool of Jell-O, because she has not one cogent sentence to say in reply.
Admit it -- wouldn't you want to see that?
Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
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