Cornering the Anger Market

[Uncle Joe]

Let’s talk for a minute about Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump.

Both of them were in New York this week. Sanders made a speech about Wall Street to a large and boisterous crowd. They cheered his idea of taxing financial transactions and using the money to make public college tuition free. They booed Wall Street executive bonuses, and loudly joined in to finish some of Sanders’s sentences. (“Congress does not regulate Wall Street … WALL STREET REGULATES CONGRESS!”)

(snip)

Both men’s campaigns are about outrage. Sanders wants the country to rise up against the special privileges that keep making the richest 1 percent richer. Trump rocketed to the top of the polls by railing about illegal immigrants. The saddest thing about this presidential race so far is that the Trump approach has gotten way more attention.

(snip)

There’s something a little refreshing in a candidate who does all his bragging up front. And let’s acknowledge that the number of typical American voters who want to listen to a call for the return of the Glass-Steagall Act is not as large as the number who want to hear Trump rant against environmental regulations by describing his affinity for hair spray.

But Sanders has such better villains. In his Wall Street speech, he talked about businessmen who get away with the financial equivalent of murder. Wachovia, an American bank later acquired by Wells Fargo, “aided Mexican drug cartels,” Sanders said, by laundering billions of dollars in their cash. “Yet the total fine for this offense was less than 2 percent of the bank’s $12.3 billion profit … and no one went to jail. No one went to jail.”

(snip)

It’s not all that stunning that he’s so far ahead in the national polls, given the quality of the Republican competition. But it’s depressing that he’s cornered the anger franchise when his targets exclude America’s own wealthy and powerful.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/07/opinion/cornering-the-anger-market.html?_r=0

[leftofcool]

1. Anger in a potential President is too scary.

We need someone who is cool, calm controlled, not angry.

[Uncle Joe]

2. I hear you.