Into the home stretch. Unless we aren't. The Republican nomination fight could be all but over on Tuesday. Or if not then on April 19, when New York, Connecticut, Pennsylvania and other voters with 1,299 delegates decide whether they want Donald Trump to make a run at gilding the White House while figuring out how to ignore the Constitution, or Ted Cruz to become available to lumber our television sets for the next four years with his special brand of humorless high-IQ preaching. Or if not then, in July in Cleveland, when the Republican establishment, which brought us Bob Dole and Mitt Romney, and assumed that their past successes would enable them and bundles of cash to put poor Jeb Bush at our disposal, plans to broker a convention so that vox populi remains unheard.
Democrats may be chortling as the Republican circular firing squad gradually reduces its membership, but the sensible ones are undoubtedly wishing that they too were spoilt for choice, as our British friends say. Instead, they have only one candidate, of such appeal that she lost to a socialist in Michigan and, according to the New York Times, is still "honing her message," this after longer in public life than many voters have been drawing breath.
One victim of the Republican candidates' battle for votes and Mrs. Clinton's efforts to win liberals back to capitalism from their flirtation with socialism has been free trade. Sanders' upset victory in Michigan might have finally consigned free trade to the dustbin of history, a phrase with which Sanders, who honeymooned in Russia, is familiar but for obvious reasons chose not to deploy.
According to some estimates, because of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), Michigan lost about 150,000 high-paying manufacturing jobs. Blame it on then-president Bill Clinton, the trade pact's sponsor. The auto industry was decimated not only by Mexico but by Japan, and misrule by over-promising Democratic liberals drove Detroit to bankruptcy. The city was once home to 1.8 million people and the auto industry, the pride of the nation's manufacturing sector. Then came competition from overseas. Jobs disappeared, Detroit's population fell by 61 percent, to 700,000, and the average house sells for about $6,000. If your taste runs to an 8-bedroom mansion with a three-car garage, you will have to fork out $14,000. But it needs work.
No, Michigan voters did not become socialists. The majority were simply unprepared to vote for anyone named Clinton, the name of the free-trade destroyer of the state's manufacturing sector. Hillary's husband brought ruin, and voters would not return him to the White House, even only as First Man to a president Hillary, even though she is opposed to president Obama's legacy-seeking Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). With the Ohio and Illinois primaries coming up, Mrs. Clinton's newly honed message will include an even stronger stand against any new trade deals that are now in the works. The rust may be coming off the Rust Belt as the jobs picture brightens, but the memory of the suffering lingers.
Cut through the smoke from the gunfire of the candidates' debates, and we see much of a muchness.
-All candidates are to varying degrees protectionist, and so is a majority of congress. Trump would do unspecified bad things to companies taking jobs overseas and build tariff barriers higher than his wall with Mexico to disadvantage currency manipulators. Clinton would charge companies transferring their headquarters to lower-tax jurisdictions an "exit fee" geared to the amount of tax relief they have received while resident in the US. Cruz is for fairer trade, whatever that may mean – is anyone in favor of unfair trade? – while Marco Rubio, teetering on the brink of irrelevance, stands alone in reminding voters that high tariffs mean higher prices in Walmart. TPP RIP.
-All candidates are to varying degrees hostile to the financial community, with socialist Sanders calling for a break-up of the big banks and jail time for malefactors of great wealth, as well as a tax on financial transactions to fund his education plan. Trump hates hedge fund managers, presumably even those living in his pricey condos, and would end tax treatment of their incomes as if they were capital gains, while Clinton, more sensible on this as on many other issues, is calling for reforms that include placing insurance-style burdens on banks proportionate to their threat to the stability of the international financial system.
-All candidates are to varying degrees dissatisfied with the health care system. All Republicans are calling for repeal and replacement of Obamacare with, well, something wonderful (Trump); Sanders wants to convert Obamacare into an NHS-style system which treats all people on the queue equally unless they are rich enough to fly to the U.S. for treatment; and Clinton is for repairing what she believes are the current system's flaws.
-All candidates want to ease the cost of higher education. Sanders would make all public universities tuition-free at an annual cost of $75 billion, Clinton says "No family and no student should have to borrow to pay tuition at a public college or university. And everyone who has student debt should be able to finance it at lower rates." A snip at $350 million. Trump says that student loans are "one of the only things the government shouldn't make money off – it's terrible that one of the only profit centers we have is student loans." Details to follow – maybe.
There are two important differences among the candidates. First, Clinton is calling for a de facto ban on fracking and for converting the nation's energy system 100 percent to renewables to fight global warming, while Republican candidates promise to remove regulations on the fossil fuel industries and end efforts to prevent climate change, which they deny is occurring, possibly a hard sell in Tuesday's primary in often-flooded Florida.
Second, all Republican tax reform proposals lower the tax burden on wealthier Americans on the theory that such a move will stimulate sufficient growth (to an implied annual rate of 7 percent, in the case of Trump) and generate tax revenues to pay for itself while creating millions of jobs. Ted Cruz is the most radical reformer: he would have a 10 percent flat tax on all incomes, and substitute a 16 percent VAT-style tax for all corporate taxes. Sanders and Clinton would increase the tax burden on the wealthiest to finance infrastructure rehabilitation and a variety of benefits for low and middle-income earners. No one talks very much about the $19 trillion-and rising deficit.
And none of the candidates sees fit to remind voters of the wisdom of our Founding Fathers, who erected a system of checks and balances that will require them to persuade Congress to make an honest man or woman of them by enabling them to deliver on their promises, unless they intend to treat the Constitution with Obama-like disdain which, as Matthew Continetti persuasively argues in the Washington Free Beacon, is more than possible under Donald but not going to happen should Ted cruise to victory in the primaries and the general election. What comes out of the legislative sausage factory might be far different from what went in.
We will, of course, know more on Tuesday, when over 350 delegate votes are up for grabs, most of them in winner-take-all states such as Florida and Ohio. Then the fun heads north, to regions less favorable to Ted Cruz, and to states in which Trump's typical 40 percent share of the vote earns him 100 percent of the delegates. The so-called Republican establishment, bald and toothless from pulling out hair and gnashing teeth, is hoping that Cruz and Kasich can deny Trump a majority, allowing party regulars to cobble together support for some compromise candidate at the July convention in Cleveland. In which case the millions Trump has brought to the voting booths for the first time storm out, sending the Clintons back to the White House. Unless, of course, Mrs. Clinton's misuse of e-mails results in an indictment, which is why some call this an "FBI primary".