Today is Shakespeare’s birthday, and I have to wonder whether the bard would have seen our current political situation as a comedy, tragedy, low farce, or perhaps all three.
He’s been dead for more than 400 years, but if he were to somehow come back to us, I would be happy to recommend a title for whatever play he might choose to write about the Trump administration. I’d call it: As You Don’t Like It.
Which is, I suppose, one of the many reasons Shakespeare, who lived a mere 52 years, is immortal, and I will probably be forgotten a week after I am dead.
But back to Donald Trump.
This may startle, delight or depress you but when you look at history, the odds are pretty good that Trump will be reelected next year. That doesn’t mean he is more popular than he seems. He got only 46 percent of the popular vote last time, and I see no sign that he has expanded his base, though no one really knows.
Indeed, polls show that if the election was merely a referendum on whether Trump should be President for another four years, most of us would vote no. But of course, that’s not how our elections work. Polls showed a majority wanted George W. Bush gone in 2004. However, they ended up preferring him to John Kerry, and so he got a second term.
The fact is that Presidents usually get reelected. Over the last century, incumbent Presidents have run for re-election 15 times. They won 11 times, and lost only four.
The four losers were Herbert Hoover, who was done in by the Great Depression, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and the first George Bush. In each of those cases, the losers were done in by extraordinary circumstances. Ford was and still is the only person who got to the Oval Office without having been elected President or vice-president.
His party was severely damaged by Watergate, inflation was out of control, and he bore the stigma of having pardoned Richard Nixon.
But Ford still barely lost, winning 241 electoral votes to Jimmy Carter’s 297. You could even argue that his near-miss was a political triumph, given the circumstances.
Jimmy Carter, a good man who had a hard time seeming presidential, lost by a landslide to Ronald Reagan four years later. But again, the country was in economic doldrums.
For a year, the United States had seemed a pitiful giant, held prisoner by the Iran hostage crisis, and people desperately wanted change. Still, we should remember that Reagan actually got less than 51 percent of the vote in that election, and a third-party candidate, liberal Republican John Anderson, got a lot of votes that may have gone to Carter instead.
The last presidential loser in our lifetimes was the first George Bush, who was pretty plainly done in by another third-party candidate, H. Ross Perot.
Now, of course, the past is only partly useful as a guide to the future. We’ve never had a President like Donald Trump. There are plenty of reasons to think he could be defeated next year. Yet remember this also: His negatives are well known.
But how much do we really know about most of the Democrats?
There are voters who loathe Trump, but who may not be willing to vote for a candidate who is gay, or soon to be 80, or is a black woman, et cetera, et cetera.
What we do know is that we really don’t know yet what is going to happen. In the end, it may all depend on one factor we probably haven’t been talking about enough.
In the words of that immortal philosopher James Carville, “it’s the economy, stupid.”
Just ask Herbert Hoover, if you have any doubts.
