The surging candidacies of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders are fueled by people’s anger with the status quo and desire for authenticity in political leaders.
We hear this every four years. Voters are always angry. They always prize straight talk. They are endlessly entranced by outsiders. And it’s always a surprising new phenomenon.
Can we just stop it? This isn’t new. It’s an evergreen. But political reporters always believe it, and every four years at least a few of them take a tour of “real” America and find exactly what they set out to find. People are fed up! And yet, every four years a fairly ordinary mainstream politician is eventually sent to the White House anyway. Go figure.
POSTSCRIPT: Someone with access to Nexis should do a stroll through the archives. I’ll bet you can easily find at least one example of this in a major newspaper during the early stages of every election cycle for at least the past 40 years.
