Carpetbaggers

This election cycle, the two major parties look to offer us a choice between two carpetbaggers for the office of President of the United States. This may seem an odd statement--how can a presidential candidate be a carpetbagger? You have to have been born here to run for office, and so long as you are a citizen over 35 years of age and living somewhere in the US, you qualify for that office.

Hillary Clinton's carpetbagging is evident, in that she did this to be elected as a senator, which then enabled her to run for this office (and lose) 8 years ago. She has kept her face (and name) in the public eye by serving as a (scandal-ridden, if anybody bothers to look) Secretary of State. If I had to guess, she would likely not have made much headway in 2008 (and thus, thereafter) if she had not spent time as the senator from New York--yet one wonders if she had set foot in that state, other than to change planes and perhaps to campaign for her husband, prior to deciding to run for the Senate in 2000. Lord know she wouldn't have been elected as the senator from Arkansas.

What of Donald Trump? In What sense does a man whom has never held public office prior to running for President, and whom has spent his life in these United States, deserve the title "carpetbagger?" Whereas Mrs. Clinton is a carpetbagger in the strictest sense of the word--a "geographic carpetbagger," if you please--Mr. Trump is what I would call an "ideological carpetbagger."

He's switched party affiliation a few times, but by and large the ideology which he is espousing does not seem to be his ow, and is in fact largely a sort of parody of what many of the Right stand for. Certainly, he has suddenly pivoted to some semblance of the right on a number of issues, just in time to run an anti-establishment campaign for the Republican nomination; he managed to crowd out the far better Ted Cruz in doing so. And certainly, there are a few promising which he made on the early campaign trail (and then unmade, and then perhaps re-made) which would be nice, if implemented: the border wall, and stricter border security and control in general, for example. But on the whole, the man has done nothing to make me trust any promises which he has made; in some ways, it would be preferable if he rose to the level of a carpetbagger--in the sense that then, he might at least attempt to deliver on his new ideological promises, much as a carpetbagger must maintain some semblance of residence in his or her newfound "home" district.