TWO weeks from today, the Democratic Party of the United States begins its state-by-state selection of delegates who will choose the party’s presidential candidate to face the Republican Party’s reelectionist President Donald Trump.
Iowa is the first of the 50 US states to make its choice on February 3, followed by New Hampshire on February 11, Nevada on February 22, and South Carolina on February 29. Then will follow Super Tuesday, March 3, when 16 states make their choices.
By June, Democrats in all 50 states will have voted, along with the District of Columbia (Washington, DC), five US territories, and Democrats Abroad. The 3,989 elected delegates will meet in the Democratic Party National Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in July. They will be joined by 771 “superdelegates” appointed from among the national party leaders whose votes will matter only if the elected delegates fail to elect a winner on first ballot.
Twelve major presidential aspirants remain, after 17 withdrew from the early campaign. Of the 12, five are seen as the leaders – Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg, and Michael Bloomberg. Trump’s efforts to put down Biden – asking Ukraine’s president to investigate him for graft – led to the impeachment which Trump now faces in the US Congress.
The Democratic Party-controlled House of Representatives voted to impeach Trump but the Republican Party-controlled Senate is expected to clear him. For impeachment – an institution that we also have in the Philippines – is not a judicial process where evidence is important. It is a political process where parties have always stood by their accused presidents, no matter the evidence.
President Trump has been widely criticized by other national and world leaders because of such decisions as banning immigrants from Muslim-dominated countries, separating children from their parents to discourage South American families from seeking entry into the US, his rejection of US intelligence findings of Russian interference in the last US elections, and ordering the killing of an Iranian general without even informing the US Congress.
Former Vice President Biden, one of the top Democratic Party aspirants, put it this way: “The American character is on the ballot. Not what Donald Trump is spewing out – the hate, the xenophobia, the racism. That’s not what we are as a nation.”
The impeachment in Congress will come to nothing. It will be the national elections in November that will matter. President Trump and his Republicans believe his policies for “America First” will win him reelection. The Democrats hope to stop him and they will begin the long political process when the state of Iowa selects its delegates to the party convention on Monday two weeks from today.
