Boy, I wish I would have had a crystal ball a year ago. I would have traveled to Las Vegas and placed a $100 bet on the likelihood of a certain 2016 presidential matchup – Bernie Sanders vs. Donald Trump. What do you supposed the odds on that would have been? But as we inch closer to the first primary contest in Iowa on Feb. 1, it looks like that’s at least a possibility. Seems as if the shine is starting to rub off Hillary Clinton. I know Iowa and New Hampshire – the first two primary contests – often produce winners who are not the eventual nominee, but it is really quite stunning to me that Sanders has overtaken Hillary in Iowa in at least one poll and has a commanding lead in New Hampshire. That scenario would have been unimaginable a couple of months ago. But these times, they are a changin’ now, aren’t they? Over the weekend, despite the legacy media’s best efforts to keep it hush-hush, I noticed several stories online about Hillary’s email foibles. One was in the New York Observer (observer.com) under the headline “Hillary’s EmailGate Goes Nuclear.” Writer John R. Schindler points out that the latest dump Jan. 7 of 3,000 pages shows that perhaps Hillary’s best buddy Sid Blumenthal was passing along highly classified NSA intelligence reports through her non-secure server. Schindler: One (NSA) official expressed to me “at least 90 percent confidence” that Mr. Blumenthal’s ... report was derived from NSA reports, and the Agency ought to be investigating the matter right now. Then there was the revelation that Hillary instructed a state department adviser to remove the classified heading from some talking points and send them nonsecure. Hillary, using her private email server, asks the adviser for a set of talking points. The adviser emails back and says: “They say they’ve had issues sending secure fax. They’re working on it.” Hillary responds, “If they can’t, turn into nonpaper w[ith] no identifying heading and send nonsecure.” Hillary quickly – and in rare fashion – took to the Sunday talk shows to tamp down the controversy. She said this was no smoking gun, explaining the State Department has one system for transmitting classified information, and another for non-classified and some communications contain both. “Look, I need information. I had some points I had to make. And I was looking for a secure fax that could give me the whole picture. But, oftentimes, there’s a lot of information that isn’t at all classified. So, whatever information can be appropriately transmitted unclassified often was. That’s true for every agency in the government and who everybody does business with the government,” Hillary told “Face the Nation” host John Dickerson on CBS “And, in fact, as the State Department has said, there was no transmission of any classified information. So, it’s another effort by people looking for something to throw against the wall, as you said in the beginning of the program, to see what sticks. But there’s no there there.” Then there’s the report from unnamed sources that the FBI has launched a criminal probe into Hillary’s role in getting sweet State Department deals for countries that gave huge amounts of cash to the Clinton Foundation. Hillary denies there is any such investigation. You know what? All of Hillary’s denials may be absolutely true. Perhaps Hillary is pure as the driven snow and faces no risk of indictment over any of her shenanigans. But the fact that she has so much to deny seems to be troubling to a good number of her (former) supporters. That includes liberal outfit moveon.org, which endorsed Sanders this week: “MoveOn members are feeling the Bern,” Ilya Sheyman, executive director of MoveOn.org Political Action told the Associated Press. “We will mobilize aggressively to add our collective people power to the growing movement behind the Sanders campaign, starting with a focus on voter turnout in Iowa and New Hampshire.” AP says the group lists 8 million members and says it will mobilize nearly 75,000 of its members in Iowa and New Hampshire. Vice President Joe Biden this week gave an interesting interview to Reuters. Biden: "Bernie is speaking to a yearning that is deep and real and he has credibility on it. And that is the absolute enormous concentration of wealth in a small group of people with the new class now being able to be shown being left out." He told Reuters Clinton hasn’t focused on income inequality as long. "It's relatively new for Hillary to talk about that. Hillary's focus has been other things up to now and that's been Bernie's. No one questions Bernie's authenticity on those issues." One poll this week showed Bernie up by 5 points in Iowa, In another, he was up 14 in New Hampshire. The vaunted Des Moines Register poll had Hillary up by 2 points – within the margin of error. Does all of this mean Hillary could lose the nomination to Bernie? Maybe. But for the sake of the remainder of this column, let’s assume – like everyone has for years – she will be the nominee. Because now we have to talk about Trump. Readers of this column saw me pontificate way back in August that I didn’t think Trump was serious about winning the Republican nomination. I wrote that he – a longtime friend and supporter of Bill and Hillary – might just play the role of spoiler by running as an independent and throwing the general election to Hillary. I was comfortable with that prognostication because back then I was confident Trump didn’t think he could win. All bets are off now though, because it looks like he can. The conventional wisdom has always been that even if Trump could win the primary, he’d get mopped up by Hillary in the general, right? Well, not really. A new survey shows a sizable number of Democrats ready to defect to Donald Trump. No, that’s not a typo. It says Democrats. According to AP, a new survey by Washington-based Mercury Analytics is a combination online questionnaire and "dial-test" of Trump's first big campaign ad among 916 self-proclaimed "likely voters." Nearly 20 percent of likely Democratic voters say they'd cross sides and vote for Trump. What!? AP: Mercury CEO Ron Howard, a Democrat whose firm works for candidates in both parties and corporate clients, concedes, "We expected Trump's first campaign spot to strongly appeal to Republican Trump supporters, with little impact – or in fact negative impact – on Democratic or independent voters. The challenge to Hillary, if Trump is the nominee and pivots to the center in the general election as a problem-solving, independent-minded, successful 'get it done' businessman is that Democrats will no longer be able to count on his personality and outrageous sound bites to disqualify him in the voters' minds." Right now, Trump has high unfavorable ratings among likely voters in both parties. Basically, people think he’s a caustic blowhard. Even at that, he’s got a big lead among Republicans and is attracting significant numbers of Democrats and Independents. He already has started to soften his approach a bit. And if he wins the primary, you can bet he will tone it down even more and start sounding downright reasonable and pragmatic. At that point, any reluctant Republicans might feel comfortable voting for him and more voters from the middle might get on board. Can Trump actually pull this off? Can Sanders? Who knows? But one thing is sure. I have been watching politics for more than 35 years and I have never seen anything like this.
