“Crazy About Money”: Cruz’s Obsession With Gold Would Do Even More Economic Damage Than Trump
In this year of Trump, the land is loud with the wails of political commentators, rending their garments and crying out, “How can this be happening?” But a few brave souls are willing to whisper the awful truth: Many voters support Donald Trump because they actually agree with his ideas.
This is not, however, a column about Mr. Trump. It is, instead, about Ted Cruz, who has emerged as the favored candidate of the G.O.P. elite now that less disagreeable alternatives have imploded.
In a way, that’s quite a remarkable development. For Mr. Cruz has staked out positions on crucial issues that are, not to put too fine a point on it, crazy. How can elite Republicans back him?
The answer is the same for Mr. Cruz and the elites as it is for Mr. Trump and the base: Leading Republicans support Mr. Cruz, not despite his policy positions, but because of them. They may not like his style, but they agree with his substance.
This is true, for example, when it comes to Mr. Cruz’s belligerent stance on foreign policy. Establishment Republicans may wince at the candidate’s fondness for talking about “carpet bombing” or his choice of a noted anti-Muslim bigot and conspiracy theorist as an adviser.
But both Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio chose foreign policy teams dominated by the very people who pushed America into the Iraq debacle, and learned nothing from the experience. I know I wasn’t the only observer who looked at those rosters and thought, “They will, in fact, be greeted as liberators.”
And then there’s a subject dear to my heart: monetary policy. You might be surprised to learn that few of the subjects I write on inspire as much passion — or as much hate mail. And it’s a subject on which Mr. Cruz has staked out a distinctive position, by calling for a return to the gold standard.
This is, in case you’re wondering, very much a fringe position among economists. When members of a large bipartisan panel on economic policy, run by the University of Chicago business school, were asked whether a gold standard would be an improvement on current arrangements, not one said yes.
In fact, many economists believe that a destructive focus on gold played a major role in the spread of the Great Depression. And Mr. Cruz’s obsession with gold is one reason to believe that he would do even more economic damage in the White House than Mr. Trump would.
So how can elite Republicans — people who have denounced Mr. Trump in part because they claim that he advocates terrible economic policies — be supporting a candidate with such fringe views? The answer is that many of them are also out there on the fringe.
This wasn’t always true. As recently as 2004, Bush administration economists lauded the very kind of policy activism a return to the gold standard is supposed to prevent, declaring that “aggressive monetary policy can help make a recession shorter and milder.” But today’s leading Republicans, living in their own closed intellectual universe, are a very different breed.
Take, as a not at all arbitrary example, Paul Ryan, the speaker of the House and arguably the de facto leader of the Republican establishment.
As I have pointed out on a number of occasions, Mr. Ryan is fundamentally a con man on his signature issue, fiscal policy. Incidentally, for what it’s worth, Mr. Cruz has been relatively honest by his party’s standards on this issue, openly declaring his intention to raise taxes that hit the poor and the middle class even as he slashes them on the rich.
But Mr. Ryan seems to be a true believer on monetary policy — the kind of true believer whose faith cannot be shaken by contrary evidence. It’s now five years since he accused Ben Bernanke of pursuing inflationary policies that would “debase” the dollar; if the rising dollar and slumping inflation that followed has ever given him pause, he has shown no sign of it.
But what, exactly, is the nature of his monetary faith? The same as the nature of Mr. Cruz’s beliefs: Both men are devotees of Ayn Rand, even if Mr. Ryan now tries to downplay his well-documented Rand fandom.
At one point Mr. Ryan got quite specific about his intellectual roots, declaring that he always goes back to “Francisco d’Anconia’s speech on money” — one of the interminable monologues in Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” — “when I think about monetary policy.” And that speech is a paean to the gold standard and a denunciation of money-printing as immoral.
The moral here is that we shouldn’t be surprised by the Republican establishment’s willingness to rally behind Mr. Cruz. Yes, Mr. Cruz portrays himself as an outsider, and has managed to make remarkably many personal enemies. But while his policy ideas are extreme, they reflect the same extremism that pervades the party’s elite.
There are no moderates, or for that matter, sensible people, anywhere in this story.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Contributor, The New York Times, March 25, 2016
“Radical And Dangerous”: Republican Response To Terrorism Would Fuel More Terrorism
In order to understand the recent attacks in both Brussels and Paris, Ian Bremmer lists “5 facts that explain why Europe is ground zero for terrorism.” Numbers 2 and 3 on the list demonstrate why the response of Republican presidential candidates Trump and Cruz are so radical and dangerous.
It’s no coincidence that these two countries are such breeding grounds for Islamic terrorism. Both are home to some of the most radicalized and ostracized Muslim neighborhoods on the continent; Molenbeek in Brussels, and the banlieues in Paris…
In the refugee crisis, ISIS has recognized a golden opportunity to further its narrative of a civilizational war between Islam and the West—and many European leaders have played directly into the terror group’s hands. When the Polish and Bulgarian prime ministers say that they are only willing to accept Christian refugees, it gives fodder for ISIS to rally more zealots to its cause…ISIS clearly wants the European public to conflate refugees and terrorists, and it has been doing a disturbingly good job so far.
Both Trump and Cruz are providing ISIS with fodder for their “civilizational war between Islam and the West” by suggesting that we should stop immigration of Muslims to this country. And of course, Trump proposes things like torture as well as the targeting of terrorists’ families.
But it was the suggestion from Cruz that law enforcement should target Muslim neighborhoods that is perhaps most alarming because it is so insidious. Not only does it suggest that people should be treated like criminals based on their religious faith, Cruz made this alarming comparison yesterday.
Cruz repudiated the comparison [to Japanese internment camps] at the press conference, saying: “I understand that there are those who seek political advantage and try to raise a scary specter.”
He instead compared it to ridding neighborhoods of gang activity and law enforcement’s efforts “to take them off the street.”
In other words, he is suggesting that living in a Muslim neighborhood (however that is defined) means you should be treated the same as a gang member. A spokesman for the NYPD tweeted an important response.
Hey, @tedcruz are our nearly 1k Muslim officers a “threat” too? It’s hard to imagine a more incendiary, foolish statement
— J. Peter Donald (@JPeterDonald) March 23, 2016
There are those who suggest that one of the reasons four attacks in Europe since 9/11 have killed 426 people, while terrorism has claimed the lives of 45 people in the United States is that Muslim neighborhoods in this country have not been radicalized and ostracized. Republicans like Ted Cruz and Donald Trump want to change all that…and make us less safe.
By: Nancy LeTourneau, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, March 23, 2016
“Tied To The Party’s Nominee”: Why Donald Trump Is Big Trouble For Republican Senators And Congressmen
Mitch McConnell can always be counted on to put a brave face on things. Asked on CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday whether he’s encouraging Republican Senate candidates to distance themselves from Donald Trump should he be the party’s nominee, McConnell essentially said that it isn’t a problem. “We are going to run individual races no matter who the presidential nominee is,” McConnell said. “Senate races are statewide races. You can craft your own message for your own people. And that’s exactly what we intend to do this fall, no matter who the nominee is.”
It’s certainly what many of them will try to do. But can they get away with it?
A few might. But distancing yourself from your party’s leader may be harder now than it has ever been.
To see why, we have to start with an understanding of how much information voters have about different candidates. We can think about a kind of information hierarchy, the top of which is the presidential race. That contest will dominate all the news sources people have about politics: newspapers, local and national TV news, social media, even the conversations they have with family, friends, and co-workers. If the race is between Trump and Hillary Clinton, the clash of these two big, controversial personalities will dominate the news.
The next level down is races for Senate or governor — amply funded, and featuring incumbents with whom people have at least a passing familiarity, but not nearly as prominent as the presidential race. You’ll absolutely hear Trump and Clinton’s messages, whether you believe them or not, but with the lower offices, it’s a challenge just to get the candidate’s name and face in front of people. Go to House seats, and then farther to state legislature or local races, and voters hear only the occasional snippet, drowned out by everything else that’s going on.
That means that it can be difficult to convince voters of something a bit complicated, something that requires them to undo their default assumptions. And one of those assumptions is that candidates from the same party are going to be partners.
Split-ticket voting (choosing one party’s candidate for president and a different party’s candidate for lower offices) has declined in recent years, which is understandable in an era of partisan polarization and tight party unity. Half a century ago, when both parties contained a relatively broad ideological spectrum — for instance, the Democratic Party had both Northern liberals and Southern conservatives — it made more sense to view an individual senator or congressman as a free agent who might act independently of his or her party. But today, most important votes break firmly along partisan lines, which means that your senator is probably not going to surprise you, or the president, with anything he or she does.
That’s not to say there are no more maverick legislators who frequently abandon their party to support the other side’s position. There are a few, like Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) or Susan Collins (R-Maine). But there are fewer of them after every election, and they’re almost gone. The more party unity there is, the more every race is nationalized.
So a message like, “I don’t agree with my party’s leader, even though I will sometimes, but not at other times, and I agree with you that he’s a jerk” is going to be less persuasive now than it might have been at another time.
This could be especially tricky for the Republican incumbents representing swing states. We often think of “purple” states as containing mostly moderate voters, but that’s often not the case. Instead, they may have roughly equal numbers of strong liberals and strong conservatives. You can see that in places like Iowa and Wisconsin, both of which will have incumbent Republican senators facing serious challenges this year. That makes things complicated for those Republicans — they don’t want to alienate the Trump fans who will be coming out to vote for president, but they also don’t want to push away voters who can’t stand him.
And you can bet that in nearly every competitive Senate race, there are going to be ads targeting the Republican that will try to tie him or her to the Republican presidential nominee, particularly if Trump’s popularity stays as low as it is now. “Senator X stands with Trump,” they’ll say, as sinister music plays in the background. “Demeaning women. Threatening immigrants. Encouraging violence. Is that what we want representing us? Tell Senator X and Donald Trump that our state says no thanks.”
Some Republican incumbents are running in extremely conservative states, in which case they probably don’t have to worry. But others will face two questions: Whether they even want to distance themselves from Trump, and if they do, whether they can do it successfully. One thing’s for sure: it isn’t going to be as easy as Mitch McConnell would have you believe. And the farther you go down the ballot, the harder it’s going to get.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Week, March 22, 2016
“Jim DeMint Looking Over His Shoulder”: Trump Made A Big Promise Aimed At Winning Over Nervous Conservatives
It sort of got lost in competing news about his efforts to seem a mite more normal now that he’s almost certain to head to Cleveland in July as the leader in delegates, if not the putative nominee, but Donald Trump made a very unusual and highly significant promise aimed right at the beating heart of movement conservatism:
Speaking at the construction site for his new hotel in Washington, D.C., Monday, Trump said he will make a list public in the next week of 10 conservative judges that he would consider nominating to the Supreme Court. If elected, Trump said, he would only pick from that list, which is being made in consultation with the conservative Heritage Foundation.
He first made that promise over the weekend in Florida, and he seems to want to make sure it’s widely heard. This means somebody is giving him good advice about how to address the concerns of conservatives about his ideological reliability.
Of all the things they fear about a President Trump, the most urgent is that he will throw away a once-in-a-generation opportunity to reshape SCOTUS and constitutional law. And of all the temptations they have to hold their noses and support the man despite all of his heresies and erratic behavior, the most powerful would be the confident belief that at least he would position the Court to overrule Roe v. Wade, protect Citizens United, overturn Obama’s executive orders, eviscerate regulation of businesses, inoculate religion-based discrimination, and maybe even introduce a new Lochner era of constitutionally enshrined property rights. This would be a legacy that might well outweigh the risks associated with a Trump presidency.
Promising to make his SCOTUS list public right now is smart, because otherwise it’s an empty promise, and involving the Heritage Foundation in developing it is key to its credibility. Not only has Heritage had a long history of vetting Republican appointees; its current president, Jim DeMint, is arguably the most reliable of “constitutional conservatives,” a man who believes conservative policy prescriptions ought to be permanently protected from the occasional liberal majority via a divinely inspired and unchanging Supreme Law.
Bonding with conservatives over SCOTUS makes some psychological sense for Trump as well. Nothing symbolizes the betrayal of the conservative rank and file — whose abiding exemplar is arguably the humble anti-choice activist staffing phone banks and licking envelopes to protect the unborn from “baby-killers” — by those GOP elites in Washington better than the long string of Republican SCOTUS appointees who have turned out to be traitors to the Cause, from Roe v. Wade author Harry Blackmun to the generally liberal John Paul Stevens and David Souter to the current Obamacare-protecting chief justice. If Trump can break that pattern with Jim DeMint looking over his shoulder, maybe he won’t be that bad for conservatism after all.
By: Ed Kilgore, Daily Intelligencer, New York Magazine, March 22, 2016
“Changing The Electoral Dynamic”: The Unexpected Political Impact Of Terrorist Violence
Early this morning, as many Americans were just learning about this morning’s deadly terrorist violence in Brussels, Politico’s Blake Hounshell noted on Twitter, “America may be one major terrorist attack away from Donald Trump as president.” MSNBC’s Chris Hayes responded soon after that it’s a scenario that keeps him up at night.
This line of thought is not at all uncommon: in a general election, Trump, burdened by broad unpopularity, would start the race as an underdog, but many analyses have concluded that he could win the presidency anyway if voters are sufficiently terrified. It feeds into a conventional wisdom that suggest Republicans benefit politically in the wake of terrorism, and Trump specifically benefits even more.
But the conventional wisdom may not be entirely correct. Yes, Trump has seen a boost in GOP support after attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, but extrapolating to a national audience is a different story. I’m reminded of this Washington Post/ABC News poll we discussed around Thanksgiving – after the Paris attacks and when Americans were increasingly panicked about refugees.
A crescendo of tough talk on Syrian refugees and terrorism seems to be elevating the toughest talkers in the GOP primary – most notably Donald Trump. But among the broader American public, the most trusted person to handle the issue is Hillary Clinton. […]
By 50 percent to 42 percent, more Americans say they trust Clinton to handle the threat of terrorism than Trump, who leads the Republican field and responded to the Paris terrorist attacks by calling for heightened surveillance of mosques and redoubling his opposition to allowing Syrian refugees to settle in the U.S.
Clinton’s eight-point advantage over Trump wasn’t unique: the same poll showed the Democratic frontrunner also leading the other GOP contenders when respondents were asked, “Who would you trust more to handle the threat of terrorism?”
It’s not the only data available on this. The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent noted this morning, “A recent Economist/YouGov poll found that only 30 percent of Americans think Trump is ‘ready to be Commander in Chief,’ while 60 percent say he isn’t. For Hillary Clinton, those numbers are 46-45.”
As we discussed several months ago, Democrats may be at a perceived disadvantage on matters related to national security generally, but Clinton, if she’s the Democratic nominee, will have more foreign-policy experience than any other presidential candidate in a generation. All of the remaining Republican candidates are either literal or practical amateurs on international affairs.
If the question is one of preparedness, it’s a test the former Secretary of State passes easily.
All of this matters, of course, because of the degree to which it challenges preconceived ideas about which issues benefit which parties. Republicans widely believe they benefit most when elections focus on the issues where they’re strongest: national security, foreign policy, counter-terrorism, etc. Just so long as voters overlook their discredited ideas and track record of foreign-policy failure – and in Trump’s case, the fact that he’s painfully clueless – GOP officials are certain they’re on firmer ground when voters’ attention moves away from the economy, health care, education, and the environment.
But there’s some evidence that suggests Clinton’s resume is unique, and with her background comes an ability to speak with authority on an issue Republicans claim as their own. It changes the electoral dynamic in ways the political world may not have fully digested yet.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, March 22, 2016
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