“A Problem Already”: Trump Is A Problem For The GOP And The U.S. Regardless Of His Political Prospects
For months pundits, including myself, have been predicting that Donald Trump lacks a serious, sustained path to the presidency. I still doubt he can win the Republican nomination and am totally convinced that if he became the general election candidate, the November elections would be a bloodbath for the Republican Party.
Others argue that Trump’s anti-immigration, xenophobic, outsider message combined with his celebrity status will be enough to squeak through this crowded field of candidates and secure the nomination.
But this is not just a political parlor game anymore. It is not enough to argue, as Robert Schlesinger did here, that Trump too shall pass or, as Nate Silver does at FiveThirtyEight, that Trump’s support now constitutes only about 6-8 percent of the electorate and that in the last two elections in Iowa and New Hampshire close to half of Republicans made up their minds during the last week before the caucus and primary. Polls will change he says, voters will pay more attention as we approach February and Trump is likely to fade.
More important than Trump’s ultimate fate is his impact on the American psyche, and the world’s.
The real question is the influence that Trump is having on the electorate – with other Republican candidates doing their best to imitate his bluster and outrageousness. From his early criticism of Arizona Sen. John McCain for being a captured war hero, to his repeated demonizing of immigrants as rapists, to his totally false claim that thousands of Muslims in New Jersey were cheering 9/11, Trump does not let up. He is clear about his desire to surveil and even close mosques, to create “watch lists” of Muslims, to bring back waterboarding and more.
The other candidates follow suit: Ben Carson rejects electing a Muslim as president, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush believe, as The Washington Post’s Ruth Marcus writes, “Syrian Christians should be admitted in preference to Muslims.”
Imagine, if you will, a good portion of the over 1.6 billion Muslims (23.4 percent of the world’s population) watching television as this parade of Republican candidates bash them, treat them as pariahs, misrepresent their goals and aspirations and place in the world. And imagine, further, that this becomes their image of America, of what we stand for, of who we are. What are they to do, how do they respond, how are they to act towards us?
Our fear of the terrorists and outrageous ad hoc rhetoric does nothing but create more terrorists. Just as the misguided war in Iraq created more terrorists than it killed what we are facing today in this campaign for president is harming our goals of peace and stability.
It is important to take on the terrorists, to root them out, to build a large and meaningful world coalition against them. But the approach of Donald Trump and others undermines this goal and makes it much more difficult to win the hearts and minds as well as win the battlefield.
The sooner we put an end to the irresponsibility of Trump and the others in this Republican field the better. Then, we can get on with solving the problem of radical jihad in the world.
By: Peter Fenn, Political Strategist and Head of Fenn Communications; U. S. News and World Report, November 25, 2015
“This Ugly Atmosphere Feels A Bit Familiar”: It’s Beginning To Feel Like 2002 All Over Again
At the end of last week, the liberal group Media Matters noted that in the wake of the Madrid bombings in March 2004, Fox News personality Bill O’Reilly asserted that “If al-Qaeda attacks here, President Bush is re-elected in a heartbeat,” since “unlike the Spanish,” who are passive sheep (or something), the strong American public “won’t surrender, they’ll get angry.” But after the recent attacks in Paris, O’Reilly sang a different tune: “We get hit, [Obama] goes down as the worst president in U.S. history. No doubt.”
While Media Matters’s purpose in juxtaposing these two quotes was surely to mock O’Reilly for his partisan hypocrisy, you can look at it another, much more depressing way: O’Reilly was probably right both times.
Not about history’s judgment of Obama, obviously. But given what we’ve seen in the last couple of weeks, it’s becoming hard to hope that anything resembling a rational reaction to the events in Paris will take hold. As I wrote last week, Republicans are rushing to exploit the attacks in the most cynical and repugnant ways, which shouldn’t surprise anyone. But the real problem is that most of the public is going to eat it up.
That’s partly because of what they’re hearing from their leaders. Today’s Republicans would never consider rallying around President Obama if there were an attack in the U.S. the way Democrats did after September 11. They might gather on the Capitol steps, but it wouldn’t be to sing “God Bless America” as Democrats and Republicans did soon after the attacks; it would be to rush to the cameras to condemn Obama for having blood on his hands. Indeed, they already have; “John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama have all served as apologists for radical Islamic terrorism,” said Ted Cruz last week.
People of all parties take cues from their leaders, which helps explain why support for Bush was so universal in the days after 9/11, and why Republicans’ hatred of Obama only grows when they’re made to feel vulnerable to foreign threats. But today’s Republicans are harvesting fertile soils of fear and hate.
People like me can explain until we’re blue in the face that becoming a refugee to Europe is nothing like becoming a refugee to the United States, a process that can take two years; and that sneaking someone into the U.S. posing as a refugee is probably the single hardest way to get them to the U.S. (as opposed to, say, buying them a plane ticket). We can explain that the threat to you and your family’s lives from terrorism is infinitesimal (the number of Americans who have been killed in the U.S. by jihadi terrorists since 9/11—26—just happens to be the same number of Americans who have been killed by lightning in 2015 alone). But it won’t much matter.
A majority of the public opposes bringing in refugees from Syria. Americans now cite terrorism as the most important issue facing the country, though by any logical standard it most certainly is not (for instance, it takes less than two days for more Americans to die from gun violence as died in the Paris attacks). In the wake of those attacks, Donald Trump remains strongly in front in the Republican presidential primary race. As Politico reports, conservative voters in Iowa may be turning away from Ben Carson and toward Ted Cruz now that they’re thinking about terrorism. In truth, Cruz has the same amount of foreign policy experience as Carson (zero), but he’s a lot angrier about it, which seems to be the order of the day in the GOP.
Reporters have spent much of the last week or so trying to pin Trump down on whether he thinks the government should create a database that every Muslim in America would have to register with, a positively fascistic suggestion that he may or may not have been unfairly entrapped into supporting. Like everything else related to government policy, Trump obviously hasn’t given it any serious thought, but reporters are operating on the quite reasonable assumption that it would be scandalous if he actually believed such a thing. But would it?
At least in the Republican primary, where virulent xenophobia now seems to be the order of the day, the answer is probably not. Trump is now talking about putting Muslim houses of worship across the country under surveillance, Marco Rubio agrees, and most voters may find that to be utterly untroubling; after all, it’s not their freedoms being taken away. Trump also wants to begin torturing prisoners again (not that we have any ISIS prisoners), Chris Christie says he wouldn’t even allow a 5-year-old orphan from Syria into New Jersey, Ted Cruz and Jeb Bush say we should only accept Christians but keep out Muslims, and Ben Carson compares refugees to rabid dogs. Nothing that any of the candidates have said since Paris suggests that there is any position they could take or thing they could say that would be regarded by their voters as beyond the pale.
To be clear, I’m not arguing that heightened fears of ISIS will sweep the Republicans into the White House next year; there’s lots of time between now and then, and other issues will grab the electorate’s attention. The American public and its political elite may not have taken leave of their senses to quite the degree they did in the months and years after September 11, when no restriction on individual liberty went far enough, no expansion of government power was too much, and invading a country that had nothing to do with the attacks on us seemed like the perfect way to handle our fear and anger. But the increasingly ugly atmosphere is beginning to feel awfully familiar.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect, November 23, 2015
“It’s Not The Media–It’s Just The GOP Base”: Locked In An Increasingly Hostile Defensive Crouch Against Reality
Bill Schneider at Reuters wrote a piece this week that garnered some attention claiming that the GOP primary disaster is the fault of the media. His argument goes that modern television journalism has created a reality show environment where the most outrageous hucksters perform the best and where quality candidates and policy positions are lost in the undertow. It’s a sentiment shared by many political observers. Schneider writes:
In a contest controlled by the media, personality beats policy. Candidates with colorful and attention-grabbing personalities have the advantage. Even candidates with abrasive personalities, like Donald Trump. And goofy personalities, like Ben Carson.
The process also rewards candidates with well-honed debating skills like Florida Senator Marco Rubio and Texas Senator Ted Cruz. Even though debating skill may not be an essential quality of a great president. Things like a solid record of achievement, practical ideas and endorsements by one’s peers get discounted in today’s media-driven process. Bush’s new slogan – “Jeb Can Fix It” — does not seem to be catapulting him into the lead.
With all due respect, this argument is more than a little bit of wishful thinking. People who make this claim have an idea in their heads of what they think politics should be: a series of competing resumes and white paper policy proposals soberly adjudicated by voters who furrow their brows at community forums. It’s a quirk of certain types of journalists, good government advocates and centrist think tank gurus to believe this about elections, and to favor uninspiring candidates.
But that’s frankly not how major elections work, nor how they have ever worked at least since the advent of television.
There’s nothing different in the press environment in 2015 than there was in 2011. This supposed media-driven reality TV campaign hasn’t seemed to turn the Democratic primary into a circus–rather, the Democratic primary has so far been conducted mostly with grace and the seriousness the issues deserve, in spite of a media that seems far more concerned with Clinton’s emails and the precise definition of socialism, than in the actual policy problems the country faces.
The difference this year isn’t the media. It’s the GOP base. Something has happened over the last 15 years in the American conservative psyche that most journalists and centrist political observers don’t want to admit. Conservatives are locked in an increasingly hostile defensive crouch against reality and demographic trends. Supply-side economics, once unquestioned in its Reagan ascendancy, has been shown to be a failure on multiple levels. President George W. Bush’s signature war in Iraq turned out to be a bungled disaster. Secularism is on the rise, gays can legally get married, and America is fast becoming a minority-majority nation. Climate change and wealth inequality are the two most obvious public policy problems, neither of which has even the pretense of a credible conservative solution. This, combined with the election of the first African-American president, has had a debilitating effect on the conservative psyche, which now sees itself under assault from all directions.
Conservatives have responded by creating their own alternative reality in which rejection of basic facts and decency in the service of ideology is a badge of merit and tribal loyalty. That has created an environment in which the most popular voices tend to be the most aggressive and outlandish.
In this context, the fact that Trump, Carson and Cruz have a stranglehold on the GOP presidential race has almost nothing to do with the media and everything to do with the state of the GOP base.
That the turn toward extremism seems so sudden is a mere accident of history. In 2004 George Bush rode to a narrow victory on the strength of a still-terrified American public. 2006 saw Republicans get shellacked across the board, and the financial crisis took the wind out of GOP sails and made a 2008 Democratic victory almost certain. Even then, the trend was apparent when John McCain selected Sarah Palin as his running mate to wild applause, and then she overshadowed him among conservatives and became the better-loved figure. Barack Obama’s election was followed by a grandiose temper tantrum over a Heritage Foundation, Mitt Romney-inspired healthcare law, leading to a Tea Party insurgency that provided huge gains to Republicans in 2010 and demonstrated where the true power in the Party lay.
That Mitt Romney became the nominee in 2012 was almost a fluke: for months the collection of anti-establishment candidates had more support then Romney, and toward the end Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum of all people combined for greater support than Romney achieved. Romney only won because the real GOP base split its vote. And the rest is recent history.
This is what the GOP base really is and what it has become. The media has little to do with it, except insofar as it has hidden and failed to report the Republican Party’s unilateral march toward reality-free extremism.
By: David Atkins, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, November 22, 2015
“The GOP’s Islamic State Bluster”: As Far As The GOP Field Is Concerned, Generosity Of Spirit Is For Losers
The impact of the Paris attacks on the Republican presidential race may turn out to be minimal, especially since the establishment candidates aren’t making any more sense than outsiders Donald Trump and Ben Carson.
Theoretically, a deadly rampage by Islamic State terrorists ought to make Republican voters think twice about presidential hopefuls who have zero experience in government and no expertise in foreign or military affairs. But the contenders who hold or held high office are offering little more than bellicose rhetoric and overblown pledges of toughness.
Not that it’s easy to match Trump for hyperbole. “Refugees from Syria are now pouring into our great country,” he said on Twitter. “Who knows who they are — some could be ISIS. Is our president insane?”
But Chris Christie, who should know better, went not just over the top but around the bend. He said all Syrian refugees should be turned away, including “orphans under 5.” As governor of New Jersey, maybe he’ll order a security sweep of the Garden State’s elementary school playgrounds.
For the record, Syrian refugees are not “pouring” into the United States. There’s hardly even a trickle: Since the civil war began, slightly more than 2,000 refugees have been admitted. Compare our meager total with the estimated 2 million Syrians taking refuge in Turkey or the hundreds of thousands flooding into Europe. Boosting the number to 10,000 over the next year, as Obama plans, would still mean that the U.S. contribution to alleviating one of the worst refugee crises since World War II doesn’t amount to a drop in the bucket. I could describe in detail the lengthy pre-entry vetting process, which can take up to two years, but why bother? As far as the GOP field is concerned, generosity of spirit is for losers.
Carson’s response to the Islamic State is, unsurprisingly, vague and off-the-wall. He wrote an op-ed in The Post calling for a military strategy virtually identical to President Obama’s, augmented by “a multi-pronged communications strategy that leverages our strengths in media production and messaging, combined with cutting off traditional access routes to social media for radical Islamist groups.” He seems to mean we should create a really cool smartphone app.
But Marco Rubio, too, called for a dramatic escalation in social-media warfare. He said Sunday that “where we strike them, we capture or kill their leaders, we videotape the operations, we publicize them, because this is a group that heavily uses propaganda to attract fighters and donors from around the world.” And John Kasich proposed a new government agency to promote “Judeo-Christian Western values” to the world.
Lindsey Graham had the best response to Kasich’s brainstorm: “I think that was the Crusades.”
Jeb Bush, the ultimate establishment candidate, seemed to sense both opportunity and peril. “The United States should not delay in leading a global coalition to take out ISIS with overwhelming force,” he said in a speech Wednesday. “Militarily, we need to intensify our efforts in the air — and on the ground.”
Coming from anyone else, those words might strike Republican voters as tough and sober. Coming from a candidate named Bush, however, they could portend a geopolitical blunder of historic proportions. Perhaps that is why Bush is vague on how many U.S. ground troops he would send and what they would do, saying he would rely on the judgment of the professional soldiers advising him.
If that sounds familiar, it’s because all the establishment GOP candidates pledge to rely on the generals to tell them how many troops to send. Obama says he follows the generals’ counsel, too.
Rogue candidate Trump, of course, needs no advice. He says he will “bomb the [expletive] out of [ISIS],” applauds the fact that Russian President Vladimir Putin is doing the same and vows to destroy the oil fields that provide much of the Islamic State’s wealth.
He says all of this in typically bombastic fashion. His claim that he will “win” by sheer force of personality is deeply unserious. But the actual policies he rants about may resonate with GOP voters: Rely on air power, get other countries to put troops on the ground, take no chances with refugees, talk really tough.
Two new polls of New Hampshire Republicans, conducted since the Paris attacks by WBUR of Boston and Fox News, show that Rubio may be doing a little better in that state and Carson a little worse. But Trump remains far ahead of the pack. Plus ça change.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, November 19, 2015
“The Perils Of Circus Politics”: Circus Politics May Be Fun To Watch, But It’s Profoundly Dangerous For America And The World
The next president of the United States will confront a virulent jihadist threat, mounting effects of climate change, and an economy becoming ever more unequal.
We’re going to need an especially wise and able leader.
Yet our process for choosing that person is a circus, and several leading candidates are clowns.
How have we come to this?
First, anyone with enough ego and money can now run for president.
This wasn’t always the case. Political parties used to sift through possible candidates and winnow the field.
Now the parties play almost no role. Anyone with some very wealthy friends can set up a Super PAC. According to a recent New York Times investigation, half the money to finance the 2016 election so far has come from just 158 families.
Or if you’re a billionaire, you can finance your own campaign.
And if you’re sufficiently outlandish, outrageous, and outspoken, a lot of your publicity will be free. Since he announced his candidacy last June, Trump hasn’t spent any money at all on television advertising.
Second, candidates can now get away with saying just about anything about their qualifications or personal history, even if it’s a boldface lie.
This wasn’t always the case, either. The media used to scrutinize what candidates told the public about themselves.
A media expose could bring a candidacy to a sudden halt (as it did in 1988 for Gary Hart, who had urged reporters to follow him if they didn’t believe his claims of monogamy).
But when today’s media expose a candidates lies, there seems to be no consequence. Carson’s poll numbers didn’t budge after revelations he had made up his admission to West Point.
The media also used to evaluate candidates’ policy proposals, and those evaluations influenced voters.
Now the media’s judgments are largely shrugged off. Trump says he’d “bomb the shit” out of ISIS, round up all undocumented immigrants in the United States and send them home, and erect a wall along the entire U.S.-Mexican border.
Editors and columnists find these proposals ludicrous but that doesn’t seem to matter.
Fiorina says she’ll stop Planned Parenthood from “harvesting” the brains of fully formed fetuses. She insists she saw an undercover video of the organization about to do so.
The media haven’t found any such video but no one seems to care.
Third and finally, candidates can now use hatred and bigotry to gain support.
Years ago respected opinion leaders stood up to this sort of demagoguery and brought down the bigots.
In the 1950s, the eminent commentator Edward R. Murrow revealed Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy to be a dangerous incendiary, thereby helping put an end to McCarthy’s communist witch hunts.
In the 1960s, religious leaders and university presidents condemned Alabama Governor George C. Wallace and other segregationist zealots – thereby moving the rest of America toward integration, civil rights, and voting rights.
But when today’s presidential candidates say Muslim refugees shouldn’t be allowed into America, no Muslim should ever be president, and undocumented workers from Mexico are murderers, they get away with it.
Paradoxically, at a time when the stakes are especially high for who becomes the next president, we have a free-for-all politics in which anyone can become a candidate, put together as much funding as they need, claim anything about themselves no matter how truthful, advance any proposal no matter how absurd, and get away bigotry without being held accountable.
Why? Americans have stopped trusting the mediating institutions that used to filter and scrutinize potential leaders on behalf of the rest of us.
Political parties are now widely disdained.
Many Americans now consider the “mainstream media” biased.
And no opinion leader any longer commands enough broad-based respect to influence a majority of the public.
A growing number of Americans have become convinced the entire system is rigged – including the major parties, the media, and anyone honored by the establishment.
So now it’s just the candidates and the public, without anything in between.
Which means electoral success depends mainly on showmanship and self-promotion.
Telling the truth and advancing sound policies are less important than trending on social media.
Being reasonable is less useful than gaining attention.
Offering rational argument is less advantageous than racking up ratings.
Such circus politics may be fun to watch, but it’s profoundly dangerous for America and the world.
We might, after all, elect one of the clowns.
By: Robert Reich, The Robert Reich Blog, November 17, 2015
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