“It’s Hogwash, But People Never Seem To Learn”: The Outsider Delusion And The Fallacy Of ‘Getting Things Done’
As you will read in a hundred news stories over the next few weeks, the outsider’s moment in the presidential campaign has arrived. This is going to be the prevailing narrative of the 2016 race, until a new one comes along. It’s perfectly accurate (for now, anyway), but we should ask just what voters are seeking when they gravitate to outsiders, and what they’re likely to get.
First, the latest numbers. A new Marist/NBC News poll of Iowa and New Hampshire shows Donald Trump holding a healthy lead in both states, with Ben Carson coming in a strong second in Iowa and third in New Hampshire; Carson’s rise is not quite as entertaining as the Trump campaign, but it’s nearly as significant. Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders has cut into Hillary Clinton’s lead in Iowa and moved ahead of her in New Hampshire, where the race between the two has been closer for some time now. And a new Economist/YouGov poll shows Trump moving even farther ahead nationally, with his support at 36 percent, followed by Carson at 11 percent.
Most reporters have decided, based not just on poll numbers but also on their conversations with voters and the evidence they gather on the trail, that the state of the race can be explained by the American people’s dissatisfaction with “politics as usual.” Fed up with Washington’s gridlock and its inability to solve big problems, voters turn to outsiders who promise to do things like “shake up the system” and “change the way Washington does business.” These candidates supposedly possess fresh ideas and new perspectives that can turn everything around.
It’s hogwash. But people never seem to learn.
On the Democratic side, you can at least make a reasonable case for Bernie Sanders’ brand of outsiderism. Sanders is no political neophyte — he has held public office for most of the past 35 years, which gives him an insider’s understanding of how the system works. And his argument is a focused one, centered on the influence of big money and how it helps produce and sustain inequality. While tackling that problem is extremely difficult, one could at least imagine a President Sanders making some progress on it.
On the Republican side though, the two leading outsiders, Trump and Carson, have nothing so specific in mind. They argue that they’ll get things done, Trump through the force of his will, and Carson because he is untainted by politics. Ask either one of them about a specific policy issue, and it quickly becomes clear that when it comes to the issues a president deals with, they’re utter ignoramuses, which is perhaps understandable, if less than reassuring. I’m sure Marco Rubio doesn’t know much about brain surgery, which Carson knows a great deal about, but he’s not running for Brain Surgeon in Chief.
If you’re a voter attracted to these outsiders, you’d do well to ask yourself: What, precisely, will an outsider do as president that an insider wouldn’t? Would they pursue a fundamentally different set of policies? Not likely — the policies they’ll pursue will by and large be those of their party. Ben Carson may be a political newcomer, but the policy positions he takes are essentially the same as those of the other Republicans. And any Republican will appoint most of the same people to the thousands of executive branch positions. When it’s out of power, each party maintains what is essentially an executive branch in exile, spread among Washington think tanks and advocacy organizations, waiting to move back into government. It isn’t as though the outsider candidate can fill these positions from somewhere else.
And when it comes to things like government gridlock, you have to ask the question again: What is the outsider candidate going to do differently? Outsiders talk about things like “shaking up the system” and “changing the way Washington does business,” but they seldom get too specific about what those things might mean in practice. What would a shaken-up system look like? For instance, would it mean that Congress would swiftly and efficiently pass a bunch of bills instead of being consumed by bickering?
If that’s your idea of what the system ought to produce, then electing an outsider president isn’t the way to do it. The way to do it is to give one party control of Congress and the White House, preferably with at least 60 votes in the Senate to overcome filibusters. Then you’ll see the system work.
President Obama had that for a time in his first term, and Congress was extremely productive, passing a large economic stimulus, financial reform, health-care reform and a bunch of other stuff you’ve probably forgotten about by now. If you don’t remember that period as one in which the system worked the way it’s supposed to, it’s probably because you didn’t like the particular things Washington accomplished. The real problem you had wasn’t with how smoothly the system operated, but with the substance of what it produced. In fact, Republicans often complain that the Affordable Care Act was “rammed down our throats” — in other words, they think the legislation wasn’t mired in gridlock for long enough (the fact that on Planet Earth it actually passed after more than a year of hearings, debates and negotiations isn’t really the point).
Plenty of voters say they want to get beyond partisanship and just find someone who’ll “get things done,” but that’s not what they really want. Everyone has an agenda. They want some things to get done, but not others. No conservative looked at Obama’s first two years and said, “I don’t like his policies, but I do admire the fact that he’s getting things done, so I’d like him to keep going in the same direction.” When George W. Bush tried and failed to privatize Social Security, no liberal said, “I’m disappointed that he wasn’t able to get things done.”
It’s perfectly understandable that Republicans are attracted to outsiders at this particular moment in history. As I’ve noted before, the real source of discontent among GOP voters with their party’s leaders is less about the rift between the establishment and the tea party than it is about the belief that the party’s leaders are ineffectual. They keep promising their constituents that they’ll destroy Barack Obama, repeal the Affordable Care Act and cut government down to size, but they never deliver. So when someone like Trump comes along and says he’ll sweep aside every problem and make all their dreams come true, it’s quite compelling, no matter how removed it is from reality.
But the truth is that voters of any persuasion don’t want to shake up the system when it isn’t getting things done; they want to shake it up when it isn’t doing the particular things they want. Washington may not be working, but what we really care about is whether it’s working for us.
By:Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Plum Line Blog, The Washington Post, September 7, 2015
“If Sandy Hook Is ‘Bearable’, What Is Not?”: Congress Trembling To The Call Of The NRA
You frequently find fortune cookie aphorisms, yes, but it’s not often that you find searing insight within Twitter’s 140-character confines. Which is why a June tweet from one Dan Hodges — his profile describes him as a British political commentator — stood out.
“In retrospect,” wrote Hodges, “Sandy Hook marked the end of the U.S. gun control debate. Once America decided killing children was bearable, it was over.”
You may cringe to hear the nation’s response to the December 2012 massacre of 20 young children — six adults also died — at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, described in that fashion, but you can’t deny the brutal truth of the observation.
After Sandy Hook, President Obama called for new legislative initiatives, saying, “Surely we can do better than this.” Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter said, “We need action.” Rep. John Larson said, “Politics be damned.” Parents of one victim walked the halls of Congress carrying pictures of their dead son and beseeching lawmakers to look, even as polls showed nearly 60 percent of Americans wanted stronger gun laws.
And nothing happened. In deciding between its children and its guns, America had decided the loss of the former was, in Hodges’ chilling word, “bearable.”
The memory of it haunts a Sunday interview CNN did with Andy Parker, the father of Roanoke, Virginia, TV reporter Alison Parker, who was murdered live on camera last week by a hateful and deranged man named Vester Flanagan. In vowing to commit his life to achieving sensible gun control, Parker said a number of striking things.
“I’m telling you,” he said, “they messed with the wrong family.”
“I’m going to be working on this for a long time,” he said. “I know that this is not a sprint, it’s a marathon.”
He acknowledged that we have seen many “tipping points” where guns are concerned: the shooting of a congresswoman and her constituents at a supermarket, a mass murder at a movie theater, the Christmas season butchery of schoolchildren in Newtown. “But,” he said, sounding like nothing so much as a father who very much loved his daughter, “I think people recognizing who the victim was and what she represented and how kind and sweet and innocent she was, I think this time it’s going to be different.”
It’s always going to be different. But it never is.
With all due deference to a father’s incalculable sorrow, the likeliest outcome here is that the murder of Alison Parker and her colleague Adam Ward and the wounding of local official Vicki Gardner will join the long line of tipping points that didn’t tip and turning points that didn’t turn. Which is why Parker’s words inspire no great hope, but only break your heart.
The sad thing is, there is no — repeat: no — inherent or insoluble conflict between the desire of some of us to have access to guns for sport and self-defense and the desire of others of us to keep dangerous people from possessing those weapons. Decent, moderate people, working from both sides of the question, could probably hammer out ideas to safeguard both imperatives in an afternoon.
Problem is, gun owners’ interests are represented not by decent, moderate people, but by the NRA, an extremist gang for whom even the most modest regulation is a brick in the road to tyranny. So long as the NRA has such an outsized voice in this debate, so long as politicians, unencumbered by conscience or vertebrae, tremble to its call, and so long as many of us are silent and supine in the face of that obscenity, Hodges is correct. And we are doomed to a future of frequent, predictable and preventable tragedies some of us will mistake for freedom.
It makes you wonder. If that kind of thing is really “bearable” then what, pray tell, is not?
By: Leonard Pitts, Jr., Columnist for The Miami Herald; The National Memo
“Iran And The Case For Realism”: The Choices We Face Are ‘Often Between Greater And Lesser Evils’
Foreign policy debates rarely get away from being reflections of domestic political conflicts, but they are also usually based on unstated assumptions and unacknowledged theories.
That’s true of the struggle over the Iran nuclear agreement, even if raw politics is playing an exceptionally large role. There are many indications that Republican Sens. Jeff Flake (Ariz.) and Susan Collins (Maine) might in other circumstances be willing to back the accord. But they have to calculate the very high costs of breaking with their colleagues on an issue that has become a test of party loyalty.
There is also the unfortunate way in which Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has chosen to frame Congress’s vote as a pro- or anti-Israel proposition. Many staunch supporters of Israel may have specific criticisms of the inspection regime, but they also believe that the restraints on Iran’s nuclear program are real. Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.), for example, has said that U.S. negotiators “got an awful lot, particularly on the nuclear front.” And the “nuclear front,” after all, is the main point.
But the pressures on Cardin, who is still undecided, and several other Democrats to vote no anyway are enormous. A yes vote from Cardin, the ranking Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, would be a true profiles-in-courage moment — and have a real influence on his wavering colleagues.
President Obama and his allies are right to say that the dangers of having the agreement blocked by Congress are much higher than the risks of trying to make it work. The notion that the United States could go back and renegotiate for something even tougher is laughable, because this is not simply a U.S.-Iran deal. It also involves allies who strongly back what’s on the table. Suggesting that the old sanctions on Iran could be restored is absurd for the same reason: Our partners would bridle if the United States disowned what it has agreed to already.
The administration’s core challenge to its critics is: “What is the alternative?” It is not a rhetorical question.
The counts at the moment suggest that Obama will win by getting at least enough votes to sustain a veto of legislation to scuttle the pact. He has a shot (Cardin’s decision could be key) of getting 41 senators to prevent a vote on an anti-deal measure altogether.
But once this episode is past us, the president, his congressional opponents and the regiment of presidential candidates owe the country a bigger discussion on how they see the United States’ role in the world. Obama in particular could profit from finally explaining what the elusive “Obama Doctrine” is and responding, at least indirectly, to criticisms of the sort that came his way Friday from Republican hopefuls Scott Walker and Marco Rubio.
There are many (I’m among them) who see Obama primarily as a foreign policy realist. Especially after our adventures in Iraq, realism looks a whole lot better than it once did. I say this as someone who still thinks that the United States needs to stand up for democratic values and human rights but who also sees military overreach as a grave danger to our interests and long-term strength. The principal defense of Obama’s stewardship rests on the idea that, despite some miscues, his realism about what military power can and can’t achieve has recalibrated the United States’ approach, moving it in the right direction.
A useful place to start this discussion is “The Realist Persuasion,” Richard K. Betts’s article in the 30th anniversary issue of the National Interest, realism’s premier intellectual outpost. Betts, a Columbia University scholar, argues that realists “focus more on results than on motives and are more attuned to how often good motives can produce tragic results.” While idealistic liberals and conservatives alike are often eager to “support the righteous and fight the villainous,” realists insist that the choices we face are “often between greater and lesser evils.”
“At the risk of overgeneralizing,” he writes, “one can say that idealists worry most about courage, realists about constraints; idealists focus on the benefits of resisting evil with force, realists on the costs.” On the whole, “realists recommend humility rather than hubris.”
For those of us whose heads are increasingly realist but whose hearts are still idealist, realism seems cold and morally inadequate. Yet the realists’ moral trump card is to ask whether squandering lives, treasure and power on impractical undertakings has anything to do with morality. Critics of realism confront the same question that opponents of the Iran deal face: “What is the alternative?”
By: E. J. Dionne Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, August 31, 2015
“Universal Election Day Registration”: Jimmy Carter And The Conservative Abandonment Of Voting Rights
Being a Georgian and a kiddie volunteer for Jimmy Carter’s first gubernatorial contest in 1966, I thought I was an expert on Most Things Jimmy. But Rick Perlstein, who was seven years old when Carter became our 39th president, has unearthed a proud moment of that presidency which I and probably others watching at the time had all but forgotten: a 1977 election reform initiative which still seems bold in its clear purpose and scope.
Everyone loved to talk about voter apathy, but the real problem, Carter said, was that “millions of Americans are prevented or discouraged from voting in every election by antiquated and overly restricted voter registration laws”—a fact proven, he pointed out, by record rates of participation in 1976 in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and North Dakota, where voters were allowed to register on election day. So he proposed that election-day registration be adopted universally, tempering concerns that such measures might increase opportunities for fraud by also proposing five years in prison and a $10,000 fine as penalties for electoral fraud.
He asked Congress to allot up to $25 million in aid to states to help them comply, and for the current system of federal matching funds for presidential candidates to be expanded to congressional elections. He suggested reforming a loophole in the matching-fund law that disadvantaged candidates competing with rich opponents who funded their campaigns themselves, and revising the Hatch Act to allow federal employees “not in sensitive positions,” and when not on the job, the same rights of political participation as everyone else.
Finally, and most radically, he recommended that Congress adopt a constitutional amendment to do away with the Electoral College—under which, three times in our history (four times if you count George W. Bush 33 years later), a candidate who received fewer votes than his opponent went on to become president—in favor of popular election of presidents. It was one of the broadest political reform packages ever proposed.
As Perlstein notes, Carter’s proposal initially drew support from national leaders of the GOP. But then the engines of the conservative movement became engaged in blocking it, led by Ronald Reagan, making arguments that sound extremely familiar today: real voters don’t need convenience; universal voting will empower looters in league with the Democratic Party; voter fraud will run rampant; and the Electoral College is part and parcel of our infallible system of federalism. The initiative was filibustered to death (in another fine usage of an anti-democratic device), Reagan beat Carter in 1980, and another rock of progress rolled down another long hill.
And now Jimmy Carter, at 90, is suffering from apparently incurable cancer, but is still speaking out:
This spring, when only those closest to him knew of his illness, Jimmy Carter made news on Thom Hartmann’s radio program when he returned to the question of democracy reform. In 1977, he had pledged “to work toward an electoral process which is open to the participation of all our citizens, which meets high ethical standards, and operates in an efficient and responsive manner.” In 2015, he was still at it.
He declared our electoral system a violation of “the essence of what made America a great country in its political system. Now it’s just an oligarchy, with unlimited political bribery being the essence of getting the nominations for president or to elect the president.”
The best possible tribute to Carter at death’s door is what Perlstein is doing: remembering his finest moments in causes then lost but now redeemable, if we take them up again.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, August 28, 2015
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 