“A Yuuuge Media Failure”: The Press Was Wrong, And Remains Wrong, About Donald Trump
The system failed. That’s what they say about the establishment Republican party, such as it is. For me, there is a logical progression from Newt Gingrich’s harsh revolution to the present moment. The tea party brought Donald Trump to the 2016 dance with its angry outsider rhetoric. Six years ago, the tea party whipped up a frenzy that Trump has furthered with every passing day as the Republican primary front-runner.
Count me out of mourning for the Republican party. This is the party that produced Richard Nixon, a vicious spirit, schemer and liar. Please don’t tell me about China, or I’ll bring up Vietnam and Cambodia. This is the party that gave us George W. Bush by one Supreme Court vote over the popular vote. The Iraq War was the longest, and for what? It has tied the Middle East up into knots and power vacuums. This is the war nobody won. Bush left messes for his successor, Barack Obama, to clean up for eight years, not to mention junking good will from our allies and military morale.
This is the party that has given us hundreds of members of Congress that, to a man, oppose reproductive rights for girls and women. There’s only one Republican woman defined as a pro-choice moderate: Sen. Susan Collins of Maine. One. This is the party that gave us Clarence Thomas. Need I say more?
But there are tears that another system failed, a system just as central to democracy. Despite great debate coverage, the press has failed and fallen down on the job of covering Trump, and I’ll tell you how. First they – we – snidely covered him as head of the “clown car,” assuring readers and viewers that he could never win the nomination despite his strong poll numbers from the start. That was a strong chorus from friends and foes alike. Don’t worry, nobody could take him seriously as a standard-bearer.
I belong to this tribe, some of my best friends are journos, but I did not share this complacency. I had actually watched Trump’s reality show, “The Apprentice,” with a reluctant respect for his deal-making and character judgment. Like him or not, he is a formidable player. And, clearly, the climate was just right for him. Now the confessions and apologies are coming up for air, from white male pundits who never saw Trump’s swath coming. Like a lifeguard who misses a tidal wave coming to shore. I won’t name names, but I will say the reason for this short-sightedness is that the media viewed Trump through the spectacles of our own class privilege.
For my part, I wrote that Trump might be a “textbook demagogue” fully ahead of the wave. And I give him credit for vociferously criticizing the Iraq War, which may be part of his populist appeal. He is the only candidate to decry that foreign policy folly, except for his fellow populist, Sen. Bernie Sanders. To me, the scary thing is that he wasn’t even the worst in the Republican line-up. I’d take him over Jeb Bush any day, or the other Floridian, Sen. Marco Rubio, the pretty darling of the pundits.
Winds of white working-class anger were blowing out there, at Trump’s rallies, but not taken seriously enough as a force. Now that we people in the press have sobered up, I fear that pendulum is swinging the other way, and the press is taking Trump too seriously. Conservative pundit Kathleen Parker wrote this in Sunday’s Post: “Trump is still terrible for the country, and therefore the world.” In Monday’s Post, Fred Hiatt tore into Trump as a narcissist, a bigot and yes, a demagogue. So now the clown is being demonized.
Here in the world’s oldest democracy, let’s let the party decide without undue hysterics from the establishment media. Yes, the press is compensating for reading the winds so wrong when the stakes are so high. But it happens all the time.
By: Jamie Stiehm, U. S. News and World Report, March 14, 2016
“You Can’t Beat Somebody With Nobody”: The GOP Establishment Has Failed. It’s Up To Voters To Deny Trump
We the people are going to have to save ourselves from Donald Trump, because politicians don’t seem up to the task.
For the big-haired billionaire, it was another week, another romp. In winning three of the four states up for grabs Tuesday, Trump demonstrated once again the weaknesses of his rivals. Ted Cruz, whose core support is among staunch conservatives and evangelical Christians, should have won Mississippi. John Kasich, the sitting governor of Ohio, should have won next-door Michigan. And Marco Rubio . . . well, he should have competed somewhere.
Cruz did manage to win Idaho, somewhat bolstering his claim to be the only plausible anti-Trump candidate left in the field. But Trump has now won primaries in the Northeast, the South, the West and the Midwest. Exit polling showed he had strength among both conservative and moderate voters. If he were not so dangerously unsuitable for the presidency, at this point he’d be called the presumptive Republican nominee.
Fumbling efforts by what’s left of the GOP establishment to halt Trump’s march to power seem too little, too late. Mitt Romney’s never-Trump salvo may have been intended to influence voters in Michigan, where Romney grew up and his father was a popular governor. If so, it was a humiliating failure.
One problem was that after forcefully stating why Republicans should not vote for Trump, Romney refused to say whom they should choose instead. There’s an old saying in politics: “You can’t beat somebody with nobody.” There is no way the establishment will derail Trump without settling on, and backing to the hilt, a viable alternative.
This will likely be remembered as the week when the establishment finally gave up on Rubio. He was always the fair-haired boy of party insiders, but not, alas, of the voters; he has managed to win only two contests, in Minnesota and Puerto Rico, and routinely finishes third or even fourth.
Rubio acknowledged this week that he rues his decision to go after Trump with playground insults. He is right to be remorseful, because that ploy probably cost him any chance at the nomination. His grand display of juvenile behavior reinforced the notion that he is too young and unformed to be president. Trump, who knows how to find the jugular, started calling him “Little Marco.” It stuck.
Rubio is trying desperately to win his home state of Florida on Tuesday, and a new Washington Post-Univision News poll shows him perhaps within striking distance; Trump leads with 38 percent, but Rubio is fairly close at 31 percent. Kasich, meanwhile, is gaining on Trump in Ohio; a recent Fox News poll even showed the governor with a small lead.
If Trump wins those states, the Rubio and Kasich candidacies are effectively over. More important, the winner-take-all haul of delegates — and Trump is also leading in Illinois, Missouri and North Carolina, the other three states that vote Tuesday — would increase the possibility that Trump could win the nomination outright, rather than have to fight for it at a contested party convention.
Put me down as extremely skeptical that the party will try to deny Trump the nomination if he comes to the convention with anywhere near the required majority of delegates. To do so would require a fortitude and a willingness to stand up to Trump’s bullying that the establishment has not shown thus far.
The low point came at last week’s debate when Trump’s opponents all described him as unfit for the presidency — then meekly pledged to support him if he is the nominee.
Stopping Trump, either before or during the convention, would require party leaders to swallow hard and support Cruz, who is right to portray himself as the only realistic alternative. Cruz has, after all, won seven states. He is widely disliked by party leaders, many of whom believe he would almost surely lose in the general election — and potentially bring down some GOP Senate and House candidates with him. But if the establishment does not agree on someone else, Donald Trump will be the standard-bearer of a political organization that calls itself the “party of Lincoln.”
Can Republicans really stomach such a thing? Do they watch those Trump rallies, with protesters being roughed up by angry mobs, and feel proud? Do they agree with his call to reinstitute torture? Do they really believe that Mexico will pay for the wall?
The GOP allowed Trump to get this far and seems powerless to stop him. In November, it appears, voters will have to do the job.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, March 10, 2016
“The Emptiest Of Suits”: Florida Gov. Scott Clueless In Lake Crisis
As a devastating deluge of polluted water darkens two coasts of Florida and threatens their tourist economies, Gov. Rick Scott is once again a flaky phantom.
Billions of gallons spiked with agricultural waste is being pumped daily from Lake Okeechobee toward the Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico, browning the blue coastal waters, choking sea grass beds and crippling small businesses that depend on a healthy marine ecology.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers says the discharges are necessary because the water in Lake Okeechobee is too high and the old Hoover dike is too weak. Gov. Scott says it’s all President Obama’s fault for not rebuilding the dike, which is absurd.
Scott, who aspires to be a U.S. senator, either has no clue how the appropriations process works, or he’ll simply say any brainless thing to duck responsibility.
A brief civics lesson for Florida’s dim and furtive governor: The president cannot write a check for major capital projects. Congress is in charge of funding, and Congress happens to be controlled by the Republicans.
Being a Republican himself, Scott should fly straight to Washington and persuade his colleagues to rebuild the lake dike and fund a flow-way to the Everglades for the excess water.
Why hasn’t that happened? One reason is that Scott has even less clout with Congress than he does in Tallahassee.
Currently, the state Legislature is gutting or discarding basically all of the governor’s major budget proposals, including a goofball request for a $250 million honey pot to lure private companies to the state.
Scott is the emptiest of suits. He’ll pop up whenever a new business opens, count the jobs and take credit for them. In times of crisis, though, he’s a spectral presence.
Privately, the governor is busy muscling special interests to bankroll his Senate run in 2018. Some of his biggest donors are the worst polluters of Lake O and the Everglades, so you can understand why he’s been hard to find lately.
Scott’s pals in Big Sugar have been back-pumping dirty water from their cane fields into the lake, which through Friday was being emptied into the St. Lucie River at a rate exceeding 2 billion gallons a day. The Army Corps says it will soon drop the daily flow to 1.2 billion gallons.
So far this year, more than 72 billion gallons has been expelled toward the Treasure Coast, ruining the salinity of the St. Lucie Estuary, chasing sea life from the Indian River Lagoon and creating a foul brown plume miles into the Atlantic.
The visual is repelling tourists who might otherwise be interested in fishing, swimming or paddle-boarding. This is also happening along the Gulf coast, where Lake O discharges gush from the Caloosahatchee River.
Under pressure from exasperated business owners and officials, Scott last week declared a state of emergency for St. Lucie, Martin and Lee counties, citing “extensive environmental harm” and “severe economic losses.”
The governor used the opportunity to bash Obama, calling out the president six times in a five-paragraph press release from his feeble Department of Environmental Protection.
Never once did Scott mention the Republican leaders of Congress, who have the power but not the enthusiasm to allocate the $800 million needed to repair the Lake O dike. If they put that item in a budget, Obama would sign it in a heartbeat.
The same is true for Everglades restoration. Showing zero sense of urgency, Congress continues to lag far behind on its commitment to share the costs 50-50 with the state.
Every year when it rains hard, an algae-spawning tide from Lake O is flushed toward the coastal bays and beaches. No president yet has stepped in to stop corporate farms from using the lake as their toilet, or stopped the Army Corps from opening the pump valves.
If Obama tried that, Big Sugar (and Scott) would scream bloody murder.
As for the governor’s “state of emergency,” it’s barely just a piece of paper. The agencies in charge are officially in “observation mode.” I’m not kidding.
TC Palm newspapers reported that the head of the state Division of Emergency Management was attending a conference in New Orleans last week. What better place than Bourbon Street from which to ponder Florida’s coastal pollution crisis?
Scott himself would benefit from spending time at the marinas or waterfront motels in Stuart, meeting the working people whose dreams are drowning in a flood of silt.
But this governor prefers upbeat media opportunities where he can talk about new jobs — not dying jobs. He’d much rather cut a ribbon at a gas station than hear from a boat captain who can no longer find any fish.
By: Carl Hiaasen, Columnist for The Miami Herald; The National Memo, March 8, 2016
“The Consequences Of Republican Obstruction”: We Need To Be Clear About Why Our Politics Is Broken Right Now
One of my favorite writers – Leonard Pitts – has weighed in on the topic du jour these days for pundits: what led to the rise of Donald Trump in the Republican presidential primary. He starts off with a quote from former Republican Senator George Voinovich: “If he was for it, we had to be against it.” That was the beginning of the Republican strategy against the newly elected President back in 2009.
The popular storyline goes that voters are seeking political outsiders this year in their frustration over a government where the legislative gears are frozen and nothing gets done. What that storyline forgets is that this gridlock was by design, that GOP leaders held a meeting on the very evening of the president’s first inauguration and explicitly decided upon a policy of non-cooperation to deny him anything approaching a bipartisan triumph…
Republicans and their media accomplices buttressed that strategy with a campaign of insult and disrespect designed to delegitimize Obama. With their endless birther stupidity, their death panels idiocy, their constant budget brinksmanship and their cries of, “I want my country back!” they stoked in the public nothing less than hatred for the interloper in the White House who’d had the nerve to be elected president.
And the strategy worked, hobbling and frustrating Obama. But as a bullet doesn’t care who it hits and a fire doesn’t care who it burns, the forces of ignorance and unreason, grievance and fear the Republicans calculatedly unleashed have not only wounded the president. No, it becomes more apparent every day that those forces have gravely wounded politics itself, meaning the idea that we can — or even should — reason together, compromise, form consensus.
Of course I agree with Pitts because I wrote basically the same thing recently. Just as it is critical for a doctor to accurately diagnose a disease in order to effectively treat it, we need to be clear about why our politics is broken right now in order to craft effective solutions.
One way to test the diagnosis Pitts has articulated is to think about what happened prior to the 2010 midterm elections – when Democrats had control of both houses of Congress – and afterwards. In the first 2 years of the Obama presidency, he and the Democrats managed to pass:
1. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act
2. The Affordable Care Act
3. The Dodd-Frank Act
4. Repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell
5. The Credit Card Accountability, Responsibility and Disclosure Act
6. The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act
7. The Fair Sentencing Act
8. The Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act
9. The Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act
10. The Hate Crimes Prevention Act
That’s a pretty impressive list for just two years, isn’t it? When you compare it to how little has been accomplished in the last 5 1/2 years, the contrast is astounding. The comparison is even more stark when you look at what the two Parties have been doing over those years. While the Republicans have spent most of their time trying to repeal Obamacare and threatening to blow up the economy if they don’t get their way, President Obama and the Democrats have put forward a list of policy proposals that have been either ignored or actively obstructed by the Republicans.
1. Comprehensive immigration reform
2. The American Jobs Act
3. Universal pre-K
4. Raise the minimum wage
5. Paid family/sick leave
6. Free community college
7. Gun background checks
8. Criminal justice reform
9. Restoration of the Voting Rights Act
As a thought experiment, it’s interesting to contemplate what might have happened over these last few years if either the Democrats had maintained their majorities in Congress and/or if the Republicans had taken the advice of people like David Frum and actually attempted to negotiate solutions.
There are voices out there who diagnose our political situation differently than the analysis above from Leonard Pitts. Some in the media are particularly fond of the “both sides do it” mythology. As we’ve seen, Bernie Sanders comes close to embracing that idea with his analysis that the entire political process is rigged by big money – both Republicans and Democrats. While money in politics plays a role, it is clear that Democrats have an agenda to address the challenges we face and Republicans have cast their lot with fanning the flames of fear/anger in order to obstruct progress. The consequences of that decision by the GOP are that: progress has been halted, the stage was set for a Donald Trump candidacy and our political system has been gravely wounded.
By: Nancy LeTourneau, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, March 8, 2916
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