“The Fake GOP Engagement Advantage”: Be Aware GOP, The Tide Will Come In And The Shoreline Will Move Against You
Why would Republicans be paying more attention to the presidential election than Democrats at this stage of the game? That’s not very hard to answer.
The most obvious reason is that they don’t have the White House right now and they haven’t had it since January 20th, 2008, when George W. Bush left office. Democrats simply aren’t craving what they already have, and it’s going to take them a while to focus on what they might lose.
That’s a cyclically-dependent variable, but there are others that are persistent, and still others that seem specific to this particular season.
As the electorate has sorted, older voters have trended Republican and younger voters have trended Democratic. Older voters read more newspapers, watch more television news, engage in more political activity outside the home, and vote more often in all elections than young voters.
There has also been a big difference between the parties in the nominating contests. The Republicans had eleventy-billion candidates, no certainty or even much consensus about who the winner might be, and the highly unusual (and famous) Donald Trump adding an entertainment value that could be enjoyed by even the least politically minded people. The Democrats have had (really) only two candidates, much less overall media coverage, and a presumed nominee from beginning to end.
Now, it should be a worrying sign to the Democrats that Republican engagement has been higher, and we’ve seen this not just in survey results but in the ratings for debates and in the voter turnout numbers in the primaries and caucuses.
But, I’m willing to argue that this should probably be of more concern to the Republicans. Despite Trump trending up in the most recent polls, his overall prospects look dim. And where is the room for growth?
Consider that Gallup finds that about twice as many people over fifty years of age are following the election “very closely” as are people under thirty. That number will begin to close and it will continue to narrow straight on through to Election Day. Consider, also, that 45% of whites claim to be watching the presidential election carefully while only 27% of nonwhites say the same.
Gallup says a central challenge for Democrats is to fix this disparity in engagement, and that’s true. But, with two conventions in July, followed by four debates, and the fall campaign, voter interest will rise automatically, and the Democrats have a lot more disengaged voters who will be coming online without any effort by the DNC or the Clinton campaign.
There’s also a current advantage the Republicans are enjoying in that their nomination is now a settled matter, and they’re consolidating a little earlier than the Democrats. Bringing the Clinton and Sanders camps together will more difficult than usual and will probably be somewhat incomplete, but that schism is minor compared to the one on the Republican side where the Speaker of the House can’t even endorse his own party’s nominee.
So, while the Democrats would probably prefer to see numbers that showed more parity in interest, they shouldn’t be overly concerned about these survey results. The Republicans should be aware that the tide will come in and the shoreline will move against them.
By: Martin Longman, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, May 23, 2016
“Just Be Glad That’s Not Your Job”: Spare A Thought For Those Condemned To Defend Donald Trump
There’s a perfectly logical reason why any Republican would decide that getting behind Donald Trump is the least bad option they face. If you genuinely care about conservative policy goals, the chance that you’ll see the government move in your favored direction under President Hillary Clinton is approximately zero, while with President Trump you’d at worst see many of those goals come to fruition. You’d get a conservative Supreme Court, an executive branch filled with Republicans, and probably many areas where Trump, who plainly doesn’t care at all about the details of policy, just tells the congressional GOP to write whatever bills it wants and he’ll sign them. In short, ideology demands Trump, ironic as that may be given that he was the least ideological Republican running.
And yet, the end point of that perfectly logical chain of thinking is still supporting Donald Trump. Donald Trump the ignoramus, Donald Trump the liar, Donald Trump the buffoon, Donald Trump the xenophobic sexist narcissist all-around jerk. And supporting him, in today’s media-saturated world, also means defending him.
This is the reality of contemporary partisanship: While there are people (like yours truly, thank goodness) who are permitted to be equivocal about politicians, partisans have no such liberty. Their guy must be defended almost no matter what, while the other side’s champion is cast as a model of perfect villainy, worthy of not a single vote. It’s a ridiculous ritual, and it takes a candidate as ridiculous as Trump to make that clear. Just as the Constitution mandates that even the most heinous criminal should be granted a vigorous defense in court, our media demand that even the most despicable politician have someone defend him on cable news. If you find it depressing to watch some party “strategist” or elected official laboring painfully to argue that Trump’s policy choices are quite clever, or that his latest outrageous statement actually contains a kernel of timeless wisdom, just imagine how they feel doing it.
Look at what we’ve heard about Trump in the last few days. There’s the extensively-reported story in The New York Times of Trump’s sleazy treatment of women over the years, including those with whom he had romantic relationships, those who worked for him, and participants in the Miss Universe pageant he used to own (which in no way did he purchase because he wanted to bang beauty queens, absolutely not, how could you think such a thing). The story is pretty much what you would expect, which means it details behavior on Trump’s part ranging from the comical to the rancid. And that followed a Washington Post story on Trump’s old habit of calling up reporters pretending to be a Trump PR guy named “John Miller” or “John Barron,” who would then wax rhapsodic about his boss’s extraordinary accomplishments, both financial and sexual.
What would you say about all that if you were a Trump supporter staring into a camera? You’d probably say what RNC chair Reince Priebus did in his round of Sunday show interviews, dismissing the allegations one moment and trying to change the subject the next, then arguing that it’s irrelevant when what we should really be talking about is Benghazi.
As one Republican said on Twitter, “I can handle Trump. But watching people I once respected and ought to know better rationalizing and validating him makes me physically ill.” Fair enough, but what is Reince Priebus supposed to do? I suppose he could say, “You’re right, we really screwed the pooch by nominating this train wreck of a candidate. This is a living nightmare.” But he has to put as brave a face as he can on things, because that’s his job. And he really does want to help Trump get elected, even if he wishes someone else had won the nomination, because from where he stands the alternative is much worse.
Keep in mind that there are going to be many more stories like the ones this weekend, because we have seen only the tip of the lurid iceberg that is Donald Trump’s oppo file. You can bet that the Clinton campaign has many stories about Trump that it will be feeding reporters on a regular schedule between now and November. Some may not check out, but others will, and I seriously doubt the media will be deterred from pursuing them by Trump’s insults (and they’ll be doing the same thing to Clinton, just as they have for the last couple of decades).
As the campaign goes on, it will be nearly impossible for Republicans to escape questions about Trump, since whenever it’s been a while since a juicy revelation, Trump will help out by saying something disgusting or appallingly dumb (the latest: He says that Syrian refugees are coming to the U.S. carrying phones with ISIS flags on them, and ISIS is also paying their phone bills. Which, you have to admit, is pretty poor tradecraft if you’re trying to smuggle terrorists into America). In a better world, politicians would be able to be completely frank about a situation like this. They could say, “Yeah, the guy’s a monumental pig, not to mention a fool. Who knows what the hell we’ll be in for if he becomes president. But I just don’t want another Democrat elected, and that’s what it comes down to.”
They can’t say that, because we’re all so used to talking about presidential campaigns not as ideological contests but as personality contests. So Republicans have to pretend that they oppose Hillary Clinton not just because she’s a liberal and they’re conservatives—which ought to be more than reason enough—but also because she’s some kind of cartoonish psychopath who would strangle your children’s puppy if she had the chance. They have to say that Clinton is a worse person than Trump, or that he’s somehow more qualified to be president because he’s a businessman, or that his can-do spirit is just what we need to clean up Washington.
They don’t believe any of it. How could they? But they have no choice but to keep on saying it, no matter how it eats at their souls. Just be glad that’s not your job.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect, May 16, 2016
“Using The Government To Intimidate”: Here’s How Donald Trump’s Authoritarianism Would Actually Work
At various points in his career, Donald Trump has praised authoritarian rulers in places like Russia, China, and North Korea for having the ruthlessness to crush their political opponents. His worship of strength, contempt for reason, and appeal to base emotions has made many observers liken him to an authoritarian ruler, and even debate whether he is an actual fascist. But what would authoritarianism look like in the United States, as practiced by Trump? It would probably take the form of Trump using the powers of the federal government to intimidate his critics in the media — one of the key tools Vladimir Putin used to push Russia’s (far more fragile) democracy into outright despotism. In an interview Thursday night with quasi-official mouthpiece Sean Hannity, Trump responded to Washington Post investigations into his life by casually threatening retribution against its owner, Jeff Bezos:
It’s interesting that you say that, because every hour we’re getting calls from reporters from the Washington Post asking ridiculous questions. And I will tell you. This is owned as a toy by Jeff Bezos, who controls Amazon. Amazon is getting away with murder, tax-wise. He’s using the Washington Post for power. So that the politicians in Washington don’t tax Amazon like they should be taxed. He’s getting absolutely away — he’s worried about me, and I think he said that to somebody … it was in some article, where he thinks I would go after him for antitrust. Because he’s got a huge antitrust problem because he’s controlling so much. Amazon is controlling so much of what they’re doing.
And what they’ve done is he bought this paper for practically nothing. And he’s using that as a tool for political power against me and against other people. And I’ll tell you what: We can’t let him get away with it. So he’s got about 20, 25 — I just heard they’re taking these really bad stories — I mean, they, you know, wrong, I wouldn’t even say bad. They’re wrong. And in many cases they have no proper information. And they’re putting them together, they’re slopping them together. And they’re gonna do a book. And the book is gonna be all false stuff because the stories are so wrong. And the reporters — I mean, one after another — so what they’re doing is he’s using that as a political instrument to try and stop antitrust, which he thinks I believe he’s antitrust, in other words, what he’s got is a monopoly. And he wants to make sure I don’t get in. So, it’s one of those things. But I’ll tell you what. I’ll tell you what. What he’s doing’s wrong. And the people are being — the whole system is rigged. You see a case like that. The whole system is rigged. Whether it’s Hillary or whether it’s Bezos.
Obviously, one can debate Amazon’s antitrust practices (a case can be made it is a monopoly) or its tax levels. But Trump is making no pretense of evaluating these questions as public policies to be settled on their merits. His diatribe weaves in and out of Bezos’s finances and the Post’s coverage, and back again repeatedly, leaving no doubt that, in Trump’s mind, the two are one and the same.
Trump is making nice with the leaders of his party now, and the Republican holdouts have been reduced to a stubborn handful. But the GOP leaders going along with Trump should be under no illusion about the likelihood that the candidate they support, if elected, would turn the United States into at least a quasi-authoritarian state. And the ease with which he has brought other Republicans to heel gives every indication that they would help him do it.
By: Jonathan Chait, Daily Intelligencer, New York Magazine, May 13, 2016
“Economic Food Poisoning”: The Bankrupt Delusions Of Donald Trump, The ‘King Of Debt’
According to Donald Trump, at $19 trillion the federal government has too much debt. Or so little debt that we could pay it off in eight years.
He says we could buy back federal debt at a discount by raising interest rates. But if interest rates rise by a couple of percentage points, he said last week that the United States of America would cease to exist.
As for taxes, we need to raise them on the rich. No, we need to lower them. Or raise them.
And American workers? Their wages are too high. No, too many earn nothing because foreign workers make so much less. Then again, maybe the minimum wage is too low.
If all his contradictory comments seem confusing, the fact is that they are. They are also difficult to square with Trump touting his economics degree from an Ivy League school, the University of Pennsylvania, where he claims he was a top student.
What reality-show hosts say is of no consequence. But every public word presidents speak gets scrutinized worldwide. Candidate Trump’s wildly inaccurate and ahistorical statements are of no official consequence, but were he president they would have serious and damaging effects on the United States.
Consider what Trump said on May 5 to CNN’s Wolf Blitzer about the cost of servicing federal debt: “If interest rates go up 1%, that’s devastating. What happens if that interest rate goes up 2, 3, 4 points? We don’t have a country.”
By Trump’s reckoning America should have ceased to be a country long ago. Back in 1982 the 10-year bond paid 14.6%. Uncle Sam’s average interest cost on all federal debt was 6.6% when George W. Bush took office. Last month it was just 2.3% even though the debt is 17 times the level of 34 years ago.
Trump talked about buying back debt at a discount and cited his own success in taking out loans, but not paying them back in full. “I’m the king of debt,” he said, in one of his frequent tangential comments focusing not on how a Trump administration would govern, but reminding us of his self-proclaimed greatness.
When journalists try to parse Trump’s words—no easy task because transcripts show jumbled thoughts galore—his response is to accuse them of misquoting him. So, whom to believe: Trump or that lying videotape?
On CNBC, Trump implied that when he took out some loans, he never intended to repay them in full.
“I’ve borrowed knowing that you can pay back with discounts,” he said on CNBC. “And I’ve done very well with debt. Now, of course, I was swashbuckling, and it did well for me, and it was good for me, and all that. And you know debt was sort of always interesting to me. Now, we are in a different situation with a country, but I would borrow knowing that if the economy crashed you could make a deal.”
That last sentence might send shivers down the spines of those who buy federal debt, as it could be read to say he would crash the economy as president just to make the market price of Treasury debt fall. I read his remarks as another example of his lack of articulation, but others could reasonably read into those remarks a plan to submarine the economy.
When challenged about his words, Trump revised his comments saying he was thinking only in terms of renegotiating the federal debt—88% of which matures in 10 years or less—to longer terms. What Trump didn’t mention is that Treasury bonds with maturities of up to 30 years pay on average 4.5% interest, more than double the average federal interest rate. The contradiction here is obvious: By Trump’s own words switching to longer-term Treasury bonds would result in interest expenses so high that America would cease to exist.
The Politics of Winging It
How and why “we wouldn’t have a country” were interest rates to rise is just one of the many observations that Trump has never been asked to explain.
When Trump’s comments drew widespread criticism as reckless, he turned the tables on those who reported what he said. He claimed that others put words in his mouth and distorted his intent.
So how do we make sense of the following: “If we can buy bonds back at a discount,” he said, “we should do that.” He also said that there would be no reason for holders of federal debt to ask the government to buy their bonds back at a discount. If that is so—and it is—then why say any of this?
The explanation is that Trump is winging it, making it up as he goes along just as he has through his career, which I have covered on and off for 27 years.
To those who understand economics, public finance and taxes, listening to Donald Trump talk about these issues is like listening to Sarah Palin talk about anything. The contradictions, the baseless assumptions, the meandering sentences that veer off into nowhere belong more in the fictional world of “Alice in Wonderland” where, as the Cheshire cat advised, “it really doesn’t matter which way you go” in search of the White Rabbit, but you could ask the Mad Hatter or the equally mad March Hare.
You might think that after decades of planning a run for the White House—after all, he did run in 2000 as a Reform Party candidate—Trump would have developed a clear set of views on economics. You might think he would have devoured policy papers, retained top experts and tested out ideas in speeches heard by few. You might think he would have polished and logical lines by now.
But that would require treating these issues as matters deserving of serious study. Absent such study, it is no surprise that much of what Trump says confounds those who have spent their lives studying economics, public finance, taxes and history.
Whatever Trump may have learned in college, his flip-flopping and wavering suggest that Trump saw no need to prepare to be president. It’s as if a chef decided he didn’t need to learn how to cook before pulling off a White House State Dinner.
Trump just tosses concepts into a pot. He starts with made-up numbers (our China trade deficit is $338 billion, not Trump’s $500 billion); adds some brazen conspiracy theories (Obama was not born an American citizen); mixes them with irreconcilable vagaries (taxes should go down, but so should budget deficits); tosses in some populist myths (thousands in North Jersey celebrated as the Twin Towers burned) and rotten ideas (the President telling Carrier, Ford and Nabisco where to build factories)—and finishes it all off with a bucket of rhetorical nonsense.
Trump is superb at one aspect of this. His economic stew would induce economic food poisoning, but he sells it with an appealing name: Make America Great Again.
By: David Cay Johnston, The Daily Beast, May 10, 2016
“Trump’s Most Impressive Boast Is A Brazen Lie”: An Excellent Time To Re-Adjust The B.S. Detector
Every presidential candidate is going to boast about all of the many reasons he or she deserves voters’ support. It’s how the process works: White House hopefuls, without exception, are going to present themselves as the best possible person for one of the world’s most important jobs.
And with that in mind, Donald Trump, perhaps more than most, seems to take great pride in singing his own praises, celebrating his wealth, judgment, and professed wisdom in ways that have evidently won over much of the Republican Party’s base. Some of these boasts have even impressed a handful of political pundits.
Last week, for example, Patrick Smith, Salon’s foreign affairs columnist, argued that Trump’s views on foreign policy deserve to be taken seriously because the Republican frontrunner opposed the war in Iraq – unlike a certain Democratic candidate.
The New York Times’ Maureen Dowd devoted much of latest column, published yesterday, to a related point.
The prime example of commander-in-chief judgment Trump offers is the fact that, like [President Obama], he thought the invasion of Iraq was a stupid idea. […]
You can actually envision a foreign policy debate between Trump and [Hillary Clinton] that sounds oddly like the one Obama and Clinton had in 2008, with Trump playing Obama, preening about his good judgment on Iraq….
It’s easy to imagine Trump and his campaign team celebrating pieces like these. It’s equally easy to expect a series of related arguments in the coming months from Clinton detractors looking for an excuse to support the GOP’s nativist demagogue.
There is, however, a rather important problem with the entire argument: it’s based on a fairly obvious lie.
Trump’s claim is that he, relying solely on his extraordinary instincts and unrivaled prognostication skills, recognized that the war in Iraq would be a disaster from the outset. The political establishment at the time lacked Trump’s vision, but if insiders had only listened to him, a catastrophic mistake could have been avoided.
Last fall, Trump went so far as to say, in multiple interviews, that he was so outspoken in his condemnations of the U.S. invasion plans in 2003 that officials from the Bush/Cheney White House actually reached out to him, urging him to tone down his criticism before he started turning Americans against the coming conflict.
These are all important assertions in the 2016 race, which may impress Clinton’s critics, but which aren’t even remotely true. Not to put too fine a point on this, but Trump is brazenly, shamelessly lying. There is literally no evidence to substantiate any of his claims, and extensive evidence that proves the opposite.
On Sept. 11, 2002, for example, Howard Stern asked Trump, “Are you for invading Iraq?” Trump replied, “Yeah, I guess so.”
One can certainly characterize this as lukewarm support for the disastrous war, but it’s hardly a position that can fairly be described as opposition. And for a New York Times columnist to tell readers that Trump “thought the invasion of Iraq was a stupid idea” is both wrong and bizarre. (As of this morning, Dowd’s error has not yet generated a correction.)
In fairness, Trump eventually criticized the war in Iraq, but only well after the Bush/Cheney policy took a devastating turn for the worse and it became painfully obvious to everyone that the U.S. invasion had been a terrible mistake. But by the time Trump acknowledged this, he was only repeating observations that had already dawned on much of the country.
The larger dynamic to keep in mind is that some in the political world have not yet come to terms with Trump’s unique style of campaigning: (1) manufacture self-aggrandizing boast; (2) repeat said boast regularly; (3) wait for unsuspecting media professionals to accept boast at face value; (4) repeat.
It’s a shame some haven’t noticed the pattern sooner, failing to recognize the importance of scrutinizing Trump’s demonstrably ridiculous claims, but it’s not too late. The likely Republican nominee will continue to make outrageous boasts with no basis in fact, counting on journalists to simply give him the benefit of the doubt, between now and Election Day. For those who’ve been fooled by Trump’s falsehoods, now would be an excellent time to re-adjust their b.s. detectors accordingly.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, May 2, 2016
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 