Month: November 2015

Now, I know there is something comical about listening to some actor or actress who has just been paid millions of dollars to recite lines on film tell you about his or her pet charity to “Free Tibet” or end world hunger. Most of the time, you have to wonder if they understand their adopted cause at all or if they were just put up to it by their publicity agent. And I’m familiar with the black-tie liberal crowd that gathers around to support the latest fad, whether it be ending Apartheid or supporting the Palestinians or the Sandinistas. These so-called limousine liberals are silly in a way, and never more so than when they spout off about global warming before embarking on a cross-country trip on their private jet.

What makes them silly is that they are so insulated from the things they claim to care about. There’s nothing wrong with having an Upper East Side soiree to raise money to end police brutality, but those folks are never going to be brutalized by the police themselves, nor is it overly likely that anyone they know personally will be brutalized by the police.

So, yeah, I get it that there’s a certain degree of cartoonish liberal smugness in how some white intellectuals embrace the writings of Ta-Nehisi Coates. Isn’t it cute how much they care?

Yet, these are caricatures. They’re the kind of caricatures that Republicans love to paint about wealthy white liberals who seem to give a damn about pretty much anything other than their own personal success.

Now, I like to read Ta-Nehisi Coates for a few reasons. One is that I like how he writes, and I’m always trying to improve my craft by studying other writers. Another is that he doesn’t just spout off about whatever is troubling him in the moment. He does extensive research and spends a lot of time putting out his big magazine pieces, and he obviously did this, too, with his recently published book. But the main reason I enjoy reading him is because I learn something I did not know. In his reparations piece for the Atlantic, he taught me pretty much everything I know about the history of redlining in urban housing.

So, it’s not just that he’s bringing a new perspective to the table, although he’s doing that, too. He’s educating people. And you don’t have to draw the same conclusions from his research that he does in order to benefit from it.

Now, if what you’re taking away from his body of work is that he really doesn’t like white people and that the white people who value his work are a bunch of self-loathing latte-sipping Volvo-driving jackasses, well…

…I think you’ve pretty much missed a good chance to become a better person.

I also think that there isn’t anything smug or cartoonish about feeling that a great wrong was done to black Americans from slavery to Jim Crow to housing policy to the drug wars and the mass incarceration period of the last several decades. How to redress those wrongs is a worthy subject of debate, and has nothing to do with self-loathing. Mocking anyone who appears to give a shit about what’s happened to the black community in this country is what’s genuinely worthy of contempt.

(Now that it’s Election Day 2015, the Politics department here at MassCommons World Headquarters has grudgingly agreed to start writing about the 2016 presidential race.)

We don’t do predictions.  This isn’t a pregame show or a Beltway cocktail party.

On the other hand, we’ve had a thought for some months now about how the presidential race might turn out, so we’re going to write it down now just in case it does turn out that way—not so we can say “I told you so” (satisfying though that might be) but so we can at least say “I thought so“.

The thought is this: nothing is going to change.  This is going to be the election campaign equivalent of World War I trench warfare—not because it will be so ugly, but because it won’t move more than a few yards back or forth.

Right now, just as she has all year, Hillary Clinton is the likely Democratic nominee and she has an edge over any of a handful of likely Republican nominees.  That’s how it’s going to stay for the next 12 months.

The economy will keep chugging along in low gear, adding a couple hundred thousand jobs a month.  Whatever global crises there are will not result in a major new war involving hundreds of thousands of US troops.  President Obama’s popularity and job approval ratings will stay roughly where they are now (and have been for years).

On Election Day 2016, Clinton will win a narrow but solid victory and become the first female president in US history.  Republicans will still control the House of Representatives.  Democrats may (or may not) narrowly retake the Senate.

That’s the thought.  It’s not a prediction.  The economy could slip into recession.  Violence overseas or terrorist attacks on US soil could draw the nation into another long, bloody and debilitating war.  Clinton could campaign poorly or an opponent could campaign brillliantly.  Any of a thousand unexpected and improbable events could reshape the campaign.

But the long, slow demographic shift that’s reshaping American society—not unlike the demographic shift in the wake of the great European migration in the late 19th-early 20th century—continues to grind forward, giving Clinton (or any Democratic nominee) a slight, but significant advantage.  That same shift—combined with the distribution of populations, the peculiarities of the American electoral system, and the emergence of two distinct electorates for presidential and off-year elections—means Republicans will continue to wield power in Congress and a majority of states.

There may come a time when the scales do tip and Democrats seize control, forcing a radical reshaping of the Republican coalition (or the party’s collapse, to be replaced by another center-right coalition party), but that time is not now.

Crossposted at: masscommons.wordpress.com

The late-October polling out of the Bluegrass State indicated that Democratic Attorney General Jack Conway is a modest favorite to win the Kentucky gubernatorial election today over Tea Party-favorite Matt Bevin. Maybe that’s not that much of a surprise, but new polling out of Louisiana should definitely be causing some alarm bells to go off at Wingnut Headquarters.

Democrat John Bel Edwards has a 20% lead over Senator David Vitter in the Louisiana Gubernatorial runoff, according to a survey released today by WVLA and JMC Analytics.

The brand new, statewide poll results confirm something that hasn’t happened in 7 years: A Democratic Governor could take office in Louisiana.

Today, WVLA released a survey of 600 likely voters, conducted by JMC analytics. When asked who they’d vote for if the election were held today, 52% of people chose State Representative John Bel Edwards. 32% chose Senator David Vitter, and 16% were undecided.

These numbers are surprising because they show that John Bel Edwards, a Democrat, will pick up more votes from former Republican candidates Scott Angelle and Jay Dardenne than David Vitter, a fellow Republican.

The WVLA poll also asked undecided voters if they had a preference between the two candidates. 54% of them leaned toward John Bel Edwards at this point, while 35% leaned toward David Vitter.

I doubt progressive Democrats will be too excited about the politics of John Bel Edwards, but that’s not really my point here. If he ends David Vitter’s career in a 20-plus percentage point blowout, that’s a pretty damning indictment of Bobby Jindal’s career and of the Republican Party in Louisiana.

Louisiana and Kentucky are among the states that voted twice for Bill Clinton before shifting to George W. Bush in 2000. They’ve been (very) reliably red states ever since. After New Orleans lost much of its black population in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the Bayou State became uncompetitive for Democrats. Meanwhile, in Kentucky, President Obama has proven to be immensely unpopular for some reason (I think you know why) even as Democratic Governor Steve Beshear successfully implemented and openly cheer led the Kynect (Obamacare) health care system. It became a source of much mirth that Kentucky voters consistently said that they loved Kynect and hated Obamacare, and the program has been a hot topic in the governors campaign. It appears that the Democrats are getting the better of the argument:

The outgoing Democratic governor of Kentucky, Steve Beshear, used an executive order to expand Medicaid and create a state-run exchange under Obamacare. Half a million people, around a quarter of the state’s population, got coverage as a result.

Democrats have aggressively highlighted this in commercials and on the stump leading up to today’s off-year gubernatorial election, suggesting that the Republicans would “callously” eliminate the exchange if they won. It’s a stark contrast to the defensive posture that Democrats largely took on the issue in the midterm elections of 2010 and 2014.

Kentucky has seen the largest drop in its uninsured rate of any state in the country. It’s currently 9 percent, down from 20.4 percent before Obamacare, according to the Louisville NPR affiliate. Open enrollment for next year began over the weekend, and the Kaiser Family Foundation says there are 285,000 uninsured Kentuckians who could still enroll using the so-called Kynect program.

GOP gubernatorial nominee Matt Bevin has backtracked on repeal since he won a four-way primary in May. In the spring, he said he would “absolutely” reverse Beshear’s executive order “immediately.” In the final debate of the race, he suggested he would narrow eligibility to below 138 percent of the poverty line and try to get participants to have some “skin in the game,” in essence forcing people to pay some kind of deductible.

Now, all if this might seem of completely local interest and unlikely to mean much for the 2016 elections, but Gov. Steve Beshear strongly disagrees:

Polling shows the Medicaid expansion playing to Democrats’ advantage: The final Bluegrass Poll put Democratic Attorney General Jack Conway up 5 points. The Lexington Herald-Leader’s Sam Youngman reported that Bevin’s opposition to the expansion “appears to be hurting him”: 54 percent said they want the state’s next governor to maintain the expansion; 24 percent say they would like to see it repealed; 22 percent were not sure. One-third of Republicans support maintaining the expansion.

For years, Gov. Beshear has publicly urged national Democrats to run on the health care law, regardless of whether they’re from a red or a blue state. “You can tell there’s a pent-up demand and a craving for access to health care,” he said in an interview here. “People came out of the woodwork in droves wanting to find about this. … This is a winner for our people, and because it’s a winner for our people, it’s going to be a winner politically.” Beshear has been publicly attacking Bevin for saying he’d roll back his signature initiative. “He understands that this is now a popular issue for Kentuckians and he’s trying to somehow find a way out of it.”

Expressing confidence that Conway will win today, Beshear told me: “In 2016, I predict the Democratic nominee will make this a major issue and will pound the Republicans into the dust with it.”

So, then the question becomes less about the idiosyncrasies of Kentucky or Louisiana politics and more about whether the rejection of Republicans in very red states is related to broadly applicable policy considerations. It looks like Kentuckians are weighing the health care law heavily in their decision making, and that it’s benefiting the supporters of Obamacare.

To see how that sentiment might be transferable, check out this map:

We think we know which states will vote which ways, but this is not a normal election cycle:

…while there’s still plenty of time for an establishment GOP candidate to beat Carson or Trump, Democratic pollster Peter Hart wonders if the 2016 Republican race is shaping up to resemble 1964, when Barry Goldwater won the GOP nomination.

“What if the cake is baked?” Hart asks. “This is not a status-quo electorate.”

The Republicans will try to shrug off the election results in Kentucky today and in Louisiana later in the month, but if things go the way they seem to be going, they may be in a lot more trouble than they want to admit.

Go vote!

Worked well in Poland recently and with Erdogan’s APK party in Turkey:

Elections in Turkey offered voters variety of choices, but process was hindered by challenging security environment, incidents of violence and restrictions against media, international election observers say.
[Source: OSCE]

On Israel, what else could Jeb Bush have said to recuperate his failing campaign in the primary. Look where all the hard cash is going …

○ Paul Singer backs Marco Rubio in boost for senator and blow for Bush | The Guardian |
○ Pro-Israel Hedge Fund Billionaire, Paul Singer, Buys Large Stake in Rubio Inc. | Tikun Olam |

The western politics of regime change in the Middle East and support for Turkey in the removal of Assad has led to the refugee crisis in bordering states and a migrants flow into Europe. Here is how the common folks in the EU react to the polemics around asylum seekers …

○ Politics, culture wars cloud migrant debate in central Europe | Reuters |

If there were elections today in The Netherlands, the party of Gert Wilders would become the largest and in a position to form a new government!! In which nation will Europe’s next “Hitler” rise?

While Germany’s Der Spiegel magazine depicted Chancellor Angela Merkel on its cover as “Mother Angela”, ministering to refugees, a conservative Polish weekly, wSieci, dressed center-right Prime Minister Ewa Kopacz in a burqa holding explosives.

It used to be a simple question of stupid vs. evil, but I think we now need to add a third option, which is “afraid.” For example, not everyone who wanted to invade Iraq was so stupid as to think it was about weapons of mass destruction or that we’d be greeted as liberators or that our homeland was in imminent danger from that quarter. And not everyone who advocated launching a war of choice was guilty of depraved indifference about the likely consequences or motivated by simple bloodlust. A lot of people were simply afraid to go against the tide.

Likewise, there are those in the so-called Republican Establishment who are wise to the game that they’re playing on the rubes through the application of their Mighty Right-Wing Media Wurlitzer. They know that they’re ginning up resentment and anxiety and fear and race-hatred and division for naked political advantage. That doesn’t prevent them from sipping a cocktail with a Democratic operative in some Georgetown bar or hobnobbing with a liberal senator’s wife at some hoity toity Manhattan charity fundraiser.

There are others, however, who have marinated so much in the right-wing media bubble that they actually believe their own talking points. These are the folks who are genuinely petrified of getting Ebola or think that there’s a real epidemic of in-person voter fraud that requires hyper vigilance to combat. These people are genuinely stupid despite being elected officials and technically part of the “Establishment.”

The final category of people are the ones who aren’t so dumb as to not see what is happening, or to understand the negative consequences of it for the Republican Party and the nation. They’re in on the joke, so to speak, but they don’t approve. Yet, they’re afraid to speak out and will even parrot the bullshit in order to avoid getting challenged from a horde of lunatics who don’t know the difference between fear-mongering hype and basic reality.

The basic problem is that everyone on the right wants to benefit from having an electorate that is convinced that al-Qaeda is planting terror-babies at the southern border or that the government has robbed them of their Social Security and Medicare or that someone is coming any day to confiscate their guns. No one wants to give this up. Not really.

And the few people who see that this has gone too far and poisoned the minds of their base?

They can’t kick the habit and they’re petrified that even sticking their neck out to suggest some restraint will get their head chopped off.

So, what you get is the spectacle of Jeb Bush this morning complaining about the tone of the campaign right after he told everyone that the international effort to block Iran’s nuclear ambitions will do absolutely nothing to curb their nuclear ambitions and that it has for the first time created a situation in which the United States is responsible for creating Israel’s greatest existential crisis.

Here Jeb is utilizing the same fear-mongering tactics that have wrecked the collective brain of the right and sunk his campaign. And he’s endeavoring to use them to build enough “credentials” with the deluded that they’ll give his “tone it down” message a hearing.

Is Jeb suffering from epistemic closure or is he wise to the game? If he’s not stupid, and I don’t think that he is, what measure of evil vs. afraid are we dealing with?

His problem is that he can’t make up his mind.

If you want to get beyond name-calling and bogus talking points and have a substantive discussion, you can’t continue to try to prove your conservative bona fides by amplifying their stupid fear-mongering about Iran.

It’s not just Jeb, of course. This is the same malady that destroyed Eric Cantor and John Boehner.

It’s the same malady that will soon destroy Paul Ryan.

If the right wants to have a debate between Ted Cruz and Donald Trump and that’s what is going to constitute the scope of their reality then there’s no room for anyone who isn’t stupid, evil, or afraid. Whether you’re in on the game or not, you’ve become a victim of epistemic closure.

If you want to break out of that bubble, you have to stand with both feet outside it.

I’ll admit that I’m a bit out of sorts and out of touch with the political news cycle. On Friday night, we had Andrew’s wake. On Saturday, we had his memorial service at which I delivered one of the eulogies (my brother, Phil, delivered the other). I’m trying to get back in the swing of things, however slowly.

I knew that the Republicans were having some kind of collective freakout about the CNBC debate and were discussing asinine plans to protect their candidates from any further uncomfortable questions, but I had no idea that the first thing they did was to cancel a Telemundo debate scheduled for February.

That the Republican National Committee did this after issuing a post-2012 autopsy that called on the party to be more inclusive and welcoming of Latinos is stunning to me.

I think David Atkins nailed it with this:

It’s perfectly obvious that of all the battles in the GOP civil war between the establishment and the base, immigration is by far the most toxic. Immigration is the main reason Donald Trump is where he is in the polls, Jeb Bush seems to have one foot in the campaign grave, and media/establishment darling “winner of every debate” Marco Rubio can’t seem to climb higher than 10% in the national numbers.

Any attempt to even consider bring a legislative proposal on immigration in the House would destroy what little is left of Republican Party unity, and make the presidential race an even bigger clown show than it is now. That downside risk is far scarier to most Republicans than whatever upside gains might be made with Hispanics come November as a result of actually trying to be responsible legislators.

Atkins was talking about why Speaker Paul Ryan won’t dare bring up an immigration reform bill, and also why the media are so reluctant to explain this to the American people. But this also explains why the RNC would go from saying immigration reform is vital for the GOP’s future presidential aspirations to canceling a debate with a Spanish-language network.

This makes the party look racist and spineless at the same time. It’s not an attractive look.

Back when I was deep in the weeds of developing the site that would become Booman Tribune, Time magazine recognized Powerline as the Blog of the Year. Those were the days, with Bush-Cheney fresh off the ratification of the people and reelection to a second four-year term, when Dartmouth assholery was at an apex. I realize that most people don’t know what Dartmouth assholery really means, but it’s a thing.

Don’t get me wrong, any institution that can give us both Dr. Seuss and Mister Rogers can’t be all bad, but Dartmouth also gave us Laura Ingraham, Dinesh D’Souza and the folks that run Powerline. There’s a strain of right-wing obnoxiousness at that university that is an embarrassment to all Ivy League graduates and the people who are supposed to educate them.

Still, John Hinderaker (aka, Assrocket) has a point. If Jeb Bush is going to spend the bulk of his time nitpicking Marco Rubio about his U.S. Senate attendance record, he ought to just give up and go home.

It’s hard to read about the reasons people have for supporting Donald Trump. People say the dumbest things and it hurts my spirit to see how people are misled or how disorganized their thoughts are, or how unsophisticated they can be.

But I have to remind myself that voters aren’t being given many choices in this election despite the unprecedented number of candidates. I mean, I can relate to the following sentiment even if its substantially different from my own:

Without ever having seen Trump’s reality TV show, “The Apprentice,” [Holly] Martin [a freelance technology writer] has come to think that he has a rare ability to get things done. She was a Republican all her life — until her party regained the majority in Congress in 2014 and proceeded, she said, “to do nothing. They did nothing on Obamacare, nothing on cutting spending, nothing on restoring honesty. They hate us, so now I’m done with Republicans. Trump is not one of them. He doesn’t hate us. He really believes we can make America great again, and I’m not an optimistic person, but I think he can, because he’s got a built-in ability to use the media, just like Obama.”

I don’t know why she thinks giving people access to health care is a bad thing, and I have no idea why she’s worried about government spending. I’m not really sure what kind of dishonesty is troubling her. But I understand that the Republicans made a bunch of promises, some of which they had no hope of keeping and others of which they had no true intention of actually delivering. It’s also clear that the folks in the so-called Republican “Establishment” are frustrated beyond endurance with people like Holly Martin who actually believed their bullshit and expected them to be effective. That she, and so many other voters like her, have no interest in Jeb Bush or Scott Walker or Marco Rubio makes them crazy, and it’s not too strong to say that the Establishment basically “hates” their own base of supporters.

So, she looks at Donald Trump and she sees in him someone who’s pretty effective in getting media attention and driving the national conversation and it looks like he’s a better bet to actually shake things up and make possible things that currently look impossible. It might be a Hail Mary pass, but what’s the alternative?

And is it really all that different from a similar sentiment on the left that looks to Bernie Sanders to create a “revolution” in the political climate that will make a progressive America possible?

Perhaps the main thing that is wrong with both sentiments is the inability to understand the role that political parties and Congress play in defining the limits of the possible. If you nominate a candidate that the party power players do not want to work with, you’re going to have a lot of problems trying to win the general election. And if you somehow manage to make that happen anyway, the new president will have to try to deliver on their promises with two antagonistic parties in Congress instead of the customary one.

Maybe that’s what you want because the two parties stink to high heaven and can’t work together anyway, but you shouldn’t invest much hope in the results. You’re creating a recipe for a failed presidency and hoping that it will somehow fix the system. Unfortunately, it’s more likely to create chaos.

What’s making this risk seem attractive is partly that a lot of folks don’t understand that they’re inviting chaos in the first place, but it’s mainly that things are already too chaotic. So, people think “What’s the difference, really?”

And it’s getting hard to argue with them.

I think most people are going to be more practical. Hillary Clinton may seem like more of the same to a lot of people despite the fact that she’d be the first woman president, but she also represents stability. Those factors, together, are probably enough to overcome this sense of frustration with the status quo, because things really aren’t as bad as they’re often made out to be. And, where they’re truly bad in a kind of unprecedented way is in the political sphere where the inability to act is being driven by dysfunction and divisions on the right.

Still, it’s an argument. And the folks who want to blow everything up and see what happens have a stronger case than they should. It’s the old thing about doing the same thing over and over again and hoping for a better result. That’s insane.

So, we’re kind of in the sad condition of picking between stupid and insane, or it at least appears that way too much of the time.

In this environment, the thing that’s neither stupid nor insane is to lower your expectations and follow the Hippocratic Oath, which is to first do no harm.

I’m a night person. Your diabolical plan to set the clocks back and make it dark out before dinnertime is really just an effort to make me depressed and filled with Nordic despair.

When I am president, the Sun will never set!