Month: December 2016

As the Democratic Party moves forward, some lessons need to be learned from the actions and performance of the last Presidential Candidate.

I have posted here and other places about that candidate’s tendendcy to “shoot” her mouth off without thinking of the electoral consequences.   A noble quality for the pure of heart, but that usually isn’t the definition of a politician running for national office, whose goal is to influence people and win votes.

Her comments about the coal industry and “deplorables” could have been miscontrued and taken out of context; but they  just provided more questions for those who may have been sitting on the fence plus provided more ammunition to the GOP for ads and social media. It may have been a factor in the Ohio and Penn.

Another example is HRC’s comment about firearms in Oct 2015.

———-excerpt———-

“Hillary Clinton says a gun buyback program similar to the one Australia implemented in 1996 is “worth considering” in the United States.

“I don’t know enough details to tell you how we would do it or how it would work, but certainly the Australia example is worth looking at,” Clinton said at a New Hampshire town hall on Friday….

The Australian government purchased more than 650,000 guns from citizens in the compulsory 1996 buyback program….

Clinton criticized rival candidate Bernie Sanders for his record on guns at the first Democratic primary debate on Tuesday.

She announced a new gun control plan earlier this month that did not mention a gun buyback. A Clinton spokesman did not immediately return a request for clarification on Clinton’s stance on guns….

http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/dem-primaries/257172-hillary-australia-style-gun-control-worth-l
ooking-at

————————-

The Australian Gun law was a compulsary buy back of semi-automatic firearms and put severe restrictions on ownership or purchase of other types. A “need” is required to allow private ownership and self protection is not seen as a need.

That recent rulings as to the 2nd Amendment would make a similar law impossible seems to have escaped the legally trained candidate; but not this article’s authors.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-35048251

That idea for the US may play well with certain constituencies, but probably not others…especially states that have large numbers of voters who enjoy field sports.  And while many equate semiautomatic arms with military style weapons, they are also the mechanism used in hunting rifles and shotguns…going back to the 1920s and 30s.

Just a few data points-Deer Hunters only (not counting bird and small game hunters which may or may not be covered by the same license)

Wisconsin
400,000+ licensed firarm deer hunters (2013)
Trump over HRC margin 22,177

Michigan-
700,000+ lic firearm deer hunters (2015)
Trump over HRC margin 10,704

Penn-
750,000+ lic deer hunters (2015?)
Trump over HRC margin 68,236

Were Clinton’s statements the reason she lost those states?  I doubt it.  Was it one more brick in the wall seperating the candidate from her hoped for electorate?  Probably.  I know it was trumpeted on not just the NRA sites but field sport magazines and web sites.  

Of course, a Clinton campaign spokesperson tried to walk back the candidate’s statements, or at least the characterization by her opponents. “She doesn’t mean confiscation” (though the Australian law demands it with compensation); but the words had already escaped her teeth.

http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/257333-clinton-aide-hillary-not-in-favor-of-gun-con
fiscation

But after other flubs and posistion switches, who was inclined to believe her once the issue was out there?

There are multiple states (outside the urban coastal regions) that enjoy shooting sports. Millions of hunters, hobbyists, competition shooters, etc… Fos some it is an important part of their recreation and family tradidtion.  They also vote.  Are military style weapons necessary?  I don’t like them but some do. Anyway.  The firearm industry has used Democratic Candidates as punching bags and straw men to promote and market firearms to the fearful.  Share prices of manufacturers dropped when Trump was announced the winner; they were expecting another sales bonanza if HRC got in.

So what posistions toward firearms will the future national Democratic Party take that will appeal, or (at the very least) not alienate, those millions of voters?

R

Michigan’s Republican Attorney General Bill Schuette has filed a lawsuit to prevent a recount of the presidential vote. He has several complaints, but one of them is just odd.

“Although [Green Party candidate Jill] Stein had the ability to request a recount from the moment the polls closed on November 9, 2016, she waited an additional three weeks — until the last possible minute under Michigan law — to do so.

The New York Giants used to have a head football coach named Tom Coughlin who expected his players to be in team meetings five minutes early and would fine them if they were later than that. This caused a big blow-up with his All-Pro defensive end, Michael Strahan, when he got fined for showing up right on time. They eventually settled their dispute and won a Super Bowl together, but they weren’t dealing with a binding legal document.

I don’t know how you go into court and argue that the plaintiff is out of line for filing their complaint on the last day it was legally allowable to do so. I don’t know how you even put something like that in writing.

Some of his other arguments aren’t much better. He says that Stein’s recount petition should be rejected because she didn’t get that many votes. That’s not how the law works. He says it will cost more than she’s forced to pay, but that’s not her problem. He says that they don’t have time to do a recount, but that’s not her problem, either.

Maybe he has a better case than I’m laying out here, but it seems like he’s just doing a lot of whining without much of anything legal to back him up.

I’m sure his position is politically popular, since most Michiganders probably don’t want to pay any taxpayer dollars for a recount that is unlikely to change the result of the state’s election, let alone the overall one. But that doesn’t mean that it will hold up in court.

Now, I suppose that there might be a legitimate issue if a hand recount will take so long that it will prevent Michigan’s electors from being certified on December 13th. They need to be certified six days before they convene on December 19th and make their selections for president. If they cannot be certified, it’s possible that Michigan’s votes won’t be counted, but even that would not change the outcome of the election. Still, a state court might weigh the threat of total disenfranchisement higher than the threat of inaccuracy.

But that would only argue against a hand recount. And whether she’s entitled to a hand recount is a matter of statutory language and interpretation, not special pleading.

Just for clarity, Clinton is currently down in the certified Michigan vote by just under 11,000 votes. In Pennsylvania, yesterday, they finished counting all the provisional ballots from Philadelphia County, and it added 24,000 votes to Clinton’s total, bringing her deficit there down from about 70,000 to about 46,000.

There shouldn’t be any provisional ballots left to count in Michigan since they already certified their vote, but I did notice when 24,000 votes suddenly turned up out of Philly that no one seemed to be talking about. That’s more than her current deficit in both Michigan and Wisconsin.

Mick Konczal,Medium: Learning from Trump in Retrospect

As Joan C. Williams noted in an important essay, “the white working class (WWC) resents professionals but admires the rich.” The WWC doesn’t encounter rich people, but “professionals order them around every day. The dream is not to become upper-middle-class, with its different food, family, and friendship patterns; the dream is to live in your own class milieu, where you feel comfortable – just with more money.”

Why class arguments don’t work on the working class anymore–what is the real American dream.  Consider that “own class milieu” allows for the distorted culture and institutions that preserve racism, sexism, and other attacks on equal protection of the law.  So do the class milieus of upper-middle-class professionals and the rich as well.

We need to talk about monopoly power, especially as Trump doesn’t take it up. Meanwhile we should feel out our own case against professionals. Tying professionals to commodification, the people who get in the way of needed goods (especially with whatever TrumpCare ends up looking like), might be a way to go there.

It is the medical profession as much as insurance companies that have prevented health care from becoming part of the infrastructure.

We need to remember a narrative of what has happened to workers and how we are going to fix it is more important than covering every potential base.

Read here “all workers”.

The brilliant economist David Card gave me a useful point here during an interview: the divide among economists on trade is driven by the fact that labor economists study the real effects of unemployment on real people, where trade and macroeconomists treat people as just another commodity.

Marx’s fundamental and valid criticism of capitalism was that it was an ideology that turned everything — people, law, politics, art, culture — into commodities and stripped every other value of society.  The price of everything and the value of nothing.  Any criticism needs to point out that the dominance of money as a showstopper is a huge problem with capitalism.

Obviously, people in poverty are worse off than others, and there’s philosophical reasons to want a market system that allows for inequality as long as it benefits the worst-off in society.

The call for centrism will not even admit this principle.  You’re on your own.

Here is the hard truth that we are not facing:

“Post-tax-and-transfer” inequality, the thing everyone was cheering as the way forward, is going to be a major causality in the next four years, probably the next 8 months even, conceptually as a Trump administration doesn’t think that way at all, and practically as the conservatives destroy transfers and progressive taxation. Getting a clearer strategy and narrative around pushing wages up, and getting a fuller agenda around places left behind, needs to be centered more than it is.

Opposition to the steamroller of Trumpism must not be based on notions of self-evident truths.

Ezekiel Kweku writes in an excellent article, “The lesson we should draw from Clinton’s loss is not that white supremacy is unbeatable at the polls, but that it’s not going to beat itself…If the Democratic Party would like to keep more Donald Trumps from winning in the future, they are going to have to take the extraordinary step of doing politics.”

He’s used the call sign “Chaos.” Some people call him “Mad Dog” and others call him “The Warrior Monk.” He spent forty years in the U.S. Marines before retiring in 2013 five months early. He’s got a major bug up his butt about Iran, and now Donald Trump wants to make him our Secretary of Defense. His name is James N. Mattis, and he needs a waiver.

To take the job, Mattis will need Congress to pass legislation to bypass a federal law stating that defense secretaries must not have been on active duty in the previous seven years. Congress has granted a similar exemption just once, when Gen. George C. Marshall was appointed to the job in 1950…

…It is unclear whether the legislation required to make Mattis the Pentagon chief will be difficult to obtain from Congress. A 1947 national security law said that a general must wait 10 years from leaving active duty before becoming defense secretary. An exception was granted on a one-time basis for Marshall, with lawmakers saying in special legislation at the time that it was the “sense of the Congress that after General Marshall leaves the office of Secretary of Defense, no additional appointments of military men to that office shall be approved.”

The 10-year rule was in effect between 1947 and 2008. It was then reduced to a 7-year rule. Mattis has currently been a civilian for only three years. The Congress that created the position of Secretary of Defense (supplanting the Secretary of War) in 1947, went out of their way to make sure future generations knew that they did not want any future generals taking the job after Marshall was done implementing his plan.

Donald Trump doesn’t care.

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), a member of the Senate Armed Services subcommittee on personnel, said Thursday night that she will oppose Mattis becoming Pentagon chief.

“While I deeply respect General Mattis’s service, I will oppose a waiver,” she said. “Civilian control of our military is a fundamental principle of American democracy, and I will not vote for an exception to this rule.”

John McCain doesn’t care.

…Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said that he looks forward to beginning the confirmation process “as soon as possible” in the new year.

“General Mattis has a clear understanding of the many challenges facing the Department of Defense, the U.S. military, and our national security,” McCain said. “America will be fortunate to have General Mattis in its service once again.”

Maybe you don’t care either. But there were reasons why Congress put the rule in place. The country had just spent considerable effort destroying fascism and they felt that civilian control of the military (as well as the State Department) was a vital principle to uphold.

Trump has already selected a retired general as his National Security Advisor, and one who almost certainly could not be confirmed by the Senate to anything. He’s been considering another retired general for the State Department despite the fact that he was convicted of being careless with classified information when he served as Director of Central Intelligence and is currently on probation.

Sen. Gillibrand won’t consider Gen. Mattis for Secretary of Defense because of the principle of civilian control. I’m sure that many other senators will take the some position. But I think the Democrats are more opposed to the idea of Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III serving as Attorney General, and I don’t know how much fight they have to spread around. I also don’t know if there are any Republicans who are willing to put principle over party. McCain was one possibility, and he’s clearly not on board. Maybe Rand Paul might take a stand?

Recent debates at another site bring up the idea of closing Democratic Party Primaries.  Why should those who won’t sign on to the National Party be allowed a say in its candidate.

To paraphrase, -The role of the Democratic Party is to build the Democratic Party.- Great  because building a Political party just for the sake of building a party does nothing.

The purpose of the Democratic Party is to serve the Nation and its non-millionaire citizens.  And the best way it can do that is to win elections; local, state and federal.  

The purpose of the Democratic Party is not to serve, build and enhance the institution of the Democratic Party; but since the 1930’s, its role is to help those citizens of the US who don’t have armies of lawyers, tax accountants, and public officials on the payroll.
It is not to strengthen the self associated group called the Democratic Party who may, or may not reflect the interests of those non-millionaires.

It has been argued that the Party did not reflect those interests effectively and it is such Institutional thinking that has brought the disaster of 2016.  Scorn has been heaped on those who joined the Party in name only to vote or run as a Democrat.  Well, guess what.  You have a better chance of advancing Democratic non-millionaire goals with them on board than not. 

Shutting them out of a primary does nothing but apply a negative stigma to the Party in their mind.  By allowing a “registered” independent to vote in an open Democratic primary, engages them in the process and increases the likelihood that will look on the eventual candidate favorably.  Unless they are a complete failure like some.

And you know, with the increase of technology, one’s public political party registration is easily found and is used as a sub-rosa filter for jobs, credit, housing, employment advancement.  Many who rely on the public for their income register as independent so as to appear neutral.  So that “registered” independent may have grown up in a Democratic home, been attracted by its policies, etc.. but due to personal/economic reasons cannot be known as such on the voting rolls.

So, if its your stated goal to build a self perpetuating Fortress Democratic Party which only allows and rewards insiders and long timers who follow a rigid policy dogma; checking off each approved position in the approved manner, you will get the result of 2016.

If you want a big tent broad enough to win a majority of states with a safe margin, then that will have to include “registered” independents.  Blocking them is just another tool of solidifying influence and policy positions in an increasingly smaller and smaller Democratic Party.

Ridge

This opinion piece confirms my joy on the positive side of Brexit and UK remaining an island at a distance from influencing foreign and military policy of the EU.

○ After Brexit: Transatlantic Opportunity for Europe’s Neutrality by Oui @BooMan on June 30th, 2016

Hurrah! Hurrah!

Little Britain: Trump, Brexit push out UK | Deutsche Welle |

A Trump presidency could reset the UK’s “special relationship” with the US. But a post-Brexit Britain could also result in the EU and the US turning their backs, as Cristina Burack reports from London.

Trade talk

Though the Brexit vote expressed the frustrations of many British citizens toward globalization, Prime Minister Theresa May ‘s post-Brexit policy remains committed to liberalization and open trade. With Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson at the helm, the UK has embarked on a quixotic quest for access to the European single market without participation in the European customs union and freedom of movement.

○ Brexit: 1 million EU citizens in Britain ‘could be at risk of deportation’ | The Guardian |

…
Uncertain foreign policy

A Trump presidency also raises uncertainties on future foreign policy collaboration. Featherstone sees Trump as more oriented toward the United Kingdom than the Pacific-focused Obama. “Trump knows Britain better than other places and he may be open to British flattery,” Featherstone said. “But Trump puts at risk a cornerstone of British foreign policy: NATO.”
Additionally, Trump’s overtures to Vladimir Putin could shift existing US-UK military coalition alliances. Trump’s suggestions that as president he would align the US with Russia on action in Syria threatens to undermine British military involvement in the region against the Islamic State.

Alternately, a decision to decrease US involvement abroad would leave a power vacuum on the world stage. Despite Brexit-supporters’ promised image of an increasingly-prominent “Global Britain,” Featherstone does not think the UK could fill the international void left by an isolationist US.

○ Crimea crisis: Russian President Putin’s speech annotated | BBC News – March 2014 |

“Post-Iraq, and reinforced by the experience of Libya, UK public opinion is wary of further security adventures. London lacks the will and capability to be a separate military power…. Britain has often followed Washington, but it can’t lead separately from it.”

A bridge too far?

In a past era, the UK might have become a go-between Washington and Brussels. Raines notes that the UK historically played this role, but it depended on Britain exerting influence on the EU from within as a member.

Featherstone also does not believe that London can be the link across the Atlantic and the Channel. “The world of diplomacy has changed,” he said. “A UK government cannot offer enough to either [the EU or the US] and neither will actually need a bridge via London.”

Tim Bales, politics professor at Queen Mary University in London and an expert on the Conservative party, has a similar view.
“The UK has always harbored the illusion that it could be a bridge between the US and the EU,” he told DW. “But it’s precisely that – an illusion. The US doesn’t need the UK to talk to the EU… The same goes for the EU.  The UK from now on is likely to be pretty much what we in the UK call a ‘third wheel’ in any US-Europe relationship.”

Vladimir Putin says ‘we are ready to cooperate’ with Trump administration | The Guardian |

Vladimir Putin has softened his rhetoric about the United States in an annual speech, expressing a desire to mend ties and work together in Syria once Donald Trump takes office.

“We are ready to cooperate with the new American administration,” the Russian president said in his state of the nation address to an assembly of lawmakers and officials. “It’s important to normalise and start to develop our bilateral relations on an equal and mutually beneficial basis.”

…
Putin made a few jibes at his opponents in the west, saying that “unlike some foreign colleagues”, Russia was looking for friends rather than enemies. But he was less strident in his criticism than in past addresses. In 2014, he accused the west of trying to contain and weaken Russia for decades. In 2015, he lashed out at western meddling and regime change in the Middle East.

In this year’s speech, Putin said the United States and Russia had a “shared responsibility” to ensure international security and nuclear nonproliferation, noting that “attempts to break strategic parity are extremely dangerous”.

Ahead of the hundredth anniversary of the October Revolution next year, Putin warned against similar actions to create “schisms, animosity, resentments” in the national unity. He said Russia cannot grow with a “weak government and a pliant regime directed from outside”.

Russia has contacted Trump’s team about Syria, diplomat says | Boston Globe |

○ NATO Allies Oppose Bush on Georgia and Ukraine | NY Times – April 2008 |
○ US gives way on NATO for Georgia and Ukraine | FT – Nov. 27, 2008 |
○ NATO split on message to send Georgia on membership hopes | Reuters – Nov. 27, 2015 |

Where the “illiterate” president George Bush failed in aggression towards Russia over a closer NATO alliance with Ukraine and Georgia, the “literate” president Obama succeeded in pushing for a united front of East- and West European states for a new Cold War stance to confront Russia. Obama and his advisors even got European member states to agree to double their military investment over the coming years (Made in USA). See the NY Times article on the Bucharest Summit of April 2008. Quite a telling story about eight years of foreign policy under a Democratic president.

There is a lot of chatter on the European air waves of “experts” hired to do the “NATO is indispensable” slogan and warn of Trump’s campaign statement: NATO is an obsolete institution. I understand all policy documents written at NATO HQ in Brussels ahead of November 8th, refers to the 45th US president as a she, not a he.

The plague of global terrorism | The Economist – Nov. 2015 |

The appalling attacks in Paris on November 13th are a brutal reminder of the danger of terrorism to the West, mainly from Jihadist groups such as Islamic State (IS). Yet terrorism is a threat everywhere. The day before the atrocities in Paris, two bomb blasts killed 37 people in Beirut. On November 17th a suicide bomber blew up a market in northern Nigeria, leaving at least 36 people dead. Last year 32,700 people were killed in attacks worldwide, nearly twice as many as in 2013. And this year the toll may turn out to be even higher.

○ Background Report: 9/11, Ten Years Later | START | [pdf]

Global deaths from terrorism – see the indiscernable thin line representing Western nations

« click for index / database

I don’t have strong opinions on who should head the Democratic National Committee. From what I’ve seen of him, I like Rep. Keith Ellison of Minnesota. I believe I even did some work with his staff when I was consulting for Democracy for America. The opposition file dump on him just came out, and it’s substantial. I don’t know if the party wants that kind of headache, but I think it really comes down to whether Ellison would be good at the job.

On that score, my concern is that he’s a full-time congressman, and that doesn’t leave enough time for another full-time job. He could have the greatest ideas in the world, but I’m skeptical that he’d be able to devote enough attention to heading the DNC.

I saw that Markos Moulitsas endorsed NARAL’s Ilyse Hogue. I agreed with a lot of his reasoning, although I don’t really care all that much that she has a background in the Netroots. It’s nice, but her ideas are more important.

Howard Dean is an interesting case because he doesn’t fit neatly into any particular camp. It’s telling that Markos, who actually worked for Dean in 2004, didn’t even devote time to making a case against him. Dean is not a clear favorite of the establishment of the party, and Chuck Schumer endorsed Ellison which tells you that he and Dean are still on the outs. This shows that the old Emanuel/Schumer war with Dean may always have been more personal than ideological, as Ellison is clearly as progressive as anyone under consideration.

Yet, despite Dean lacking support from quarters where you might expect it, it’s widely conceded that he was an effective chairman of the DNC. He did a good job before, so why couldn’t he do a good job again?

There’s probably a temptation to worry about the racial/religious/gender identity of the chairman since they will be an important symbol of the party. I don’t care about that very much. I think the most important thing is that they have good ideas and management skills and that they can devote all their energies to the job.

None of these candidates appear to me to be miracle workers, and none of them strike me as clear disasters. So, I guess I just don’t care very much who gets the job.

Third way politics are dead. The left needs to be radical again; the incredibly costly belief that you can find a middle ground with fundamentalists, nihilists and robber barons needs to be put to bed.Democrats need to learn from Herman Melville´s Sermon to the Sharks
In Melville’s Moby Dick, Stubb, annoyed by the noise made by a group of sharks that are eating the carcass of a whale that is tied to the side of the boat, asks Fleece to preach to the sharks:
“tell ’em they are welcome to help themselves civilly, and in moderation, but they must keep quiet”
The point of the story, of course, is that it is pointless to preach to the sharks.
Third Way neoliberalism was proposed as a new way forward for the left after the resouding victories of rightwing neoliberals in Britain and the US (Thatcher and Reagan). The new left would keep the “values” of the old, but espouse free market economics. The goal would be a socially progressive society, with a decent social safety net, but also allowing for large concentrations of wealth (and therefore power) in the private sector. Third way neoliberalism can only work if the moneyed elites are somehow restrained; if , for some reason, they resist the temptation of using their wealth to control democracy (by using media to further the agenda, and funding politicians directly), in order to further increase their own power and wealth. As an example, Third Way politicians would like a booming and low-taxed private sector and also a modest social safety net; as if the power of the private sector would not be used to destroy the safety net (in order to lower taxes for, and increase the power of, the private sector). In essence, Third Way politics hinges on tolerating the sharks, and hoping they behave: “tell ’em they are welcome to help themselves civilly, and in moderation, but they must keep quiet”
In 2016, the failure of Third Way politics showed itself to be absolute, irredeemable and complete. The lesson to be learned (and it was foreshadowed by the work of T .Picketty) is that is impossible for democratic, progressive societies to coexist with elites that concentrate enormous amounts of wealth. Third Way politics is a conceptual impossibility; the only possible way forward for the left is to attack the high concentrations of wealth that are a cancer on democracy.

For many hypotheses, experiments under laboratory conditions are impossible in the social sciences. The best a historian or sociologist can hope for, then, is a so-called “natural experiment”, where conditions spontaneouslty approximate those of an experiment. For the social scientist, it is therefore rather fortunate that Barack Obama was such a great politician (eloquent, charismatic, intelligent), and Donald Trump such a transparently disgusting human being. In these near-perfect conditions, third-way neoliberalism failed spectacularly. This means that third way neoliberalism can never win again. Candidate Hillary Clinton was a victim of president Bill Clinton’s policies (much more so than his indiscretions): he aided the processes of capital mobility (globalization), the concetration of wealth, bank deregulation and the erosion of the fairness doctrine in the media. The first three caused the inequality and poor employment that fueled populist anger; the last made it possible for that populist anger to power a transparent con-man like Trump.

The only way forward for the left is true populism: nationalize fossil fuel industries and use them as a transitional energy source, tax financial speculation to the point that it becomes a marginal part of the economy; spend on job-intensive infrastructure to put money in the pockets of the working class; make the minimum wage a living wage, recognize health and education (including higher education), as human rights, de-privatize prisons and water utilities. And yes, the people who profit from all these moral affronts will fight every positive change; it is about time that the left fought back.

I’ll be writing long pieces on this later, but for right now I’ll be relatively brief. I enjoyed E.J. Dionne’s column today and I appreciate his level headedness and basic decency.

One thing Democrats need to do is to understand the scope and nature of their problem. They just ran a presidential election in which they got more votes. They ran house elections in which they got more votes. I’m not sure about the overall Senate tally (it’s distorted because only a third of the Senate was up for reelection, and that third was tilted red), but they gained a couple of seats. The Democrats have a lot of support. Their problem is the shape of their support.

The challenge is not just to sustain and hopefully grow their plurality base of voters, but to change the demographic nature of their supporters. This is why you’ll hear people like me say that the Democrats absolutely cannot ignore that they lost 75%-80% of the white vote in county after county in Pennsylvania and the Upper Midwest. This is the kind of racial voting we’ve seen in the South for years, and if it becomes the norm in the North it will make it impossible for the Democrats to win control of state legislatures in that region, make it nearly impossible to win back the U.S. House of Representatives, and give the Republicans a narrow opening to win the Electoral College with a minority of the popular vote, again.

A lot of people do not like the sound of that. But I don’t care how it sounds. It isn’t a value statement or an assessment of worth. It’s just a diagnosis of a problem. How you solve it, if it can be solved, is what ought to be controversial. The fact that it needs to be solved should not.

To be clear, this isn’t a matter of changing the party so that it abandons its preexisting base on civil, women’s or gay rights. The goal does not need to be to win white rural counties that have socially conservative values and a strong skepticism about the federal government. Obama didn’t win most of those counties. In fact, he struggled to get 30% of the vote in most of them. But he won two presidential elections with relative ease, and he carried the House with him in the first one. So, this is about reestablishing some support in areas where it totally collapsed in 2016, not about selling anyone out.

My concern is that things like this have a momentum of their own, and voting behaviors can easily become entrenched. There’s something fundamentally different about a community that will give 30%-35% of its votes to the Democrats and one which will only give them 15%-20%. In the latter case, voting Democrat is almost antisocial. If you live in a major city or a college town, you know how culturally suspect it is to be an outspoken Republican. The same type of thing (in reverse) in our northern exurbs and rural areas is what developed this year, and it basically describes what caught most everyone by surprise, including the pollsters and both campaigns.

This should be treated as a major threat to the left. It’s a full blown crisis.

On the one hand, we’re talking about winning back only 10%-15% of the white working class/rural vote, which doesn’t sound all that daunting. On the other hand, it could prove as impossible to do as winning 25% of the white vote in Alabama or Mississippi.

But, unless the left is content to be a permanent minority in state legislatures and in Congress, and to lose presidential elections it should win, it has to solve this problem.

And part of solving it is in understanding how certain decisions and behaviors from the Democratic base made it easier for Trump to convince the white people in these counties that the Democrats were hostile and not on their side. I mean, this is a big challenge in any case, but the least we can do is not make it more difficult through our own myopic reaction.

Whenever anyone tries to discuss these uncomfortable truths, it invites a defensive response that is understandable but typically unhelpful. It’s natural to pile contempt on people who thought Donald Trump is competent to serve as the president of the United States. It’s normal to be outraged when folks vote for a guy who disrespected every vulnerable community in the country and who promised to oppress and harass them. But a huge number of those folks voted for Obama once (or even twice) before voting for Trump. Those are the folks we need back. The rest we never had, can’t get, and probably don’t want.

The left will need imaginative political leaders and strategists, but the rest of us can get started by simply refusing to do Trump’s work for him. And that’s not easy, because we can be easily provoked and react with thoughtless and self-destructive behaviors.

As much as possible, we need to avoid that.

First, before I begin, let me supply some calming music so my blood pressure doesn’t give me a stroke.

Okay, that’s better.

Now, I’ve spent a lot of time researching our intelligence community and I’m hardly an unqualified fan of the job they’ve done for our country since the Japanese surrendered in 1945. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t think that most of what they do is important. I think they need good solid leadership from a president with a good moral compass. If provided that, they will give us much less reason to worry and go about their job of providing us with good analytical research and an early warning on threats we may face.

They’re a force to be reckoned with in their own right, as are sophisticated spy networks in all the countries that have them. Managing them is not a task for a coward or a simpleton. President Obama’s record has been mixed, better than any president since Carter, but disappointing in many ways, too.

But Trump is completely out of his depth and it already shows.

Only one member of President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team is dealing with the CIA and the 16 other offices and agencies that make up the U.S. intelligence community, four U.S. officials said Wednesday.

Geoffrey Kahn, a former House intelligence committee staffer, is the only person named so far to Trump’s intelligence community “landing team,” they said. As a result, said one senior career intelligence officer, briefing books prepared by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the National Security Agency, the National Counterterrorism Center, and 13 other agencies and organizations are “waiting for someone to read them.”

This is not how a nuclear-armed nation with soldiers stationed is dozens of countries handles a transition of power from one government to the next. This is absurd.

People want us to remember Pearl Harbor and remember 9/11, which are things we should obviously do. It’s hard enough to guard against sneak attacks when you’re trying. Who knows what are in all those briefing books?

And the Trump team is all geared up to humiliate President Obama by voting to destroy the Affordable Care Act before he can even leave office, but they can’t read what the intelligence community has to say about the state of the world?

Trump on Tuesday received only his third intelligence briefing since he won the Nov. 8 presidential election, despite an offer from President Barack Obama of daily briefings, three of the officials said.

Trump can’t even be bothered to have a briefing. Will that change once he’s inaugurated?

“It seems like an odd time to put issues like cyber security and international terrorism on the back burner,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.Previous administrations, the official said, were quicker to staff their intelligence teams, in part because they considered intelligence issues critical to setting foreign policy, defense and budget priorities.

So, a pattern is being set early on. Act quickly and spitefully with no plan and no intelligence.

This is dangerous enough that people should really try to focus on it rather than on what Trump is tweeting about at the moment.

If something happens because Trump is leaving our guard down, he’ll use it to crack down on minorities and break more laws. It seems like every time a Republican becomes president something catastrophic happens within months. Reagan survived an assassination attempt. Under Poppy, the Soviet empire began to crumble and we wound up in Panama. With Bush we had 9/11. What will it be with Trump?

Whatever it is, he’ll never see it coming.