Author Archives: weeklysift

Doug Muder is a former mathematician who now writes about politics and religion. He is a frequent contributor to UU World.

Fears of Democratic Disunity: talking myself down

May 23, 2016 – 9:00 am

What if the Nevada fracas is a preview of the national convention?

For months, I’ve been reassuring other Democrats that party unity wasn’t going to be a problem. Sure, the Bernie/Hillary rhetoric might sound bad sometimes, but that’s how these things go. When we got to the convention this summer and Hillary proved that she really did have the delegates, Bernie would do the right thing, just like Hillary did in 2008.

It’s easy: Hillary agrees to put some Bernie-like language in the platform (which won’t be that hard for her, since most of his proposals are just more ambitious and optimistic versions of something she’s proposing anyway), maybe some rule changes make things easier for the next insurgent candidate, the VP appeals to people in both camps (Elizabeth Warren would be ideal, but if she wants to stay in the Senate it shouldn’t be that hard to find somebody else), and everybody is happy. In a prime-time speech, Bernie gives his supporters a chance to congratulate themselves on a hard-fought campaign and yell really loud for him one last time, and then he lays out all the common values that make it essential that Clinton become president next January rather than Donald Trump. Everybody winds up on the podium waving their arms and smiling into the national-network cameras as the credits roll.

That could still happen. If I had to bet, I think I’d still say that most of it will happen. But this week for the first time I started to have some real doubts and some real fears. So I started looking into it.

Talking myself down. I’d don’t think she’s done it for years now, but Rachel Maddow’s show used to have a regular “Talk Me Down” feature. For one segment, Rachel would put aside her calm and collected persona and let her fears about something run wild. Then she’d bring on an expert guest to explain to her why that level of panic wasn’t warranted yet.

Sadly, I don’t have a rolodex full of experts I can call to talk me down. So (with some help from publicly available sources) I’m going to have to play both roles. But I think the basic format works for this topic. So I’ll start by letting my fears run.

The Sanders progression. For months now I’ve been watching the Sanders campaign shift its focus. In the beginning, it was a purely positive campaign about the kinds of goals Democrats ought never to lose sight of, whether they seem politically feasible right now or not: health care as a right, protecting democracy against the rule of big money, government infrastructure projects to create full employment, union rights, voting rights, a livable wage for all workers, and affordable education for everyone.

That was the message I was attracted to and ultimately voted for in the New Hampshire primary.

That positive message is still at the Sanders campaign’s core, but little by little it has been joined by an anti-Hillary-Clinton message: She is corrupt and untrustworthy. She is a Republican posing as a Democrat. She is a weak candidate who will lose to Donald Trump. She has taken money from the wrong people, so no matter what she is saying now, ultimately she will do their bidding.

Last summer I went on a Hillary research project, and I didn’t find much support for that vision of her. I came out liking Hillary. I think it’s important to keep pressuring her from the Left, but I expect to be mostly content with a Hillary presidency.

And more recently, a persecution narrative has become a third part of the Sanders campaign: The Democratic Establishment will stop at nothing to give the nomination to Clinton, no matter what the People want.

To a degree, that narrative was justified. For example, the original debate schedule — since adjusted to include more debates — seemed crafted to give unknown candidates as little room as possible to break out. But as the campaign has worn on, everything that didn’t benefit Sanders has become part of the persecution narrative. Sanders did better in open primaries where Independents could vote, so closed primaries — which have existed since the beginning of the primary process many decades ago — were part of the Establishment’s conspiracy. (Caucuses, which are even less democratic than closed primaries, benefited Sanders, so they were not a problem.) Any election-day glitch — even the ones caused by Republican officials, and even if the effect on the Clinton/Sanders race was unclear — was part of the Democratic Establishment’s plot to steal the election for Hillary.

Sometimes rationales flipped overnight, with no apparent soul-searching or justification. Initially, it was a horror that superdelegates might reverse the will of the People (as expressed in the primaries) and give the nomination to Clinton because they thought she was more electable. Then, as it because clear that the People were actually voting for Clinton in larger numbers than Sanders, the Sanders campaign embraced the opposite argument: Superdelegates should reverse the will of the People and give the nomination to Sanders because he is more electable.

Esquire‘s Charles Pierce expresses his opinion on the persecution narrative harshly, but he’s not wrong.

I voted for Bernie Sanders. I even wrote about why I did here at this very shebeen. But if anybody thinks that, somehow, he is having the nomination “stolen” from him, they are idiots.

Nevada. So now we come to Nevada. In the caucuses in February, the voters went for Clinton 53%-47%. But that wasn’t the end of the story, because in Nevada’s arcane process the statewide caucuses just lead to the county conventions, which then lead to the state convention where the delegates to national convention are supposed to be chosen.

The county conventions happened in April, and a combination of lackadaisical organizing by the Clinton campaign and Sanders backers finding an exploitable hole in the rules turned the tables: Now it looked like Sanders would have an advantage going into the May state convention. February’s apparent 20-15 national-convention delegate split for Clinton appeared likely to shrink to 18-17. (Imagine the outcry if everything had been reversed: if Sanders had won in February, but then Clinton supporters found a backdoor way to take some of those delegates away.)

But again, it’s an arcane process. Sanders supporters were entitled to more state-convention delegates than Clinton supporters, but there are rules about credentials. Those rules are available to both campaigns, and it’s a campaign-organizer’s job to make sure than your delegates jump through all the appropriate hoops. At this stage, the Clinton people did a better job than the Sanders people, so at the May 14 state convention, Clinton narrowly had more credentialed delegates than Sanders. The ultimate result was a return to Square One: Clinton will get the 20 national convention delegates it looked like she had won back in February.

There’s been a lot of charge and counter-charge about exactly what went down at the state convention, but the accounts that have the ring of truth to my ear are the ones from Politifact and TPM’s Tierney Sneed. (I also found this on-the-floor view from a Clinton delegate to be enlightening.)

Here’s how it looks to me: After the Sanders campaign leaders in Nevada realized they’d been out-organized by the Clinton people, they decided to bury that fact inside the persecution narrative: The Evil Democratic Establishment had stolen the convention for Clinton. The Sanders campaign had been seeding that ground for months, so their delegates accepted that explanation without question and reacted with an understandable amount of anger. (The insults and threats that expressed that anger were still over the top, though.)

Bernie’s reaction to Nevada didn’t increase my confidence in him. His condemnation of his supporters’ bad behavior seemed perfunctory. (“It goes without saying that I condemn any and all forms of violence, including the personal harassment of individuals.”) The stronger message was that the process is corrupt and his people’s reaction had been justified. Josh Marshall’s response was harsh, but not too different from what I was feeling:

This, as I said earlier, is the problem with lying to your supporters. Sanders is telling his supporters that he can still win, which he can’t. He’s suggesting that the win is being stolen by a corrupt establishment, an impression which will be validated when his phony prediction turns out not to be true. Lying like this sets you up for stuff like happened over the weekend in Nevada.

Or maybe it sets you up for an even bigger mess this summer in Philadelphia.

My fear. Most primary campaigns end the way the Republicans’ just did: As candidates get to a point where they have no credible winning scenario, they drop out. Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz … they all got to a point where they couldn’t predict victory with a straight face, so they quit.

Not everybody does that. In 2008, Clinton herself hung on until the last primary before dropping out and endorsing Obama (though that race was considerably closer than this one). Sometimes losing candidates go all the way to the convention, like Ron Paul did in 2012 or Gene McCarthy did in 1968.

When you take a campaign to a convention that is not going to nominate you, you do it for some other reason. Maybe you want to register your protest over an important issue, like the Vietnam War in 1968. Or you might be looking ahead to future elections. (The 1968 Democratic Convention started a process to change the rules that had allowed Humphrey to win the nomination without competing in the primaries. McGovern’s 1972 nomination couldn’t have happened otherwise.) Or maybe you want to use the convention battle as part of your narrative for the next cycle. (Hillary in some sense did that in 2008; her motion to nominate Obama by acclamation, her prime-time speech, and the way she and Bill campaigned for Obama in the fall impressed some Obama supporters — me, for instance — and set her up well for this year’s campaign.)

What I want to believe — and do, most of the time — is that Bernie Sanders is going to the convention looking for the kinds of things Hillary can offer: platform concessions on progressive issues, rules changes that will make the next insurgent candidate more viable, a prime time speech to inspire his supporters to become a long-term movement, and so on.

But after Nevada, I started worrying about something else: What if the thing Bernie wants out of the convention isn’t a concession? What if it’s a fight? What if the culmination he sees for his “political revolution” rhetoric and his narrative of persecution by the Democratic establishment is to have his supporters dragged out of the convention hall by force? That would probably hand the White House to Trump, but it might also rupture the Democratic Party in some way that leads to an overall realignment of the two-party system.

What if that’s the goal?

It’s always like this. Naturally, I’m not the only person to have this worry, or at least this area of worry, so I went looking for how others were dealing with it, in hopes that they might talk me down. Appropriately, one of the people I found was Rachel Maddow, who discussed it on her show Wednesday.

At this point in the primary process, it’s always like this. There is always acrimony and upset between remaining candidates at this part of the race. Parties just do this. It is to be expected. It’s very, very, very rarely fatal.

Making a similar point, Matt Yglesias pulled up video of an extremely harsh exchange between candidates Jerry Brown and Bill Clinton in 1992.

[The Clinton/Sanders contest] feels unusually intense and vicious to many heavy consumers of internet news. Thanks to social media, lots of supporters of both candidates are now spending their free time acting as amateur advocates for their preferred campaign. This makes the race more intense and immediate than many past campaigns, and there has certainly been a lot of name-calling on Twitter.

But the actual campaign has been, by the standards of campaigns, remarkably issue-oriented and low-key compared to past races.

I sort of knew that, but it was helpful to be reminded of just how ugly things got in, say, 2008, before they got better. It turns out that parties don’t just forgive their internal spats, we very often literally forget. So the next time it happens, it’s always like “It’s never been this bad before.”

Once I started remembering, I remembered all the way back to the first year I watched conventions on TV: 1968, when I was 11. Even that year, after Mayor Daley’s “police riot” and the chaos on the streets in Chicago, nearly all of the McCarthy Democrats eventually came home. (The Wallace Southern conservative white Democrats had begun their trek to the Republican Party and weren’t ever coming back, but that was a whole different story, which I’ve told before.) After falling ridiculously far behind in September, Humphrey came back almost all the way, making 1968 one of the closest presidential elections ever.

Both sides have the same scenario in mind. Those recovered memories helped a little, but I didn’t really regain my optimism until I started chasing the links that my Sanders-supporting Facebook friends were posting.

Yes, of course there were some Bernie-or-bust type posts, and some that put the worst possible construction on anything having to do with Clinton or with anybody who isn’t 100% for Sanders. But a lot of the voices are simply asking for “respect”. Sanders’ only supporter in the Senate, Jeff Merkley of Oregon, says:

If you want to bring people together, they have to feel heard and they have to feel respected and well-treated.

And then he sounds remarkably conciliatory:

I believe that once a candidate has a majority of pledged delegates — so not superdelegates, but the pledged delegates — (and) has a majority of the votes cast, that the party will have made its decision and we need to do the hard work of coming together,” he said. “Should Secretary Clinton win these key categories, I think the conversation will begin about how to bring the sides together so we can go into the convention united, go out of the convention even more united, and make sure that this charlatan, this self-promoting charlatan, Donald Trump, does not become president.

A lot of the other Sanders-supporters are mainly just saying that it’s up to Clinton to make the first move. Jason Linkins, for example:

the responsibility of unifying the party falls to the winner of the primary, not the loser. To anyone who thinks otherwise: Come on, now. This is literally the job of the person who becomes the presidential candidate, not the person who is going to be pursuing politics in some other office. An election is not a contest between warring factions, where the winner gets to spend the next four years stunting on the losers. The electoral process will decide which candidate will serve all Americans. And all Americans are owed something, no matter how the votes were cast.

This is how magnanimity works.

The more I read, the more I came to the conclusion that the majority on both sides have the same ideal scenario, the one I talked about in the first section. That seems like a long time ago now, so let me repeat it:

Hillary agrees to put some Bernie-like language in the platform, maybe some rule changes make things easier for the next insurgent candidate, the VP appeals to people in both camps, and everybody is happy. In a prime-time speech, Bernie gives his supporters a chance to congratulate themselves on a hard-fought campaign and yell really loud for him one last time, and then he lays out all the common values that make it essential that Clinton become president next January rather than Donald Trump. Everybody winds up on the podium waving their arms and smiling into the national-network cameras as the credits roll.

But — and here’s the real sticking point right now — large numbers of people on both sides are worried that the other side won’t play its role. Bernie’s supporters are worried that Clinton won’t reach out to them and Clinton’s supporters are worried that Bernie will spurn all offers so that he can stomp away mad.

My reading of this is that we’re all victims of one side or the other of the polarizing propaganda. Hillary won’t reach out because she’s a bought-and-paid-for tool of Wall Street, and Bernie will spit on her attempts to reach out because he’s a neo-Leninist bomb-thrower. The media is fanning both of those flames, because conflict draws eyeballs. (In reading all these stories, it’s important not just to read the selected quotes from campaign spokespeople, but to consider what they were asked, and whether there was any way to answer that question differently.)

But when I forget all that nonsense and re-anchor myself in reality, I wind up where Matt Yglesias is:

The differences between Clinton and Sanders are real and important, but they amount to an argument about whether to try to shift the country a little bit to the left or a lot to the left. Under the circumstances, it would be very odd for it to produce a lasting, unbridgeable divide if earlier elections have not.

Let’s flesh out that analysis by using the minimum wage as a proxy for a long list of issues. Sanders wants a $15 federal minimum wage. Clinton wants a $12 federal minimum wage with higher minimums established by state or local laws in areas with high costs of living. The current federal minimum wage is $7.25. Trump wants no federal minimum wage at all. (“Let the states decide,” he says.)

Is it really going to be that hard for Democrats to come together?

I have no way of knowing what’s going on in the minds of the two candidates right now. Maybe they really are mad at each other, or maybe not. But ultimately, I find it hard to believe that either is going to go against the general will of his or her supporters. And among Hillary supporters right now, I find very little desire to show Bernie who’s boss. Among Bernie supporters, the number who want to burn down the Democratic Party seems pretty small.

We’re due for another two weeks or so of ugliness. But after the last major primaries on June 7, the pressure on both candidates — pressure from their own supporters — to work something out is going to be enormous. So I still think we’re going to get that scene everybody wants: Clinton and Sanders standing together in Philadelphia as the credits roll.

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The Monday Morning Teaser

May 23, 2016 – 6:59 am

A couple of months ago, who thought we’d be here? The Republicans seem to be uniting around Donald Trump, months ahead of what was supposed to be a party-destroying convention. Meanwhile, it’s the Democrats who seem unable to put aside their differences, and the ugliness at the Nevada state convention seems to presage an ugly national convention in Philadelphia.

Rachel Maddow used to do “Talk Me Down” segments, where she’d vent whatever fear she was feeling about some negative scenario, then bring on an expert to explain why things probably wouldn’t turn out that badly. I don’t have a stable of experts to consult, so I largely have to play both roles, but I think the format is appropriate here. This week’s featured post is “Fears of Democratic Disunity: talking myself down”. It should be out by 9 EDT or so.

The weekly summary briefly mentions EgyptAir 804, which I’m sure you’re hearing plenty about already, then goes into the meaninglessness of Trump’s list of possible Supreme Court nominees, before finding informative links about the important stories that are getting buried under all the political coverage: Brexit, Brazilian impeachment, Zika, and Puerto Rico. Then I close with the Boston’s hidden sidewalk poetry, which only appears when it rains.

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Truth and Fantasy

May 16, 2016 – 11:00 am

I play to people’s fantasies. I call it truthful hyperbole. It’s an innocent form of exaggeration — and a very effective form of promotion.

— Donald J. Trump, The Art of the Deal (1987)

This week’s featured post is “Four False Things You Might Believe About Donald Trump“.

This week everybody was talking about the Trump-Ryan meeting

Trump dominated the news cycle even more than usual this week. His meeting with Paul Ryan was covered like an international summit, even though there was really nothing to say about it: We’re not sure what they talked about and nobody expected a clear result. It sounds like they have agreed to agree at some point in the future, though the content of that agreement has been left open.

In general, and with a few notable exceptions, this was the week when elected Republicans realized they have no choice: Trump is their nominee, and his positions are vague enough to leave room for imagining that he will do something they’ll like.

Trump is still refusing to release his tax returns, giving very implausible excuses for his refusal.

It’s hard to imagine what could be in there that is worse than what the media is already imagining. I think the most likely thing we’d learn is that he’s not nearly so rich as he claims. Using a separate source of information, Crane’s New York Business argues that his annual income must be less than $500K.

The NYT did a deeply researched article into Trump’s interactions with women. Trump thinks it’s a hit piece, but it actually captures some of the ambivalence of his character: On the one hand, Trump made room for women to advance in his organization, giving them opportunities they would not easily find elsewhere in the real-estate-development business. On the other, he feels like this should give him cover when he misbehaves, which he frequently does.

The other Trump news story falls into the WTF category: The Washington Post released a tape of a 1991 conversation in which Trump is posing as his own publicist and talking to a gossip columnist. The conversation is largely about all the women who either want Trump or want him back.

I’m a bit at a loss about how much importance to give this. It doesn’t fall into any of the usual political-scandal categories. It’s more like: “Who does that kind of thing?” I’m reminded of the damaging YouTube of John Edwards primping his hair.

Trump’s response is more telling than the story itself: He reiterated his threat that the Trump administration would start an antitrust case against Amazon, whose owner (Jeff Bezos) also owns the WaPo. Josh Marshall comments:

Let’s all take stock of this being a thing: Donald Trump routinely threatens to use government power (DOJ, IRS, etc.) to attack his personal enemies once he becomes President.

In other words, Trump openly promises to do what Republican propagandists and fever swamp nutballs have pretended or imagine Democratic presidents do.

and polls

Lots of Democrats freaked when a Quinnipiac poll showed tight Clinton/Trump races in Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania — i.e., the states that have been the deciders in most recent elections.

Slate‘s Jamelle Bouie dug into the numbers to see what was going on, and discovered something interesting: Quinnipiac is assuming that these states will have a significantly whiter electorate than in 2008 or 2012.

The standard narrative for nonwhite voting in a presidential year is this: Before Barack Obama, blacks and Latinos turned out to vote in modest and static numbers. After Obama’s 2008 campaign, they began to vote in droves, transforming the American electorate. Now, with Obama and his historic candidacy off of the ballot, they’ll return to the sidelines.

Every part of this narrative is wrong.

To me, the compelling part of Bouie’s counter-narrative is the Hispanic vote, where turnout is traditionally low, but went up to 50% in 2008 and 48% in 2012. Somehow, I think Trump is going to inspire a lot of Hispanic voter turnout.

So the Q poll should be read as more of a cautionary tale than a prediction: If Democrats forget about non-white turnout, or if Clinton makes the mistake of competing too hard for the angry white voter and blurs the choice between herself and Trump, things could get close.

In general, you shouldn’t let yourself get too upset by any one poll. The media has a tendency to publicize polls precisely because they say something unexpected. (In the primaries, any poll showing Sanders unexpectedly close to Clinton made headlines, while polls showing Clinton comfortably ahead didn’t.) In practice, that means that the polls you’re most likely to hear about are the outliers, the ones fall outside the range of the other polls. Those are precisely the ones you should be most suspicious of.

and bathrooms

The Obama administration has sent a letter to all the school districts in the country, warning them that bathroom rules discriminating against transgender students (like the ones mandated in North Carolina by HB2) will be seen as violations of Title IX of the Civil Rights Act. Vox has an informative article about this.

[Until they are tested in court] the Obama administration’s guidelines are simply a legally non-binding guidance. Still, they suggest that the Obama administration will attempt legal action against violators. And if courts do ultimately rule in the administration’s favor, schools and states could lose billions in federal education funding for violating civil rights laws — a position no public official wants to be caught in.

The article also contains a map showing all the states where some kind of transgender-rights protection already exists. In other words, there’s no reason why opponents of trans rights need to make up hypothetical examples of men claiming to be trans so that they can enter women’s bathrooms and locker rooms for whatever nefarious purposes. If such things are going to happen, they should already be happening all over the country.

For example, last week I watched Bill O’Reilly raise these kinds of fears on his TV show. Bill’s show comes out of New York, where the law already includes protections of trans rights. So if trans rights cause a problem, he’s perfectly situated to report on that problem, not speculate hypothetically about it.

Religion writer Jonathan Merritt has written an interesting article about how the religious right is playing this issue. His claim is that they learned nothing from their battles against gay rights, and so they’re making all the same mistakes: They’re making abstract arguments based on dogma and stereotypes, and aren’t paying attention either to the experiences of real people or to what science is finding out.

When it comes to transgender issues, conservative Christians advocate for a privileged majority that is not currently under threat while ignoring the plight of an oppressed minority that is currently being harassed. Are you starting to see the parallels to the way Christian activists bungled the gay rights fight?

In the early 2000s I began predicting that the battle over gay marriage was already over. My conservative friends called me crazy, but time proved who was right. Because conservative Christians seem hellbent on perpetually making the same mistakes ad infinitum, today I’m predicting that the transgender conversation is over. And once again, conservative Christians will be the authors of their own demise.

Scare tactics only work until real experience starts to develop. Conservative Christians could claim anything they wanted about same-sex marriage leading to the fall of Civilization as long as no states had legalized it. But eventually you could go to Massachusetts or Canada and see for yourself that Civilization was doing just fine.

and you might also be interested in

Mistakes are bigger in Texas. This TCU typo is the worst since the commencement of the University of Texas Lyndon B. Johnson School of Pubic Affairs in 2012. I’m not making that one up either.

Also in Texas: An 8th-grade girl in Houston was held by police after she tried to buy her school lunch with a $2 bill her grandmother had given her. The bill failed the current counterfeiting test because it was printed in 1953. The link (from the local ABC affiliate) tells of numerous other cases in which school officials and police have treated students like adult felons rather than give them the benefit of the doubt while an anomaly is investigated. Oddly, this seems to happen almost entirely to non-white students.

West Virginia Democrats are a confusing bunch. In their presidential primary, they picked Sanders over Clinton 51%-36%. But on the same day, in the governor’s race, they nominated a billionaire coal baron who denies global warming and has a history of safety violations in his mines.

and let’s close with something big

A life-size Foosball game.

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Four False Things You Might Believe About Donald Trump

May 16, 2016 – 8:24 am

Election years are always full of false claims and false beliefs. Candidates will tell you that some number — the deficit, unemployment, inflation — is going one way when it’s really going the other way. They’ll say that things are good when they’re bad, or bad when they’re good. They’ll invent scandals about their opponent and deny that their own scandals amount to anything. They’ll find imaginary disasters and injustices lurking in their opponent’s proposals, while making ridiculous claims about the benefits of their own.

That’s par for the course and a lot of it doesn’t matter. Americans are pretty skeptical of political claims, most of which go in one ear and out the other. Often the original disagreement gets lost in a subsequent argument about whether one or the other of the candidates is lying, or whether the media is holding one candidate to a higher standard than the other. Partisan voters find their own side’s case convincing, and the others tune out.

But there’s another kind of falsehood we should pay more attention to: the ones that slip past our filters and get woven into our fundamental image of who a candidate is and what he or she has to offer. Often they aren’t lies, exactly, or aren’t the clear fabrications that fact-checking columns like to expose. They’re more like the illusions and misdirections of stage magic: The card was never really in the deck, and the coin never left the magician’s hand. The magician may never say that it was or it did, while saying dozens of other false things of no particular significance to the illusion. The trick didn’t fool us so much as suggest ways that we could fool ourselves.

So in compiling this list, I completely ignored high-profile arguments like whether President Trump really can build his “big, beautiful wall” or make Mexico pay for it. I ignored all the insults and hyperbole, all the did-he-or-didn’t-he debates about his past, and the I-can’t-believe-he-said-that moments. Instead I looked for misconceptions that have gotten established in his public image, the kinds of things people take for granted while they argue about other things.

I found some. Whether you like Trump or not, your thinking is very likely influenced by one or more of these four false beliefs about him.

Donald Trump is one of America’s top businessmen. Trump himself makes this argument:

I’m running for office in a country that’s essentially bankrupt, and it needs a successful businessman

His critics claim to be appalled that somebody with no experience in public office could become president, but actually that’s fairly common in American history. Usually the outsider is a victorious general, like Eisenhower or Grant or Washington. Nobody has ever gone straight from academia to the presidency, but Democrats have been known to elevate university professors like Daniel Moynihan or Elizabeth Warren to the Senate. And maybe nobody has made the leap from the boardroom to the White House yet, but the idea of a businessman-president is not new. Ross Perot made the most credible third-party run in modern times. In the 1980s, Chrysler President Lee Iacocca was often the subject of presidential speculation. Mitt Romney didn’t like to talk much about his days as governor of Massachusetts (when he passed RomneyCare, the forerunner of ObamaCare) so he mostly ran on his record as a businessman. One of the candidates running against Trump in this year’s primaries, Carly Fiorina, was also coming from the business world.

So choosing one of our top businessmen or businesswomen to be president is actually not that radical a notion.

But is Trump in fact a top businessman? Not really. He’s a businessman, and he’s been OK at it, but he’s not at all the genius he’d like us to think he is.

To start with, he is rich, but not nearly as rich as he claims. He boasts of a $10 billion fortune, but Forbes estimates less than half that, $4.5 billion, and Bloomberg even less, $2.9 billion. Either estimate could be improved if Trump would ever release his tax returns, which is probably the reason he doesn’t. (For comparison, Forbes estimates that another businessman/politician, Mike Bloomberg, is nearly ten times as rich, worth an estimated $38 billion.)

Even $2.9 billion still seems like a lot of money, though, so let’s consider how he got it. Trump inherited a New York real estate empire from his father. The size of his inheritance (in 1974) is not a matter of public record, so estimates vary from $40 million to as high as $200 million. A few years later, in 1978, Business Week estimated Trump’s net worth at $100 million. Max Ehrenfreund observes that if Trump had cashed out then and stashed the money in an S&P 500 index fund, he’d be worth $6 billion today — considerably more than he probably has.

But even that’s not the full story. More than just money, Trump inherited a New York City real estate business and the corresponding connections. And although he talks a lot about his international properties and his diverse business ventures, New York real estate is still the center of his empire. The further he has gotten from his roots — whether it was his bankrupt Atlantic City casino, the Trump Tower Tampa project that collected deposits on luxury condos but went broke without building any of them, or non-real-estate failures like Trump Steaks, the Trump Shuttle, or Trump magazine — the less success he’s had. To the extent that he’s a successful businessman at all, he’s a successful NYC real estate developer.

Now look at the era that his career has spanned. Trump received his inheritance when New York City was bottoming out. In 1975 the city very nearly went bankrupt. Since then, the long-term trend has been dramatically upward. In retrospect, the last 40 years has been a very good time to be in New York City real estate. When the trend is on your side to that extent, you don’t have to be a that good to come out ahead.

For comparison, look at my father. He bought a 160-acre farm for $30,000 in 1950, and when I was dissolving his estate a few years ago, I sold it for $1 million. Did that significant increase reflect my Dad’s deep insight into real estate? Not to disparage my Dad’s intelligence, but no: His career as a farmer happened to fall during an era when the price of farmland went up.

On a larger scale, something similar happened to Trump. While he has engaged in a lot of impressive wheeling and dealing during his career, that activity is probably irrelevant to his wealth, and may even have kept him from being considerably more successful. He’s rich because his Dad was rich, and the business he inherited was destined to do well as long as he didn’t screw it up too badly.

He is financing his own campaign rather than selling out to special interests. Last September, Trump announced on Facebook:

Of course, Trump’s campaign was never completely funded out of his own pocket — there was always the money he collected by selling campaign hats and such, as well as small donations — but none of that invalidated his main point: Nobody bought a Make America Great Again hat or sent him $25 with the idea that they were buying a favor from the next president.

The more interesting question was how that self-financing worked: Trump gave his campaign very little. Instead, he loaned money to his campaign. According to the Sunlight Foundation, as of late February, loans from Trump himself made up 68.7% of the campaign’s funding. Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported: “Mr. Trump lent his campaign $36 million of the $47 million he spent on the primaries through March, with the rest coming mostly from small donations.”

But now that he is heading towards a fall campaign that could cost a billion or more, self-financing is out the window. Trump now has a joint fund-raising agreement with the Republican National Committee, and is pursuing all the big-money donors who usually give to Republican campaigns. A Great America super PAC is also raising money to support Trump’s general-election campaign.

One possibility is that Trump could use big-donor money to pay back the loans he made to the campaign — a sort of retroactive de-self-financing. In other words, money collected from lobbyists and billionaires could go straight into Trump’s pocket. Campaign spokesmen say that won’t happen, but there has also been no move to officially turn the loans into contributions.

In the primary campaign, Trump frequently claimed that big donors own candidates. He said of Ted Cruz: “Goldman Sachs owns him. Remember that folks.” Now he’s looking for a billion dollars from the same people who funded his Republican rivals. To exactly the same extent that they were selling themselves then, he’s selling himself now.

He was against invading Iraq. Trump counters Hillary Clinton’s greater experience as First Lady, Senator, and Secretary of State by claiming to have better judgment. The foremost example he gives is that he spoke out against invading Iraq, while she voted to authorize the invasion.

In a February debate with the other Republican candidates in South Carolina, he said

I’m the only one on this stage that said, “Do not go into Iraq. Do not attack Iraq.” Nobody else on this stage said that. And I said it loud and strong. And I was in the private sector. I wasn’t a politician, fortunately. But I said it, and I said it loud and clear, “You’ll destabilize the Middle East.”

He may remember it that way, but that’s not how it happened. PolitiFact, the Washington Post Fact Checker, and FactCheck.Org have all looked at this claim. PolitiFact rates it False and the WaPo gives its lowest rating, four Pinocchios. FactCheck.Org does not give a simple rating, but provides a timeline of Trump’s statements on the war that begin with support and only come around to opposition later, at about the same time as the rest of the country.

The invasion didn’t begin until March, 2003, but the national debate about authorizing it happenedthe previous fall. Congress passed the authorization resolution (the one Hillary voted for) in October, 2002. In a September, 2002 radio interview, Howard Stern asked Trump “Are you for invading Iraq?” and Trump responded “Yeah, I guess so.”

Like most of the country (and Clinton), Trump eventually soured on the war. But it happened little by little, as is clear from this interview for the August 2004 edition of Esquire. By then, things had started going bad in Iraq: The first battle of Fallujah had been the previous April, and it was starting to be clear that we wouldn’t find the WMDs that had been the most impressive justification for the original invasion. But even this late, Trump didn’t say the invasion was a bad idea, just that he’d have done it better.

Look at the war in Iraq and the mess that we’re in. I would never have handled it that way. Does anybody really believe that Iraq is going to be a wonderful democracy where people are going to run down to the voting box and gently put in their ballot and the winner is happily going to step up to lead the county? C’mon. Two minutes after we leave, there’s going to be a revolution, and the meanest, toughest, smartest, most vicious guy will take over. And he’ll have weapons of mass destruction, which Saddam didn’t have.

What was the purpose of this whole thing? Hundreds and hundreds of young people killed. And what about the people coming back with no arms and legs? Not to mention the other side. All those Iraqi kids who’ve been blown to pieces. And it turns out that all of the reasons for the war were blatantly wrong. All this for nothing!

In short, Trump’s trajectory on Iraq is similar to Clinton’s: At first he supports the war. Then he begins to have doubts about how the Bush administration is handling it. And eventually he comes to believe that it was a bad idea. The major difference between the two candidates is that Clinton admitted her mistake; Trump just replaced those memories with ones where he was right from the get-go.

His Muslim immigration ban is just temporary. A press release in December said Trump was

calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.

Subsequent statements have described the ban as “temporary”. This January TV ad, for example, talked about

a temporary shutdown of Muslims’ entering the United States until we can figure out what’s going on.

“Temporary” is a big part of the ban’s appeal. It’s dubious constitutionally to apply a religious test to immigrants and visitors, and it’s not at all clear how such a ban would work. (If I want to come to America, what proof can I offer that I’m not a Muslim?) But problems are easy to ignore if they’re just temporary.

However, calling something “temporary” doesn’t make it temporary. The Pentagon built gobs of “temporary” buildings during World War II, and so many of them were still in use forty years later that the Military Construction Act of 1983 had to specifically mandate their destruction.

If something is really temporary, it’s end is in sight. Either it has an explicit time limit, or it is tied to some other process that is clearly headed towards termination. (As in: “We’ll come straight home after the football game.”) Trump’s ban isn’t like that.

Picture it this way: Suppose you’re a ninth-grader and your parents are punishing you by taking away your video game access. If they tell you your access is gone for a week, that’s temporary. If they tell you it’s gone “until you start passing your math quizzes again”, that also is temporary (assuming that you can pass those quizzes if you start studying). But if it’s “until you shape up”, with no specifics given about what shape up means, that’s not temporary. They’ve opened the possibility that they may change their minds some time in the future, but that’s about all.

That’s all Trump has offered. Maybe at some point in the future, President Trump will go on TV to say, “OK, I’ve figured out what’s going on, so Muslims can start coming in again.” I have trouble picturing that happening at all, but even if I stretch my imagination, it’s not happening on any predictable schedule.

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The Monday Morning Teaser

May 16, 2016 – 6:30 am

Like much of the country, I’ve had a cold this week. So I didn’t get as much done in advance as usual. That will mainly show it in the weekly summary, which will probably go out later than usual.

This week the news cycle was dominated by two different kind of Trump stories: ones where he met with Republican leaders and tried to unite the Party, and ones where the news media started digging into his past. I’ll link to those in the summary, but in the featured post I thought I’d go in a slightly different direction, looking at core pieces of his identity and appeal that aren’t based in reality: “Four False Things You Might Believe About Donald Trump”. For example, he’s not one of America’s top businessmen.

Some polls came out, indicating that the fall election might be closer than we’d been expecting. But those polls had some odd internals, which I’ll explain. The debate over transgender rights and bathrooms went national, after the Obama administration sent out a letter warning school districts that it believes trans rights are part of Title IX of the Civil Rights Act. Many of the people who are freaking out about this probably don’t realize that the states they live in already recognize these rights, and the horrors they are predicting aren’t happening. And we’ll close with a video of a life-sized Foosball game.

The Trump article should be out by 8, with the weekly summary appearing by noon.

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Say Never

May 9, 2016 – 9:45 am

This is a Joe McCarthy moment. People will be judged by where they stood at this time. Those who walked with Trump will be tainted forever after.

— David Brooks, “If Not Trump, What?” (4-29-2016)

This week’s featured post is “What Will Republicans Do Now?“

If you’re wondering where I was last week, check out the Mayday service I gave at the Unitarian Church of Quincy, Illinois.

These last two weeks, everybody has been talking about the end of the Republican primary campaign

Two weeks ago, the plan to stop Donald Trump at the convention was still iffy, but didn’t seem completely daft. Then very quickly, Trump won the Middle Atlantic primaries by wide margins and Cruz collapsed in Indiana. Suddenly Cruz and Kasich were out and Trump was the last man standing.

I talk about the still-splintered Republican Party in the featured post.

Before Cruz went out, though, he unleashed the kind of scathing diatribe you can’t take back, calling Trump a “pathological liar” who “lies [with] practically every word that comes out of his mouth”.

In a response that I think comes straight out of a psychology textbook, his response is to accuse everyone else of lying. … And it’s simply a mindless yell. Whatever he does, he accuses everyone else of doing.

This is actually a sound insight. In particular, I think it applies to Trump’s recent attack on Hillary Clinton:

Frankly, if Hillary Clinton were a man, I don’t think she’d get 5 percent of the vote. The only thing she’s got going is the women’s card.

Reverse that and see how much better it fits. Would anyone support Donald Trump if he weren’t a white man? Isn’t he constantly playing the white man card, stoking up white male resentment against Hispanics, against women, against blacks, against Middle Easterners?

Another frequent Trump claim is that Hillary either will or should be indicted over the email affair. But the more we learn, the more clear it is that she broke no laws. It is Trump, on the other hand, who has a legal problem: The Trump University fraud lawsuit will be heard shortly after the election.

and political comedy

At his last White House Press Correspondents’ Dinner, President Obama proved once again that he has a career in stand-up waiting, if he wants it.

And Jimmy Kimmel did a funny but effective piece about climate change.

The Daily Show turned real Donald Trump quotes into a rap video.

That video illustrates one reason I think liberals will do better against Trump than conservatives did: Trump deserves to be laughed at, and we have much better comedians.

Meanwhile, the last week of the Ted Cruz campaign was full of unintentional yucks: Ted accidentally elbowed his wife in the face. His would-be VP, Carly Fiorina, diverted attention from the entrance of the Cruz family by falling off the stage. And in a WTF moment, Carly started singing. When Hollywood eventually makes a comedy about the 2016 campaign, those moments will have to be included.

and Puerto Rico

The first time I noticed that Puerto Rico had a debt problem was when I started seeing this ad:

It was paid for by one of those dark-money groups with an amorphous name: the Center for Individual Freedom. So of course you can trust everything they tell you.

To get a better idea of what’s involved, watch this John Oliver segment (which features Puerto-Rican-born Lin-Manuel Miranda of Hamilton).

The general theme here is the problem of colonialism: Puerto Rico may have its own government, but the rules it operates under are circumscribed by what Congress allows, and Congress often makes new rules affecting Puerto Rico either by accident (just failing to mention it in the law) or in order to achieve some purpose on the mainland, with the effect on the island being mostly an afterthought.

Right now, Puerto Rico owes $70 billion, or about $20,000 per person. The debt simply can’t be paid, and as the laws currently stand, the island’s government has to pay its bonds before providing services like public health and education. If they do that, it seems clear that people will die; that’s why they’re currently in violation of the law.

Mainlanders who want to write Puerto Ricans off because they’re Hispanics might want to think again: Since Puerto Rico is a U.S. territory, all its people are American citizens. They don’t have to cross any borders or jump any walls to resettle in your town; they just need a plane ticket.

and Cinco de Mayo

For an explanation of why wearing a sombrero, eating nachos, and drinking too much tequila is not a proper way for Anglos to celebrate Cinco de Mayo, listen to Liz Martinez , or watch this:

For what Cinco de Mayo really means, see Wikipedia.

For non-Hispanic Americans, Cinco de Mayo should be an annual opportunity to think about cultural appropriation, the tendency of powerful cultures to steal anything that looks like fun from less powerful cultures. (I discussed this a few years ago in “A Brief Meditation on White Twerking“.) Done badly, the powerful culture’s megaphone drowns out the authentic tradition, ruining practices and celebrations for the people they ought to belong to.

There are respectful ways to mark holidays of cultures you don’t belong to. For example, if you’re a Gentile and your Jewish friends invite you over for a Passover Seder, you can attend without worrying about cultural appropriation, as long as you don’t try to make yourself the center of attention. That’s way different from dressing up like Moses and inviting a bunch of other Gentiles over to eat matzo shaped like the 10 commandments and drink a lot of Manischewitz.

The question is who’s in control. One key symptom of privilege is the tendency to assume that you ought to be in control. If someone else is offended by what you do, you’ll be the judge of whether their objection is justified. You’ll examine your own intentions, and if you decide you meant well, that’s all that matters. If that doesn’t satisfy some people, well, that’s their problem.

You can see that process at work in Washington Redskins’ owner Daniel Snyder: He knows he doesn’t intend to insult Native Americans, so if they take offense they’re just wrong. “The truth is on our side,” he says.

A current example is Donald Trump’s Cinco de Mayo tweet. All the elements of cultural appropriation are on display: A white guy eats a white imitation of Mexican food while proclaiming (falsely, according to New York Eater, which judged the Trump Tower Grill’s taco bowls to be “an insult to Mexicans every bit as profound as Trump’s previous pronouncements”) that his people do it better than actual Mexicans. It’s textbook. No wonder California Republican Dennis Hollingsworth tweeted in response: “Holy guacamole, what a dipshit.”

Like Hollingsworth, many interpreted Trump’s tweet as a clueless attempt to reach out to Hispanic-American voters. (Reince Priebus’ generous interpretation was that Trump is “trying”.) But I see something more clever. Trump knows the Hispanic vote is beyond his reach. His actual purpose here is to convince other clueless Anglos that he’s not anti-Hispanic, so they can vote for him without feeling like bigots.

The goal was to get the response he got from Bill O’Reilly (and Neil Cavuto): that the objections to his tweet demonstrate the “political madness” of this campaign. No doubt O’Reilly’s aging white audience is saying, “Look at how crazy those people are! Trump says he loves them, and they’re mad.” Just what the Donald wanted.

and HB2

The plot thickens regarding North Carolina’s HB2 law, the one that polices the state’s bathrooms and prevents local governments from protecting any rights the state doesn’t recognize — particularly gay or trans rights.

Wednesday, the U. S. Justice Department sent Gov. Pat McCrory a letter notifying him that the law violates federal laws against sex-based discrimination in the workplace. The feds wanted assurance by today that North Carolina will not be enforcing the law, which Gov. McCrory is not going to give, calling the letter “Washington overreach”. Billions in federal funds are potentially at risk.

Basically, McCrory is taking the same path that Southern governors like George Wallace and Ross Barnett did during the civil rights era: calling for delay and invoking states rights.

One possible way out is if the city of Charlotte agrees to repeal the LGBT-rights ordinance that HB2 was passed to undo. Then the state might amend HB2 in some way acceptable to the Justice Department. So far, though, Charlotte seems to be taking the view that they didn’t make this problem.

and let’s close with something time-devouring

Polygraph has constructed the most addictive web site I’ve ever linked to. Start at any date you want (after 1958; 1997 is the default), and then watch (and hear) the Billboard Top 5 songs evolve week by week, with a running total of how many weeks each artist stayed at #1. “Maybe I’ll just watch another couple of months,” I say. “Aren’t the Beatles due to show up soon? How long will it take them to catch Elvis?”

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What Will Republicans Do Now?

May 9, 2016 – 8:12 am

Donald Trump will be the presidential nominee of the Republican Party. After his landslide win in Indiana, his last remaining rivals dropped out of the race. So there is no longer any alternative: Donald Trump will be nominated at the Republican Convention in July.

Even though he has led in the polls almost without interruption since last summer, right up until Tuesday a lot of Republicans were still telling themselves it wouldn’t happen. The early theory was that his gaffes would doom him. Then his supporters weren’t serious; when it was time to start marking ballots, they’d either stay home or come back to more sensible choices like Bush or Rubio. Then he had a low ceiling, so his victories were the effect of a splintered field; whoever survived long enough to get him in a one-on-one showdown would win. And finally, he might come into the convention with a lead, but he wouldn’t have a majority and then somehow the Party would unite behind somebody else.

Admittedly, the rest of us were wrong too. Nate Silver certainly. And I was no better: In July, I made the prediction that he’d fade when it came time to spend real money in November or December. As late as April 11 (in the aftermath of Trump’s loss in Wisconsin) I was buying into the low-ceiling theory. Already in late December, I was noticing that I couldn’t generate a convincing scenario where somebody else got nominated. Nonetheless, I struggled against that insight. I mean … Donald Trump?

But das Trumpentrauma is definitely hitting Republican elites harder, because it has exposed their denial about their party. As far back as the rallies for Sarah Palin in 2008 and the Tea Party in 2010, it’s been pretty clear to the rest of us that something ugly was stirring among the GOP rank and file. But Republican insiders ignored all the evidence of racism, misogyny, homophobia, and xenophobia, as well as the rumbles of potential violence. They told themselves they were seeing a patriotic protest against big government or rising debt or some other kind of liberal overreach.

Now their bubble has popped.

Control of the brand. Establishment Republicans thought they were in control of the unreality of Republican discourse. They believed they could raise voter energy by promoting (or at least winking at) conspiracy theories of global warming or gun confiscation or death panels; they could make wild claims about revenue-generating tax cuts or what a sweet deal it is to be poor in America; they could stoke irrational fears about reverse racism and Christian persecution; they could benefit from entirely baseless charges against Obama like birtherism or his Muslim faith or his Communist upbringing — all without worrying that someday they themselves might need to appeal to facts and the kind of understanding that is based on evidence and expert insight.

That’s all untenable now. Donald Trump has ignored everything GOP leaders thought was the essence of their party, and instead embraced the craziness they thought they could control. National Review‘s Yuval Levin called Trump “the least conservative Republican presidential aspirant in living memory”, and the NYT’s Ross Douthat wrote:

Trump has consistently arrayed himself against this vision. True, he paid lip service to certain Reaganite ideas during the primaries — claiming to be pro-life, promising a supply-side tax cut, pledging to appoint conservative judges. But the core of his message was protectionist and nativist, comfortable with an expansive welfare state, bored with religious conservatism, and dismissive of the commitments that constitute the post-Cold War Pax Americana. And Trump’s policy forays since clinching the nomination have only confirmed his post-Reagan orientation. … Reaganite conservatives who help elevate Trump to the presidency, then, would be sleepwalking toward a kind of ideological suicide.

Instead of championing conservative ideology, Trump became an avatar of resentment. His runaway win over “the strongest field of candidates that the Republicans have had in 30 years” proves that resentment is what the Republican Party has really been about in the Obama era.

For months, GOP insiders seemed so sure that they could just call Trump on his apostasy, and that once the voters realized he wasn’t a true conservative they would reject him. But it turned out that Trump wasn’t fooling a conservative primary electorate about his views; it was conservative leaders and pundits who had been fooling themselves about the importance of their ideas. In the era of a black president, bilingual signs, and same-sex marriage, conservative ideology has simply been a way to dress up racial, sexual, and cultural resentment. Conservative sounds so much better than bigot, but in practice the difference has shrinking for a long time.

Family values? Nowhere has this been clearer than in the final showdown between Trump and Ted Cruz. Cruz is literally a preacher’s son, a lifelong believer in Christian theocracy. Trump, by contrast, has openly lived a libertine life that he has never repented. He has regularly traded in his wives as if they were cars, always upgrading to a newer model. (In the most recent case, literally a model.) His anti-abortion position was obviously pasted on for political purposes, and he seemed not to understand the rhetorical nuances of defending it. His praise for the Bible — the only book he acknowledges as better than The Art of the Deal — is similarly cardboard-thin; asking him about his favorite Bible verses was a gotcha question that he had to dodge — until he responded by quoting a verse that doesn’t exist.

And yet, Cruz couldn’t get evangelical voters to pick him over Trump. In the decisive Indiana primary, evangelicals chose Trump over Cruz, 51%-43%, and Trump even got the votes of a third of those who claimed to attend church more than once a week. All through the primaries, so-called “values voters” showed little interest in candidates who shared their values or tried to live by them. Instead, they were looking for someone who would stick it to their enemies.

Ditto on immigration. Deporting the undocumented isn’t about the rule of law, it’s about sticking it to Hispanics. Banning Muslims isn’t about protecting us from terrorism — they’re effing Muslims, who wants them here? Few who claim to care about aborted fetuses actually do; they just want somebody to do something about all these damn empowered women. Get them back on their knees where they belong.

That’s the party that just nominated Donald Trump. If you thought the GOP stood for something else, you’re having a tough time now.

Getting in line. In every nomination cycle, politicians and their supporters say bad things about rivals that they eventually end up supporting. Most famously, George H. W. Bush attacked Ronald Reagan’s “voodoo economic policy” during the 1980 primary campaign, but then accepted his vice presidential nomination that summer.

That’s why many Democrats have been taking Stop Trump or #NeverTrump statements with a grain of salt. Come November, surely, those Republicans would say “OMG! Hillary Clinton!” and endorse Trump. And as predicted, Bob Dole, John Boehner, and Mitch McConnell have gotten in line and welcomed their new overlord, though perhaps with little enthusiasm. Paul Ryan claims to be unsure, but that might be a negotiating tactic. After a planned meeting on Thursday, he might claim to have received the kind of assurances he needs to get on the bandwagon.

Many Republicans up for election, like my own state’s Senator Kelly Ayotte, are trying to have it both ways: express pro forma support while not embracing Trump too closely. Ayotte says that she “supports” Trump but will not “endorse” him, whatever that means. John McCain says, “You have to listen to people that have chosen the nominee of our Republican Party”, but he won’t commit to any joint appearances.

(The Atlantic has a more complete list of which Republicans are where.)

Bells that can’t be unrung. But if you’re planning to come around by November, you start hedging your bets when it becomes clear your favored candidates are losing, and you go silent for a while after the candidate you’re trying to stop becomes the last man standing. You don’t publish something like David Brooks just did:

this is a Joe McCarthy moment. People will be judged by where they stood at this time. Those who walked with Trump will be tainted forever after

In a May 2 piece on RedState.com called “I lied to myself for years about who my allies were. No more.” contributing editor Ben Howe regrets recognizing Trumpists as part of the conservative movement:

When your life becomes politics and you are surrounded by people in the industry, you learn a key term: allies. Allies aren’t friends. They may not even be colleagues. They are simply people that you find enough agreement with on enough issues to not go after each other. … I kept quiet about these allies in new media and in Washington. People who I thought I agreed with only 70% of the time. Which normally is a great reason to consider someone an ally, but not when the other 30% is cringe-inducing paranoia and vapid stupidity.

I chose peace over principle. I chose to go along with those I disagreed with on core matters because I believed we were jointly fighting for other things that were more important.  I ignored my gut and my moral compass.

The result is that, almost to a man, every single person I cringed at or thought twice about, is now a supporter and cheerleader of Donald Trump.

The next day, another RedStater, Leon Wold, wrote “#NeverTrump Means Never Trump. Never Ever.”

Over the course of the next few weeks and months and years, as a conservative movement we will spend a great deal of time in self reflection, examining the weaknesses in our movement that allowed a cancer like Trump to flourish in our midst. We will have hard decisions to make about our affiliation with the Republican party, and what we will do with our votes in November. But one thing and one thing only remains certain: Donald Trump will never have our vote. We said it, and we meant it.

And RS founder Erick Erickson even invoked the Great Satan himself:

Republicans owe Bill Clinton an apology for impeaching him over lies and affairs while now embracing a pathological liar and womanizer. That apology will not be forthcoming. In fact, for years Republicans have accused the Democrats of gutter politics and shamelessness. Now the Republicans themselves have lost their sense of shame.

Those are the kinds of statements you can’t walk back. Ditto for Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse, who wrote an open letter to “Those who think both leading presidential candidates are dishonest and have little chance of leading America forward”.

With Clinton and Trump, the fix is in. Heads, they win; tails, you lose. Why are we confined to these two terrible options? This is America. If both choices stink, we reject them and go bigger.

Ted Cruz hasn’t said yet what he’ll do, but the “pathological liar” diatribe he unleashed just before Indiana goes way beyond ordinary political back-and-forth. It’s hard to see how he can embrace Trump and maintain any credibility.

Between now and the convention. A very large number of Republicans — somewhere between a quarter and a third, I’d guess — are conflicted about Trump as their candidate. What a lot of them are looking for now, I think, is cover or maybe permission. Maybe you can oppose Trump like Mitt Romney does, or the Bush family’s example will let you sit this election out without renouncing your Republican identity. Maybe you can follow John McCain and vote for the Party’s nominee, while still withholding enough of your loyalty from Trump himself to keep your integrity unstained. Or maybe, like Chris Christie, you can toss aside everything you’ve stood for in the past just for the sake of being on the winning side.

David Brooks has never struck me as the sharpest pencil in the box, but this time I think he’s got it right: Republicans are facing a Joe McCarthy moment. Between now and July, they have to decide which way to go.

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The Monday Morning Teaser

May 9, 2016 – 7:23 am

My week off came at a bad time. Two weeks ago, pundits were still speculating about a brokered Republican Convention, and wondering what would happen if Donald Trump didn’t arrive in Cleveland with a majority of delegates locked up on the first ballot. Today, Trump is the presumptive nominee, leaving those Republicans who didn’t support him with a difficult choice: get behind a man many of them despise, sit out the presidential election and let Hillary win, or actively jump ship and help Hillary win.

The early polls — whose predictive value is still iffy at this point — show Trump headed for a massive defeat in the fall. If that happens, will more blame accrue to those Republicans who follow him off the cliff? Or to the ones who refuse to get behind him? If you’re a Republican who feels that Trump has stolen your party, which choice puts you in a better position to take it back in 2018 and 2020?

That’s the topic of this week’s featured post “What Will Republicans Do Now?”, which should be out around 8 EDT. The weekly summary will cover other aspects of the end of the Republican primary campaign, a great two weeks for political comedy, the Puerto Rican debt crisis, and what Cinco de Mayo can teach us about cultural appropriation, before closing with the most addictive, time-eating web site I’ve ever linked to. That should appear by 11, or maybe earlier.

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Getting Through

April 25, 2016 – 12:02 pm

Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to get through this thing called life.

— Prince, “Let’s Go Crazy” (1984)

No Sift next week. New articles will appear May 9.

This week’s featured posts are “Beyond Bernie 2016” and “Why You Should Care About Felon Voting Rights“.

This week everybody was talking about the New York primary

The odds of a Clinton/Trump contest in the fall jumped considerably Tuesday, after both had landslide wins in New York. I describe just how completely this slams the door on Bernie’s chances (as well as the options on what to do next) in “Beyond Bernie 2016“.

Trump’s win was in some ways even more crushing, because Ted Cruz got no delegates at all from New York. Cruz is now in the same position as Kasich (or Paul Ryan, for that matter): His only path to the nomination involves stopping Trump from getting a first-ballot majority at the convention, then convincing other candidates’ delegates to switch to him on subsequent ballots. The last time a major party had a convention with more than one ballot was in a different political era entirely, when Adlai Stevenson won the 1952 Democratic nomination on the third ballot.

and Prince

If you weren’t music-conscious in the mid-80s, and haven’t had a friend introduce you to Prince’s music since, you’re probably puzzled by the overwhelming public response to his death (at age 57, two years younger than I am). He’s getting tributes not just from the music and pop-culture parts of the media, but from folks like Rachel Maddow and Josh Marshall.

Here’s what I think was unique about Prince: Other musicians typically envy pop hit-makers for their success, but not for their musical skills. Prince was the exception. He could play almost any rock instrument at a high level — check out the guitar solo that begins at the 3:30 mark here — and he had mastered the entire process that starts with a thought in somebody’s head and ends with music coming out of somebody else’s headphones. He didn’t just perform his songs, he wrote and arranged them, was his own studio band, and sometimes the mixer, engineer, and producer as well. He was famous for blatantly sexy songs, but he also could fit in with the Muppets.

And he was successful at all that. Wikipedia says: “At one point in 1984, Prince simultaneously had the No. 1 album, single, and film in the US; it was the first time a singer had achieved this feat.”

Prince also kept his local identity, and created a music industry in Minneapolis rather than move to an existing music capital like LA. The performances in his movie Purple Rain were filmed at Minneapolis’ First Avenue Club.

That’s why it’s so dismal to hear that he has died at a comparatively early age. But if the elevator tries to bring us down, at least we know what to do.

and you might also be interested in

There’s still another week of Confederate Heritage Month to celebrate over at Orcinus.

Whether or not our war against ISIS succeeds is not entirely up to us. It also depends on Iraq maintaining a stable government, which might be a challenge.

In Alabama, separation of church and state means that your daycare center can go virtually unregulated, if you claim it has a religious purpose. The Center for Investigative Reporting has been doing a series called “The God Loophole” about the problems that leads to.

The tenured Wheaton College professor who got in trouble for saying that Christians and Muslims worship the same God has reached an agreement to leave the school.

Now that Trump has opened the floodgates, we can expect to see Hispanic stereotypes in lower-office campaigns. Like this ad from a Kentucky Republican running for Congress.

You can tell you’re getting old when more and more news stories make you say, “I thought he was dead.” Well, it turns out Pat Boone is still alive, and calling for FCC regulations against blasphemy. What set him off was a Saturday Night Live skit, which is a fake movie trailer for a fake movie called God is a Boob Man, in which a Christian baker is pressured by the legal system to say that God is gay.

To appreciate it, you need to know what it’s satirizing. In 2014, a film God’s Not Dead was made for all those Christians who imagine that they’re persecuted. In it, a university philosophy professor “demands his students sign a declaration that ‘God is dead’ to pass.” One student resists, is vindicated, and the professor ultimately converts just before dying. Totally realistic, in other words.

That was successful enough that it’s getting a sequel, God’s Not Dead 2. (Who knows, maybe this is the beginning of a genre similar to the blaxploitation films of the 1970s, but for Christians. I’m visualizing Shaft with a Bible.) Here is its trailer, which you need to understand is not an SNL parody, no matter how much it sounds like one.

Parodying such nonsense is the blasphemy that Boone thinks TV stations should lose their licenses for broadcasting.

and let’s close with some reading suggestions

A few years ago, NPR polled its readers to find the 100 best fantasy and science fiction novels. But lists like that are a bit unwieldy: Where do you start? So the fanzine SF Signal created an interactive guide to help you figure out which one to read next. And that turned into this flow chart. Click to expand.

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Why You Should Care about Felon Voting Rights

April 25, 2016 – 10:53 am

Something important happened in Virginia this week: Governor Terry McAuliffe restored voting rights to Virginia felons who have served their time and completed the subsequent probations. In the age of mass incarceration, that’s a lot of people: more than 200,000 in Virginia alone. Nationally, an estimated 5.85 million people have lost their voting rights because of felony convictions. That’s bigger than the winning margin in every recent presidential election other than 2008.

But the question that probably leaps to mind is: Why would changing that be a good thing? The class of felons includes a lot of bad people, so why do we want more bad people picking our leaders? But felon voting rights are important for both micro and macro reasons.

The individual ex-con. The micro-level reason is that we want an ex-con to have a path back into normal life. (John Oliver did a great segment on this a few months ago. The ex-con’s difficulty re-entering society also made it into pop culture through the recent hit movie Ant-Man.) The old-fashioned notion was that by the time a prisoner got released, he had “paid his debt to society” and everything was square now. But in reality, many ex-cons can only hope for a second-class citizenship, which permanent disenfranchisement symbolizes. And if you can never hope for a normal life, returning to crime becomes more tempting.

Decades ago, you might start over by taking the Jean Valjean approach: Move far away and keep quiet about your criminal history. But in this era of universal databases, the relentless Inspector Javert has been automated: Your past is bound to catch up with you.

Large-scale voter suppression. The macro-level reason is that our criminal justice system is biased, so disenfranchising felons is a way to diminish the voting power of blacks, the poor, and other over-policed segments of society.

The racial difference might be defended if it were solely the result of blacks committing more crimes than whites, but that’s far from the whole story. An ACLU report says:

[R]acial disparities result from disparate treatment of Blacks at every stage of the criminal justice system, including stops and searches, arrests, prosecutions and plea negotiations, trials, and sentencing. Race matters at all phases and aspects of the criminal process, including the quality of representation, the charging phase, and the availability of plea agreements, each of which impact whether juvenile and adult defendants face a potential [life without parole] sentence. In addition, racial disparities in sentencing can result from theoretically “race neutral” sentencing policies that have significant disparate racial effects, particularly in the cases of habitual offender laws and many drug policies, including mandatory minimums, school zone drug enhancements, and federal policies adopted by Congress in 1986 and 1996 that at the time established a 100-to-one sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine offenses.

Racial disparities in sentencing also result in part from prosecutors’ decisions at the initial charging stage, suggesting that racial bias affects the exercise of prosecutorial discretion with respect to certain crimes. One study found that Black defendants face significantly more severe charges than whites, even after controlling for characteristics of the offense, criminal history, defense counsel type, age and education of the offender, and crime rates and economic characteristics of the jurisdiction.

Governor McAuliffe invoked the racial issue by comparing felon disenfranchisement to the poll tax, but I think a better comparison is to another Jim Crow relic: literacy tests. The literacy test had a similarly virtuous rationale: Do you want illiterate people picking our leaders? But it was applied in biased ways, and combined with other systemic discrimination (i.e., separate-and-unequal school systems) to keep blacks from voting.

Partisan politics. As so often happens these days, what ought to be a simple good-government argument has gotten swamped by partisan power politics. Blacks overwhelmingly vote Democratic, so Republicans are against anything that enfranchises more of them. (This has the cycle-completing effect of motivating more blacks to vote Democratic.) And so, Kentucky’s Democratic Governor Steven Beshear issued a similar order as he was leaving office, but the incoming Republican Governor Matt Bevin rescinded it before it could take effect. Felon disenfranchisement effects about 1 in 19 Kentuckians, but 1 in 6 blacks.

As Mike Dukakis learned when he became the Willie Horton candidate in 1988, felons (especially black ones) make for bad political optics. And that puts governors on the horns of a dilemma: Like Gov. Besmear, they can wait until they’re leaving office to restore voting rights, when critics can claim that they didn’t dare do it until they were slinking out the door. Or, like Gov. McAuliffe, they can restore rights earlier in their terms, and face the criticism that they are trying to remake their own electorate.

Optics or partisanship aside, though, it’s the right thing to do. We’ll have a hard time tackling the racial biases in our justice system as long as they continue to give one side an advantage on election day.

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