I finally got around to watching Bernie Sanders’ speech to the students at Liberty University on September 14. [video, transcript]. I wasn’t as impressed as I had expected to be.
The most impressive thing is that he was there at all. Presidential candidates usually only talk to audiences of their supporters, and when they go to foreign territory it is often only so that their supporters can see them talking tough to the opposition (like Mitt Romney’s speech to the NAACP in 2012). But I think Bernie went to the center Jerry Falwell’s empire in an honest attempt to make converts, or at least to show that he wasn’t the Devil. More candidates, on both sides of the political spectrum, should show their flags in hostile territory. I’d love to see Hillary Clinton explain her views to an NRA convention, or Donald Trump speak to La Raza.
For their part, the Liberty University people treated Sanders with respect. He got a generous introduction from President Falwell — Jerry’s son — the audience did not boo or heckle, and some Sanders’ supporters from outside the university community were allowed to attend.
Sanders made an attempt to speak his audience’s language. He quoted the Golden Rule from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. He quoted the verse from Amos that Martin Luther King often quoted, about justice rolling down like a river. And the rest of his speech was a litany structured around the phrase “There is no justice when …” that confronted the audience with the facts of income inequality in America.
I applaud him doing that. I think conservative Christians too often let themselves rationalize the economic process in America, without really confronting the results of that process.
But I think he made three mistakes. The first is that he gave a very traditional speech/sermon, standing at a podium with a printed text, speaking in the tone and cadence of a 19th-century orator who needs to make sure his voice carries to the back of the auditorium. Liberty University students are used to much higher production values than that. (Compare Ted Cruz’ announcement speech at the same venue, where he walks around the stage and speaks without notes, in a tone that suggests he is talking to each student individually.) Liberty is a place to give a TED talk, not a Cross of Gold speech.
Second, his message about income inequality is all statistics and no stories. As Stalin is supposed to have said, “One death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.” When I read the conversion stories of people raised in the Religious Right who subsequently leave that movement, it’s never a statistic that turns them around, it’s confronting the human reality of people that their theology has written off. (In Rachel Held Evans’ memoir Evolving in Monkey Town — I think I’ve got the right source, but my memory might have shifted the story from somewhere else — she tells about being on a mission trip to China, looking out the bus window and realizing that according to her theology, all those millions of people out there are going to Hell. It’s the first time that she realizes deep down that “the Damned” aren’t minions of the Devil, they’re mostly just people trying to live their lives as best they can.)
Similarly, what I would want to get across to the Liberty students is the human reality of poverty in America, the fact that many poor people are already doing the best they can, and that they don’t need a lecture about values and character, they need help. That is best communicated in stories. Then you can bring in statistics and argue that they need help on a scale that individual charity can’t give, a scale that nothing but government is big enough to provide.
And only then should you reach beyond the giving-help idea, and ask why our system produces so many people who need so much help. Could we organize society differently, so that more people could succeed with less help?
Finally, while I give him credit for submitting to a Q&A at the end, he didn’t seem very well prepared for the obvious question: Why does he talk so much about protecting our society’s children, but not want the government to protect the unborn?
What he says is not bad as far as it goes: He points out the inconsistency of wanting a small government that will stay out of people’s personal lives, but also wanting that government to regulate pregnancy. But that attack on the conservative position doesn’t defend the consistency of his own views. He also doesn’t confront the question on the religious/political grounds from which it came.
Here’s what I would say: Our society and our laws recognize that something makes a human life different than an animal life, so that killing a human is murder, while killing a cow or pig is just agriculture. That difference is not something you can point to on an ultrasound — that humans have hearts or feel pain — because animals have all the same organs and suffer just like we do. For most of a pregnancy, most of us would be hard pressed to tell the difference between an ultrasound of a human fetus and a chimpanzee fetus.
Religions talk about this ineffable something as a soul, but throughout history religions have had different teachings about when the soul enters the body. Jesus doesn’t talk about the issue in any records we have, but in his day just about everyone believed the soul entered the body at the quickening, the time when a woman first feels her fetus move in the womb. Some religious leaders have taught it happened later, even as late as the first breath, as the Bible describes in Genesis 2:7. More recently, many denominations have begun to teach that the soul enters the body at conception.
A basic American principle that goes back to the Founders is that the federal government should not be adjudicating theological disputes, or taking the side of one sect against another. This is a principle whose value I think we can all see, because as satisfying as it might feel sometimes to imagine the government imposing our theology on everyone else, it would be so much worse to have the government impose somebody else’s theology on us.
That’s why I believe decisions about abortion should be made not by legislators or bureaucrats, but by individual women and their families, in consultation with the medical and spiritual advisers they choose.
Republican presidential debates have made fact-checking obsolete.
In a typical political debate, fact-checkers play the same role that referees do in football: They apply standards and call penalties. And like referees, they depend on the fact that violations are fairly rare. The football-refereeing system works because, even on plays that draw flags, 20 or 21 guys do more or less what they are supposed to do, making the one or two violations stand out. But nobody could referee a game in which all the players ran around the field doing whatever.
In the same way, fact-checking works pretty well when the checkers just need to catch those half-dozen-or-so moments when somebody misquotes a statistic or gets a date wrong. If a debater cherry-picks data to “prove” a point, or oversimplifies a complex situation, a checker can introduce additional information to give readers a more complete picture — as long as it doesn’t happen too often.
But when standards of truthfulness and accuracy vanish as completely as they did in Wednesday night’s Republican presidential debate (here’s the video and transcript), fact-checking is out of its league. When the consensus of participants is that they would rather discuss an alternate reality, picking out a handful of “errors” the next morning just doesn’t address the situation.
So, for example, the debate’s most memorable moment, the one that caused a lot of observers to pick Carly Fiorina as the “winner”, was her denunciation of Planned Parenthood. In that short speech, she didn’t simply quote some numbers out of context or use an unjustified pejorative term, she invented an entire scene from the undercover videos attacking Planned Parenthood, described it in graphic detail, and then dared Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton to watch it. [1]
And Fiorina looked most presidential when she rattled off all the things America should be doing to intimidate Putin out of meddling further in Syria — unless you realize that President Obama is pretty much doing all that already.
It’s 9-11. Do you know who your president is?
Or consider the evening’s biggest applause line: when Jeb Bush responded to Donald Trump’s characterization of his brother’s presidency as “a disaster”: “You know what? As it relates to my brother, there’s one thing I know for sure. He kept us safe.”
Well, except for that one time, when (after ignoring warnings in intelligence briefings) President Bush lost far more Americans to terrorism in one day than President Obama has in seven years, and then in response lost thousands more American soldiers attacking a country that had nothing to do with 9-11 — removing a secular government that was keeping Islamic radicals in check and neutralizing Iran’s biggest rival in the region — while letting Osama bin Laden escape and stay hidden until Obama nailed him years later.
If that’s what you mean by “keeping us safe”, then sure, President Bush totally kept us safe. And the audience at the Reagan Library loved it, though what I heard them applauding was not Jeb himself, or even W’s record, but a candidate’s willingness to stand tall and spit in the face of an uncooperative Reality. That’s the quality Republicans seem to be looking for in a president this time around.
As for the Planned Parenthood videos, Ted Cruz had his own fantasies:
On these videos, Planned Parenthood also essentially confesses to multiple felonies. It is a felony with ten years’ jail term to sell the body parts of unborn children for profit. That’s what these videos show Planned Parenthood doing.
In a word: no. Even after being doctored, the videos don’t show that, “essentially” or any other way. If they did, a political smear campaign against the organization wouldn’t be necessary; you could just prosecute them.
Speaking of prosecution, Chris Christie didn’t just repeat his previously debunked lie about being appointed U.S. district attorney on September 10, [2] he spun a crowd-pleasing fantasy about prosecuting Hillary Clinton for the wildly overblown email “scandal”.
The question is, who is going to prosecute Hillary Clinton? The Obama White House seems to have no interest, the Justice Department seems to have no interest. I think it’s time to put a former federal prosecutor on the same stage as Hillary Clinton.
(APPLAUSE)
And I will prosecute her during those debates on that stage for the record we’re talking about here. The fact she had a private email server in her basement, using national security secrets running through it, could have been hacked by the Russians, the Chinese, or two 18-year-olds on a toot wanting to have some fun. [3]
Then there was Donald Trump connecting vaccines to autism — a well-studied theory that has been pretty thoroughly debunked. [4] Ben Carson, a doctor who knows better, briefly alluded to that reality, but then acquiesced to Trump’s implication that the currently recommended schedule of vaccines might cause harm, even if the individual vaccines are safe. He did not comment when Trump then told an anecdote about a child whose autism appeared shortly after vaccination. Rand Paul, who has an M.D. from Duke, volunteered his support to Trump: “I’m also a little concerned about how [vaccines are] bunched up.” [5]
No one then protested when Mike Huckabee segued from “controversies about autism” to another topic. Because there are no scientific facts on Bizarro World, there are just “controversies” — like climate change or evolution — that people can believe whatever they want about.
So how do you “fact check” that exchange? That’s not just one lineman jumping offside, it’s a rugby scrum breaking out in the middle of a field goal attempt. Throwing a flag just won’t cover it.
With all that going on, who has time for the ordinary job of a fact-checker? Like flagging Scott Walker’s absurd exaggeration that his pamphlet on healthcare is “an actual plan” to repeal and replace ObamaCare, which puts him in a position “on day one” to “send a bill up to Congress”. [6] Or ridiculing Marco Rubio’s non sequitur that “America is not a planet” as an excuse for doing nothing about climate change. Or pointing out Donald Trump’s often-repeated falsehood about birthright citizenship, that
Mexico and almost every other country anywhere in the world doesn’t have that. We’re the only ones dumb enough, stupid enough to have it. [7]
Compiling a list of errors for this debate would be misleading. Such lists imply that the rest was more-or-less correct, like the football plays that don’t draw penalties. But the specific divergences from reality that I have called out are like Jonathan Swift’s fleas: the closer you examine the text, the more you will find, without limit.
So I deny any claim that I have “fact-checked” the Republican debate. I spent three hours in Bizarro World, and while I was there I saw some strange things. But there was much, much more to see.
[1] How, I wonder, are Obama and Clinton supposed to accept Fiorina’s dare, when even the makers of the video can’t produce the scene she has conjured up?
[2] It’s not fair to mention that lie without also busting Carly Fiorina’s ridiculous secretary-to-CEO claim. Fiorina temped as a secretary during summer vacations from Stanford. Paul Krugman comments:
If her life is a story of going from “secretary to C.E.O.,” mine is one of going from mailman to columnist and economist. Sorry, working menial jobs while you’re in school doesn’t make your life a Horatio Alger story.
I picked up a few extra bucks as a busboy one New Year’s Eve, and then just a few years later I had a Ph.D. in mathematics! If that’s a rags-to-riches story, then just about every successful person in America has one.
As the pro-Carly site fromsecretarytoceo.com will tell you, she grew up in “a modest, middle-class family”, i.e., her father, Joseph Tyree Sneed III, was dean of Duke Law School before becoming Deputy Attorney General and then a federal judge.
[3] The image of national security being endangered by Hillary’s emails seems to be completely bogus. The heart of the issue has been described by The Wall Street Journal as a “bureaucratic turf war over complicated issues of classification”, i.e., whether information that the State Department considered unclassified at the time should have been reclassified, after input from other departments.
David Ignatius talked to experts whose opinions mirror what I remember from when I had a security clearance:
First, experts say, there’s no legal difference whether Clinton and her aides passed sensitive information using her private server or the official “state.gov” account that many now argue should have been used. Neither system is authorized for transmitting classified information. Second, prosecution of such violations is extremely rare. Lax security procedures are taken seriously, but they’re generally seen as administrative matters.
Where I used to work, a security violation — like leaving a secret document overnight in your desk drawer rather than locking it up in an approved safe — could earn you and your boss a very uncomfortable meeting with the security department. Repeated violations like that could probably get you fired, though I didn’t know anybody that happened to. But criminal charges were reserved for intentional espionage, not screw-ups. So the Obama administration and the Justice Department “have no interest” in prosecuting Clinton because there is no reason to do so.
[4] Autism tends to get noticed at about the same age as certain vaccines are administered. That seems to be the whole connection between the two. So there are bound to be a number of children whose autism is discovered shortly after they get vaccinated. If that correlation-in-time happens to your child, I’m sure the evidence against vaccinations seems compelling. But eliminating that kind of illusory causality is why we do scientific studies.
The CDC guidelines aren’t willy-nilly. Infants are at greater risk of complications from these diseases. That’s why we give the vaccinations to infants. There’s no evidence to support the notion that too many shots are being given too quickly. An infant’s immune system can handle it. … What we do know is that when parents delay immunizations, it puts their children at risk of acquiring life-threatening infections.
[6] For example, here’s Walker’s complete section on services for long-term illnesses like Alzheimer’s:
One of the greatest threats to middle-class American families is the obligation to pay for long-term services and supports (LTSS) for seniors who develop chronic or disabling medical problems. My plan would reform existing regulations to better protect middle-class families from financial hardship and to prepare for future LTSS. It would also deregulate the current Long-Term Care insurance market to allow the private sector, including health insurers, to offer products that reflect consumer demands for assistance at home. When LTSS and acute care services are coordinated, the cost of each can be lowered.
Does that sound like it’s ready to be passed into law “on day one”?
[7] In reality, it’s a New World vs. Old World thing. European countries by and large don’t have birthright citizenship, but most countries in the Western Hemisphere do, including Mexico and Canada. This has been pointed out often enough that Trump either doesn’t want to know it, or does know it and lies about it anyway.
More than even Donald Trump, Ben Carson’s appeal — and he has appeal; numerous recent polls have him second to Trump both nationally and in keystates — derives from not being a politician. When he talks, he does not seem to be giving a speech. If a typical politician sounds like a minister preaching on Sunday, Carson sounds like the same minister chatting with his Bible-study class on Wednesday evening. It is easy to imagine him in his previous life as a pediatric neurosurgeon, describing a particularly difficult case to a roomful of colleagues.
A second piece of his appeal is his life story: He came out of poverty, got an education, and reached the top levels of a challenging profession. Other candidates may talk about the struggles of their parents or grandparents to achieve the American dream, but Carson can point to his own rise out of poverty. (He doesn’t harp on it, though, because in the conservative circles where he travels, his story is already well known.) He is black and clearly must have experienced some racism in his life, but he projects no bitterness about it. America has been good to him, and he is grateful.
In the same way that his life embodies the American dream, his candidacy embodies a common conservative dream: that we don’t need policy experts or even political parties, we just need to turn our government over to good people with common sense. Carson expressed it like this in his announcement speech [video, transcript]
We have to get the right people in place. We need, not only to take the executive branch in 2016, and when I say we, I’m not talking Republicans – I’m talking about anybody who has common sense, you know. We have to have another wave election and bring in people with common sense, who actually love our nation and are willing to work for our nation and are more concerned about the next generation than the next election. That’s what’s going to help us. [1]
More than any other candidate, Carson communicates the truthiness of the conservative movement. [2] He has a Reaganesque ability to sound convincing while saying wild things that conservatives know in their hearts must be true, even if they aren’t.
Outline of the speech. [video, transcript] Carson announced his candidacy on May 4. He begins by introducing his wife and children, and then makes his low-key announcement.
Now, I have introduced my family. You say, well who are you? I’ll tell you. I’m Ben Carson, and I’m a candidate for President of the United States.
He then starts telling his mother’s story, as evidence that “America is a place of dreams” and in refutation of “a lot of people” who “are down on our nation”. Carson’s mother married his father at 13 to escape her family. But her husband turned out to be a bigamist, so they got divorced, leaving her as a single mother with a third-grade education. She worked as a domestic and they lived with relatives in a Boston tenement.
Boarded up windows and doors, sirens, gangs, murders. Both of our older cousins, who we adored, were killed.
But she after consulting God (“She asked God for wisdom. And you know what? You don’t have to have a Ph.D. to talk to God. You just have to have faith. And God gave her the wisdom.”), she instilled good values in Ben and his brother, and they succeeded.
From his mother’s desire to stay off welfare, he segues into a discussion of how welfare creates dependency.
there are many people who are critical of me because they say Carson wants to get rid of all the safety nets and welfare programs, even though he must’ve benefited from them. This is a blatant lie. I have no desire to get rid of safety nets for people who need them. I have a strong desire to get rid of programs that create dependency in able-bodied people. And we’re not doing people a favor when we pat them on the head and say, there, there, you poor little thing, we’re going to take care of all you needs; you don’t have to worry about anything.
And a denunciation of socialism.
You know who else says stuff like that? Socialists. … They say it’ll be a utopia and nobody will have to worry. The problem is all of those societies end up looking the same, with a small group of elites at the top controlling everything, a rapidly diminishing middle class, and a vastly expanded dependent class. [3]
Which is not what America was intended to be.
And I’m not an anti-government person by any stretch of the imagination. I think the government, as described in our Constitution, is wonderful. But, now we’ve gone far beyond what our Constitution describes, and we’ve begun to just allow it to expand based on what the political class wants, because they like to increase their power and their dominion over the people, and I think it’s time for the people to rise up and take the government back.
The “political class” is the villain of Carson’s story. [4]
I’ll tell you a secret. The political class comes from both parties and it comes from all over the place.
He paints an idealized picture of early America.
You’ve got to remember it was the can-do attitude that allowed this nation to rise so quickly. Because we had people who didn’t stop when there was an obstacle. That’s how those early settlers were able to move from one sea to the other sea across a rugged and hostile terrain. [5]
That can-do attitude contrasts with the timidity of today’s Americans, who are intimidated by political correctness.
We’ve allowed the purveyors of division to become rampant in our society and to create friction and fear in our society. People are afraid to stand up for what they believe in because they don’t want to be called a name. They don’t want an IRS audit. They don’t want their jobs messed with or their families messed with. But isn’t it time for us to think about the people who came before us? … We dare not soil their efforts by being timid now and not standing up for what we believe.
Belying his humble tone, Carson presents himself as the kind of brave man we need.
I’m not politically correct, and I’m probably never going to be politically correct because I’m not a politician. I don’t want to be a politician, because, politicians do what is politically expedient, and I want to do what is right. We have to think about that once again in our country.
When he talks about fixing the economy, he starts with the national debt:
You need to know who your representatives are. And you need to know how they voted, not how they said they voted. And if they voted to keep raising that debt ceiling, to keep compromising the future of our children and our grandchildren, you need to throw them out of office. [6]
He attributes to “economists” the view that:
when the debt to GDP ratio reaches 90%, at that point economic slowdown is inevitable. [7]
He goes on to talk about how “the most dynamic economic engine the world has ever known” won’t work “when we wrap it in chains and fetters of regulations” and “when you have high taxation rates”. The only specific policies he mentions involve cutting corporate taxes: He wants to cut the corporate tax rate, and have an even cheaper rate to induce companies to repatriate profits held overseas (though he doesn’t specify either rate). He then closes by coming back to the notion that expertise is not necessary:
The real pedigree that we need to help to heal this country, to revive this country: Someone who believes in our Constitution and is willing to put it on the top shelf. Someone who believes in their fellow man and loves this nation and is compassionate. Somebody who believes in what we have learned since we were in kindergarten. And that is, that we are one nation, under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all.
The myth of America. Whenever American history comes up in Carson’s speech, it’s the kind of history most Americans want to believe, rather than the kind that actually happened. I’ve already mention the “can-do attitude” that built America without needing to steal Indian land or enslave African workers.
He talks about freedom of the press like this:
You know, the media, the press, is the only business in America that is protected by our Constitution. You have to ask yourself a question. Why were they the only ones protected? It was because our founders envisioned a press that was on the side of the people, not a press that was on the side of the Democrats or the Republicans or the Federalists or the Anti-Federalists.
Again, it would be nice to think so. But pamphlets were the main method of debate in early America, and “freedom of the press” meant nothing more to the Founders than the right to own a press yourself or hire somebody who could print your pamphlets. It did not refer to an institution of “the Press” as we think of it today. And such newspapers as existed in the early days of the Republic were more partisan than the present New York Times or Wall Street Journal, not less. (Wikipedia: “Nearly all weekly and daily papers were party organs until the early 20th century.”)
The idea that journalism should be a profession with professional standards of public responsibility really starts in the 1920s with Walter Lippmann.
Social truthiness. Carson’s race and up-from-the-ghetto life lend authenticity to a number of social myths conservatives like to believe. For example, his explanation of the Baltimore riots is not that anybody actually cared about Freddy Gray or police abusing their power in the black community; poor blacks just saw an opportunity to go wild and take stuff.
This past couple of weeks, there’s been a great deal of turmoil in Baltimore – where I spent 36 years of my life. … The real issue here is that people are losing hope and they don’t feel that life is going to be good for them no matter what happens. So when an opportunity comes to loot, to riot, to get mine, they take it.
And government anti-poverty programs just create dependency.
My mother was out working extraordinarily hard. Two, sometimes three, jobs at a time, as a domestic. Trying to stay off of welfare. And the reason for that was she noticed that most of the people she saw go on welfare never came off of it. And she didn’t want to be dependent. … I have a strong desire to get rid of programs that create dependency in able-bodied people. [8]
In Carson’s idealized American past, federal programs weren’t necessary, and they wouldn’t be necessary now if we recovered traditional values.
There were many communities that were separated from other communities by hundreds of miles, but they thrived. Why did they thrive? Because people were willing to work together, to work with each other. If a farmer got injured, everybody else harvested his crops. If somebody got killed, everybody else pitched in to take care of their families. That’s who we are. We, Americans, we take care of each other.
But we should do it as individuals, not through the government. And people who don’t succeed? It’s their own fault: If they’re not disabled, they must be lazy or stupid.
You don’t have to be dependent on the good graces of somebody else. You can do it on your own if you have a normal brain and you’re willing to work and you’re willing to have that can-do attitude.
People focusing on racial issues aren’t exposing problems, they’re creating problems.
We’ve allowed the purveyors of division to become rampant in our society and to create friction and fear in our society.
A lot of people perceive everything through racial eyes, but my point is that we don’t have to do that. What we have to do instead is to begin to see people as people. [9]
Conspiracy theory dog whistles. A lot has been made of Carson’s ability to rise in the polls without getting the kind of media attention that has fueled Donald Trump’s candidacy. But this ignores the extent to which Carson is a darling of the alternative conservative media: talk radio, evangelical conferences, and web-based empires like Alex Jones and Newsmax.
Carson’s speeches are littered with references that the alternative-conservative-media audience will recognize and regard as established facts, when they are nothing of the kind. For example, that the IRS is being used to persecute conservatives:
People are afraid to stand up for what they believe in because they don’t want to be called a name. They don’t want an IRS audit.
On Planned Parenthood (which isn’t mentioned in the announcement speech) Carson has said:
I know who Margaret Sanger is, and I know that she believed in eugenics, and that she was not particularly enamored with black people. And one of the reasons that you find most of their clinics in black neighborhoods is so that you can find a way to control that population.
That’s debunked here and in more detail here. (I never knew that one of those “racist” Sanger quotes floating around the internet was originally said by W.E.B. Du Bois.) And he has totally bought the claim that Planned Parenthood is “harvesting” and “selling” baby parts.
Thanks largely to Glenn Beck, Saul Alinsky (who has been dead for 43 years) has become famous as the grand strategist of the Great Liberal Conspiracy, and Rules for Radicals as important as Chairman Mao’s little red book. (Take any bad thing and use it in a sentence with “Saul Alinsky” and “George Soros” and you’re halfway to a right-wing conspiracy theory.) So Carson says:
You have to recognize that one of the rules in Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, is you make the majority believe that what they believe is no longer relevant and no intelligent person thinks that way and the way you believe is the only way intelligent people believe. And that way they’ll keep silent. Because I’ll tell you something. They don’t care if you don’t believe what they believe, as long as you keep your mouth shut.
Is anything like that true? If you google “Saul Alinsky” and look for recent references, they’re almost all from conservative sources, because he’s actually not that important in liberal discourse. Half of liberals have never heard of him, and to the rest of us Rules is one of those books we think we ought to get around to reading someday, but never do.
Consequently, people like Carson can attribute anything they want to Alinsky, and who’s going to say they’re wrong? Well, I guess I am: Fact-checking Carson gave me one last push to read Rules for Radicals. (It’s short, flows well, and you can find it free on the internet.) It doesn’t contain anything resembling the rule Carson mentions. Whether he got his “rule” from some fabricator like Beck or made it up himself I can’t say. But Alinsky’s book is all about how to get powerless people to speak up, not shut up. (The subtext is Alinsky’s disgust with the late-60s student radicals, whose rhetoric was designed to shock and piss off blue-collar workers rather than make common cause with them against the establishment.)
Conclusion. In tone and manner, Ben Carson is the anti-Trump — calm and collected, not aggressive or even particularly animated most of the time. He avoids conflict, even when baited by an expert like Trump.
But in many other ways, he’s a Trump alternative: an outsider brought in to fix our broken government; appealing to “common sense” rather than expertise in law, economics, foreign policy, the military, or any other relevant field; almost completely lacking specific proposals [10]; and free to say what white conservatives think ought to be true, unencumbered by actual facts.
[1] What I find amazing in that quote is the “actually” — as if it would be remarkable to find in our government people whose love for our country is genuine. But this is a common belief in conservative circles. In February, a poll asked Republicans whether President Obama loves America. By a 69%-11% margin, they said no.
a quality characterizing a “truth” that a person making an argument or assertion claims to know intuitively “from the gut” or because it “feels right” without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination, or facts.
Face it folks, we are a divided nation. Not between Democrats and Republicans, or conservatives and liberals, or tops and bottoms. No. We are divided between those who think with their head and those who know with their heart.
[3] If you compare the United States to actual socialist countries like Denmark or Sweden, Carson has it exactly backwards. A person born poor under Scandinavian socialism has a far better chance of achieving prosperity than a poor American — the exact opposite of what you’d expect if America were the land of opportunity and socialism trapped people in a “dependent class”.
And “a small group of elites” dominating “a rapidly diminishing middle class”? That’s us, not them.
[4] “The political class” is an interesting spin that allows Carson to be pro-business and pro-wealth while sounding populist. “Politicians” have betrayed us, but Carson never discusses who they’ve betrayed us to. So his proposals — a flat tax, lower corporate taxes, less regulation, a tax holiday for repatriating overseas profits — all further the interests of what Bernie Sanders calls “the billionaire class”.
[5] I find this passage particularly odd. First, because Carson’s focus on the “can-do attitude” obliterates the role of slave labor and land stolen from the Native Americans in building this country. And second, because “we” are the heroic “early settlers”. Carson identifies with them, and not with his slave ancestors, who were driven like cattle across that “rugged and hostile terrain”.
[6] Note the focus on the debt ceiling, as if we could solve the problem of rising government debt by simply outlawing it. (His web page promotes a similar gimmick, a balanced budget amendment that he doesn’t bother to state. It’s an amendment that will balance the budget; what else do you need to know?)
On that date, if the debt ceiling has not been raised, the United States will begin to default on payments that it is legally obligated to make, payments that Congress has already promised that we will make. … The Treasury will only be able to pay about 60% of the bills that are owed. In relatively short order, therefore, the United States will stiff about 40% of the people and companies it owes money to.
… To not raise the debt ceiling is to say that it is totally okay to stiff people and companies we owe money to–and, more importantly, to actually stiff them. This is astoundingly reckless and irresponsible behavior (not to mention illegal).
Apparently, refusing to pay bills you have already run up constitutes doing “what is right”.
If you honestly think that the national debt is our country’s worst problem — I don’t — then you need to talk about the budget, which Carson has not done. You need to specify which spending you’re going to cut, where the revenue is going to come from, and how the math works out. That’s the hard work of governing, which Carson has shown no interest in.
[7] Actually that’s a single team of two economists, they didn’t really say “inevitable”, and their results depended on a spreadsheet error that was exposed over two years ago. Economist Dean Baker summarizes:
When the error is corrected, there is nothing resembling the growth falloff cliff associated with a 90 percent debt-to-GDP ratio that had been the main takeaway from the initial paper.
[8] Notice he says only that she was “trying” to stay off welfare, not that she did stay off it, or that he didn’t benefit from other government programs. We know that his family received food stamps and that he got free glasses from a government program. What additional government help Carson or his mother received is conjecture.
So his life story could be told with the exact opposite spin: Government help kept his family from falling through the cracks of society, giving him the chance to work hard, get an education (at public schools), and succeed.
[9] So the situation is a little like kindergarten, when a kid would say shit or fuck. You couldn’t report that to the teacher because then you’d have to say the word yourself.
Similarly, if racists are mistreating people of a different race, how would you even notice that unless you are making racial distinctions yourself? Being truly colorblind means not just that you don’t treat people of different races differently, but that you can’t see racism at all.
[10] Looking around Carson’s web site reminds me of Ezra Klein’s comment about Mitt Romney in 2012: that he had presented “simulacra of policy proposals”, avoiding any details that would allow outside experts to analyze them. But Carson makes Romney look like a wonk. His issue-focused pages each contain about one relevant buzz-phrase that hints at Carson’s intentions.
On the health care page, that phrase is “health savings accounts”. (And that’s his field; he’s a doctor!) His tax system would be “fairer, simpler, and more equitable“. Here, at least, he has given a few more details in speeches: At the first debate, he endorsed “tithing”, which seemed to be a reference to a flat tax. Elsewhere, he elaborated: He does want a flat tax, one that applies even to the poorest people, because “we all need to have skin in the game“.
In order to raise the same revenue as the current system, he believes the flat rate would need to be “between 10 and 15 percent”. That range is an indication of how much thought he has put into this: If you make $50,000 a year, will you pay $5,000? $7,500? More if Carson’s assumptions — whatever they are — prove too optimistic? He doesn’t know.
Ben Carson knows exactly what BLM should be doing.
The biggest obstacle a protest movement faces isn’t resistance from people on the other side. Quite the opposite: One purpose of protest actions is to make your opponents come out of the shadows and demonstrate the previously hidden power dynamics that hold the status quo in place.
So when Sheriff Clark deputized all the adult white males of Dallas County and met protest marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, he didn’t break the Civil Rights movement, he made it. He showed the world that the relationship between the races in Alabama was predicated on officially sanctioned white violence.
Clark didn’t know it, but he was following the script Martin Luther King had laid out two years earlier in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail“:
Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored.
Drama needs a villain, and Clark had unwittingly signed up for the role.
So if people like Sheriff Clark and Bull Connor are not an activist movement’s biggest obstacle, what is? The people who say, “I agree with your goals, but you’re doing it all wrong.” They compare an actual social-action movement, one that is organizing in the real world and doing things, to their own fantasy movement, which they are not lifting a finger to make real. So what their criticism actually promotes is not a competing real-world program of action, but a passivity that says: “Not this. Not here. Not now.”
In MLK’s day, the criticism centered on timing: Wasn’t King pushing for too much too fast, without giving his white moderate allies time to take the smaller, more deliberate actions that seemed reasonable to them? His Birmingham-jail letter answered:
I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.”
This is the proper context for reading Ben Carson’s recent op-ed in USA Today: “#BlackLivesMatter misfire“. Carson’s objection to the BLM protests isn’t time, it’s target. But his message is otherwise very much the same as the pseudo-sympathetic moderates who bedeviled King: Not this.
Carson’s fantasy protest movement (which he is not lifting a finger to make real) would find a better target than police violence against blacks.
The notion that some lives might matter less than others is meant to enrage. That anger is distracting us from what matters most. We’re right to be angry, but we have to stay smart.
Of course, the protesters are right that racial policing issues exist and some rotten policemen took actions that killed innocent people. Those actions were inexcusable and they should be prosecuted to deter such acts in the future.
But unjust treatment from police did not fill our inner cities with people who face growing hopelessness. Young men and women can’t find jobs. Parents don’t have the skills to compete in a modern job market. Far too many families are torn and tattered by self-inflicted wounds. Violence often walks alongside people who have given up hope.
He goes on to list some better targets for protest: school boards that don’t educate black children, entertainment corporations that glamorize black thuggery, city governments that tolerate unsafe black neighborhoods, crack houses in black neighborhoods, and the two major political parties.
And you know something? There’s no point in arguing with him about those targets, because they’d all be good. In the same way that Carson can say “the protesters are right” about racial policing issues, I can likewise support his fantasy protesters.
But you know who is perfectly positioned to start such protests in the real world? Ben Carson. He is a presidential candidate with a considerable following — second to Donald Trump in a lot of recent Republican presidential polls. TV crews and newspaper reporters follow him wherever he goes. They’re just waiting for him to make some actual news.
Imagine if Carson had closed his op-ed by announcing a march on Baltimore’s city hall or a sit-in in front of the Chicago Board of Education. Unlike most BLM leaders, Carson could absolutely guarantee coverage on all major TV networks. Pundits all over the country would talk about his demands and the problems they addressed.
Who knows? If Carson is right in his criticism of BLM, if they have legitimate grievances but are misguided tactically, then his better-targeted protests might change the whole national conversation. He might make BLM irrelevant by drawing bigger crowds, raising more energy, and having a more direct impact.
Or consider one of the other things he says needs to be done:
Finally, we need to go over to the Republican Party. We need to tell them they have ignored us for too long. They need to invite us in and listen to us.
But Ben: You just appeared in a Republican presidential debate that 28 million people watched on TV! The GOP invited you in and they were listening to you. Why didn’t you raise any racial issues then?
Imagine if Carson had used his closing statement to call out the Republican Party for ignoring the black community and minimizing its issues — exactly what he says needs to be done. That clip would have been replayed on every news network in the country. It might even have taken Donald Trump out of the headlines for a day or two.
But he didn’t do that.
Here’s the point Carson’s op-ed glides over: There’s room for more than one protest in the world. Nobody has given BLM the monopoly on expressing black frustration or fighting for social justice, so nobody has to stop BLM before starting a rival movement. Just because one group picks one set of targets doesn’t stop another group from picking different ones.
Anybody who thinks he has a better way to promote change and racial justice is perfectly free to go that way. If you think BLM is doing it wrong, then go out and do it right.
If that’s really what you want to do.
But what if your purpose is to support the status quo, and maybe to gain the gratitude of the Powers That Be by helping derail and delegitimize the only effective action that’s currently happening? Then you should do what Ben Carson is doing: Fantasize about protest movements that could be happening, but aren’t.
Because that’s one thing the Powers That Be can always count on: Fantasy protests never change anything.
Back in 2012, Ezra Klein noted an interesting distinction between the two major candidates for president:
The central difficulty of covering this presidential campaign — which is to say, of explaining Barack Obama and Mitt Romney’s disparate plans for the country — is the continued existence of what we might call the policy gap. The policy gap, put simply, is this: Obama has proposed policies. Mitt Romney hasn’t. …
Romney’s offerings are more like simulacra of policy proposals. They look, from far away, like policy proposals. They exist on his Web site, under the heading of “Issues,” with subheads like “Tax” and “Health care.” But read closely, they are not policy proposals. They do not include the details necessary to judge Romney’s policy ideas. In many cases, they don’t contain any details at all.
That distinction between the parties has continued into the 2016 presidential cycle. Rarely does a week go by without some Democratic candidate announcing a policy detailed enough to put a price tag on and assess who would be helped or hurt. Hillary Clinton has a plan to address student debt. Bernie Sanders has drafted a bill — Congress could enact it tomorrow if it were so inclined — to create jobs by rebuilding infrastructure. Democratic candidates are competing to make detailed proposals to increase renewable energy, promote racial justice, raise the minimum wage, limit the power of money in politics, guarantee the right to vote, and do dozens of other things. Sanders likes to propose fully drafted laws, while a Clinton proposal is more typically a list with a price tag and maybe a funding mechanism. But the details are there.
You may hate these plans, and think the proposals that implement them are terrible. But if you don’t know exactly what Democrats are proposing, it’s probably because you haven’t bothered to find out. The candidates (or their web sites) would love to tell you. [1]
On the other side, though, details are scarce. Republicans want to “shrink the government” and “secure the border” and “defeat ISIS” and “repeal and replace ObamaCare” and “promote a culture of life” and enact “a growth agenda” and “make America great again”. But when you ask exactly what any of that means in this case or that case, things get iffy.
Why? When a pattern like this persists over multiple elections, the cause has to be more than just the style of particular politicians.
On some issues, the cause is obvious: Republican candidates aren’t going to have point-by-point plans to deal with global warming, because their ideology won’t allow them to admit it exists. [2] Likewise, they’re not going to have a plan to deal with racial injustice, because (according to them) there is none: Blacks are a disproportionate share of the prison population because they commit more crimes, and police gun them down more often because they are more threatening. Likewise, Republicans are not going to have a minimum wage proposal (other than maybe getting rid of the minimum wage) because setting wages is the market’s job.
But that doesn’t explain why so few Republicans have detailed their plans for cutting the federal budget [3], or replacing ObamaCare, or reducing entitlement spending [4]. Republicans say they want to do all those things. They just don’t say how.
The reason, I believe, is what I am calling the Do-Something-Else Principle:
When a public problem is genuinely hard, and has so many moving parts that the average person has a hard time holding them all in mind, any realistic detailed solution will disappoint the general public. Consequently, a politician who gets identified with any particular solution is at a disadvantage when running against a rival who wants to do something else.
No matter who proposes it or what kind of principles they base it on, once a solution gets nailed down well enough for the nonpartisan wonks at the Congressional Budget Office to estimate what it will cost and how well it will achieve its goals, most Americans will get disenchanted, thinking “There has to be a better way.” So a canny politician — particularly one who is out of power and has no responsibility to actually govern — will align himself with that longed-for “better way” and avoid getting pinned down on specifics as along as possible.
Examples of do-something-else are legion: ObamaCare is a specific program, while “repeal and replace ObamaCare” is a proposal to do something else. [5] The Iran nuclear deal is a specific agreement that Congress can vote up or down, but the “better deal” that Republicans support is something else. The Comprehensive Immigration Reform that the Senate passed (with votes from Republicans like Marco Rubio who have since retreated from it) is a specific plan, but “securing the border” is something else.
So far, the campaign has only two complex issues on which Republican candidates have taken definite stands: abortion and immigration. On both issues, they have been dragged kicking and screaming into policy commitments, and it hasn’t worked out well for them.
Abortion. Republicans run best when they can maintain a vague abortions-are-oogy position without getting drawn into individual examples. But the Christian Right fell for that back in the Reagan administration and has been wise to it since. Today’s pro-lifers demand clear commitments.
Consequently, everyone who isn’t a religious extremist finds Republican candidates’ abortion positions disappointing, or maybe even horrifying. Mike Huckabee has supported the government of Uruguay in forcing a 10-year-old to give birth, even though the pregnancy resulted from rape by her stepfather. Huck has also pledged that as president he would “invoke the Fifth and 14th Amendments to the Constitution” to protect a fetus’ right to life, a position that would justify sending federal troops to abortion clinics in much the same way that Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy sent troops to the South to enforce school desegregation. Scott Walker won’t support abortion even when the life of the mother is at stake, and Marco Rubio has come out against rape and incest exemptions to abortion bans.
Hillary is eagerly awaiting her opportunity to run those videos in the general-election campaign.
Details kill you. Stick with “abortion is oogy”.
Immigration. Republicans were doing fine with “secure the border” until Donald Trump came along. Trump is operating by his own rules, and I’m not completely sure what they are. But one rule seems to be that he can put out detailed plans where the details make no sense.
For example, consider the first reprisal he lists if Mexico refuses to pay for the wall he wants to build on our southern border:
impound all remittance payments derived from illegal wages
A “remittance payment” is money that a worker in the United States sends back to his family in Mexico. Both documented and undocumented immigrants do this, totaling more than $20 billion. But these are not drug kingpins and we’re not talking about the kind of large-scale transfers the government is set up to trace. Even National Review, no fan of Mexican immigrants in general, doesn’t see a practical way to block the undocumented guy washing dishes at your local diner (for $3 an hour) from sending $20 to his mom, much less block only the payments from undocumented workers and allow remittances from legal employment. (The work-arounds would be simple. Maybe I’ll take the $200 I’ve saved up and wire it to my cousin in Toronto, who can wire it from there to our grandma in Oaxaca.)
Anyway, though, the idea that Trump has a detailed immigration plan is forcing the other candidates to comment on it. They’re taking positions on birthright citizenship and using derogatory terms like “anchor babies“. It’s not doing any of them any good with the non-Republican electorate.
Why only Republicans? The Do Something Else Principle generally works to the advantage of the party out of power. The president has to govern; he can do something or do nothing, but he can’t stand for doing “something else”. (You might think that controlling Congress would give Republicans a similar interest in governing, but apparently not.)
But there is also a subjective element in the Do Something Else Principle that makes it more applicable to Republicans: It only works when the issues are complicated. When a simple proposal would do exactly what it’s supposed to do in a perfectly understandable way — like raising the minimum wage, for example — you’re either for it or against it. Supporting “something else” doesn’t make a lot of sense.
For years, Republicans have been pushing the idea that governing should be simple: There’s right and wrong, principled and unprincipled. We just need simple, good-hearted leaders who have the will to do the right thing, not brainiac experts who design complicated systems. (No Sarah Palin speech is complete without a reference to “common sense solutions“. George W. Bush once pushed a nominee for the Supreme Court — a job normally thought to require expertise — by assuring us that “I know her heart.”) Voters shouldn’t need to study an issue or understand anything difficult, nor should they have to yield to people who do study and understand things. “I’m not a scientist” is a reason to ignore climate change, not a reason to listen to the people who are scientists.
Consequently, the voters of the Republican base, particularly those who live inside the Fox News bubble, have been trained to throw up their hands quickly when things get complicated. Undoing structural racism? An insurance mandate? A tax on carbon? There has to be a better way!
Republican candidates, by and large, are not stupid. They just pander to voters who have been over-indulged in their intellectually laziness. Those base voters don’t want to understand complex issues, they just want to be told that the solution follows easily from the common-sense principles of their ideology. If no actual solution is simple or ideologically correct, then you shouldn’t present one. Just tell them that you’re going to do something else.
[1] The exception that proves this rule is Clinton’s position on the Keystone XL Pipeline: She hasn’t announced one, and that’s a serious problem for her campaign. Democratic voters expect to know what their candidates plan to do.
[2] That’s not entirely true. Republican candidates are split between those like Ted Cruz and Donald Trump, who think the Earth is not warming, those like Marco Rubio, who believe the Earth might be warming, but don’t care because “the climate is always changing”, and those like Jeb Bush and Carly Fiorina, who acknowledge the reality of global warming, but don’t believe political leaders should do anything about it, beyond crossing their fingers and hoping for “innovation”. But all the candidates are united on the don’t-do-anything conclusion.
Given that, “do nothing” actually is a fully detailed description of their intentions.
[3] In previous years, Rand Paul made headlines with detailed descriptions of how he’d cut federal spending. However, a plan to slash the CDC doesn’t look so good in light of the recent Ebola scare, so Paul has de-emphasized the specifics now during his presidential run.
In his announcement speech, he stated his intentions in a more do-something-else way:
Currently some $3 trillion comes into the U.S. Treasury. Couldn’t the country just survive on $3 trillion?
Three trillion is a number beyond the ken of most of us. So who can say why the sum total of all the stuff we expect out of our government costs more than that? Isn’t there some other way to spend that $3 trillion that would do everything we want?
That sounds a lot better than slashing the CDC or cutting back on food safety or the national parks.
[4] Chris Christie is virtually unique in presenting a detailed plan for cutting Social Security benefits and raising the retirement age. He thought this would enhance his image as a guy who tells it like it is, even if it means delivering the bad news. That message seems to be working for about 3.3% of the Republican electorate. He will probably be out of the race soon.
[5] The polls that show ObamaCare is unpopular usually measure it against doing something else. It would be interesting to poll a question like: “Do you want to keep the Affordable Care Act or go back to the way our health care system worked in 2009?”
Likewise, if Republicans offered a detailed replacement plan — they’ve controlled the House since 2011 and the Senate since January, so if they had a plan they could have passed it in the House and forced the Democrats to either filibuster it in the Senate or have Obama veto it — polling that plan against ObamaCare would be a fair comparison. But if they had a plan, the burden of public disappointment would shift to them: Is their plan really the best we can do? Why isn’t the problem simpler than that?
Scott Walker and Marco Rubio have talked about their ObamaCare replacement plans recently, but they have produced exactly the kind of “simulacra of policy proposals” Klein was talking about. As Politico observed about Walker’s “plan”:
Walker leaves many other questions unanswered about his plan, including how many people might be covered and how he would pay for it, except to say it would require no new taxes or fees.
Rubio’s “plan” is presented in an op-ed. It includes no numbers. (The numbers in the op-ed are all about ObamaCare, not his own program.) The ObamaCare tab on his website is similarly non-quantitative and unanalyzable, containing statements like “we must save Medicare and Medicaid by placing them on fiscally sustainable paths” without saying what such paths might look like in terms of decreased benefits or increased taxes.
The last time Republicans floated a healthcare proposal detailed enough to be analyzed was in 2009, when ObamaCare was still being debated. The CBO found that the Republican alternative would lower the 2019 federal budget deficit by a small amount ($18 billion), while doing essentially nothing to cover the uninsured: 3 million more people would be covered in 2019 than if Congress did nothing (no ObamaCare, no Republican alternative), but 52 million non-elderly adults would remain uninsured.
If somebody wants to run on “I stand for an America where in 2019 you will have a 1-in-7 chance of being uninsured”, the Democrats will eat them up.
How Fox turned the first Republican presidential debate into a plus for the GOP.
Leading up to Thursday’s debate, most liberals I know were somewhere between smug and gleeful. The Republican presidential process had started out as something of a circus, with more candidates than anyone could remember and a corresponding need to say outrageous things to stand out from the crowd. And then Donald Trump got into the race, openly characterizing undocumented Mexican immigrants as drug dealers and rapists, and responding to criticism from Senator Lindsey Graham by saying Graham was “not as bright as Rick Perry” and revealing his personal cellphone number.
It got so bad that even Democrats were getting a little uncomfortable, thinking about how these shenanigans reflected on America. Humorist Andy Borowitz was only partially kidding when he wrote:
As preparations get under way for the first Republican Presidential debate, on Thursday night, a new poll shows that Americans are deeply concerned that the rest of the world might see it.
Hours before the debate, this showed up on my Facebook newsfeed.
For a real news network or even an unbiased political entertainment network, none of this would have been a problem. (Pass the popcorn and let the insanity begin!) But the debate was being hosted and televised by the official Republican Party Ministry of Information, a.k.a. Fox News. So although a debate that descended into kindergartenish chaos would make great television, Fox’ brain trust recognized that such a spectacle would hurt the conservative movement it has worked so hard to foster. They saw that as a problem.
They solved it brilliantly.
If you watched the debate through your liberal glasses, you may not have recognized their achievement; to you, everybody probably looked just as scary and unhinged as you expected. (When Huckabee started talking about invoking the 5th and 14th Amendments to protect the personhood of the unborn, he seemed seconds away from calling for federal troops to occupy abortion clinics. But moderator Brett Baier wisely moved on.) However, in the eyes of moderates, independents, and low-information voters, I suspect the debate raised the image of the Republican Party and its gaggle of candidates.
How did Fox manage that? Artfully. I learned a lot by watching.
The problem and the solution. The first step in solving a problem is to state it precisely: The Republican Party’s problem is that its conservative base is shrinking and far out of tune with the rest of the country. So as they campaign for the nomination, candidates constantly have to choose: Should they appeal to the base voters (who will be the majority in the upcoming primaries), or to the American public as a whole (who will judge the eventual nominee in the general election)? For example: Members of the conservative base love to hear pledges that Republicans in Congress will shut down the government this fall and keep it shut until Obama knuckles under and agrees to defund Planned Parenthood. But the public as a whole is ready to be done with that kind of brinksmanship.
So the path to a Republican presidency involves walking a tightrope: leaning far enough to the right to get the nomination, but not so far as to topple out of the mainstream voter’s consideration. Mitt Romney (who I think was a far better candidate than he gets credit for) couldn’t manage it in 2012. His actual record as governor of Massachusetts would have been hard to defeat: He was a problem-solver who could work across the aisle to come up with bipartisan programs other executives wanted to imitate, the way ObamaCare imitated RomneyCare. But he had to pander to right-wing extremists to get the nomination, and he couldn’t recover in November.
Since then, the problem has only gotten worse: The base has gotten angrier and more demanding, while the whiteChristians who provide its membership continue to shrink as a percentage of the population.
The worst possible thing for the image of the party would be to lob a series of questions into that gap between the base and the average voter: Ask Ted Cruz about his role in the 2013 government shutdown. Ask Ben Carson if Hitler might actually have been a teensy bit worse than President Obama. Ask all the candidates how they plan to avoid war with Iran (if they do), or what they would say to the 16 million people who will lose their health coverage if ObamaCare is repealed, or whether they think our scientists are conspiring to deceive us about climate change, or why they want to force women to bear their rapists’ children.
Once you understand that, you also see the solution: Control the questions and control who answers them. If an issue makes the party look bad, just don’t ask about it. And when most of the candidates stand united around an unpopular position, pick out the one with the most moderate record and ask him to defend it. That answer will look completely different to the two camps: The base voter will see that you’re really putting this guy on the spot. But the average voter will listen to the answer and say, “Hey, these Republicans aren’t as far out as I thought.”
And finally, there’s the special problem of Donald Trump, whose wild statements have been turning off Hispanics, women, and other key demographics. Here, the solution is to excommunicate him: Trump is not a real Republican, so all the bile he expresses is just personal and has nothing to do with the party.
See nothing, say nothing. For two hours in that arena in Cleveland, large chunks of American political discourse just vanished, without even leaving a puff of smoke behind.
The environment, for example, was simply not an issue — not just climate change, but also pollution, oil spills, endangered species, or any other environmental concern. Bashing the EPA is a standard Republican applause line, but there was no cause for that here, because the environment did not exist. It was so far off the radar that Jeb Bush could express puzzlement that Hillary Clinton hasn’t endorsed the Keystone XL pipeline. Rand Paul didn’t have to explain why he once proposed a 42% cut in the National Park Service budget, and Ted Cruz didn’t have to justify his proposal to sell off large chunks of federal wilderness lands.
The related issue of energy policy was also off the table, so no one had to defend burning coal, or fracking, or drilling for oil offshore, or in other fragile ecosystems like the Arctic. No one had to explain wanting to end subsidies for wind and solar power.
Economic inequality was also not an issue, despite the fact that it has come up in several of the candidates’ campaigns: Rand Paul has talked about “the income gap”, and Rick Santorum has charged that “Middle America is hollowing out.” Just about every candidate has questioned whether the American Dream of economic mobility will be available to future generations. But none of that came up.
But as far as I know, Rick Santorum is the only Republican candidate who wants to raise the minimum wage at all, and even his proposed rate is far smaller than the $10.10 that President Obama supports. (Bernie Sanders wants a $15 minimum.) And while I haven’t found a direct quote of a candidate openly calling to repeal the federal minimum wage, several seem to dislike it on general principles. Marco Rubio has said, “Minimum wage laws have never worked in terms of having the middle class attain more prosperity.” And the Rand Paul 2016 Facebook page posted a link with the comment “How the minimum wage hurts everyone.”
Student debt wasn’t in the questions, and only came up because Marco Rubio volunteered that he used to have some. “How is [Hillary Clinton] gonna lecture me about student loans? I owed over $100,000 just four years ago.” But that was just a fact, not a problem, so no solutions were necessary.
Equal pay for women? Off the table. Prosecute bankers whose law-breaking contributed to the Great Recession? No mention. Again, Marco Rubio volunteered that he wanted to repeal the only real financial reform Congress passed after the collapse, Dodd-Frank, inaccurately blaming it for the failure of small banks. But Fox completely omitted Wall Street reform from the agenda.
No one was asked about government shutdowns — including Ted Cruz, who more than any other person was responsible for the last shutdown. Another shutdown in the fall is a real possibility, and Cruz in particular wants that option left on the table. But it wasn’t discussed.
Although many candidates called for ending ObamaCare and none defended it, no one was asked how to replace it, or what they would say to the millions of Americans who have health insurance now, but will lose it if ObamaCare is simply repealed without a replacement.
Although all the candidates oppose the Iran nuclear deal and several criticized it during the debate, none was asked how he plans to avoid going to war.
The Black Lives Matter movement rated one question (to Scott Walker, who dodged it. He didn’t say whether he thought police were over-aggressive towards blacks, but merely called for better police training. There was no follow-up.)
Voting rights? Not an issue. Gun violence? Nothing.
Pin the tail on the moderate. Rather than draw attention to the most rabidly conservative positions the candidates have taken, Fox repeatedly picked out the candidates’ most moderate positions and asked them to justify why they weren’t more conservative.
For example, most of the ten candidates oppose allowing abortions in cases of rape or incest. But Marco Rubio was asked to justify favoring such exceptions (which he denied, misleadingly). No one was asked why he would force a woman to bear her rapist’s child. (The one counter-example to the pattern was when Scott Walker was asked to justify his opposition to abortions that protect the life of the mother. He dodged, and there was no follow-up.)
Governor Kasich was asked to justify accepting the money the federal government offered his state to expand Medicaid, but Governor Walker wasn’t asked to justify turning the money down in Wisconsin, thereby denying coverage to 87,000 Wisconsin residents. Kasich talked about the good that money has done in Ohio, delivering a paean to compassion and the effectiveness of government that is totally atypical of both his own philosophy and the Republican Party as a whole.
Kasich got to give another heart-warming speech about love and acceptance when asked how he would respond if one of his daughters turned out to be lesbian. But Mike Huckabee wasn’t asked why he believes same-sex marriage will lead to “the criminalization of Christianity“.
Jeb Bush was asked why he favors immigration reform. (Ted Cruz volunteered that he led the fight against the immigration reform bill that passed the Senate but died in the House.) On the campaign trail, I believe all the candidates have come out against the executive order by which President Obama has prevented DREAMer deportation, and the Republican-dominated House has voted to deport them, but Fox did not find DREAMer deportation worth mentioning.
Rand Paul had to justify why he wants to stop the NSA from collecting the phone records of Americans who have done nothing wrong.
Trump. From the opening question, the moderators made their position clear: Donald Trump is not really a Republican. That opening was a lesson in how apparently neutral questions can in fact be targeted. Brett Baier asked:
Is there anyone on stage, and can I see hands, who is unwilling tonight to pledge your support to the eventual nominee of the Republican party and pledge to not run an independent campaign against that person.
Only Trump raised his hand, and that invited follow-up questions, a reminder that an independent run by Trump “would almost certainly hand the race over to Democrats and likely another Clinton,” and a direct attack from Rand Paul:
This is what’s wrong. He buys and sells politicians of all stripes. … He’s already hedging his bet on the Clintons, OK? So if he doesn’t run as a Republican, maybe he supports Clinton, or maybe he runs as an independent.
Trump was later asked about his past support for “a host of liberal policies” (partial-birth abortion, an assault-weapon ban, and single-payer health care), and his donations to Democrats, including Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi. He has justified those donations as a normal business practice, and so he was asked “what specifically” he got in return.*
Megyn Kelly finally brought it home:
In 2004, you said in most cases you identified as a Democrat. Even in this campaign, your critics say you often sound more like a Democrat than a Republican, calling several of your opponents on the stage things like clowns and puppets. When did you actually become a Republican?
It was hard to miss her implication that the right answer was never.
Results. I suspect that when all is said and done, we’ll find out that Fox’ effort to pick the candidate — favoring Rubio and Kasich while trying to cast out Trump — had very little effect. But in the way the debate showcased all the candidates and made the Republican race seem much less clownish than it has otherwise been, I think Fox has scored a major victory for its party.
All in all, the evening resembled one of those holiday dinners where you introduce your fiance to your crazy relatives for the first time. All day long, you short-circuit the discussions that will set Aunt Jenny ranting about the Jews, or evoke one of Uncle Bob’s long pointless stories. You carefully approach your sister only when her husband is around to keep her in line, and you seek out Cousin Billy early, before he starts drinking. Only in the car, after hours of threading a safe path through the labyrinth of family issues, do you finally begin to relax. And that’s when your spouse-to-be says, “I don’t know what you’ve been so worried about. They don’t seem that bad to me.”
* Trump replied that because he was a contributor, Hillary had to come to his wedding. I wish I were doing Twitter for Hillary, because I know exactly how I’d respond. Of course she should deny that money was her reason for attending, and she should promise to attend all his future weddings as well, whether he gives any more money to her campaigns or not.
[This is part of my series: The 2016 Stump Speeches.] Hillary Clinton’s candidacy presents a unique challenge. As a presidential campaign begins, the question in voters’ minds is usually “Who is this person?”, and a responsible journalist tries to answer it by presenting information. But the question I keep hearing about Clinton is “Who is she really?”
We are drowning in information about Hillary, but so much of it — positive and negative alike — is false. For decades her critics have been lying about her, and she has countered by presenting a series of images that aren’t completely consistent. So what should we believe about her? If we elect her, what kind of president can we reasonably expect her to be?
The speeches she’s been giving since she started campaigning are meatier, in terms of detailed policies, than just about any other candidate in the race. And I’ll get to those speeches and policies below. But it’s hard to know how to listen to her proposals until you come terms with that over-arching question: Who is she really? Those policies she’s putting forward — which ones come from the heart, and which are driven by expediency?
My Hillary reading project. To answer those questions, I decided to try to clear my mind of prior conceptions and read her books in order: It Takes a Village(1996, a book about policies related to children and families, which she illustrates with stories about her own childhood and her experiences with Bill and Chelsea, as well as stories from women she’s met all over the world), Living History(2003, about her two terms as First Lady), and Hard Choices (2014, covering her Secretary of State years).
Along the way, I found myself drawn to read two books by the reformed right-wing hack David Brock: The Seduction of Hillary Rodham (1996; this was originally intended to be a hit job prior to Bill’s re-election campaign, but it went oddly astray and became an interesting biography) and Blinded by the Right(2002, giving an insider’s view of the Arkansas Project, the “vast right-wing conspiracy” that billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife funded to dig up and publicize dirt about the Clintons).
What I was looking for in Hillary’s books was a consistent author’s voice. I believe writers always reveal more about themselves than they intend. (I worry about that sometimes.) It’s in their word choices, the tone of the stories they tell, the metaphors they use, and what topics they think flow naturally from other topics. If Hillary really wrote those books — and after reading them, I strongly believe she did — then her character must be in there somewhere, no matter what image she may have wanted to project.
Personal impressions. The simplest thing I can report after my reading project is that I like Hillary a lot more than I did when I started. When she appears on TV, she is so often either responding to an attack or anticipating one, so she seems guarded. But I think she feels much more secure when she is alone with a text (which already tells you something about her), and that’s when her self-effacing charm comes out.
She tells one story I love: Hillary knows she doesn’t sing well, so she mostly just doesn’t do it. (In her announcement speech, after she made fun of her Republican rivals by quoting lyrics from the Beatles’ “Yesterday”, she quipped: “You’re lucky I didn’t try singing that.”) But years ago she made one exception: After Chelsea was born, she sang lullabies. That stopped one day when Chelsea became old enough to put rudimentary sentences together. The toddler held up one finger and said, “No sing, Mommy.”
I also now have my own impression of her mysterious and unique relationship with Bill. Critics sometimes portray their marriage as a sham of political convenience, but I don’t think so. Bill Clinton is quite simply the most interesting person Hillary has ever met. She describes their relationship as one long conversation that started back at Yale in the 1970s and is still going. No matter what he might do, the world would be a dull place without him to talk to. For his part, I don’t think Bill would know who he was if he couldn’t see himself through her eyes. In all those infidelities, he’s never been looking for someone to replace Hillary, and if she dies first he will be devastated.
The establishment radical. As for understanding Hillary’s politics, a simple formula will take you a long way: progressive ends through pragmatic means. One of David Brock’s more interesting insights is the formative effect of her student-government years at Wellesley. Like most American colleges and universities, Wellesley changed a lot between 1965 and 1969. But unlike many other educational institutions, Wellesley stayed surprisingly peaceful through it all. Brock attributes that to Hillary’s cadre of student activists:
Hillary was able to co-opt the campus administration by calibrating student demands and winning change through the system.
He sees that experience as imprinting a paradigm of change on her: Hillary is not a revolutionary. She does not seek to overthrow the power structure, but is constantly probing to see how much the powers-that-be are willing to give up to keep the peace and stay in power. Brock labels this “establishment radicalism”.
[At Yale] Hillary took her moral bearings from the radicals, while favoring establishment tactics – precisely the formulation she had told Saul Alinsky would be most effective [when she turned down his job offer and went to law school]. This enabled her to work within the mainstream and to retain the respect and admiration of those in power.
You can hear this in her voting rights speech (see video below): “Progress is based on common ground, not scorched earth.” That’s why she won’t offer liberals red-meat rhetoric about “the bankers” or “the billionaire class”. They represent a power center she hopes to negotiate concessions from, not battle to the death.
The establishment-radical paradigm got reinforced by her biggest failure: healthcare reform. Not only did HillaryCare not become law, she was blamed for the 1994 Democratic rout that made Newt Gingrich the Speaker of the House. She learned her lesson: Push the powers that be too far, or get too far out in front of the country, and you’ll be slapped down.
You can see that cautious vision at work in her account of the Arab Spring uprisings: She presents herself (in Hard Choices) as the hesitant voice in the administration (compared to Obama’s idealism; this is one of the rare instances where she portrays herself out of harmony with Obama). Pushing tyrants like Mubarak to liberalize was right up her alley, but seeing them overthrown by young activists who offered no political program or organization to replace them made her very uneasy. (You can tell she feels vindicated by how things have played out.)
Half a loaf. That pragmatism often causes her to champion half-a-loaf policies when in her heart she still wants the whole loaf, or even to accept a step backwards to prevent a longer slide. You can see that in the Clinton administration’s gay-rights record. Bill came into office wanting gays to serve openly in the military and not thinking about marriage equality at all. He ended up with don’t-ask-don’t-tell and the Defense of Marriage Act — two policies both he and Hillary supported repealing in more recent years. But by supporting those compromises he avoided measures that would have been harder to reverse, like a federal marriage amendment. Through DADT and DOMA, the door to progress stayed ajar until the political climate changed.
It is both a strength and a weakness that Hillary never floats a pie-in-the-sky vision. Behind every Clinton proposal is the judgment: I think we could really do this.
Ironically, one of the best criticisms of that approach comes from the young Hillary Rodham, in the commencement speech she gave to her graduating class at Wellesley in 1969:
For too long our leaders have used politics as the art of the possible. And the challenge now is to practice politics as the art of making what appears to be impossible, possible.
If I could fix one thing about Hillary’s current rhetorical style, I would add a dash of dream-the-impossible-dream.
Hillary as Wellesley’s first student commencement speaker. Is that young woman still in there somewhere?
The wonk-in-chief. The other big thing to understand about Hillary is that she’s a wonk, a technocrat. She believes that smart people can figure things out, and that simple ideological solutions are often wrong. The most from-the-heart line in her economic policy speech was:
And, please, let’s get back to making decisions that rely on evidence more than ideology.
I don’t think she believes in ideology. Here’s what I mean by that: What’s real to her are people and the situations of their lives. (That comes through most clearly in It Takes a Village.) Ideologies are abstractions, and while abstractions can be handy tools for thinking things through, they aren’t real in the same way that people are real.
Worse, ideologies exaggerate conflict and hide agreement. My ideology may directly contradict yours, but when we get down to cases and start looking at individuals, very often we might want the same things for them. That’s how she can negotiate with the Iranians and make deals with insurance companies: If we can get down to cases and then create new abstractions from them, maybe we agree on principles that weren’t part of our prior ideologies.
But that approach demands a respect for facts and the real world. Her own respect for such expertise runs deep and traces all the way back to being a girl of the Mad Men era (just a few years older than Sally Draper) hoping to go places women had never been. Being smart and working hard to master the details of a subject was young Hillary’s claim to a place in the Man’s World. She knows that when expertise is disregarded, that’s when prejudice and old-boys’ networks and all the other defensive mechanisms of the status quo have free rein.
She has a wonkish sense of integrity that is easy to overlook: In the three speeches discussed below, every idea comes with either a proposal to implement it, or a promise that such proposals will come later. That discipline won’t let her indulge in the sweeping rhetoric that you’ll hear from other candidates to her left and right. Bernie Sanders can promise to break up the big banks. But in Clinton’s economic speech, you can almost hear her unspoken thoughts on that: What we really ought to be doing is getting the irresponsible risk out of the banking system, and while the too-big-to-fail banks are part of that, there are sometimes bigger risks in “the shadow-banking system, including hedge funds, high-frequency traders, non-bank finance companies; so many new kinds of entities, which receive little oversight at all.” She anticipates her future proposal, where she may have to give a little on the big banks in order to get the risk-reduction she wants.
That wonkish integrity may have cost her the presidency in 2008. She and Obama had very similar half-a-loaf healthcare plans, because neither dared to come out for the single-payer system that I suspect both would prefer. But once committed to her plan, she refused to misrepresent it: Obama pretended he could implement his plan without the unpopular individual mandate, but Clinton would not say that.
She’ll compromise in constructing her proposals, but once she has a plan she takes pride in it and won’t distort it.
But can I trust her? Just this week, we saw another example of what I’m coming to see as the standard pattern: The NYT had a BIG story: Two State Department inspectors general had asked the Justice Department to open a criminal investigation into possible misuse of classified information in Clinton’s emails as Secretary of State. After dodging the bullets of countless scandals in the past, maybe this one would finally nail her.
Except … well, it wasn’t actually a criminal investigation. They had to issue a correction about that. And it wasn’t specifically targeted at Secretary Clinton. Another correction. And a Newsweek journalist who got hold of the same documents says even the corrected NYT story misinterpreted the whole thing. He concluded: “the piece is wrong in all of its implications and in almost every particular related to the inspector generals’ conclusions.”
In short, the big story has evaporated, leaving behind no specific accusation, but a general impression that Clinton must have done something wrong. That’s the pattern. The only atypical thing about this “scandal” is that it fell apart so quickly. If you take a post-investigation look at everything from Whitewater to Benghazi, there’s nothing there. But the overall effect is to shroud Hillary’s public image in a general haze of distrust.
Compare this to the residual cloud of pseudo-scandals that hangs over President Obama: his birth certificate, death panels, Fast & Furious, using the IRS to target the Tea Party, stealing our guns, plotting to invade Texas, and so on. By the Obama administration, most liberals had caught on to the right-wing attack machine, and the way it can sometimes co-opt “liberal” media like the NYT. So we shrug off those Obama stories. But your conservative friends and relatives are sure there must be a fire somewhere under all that smoke. But the attacks on Hillary started in a more trusting era, so her cloud seems more real.
Sometimes I hear this question: Given that Hillary carries this baggage, can’t Democrats nominate a ticket doesn’t have such a cloud hanging over it? Sure. It’s simple: Find candidates so perfect that the opposition can’t even lie about them. Good luck with that.
Announcement speeches are always sited in symbolic places. The choice of Roosevelt Island outside of New York City sends several messages: First, Hillary is running as herself, the former Senator from New York. If she had wanted to run as Bill’s wife, she’d have announced at the Clinton Library in Little Rock.
Second, as she points out in the speech, you can see the new World Trade Center from there. She’s acknowledging that we’re in a post-9-11 world, and she’s identifying with the collective heroism of New York City. But she’s also sending the message that New York isn’t stuck in 2001; it remembers, but it’s getting on with its life. America should do the same.
But finally, and most important, Roosevelt Island indicates that she’s running as a Democrat and claiming the heritage of the Democratic Party as it was remade by Franklin Roosevelt. The Republican nominee will have to run away from both the obstructionist Republican Congress and the disastrous legacy of George W. Bush. (That’s why Jeb Bush’s logo just says “Jeb!”.) But Hillary is confidently invoking the legacies of both President Obama and President Clinton. In the Economics speech she says:
Twice now in the past 20 years, a Democratic president has had to come in and clean up the mess left behind. I think the results speak for themselves.
In this speech, she ties the failure of those two Bush presidencies to ideas Republicans are still pushing.
We’re still working our way back from a crisis that happened because time-tested values were replaced by false promises. Instead of an economy built by every American for every American, we were told that if we let those at the top pay lower taxes and bend the rules, their success would trickle down to everyone else.
She recalls FDR’s historic “Four Freedoms” speech, and organizes her own speech around another set of four:
If you give me the chance, I’ll wage and win four fights for you.
Those fights are:
To make the economy work for everyday Americans, not just those at the top. More about this in the economic speech. But the key point is: “Growth and fairness go together. For lasting prosperity, you can’t have one without the other.”
To strengthen America’s families. Here you can see my point about ideology. When Republicans talk about “strengthening the family”, they mean an archetype of family: heterosexual Mom and Dad married once-and-for-all-time, raising their biological children in a house down the street from their Christian church. But Hillary is talking about the actual families that live in America: households of people related in all sorts of ways, who are struggling to get by and to achieve their full potential.
To maintain America’s leadership for peace, security, and prosperity. This part would fit in most Republican speeches, minus the endorsement of diplomacy. Most of my disagreements with Clinton are in defense and anti-terrorism, but I have to admit she is probably more in tune with the country than I am.
To reform our government and democracy so that it works for everyday Americans. More on this in the voting-rights speech, where she goes into detail about fighting the Republican efforts to suppress voting. But there’s also campaign finance reform: “We have to stop the endless flow of secret, unaccountable money that is distorting our elections, corrupting our political process, and drowning out the voices of our people. We need justices on the Supreme Court who will protect every citizen’s right to vote rather than every corporations right to buy elections. If necessary I will support a constitutional amendment to undo the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United.”
The basic principle is unchanged since Bill’s presidency: “If you work hard and do your part, you should be able to get ahead.” Hillary describes this as the “basic bargain” of our society.
The most fundamental liberal/conservative battle of frames revolves around who the poor are. Republicans push a Makers vs. Takers frame, in which the poor are moochers. A government safety net should keep them from dying in the streets, but leave them miserable enough that they will get off their asses and work. As Paul Ryan put it: “We don’t want to turn the safety net into a hammock that lulls able-bodied people to lives of dependency and complacency.”
When that frame takes hold, Democrats lose: We become the people who want to tax away your hard-earned money and give it to the moochers, who could succeed if they tried, but don’t bother because life in the government hammock is too pleasant.
In the Democratic frame, the poor do work hard, but life at the bottom of society is so arduous that it’s difficult to do more than survive day-to-day. If we want poor people to invest effort in building a future for themselves and their children, we need to make their lives a little easier, and check that the uphill roads we expect them to travel are still open.
The Clintons have specialized in co-opting Republican rhetoric, as in the “work hard” above. Here’s another example:
I firmly believe that the best anti-poverty program is a job. But that’s hard to say if there aren’t enough jobs for people that we’re trying to help lift themselves out of poverty.
She steals Republican rhetoric around “growth” and organizes her own economic proposals around three themes: strong growth, fair growth, and long-term growth.
Hillary critiques the Republican growth prescription like this:
For 35 years, Republicans have argued that if we give more wealth to those at top by cutting their taxes and letting big corporations write their own rules, it will trickle down, it will trickle down to everyone else. Yet every time they have a chance to try that approach, it explodes the national debt, concentrates wealth even more, and does practically nothing to help hard-working Americans.
Her view is that strong growth depends on a large and vibrant middle class. “Inequality is a drag on our economy.” So anything that blocks people’s rise into the middle class is a growth problem. So her growth agenda involves equal pay for women, legal status for immigrants, and child care for working parents. It also requires investment in productivity by both the private and public sectors. The tax code should encourage private investment (and discourage moving jobs overseas), and government should finance an “infrastructure bank” to build and maintain airports, roads, a better electrical grid, and world-class internet (which we don’t have now). And it requires encouragement of the clean energy sources we’ll need in the future.
These investments will create millions of jobs, save us money in the long run and help us meet the threats of climate change.
Making “strong” and “fair” separate points is really more rhetoric than substance, because she believes they go together:
You can’t have one without the other. We can’t create enough jobs and new businesses without more growth, and we can’t build strong families and support our consumer economy without more fairness. We need both.
The fairness part of the speech covers increasing the minimum wage. (She hasn’t committed to a national $15 rate, which I see as a combination of her wonkishness and commitment to political possibility. As a wonk, she knows that the minimum wage should vary according to the local cost of living. A $15 rate probably won’t hurt employment in big cities, but in rural Iowa it might. So politically, $15 is not the hill she wants to die on.) Also: encouraging unions and profit sharing, defending and “enhancing” Social Security, shifting more of the tax burden back onto the rich, setting “a high bar on trade agreements” (though she still hasn’t taken a clear position on the Trans-Pacific Partnership), and “seeing every 4-year-old in America have access to high quality pre-school in the next 10 years.” She promises more specific proposals on student debt and K-12 education in a later speech.
The long-term growth portion of the speech focuses on Wall Street, whose focus on quick profits through financial manipulation is largely responsible for the collapse of 2007-2008.
To the extent that such behavior was criminal, she wants to prosecute it:
There can be no justification or tolerance for this kind of criminal behavior. And while institutions have paid large fines and in some cases admitted guilt, too often it has seemed that the human beings responsible get off with limited consequences or none at all, even when they’ve already pocketed the gains. This is wrong, and on my watch it will change. … Too big to fail is still too big a problem … and we will prosecute individuals as well as firms when they commit fraud or other criminal wrong-doing.
She wants to defend the Dodd-Frank reforms, get more of a regulatory handle on “the shadow banking system”, provide tax credits for businesses that invest in their workers, and reform the capital gains tax to encourage more long-term investment. (The details of that came out later.)
We have a responsibility to say clearly and directly what’s really going on in our country. Because what is happening is a sweeping effort to disempower and disenfranchise people of color, poor people, and young people from one end of our country to the other. … I call on Republicans at all levels of government, with all manner of ambition, to stop fear-mongering about a phantom epidemic of election fraud and start explaining why they’re so scared of letting citizens have their say.
… We need a Supreme Court that cares more about protecting the right to vote of a person than the right to buy an election of a corporation.
Proposals:
Repair the Voting Rights Act to restore the pre-clearance procedures thrown out by the Supreme Court.
Expand absentee voting and vote-by-mail.
Ensure that no one should ever have to wait more than 30 minutes to cast a vote.
At least 20 days of in-person early voting, including weekend and evening hours.
Universal, automatic voter registration when people turn 18, unless they opt out.
What Clinton has going for her. In resume terms, Hillary Clinton is one of the best qualified candidates ever. She had an unofficial-but-central role in her husband’s governorship and presidency. She served eight years in the Senate, and four as Secretary of State. (I recommend Hard Choices as a world tour of American policy. It’s organized by region, so you get a country-by-country review of America’s foreign relations during Obama’s first term. By the time you’re finished, you’ll probably know more about America’s challenges abroad than most Republican presidential candidates do.)
But experience is only a face-card in politics if you know how to play it. John McCain could never make it work against Obama, primarily because McCain always seemed like the one more likely to make some rash, spur-of-the-moment decision. I think Hillary will know how to use it, particularly against a national neophyte like Bush or Walker. In debates, she’ll spring the proper I-was-there story about Putin or Bin Laden at just the right moment, and it will be effective.
Where I wish for more. The progressive case against Hillary is that the current crisis doesn’t call for making the best deal possible with the powers that be, it calls for revolutionary change. Wall Street, the fossil fuel companies, the billionaires buying our elections — that whole power structure has to go. Just changing course from center-right to center-left won’t save our economy, our society, or the planet.
In foreign policy and defense, she is too identified with what Glenn Greenwald calls the National Security State. I don’t think she’ll start another Iraq War, but the drone wars in Yemen, Sudan, Somalia, Pakistan, and other countries would continue. And I don’t see her reining in the surveillance of the NSA.
The trick that I don’t think either Bill or Hillary (or Obama) ever mastered was how to take the half-loaf while continuing to raise energy behind the full-loaf vision we really need. Bill Clinton showed how to minimize the damage of the conservative consensus that formed during the Reagan years, but he never reversed it or inspired a new liberal consensus. Neither has Obama, and I’m skeptical that Hillary will either.
At the same time, I think the progressive ire and distrust towards Hillary that I see on my Facebook feed is overblown. She negotiates and constructs compromises — with Iran, with Wall Street, whoever — that’s who she is. It’s a trait, not a flaw.
We could do a lot worse in our next president, and if we don’t elect her I suspect we probably will. But is that a good enough reason to support policies — like drones — that I think are huge mistakes?
So the question boomerangs back to me: Can I take half a loaf in a president? And if I do, can I keep reaching for more later?
Whether you love him or hate him, it doesn’t matter. He’s bluffing.
After John McCain showed the bad judgment to make Sarah Palin a national figure in 2008, every few months a flurry of excitement/panic about Palin’s political future would erupt in the media. She was anointed the early Republican front-runner in the 2012 presidential cycle, to the point that Ross Douthat devoted a whole column to denying her front-runner status. When that speculation faded (because by the spring of 2011 she’d made no moves to build an organization in Iowa or New Hampshire), she went on a national bus tour to fan the flames again. She didn’t officially bow out until October, 2011.
Then she was going to run for the Senate in 2014, but that didn’t pan out either. This January she said she was “seriously interested” in a 2016 run, and proclaimed herself “ready for Hillary” at the Iowa Freedom Summit. But in a year when it seems that every Republican with a pulse is running for president, Palin isn’t.
I’ll take some credit for seeing through the Palin hype. After the 2010 mid-terms, I looked ahead to 2012:
Sarah wants to be famous and make a lot of money and not work very hard. (If that’s a vice, a lot of us have it.) Teasing about running for office served those goals well, but actually running would require effort, not to mention answering the lamestream media’s gotcha questions, like “What newspaper do you read?”
And that brings me to Donald Trump.
Trump is not exactly Palin — he loves hostile questions, for example — but the same phenomenon is at work. He really has no interest in being president, and when the campaign gets serious he won’t be there. So if his candidacy is getting you either excited or riled, don’t waste your energy.
Like Sarah Palin, Donald Trump lives off his image. That image is all about leadership, so of course he wants to be seen in terms of the ultimate leadership job, President of the United States. If you buy Trump’s image, you think he’d be a great president: making the tough decisions, banging heads together until everybody gets in line, cutting through the BS of the vested interests, and doing the common-sense things we all know need to get done. Who wouldn’t want to call up ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and say, “You’re fired”?
It’s a great fantasy. But actually being President? What a headache that would be. Even the Donald’s hairpiece would go grey.
In previous cycles, bluffing about running for president has served him well. But Trump understands something that seems to have escaped Palin: To keep people interested, you have to keep raising the bar. Except for a small group of rabid fans, the public has lost interest in Palin, because we’ve seen it all before. So she can hint about running, but until she starts acting like a serious candidate — building an organization, appearing in debates, pushing some signature issues beyond the buzzword stage, and so on — nobody is going to pay much attention.
If Trump hinted about a 2016 race and then backed away from it, nobody would pay attention to any future bluffs. So he raised the bar: This time he actually declared his candidacy, and he’s giving speeches and interviews. He’s still not building an organization in primary states or raising money for a serious campaign, but he’s on top of the recent polls (with 18% of Republicans in a very divided field), and he’ll probably be on the stage in August when the first debate happens. Chances are good he’ll get a lot of attention during that debate and be in the headlines the next morning.
And that’s where the bluff is going to break down. The kind of campaign he’s run so far — flying around and giving speeches — isn’t very expensive. The big money in primary campaigns goes two places: Early, it goes into hiring staff and opening campaign offices in early-primary states, and then later it goes into TV advertising. He’s not doing either.
The kind of money Trump has spent so far — and foregone as business partners run away from him — is a recoverable investment. He’s building the Trump brand, which will net him future earnings in book sales and TV ratings. The campaign — at least the way he’s run it so far — will keep his act fresh for years to come.
By November, though, a serious candidate will have to start putting serious money into Iowa and New Hampshire. Not thousands, millions. TV time on the Boston stations that cover southern New Hampshire is not cheap. The idiosyncratic process of the Iowa caucuses requires a ground game. And if you survive the Iowa/NH/South Carolina winnowing in January and February, you just need more money to compete nationwide in March.
That’s not an investment any more. It would take maybe $100-200 million to win the Republican nomination, and even more to run a serious third-party campaign in the fall if he isn’t nominated. That’s money he can never get back.
And I don’t even believe he has it. Trump’s empire has always been a precarious structure built on debt. (That’s why he’s been involved in four bankruptcies.) Whatever he might be worth on paper, he doesn’t have hundreds of millions of ready cash available to blow on a whim.
So this campaign is a more elaborate bluff than he’s run in previous years, but it’s still a bluff. Look for him to find an exit sometime in December.
[This is part of a series of articles on the speeches of 2016 presidential candidates. The overall vision of the series and links to the other articles can be found here.]
On May 27, in a speech at Penn United Technologies in Cabot, Pennsylvania, Rick Santorum announced that he is running for president again. [video with transcript,better transcript]
Rebranding. The main thing I learned from the speech is: Santorum is rebranding for the 2016 cycle. He hasn’t changed the product, in that he still has the same positions and beliefs. But the emphasis will be different this time.
The Santorum of 2012 was mainly a culture warrior: anti-abortion (to the point of telling women carrying their rapist’s child to “accept what God has given you” and “make the best out of a bad situation”), anti-gay (he famously compared gay sex to “man on dog” in 2003 and then stood by that quote in 2011), and even anti-contraception. (“It’s not okay because it’s a license to do things in the sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be.”)
And he still opposes those things. (Well, I’m guessing about contraception; he didn’t mention that.) But they’re not front and center any more. Instead, “My priority is you: the American worker.”
That’s not completely new either. In the 2012 cycle, especially after he was the last man standing against plutocrat Mitt Romney, Santorum tried to be the candidate of the working-class Republican. [see endnote 1] And much of the post-Ohio-primary wrap-up analysis said that Santorum could have won if he’d focused on that message, rather than getting drawn back into talking about contraception.
It sounds like he got the message. The announcement speech took place at a manufacturing plant in his home state, and was dominated by declarations like “Working families don’t need another President tied to big government or big money.” and “I promise you we will regain the title of a leader in world manufacturing.” He introduced himself by holding a lump of coal and telling about his coal-mining Italian-immigrant grandfather. [2]
New and improved nostalgia. Santorum’s conservatism has always been scented with nostalgia, but this time around the formula has changed: Rather than longing for Leave It to Beaver families, he’s trying to recover a past of humming factories, where unskilled workers could earn enough to support a housewife and send two kids to college. [3]
Any nostalgia-driven campaign has to answer two questions: How did we lose those golden days, and what can we do to get them back? Santorum answers the first in a classic right-wing fashion: American workers didn’t lose their place in the world economy, they were stabbed in the back.
In the late 70’s [4], like many of you, we saw the economic devastation here in Southwestern Pennsylvania and across this country, particularly in manufacturing, as a result of the excesses and indifference of big labor, big government, and yes, big business. Here in Southwestern Pennsylvania, the epicenter, we lost over 100,000 jobs in what seemed to be overnight.
That has to and did leave a mark on all of us. Afterwards, big government and big business told our workers that times have changed, American workers could no longer compete with low foreign wages and that those jobs were gone forever. Well, what about those politicians? For all those years, what did they do? What did they do for communities across this area and across this country and in small town America? They had no plan, and they provided no hope. And to that, I say: “No longer.”
As Middle America is hollowing out, we can’t sit idly by as big government politicians make it harder for our workers and then turn around and blame them for losing jobs overseas.
And they were subverted by an underclass.
Over the last 20 years, we’ve brought into this country, legally and illegally, 35 million mostly unskilled workers. And the result, over that same period of time, workers’ wages have flat lined.
Hillary Clinton and big business, they have called for a massive influx in unskilled labor. Business does it because they want to control costs. Hillary does it – well – she just wants votes. Their priorities are profits and power. My priority is you, the American worker.
Sleight of hand. Where Santorum will be vulnerable, at least in a general election, is in his answer to the second question: What in his proposals would actually do anything for the American worker? Answer: not much. His rhetoric about workers mostly just masks an agenda that will make the rich richer.
During Santorum’s grandfather’s lifetime, mining transformed from a hellish existence to the kind of endurable, good-paying job Santorum is nostalgic for. Two forces were responsible for that: government safety regulations and the United Mine Workers. Santorum is against both. His speech mentions unions only in that one derisive “big labor” quote above. As for regulations:
We will revoke every executive order and regulation — yeah — will revoke every executive order and regulation that costs American jobs.
Both in his speech and on his web site, Santorum frames a flat tax as his primary pro-worker idea. In fact it is an anti-worker idea, as anyone with common sense can see: Assessing the same tax rate on everyone reduces taxes for those who pay the top tax rates now, i.e., the rich. Unless the government is going to collect far less revenue, that means working people will have to pay more. And if a sharp loss of revenue and no corresponding cut in defense spending is the plan, will the deficit rise, or will Santorum make working people pay by cutting the other programs that make up most of the federal budget: Social Security and Medicare?
In short, what Santorum is proposing is the same sleight-of-hand Sam Brownback has played on Kansas: Cut taxes on the rich, and then (after huge deficits appear) re-balance the budget on the backs of working people.
The theory that this would create jobs is based on the same trickle-down economics conservatives have promoted for decades: Make the rich much richer, and then they’ll have the money to hire more people. It hasn’t worked for the last forty years, and doing even more of it in the next administration won’t work either. [5]
I could only find two Santorum positions that might genuinely help workers: an “incremental” increase in the minimum wage (I can’t find a commitment to a specific figure, but implicitly it must be lower than the $10.10 proposed by President Obama), and opposing the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement.
Nativism. There is one other part of Santorum’s plan that will appeal to working-class conservatives: restricting immigration. His web site says:
He supports reducing immigration from about a million immigrants per year—the current level—down to about 750,000 per year. This will help blue collar American workers get back to work and thrive economically.
He spelled out his plan for undocumented immigrants in a column for Breitbart last month: Build an Israeli-style fence across the southern border, track more closely everyone who comes into the country legally on tourist or education visas, deport everyone who is here illegally, and start a guest-worker program for agricultural workers from Mexico.
Here at least the first-order common sense works: If you reduce the foreign-born competition for unskilled jobs, more native-born Americans might get them, and employers might have to pay more. Whether that all works once you figure in the secondary effects, though, is something a lot of economists doubt. Immigration doesn’t just take jobs, it creates jobs. Throwing out all those working, tax-paying undocumented immigrants will certainly shrink the economy. Whether the resulting smaller economy would have more jobs for the native-born — other than government jobs tracking down undocumented immigrants — is not clear.
At a minimum, there’s something unseemly about a guy glorifying his grandfather’s immigrant experience while denouncing today’s immigrants: Now that my family has made it into the lifeboat, let’s cast off.
Racial resentment. There was nothing overtly racist in Santorum’s speech, but his rhetoric is carefully constructed to appeal to a target audience — working-class Republicans — that is overwhelmingly white. Consequently, it contains certain code phrases that blacks and whites will hear differently.
It’s time we have a President who sees the struggle of working families in America not as an opportunity to divide us along race or class – but as a chance to unite us around the ideal that every child in America deserves her birthright – to be raised by her parents in a healthy home.
The idea that Democrats in general and Obama in particular “divide us along race or class” is very popular among Republicans. But let’s think about what it means. [6] First, delete “class” from the quote, because what else is Santorum doing when he talks about “a president tied to big money”? He’s dividing us by class. He’s saying Jeb Bush can’t represent American workers because he’s from the wrong class.
And how does Obama “divide us by race”? He talks about racism. Unless you believe racism ended with Jim Crow — somebody should ask Santorum about that — it continues to be a problem America needs to address. And how are we going to do that without pointing out ways that the black or Hispanic experience of America continues to diverge from the white experience? So in essence, what Santorum (or any of the other Republicans who use this phrase) mean when they denounce those who “divide us by race” is: People who talk about racism should just shut up.
Black Americans hear that message loud and clear, and know that they are not welcome to put their concerns forward in Santorum’s America. In short, Santorum’s white-targeted rhetoric divides us by race.
The culture warrior. Santorum the Culture Warrior is not gone, but in this speech he was submerged a bit.
As President, I will stand for the principle that every life matters – the poor, the disabled, and the unborn. I will also fight for the freedom for you to believe what you are called to believe, not just in your places of worship, but outside of your places of worship too.
First, I sincerely doubt that Santorum wants to extend “the freedom to believe what you are called to believe” to, say, Muslims or atheists. He is talking to Christians, and maybe a few conservative Jews. Nobody else.
In front of a different audience, though, the culture war is still front-and-center. On a recent Glenn Beck radio show, Santorum played along with Beck’s apocalyptic fantasy of the government forcing churches to perform weddings for same-sex couples, saying “this is tantamount to government establishing religion.” He went on to echo what Mike Huckabee has been saying, that if the Supreme Court finds that marriage equality is part of the 14th Amendment’s “equal protection of the laws”,
that’s the court’s opinion. They’re entitled to their opinion. But the president and the Congress have an opinion too of what the Constitution is. And if they get it wrong and the consequences are what I suspect they will be toward people of faith, then this president will fight back.
What he leaves out. Mainly two things: climate change (or any concern for the environment at all) and women’s rights.
When he talked about his grandfather, Santorum admiringly held up a lump of coal — the dirtiest kind of fossil fuel to burn. “Cheap energy”, specifically “the shale revolution”, is one of the catalysts he sees for new American manufacturing jobs. And if he really does reverse “every executive order and regulation that costs American jobs”, that would include just about every environmental regulation ever. Didn’t the chemical companies that dumped toxic waste at Love Canal make that waste while creating American jobs?
Specifically, though, I think Santorum is targeting the executive orders President Obama has issued to control greenhouse gases. The words climate, global warming, and greenhouse gas don’t appear in this speech. But Santorum is a climate change denier, and has even criticized the Pope for defending the environment.
And Santorum’s concern for the American worker doesn’t extend to female workers who make less money than their male co-workers or don’t want their employer’s religion to control their health care options. And if a woman would like to make her own choices about when to have children, or even just to have children by someone other than her rapist, tough luck.
[1] His pro-working-class stands have not stopped Santorum from drawing large contributions from mega-wealthy donors like Foster Friess.
[2] It’s always entertaining to watch Republican candidates stretch to connect to the working class. Rick himself was a professional-class kid. His Dad got a G.I.-bill education after World War II — thanks, big government — and became a psychologist. No doubt Jeb Bush’s announcement speech will flash back to a working-class Bush in the Middle Ages.
[3] Just as family-values nostalgia leaves out the oppression of women and blacks, nostalgia for the factories of the 1950s and 60s leaves out pollution, workplace injuries, and the unsafe-at-any-speed cars they made. (In a crash, those steering wheels would go right through your chest.) Also forgotten: the unions that demanded the wages that moved factory-workers into the middle class.
[4] Locating this betrayal in the 1970s is important, because it hides Ronald Reagan’s role in dismantling unions, changing the tax code to favor the rich, and taking the teeth out of antitrust enforcement.
[5] The best capsule definition of trickle-down theory was provided by William Blum: “the principle that the poor, who must subsist on table scraps dropped by the rich, can best be served by giving the rich bigger meals.”
[6] The Weekly Sift’s “Conservative-to-English Lexicon” defines dividing the country as “Talking about the concerns of voters other than real Americans.”
real American, in turn, is defined as “A white conservative Christian born in the United States at least 30 years ago.”
Bernie Sanders challenges not just Hillary Clinton, but the country’s long-term rightward drift.
[This is part of a series of articles on the speeches of 2016 presidential candidates. The overall vision of the series and links to the other articles can be found here.]
Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont began his presidential campaign on April 30 with a five-minute statement in front of the Capitol, and then took five more minutes of questions from reporters. [video, transcript]
The standard I try to maintain at The Weekly Sift is that I’m honest, but not necessarily objective. So I’ll tell you the bias I start with: As I listened to Sanders’ talk, I had the reaction conservatives must have had in 1964 when they listened to Barry Goldwater. In my heart, I know he’s right.
Sanders says the things I’ve been thinking, but that I never hear directly from presidential candidates. Or I hear them, but only because I know how to unwrap the layers of bows and wrappings that politicians put on their ideas to make them look pretty to the conventional wisdom.
Prosperity for everybody. All candidates, left and right, seem to agree that the major economic issue America faces is the shrinking of the middle class and the dismal prospects faced by our young adults. Rand Paul, for example, said:
I’ve been able to enjoy the American Dream. I worry, though, that the opportunity and hope are slipping away for our sons and daughters.
My parents achieved what came to be known as the American Dream. But now, too many Americans are starting to doubt whether achieving that dream is still possible.
If the 2016 race is about issues — always a question in this era of trumped-up pseudo-scandals and 30-second attack ads — the issue it should be about is why the middle class is shrinking and what can be done about it. Paul explains that our economy is “collaps[ing] under mounting [government] spending and debt.” Rubio blames leaders whose “ideas are stuck in the 20th century” and says we need to “reform our tax code, reduce regulations, control spending, modernize our immigration laws and repeal and replace ObamaCare”. Cruz talks more vaguely about “liberty”, mentions policies like a flat tax, and implies that the real secret to success in all areas is for our nation to get right with God.
Sanders points in a different direction: The middle class is endangered because the very wealthy have taken control of our political system and shaped our economy so that virtually all economic growth flows to them.
The major issue is how do we create an economy that works for all of our people rather than a small number of billionaires, and the second issue, directly related, is the fact that as a result of the disastrous Supreme Court decision on Citizens United, we now have a political situation where billionaires are literally able to buy themselves elections and candidates.
Class warfare and socialism. Conservatives have wasted no time calling this “class warfare“. Ben Stein expressed his upper-class let-them-eat-cakism like this:
There has never been a case in history where a poor person who’s a slovenly, uneducated, lazy, undisciplined drug addict got to be rich because of some wealthy person being taxed.
But a lot of progressives aren’t afraid of the class-warfare meme any more, and respond: “It’s about time somebody started fighting back.” As Warren Buffett said in an interview in 2010:
There has been class warfare waged, and my class has won. I mean, it’s been a rout. You have seen a period where American workers generally have gone no place, and where the really super-rich have (as a group) increased their income five for one.
Sanders has been turning around the “class warfare” rhetoric for a while now. When Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankenship (with an annual salary of $16 million) came to Congress in 2012 to call for cuts to Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare, Sanders’ web page called him “the face of class warfare“.
Likewise, Sanders doesn’t run away from the word socialism. They have socialism in Scandinavia, and those countries are pretty nice places to live. Let’s talk about how kids are going to afford college, not about labels like socialist.
Proposals. Sanders alluded to a number of proposals he has fleshed out elsewhere. All of them take a step beyond anything the Obama administration has proposed.
Nothing in this Constitution shall be construed to restrict the power of Congress and the States to protect the integrity and fairness of the electoral process, limit the corrupting influence of private wealth in public elections, and guarantee the dependence of elected officials on the people alone by taking actions which may include the establishment of systems of public financing for elections, the imposition of requirements to ensure the disclosure of contributions and expenditures made to influence the outcome of a public election by candidates, individuals, and associations of individuals, and the imposition of content neutral limitations on all such contributions and expenditures.
$70 billion a year in assistance – two-thirds from the federal government and one-third from states – would replace what public colleges and universities now charge in tuition and fees. The federal share of the cost would be offset by imposing a tax on Wall Street transactions by investment houses, hedge funds and other speculators.
That tax, the so-called Robin Hood tax, is interesting in its own right. The theory is that introducing friction into the financial markets would make them less volatile.
Transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy. Sanders is a long-time champion of solar energy, and a leading opponent of the Keystone XL pipeline.
Create jobs by rebuilding infrastructure. He has proposed spending $1 trillion over five years on infrastructure, and claims this would create 13 million jobs. (I don’t know what that’s based on.) He has not specified how to pay for this (though the next item might play a role). He has pointed out that this plan would be cheaper than the Iraq War, which also had no funding mechanism.
Tax corporate profits that are hidden overseas. Again, he has a bill proposed:
Under current law, U.S. corporations are allowed to defer or delay U.S. income taxes on overseas profits until the money is brought back into the United States. U.S. corporations are also provided foreign tax credits to offset the amount of taxes paid to other countries. Under the legislation, corporations would pay U.S. taxes on their offshore profits as they are earned. The legislation would take away the tax incentives for corporations to move jobs offshore or to shift profits offshore because the U.S. would tax their profits no matter where they are generated.
He quotes an estimate by the Joint Committee on Taxation that this would bring in $590 billion over ten years.
Can he win? Should he? I understand the point Hillary Clinton supporters make: The difference between the two parties is so vast now that our entire focus should be on winning in the general election. (Justice Ginsburg will be nearly 88 by the time the next president leaves office; 92 if there’s a second term. Imagine any of the Republican candidates appointing her replacement.) The best way to do that is to get behind our strongest general-election candidate early, and avoid any fratricidal strife that will hurt the party.
I see two problems with that. First, since Republicans show no signs of returning to the moderate ways of Dwight Eisenhower and Jerry Ford, we might be in this position for decades. So the upshot of this argument is that the liberal wing of the party should never make its case to the primary electorate. If that’s how things are, then I have a hard time arguing against the progressives who want to abandon the Democratic Party completely. If you want to prevent another Nader-style candidacy by Sanders (who has already rejected the idea) or somebody else, you have to be able to argue that the Left had a shot at the nomination and just lost it fair and square.
So I think it’s way too early to make the unite-behind-a-winner argument. There has to be some point in the electoral process where people express their consciences and vote their ideals. Otherwise, the horse-race mentality becomes self-stoking: People won’t support a candidate they agree with because he can’t win, and he can’t win because the people who agree with him won’t support him.
Second, there are large sections of the electorate who never hear a strong progressive message. Compare to the Republicans. No matter who gets nominated, they always make a pitch for their overall brand identity: small government, low taxes, strong defense, so-called “family values”, and so forth. It would be unthinkable to go through an election cycle without somebody preaching that gospel in its purest form.
The Democrats don’t do that, and in the long run it hurts us. Obama-Clinton in 2008 was a debate between two flavors of moderate. Dean and Kucinich were out of the picture early in 2004, and so was Bradley in 2000.
The result is that right-wing alternatives to the status quo are part of the national debate, but left-wing alternatives aren’t. So voters who could tell you about the conservative Ryan Budget have never heard of the progressive People’s Budget. Every hint of a conservative alternative to ObamaCare gets massive coverage, but a liberal alternative well tested in other countries — single payer — is off the table.
So when it comes time to compromise, the compromise that seems reasonable in the media is between an already-moderate Democratic plan and a far-right Republican plan. Should we cut Social Security little by little, or make a big slash in it? Should we invade any country that gets in our way, or just hit them with a few drone strikes? Hold the line on the estate tax or eliminate it?
In short, even if we end up nominating Hillary, I want the public to know she’s not the extreme edge of the liberal spectrum.
I’ll get more pragmatic as Election Day gets closer. (I was totally against voting for Ralph Nader in the 2000 general election, for example, and I stand by that. The Nader voters in my own state of New Hampshire — forget Florida — had it in their power to swing the election from Bush to Gore, and decided not to.) If, late in the primary season, after Sanders’ message has been aired around the country, polls show him running behind the Republican front-runner while Hillary runs ahead, then Democrats should think about doing the pragmatic thing.
But this far out, that’s not the only possible scenario. Sanders is claiming that a full-throated defense of the middle class will resonate with voters who don’t get inspired by baby-step proposals like bumping the minimum wage up a little, or not cutting Social Security as much as Republicans want to. That case needs to be tested every few cycles, and it has been a while.
Fact-checking. Sanders made a number of checkable claims.
For most Americans, their reality is that they are working longer hours for lower wages. In inflation-adjusted income, they are earning less money than they used to, years ago, in spite a huge increase in technology and productivity.
The wild card in this discussion is how you account for health-care costs, which have ballooned over the last several decades. So pro-business groups will show you graphs of total cost of employment, which includes everything a company spends on a worker, including health insurance premiums. That looks less depressing.
Over the past quarter century, labor’s share of income in the United States has trended downward, reaching its lowest level in the postwar period after the Great Recession.
99% of all new income being generated in this country is going to the top 1 percent
The transcript I linked to has this quote wrong. (It says “99 percent of the income”, which would be a laughable statement.) Watch the video to get it right.
PolitiFact rated this claim “mostly true“. The more complete story is that Sanders’ claim is based on what the economy does prior to any government interference: before taxes on the rich or government benefits paid to the rest of the country.
the top 1 percent owns almost as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent
This is wrong, but not in the way you think: Sanders should have said the top tenth of a percent. Economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman provide the following graphs:
we have the highest rate of childhood poverty of any major nation on Earth
Like so many claims, this one depends on how you define your terms. In sheer size, India is a “major nation”, and in absolute terms, a lot of Indian children have less than American children who are considered poor.
Most studies that get results like Sanders is stating are measuring relative poverty, i.e., the number of children who live in households whose income is less than some percentage (typically 50%) of the national median. Also, they are comparing the U.S. to other developed nations — a group that includes Canada, Japan, and the European Union nations, but not India or Indonesia.
Miles Corak does a creditable job of explaining why relative poverty is the right thing to measure. (Summarizing: A household receiving less than 50% of the median income has a hard time participating in normal society. So these children are growing up so far outside the mainstream that it will be hard for them to present themselves as normal adults when they go looking for work.) And if contemplating America’s superiority to Ethiopia or Bangladesh gives you a chest-thumping satisfaction, don’t let me stop you.
the Koch Brothers and other billionaire families who are prepared to spend hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars in elections to buy the candidates of their choice
The political network overseen by the conservative billionaires Charles G. and David H. Koch plans to spend close to $900 million on the 2016 campaign.
It’s not immediately obvious how much of that $889 million is from the Kochs themselves. Sheldon Adelson spent around $100 million of his own money on 2012 campaign (including $20 million for Newt Gingrich), and is expected to be a major donor in 2016 as well.
There’s no way to quantify to what extent the candidates who receive this money will be “bought”. In the 1950s, Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn is supposed to have told a young congressman, “Son, if you can’t take their money, drink their whiskey, screw their women, and then vote against ’em, you don’t deserve to be here.”
Real unemployment in America is not five and a half percent, if you include those people who have given up looking for work, and people who are working part time when they want to work full time. Real unemployment is 11 percent.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics calculates something it poetically refers to as “U-6”: a measure of unemployment that includes the people usually classified as “unemployed”, but also people who are underemployed (i.e., the engineer who’s flipping burgers) or who want a job but aren’t currently looking for one (i.e., “discouraged workers”). (The unemployment rate you usually hear about is U-3.)
U-6 is running at about 11%, — 10.9% in the most recent stats available when Sanders spoke — so that might be what he was talking about.
It’s fine to quote U-6 or any of the other U’s, as long as you’re consistent about it. Watch out for anybody who compares some measure of “real” unemployment today to what the official unemployment rate was when Obama took office, or claims that the gap between the two represents some kind of statistical shenanigans. Since discouraged workers tend to be the last people to start working again, you’d expect U-6 to lag behind the official unemployment rate. So even though the official unemployment rate is back below where it was when Lehman Brothers collapsed in 2008, U-6 hasn’t completely recovered yet. That’s not some sleight-of-hand by the Obama administration, it’s how these statistics run.
One thing is undeniable: All the measures of unemployment have been coming down over the last few years, as shown in this graph:
In Germany, countries around the world, they understand that you tap the intellectual capabilities of young people, and you make college tuition in public colleges and universities free.
“Never” is hard to check, and “negative” is a judgment call, but in his 2012 Senate race (as an incumbant Independent) Sanders didn’t run TV ads at all. He got 71% of the vote. People say, “Well, that’s Vermont for you.” But Sanders counters:
It wasn’t that long ago that Vermont was one of the most Republican states in the country. Until two years ago, the governor was a Republican; the lieutenant governor is a Republican. This is a significantly rural state. This is a state with some very conservative regions.
Since April 30, Sanders has been living up to his word and running a positive campaign. On CNN’s State of the Union he said:
I’ve known Hillary Clinton for 25 years. Maybe I shouldn’t say this: I like Hillary Clinton. I respect Hillary Clinton.
That doesn’t sound much like the fratricidal strife Clinton supporters are worried about.
In the same way, fact-checking works pretty well when the checkers just need to catch those half-dozen-or-so moments when somebody misquotes a statistic or gets a date wrong. If a debater cherry-picks data to “prove” a point, or oversimplifies a complex situation, a checker can introduce additional information to give readers a more complete picture — as long as it doesn’t happen too often.
[This is part of my series: 
But that approach demands a respect for facts and the real world. Her own respect for such expertise runs deep and traces all the way back to being a girl of the Mad Men era (just a few years older than Sally Draper) hoping to go places women had never been. Being smart and working hard to master the details of a subject was young Hillary’s claim to a place in the Man’s World. She knows that when expertise is disregarded, that’s when prejudice and old-boys’ networks and all the other defensive mechanisms of the status quo have free rein.
And that brings me to Donald Trump.
The Weekly Sift 