Month: February 2016

The concept behind the Bush campaign had the following components:  (a) scare off all potential Romney Coalition rivals with overwhelming fundraising; (b) hope for competition among the Reagan Coalition candidates; and (c) outlast everyone with its organizational advantages.  It failed miserably, and he is now out of the race.

The Rubio plan, on the other hand, was to hope that Bush imploded, given his obvious drawbacks as a candidate, and to build bridges to all of the factions of the GOP with an eye to becoming a consensus candidate.  The first part of this has worked, due partly to his own strengths as a candidate, but more to Trump’s evisceration of Bush.  Now comes the hard part:  can he peel enough votes away from Trump and Cruz to win the nomination?

After the first three contests, you would have to say the answer is no.  His best hope at this point is to get Kasich out of the race as quickly as possible, to inherit the Bush and Kasich voters in the establishment lane, and to win enough states with about 40 percent of the vote to get a majority of the delegates.  It’s not impossible, but you wouldn’t want to bet the ranch on it.

The senator from my home state

Came on to be second quite late.

He called it a win.

In my eyes, that’s just spin.

Trump’s bubble he’s yet to deflate.

Marco Rubio has just finished addressing his supporters after the South Carolina primary.  He and his aide, Horatio, are looking for their rental car when they see a faded Jeb Bush campaign poster.  Marco stops to contemplate it.

M:  Alas, poor Jeb!  He was my mentor, Horatio.  Now he is as dead as Yorick.

H:  Politicians are like athletes–they die twice.  Sometimes more than twice.  Just ask Mike Huckabee.

M:  He gave me a sword, and I beheaded him.  It feels like patricide.

H:  Yes, I can see it now:  Rubio Rex!  Just leave out the part about sleeping with your mother.

M:  He’ll be humiliated at family gatherings.  And most of it is his brother’s fault.

H:  His brother poisoned the well, and he drank from it.

M:  He should never have run.

H:   He was a man of his times, and the times changed.

M:  Oh, well.  We need to move on.  There are battles ahead in foreign lands with Trump and Cruz, and we actually need to win this time.

H:  Woe be to all if we should lose

To Trump or that extremist, Cruz.

They find the rental car and head for the airport.

Sanders believes that all of the trade agreements signed within recent memory were the product of a rigged political system dominated by plutocrats, and are largely responsible for wage stagnation.  On that point, he more or less agrees with Trump; unlike Trump, however, he hasn’t told us what he plans to do about it. Are his plans to strengthen the welfare state his answer?  Or does he plan to disregard the agreements and start imposing tariffs?  If the latter, what is he going to do to deal with the inevitable consequences:  rising prices and the loss of jobs in exporting industries due to retaliation?

We need to know the answer to these questions ASAP.

When I was growing up, it was common for history textbooks to make the statement that Lincoln’s assassination was a national tragedy largely because he could have reconciled the North and the South.  The question for today is, is that really plausible?

Let me break that down into three more narrow questions, in descending order of importance:

1. Would Lincoln have found it easier to work with Congress to create a viable Reconstruction program than President Johnson?
2. Would Lincoln have been able to persuade Congress and the voters in the North to continue that program over the long haul?
3. Would Lincoln have succeeded in persuading the citizens of the Confederacy to accept Reconstruction?

These are not difficult questions to answer.  My responses are as follows:

1. Clearly, yes.  Given his responsibility for winning the war, Lincoln would have had far more credibility with the Radical Republicans than Johnson did.
2. Issues with Reconstruction persisted long after Lincoln would have left office.  It is implausible to suggest that the voters in the North would have supported a lengthy and expensive occupation, and contentious political change, for the indefinite future;  if you don’t believe that, look at Iraq and Afghanistan.  The answer to this question is no.
3. Are you kidding?  The South was being required to accept dramatic changes in its political and socio-economic systems after a bloody war of which Lincoln was, in their eyes, the personification.  A few fine words about reconciliation weren’t going to make much of a difference.

The bottom line is that the strife associated with Reconstruction, and its ultimate shortcomings, were both inevitable, and would have occurred with or without Lincoln as President.

Centuries of experience tell us that most revolutions fail, and those that “succeed” usually turn into fun house versions of the previous regime in the long run.  That said, our country embodies values that cannot be completely ignored when obviously ineffective, brutal, and corrupt regimes are challenged by their citizens.  What is the most appropriate response to revolutions, particularly when we have interests that are supported by the regime?

I think the best answer is to compartmentalize, and be honest.  We need to make two things clear:  first, we believe, based on our own national experience, that it is in the best interests of the people of the country in question to have a truly democratic government; and second, that the United States is not responsible for the outcome of the political struggle in that country, and will pursue its own interests.  By being honest about the conflict between our interests and values, and how it will be resolved, we can avoid some of the complaints about hypocrisy that inevitably arise in these situations and maintain some degree of credibility with all of the concerned parties.

 

Someone should disguise the Bible as a Koran and read him verses about Christian charity.  That way, he can rip Jesus, too;  it’s the only remaining frontier for him.

The single most important figure in the drafting, ratification, and short-term implementation of the Constitution was James Madison.  A year or two into the Washington Administration, however, he effectively joined the opposition, which leads us to the Madison question:  what happened to cause him to flip to the Jeffersonian side?

There are two plausible answers to this question.  The first is that the mild-mannered Madison was intellectually seduced by Jefferson after the latter’s return from France;  I believe there is a quote from Hamilton to the effect that Madison was always destined to be “a handmaiden to a greater mistress.”  The second is that Madison’s enthusiasm for the Federalist cause was motivated by misgovernment at the state level, that he saw the federal government largely as a mechanism to check state excesses, and that Hamilton’s vision for the use of federal powers, when put into practice, went beyond anything he had imagined. The two are not mutually exclusive, and I think there is some truth in both of them, but would lean more towards the latter explanation.

Matt Yglesias has a piece on Vox.com in which he essentially says that it is ironic that Trump is so critical of George W. Bush, because he is his ideological heir. While there are fragments of truth in the article, I think the logic behind it is flawed, for reasons which, as usual, return us to the structure of the Republican Party.

Bush 43 was a quintessential Romney Coalition candidate; in fact, you might just as well call it the Bush Coalition.  While his tax cuts and proposals for deregulation were standard PBP fare, “Compassionate Conservatism” is a good shorthand way to describe the Christian Democrat agenda, which involves the use of government, through market mechanisms, to assist the poor.  Trump, on the other hand, is a Reagan Coalition candidate; what makes him different from most such candidates is his tilt towards the Reactionary faction of the coalition. Reactionaries are not opposed to the welfare state so long as the “right kind of people” are the principal beneficiaries;  attempts to redistribute wealth for the benefit of the poor are anathema.  Reactionaries consequently object to cuts in Social Security and Medicare, which, in their eyes, are just a form of repayment to them (i.e., they are not a redistribution), but they loathe the subsidies in Obamacare.

Trump’s support of Social Security and Medicare do not, therefore, put him in the Bush camp.  The real heir to the Bush ideological legacy is Marco Rubio, with his neoconservative foreign policy leanings and his tax cuts for the working poor.

There once was a Justice named Tony.

His calls for restraint sounded phony.

His hard right-wing views

Would have fit on Fox News

But his writings were full of baloney.

Trump has pushed the envelope about as far as he possibly can in South Carolina.  If the polls are right, and he wins easily, it is difficult to imagine how he can be stopped.  That, of course, raises a question about how he would conduct himself as the nominee, and how the Democrats would run against him.

As the nominee, Trump basically has two choices:  he can either try to rebuild his bridges with the rest of the GOP, surround himself with establishment figures, and run a conventional race; or he can continue with his Captain Outrageous approach.  In my opinion, it is too late for the first option; his best chance of uniting the party at this point is to come out with his guns blazing and hope that tribal loyalty will take care of the rest.

Assuming, for purposes of argument, that Hillary is the Democratic nominee, I think her argument against him will consist of the following:

1. He has no experience that qualifies him to be President;
2. His temperament is such that he cannot be trusted to be the Commander-in-Chief;
3. His history indicates that, notwithstanding his rhetoric, he’s just another rich guy who tramples on less powerful people to get his way.  His tax plan, which is a huge gift to the very wealthy, is evidence of that; and
4. He’s a bigot who will tear apart our country and damage our standing in the world.  He may be popular with Putin, but not with our allies.

Most of this is proved by Trump’s own words.  It will not be necessary to do much research.

As the effective party leaders in an age that was even less genteel than our own, Hamilton and Jefferson heartily loathed each other.  Their views about the Constitution and the future of America were largely incompatible, and remain fodder for political argument today.

As I will discuss in a future post, the differences between the two largely mirror the differences between Whigs and Country Tories in early 18th Century England.  The question for the day is, where did they agree?  Here is my list:

1.  Government is a purely human contrivance, and can be ordered in accordance with the needs of the nation.  Divine right kingship was by no means dead as a political theory in the late 18th Century.  Both Hamilton and Jefferson would have rejected it and maintained that Americans could set up any kind of government they thought appropriate.

2.  The establishment of a state religion is inappropriate.  Neither man was an orthodox Christian.  Jefferson’s beliefs were fluid, but apparently leaned towards Deism;  when Hamilton was asked why God was not referenced in the Constitution, he put his tongue in his cheek and said “We forgot.”

3.  America is destined to play a great role in the world.  They would not have agreed on what that role was to be.

4.  Making war on a European power would be a mistake.  Hamilton favored the British, and Jefferson the French, but neither was stupid enough to think that war on either would be a good idea, given the military weakness of the new country.

5.  America should not have a rigid class system.  Hamilton admired Great Britain and might have had some sympathy for the notion of a Whiggish hereditary aristocracy, but his background would have made it impossible for him to support any kind of rigid system.

6.  For the foreseeable future, most regulation will take place at the state and local levels.  Hamilton, of course, supported a stronger federal government than Jefferson, but it would have been absurd, given the size of the new country and the state of its communications and transportation networks, to think that the federal government could be the predominant regulatory power in the 1790’s.

His obvious intellectual brilliance notwithstanding, Jefferson has always been an easy target, due to the discrepancies between his stirring words and his actual deeds. He wrote eloquently about equality, but kept a slave woman as his mistress; his greatest accomplishment as President, the Louisiana Purchase, was completely inconsistent with his avowed constitutional principles; he financed newspapers that opposed the Washington Administration while he was still a member of the cabinet; he professed to hate cities, while luxuriating in Paris; and so on.  The uncharitable could call him a hypocrite, and many did; more indulgent viewers would say that he was a practical politician, not a philosopher, whose actions were largely dictated by the necessities of the day.

The two most important questions about Jefferson are as follows:

1. Would Jefferson have supported or opposed the ratification of the Constitution if he had been in the country in 1788?  It’s difficult to say.  He clearly had reservations about the Constitution, but so did everyone else; it was, after all, a series of compromises.  He used arguments that were consistent with those of the Anti-Federalists when he was in opposition, but his governing practices as President did not diverge dramatically from those of his predecessors.  I guess what you can say is that it was a good thing both for his reputation and for the country that he was in France at the time, so we will never really know one way or the other.

2.  How should one apply Jeffersonian principles in a Hamiltonian world? Jefferson’s vision of America was dominated by small, independent farmers.  He was right in the short run, which meant that the Federalist Party was doomed, but wrong about the national economy in the long run.  How would he have reacted to a world in which national and multi-national corporations have the kind of economic clout that they do today?  Would he have supported increased governmental regulation as the only possible counterweight to their power?  If you are a Democrat, you say yes; if you are a Republican, you cite to his antipathy to the use of federal power, and say no.  There is no possible definitive answer to this question, but I have to believe, given Jefferson’s willingness to change tactics and his open-mindedness about the future, that the Democrats are right.

 

The centerpiece of Ted’s economic plan is a radical revision to the tax code that goes far beyond that of his rivals.  I don’t have the ability to model the proposal to determine its impact on the economy or the deficit, but some of its implications are fairly clear.

The key components of the plan are as follows:

1.  The adoption of a 16 percent VAT (he denies it’s a VAT, but that’s what it is);
2.  The abolition of the payroll tax;
3.  The abolition of the estate tax;
4.  The abolition of the corporate tax;
5.  The progressive income tax would be replaced by a flat tax over a specified income threshold; and
6.  It appears that capital gains and wages will be taxed at the same rate.

The winners and losers from these amendments would be as follows:

1. Big losers:  The non-working poor; the elderly; and charities.  If you don’t work, you will have to pay the VAT, but you won’t get any benefit from the elimination of the payroll tax.  Charities will lose because the value of charitable deductions will fall significantly.
2. Big winners:  The wealthy.  Anyone who doesn’t have to use most of his income for consumption is a winner here.  All of the taxes that are paid primarily by the rich are being reduced or eliminated altogether.
3. A wash:  everyone else.  For working middle-class Americans, the reduction in some of the income tax rates and the elimination of the payroll tax would be offset by the VAT.

On its face, I have to think that overall tax revenues would go down substantially, and that the deficit would rise pretty dramatically.  I don’t know that for sure, however.  I also can’t determine how Cruz proposes to tie Social Security benefits to contributions in the absence of the payroll tax, although I would have to applaud his efforts to eliminate the link between work and the funding of the welfare state.

This plan appears to assume that the biggest economic problem facing our country is a lack of saving and investment.  If you had asked me about that 20 years ago, I probably would have agreed.  We live in an environment in which corporations are piling up mountains of cash due to inadequate aggregate demand, however, so I think the assumptions behind the plan are out of date.  Fortunately, it is too radical to pass even in a Republican-dominated Congress.

There once was a Texan named Cruz.

Right-wing Christians, it seems, share his views.

He hopes that the South

Will reject Trump’s foul mouth.

If he loses, he’ll have no excuse.