Month: January 2020

With Sanders apparently gaining support on the left, Warren has started picking small fights with him and arguing that she is the bridge between the two wings of the party, not Bernie lite. Will it work?

I doubt it. There are too many photos of Warren and Sanders standing arm-in-arm. No one is going to forget “I’m with Bernie” on M4A. Being a watered-down version of Sanders is not the same thing as being a bridge between realos and fundis. Realo voters aren’t going to support her unless Bernie is the only other option.

It didn’t have to be this way. Warren could have made more of an effort to distinguish her world view from Bernie’s, and she easily could have avoided supporting the Sanders version of M4A. In the end, she decided to chase democratic socialist votes instead of tacking to the middle, and as they say in “The Irishman,” it is what it is.

Nominating the elderly white guy would deprive Trump of his favorite weapon–identity politics. It would mean he couldn’t run against Hillary Clinton again. It also means that he won’t be able to sell a “socialism” argument to swing voters. So–other than talking about the big, bad Ukrainians, of course– how would he campaign against Biden?

By going back to an old argument in the GOP playbook. Remember, to a Republican, every GOP nominee is Ronald Reagan, and every Democrat is the weak, ineffectual Jimmy Carter. Trump will argue that Biden is just an extension of Obama, and that America from 2009 to 2016 looked like America in 1979; the economy was weak, crime was soaring, illegal immigrants were running wild, China and Iran remained unchecked, and America was disrespected throughout the world. According to the narrative, Trump and his swagger made America great again over the last four years. You wouldn’t want to put that at risk, would you?

This is so much hogwash, of course. Could he get enough swing voters to ignore their actual experience and buy into it? Maybe.

The next debate is tomorrow night. With Iowa just a few weeks away, you can expect a higher level of aggression from the also-rans. Otherwise, this is what the candidates will be trying to accomplish:

1. BIDEN: Another reasonably strong performance. He doesn’t have to win; he just has to show that there is no need for a Biden replacement. It helps that there will be no African-American candidates on stage talking about identity issues, which are his biggest weakness at this stage of the process.
2. SANDERS: Same old, same old. Bernie never really changes his approach. He’ll be playing to the progressive base. Expect some animated discussion about Biden’s Iraq War vote.
3. WARREN: Having apparently lost the bulk of the progressive vote to Sanders, she needs to make the case that she can be a successful unity candidate. This requires her to put distance between herself and Sanders without alienating his supporters. It’s a big lift.
4. KLOBUCHAR: Attack the progressives and Mayor Pete, establish that she is the most persuasive of the two Biden replacement candidates, and hope that Biden implodes. It’s her only chance. She can’t really make much of an attack on Biden himself, because they don’t disagree on anything important except who would make the most electable nominee.
5. MAYOR PETE: He’s essentially in the same position as Klobuchar, although he seems more inclined to talk about Biden’s Iraq War vote than she is.

All of the potential Democratic nominees, regardless of where they stand on the ideological spectrum, will run essentially the same campaign against Trump. Here are the biggest issues, listed in order of importance:

1. He’s a faux populist. He stacked his cabinet with billionaires, pushed for a hugely regressive tax cut, opposed changes to the minimum wage, and promoted regulatory changes that hurt working people and unions.

2. His blustery, erratic, and self-serving foreign policy has endangered our country. He sucks up to dictators, damages our alliances, invites foreign interference in our elections, ignores human rights, and needlessly drives up the cost of goods with his trade wars. Because he lies all the time, no one takes him seriously. America is now a world laughingstock (there is already great footage for a commercial here).

3. His idea of health care reform is to take insurance away from millions of Americans, and bring back pre-existing conditions.

4. Climate change is an existential problem. He views it as a Chinese hoax. The visuals of fires, hurricanes, etc. should be very compelling.

5. He’s corrupt in every possible sense of the word.

You might think that #5 should be listed first, but everyone already knows that, and his supporters discount it. The point of the campaign is to provide valuable information to people who may not be completely engaged, not to beat them over the head with stuff they already know.

Plenty of American Iran hawks dismiss Suleimani as a terrorist. Are they right?

Consider that there is a very good analogy in UK history: T. E. Lawrence. Lawrence was a gifted guerrilla fighter, a political fixer, and a liaison between the British and various groups of Arabs fighting for independence from the Ottoman Empire. Sound familiar?

The Turks undoubtedly viewed Lawrence as a terrorist; from their perspective, he was. We think of him as a hero. The size of the crowds at Suleimani’s funeral tells you that the Iranian population saw him as a hero, too. Just calling him a terrorist is overly simplistic.

Here are the three kinds of voter, with the key question they ask:

1. IDENTITY VOTERS: Which candidate reminds me the most of myself?

2. VISION VOTERS: Which candidate has the same vision of a just society that I do?

3. POLICY VOTERS: Which candidate proposes the best means to get to the just society?

The vast majority of voters are in the first two groups. Paradoxically, virtually all of the chatter about campaigns revolves around the third group. You don’t even get to that question unless you’ve passed the first two tests, and for most people, it never comes up.

It is the one lesson of politics that Donald Trump understands far better than his critics, and the reason that Elizabeth Warren is unlikely to be the nominee even though her innumerable plans are, in general, quite popular.

If you think about Bernie Sanders and foreign policy, probably the first thing that comes to mind is his enthusiasm for left-wing Latin American dictators. Understandably, Bernie wants to change that. He is promoting a big idea: that we are reliving the 1930’s, and that America needs to lead the fight against oligarchs and right-wing strongmen all over the globe. Is he right?

The analogy isn’t completely absurd; after all, Steve Bannon views the thirties as a golden age of nationalism, illiberal democracy and right-wing populism are all the rage, and Putin and Xi appear to have counterparts from the thirties. Analogies are never perfect, however, and this one certainly isn’t, for the following reasons:

1. PUTIN ISN’T HITLER: Sure, he is a thuggish revisionist who wants to expand his country’s sphere of influence and make Russia great again. He’s far more cautious about using his military, however–hence, the stalemate in Ukraine, and the lack of action in the Baltic states. Oh, and there are no death camps in Russia; the country is much freer than it was during the Soviet era.

2. XI ISN’T STALIN: Yes, he’s building a digital police state and locking up Uighurs, but he’s not murdering millions of people, and there is far more freedom, at least in the economic sphere, than there was in Mao’s time.

3. ILLIBERAL DEMOCRACY IS NOT EXACTLY FASCISM: It’s close, but the illiberal democracies in Europe haven’t threatened anyone outside their borders, and they still pay some attention to the EU and provide a degree (albeit diminished) of political and legal freedom. They have to; they’re economic and security beggars.

4. OLIGARCHS DIDN’T CAUSE THE EROSION OF LIBERAL DEMOCRACY: Right-wing populism is a mass movement; it isn’t just a distraction created by the wealthy to protect their economic interests, any more than fascism was in the thirties.

5. WHERE DO BOJO, MACRON, AND MERKEL FIT IN THIS SCHEME?: They’re genuine democrats, but right-wingers. Does Bernie consider them friends or foes? It’s hard to tell.

6. THE THIRTIES BAD GUYS WERE OVERCOME BY MILITARY MIGHT: Bernie wants to cut the defense budget and rely purely on diplomacy and moral force to promote American interests and democracy. How did that work out last time?

Article II presents a different issue in that the facts are undisputed; the only real question is whether Trump’s partially unsuccessful efforts to impede the impeachment process are a “high crime and misdemeanor.” How does that play out?

You can expect Trump’s attorneys to assert that the executive has the constitutional right to determine whether an impeachment inquiry is legitimate or not, and to refuse to cooperate with a process he considers to be frivolous. Leaving aside the complete absence of any constitutional basis for this argument, it is going to make the GOP senators very uncomfortable, because it will serve as a precedent for future impeachments. If the Republicans decide to investigate, say, President Sanders, what is to prevent him from stonewalling them for the same reasons? It is a conundrum.

I think you are going to hear an argument from the GOP that the underlying charges against Trump were so uniquely flimsy, he was entitled in that particular case to refuse to cooperate without violating the Constitution. No neutral observer is actually going to buy that line of reasoning, however, and a dangerous precedent will have been set.

You can make a case for Pelosi hanging on to the articles indefinitely; that way, she could prevent Trump from taking a victory lap, and use the unfairness of the process as a campaign issue against GOP senators. That would trivialize the impeachment process and be a violation of her constitutional duty, however, so she won’t do it. Then what?

The job of the managers at the trial with regard to Article I will be fairly straightforward; they will lay out the evidence, probably in chronological form, showing the effort to coerce the Ukrainians into at least announcing the investigations (the actual investigations were an afterthought at best). This should not be too difficult, as there is no truly exculpatory evidence in the record. The more important and complicated task will be to make the case that Trump’s ultimately unsuccessful efforts at self-dealing are serious enough to be considered high crimes and misdemeanors. How will Trump’s lawyers respond?

This is where it gets tricky. They can complain about the unfairness of the House process, but the logical antidote for that is live witnesses. They can also argue that there is insufficient direct evidence of Trump’s involvement to convict him, but the obvious rebuttal to that is to subpoena Bolton, Mulvaney, and Giuliani. There appears to be an agreement with McConnell to avoid doing that. What’s left as a defense?

That the activity in question is not serious enough to merit impeachment. That defense will not satisfy the president in the slightest, but as long as no witnesses are called, at the insistence of his lawyers and his GOP allies, it’s the only argument that can be made that survives the straight face test.

And what about Article II, which presents different legal and tactical issues? More on that in a subsequent post.

On the Democrat candidate Joe.

By mid March he had not far to go.

With a comfortable lead

He paid Sanders no heed

Aimed his fire at the Don, don’t you know.

As we know, there are plenty of progressives who argue that there are no real swing voters, and that the key to success in November is the ability to coax apathetic left-leaning millennials to the polls by offering them lots of new government spending programs. Are they right?

Based on history, almost certainly not, but the good news is that we don’t have to extrapolate; the primaries will tell us if the theory is accurate or not. If hordes of new voters come out to support Sanders, he’ll be the nominee, and deservedly so. If they don’t, and he loses, why would anyone continue to believe that he has a better chance to beat Trump than Biden?

OVERVIEW: The big day is here at last, and questions abound. Can Biden win a big victory and make himself the presumptive nominee? Can Sanders stay in it by winning California? What impact will Bloomberg’s commercials have? Can the others remain relevant?

THE PREDICTION: Biden wins virtually all of the states and becomes the clear leader, but it isn’t completely over. Sanders wins a narrow victory in California. The voters appreciate Bloomberg’s attacks on Trump, but they don’t vote for him. Warren drops out and endorses Sanders. Mayor Pete drops out and endorses Biden.

Citing a typology from an influential 2001 book, Ross Douthat divides American foreign policy into four tendencies, and argues that Trump is a “Jacksonian.” Is he right?

Yes, and I would take the typology a step further; each of the four tendencies can be clearly identified with a GOP faction, as follows:

1. “Hamiltonian” (pragmatic and business-oriented): PBPs.
2. “Wilsonian” (determined to spread American values around the globe–by force, if necessary): Christian Democrats.
3. “Jeffersonian” (the world is an evil place–disengage from it): Conservative Libertarians.
4. “Jacksonian” (avoid entanglements with the outside world, but use overwhelming force against anyone who attacks you): Reactionaries.

I can remember right-wingers arguing many years ago that we should have stayed out of Vietnam, but if we were going to fight, we should have won by using the bomb. That is a perfect description of the Reactionary attitude towards foreign wars. It is also an accurate picture of Trump’s views on warfare.

Trump is primarily a Reactionary, so you would expect him to be a “Jacksonian,” and he is. That’s one of the reasons the use of nuclear weapons will be on the table at some point in this process. The others are the difficulty of fighting a conventional war with Iran, and the man on golf cart’s attitude towards negotiations. I will address them in subsequent posts.

OVERVIEW: The day of reckoning is here! This is the first, and most important, test of Biden’s firewall. If it holds, he’s likely to win big on Super Tuesday; if not, Sanders has a real shot at the nomination. The others don’t matter much at this point.

THE PREDICTION: The firewall holds. Biden wins, and it isn’t close. Super Tuesday is looking good for him, but Bloomberg and his commercials will be a factor from this point forward; they add yet another layer of uncertainty to the process.

If I were Elizabeth Warren, I would make the case for her new taxes, spending programs, and regulatory schemes as follows:

1. In the 18th and early 19th centuries, there were no issues with excessive corporate economic and political power, as the country was small, transportation and communications were slow, and land was readily available. The US was really a mosaic of tiny local markets and governments, not a single market, as it is today.
2. That changed as the country grew and was linked together by the railroads and the telegraph. The reforms of the Progressive Era were, in large part, an appropriate response to excessive corporate power arising from the creation of the single national market and new forms of wealth.
3. Similarly, when the shortcomings of laissez-faire became obvious during the Great Depression, the government responded by creating the beginnings of the welfare state and by vastly increasing its powers over corporations and the economy as a whole.
4. Once again, the natural drift to oligarchy, as described by Piketty, has characterized the American economy and political system since 1980. It’s time for a third wave of regulations and welfare state improvements to update an outdated system and make it work for everyone. That isn’t socialism; it’s the way we’ve successfully responded to systemic problems in the past.

To me, when you put Warren’s program in that historical context, it becomes much more persuasive to people who are skeptical of radical change. Given her problems with identity politics, I’m not sure reframing the argument would make that much difference, but it would definitely be worth a try.