Author: hamilton1788

For about the first hour, I thought I was watching a bull-baiting, not a debate.  It might have had the intellectual heft of a Twinkie, but it certainly was compelling TV.

It is becoming clear that Donald Trump believes he can overcome all of his past heresies and all of his logical inconsistencies with pure, unadulterated swagger.  As long as the format permits him to avoid any kind of extensive cross-examination, he may be right.  My guess is that the winnowing of the field and the cumulative effect of commercials highlighting his inconsistencies that will be forthcoming in due time will ultimately destroy his candidacy, but that will not happen overnight.

Winners, losers, and also-rans:

Winners:

Trump:   Came across as the most compelling candidate in the field, no matter how ridiculous his ideas are.

John Kasich:   Articulated the Christian Democrat position better than Jeb Bush, and was rewarded for it by the hometown crowd.

Mike Huckabee:   Had some of the best lines of the night and was forceful without sounding angry.

Losers:

Jeb Bush:  No big mistakes, but no swagger.  His backers have to be worried.  Sooner or later, someone has to mention that his accomplishments in Florida were the product of a huge real estate bubble, and he can’t blame the federal government for the aftermath, because his brother was President at the time.

Chris Christie:  His usual bellicosity was lost in Trump’s exhaust.  His exchanges with Rand Paul and Mike Huckabee were draws at best.

Also-Rans

Ted Cruz:   Made his anti-establishment pitch clearly and forcefully, but it, too, disappeared in the Trump supernova.  Does he really believe that he can get elected without reaching out to anyone outside of the hard right?

Ben Carson:  Tentative and unremarkable, although he improved as the night went on.

Rand Paul:  Gave and took about equally.

Marco Rubio:  Made some effort to talk about real world problems and made his case for being new blood, but his statements on abortion are going to cost him dearly if he is the nominee.

Scott Walker:  Showed a reasonable command of the facts, but did not swagger particularly effectively.  There is something about this man’s personality that I find deeply disagreeable.  If someone ever makes a horror movie with an evil Eagle Scout protagonist, Walker should be the star.

I have been puzzled for years as to why there has been such limited support for protectionism within the Democratic Party, given the impact of globalization on the incomes of the party’s working class constituents during the last two decades.  Thanks to Donald Trump, I think I now have the answer:  a disproportionate number of the beneficiaries of protectionist policies would be white men working in manufacturing who, for a variety of reasons, have become Republicans.

Never fear, free traders:  the WSJ and the other ideological enforcers within the GOP are never going to permit the leadership of the party to embrace protectionism.  That said, we may have a very interesting discussion on the subject during the debates over the next several months.

1.  Immigration (legal and otherwise);

2.  Education;

3.  Protectionism (to be discussed in a post tomorrow);

4.  Government support for business (subsidies, bailouts, tax preferences, etc.);  and

5.  Overseas military interventions.

Most of these pit the Pro-Business Pragmatists against the Reactionaries, which is why the Reagan Coalition is harder to pull off than the Romney Coalition.

The debate is only a day away!  Comedians everywhere are rubbing their hands with glee.

Some things to look for:

1.  How aggressively will the panel question the candidates?  Historically, the Fox News panels have been surprisingly effective in dealing with Republican candidates.  Expect that to continue tomorrow.

2.  How will the candidates react to the panel?  One of the ways Republican candidates have traditionally shown off their swagger is by attacking the panel.  Doing this with a group of Fox News journalists who have at least as much credibility with the right-wing public as they do would be very dangerous.  This could help Rubio, whose lack of swagger is a big liability.

3.  How will Donald Trump handle himself?  Trump will be walking a tightrope here:  he will disappoint his audience if he doesn’t perform to his outrageous, unscripted campaign persona, but he can’t afford to alienate the panel or look uninformed.   He would be wise to use all of his ammunition on the Democrats.

4.  How will the other candidates deal with Trump?  At this debate, I think the better practice would be to ignore him and see if the panel will expose his weaknesses.

5.  Which candidate will lead the breakaway, and will the peleton reel him in?  It certainly won’t be Bush, Walker, or Rubio.  Chris Christie could try it, but I don’t think he will.  Bet on Ted Cruz, and don’t expect him to back down, because he has nothing to lose with the GOP establishment.

6.  What characters will the candidates be playing?  Here are some of them:

Jeb Bush:  Lord Grantham of GOP Abbey

Scott Walker:  Ronald Reagan’s Undiscovered Son

Ted Cruz:  Mr. Tea Party Goes to Washington

Ben Carson:  Horatio Alger

Marco Rubio:  Mr. Fresh Face with New Ideas

Rand Paul:  Harpo Marx

Donald Trump:  Himself, of course

7.  Who has to play Cecil the Lion?  TBD.

So let me get this straight:  the Republicans are threatening to shut down the federal government (a proven vote loser) in order to defund Planned Parenthood (and thereby reignite their unpopular “War on Women”) even though none of the funds in question are used for abortion?  That is bad policy and stupid politics.

Thank God these people choose to use their beloved Second Amendment rights on themselves.

 

Where other countries have men on horseback, we have egomaniac billionaires.  I suppose we should consider ourselves lucky.

1.  Events have reached the point where even the German leadership admits the Greek debt is unsustainable, but the parties have done nothing meaningful to change their positions in the negotiations over debt relief.  How ridiculous is that?

2.  A large part of the problem here is that there is no bankruptcy process (i.e., one ultimately guided by an independent third party using a well-established body of law) for the parties to use.  Instead, all decisions result from negotiations between parties with decidedly unequal bargaining power.  The unsatisfactory outcome of that process was and is inevitable.

3.  The essential difference between Greece and the other EU bailout recipients is that Greece had both a governmental overspending/credibility crisis and a euro-driven private sector bubble, while the others only had the latter.  If you are looking for reasons why the Greeks are in a bigger bind than the Spanish and the Irish today (life isn’t exactly paradise in those countries, either), start there.

4.  In retrospect, the Greek government would have been better served if it had sucked up to the Germans and conceded that their system needed a complete overhaul to be more, well, Germanic, in exchange for some debt relief.  Instead, they turned the issue into an EU referendum on austerity, and lost.

Fast forward to 2017.  Having successfully (at least in their eyes) dealt with the Greece question, the Germans have been pestering the French to reduce their deficit and institute “structural reforms” for the last 18 months.  Francois Hollande, Nicolas Sarkozy, and Marine Le Pen are running for president.

Ms. Le Pen makes roughly the following argument to the French electorate:

“For years, the Germans have been telling us we have to become more like them–work harder, spend less, and save more. M. Sarkozy agrees with that, and will work hand in hand with the Germans to dismantle the social protections that we consider to be an essential part of our culture.  M. Hollande can’t make up his mind; sometimes he half-heartedly stands up to the Germans, but sometimes he goes along with them and tries to pretend that we are equal partners in austerity.  As a result, he accomplishes nothing, and the EU has become nothing but a German empire.

If you don’t want to give up your August vacations on the Riviera, your long lunches, and your 35 hour work week, there is only one candidate who will stand up for you and for France–me.”

It is just about a foregone conclusion at this point that Le Pen and Sarkozy will be in the run-off.  The widespread assumption is that the establishment will stand firm for Sarkozy, and he will win.  Personally, I think that Le Pen’s argument is going to resonate with French workers, and I wouldn’t bet the ranch that she will lose.  If that turns out to be the case, life in the EU is going to get even more interesting than it is now.

1.  The Germans never wanted to give up the mark.  They were talked into it by the French, who viewed it as an essential part of the effort to build an “ever closer union.”  To the German people in 2015, an “ever closer union” almost certainly means a “transfer union,” and they don’t want any part of it.  There is no reason to continue to pursue a dream that is already dead.

2.  A new mark would undoubtedly soar in value, thus making the population wealthier and imports much cheaper.  This would create a substantial stimulus for the EU as a whole.  The remainder of the EU would have a euro with a lower value, and would be able to increase exports and growth and ultimately reduce debt.

3.  Any moral obligation to bail out the overspenders would disappear.

As far as I can tell, the only reason for the Germans to stay in, other than mere inertia, is that it creates a platform for them to impose their values on the rest of the EU.  The potential consequence of that will be discussed in a future post.

Suppose you are Angela Merkel, Chancellor of Germany.  You look at your country and see serious long-term demographic issues, which will ultimately create financing problems for your welfare state.  Your country’s culture emphasizes thrift, in any event.  Under these circumstances, it makes both economic and political sense to keep public spending and aggregate demand under strict control.

Suppose, instead, you are Angela Merkel, de facto leader of Europe.  You see stagnation and double-digit unemployment in most of the continent.  In places like Spain and Greece, the unemployment rate is over 20 percent, with little hope of substantial improvement on the horizon.  One of the obvious ways of dealing with these problem is to take actions to increase demand in Germany.

Which course do you take?  You are responsible to the voters of Germany, but not Europe.  What do you think?

In the not-so-distant past, France and Germany ran the EU as partners.  No longer, due to robust German growth and French stagnation.  It has gotten to the point where the Germans don’t even pretend to treat the French as equals anymore.  And if President Obama wants to call Europe, he knows which number to use, and it isn’t answered in Paris or Brussels.

I always had trouble understanding exactly how the institutions in the Holy Roman Empire worked in practice, but the evolution of the EU has made it more clear to me.  Substitute Angela Merkel for a Hapsburg emperor and it all starts to make sense.

The dual role of the German Chancellor as the head of state of an individual nation and the de facto leader of Europe is naturally going to create a whole new series of issues for the EU.  This will be discussed in a future post.

 

Republicans offer the electorate nostalgia for a better past, promise to get rid of environmental regulations that they can plausibly (although not very accurately) claim are the source of the area’s economic problems, and visibly embrace rural cultural values.

Democrats offer government benefits that provide little more than subsistence.

Is it any wonder that (a) is winning?

One of the best insights about politics that I ever received came to me in a dream.  A character in the dream, identity unknown, told me that the American people don’t really expect their leaders to solve their problems, but they have to know that their hearts are in the right place.  If you think fairly hard about it, that explains a lot of what happens in politics, which would include Hillary Clinton’s wish list of an agenda.

The bottom line is that the Republicans are going to maintain control of the House after the 2016 election, and quite possibly the Senate, as well.  As a result, few, if any, of the Democratic agenda items are going to become law.  Hillary is undoubtedly well aware of this. With that in mind, what can her supporters actually expect her to do, in the real world, if she is elected?

First, she would stop a Republican counterrevolution in domestic policy, which would include: cuts and counterproductive structural changes to entitlement programs; massive cuts to anti-poverty programs; large tax cuts on capital; the dismantling of regulations on financial institutions and pollution sources; new legislation restricting abortion; and, in all likelihood, a national right-to-work law.

Second, she can stop us from going to war in the Middle East for little or no good reason.  Her support of the Iran deal provides some needed reassurance on that point.

Third, she can try to make deals with Republicans based on mutual self-interest.  Obama has had little success with this, but it could be tried again with a slightly different case of characters.  These could include the following:  income tax cuts in exchange for a carbon tax; entitlement cuts in exchange for infrastructure spending; trading tax cuts for working people for tax cuts for the wealthy (deficit be damned); pro-business changes to immigration law; or getting rid of the Obamacare employer mandate in exchange for additional discretionary spending.

Fourth, she can use her regulatory authority to the maximum extent of the law.

That’s about it.  In terms of making actual social progress, as opposed to warding off disaster, it may not be very inspiring, but when you consider the alternative, it doesn’t look bad at all.

 

 

 

By all accounts, Taylor Swift was born and raised as a blue person.  She found her opportunity, however, in Nashville.  Her records became progressively more pop (i.e., “blue”) as time went on, and she finally decided to move to New York and embrace a more urban audience and lifestyle.  As far as I can tell, however, she did this without offending her country fans, who viewed her departure with regret instead of anger, so she can still cross over if the occasion presents itself, as I suspect it will at some point in the future.

Her music does not really speak to me, but I have great respect for her intelligence and business sense, and I think there is a lesson in this story that the Democratic Party needs to hear:  a little effort to understand and visibly respect red culture can do a world of good.

T.S. 1989 2016!

Just as the Republicans have done their best to nominate Ronald Reagan, or his latest incarnation, since the 1980 election, the Democrats have been looking for the new JFK since 1963.  Several contenders were nominated, but found wanting for one reason or another.  At long last, they struck it rich with Obama–young, fresh, charismatic, and a great speaker– in 2008.  A more appropriate JFK successor could scarcely be imagined.  But now his tenure is winding down, so where do the Democrats go from here?

The likely Democratic nominee is an extremely experienced politician whose campaign theme will be her ability, in spite of (or maybe because of) her many scars, to get things done, because she has succeeded in maintaining relationships with Congressional leaders in both parties regardless of personal and ideological differences, and she knows how to cut deals.  In short, great speeches and charisma are all well and good, but it takes an insider with thick skin to make the system move.

It’s perfect.  Hillary is the new LBJ.