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Elizabeth Warren frequently does it with a twinkle in her eye, while Bernie Sanders shouts and looks grim, but both have made bashing billionaires the centerpiece of their respective campaigns. Is that good for the country?

Sometimes the billionaires bring it on themselves, by seeking rents, successfully lobbying for even more regressive tax cuts which benefit no one but themselves, and constantly whining about a lack of respect. It’s hard to be very sympathetic, and I agree with the consensus that their taxes should be raised significantly. But still . . .

Sanders and Warren are threatening to turn the wealthy into the left-wing version of illegal immigrants– convenient scapegoats for policy failures. The idea of hiring armies of IRS agents to scrutinize their assets on an annual basis is the rough equivalent of treating them like dangerous wild animals in a zoo. Worse, the wealth tax sends the message that too much financial success makes you evil. As Cory Booker pointed out at the last debate, we need to grow the economy as well as redistribute the proceeds.

In my opinion, it is perfectly OK to identify important unmet social needs and ask the wealthy to give up their unjust tax benefits and pay for programs that address them. I would go on to say that you can even make a case that redistribution will help rebuild the middle class and ultimately enhance economic growth. The unconstitutional and administratively awkward wealth tax is not the way to go, however, and the anti-billionaire rhetoric needs to stop. We need to solve problems, not create scapegoats and unlikely martyrs.

On the one hand, the witnesses at the impeachment hearings were bright, articulate, nonpartisan civil servants–some of them immigrants–who were willing to risk career and reputation to tell the truth and protect the interests of the nation as a whole. On the other hand, some of the GOP members of the panel were peddling conspiracy theories favored by Putin and attacking the objectivity and patriotism of the witnesses in a desperate effort to protect the position of a corrupt, pathetic cult figure–a man on golf cart.

I bet you don’t have any problems identifying the best and worst of America.

The single most memorable thing I have read during the last few months was a comment about Mike Pompeo’s nose in The New Yorker. The author of the article quoted an anonymous European diplomat calling it “a heat-seeking missile for Trump’s ass.” That sounds about right, and it explains how the man keeps his job.

As Secretary of State, Pompeo has obligations to the American people, to Trump, and to the people who work for him. The essence of the problem is that he only acknowledges the second obligation. The others apparently don’t matter to him.

It is clear from this week’s testimony that Pompeo enabled Trump’s self-interested shadow diplomacy, and that morale at the State Department and our standing in the world have plunged as a result. If he had an ounce of integrity, he would resign immediately. In spite of the lessons he supposedly learned about honor and patriotism at West Point, he doesn’t, and he won’t. He’ll just keep trucking on and sucking up to his boss until he sees an exit ramp that appeals to him.

One can only hope he will pay the price for it when he runs for office in Kansas, which seems almost inevitable.

A: This bright, dedicated civil servant ripped conspiracy-loving GOP members a new one during her testimony on impeachment.

Q: Who is Fiona Hill?

A conservative named Daniel McCarthy makes the following arguments against impeachment in today’s NYT:

1. The left is too eager to assume the worst about Trump’s motives when other inferences are possible;
2. Trump is just fulfilling a campaign promise to behave unconventionally and “drain the swamp;” and
3. He has only violated norms, not laws.

My reactions are as follows:

1. The only plausible explanation of Trump’s behavior, particularly after hearing yesterday’s testimony, is that he attempted to compel the Ukrainian government to intervene in our election purely for his personal benefit. No other explanation even remotely makes sense.
2. What Trump meant by “draining the swamp,” both then and now, was not clear. In any event, complying with campaign promises to take on the establishment is not a legitimate justification for committing high crimes and misdemeanors against the American political system.
3. Norms are on a continuum, based on their importance to the integrity of our political system. For example, changing the date on which one customarily gives the State of the Union address would hardly be a high crime and misdemeanor. Directing the Justice Department to bring frivolous criminal charges against political adversaries clearly is. Trying to force foreign countries to assist with a re-election campaign in a manner inconsistent with our declared national interests unquestionably falls on the latter end of the spectrum. In other words, abuses of power may not be technical violations of the law, but they are certainly valid grounds for impeachment.

My thoughts on last night:

1. There was a decided lack of electricity in the air. Part of that was due to the impeachment hearings, and part due to the tactics of the moderators, who made little effort to stir up conflict for the sake of entertaining the crowd. The last was wise, I think.

2. Most of the anticipated attacks on Mayor Pete were pretty muted. He successfully fought off the rest. On the whole, he had a fairly good night, but he can’t change the fact that he looks and sounds like a white bread technocrat, which creates a relatively low electoral ceiling for him.

3. It was painfully obvious, as it usually is, that Biden was the least acute speaker on the stage. He lost his train of thought on occasion, and, of course, committed a gaffe. The real question is, how much does that matter? After all, if he gets the nomination, he will be standing on stage next to Donald Trump, not Elizabeth Warren. Trump is so ignorant of policy that he won’t be able to expose Biden’s weaknesses the way his Democratic rivals can.

I’m still struggling with this question. I think many of us are.

4. I don’t think the needle will move much. Biden’s gaffes have long since been priced into his standing in the polls.

The former UN woman Nikki

Found working for Trump to be tricky.

She sucks up to the man.

It’s all part of a plan

‘Cause a beggar just can’t be too picky.

On the head diplomat known as Mike.

There’s not much about him to like.

He enables his boss

At the whole country’s cost

When he should stick his thumb in the dike.

Mayor Pete has unquestionably emerged as the leading Biden replacement candidate. He’s ahead in the most recent Iowa poll. As a result, it is widely anticipated that he will be taking a disproportionate amount of fire on his qualifications and identity issues during tonight’s debate. I think most of it will be from the other Biden replacement wannabes–Klobuchar, Harris, and Booker–because they have the most to gain by toppling him. The two progressives will engage with him on policy issues, but they have no reason to make it personal, and Biden probably won’t attack him at all, since he is a useful and articulate ally against the left.

Can Mayor Pete actually win? In Iowa, possibly. In the country as a whole, no. His sexual orientation is an issue with many older voters, of course, but the bigger problems are his lack of relevant experience and his bloodless approach to what most people view as moral issues. He comes across as a short, unprepossessing, brainy technocrat–a Michael Dukakis for the 21st century. That makes him about as different from Trump as you can get, to be sure, but I just don’t think a technocratic personality is in tune with an electorate which increasingly sees politics in apocalyptic terms.

It’s bound to happen, sooner or later; Elizabeth Warren is going to have a Kirsten Gillibrand moment. A struggling white worker is going to appear at one of her events and ask her a loaded question about reparations and white privilege. How will she respond?

The political ramifications of her answer will be immense. On the one hand, Warren appears to buy into the entire smashmouth wokeness agenda, which thrills her left-wing base. On the other hand, she will need the votes of millions of white workers to beat Trump; arguing that poor white people should admit they’re guilty of racism and write checks to African-Americans isn’t exactly an electoral treasure trove.

Warren is very good at avoiding questions she doesn’t like. My guess is that she will label reparations a “Republican talking point” and call on white and African-American workers to unite against their common Wall Street enemies.

That will satisfy precisely no one, as reparations truly are a zero-sum game. The GOP will exploit this issue mercilessly if Warren is the nominee.

Having belatedly recognized the electoral futility of dismissing Obama as a neo-liberal failure, some progressives are now arguing that he was actually a leftist outsider challenging the establishment in 2008. Is that accurate?

No. Obama, as you will recall, had at least as much establishment support as Clinton did in 2008, and the differences between the two on the issues were microscopic. Obama set himself apart from Clinton by pointing to his opposition to the Iraq War, and by arguing that he, unlike the uniquely divisive Clinton, could bring the country together. The latter argument, of course, ultimately proved to be incorrect, but it was perfectly plausible at the time. It also worked to his advantage that we were tumbling into the Great Recession at the time of the general election, and that McCain had no clue as to how to deal with it.

So, no, the success of his campaign in 2008 is in no way a harbinger of success for Warren or Sanders in 2020.

The argument for Biden is easily stated; he is the candidate with the best chance to beat Donald Trump. So far, it has worked reasonably well; in spite of his obvious weaknesses, Biden still leads in most national polls. It isn’t very inspiring, however, and it puts him at the mercy of the polls. It also doesn’t provide any guidance as to how he should behave once in office. Is something better available?

Yes–he can sell himself as the candidate who is best positioned to bring the country back together.

OK, I hear you saying that it sounds like warmed-over Obama, and that the GOP is too far gone for reconciliation. It is also true, however, that the divisions in our country are starting to become dangerous, and that Biden is, by far, the least divisive of the first tier candidates, as he does not seek to demonize the wealthy or the mainstream of the GOP. It is further true that calls for unity and compromise resonate with a large portion of the Democratic electorate. Finally, it gives him a blueprint as to how to behave in office in the face of Republican obstruction. It preemptively makes a virtue of likely legislative failure.

Since there is no realistic hope of removing Trump from office through the impeachment process, the objective has to be to sway enough open-minded voters to win the upcoming election. The principal ways of doing that are:

1. Convince the public that they should care about what happens in Ukraine; and
2. Establish through the testimony of credible and independent witnesses that this is not just a partisan witch hunt.

I think the Democrats are doing a good job on the second point. As to the first one, it’s harder to say. Some of the witnesses have put the issue in its correct context, but I’m not sure the public is convinced the security of Ukraine is really important to them. We’ll see as the process rolls on.

It is clear that Russia has eclipsed the United States as a power broker in the Middle East. Given the brutal and undemocratic nature of the regimes there, to be sure, Putin’s Russia is a more logical fit. If you’re the type of person whose self-esteem depends to any extent on the figure your country cuts on the international stage (think Lindsey Graham), that probably matters to you. If you aren’t, maybe not.

And so, the question for today is, is the average Russian better off in any material way because Putin has increased Russia’s influence in Syria? It’s hard to see how.

The latest issue of The Atlantic is entitled “How to Stop a Civil War.” As you can imagine, it is dedicated to describing the red/blue divide in America and discussing ways in which it can be healed. Two articles in particular are noteworthy:

1. In “How America Ends,” Yoni Applebaum finds a disturbing analogy to America in 1850. His thesis is that when a group that has been politically and socially dominant perceives it has no future in the democratic process due to cultural and demographic change, it lashes out violently to protect its privileges. Frankly, this article sounds a great deal like some of my posts about the reactionary problem over the last few months, and I agree with it.

2. By contrast, in “Against Reconciliation,” Adam Serwer argues that the correct historical analogy is to Reconstruction, and contends that it would be a mistake for the left to eschew smashmouth politics in favor of civility. The problem with his analogy, of course, is that the left hasn’t won the new Civil War; Donald Trump is our president, after all. Serwer essentially is arguing that there can be no compromise on the woke agenda at a time when it doesn’t command anything like majority support in this country. That is a recipe for electoral disaster in 2020 and for years thereafter.

If I could give some unsolicited advice for the wokeness crowd, it would be to show some patience. Their enemies are going to die of old age in the next ten to twenty years. Is it really worth running the risk of triggering a violent conflict in this country to try to impose your will today when power is going to fall into your hands in the foreseeable future without one? Particularly when you might well lose? After all, it’s the right that has the guns, not the left.