Category: Uncategorized

Angela Merkel is on her way out.  Macron is fighting angry populists for survival.  The UK is leaving the EU, if it can.  The Italians are refusing to comply with EU budgetary rules.  Trump, of course, views the Europeans as unscrupulous and parasitic competitors, not allies, and it’s not as if Xi has any reason to help.

In short, the door is open for Putin to engage in plenty of new mischief until the vacuum has been filled, as it will ultimately be, in one way or another.  Don’t be surprised if he exploits the opportunity, probably starting with Ukraine.

The good news is that our voter suppression measures are working! With the help of some of the courts, we’re keeping the minority votes down a little bit.  It has made a difference in a few close races.

The bad news is that it didn’t make enough of a difference to win in 2018.  We need something much bigger than that for 2020.  What should it be?

The answer comes, as it frequently does, from our brothers in Wisconsin, who have recognized that the problem is blue voters who live in cities.  They’re not real Americans, after all.  Jefferson said so, and so did Sarah Palin.  How could both of them be wrong?

So here’s an idea:  let’s limit the franchise to people who own single-family detached homes.  They’re real Americans, because they’re truly invested in their suburban and rural communities.  They vote Republican, too.  They’re our kind of people.

Hey, if it was good enough in the 18th century, it should be good enough for us.

The one thing we need to avoid is literacy tests.  As our beloved leader, President Trump, once said, we love the poorly-educated.  They remind us of ourselves.

Talk about identity politics!

A:  What you call someone who hires a man who is allegedly “dumb as a rock” to be Secretary of State.

Q:  What is a moron?

On the new AG nominee Barr.

The Don clearly thinks he’s a star.

He’s the man of the hour

‘Cause he sucks up to power.

Can we really have fallen that far?

Sometimes history is driven by apparently insignificant facts.  The primary schedule may well be one of those facts.

Iowa and New Hampshire, both free trading states, come first.  The protectionist Rust Belt states come relatively late in the process.  That means the Democratic candidates will have every incentive to take moderate positions on trade during the 2020 primaries if they want to stay in the race.

Be thankful for small favors.

A:  Thanks to the untiring efforts of this superhero, America’s trade deficits with China and the EU soared last month.

Q:  Who is Tariff Man?

From the perspective of the Democrats, Michigan is a bit like Ohio’s better looking sister; the two have similar demographics, but for some reason, they vote a bit differently.  If Ohio is pink, Michigan is light blue.

Given the colors of the state universities, I guess that’s appropriate.

The issues in Michigan are similar to those in Ohio.  Just expect the Democrats to do better in Michigan.  When it’s over, perhaps you can explain why it happened.

Like Ohio, Iowa is basically a pink state;  Obama won it in 2008, Trump prevailed by a comfortable margin in 2016, and the verdict was split in 2018.  The Democrats don’t have to win it, but it can be done with the right combination of circumstances and policies.

The key to success in Iowa is likely to be the state of the trade war with China.  Protectionism is a major vote loser here.  In that sense, it is the opposite of Ohio.

I think the message here is that trade is going to be an enormously important variable for the Democrats in this election.   A strong commitment to free trade helps in the agricultural states and with most of the blue base, but hurts in the Rust Belt.  The logical choice is to thread the needle in the manner I have described in previous posts and keep everything in play.

As we know, Putin used “little green men” to take the aptly-named Crimea in 2014.  He earned wild popularity in Russia as a result.  As a symbol of the strength of his (and his country’s) commitment to Crimea, he then spent billions of rubles to build a bridge over the Kerch Strait to the Russian mainland.   He is now using Russian control of both sides of the strait to essentially blockade a substantial portion of Ukraine.

The bridge is a sitting duck.  If you ran Ukraine, wouldn’t you seriously consider sending some of your own little green men to blow it up?  Wouldn’t that really piss Putin off?

After all, if the shoe were on the other foot, don’t you think he would do it?

Pennsylvania is not really a Rust Belt state;  the eastern part of the state, from an economic perspective, is indistinguishable from New Jersey and New York, and Pittsburgh has remade itself as a successful tech and medical research center.  Some of the extreme western section of the state looks like the struggling part of Ohio, but the real partisan division within Pennsylvania is the urban/rural split.  Statewide elections are typically won in the suburbs of Philadelphia.

You can make a pretty decent argument that no state means more to the Democrats than Pennsylvania in 2020.  The results of the 2018 election suggest that Trump’s victory there was an anomaly; there is no reason to believe that he can recover his standing with suburban women, or that he even intends to try.  The Democrats’ task here in 2020, therefore, is mostly to stay on a fairly generic message, to direct their appeal to women and reachable white working men, and to avoid extreme or provocative positions on either policy or identity.

A jacquerie, for those of you who aren’t dedicated medievalists, was a French peasant revolt.  They were typically caused by the convergence of bad economic times and higher taxes. Lacking meaningful leadership and any kind of positive and realistic political or economic program, the angry peasants typically killed lots of people and destroyed plenty of property, but ultimately accomplished nothing.  When it was over, life went on as before, but everyone was poorer as a result.

As it was in the 14th century, so it is with the yellow vests today; they have no program except anger.  They don’t even support LePen.  It’s hard to see anything constructive coming out of this situation.

It’s a bird . . . it’s a plane . . . it’s Tariff Man!  He puts up invisible walls to protect us from inexpensive Chinese products, and impoverishes American farmers in the process.

Even Stan Lee couldn’t think up that one.

I suppose it should have been obvious, but it only occurred to me after I posted on Batman and the Joker that Trump already has a domestic arch-villain to deal with after January–Catwoman!  You probably know her as Nancy Pelosi.

There will be interesting times in Gotham City, to be sure.

Sherrod Brown notwithstanding, Ohio is clearly turning into a slightly red state–call it pink.  The reasons for this are undoubtedly demographic.  Unlike blue Illinois, Ohio isn’t dominated by a single enormous metropolitan area, and its population losses have taken place primarily in its medium-sized cities and suburbs.  The rural residents are staying, and they vote for Republicans.

The swing voters in Ohio are white working men.  How do the Democrats reach them?  Here are some ideas:

1.  Down with the plutocrats–up with unions!  Spend lots of time talking about Trump’s faux populism, and how little he has actually done to help working people.  That includes, of course, the tax cut and the composition of the cabinet.

2.  Save Obamacare!  Rising health care costs are a major concern here, as elsewhere.  Talk about drug prices and Trump’s ongoing efforts to sabotage Obamacare.

3.  It’s the Chinese, stupid.  As I’ve noted before, the best way to pander to protectionists without doing any damage is to argue that Trump has made enemies of our friends, and to focus on his tactical failures in combating the Chinese.

The Democrats don’t have to win Ohio.  At this point, it’s a bit of a luxury.  It’s well worth trying, however, particularly if the economy stumbles between now and 2020.

He wanted to make his country a great power, and in his eyes, that meant building a high-tech manufacturing base, from which political and military power would naturally flow.  The infant industries in the country could not survive without help in the face of foreign competition.  So he proposed to protect them to the maximum extent possible, partly by tariffs, but mostly by well-designed subsidies and other, less obvious interventions in the market.

Is it Xi or Alexander Hamilton?  You decide.