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Today’s electability steel cage match features a complete contrast in styles.  In the blue corner we have Joe Biden, the old white guy who has paid his dues, but never won the big prize.  In the red corner we have Kamala Harris, the female minority newcomer with a gift for generating publicity.

LET’S GET READY TO RUMBLE!

1.  Relevant experience:  No one could possibly beat Uncle Joe here.  Certainly Harris can’t.  Advantage:  Biden.

2.  Skeletons in the closet:  Biden has a minor plagiarism problem.  Harris hasn’t been vetted on the national stage yet, so we don’t really know.  Advantage:  TBD.

3.  Don’t rerun the 2016 campaign:  Neither candidate resembles Hillary Clinton in any way.  Advantage:  Even.

4.  Charisma counts:  The camera loves Harris.  The old white guy has nothing to match that.  Advantage:  Harris.

5.  Play the identity game more shrewdly:  Biden is good with white working men and is broadly acceptable to the entire party.  Harris is best known for her support for illegal immigrants.  Advantage:  Biden.

And the winner is . . . Biden, as of today, but expect Harris to attract a lot of attention during the debates.  She can be a major factor in the race if she can figure out a way to broaden her message and appeal to white workers.

Words that will never come out of the mouth of Donald J. Trump.

If Cohen is serious about wanting to turn over a new leaf, things are about to get really, really interesting.

The web is full of analysis of Trump’s Twitter equivalent of a declaration of war against Iran.  The consensus seems to be that Trump is attempting to use the same tactics that he employed, at least in his eyes, successfully against North Korea.  The formula would be threats of annihilation + sanctions =surrender.

Is this correct?  Of course it is.  Trump is a man of limited experience and imagination.  If something works for him, he uses it until he wears it out.  Just ask his base, or the students at Trump University.

Leaving aside the fact that his North Korea “diplomacy” has actually accomplished less than nothing, the two would-be victims are very dissimilar, for the following reasons:

1.  Trump actually appears to like Kim, and views him as sort of a candidate for the political version of The Apprentice.  The elderly Muslim leaders of Iran–not so much.
2.  Iran doesn’t have any nuclear weapons, thanks in part to the Obama deal, so war with the ayatollahs is a more viable option.
3.  North Korea is diplomatically isolated.  On the Iran issue, it is the US that is isolated.
4.  Kim is in no way accountable to his people.  The Iranian system, on the other hand, has real democratic elements.  That means the Iranians can’t change course on a dime the way Kim can.
5.  Powerful elements of the Iranian system profit from sanctions, and won’t be persuade to change course by them.
6.  Trump’s best international friends–Bibi and MBS–want regime change in Iran.  Our allies in Asia have no plan for regime change in North Korea.

The bottom line is that the threats + sanctions formula is not going to force Iran to capitulate.  Then what?  A limited strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities isn’t going to stop the Iranian government from supporting Hezbollah and the Houthis, which is a big part of the rationale for scrapping Obama’s agreement.  Trump won’t agree to a huge, expensive ground offensive that leads to the occupation of Iran.  That leaves the one alternative that none of the commentators has even dared to contemplate, but will certainly occur to Trump:  a bomb; a parade; and a statue.

If Joe Biden doesn’t run, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren will probably begin the 2020 campaign as the frontrunners.  Which of the two is more electable, based on the criteria I posted a few days ago?  Here is my analysis:

1.  Relevant experience:  Both are US senators and are thus equally qualified.

2.  Skeletons in the closet:  Socialism!  Sandinistas!  If Bernie is the nominee, the GOP will have us believing that Daniel Ortega is his running mate.  Advantage:  Warren.

3.  Don’t rerun the 2016 election:  Warren isn’t a clone of Hillary Clinton, but to the average, uninformed voter, she will look like one.  Advantage:  Sanders.

4.  Charisma counts:  Bernie offers a kind of gruff authenticity and a single well-worn speech.  Warren’s speeches are fairly wooden, but she can come up with a good zinger now and then, and she clearly gets under Trump’s skin, which is a plus.  Advantage:  Warren (slightly).

5.  Play the identity game more shrewdly:  In his heart of hearts, Bernie believes that class is the primary source of conflict in American politics, and he doesn’t really accept identity politics.  Warren gets it.  Maybe it’s her Native American heritage.  Advantage:  Warren.

So the winner is . . . Warren!  If these two are the finalists, however, all of us will lose.

The Chinese have opposed the application of the rule of law to disputes involving the South China Sea.  They have resorted to threats, bribes, and divide-and-conquer tactics in order to get their way.  So far, they have been pretty successful.

The Chinese government says it believes in the rule of law at home, but what it means by that is the elimination of local obstacles to the effective use of power by the center.  The government makes the law–it is not bound by it.  Politics will always prevail over legal norms when it really matters.

The Chinese government is currently posing as the defender of international law on trade issues.  In light of the practices described above, should that claim be taken seriously?

Of course not.  The Chinese see trade in much the same terms as Trump does.  They just happen to have a political and economic system that is far better designed for mercantilism than ours.

In today’s NYT, David Brooks recommends that the Democrats run a nominee with a forward-looking, optimistic message in 2020.

Sure.

It is extremely important for tactical reasons, and for the sake of the country, that the Democrats pose as the defenders of traditional American values and institutions in both 2018 and 2020.  Left-wing Trumpism would be almost as bad as the original hard right version.  That said, the party isn’t going to endure four years of Trump and then pick someone who is going to bring a knife to a gun fight.  The nominee should be the candidate who best figures out how to express the anger of the base in a colorful, but constructive way.

 

I’ve been predicting a war with Iran practically from the day Trump was elected.  The only questions are:  (a) what will be the precipitant?  (b) when will it start?  (c) how broad will our objectives be?  and (d) will nuclear weapons be involved?

From a partisan political perspective, Trump would be wise to start and win the war before November.  It’s late July, so he doesn’t have much time.  Can he devise a plausible pretext between now and then?  We’ll see; for the most part, the Iranians have avoided obvious provocations.

If this week’s issue of The Economist is to be believed, Donald Trump, whether wittingly or not, may be playing the bad cop with the EU and the Chinese in an effort to strengthen, not destroy, the WTO.  As the story goes, he’s trying to create a crisis which will ultimately result in a WTO that is friendlier to the US and to other genuine market economies, because the alternative, an all-out trade war, will be even worse for the Chinese.

If true, it sounds eerily like Kaiser Wilhelm II trying to intimidate the British into an alliance by increasing the size of his fleet.  We all know how that turned out.

The reality, however, is that Trump has nothing but contempt for the EU, international organizations, and the rule of law.  He longs for a world in which the US is free to use its military and economic power to serve its own selfish interests without regard to the rest of the world.  He wants America to be the new Russia.

There may be people in his administration who secretly hope to save the WTO with hardball tactics, but Trump isn’t one of them, and in the final analysis, he is the only one that matters.

 

I’m increasingly seeing references to RFK being a role model for a new crop of left-wing Democrats.  Does this make sense, and could it work on a national level?

Yes.  RFK’s constituency was an alliance of young people, liberals, union members, and minorities.  His ideology was pro-worker without being explicitly grounded in socialism.  It transcended the race/class division that separates Bernie Sanders from the rest of his party.  If used properly, it could unite the Democrats and peel off enough white working class votes to win in 2020.

One can imagine someone like Kamala Harris picking up RFK’s mantle and having some success running with it in 2020.  She would have to broaden her horizons beyond being an advocate for illegal immigrants and find a way to appeal to white working class men to make it work, however.  Right now, I don’t see it, but it is early days.

There has been a fair amount of discussion recently as to whether the Democrats should emphasize electability during the 2020 primaries.  The clear answer to the question is . . . yes!  Does GM deliberately build cars that no one wants to buy?

In reality, the better question is, what constitutes electability in 2020?  Here is my view of it:

1.  Relevant experience is important.  You can’t make a compelling case on competence if you run a, say, real estate developer against Trump in 2020.

2.  Limit the number of skeletons in the closet.  As I noted yesterday, the GOP will be playing the false equivalence game for all it’s worth no matter who the candidate is, but there is no reason to make their lives easier.

3.  Don’t let Trump rerun the 2016 campaign.  Trump has limited skills and imagination, but there are two things he knows how to do:  feed his base; and beat Hillary Clinton.  Selecting a candidate that looks and sounds like Clintton would be a mistake.

4.  Charisma counts.  No further elaboration is necessary.

5.  Play the identity game more shrewdly.   Given the nature of its component parts, the Democratic Party cannot avoid identity politics altogether.  What the nominee can do is put identity in a broader context that doesn’t threaten the interests of white people in general, and white working men in particular.

And so, the perfect candidate would be a young, conspicuously intelligent and vibrant, senator or governor with a record of accomplishment, no skeletons in his closet, and the ability to appeal to both the base and the white working class.  Alas!  Barack Obama won’t be running in 2020.

False equivalence was Trump’s not-so-secret weapon during the 2016 campaign.   No matter how many times he proved himself to be manifestly unfit to be president, he could always rely on the MSM to make the case that Hillary was just as bad, because of her e-mail issue.  If the two choices are equally poor, and you want change, why not vote for Trump?  That, more than any Russian interference, won him the election.

The MSM woke up to this kind of manipulation after the election and started calling him out when he lies.  You can be sure, however, that the GOP will try it again in 2020.  Ignore the corrupt, incompetent man on golf cart in the White House, they will say, and focus on what really matters!  Biden’s plagiarism!  Warren’s fake Native American heritage!  Bernie’s old Sandinista bros!  Whoever’s whatever! It’s just as bad, so stick with the devil you know!

Will the MSM fall into the trap again?  One hopes not, but we’ll see.

In a lengthy article you can still read in New York Magazine, Jonathan Chait, using facts that are already in the public record, sets out a case that Trump has been operating as a de facto asset of the Russian government since the late 1980s.  Chait readily concedes that this is not the only possible explanation for Trump’s enthusiasm for Putin and Russia, but he doesn’t think it can be completely dismissed as a bizarro conspiracy theory, either.

He has a point.  Like Ross Douthat, I think it is much more likely that Trump’s actions can be explained by his life experiences and his unusual personality than by any overt Russian effort to manipulate him.  Things have gotten to the point, however, where it is no longer appropriate to take even more sinister explanations off the table.

And so, in response to my question, I would say that Trump is still entitled to the benefit of the doubt, but that might not last much longer.

 

 

I was reading an article–either on Politico or Axios, I think–a few weeks ago in which the writer was polling Trump people to try to get a succinct description of our new foreign policy.  The most popular formula was “Bitch, we’re America!”

That sounds about right.  It encapsulates the arrogance, the belligerence, and the preference for unilateral action and raw power over rules that are characteristic of what you could call the Trump Doctrine.

Leaving aside any concerns about morality, it is also deeply disturbing, because it is out of date.  At the risk of sounding like Thomas Friedman, the fact is that technology has made national borders inherently more porous than ever before.  Terrorism, cybercrime, pandemics, and refugee crises can have their roots essentially anywhere in the world, and our only choices are to attack the problems on the ground or to wait until they do damage at home, and then try to build a physical or virtual wall around the country after the horse has left the barn.  Obama correctly decided that the better approach was the first one, with the assistance of rules and allies;  Trump, whose brain still operates in the 1950s, clearly believes in the latter, and we will ultimately pay the price for it.

So Trump clearly doesn’t get NATO.

For Putin, he’s opened the gate-oh.

If the Russians march in

Would a war soon begin?

Would he leave the small fry to their fate-oh?

David Brooks used this term in a column last week; we all know what it means.  It manifests itself in two ways:  in Trump’s deplorable behavior towards women, including other heads of state; and in some of his policy positions, ranging from increases in the defense budget to his eccentric preference for jobs traditionally held by brawny men (e.g., coal miners and steelworkers) over, say, retail jobs.

The sad fact is that Trump’s extreme version of swagger is one of the two pillars of his popularity with the base.  Its principal audience is unskilled male workers who feel that a world which increasingly places less value on physical strength than intellect is screwing them over.

All I can say is that men with more testosterone than brains are not at the top of the list of American “victims” for whom I feel intensely sorry.