Cromwell

In 2008, John McCain was behind; he needed to take some risks to turn things around. He was consequently persuaded to pick a figure who was untested on a national level as his running mate. The decision was a disaster: Palin proved to be totally unqualified for the job on substance, but she was also far more popular with the GOP Reactionary faction than he was, which meant she overshadowed him on the campaign trail on a daily basis. In the end, the risk was not worth taking.

Unlike McCain, Biden is ahead, but he still faces the same kind of choice. If he picks Warren or Harris, he will be running with someone with national experience–for better or worse, a known commodity. If he doesn’t, who knows?

To me, it’s a simple decision. Why take risks now?

Assume, for purposes of argument, that Trump is soundly beaten in November. What, in the eyes of the potential GOP contenders in 2024, will be the lesson? Here are four possibilities:

1. THE MESSAGE WAS RIGHT, BUT THE MESSENGER WAS TOO FLAWED: The theory here is that the combination of regressive tax cuts for wealthy businessmen and divisive, provocative tweets and conservative judges for the reactionary base was exactly right, but that Trump’s indiscipline, narcissism, corruption, and ignorance were just too big a hurdle to overcome. A better candidate with the same message could prevail. LIKELY CANDIDATE WITH THIS MESSAGE: Tom Cotton.
2. THE MESSAGE WAS WRONG. WE NEED A BIGGER TENT. BRING BACK THE CDS AND STOP THE RACIST STUFF!: This is a call for a revival of the PBP/CD Romney Coalition. LIKELY CANDIDATES WITH THIS MESSAGE: Larry Hogan; Nikki Haley.
3. TRUMP JUST WASN’T POPULIST ENOUGH: “National conservatives” want a populist (i.e., reactionary) economic policy focusing on white Christian workers, not more tax cuts for rich people. The rest of Trump’s message is on point. LIKELY CANDIDATE WITH THIS MESSAGE: Josh Hawley.
4. TRUMP DIDN’T CARE ENOUGH ABOUT CONTROLLING SPENDING AND CUTTING DEFICITS: Bring back the Tea Party! This time, the GOP really, really means it about reducing spending. Trust me. Trust me. LIKELY CANDIDATES WITH THIS MESSAGE: Ted Cruz; Rick Scott.

For the record, my money is on Cotton, but the world can change a lot between now and then. Let’s just hope it doesn’t change a lot between now and November.

Today’s NYT features a lengthy article advocating a multi-platform media event, lasting weeks or even months, addressing the plight of black people in America. The event would include documentaries, panel discussions, cultural events, and drama. Would it work?

No, because unlike the Germans after World War II, there is no power in this country that can force people to watch. Fox News would never participate. I would guess that 30 percent of the population would watch every minute of it, 30 percent would quickly tire of it, and 40 percent would make a point of never tuning in. The 40 percent, of course, is where the worst of the problem lies.

The idea is not completely stupid. The MSM have made a great effort to portray minorities in greater number and more sympathetically over the last decade or so, and its efforts have been reasonably successful. Using the media to create empathy is much more likely to change hearts and minds than the bulldozer of legislation. Reconciliation is a process, however, not an event. It will take many years, not weeks or months, and it has to be done with gentle persuasion, not a sledgehammer.

Imagine that you are a Never Trumper. You despise the man on golf cart for all of the reasons that the left does. You view him as a corrupt, inept, would-be authoritarian who is rotting the foundations of the American political system. He has to go. You agree with large parts of Trump’s domestic agenda, however. So how do you resolve this problem? By rooting for the GOP to retain control of the Senate. That will put an end to the legitimacy crisis without giving free rein to the left. It sounds like a perfect solution.

Except that it leads to a different kind of roller coaster. It doesn’t just mean that the progressive agenda is dead in the water, and that the government’s ability to deal with the pandemic and the recession will be hobbled; it means gratuitous shutdowns and debt ceiling crises on top of that, as McConnell reverts to his favorite game of taking hostages for partisan gain at the expense of the public interest. In addition, one can easily imagine McConnell being emboldened to the point of refusing to confirm any Biden judges–period. Instead of one Merrick Garland, we could have a hundred. Is that what we really need, if we’re looking for decency and stability?

(Donald Trump is alone in the Oval Office. He’s way behind in the polls, the pandemic is out of control, and the economy is on its knees. In desperation, he does something he’s never done before–he tries to pray. To his surprise, God answers immediately.)

G: Mr. President! I haven’t heard from you in a really, really long time. What do you want from me?

T: I need your help, Lord. I need you to win the election.

G: You’re a liar and a narcissist. You don’t care about anyone but yourself. You’re deliberately tearing your country apart. You don’t even really believe in me. Why would I help you?

T: Because I stand with your people, of course.

G: What, you mean that stunt where you held the Bible as a prop? That was embarrassing and offensive.

T: But I was just sending a message to your people that I love and support them. What’s wrong with that?

G: All people are my people. Even the ones who say they don’t believe in me. How would they really know? I didn’t make them omniscient, so I can’t very well blame them if they get things wrong.

T: You just can’t let Biden beat me. I’d be a loser! I can’t live with that. It wouldn’t be right.

G: I help those who help themselves. You could start by actually doing something to help your country instead of trying to tear it apart. Try telling people to wear masks, for example.

T: Masks are for wimps. I’m not going to tell people to be wimps.

G: That’s the best I can do for you.

T: So you won’t help me?

G: I don’t take sides in elections. If the American people are stupid enough to vote for you, they deserve you. If not, so much the better. Biden may not be perfect, but he’s a good and decent man, and America has suffered enough.

T: Please! I’m desperate here! You can’t just leave me here to lose!

G: Goodbye, Mr. President. With luck, this is the last time I will have to call you that.

(God leaves. Trump is still alone in the Oval Office.)

My predictions from a week ago regarding the Lewis service were right on track. Obama connected the dots between the sixties and today, as he was bound to do. As with most of his speeches regarding race and civil rights, it sounded a lot like a sequel to the Gettysburg Address, with the emphasis on the never-ending struggle to perfect the Union. The best part of it, for me, was his description of the forces that the young Lewis was facing in the sixties; he, unlike us, had no idea that victory was inevitable. It is both chilling and inspiring to consider that.

The most consequential speech, from a political perspective (and make no mistake about it, this was always intended to be a political event) was that of George W. Bush. Why was he even there? For two reasons: to send a message to the country that Trump doesn’t speak for all Republicans on issues of race; and to reassure swing voters with ties to the GOP that voting for Biden is OK. That matters, a lot.

Let’s hope the message got through.

Mark Zuckerberg had a dream: to transcend national boundaries and bring the entire world together to share happy talk on his social media platform, while making a ton of money. How is he doing? Well, one for two gets it done in most sports.

As I have noted before, Facebook is so large, and plays such a significant role in the political process, that it is effectively a worldwide public utility which is accountable only to Zuckerberg. That is a business model which cannot be sustained. All Zuckerberg can do is promise reforms and hope no one notices when he doesn’t deliver, or at least that Facebook’s many critics are too ideologically divided to agree on a remedy. The rear guard action is doomed to fail at some point–probably fairly soon, although not as a result of yesterday’s circus in the House.

BUY OR SELL? Sell, sell, sell! Facebook will ultimately either be severely regulated as a public utility or broken up. I’m guessing the former.

Stuart Stevens joins an increasingly long line of prominent GOP figures who have concluded that the image of a party primarily concerned about low taxes, free trade, and limited government was a fraud. He thinks the party needs to lose big in November to return to its intellectual roots. Rich Lowry, on the other hand, notes that the GOP is beholden to its reactionary supporters, and consequently sees no point in a demolition. Who is right?

Lowry is definitely correct when he notes that a large percentage–maybe even a majority at this point–of GOP voters enthusiastically support Trump’s authoritarian populism, not a freedom-oriented Reagan agenda. That is the problem, not just Trump himself. On the other hand, Lowry doesn’t give adequate weight to the influence that Trump, other GOP leaders, and, above all, Fox News has on reactionary voters. For example, Russia used to be viewed as the enemy; today, Trump says that Putin is a friend, and they believe him. Free trade was always identified as a GOP objective; today, the GOP is largely protectionist, because Trump has decreed that it should be so. The faithful have fallen in line. And so on.

Good, clear solutions to this problem are hard to find, but I don’t see any way the GOP becomes a respectable center-right party unless Fox and the thought leaders of the GOP conclude that authoritarian populism is a dead end, and dramatically change the message they send to the rank and file on a daily basis. The only way that happens is if the GOP loses big in November. My conclusion, therefore, is that Stevens is right. Bring on the blue wave!

Amazon is a colossus of innovation. It uses its tech expertise to revolutionize everything it touches, much to the benefit of consumers and the detriment of other producers and middlemen. It is relentless. What does its future look like?

Because Amazon’s MO is to expand horizontally into fields in which it has lots of competitors, it is not particularly vulnerable to antitrust action, barring an implausible and dramatic change in the law. Unlike Google and Facebook, it doesn’t play a large role in shaping the political discourse in this country. In legal terms, it is in better shape than some of its brethren.

Amazon’s points of vulnerability are its manipulation of third party sellers on its platform and its treatment of workers. With the latter, however, the relevant question is, compared to what? Is there any credible information which suggests that Amazon’s employees are treated significantly worse than workers in comparable positions in competing companies? I’m not aware of any. As to the former, even if the federal government had the ability and the will to force Amazon to choose between its platform and its own producers, which is highly unlikely, it would hardly be fatal to the company.

BUY OR SELL? Buy. Amazon has plenty of friends and resources to use against its political opponents, and its commitment to innovation is very impressive.

At first glance, the GOP Senate stimulus package seems politically and economically foolish; if you’re unkind, you could even call it insane. It isn’t nearly sufficient to get the economy roaring back to life and improve Trump’s chances of re-election, but it is way too large for Republicans who at least like to pretend that they care about the deficit. So what’s the point?

McConnell is a PBP, so his greatest interest is in protecting the donor class. The package may be politically obtuse, but it undeniably addresses some of the biggest concerns of small businesses; it extends financial support for business, effectively cuts the minimum wage by reducing UI payments, and creates new safe havens for premises liability relating to the virus. Who could ask for more?

The rumbling about the package on the right tells you that the CLs and the Reactionaries have realized that Trump will probably lose, and that they want to start positioning themselves as critics of large deficits for the Biden administration. In other words, the Tea Party is back, baby! Expect to see a lot more absurdly hypocritical screaming from these Trump enablers about spending in the near future.

How do you break up an algorithm? That, in a nutshell, is the antitrust challenge presented by Google.

Google dominates in its field and inevitably influences the political landscape with the preferences that it creates. That makes the company a legal and political target for both the right and the left. The problem, however, is that competitors do exist, consumers don’t have any beef with Google, and there is no obvious legal solution to its dominance. The remainder of its activities are just a sideshow.

Buy or sell? I’m neutral on this one. Google’s trajectory looks fairly flat to me. There is no reason to believe that its core competency will be challenged in the foreseeable future; conversely, there is no reason to believe that it will become a diversified behemoth, like Amazon.

I don’t want to be fair to Tom Cotton, because if America ever generates its own Franco, it is far more likely to be him than the shambolic Trump. Nevertheless, it’s my duty, and I’ll do it.

The uproar about Cotton’s latest interview has two parts. The part that has received the most attention is the quote about the Founding Fathers viewing slavery as a “necessary evil.” This statement was probably a little bit too glib; many of the FFs didn’t own slaves or approve of slavery, and those who did viewed it with plenty of doubts and a measure of guilt. However, it is fair to say that the FFs who did own slaves believed (with some reason) that they could not survive economically without them, and that a united America could not exist, as a practical matter, without the slave states in 1787. That is probably what Cotton meant to say. The broader context of his statement makes it clear that he was not defending slavery just because some of the FFs owned slaves, which is what he is being made out to say.

The bigger picture is his attack on the 1619 Project, which he views as being “divisive” and “fake news.” Well, slavery, the Civil War, and the South’s subsequent version of apartheid were pretty divisive, too; on this point I am more sympathetic with the 1619 people than Cotton in spite of my frequent criticism of their work. What we have here, unfortunately, is a battle between people who think that the entire American story revolves around slavery and racism, and people like Cotton who prefer to gloss over those chapters and talk only about how great we are. The truth is in the middle; slavery and racism are a major theme in the American project, but they are not the only theme.

If you’re a huge fan of Apple products, like my wife, the good news is that the company doesn’t share the legal and political liabilities of its tech brethren. It doesn’t dominate the market with regard to any particular product, so antitrust is not a problem, and it doesn’t shape the political debate to a dangerous degree. Nobody really hates Apple–at least not like Facebook or Amazon. It’s just a well-run company with plenty of cachet and a mountain of cash.

But Apple has two different, and very serious, points of vulnerability. First, it has exposure to China that the other tech companies don’t. Losing the Chinese market would be painful; being forced to make major changes to the supply chain would be far worse than that. Second, Apple appears to have lost its mojo as a product developer. The company is basically living off its past glories at this point.

BUY OR SELL? Sell. Apple is a mature, profitable company that hasn’t shown the ability to revolutionize anything for the last several years. It’s all downhill, albeit slowly, from here.

On the Democrat candidate Joe.

His VP choice, nobody knows.

Is Kamala queen?

The left won’t be keen

‘Cause Warren’s the way they would go.

Normally, at this stage of the campaign, we would be engaged in a tolerably rational debate about policy–how to improve the economy, reform our health care system, etc. That simply isn’t happening. Why?

Part of it is due to the overwhelming importance of the pandemic, of course, but it is also caused by the interests and personalities of the candidates. Trump has no policy ideas; he is running purely to disrupt the system for four more years in the ostensible interest of “real Americans.” He portrays himself as a real life Batman protecting Gotham City from evil outsiders (Chinese; Mexicans) and left-wing looters and rioters. There is no vision of a better America here; the message is to hang on to what little we still have. Biden, for his part, has lots of ideas, but he has no incentive to discuss them, because he wants the election to be purely a referendum on Trump. The more he talks about policy, the more he exposes himself to criticism; why not just let Trump hang himself, instead?

The Biden plan is working. Don’t expect any major changes in the formula between now and November.