Strengths: famous and respected name; reasonably successful Governor of New York.
Weaknesses: lots of things in his record for fundis to criticize.
Prognosis: If Biden doesn’t run, he could conceivably win by consolidating the vote in the white/realo lane. If Biden runs, he’s toast.
Whether you like her or not, there is no arguing that Hillary Clinton is an historically significant figure. How will her career be evaluated 50 years from now?
I think there will be two components to it. First, it will be said that she was too far ahead of her time; there were just too many Americans who couldn’t accept the idea of a female president in the early 21st century. Second, she was unlucky. It is likely that she would have been elected in 2008 if the market crash had occurred six months earlier, and the MSM’s fixation with her bogus e-mail issue and Obama fatigue ultimately torpedoed her campaign in 2016.
It’s doubtful that Hillary would have been a great president, but she surely would have been competent, and that looks pretty good right now.
Strengths: Vast executive and legislative experience at the highest level; Obama connection; compelling family story; experience with national campaigns; ability to appeal to swing voters, particularly white working men.
Weaknesses: Age; occasional gaffe machine.
Prognosis: It is hard to imagine anyone with better qualifications to be president than he has. No one would notice his age and gaffe machine weaknesses when he’s standing next to Trump. He’s the leader in the clubhouse if he decides to run.
All GOP politicians feed red meat to the Reactionary base to some degree, but Trump has taken it to a whole different level. He just never stops. Why?
Here are some reasons, which are not mutually exclusive:
1. It’s fun. There’s nothing more entertaining than triggering liberal outrage.
2. He believes in rewarding loyalty. After all, nobody sticks with him like his base, and loyalty means more to him than anything else.
3. He doesn’t know what else to do. He got elected by offending moderate opinion–why would he stop now?
4. He knows he’s an implausible champion of the far right. A thrice-married, flamboyant Manhattan developer and casino owner isn’t exactly an obvious mouthpiece for white rural Christian America, so he has to keep reminding them he’s on their side.
And so he continues on Twitter, regardless of the damage it is doing to the image of this country throughout the world.
Strengths: already a national figure; very bright; strong grasp of policy details; acceptable to fundis; gets under Trump’s skin.
Weaknesses: Stop me if you’ve heard this before–a smart, uncharismatic, middle-aged white woman running against Donald Trump.
Prognosis: She only wins if the Democratic electorate decides that a virtual rematch of the 2016 election is a good idea, which it isn’t.
Here is my analysis of Bernie’s strengths, weaknesses, and chances:
Strengths: experience running a national campaign; strong support from fundi voters; a certain gruff authenticity.
Weaknesses: age; wife’s legal problems; inability to connect with minorities due to world view revolving around class; half-baked political and economic ideas; embarrassing past left-wing statements and associations.
Prognosis: Bernie succeeded in moving the needle in 2020. This time, there will be multiple candidates without his baggage running in his lane. He would be wise to quit while he’s ahead.
It has become clear, if it wasn’t clear already, that the principal obstacle to DACA isn’t Trump or Mitch McConnell; it’s Paul Ryan and the Reactionaries in the House. How can their opposition be overcome?
Plan A was the shutdown. The idea was that the popularity of DACA, along with the fallout from Trump’s inflammatory comments and the unpopularity of the shutdown, would cow the GOP into conceding the point. It was obvious even three days on that it hadn’t worked. The Democrats were wise to cut the deal with McConnell and move on.
Plan B is to get a bill through the Senate with a large majority, persuade the unpredictable Trump to support it, and rely on that support to provide political cover for Ryan to violate the Hastert Rule. Will it work? It’s worth trying, but the odds are against it. It isn’t clear that there are enough Republican votes to pass an acceptable bill, there are never any guarantees with Trump, and history suggests there are no powers on earth strong enough to make the House leadership move on this issue as long as the GOP has a majority.
My best guess is that a bill will pass, but that Trump will equivocate, and the House will do nothing. The March deadline will pass, but Trump won’t want to take the blame for any ensuing deportations, so he will call for further negotiations and extend his deadline, probably more than once. The issue will remain in limbo until the election.
Plan C is to win the election and take control of the House. That’s really the best hope for DACA.
John Boehner was always willing to violate the Hastert Rule when it was necessary to keep the government open. On the other hand, he was never willing to confront the Reactionaries in his caucus on immigration.
Ryan is currently facing both issues at once. Which path will he choose? Will he agree to allow a vote on DACA in exchange for ending the shutdown, knowing that it might cause his party to splinter, or will he opt for partisanship over the national interest?
Do you even have to ask?
Next time, it really will be different.
Hillary entered the 2008 campaign as a decided, but not overwhelming, favorite. She lost to Obama, not because of any meaningful ideological differences, but because the public preferred a fresh, articulate figure without her baggage, most notably her vote on the Iraq War. In 2016, on the other hand, the only meaningful opposition came from the left, and was ideological. This time, she won.
There will be no clear frontrunner going into 2020. The Democratic base has moved to the left. There will almost certainly be multiple minority and female candidates, and they will effectively be running in separate minority and female lanes. As a result, the primaries will look a bit like the GOP in 2016.
Who will win? I will be analyzing the chances of the known prospective candidates throughout the week.
Before Inauguration Day, it was just possible for optimists (I wasn’t one of them) to predict that Trump would jettison his ignorant racist blowhard campaign persona and evolve into a serious politician when he took office. “American Carnage” put an end to that. As Dennis Green would have said, he is what we thought he was, and he will never change.
“American Carnage” was, in retrospect, the high point of the Trump-as-Batman theme, because, with time, he has to take more and more responsibility for the status quo. But what of his promises? Where are we today?
Our political system has been corrupted. The nation has not been this divided in the last fifty years. Nuclear war is a real possibility. Our country has never been less respected overseas (except in Israel and Saudi Arabia)–at least not in my lifetime. And now the government is shut down, because Trump wants to use a program that he has previously claimed to support as bargaining leverage for other immigration concessions, which is either dishonest or completely insane.
Against that, the market is up, and unemployment is at four percent. His deregulation program and regressive tax cut have played a small role in that. On balance, is it worth it? You decide.
A number of publications have proclaimed different words “Word of the Year” for 2017. One opted for “youthquake,” based on the result of the election in the UK; others chose “feminism,” for obvious reasons.
To me, the choice is clear: it has to be “covfefe.” It tells you everything you need to know about 2017.
Until 2009, it appeared that the Republican Party had learned its lesson from the Great Depression: Bush had supported soft money and tax cuts during recessions, and all of the major GOP candidates proposed stimulus packages during the 2008 election. Then Obama was elected, and the party reverted to form: suddenly low interest rates, bailouts, and large deficits were turning us into Greece. Stagflation and economic collapse were imminent.
That didn’t happen, of course, but the people who predicted it are in power today, and they have never apologized for their mistakes. President Trump, for his part, is incapable of saying anything coherent on the issue of interest rates. When you then consider that the Fed’s ability to reduce interest rates is more limited than it was in 2008, that the current administration is doing its best to defang Dodd-Frank, and that the deficit is much larger than it was in 2008, you can see that any financial crisis in the next few years could turn into a complete disaster.
Most people associate Obama with the (successful) bailouts, but TARP was actually passed when Bush was president, mostly with Democratic votes. The GOP was severely divided on the issue.
If something similar happens under Trump, the issue will be even more contentious, because the factions are split:
The potential for calamity in the face of a financial crisis, given the splits in the GOP and Trump’s economic illiteracy, is very grave. I will have more on that tomorrow.
If you’ve seen “The Missiles of October,” you probably remember the scene in which JFK’s military advisers are calling for air strikes on Cuba. RFK responds by saying that he doesn’t want his brother to go down in history as an American Tojo.
Trump is facing the same kind of issue with North Korea. The questions for today are:
My guess is that the answer to both questions is no.