David Freedlander didn’t get New York Governor Andrew Cuomo to cooperate with him while he was writing his profile of him for Politico, and that is apparently the norm. Cuomo doesn’t want people discussing his presidential ambitions. Nonetheless, I imagine that Cuomo isn’t displeased with the piece since it paints him as a ruthlessly effective politician who gets shit done and takes no prisoners.
Overall, it’s a good piece because it provides a comprehensive history of Cuomo and his time in Albany, and it takes in commentary from a wide spectrum of views including admirers, progressive opponents, and even fearful members of Trump’s team. But there is one rather significant problem.
It begins by asking if Cuomo can win over liberals if he runs for president. It correctly sees this as his largest obstacle. It then goes into admirable detail about why this won’t be easy considering his record of vindictively antagonizing progressives and welshing on his promises. This is followed by a long and somewhat convincing argument that he’s checked off a whole lot of boxes on the progressive wishlist: free college, gay marriage, stricter gun control, a relaxation of Rockefeller-era drug laws, and a ban on fracking. In other words, he’s fought with liberals but he’s also delivered for them. Liberals should recognize his effectiveness.
And that’s all fair. But then the piece concludes with stuff like this:
It would be impossible to mount a presidential campaign in this day and age without a groundswell of support from the party’s liberal edge. People close to Cuomo know he needs to do some repair work in New York, end his bitter feud with [NYC Mayor Bill] de Blasio, push for a Democratic legislature.
He knows they will never love him. Cuomo still sees himself as an outer-borough guy, his advisers say, as the kind of person whose favorite weekend hobby is working on old cars. Those mandarins at the Times editorial board or perusing Mother Jones in the checkout line of the Park Slope Food Co-Op who think politics is about pretty words and debating ideas will never get it. “He thinks the far left think they are so much smarter and more righteous than everyone else, and that if you don’t constantly kiss their ass that there is something repugnant about you,” said one adviser. “He really doesn’t care. He’s got the unions on his side, and he knows that’s worth more than whatever the 800 ivory tower liberals in New York think about him.”
It’s hard to see how Cuomo’s “advisors” think these kinds of comments will fix the rift that has developed between their champion and the progressive left. It’s really this kind of disrespect that has prevented Cuomo from getting the credit he actually does deserve. He and his minions have punched down so hard on his critics that he’s created an army of folks for whom he’s not just an enemy. His very name is now an epithet. Here’s an example from the piece:
“The worst of the worst,” said Nomiki Konst, a Bernie Sanders delegate to the Democratic National Convention and frequent cable TV defender of the candidate who now serves on the Democratic National Committee’s Unity Commission. “Andrew Cuomo is somehow the only politician in America who still thinks neoliberalism and triangulation work, who opens up the Blue Dog playbook and says, ‘How can I use this to run for president?’”
Cuomo’s approach has worked on a lot of levels and he’s got good enough poll ratings that he could probably be reelected to another term as governor without much difficulty. But the perception that he’s from the wrong wing of the Democratic Party is widespread and is going to be tough to overcome in any effort to win the nomination for the presidency.
He’ll be able to go down the list of things he’s accomplished and make the case that he’s a solid progressive, but his hardened enemies will make things tough for him. If he really has the ambition to be president, and I do not doubt that he does, then he needs his supporters to stop trashing the progressive left.
As things stand now, he’s become a symbol of everything that is wrong with the Democratic Party. He’ll need to change that perception substantially, and I honestly don’t think he can accomplish it just by banning fracking and providing a free college program. He has to learn to turn the other cheek and make some amends. And I think those are two things that he’ll never learn to do.
He’ll make some halfhearted efforts, but he’s going to argue what this profile argues, which is that he’s an asskicker who can’t take on any opponent and vanquish them. He’s a winner who will get results.
That could be enough in a world where he wasn’t perceived as a kind of anti-Sanders persona. In the real world, though, progressives will go to the wall to deny him the nomination.
While trying to explain both why the Republicans have so few women in the Senate and why they should run more women as candidates, Nathan L. Gonzales of Roll Call offers this observation:
One seemingly obvious way to avoid Republican men’s temptation to offer their biological views on abortion and choice is to nominate a woman.
He’s obviously hearkening back to Senate candidates Todd Akin of Missouri and Richard Mourdock of Indiana who both lost five years ago when they expressed their views on pregnancies that result from rape. Akin said that rape pregnancies don’t happen and Mourdock said that they’re God’s will.
Presumably, no woman would ever say something so stupid and offensive. I guess that’s the argument. But isn’t it sad that anyone would think this was a necessary precaution? And how does that work when trying to recruit women to run? Please represent this party that is full of rape-baby apologists?
I read analysis like this and it’s not so much that I think it’s wrong exactly as that I just don’t ever want to get to the point where I think it’s normal.
How about recruiting women to run because you think they’ll be good politicians and excellent public servants?
And how about having a party that’s not so chock full of nutcase men that you think women’s primary value is that they won’t say something so dumb and toxic as to lose you a winnable seat?
If you show up in court without a lawyer visibly by your side, the judge will probably ask you if you have “representation.” That’s what lawyers do for their clients. They represent them. It’s also what political parties do for their clients. And we hope that their clients are at least sometimes the people in the states and districts the party’s politicians hope to represent. Too often, it seems, they consider their real clients to be big donors.
Nonetheless, we call the lower chamber of Congress the House of Representatives (or, alternatively, “the People’s house”) for a reason. Political parties aspire to place members in Congress where they can represent the interests of the people who are members of their party.
Mark Penn appears to have a loose grasp on this concept. He says “The path back to power for the Democratic Party today, as it was in the 1990s, is unquestionably to move to the center and reject the siren calls of the left, whose policies and ideas have weakened the party.”
It’s doubtful that it’s a good idea to pursue a strategy with the explicit aim of rejecting the values and interests of your clients. A lawyer who did this would lose the trust of the community he served. He might even be disbarred.
The better way to look at things is that the Democratic Party needs to be able to serve more clients than they are presently serving. There are too many communities right now who feel like the Democrats aren’t offering the kind of representation they want. They can find ways to meet these clients’ demands without, as a price, suddenly failing to do the one thing that they’re really fairly good at.
In fact, when you present this a zero-sum game, it becomes something you can’t accomplish. If the only way to add new clients is to lose the clients you already have, then you can’t grow. If you figure that your clients are loyal and, in any case, don’t have anywhere else to go for representation, you’ll discover that you’ve overestimated the strength of your position. There will be negative consequences if you keep going into court and doing a lousy job.
The way to look at this is not that the party has lost the support of white working class voters by doing too good of a job representing the people in their urban strongholds. The party has lost support from the white working class by doing a lousy job of representing the white working class. And there are a whole host of areas where the interests of the white working class and the Democrats’ urban base are not in conflict.
For Penn, the Democrats' problem is that they’ve criticized the police and gone too far in pushing LGBT rights. They’re too soft on illegal immigration, and they’re proposing too many “socialist” solutions. But that’s how the Democrats represent their clients. Their problem isn’t that they do this too well. They’re problem is that these issues aren’t addressing what is foremost on the minds of people living outside of the large population centers of the country.
If these people want someone to outlaw abortion, they’re going to hire the other firm. If they want someone to help them with the opioid epidemic then they might well hire the Democratic firm. If the Democrats would develop a plan for revitalizing small-town entrepreneurship and regional equality, they could take that plan to these communities and make a case that they’re best prepared to revitalize them economically.
If the Democrats have a problem it’s their impulse to impose a uniformity on the party that just won’t work if the goal is to compete everywhere. Everyone seemed enthusiastic about Howard Dean’s 50-state strategy when he rolled it out as chairman of the DNC. Progressives want the party to compete everywhere. What they don’t want is to have the party speak with two voices on key issues. That’s understandable, but it’s easy to make the perfect the enemy of having any political power on the state or national level.
Too often, progressives operate from the reverse side of the same basic paradigm that Penn is using, which is that any emphasis on attracting white working class voters must of necessity involve a zero-sum calculation where they come out on the short end of the stick.
Admittedly, things can get uncomfortably fuzzy at the juncture where contentious issues meet. But progressives need to be mindful that civil rights, the environment and social justice are best served and protected when the broad left has majorities. If a little fuzz is the price for obtaining those majorities, the tradeoff is well worth it.
Living at all times at that intersection where divisions are emphasized and hashed out is not a productive way of going about our business. The productive course is figuring out how the party can serve the interests of potential clients in more communities without at the same time failing to represent the left.
Mark Penn doesn’t attempt this. At all.
This is why he is a legendary failure as a political strategist. But, to be honest, he’s only a mirror image of the same problem a lot of people on the left are having figuring out how to regain power. It’s one part of lack of imagination and two parts lack of effort. Progressives are always giving me reasons why white working class voters won’t support the Democrats even though the whole point is that their support elected Barack Obama and not Hillary Clinton. Their support gave the Democrats control of most state legislatures in the 1990’s and their lack of support is locking the Democrats out of power in a large majority of states in the present.
Mark Penn is right about only one thing, and that is that the Democrats are suffering terribly due to their loss of support from white working class people. The solution is not to try to become a party that serves white working class people at the expense of the still-loyal members of the party. That suggestion is idiotic on its face. The solution is to find a way to represent working people regardless of their race, and if that means that the party isn’t as coherent as some people would like, that’s just too bad.
The way David Petraeus describes U.S. foreign policy under Donald Trump is hard to quickly summarize. I guess he’s basically saying that the foreign policy establishment, including the key figures in Trump’s cabinet, is like a really sturdy ship with lots of ballast with an excellent crew. While it might be true that the captain is charting an erratic zig-zag course, there’s little danger that the ship will get lost or capsize. In fact, the basic structure and crew is so solid that it’s “immaterial” whether or not the captain is mentally ill because he is incapable of doing any lasting harm.
This is nonsense, of course. Trump is destroying America’s credibility on the world stage, and there is now statistical evidence to support this. Pew Research recently surveyed people in 37 nations, and only the people of Israel and Russia have a better opinion of Trump’s America than they had of Obama’s. In most cases, the drop-off is very large. We’re down 83 points in Sweden, for example, and 75 points in Germany and the Netherlands.
Moreover, not every impulsive, ill-informed, ill-considered decision can be corrected by Trump’s staff and the foreign policy establishment. Petraeus cites a few cases of this happening, like when Trump seemed to waffle on the two-state solution in Israel/Palestine or the One-China policy. Petraeus assured us that the failure to reassure Europe about our commitment to Article 5 of NATO has been rectified and that our Syria policy is ultimately on a sound course. But some decisions can’t be taken back.
What happens when Trump gives an order that commits us to a course of action? And, however wise our foreign policy establishment might be (and recent history calls this premise into serious question), what happens when they don’t agree with each other and a mentally ill person needs to make the final call?
Anyone who says that it’s okay to have a mentally ill captain isn’t a serious person. We’re now faced with making a decision about whether we can wait around until after North Korea has miniaturized their nuclear weapons to the point that they can place them on ICBMs before we respond. Does Trump understand what might be required of our nation if we decide to take preventive military action against Pyongyang. Does he know what will happen to Seoul and perhaps Tokyo? Does he even know what China did the last time we had a conflict on the Korean peninsula or what would be required to prevent a potentially nuclear-armed conflict with them?
Before anyone even thinks of committing us to that kind of risk, they’d have to understand all of it. They’d have to prepare for it. One reason we didn’t win in Korea the last time is because we weren’t ready for it. There are enormous diplomatic and alliance-building tasks that would be involved, and those same types of tasks will be required to settle the matter without war.
We’d also need a leader who had some credibility with the American people and with Congress. Even if Trump is mentally fit in some ways, he doesn’t have what it takes to meet these challenges. Petraeus should know this and I think he does. Why he says otherwise is anybody’s guess, but he’s not helping.
The stakes are far too high here for this kind of screwing around with the truth. People like Petraeus need to stop bullshitting us and themselves and get on board with making sure we’re prepared for what’s coming. We’ll never be prepared as long as Trump is the final decision-maker.
I really like the piece Nancy LeTourneau wrote this morning. She titled it Dear Trump Voters: The 1950’s Aren’t Coming Back, but it’s actually about more than that. Obviously, we can’t return to the past. In most cases, we wouldn’t want to anyway. We are creatures of our own time and wouldn’t feel at home in another.
Her piece is really about dispositions and the difference between those who have an appetite for change and those who want to protect the social order that exists or that has existed for most of their living memory. She calls the latter attitude a “confederate” disposition, and I think she provides a keen insight when she highlights the lack of legitimacy unwelcome democratic outcomes have for Trump supporters and Tea Party types.
A democratic process that could result in the election of Abraham Lincoln wasn’t respected because it signaled that political efforts to change the social order preferred in the South had some kind of sanction from the people. In a similar manner, a process that could result in a black president or a woman president was not respected. That process could be attacked by taking measures to suppress the vote. Maybe it could be attacked by colluding with a foreign country.
For my purposes, though, I’d like to take a little heat out of this explanation. What I want to take away from it isn’t so much that there are people who feel threatened by democracy when it creates change they don’t want. If there are people who’d prefer to live in a country where women don’t compete with men for jobs, where Jim Crow is widespread, where homosexuality is a crime, where we have no environmental or consumer protection whatsoever, where Medicare and Medicaid don’t exist, well…those people don’t interest me much except insofar as they’re winning politically. I don’t want or believe that we can get their votes. I only want to figure out how to beat them.
We can call these people “confederates” if we want. I think it’s a useful way of making a point about human psychology. We can call them “deplorables,” too, considering that they have attitudes about women and race and human sexuality that can’t or shouldn’t be translated into policy in a modern society. We should certainly be mindful of their contempt for representative government and the legitimacy it brings.
But we tend to exaggerate how many of these people there really are, and we also are perhaps too unwilling to admit how many of them have spent most of their lives voting for Democrats or how reliant we have been and still are on winning political support from at least some of them. The truth is that people are more complicated than these caricatures. It’s a simple fact that many people voted for Trump because they were attracted to some of his racist themes but also voted for a black candidate four or eight years earlier because they made a different calculation. This often seems too difficult for people to grasp. But you can see it here in black and white:
Many Democrats have a shorthand explanation for Clinton’s defeat: Her base didn’t turn out, Donald Trump’s did and the difference was too much to overcome.
But new information shows that Clinton had a much bigger problem with voters who had supported President Barack Obama in 2012 but backed Trump four years later.
Those Obama-Trump voters, in fact, effectively accounted for more than two-thirds of the reason Clinton lost, according to Matt Canter, a senior vice president of the Democratic political firm Global Strategy Group. In his group’s analysis, about 70 percent of Clinton’s failure to reach Obama’s vote total in 2012 was because she lost these voters.
It might seem impossible for someone to be attracted to Trump because of his racist attitudes and also attracted to Barack Obama, but it wasn’t impossible at all. This is because race was only one factor among many in how people made their decisions. For some, Obama’s race wasn’t a plus but it also wasn’t a dealbreaker. Maybe Hillary Clinton’s gender was the dealbreaker. Maybe they became convinced that Clinton was personally corrupt and were concerned that she was under FBI investigation, which were things they never worried about with Barack Obama. Maybe it feels different when your community is roughly split in who they’re supporting, but it becomes a more courageous act to support the Democrat when eighty percent of your neighbors are supporting the Republican. Maybe some people just vote against the incumbent party every single time.
What I think is important is to not exaggerate what happened and to write off whole sections of the country as beyond reach or hope. We get bogged down in trying to figure out if people voted for Trump because they’re irredeemably retrograde in their social attitudes or because their communities have been left behind, particularly in the post-Great Recession economy. If these communities had voted for Clinton at anything close to the rate they voted for Obama, she would have won a giant victory because she actually took suburban votes away from the Republicans. In the Philly suburbs, for example, she came away with 65,000 more net votes in the bank than Obama had, and she started out with a statewide cushion to begin with. She still lost.
What we need to understand is how to win enough Obama-Trump voters back, and that might not be the exact same thing as understanding why they abandoned us.
Nancy identified one clue when she quoted Robert Jones, CEO of the Public Religion Research Institute, to explore the power of nostalgia:
Trump’s campaign—with its sweeping promise to “make American great again”—triumphed by converting self-described “values voters” into what I’ve called “nostalgia voters.” Trump’s promise to restore a mythical past golden age—where factory jobs paid the bills and white Protestant churches were the dominant cultural hubs—powerfully tapped evangelical anxieties about an uncertain future.
We need to be mindful of two things. The first is the power of these appeals to nostalgia and the second is the fact that not all nostalgia is illegitimate. I believe that the left can do better by developing a competing nostalgia than they can by writing off the entire sentiment as morally unacceptable.
I don’t think I was fully conscious of the nostalgia element while I was writing my piece How to Win Rural Voters Without Losing Liberal Values, but I was grasping for a way to meet this longing for a bygone America in a way that would combine political effectiveness, good policy, and actual benefit to these afflicted communities without at the same time succumbing to or accommodating their worst instincts or characteristics.
Wanting racial segregation back is not a legitimate form of nostalgia. Wanting women out of the boardroom and elected office is not legitimate. Putting gays and lesbians back in the closet is not legitimate. Eliminating the Department of Education and the EPA is not legitimate. What’s legitimate is wanting your small town to have small businesses back. It’s not unreasonable to want it to be possible for your kids to settle nearby to you and have opportunities to prosper. In the simplest formula, people would like their kids to have to the same or better opportunities that they had, and to have them in the same place.
This is why I identified anti-monopoly and antitrust enforcement as the direction the Democrats need to go. We can’t rebuild these communities by bringing back heavy industry, but we can restore their ability to compete as small businesspeople.
How would this sound on the campaign trail?
Well, I’ll give you two examples.
The first is from 1912. It’s Woodrow Wilson campaigning in Lincoln, Nebraska:
“Which do you want? Do you want to live in a town patronized by some great combination of capitalists who pick it out as a suitable place to plant their industry and draw you into their employment? Or do you want to see your sons and your brothers and your husbands build up business for themselves under the protection of laws which make it impossible for any giant, however big, to crush them and put them out of business, so that they can match their wits here, in the midst of a free country with any captain of industry or merchant of finance … anywhere in the world?”
The second is from 1952. It’s Hubert Humphrey speaking from the Senate floor:
“We are talking about the kind of America we want.… Do we want an America where the economic marketplace is filled with a few Frankensteins and giants? Or do we want an America where there are thousands upon thousands of small entrepreneurs, independent businessmen, and landholders who can stand on their own feet and talk back to their government or to anyone else?”
I have a longstanding habit of mocking the columns of David Brooks, but he manages to provide a useful supplement to this conversation in his column today. His theory is that a lot of Trump country was once on the frontier, and the legacy from that is that people value self-reliance even when their circumstances actually call for accepting some help. As long as we don’t take that observation too far, we can use it to understand that a lot of the more culturally conservative places in America will respond better to a message (and ultimately policies, too) that is directed at their aspirations to be self-reliant again. We can give them subsidies to get health care. We can make sure their kids get enough nutrition. We can offer them free college. But what they want more than assistance is a chance to compete again. And we can offer that.
We can offer that without making concessions on civil rights or pretending we agree with them on social issues. In fact, the alternatives seem to me to be either giving up on them and their communities altogether (which means empowering their worst elements and our political opponents) or conceding on these things and asking them to vote for the lower calorie version of what they actually prefer.
The North Korean missile that soared high above the Sea of Japan on Tuesday was hailed by state-run television as a “shining success.” But to U.S. officials, it was a most unwelcome surprise: a weapon with intercontinental range, delivered years before most Western experts believed such a feat possible.
Hours after the apparently successful test, intelligence agencies continued to run calculations to determine precisely how the missile, dubbed the Hwasong-14, performed in its maiden flight. But the consensus among missile experts was that North Korea had achieved a long-sought milestone, demonstrating a capability of striking targets thousands of miles from its coast.
Initial Pentagon assessments said North Korea had tested a “land-based, intermediate-range” missile that landed in the Sea of Japan just under 600 linear miles from its launch point, Panghyon Airfield, near the Chinese border. The State Department later confirmed North Korea had launched an intercontinental ballistic missile, or ICBM. Government and independent analyses showed the missile traveling in a steep arc that topped out at more than 1,740 vertical miles above the Earth’s surface.
If flown in a more typical trajectory, the missile would have easily traveled 4,000 miles, potentially putting all of Alaska within its range, according to former government officials and independent analysts. A missile that exceeds a range of 3,400 miles is classified as an ICBM.
“This is a big deal: It’s an ICBM, not a ‘kind of’ ICBM,’ ” said Jeffrey Lewis, director of the East Asia program at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies. “And there’s no reason to think that this is going to be the maximum range.”
Anyone with even one ounce of sense in their brains understands that we urgently need to replace our commander in chief. So, let’s get on with it.
As Donald Trump prepares to travel to Germany for the G20 summit, he has succeeded in getting the country he leads defriended:
In their campaign program for the German election, Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservatives have dropped the term “friend” in describing the relationship with the United States.
Four years ago, the joint program of her Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU), referred to the United States as Germany’s “most important friend” outside of Europe.
The 2013 program also described the “friendship” with Washington as a “cornerstone” of Germany’s international relations and talked about strengthening transatlantic economic ties through the removal of trade barriers.
But the words “friend” and “friendship” are missing from the latest election program – entitled “For a Germany in which we live well and happily” – which Merkel and CSU leader Horst Seehofer presented on Monday ahead of a Sept. 24 election.
The German people are similarly unimpressed with our new president.
A survey by the Pew Research Center last week showed that just 35 percent of Germans have a favorable view of the United States, down from 57 percent at the end of President Barack Obama’s term.
I don’t really care if this helps or hurts Trump politically here at home. It’s an indication that he’s failing to lead the Western world and putting American interests at risk.
One of the first freakouts the right engineered after Barack Obama became president occurred only one week after he took office in 2009. They managed to win a full article in the New York Times dedicated largely to the fact that the new occupant of the Oval Office showed up to work on the weekend in business casual attire and allowed his staff to do the same.
If Mr. Obama’s clock is looser than Mr. Bush’s, so too are his sartorial standards. Over the weekend, Mr. Obama’s first in office, his aides did not quite know how to dress. Some showed up in the West Wing in jeans (another no-no under Mr. Bush), some in coats and ties.
So the president issued an informal edict for “business casual” on weekends — and set his own example. He showed up Saturday for a briefing with his chief economic adviser, Lawrence H. Summers, dressed in slacks and a gray sweater over a white buttoned-down shirt. Workers from the Bush White House are shocked.
“I’ll never forget going to work on a Saturday morning, getting called down to the Oval Office because there was something he was mad about,” said Dan Bartlett, who was counselor to Mr. Bush. “I had on khakis and a buttoned-down shirt, and I had to stand by the door and get chewed out for about 15 minutes. He wouldn’t even let me cross the threshold.”
This would not be the last time that President Obama was accused of not having a proper respect for the dignity of the office.
I have a really bad memory except for certain things. It’s a long time ago now, but I still remember the story the new Bush administration engineered in the early days of Dubya’s presidency about the freaking dress code and its importance. I will quote this at length:
One of the very first decisions President Bush made after his inauguration was to reinstate the White House dress code. Like much of what he does, this move seemed to be primarily aimed at pleasing his father. It can’t be easy having George Sr. for a dad, and it’s too bad about the president’s inner child, but it’s hard to watch Bush use policy to gain his father’s approval and not feel uncomfortable — it’s like we’ve walked in on something really private.
The dress code was established initially by the first Bush administration, and, at the time, it specified that women wear knee-length skirts and stockings in the West Wing. In other words, during the administrations of Ronald Reagan and Bush the Elder, only the boys wore pants. Because this was an idea whose time came — and went — in the Paleozoic era, the minor style revolution that followed with the election of Bill Clinton was totally inadvertent.
“On Inauguration Day, I was wearing a pantsuit,” Dee Dee Myers, Clinton’s former press secretary, told Chris Bury on “Nightline” two days after George W. Bush’s inauguration. “It was a very cold day in Washington and when I came into the West Wing, I actually broke what had been a Reagan and Bush protocol rule, which was: Women weren’t allowed to wear slacks. And so we sort of changed that protocol right from the very beginning, accidentally. I don’t think any of us realized there was a dress code that officially or unofficially discouraged or barred women from wearing slacks.”
The no-pants rule was never rehabilitated, so after the recent dress code announcement, many feared the worst: nude pantyhose. When Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer eventually declared that “the [women’s] pantsuits can stay,” women outside the Amish community breathed a collective sigh of relief.
He made it clear, however, that in this administration, West Wing women would be required to wear “appropriate business attire” and men would be expected to wear suits and ties at all times. The point, as one aide told the New York Times, was “to treat the office with respect.”
In case that isn’t clear enough for you, even back in 2001, the right-wing media was geared up to amplify the point.
“Mr. Bush is restoring the dignity that used to be associated with the Presidency,” wrote Tom Barrett on Christianlink.com. “Gone are the blue jeans, tie-dyes, T-shirts and jogging shorts that were considered appropriate attire during Clinton’s Presidency.”
“Out are the 20-something, denim-wearing, pony-tailed Clintonites known for strewing pizza boxes throughout the halls,” wrote Joseph Curl of the Washington Times. “In are the 30- and 40-something, box-cut, scrubbed-clean, suit-and-tie-wearing Bushies.”
This whole narrative was tiresome from the beginning, but it was at least in part based on the fact the new president wanted to run his White House in a way that would meet the approval of his father. Running the executive branch of the federal government is a serious job and Poppy Bush thought his staff should look the part.
This is what I think about when I read President Trump’s tweets.
It’s not that I ever thought criticisms that the Clinton administration (as opposed to the president himself) didn’t uphold the dignity of the office were serious. It’s just that I look at what Trump does and I try to imagine how Poppy must feel about it.
Back in April, when the BBC talked to Thomas Homer-Dixon, chair of global systems at the Balsillie School of International Affairs in Waterloo, Canada, about the prospects for the collapse of Western Civilization, they were told that things do not look good.
The Syrian case aside, another sign that we’re entering into a danger zone, Homer-Dixon says, is the increasing occurrence of what experts call nonlinearities, or sudden, unexpected changes in the world’s order, such as the 2008 economic crisis, the rise of ISIS, Brexit, or Donald Trump’s election.
I guess you can call that an updated version of the four signs of the Apocalypse. These nonlinearities aren’t so much causes of our current problems as they are consequences of them. Many have noted how the invasion of Iraq cascaded into the Syrian civil war, and also how a drought brought on by climate change contributed to the disintegration of Syria’s political consensus. The financial collapse of 2008 was foreseen by relatively few experts but came about as a natural consequence of a failure to adequately regulate financial instruments. And both Brexit and the election of Donald Trump are widely regarded as hard to foresee consequences of growing income inequality and anxiety about immigration and refugee patterns.
For Homer-Dixon, there are echoes in all of this of the end state of the Western Roman Empire:
Also paralleling Rome, Homer-Dixon predicts that Western societies’ collapse will be preceded by a retraction of people and resources back to their core homelands. As poorer nations continue to disintegrate amid conflicts and natural disasters, enormous waves of migrants will stream out of failing regions, seeking refuge in more stable states. Western societies will respond with restrictions and even bans on immigration; multi-billion dollar walls and border-patrolling drones and troops; heightened security on who and what gets in; and more authoritarian, populist styles of governing. “It’s almost an immunological attempt by countries to sustain a periphery and push pressure back,” Homer-Dixon says.
Maybe this is the very definition of alarmist, but it doesn’t feel like something we can afford to be complacent about. It seems more like an invitation to awaken from the dream-state most progressives (including myself) were living in during the Obama years when things appeared to be stressed by moving methodically in a generally positive direction. Of course, there was a lot of concern about all of these issues and whether we were reacting with enough coordination and urgency to meet our challenges. Efforts to mitigate Climate Change were criticized as inadequate, and the same could be said for regulating Wall Street. The Occupy Movement was a visible expression that income inequality was not improving. And the Middle East continued to disintegrate causing a massive refugee crisis that Europe was struggling to manage. Nonetheless, we had leadership that understood these challenges and was working on them with varying degrees of success. We weren’t ready for the nonlinearities that were hidden just off the horizon. Perhaps the clouds looked ominous, but almost no one forecast how quickly the storm would arrive.
Of course, there were exceptions and we can now point to a few individuals who were especially prescient. I liken these people to the folks who were early in seeing the direction Europe was headed in the 1930’s. Back then, the progressive view was shaped by the experience of the First World War which looked in retrospect like a lot of death and expense for what was ultimately a spat among elite royal families, rapacious imperialists, and nationalist shit-stirrers. The default position in the United States was of isolationism and non-intervention.
Franklin Roosevelt had an appropriate level of foresight and alarm but he didn’t have unity within his own party. Once he decided that the challenge required him to run for an unprecedented third term in office, he began to move beyond traditional partisanship in an effort to rally the country to the challenge. To give one example, he asked for the resignation of his Secretary of War, Harry Hines Woodring, because he opposed helping supply the United Kingdom for their fight against the Nazis.
A strict non-interventionist, Woodring came under pressure from other cabinet members to resign in the first year of World War II. Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes met with Roosevelt at least twice to call for Woodring’s firing, but FDR was at first unwilling to do so, instead appointing outspoken interventionist Louis A. Johnson as Woodring’s assistant secretary of war. Woodring and Johnson were immediately at odds, and quickly reached the point where they refused to speak to each other.[8] On June 20, 1940, Roosevelt ended the struggle by finally firing Woodring, replacing him with long-time Republican politician Henry Stimson.
Even more strikingly, FDR hired Frank Knox to serve as the Secretary of the Navy. This was remarkable because Knox had been Alf Landon’s running mate four years earlier. To put this in today’s terms, imagine if Barack Obama had been sufficiently alarmed about the foreign policy myopia in his own party and the need to unify the country for a coming struggle that he had put Sarah Palin in charge of our naval fleets.
On one level, this comparison is ludicrous. Frank Knox was a capable person. Sarah Palin is not a capable person. Still, on another level, it is a one-to-one comparison.
It might be more useful to imagine what a newly-minted President Mike Pence might do to reunify the country. If he tapped Joe Biden or Tim Kaine to serve in his cabinet we’d begin to see a more appropriate parallel.
I’m fully aware that Mike Pence is no more Franklin Roosevelt than Sarah Palin is Frank Knox, but that shouldn’t prevent me from pointing out how a previous president responded to a situation where the country wasn’t prepared for the coming storm and elements of his party were living in denial.
If this country still has enough of a pulse to rid itself of Donald Trump before it is too late, it will be Mike Pence’s job to try to patch something together from what is left. If he acts like everyone expects him to, he’ll only be a modest improvement. If he’s smart, he’ll realize that he needs to unify the country. He’ll see how climate change and income inequality are contributing to disintegration and conflict and resource wars.
I know it’s more likely that he’ll do none of this. Gerald Ford tried to bring the country together by putting people like Henry Kissinger, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld in charge of his administration. That’s about what I’d expect from Pence, with retrograde attitudes about human sexuality thrown in to make things maximally divisive.
Still, we’re in a deep hole and our commander in chief is clearly insane. We can’t go on like this, and we have to take one small step after another to climb out. If he gets the chance, and I hope he soon does, Pence should look back at FDR to find a role model for how to act in a situation of similar national and civilizational peril.
For the record, I do the exact same thing I've always done. It's just that my neighborhood has gone to shit. Actually, my whole country has gone mad, so I guess I shouldn't complain that much that my audience has as well.
I should have known that when the evidence began to come to light, it would reveal a second-rate operation. The most prized witness here is dead but presumably he didn’t take his electronic records with him. The FBI is going to be very interested in talking to this John Szobocsan fellow. Very interested. It looks like he and the recently deceased Peter W. Smith were partners in DigaComm LLC, “a private equity and venture capital firm specializing in seed, start ups, emerging growth, mature, growth capital, industry consolidation, buyout, and early stage investments” that is no longer actively trading. And Mr. Szobocsan is up to his ears in Russian collusion. He made a big mistake when he decided to get on a call with Matt Tait, an “information security specialist for GCHQ” and talk about getting stolen documents from Russian hackers.
It is no overstatement to say that my conversations with Smith shocked me. Given the amount of media attention given at the time to the likely involvement of the Russian government in the DNC hack, it seemed mind-boggling for the Trump campaign—or for this offshoot of it—to be actively seeking those emails. To me this felt really wrong.
In my conversations with Smith and his colleague, I tried to stress this point: if this dark web contact is a front for the Russian government, you really don’t want to play this game. But they were not discouraged. They appeared to be convinced of the need to obtain Clinton’s private emails and make them public, and they had a reckless lack of interest in whether the emails came from a Russian cut-out. Indeed, they made it quite clear to me that it made no difference to them who hacked the emails or why they did so, only that the emails be found and made public before the election.
Trump obviously felt the same way. Of course, there’s a total absence of evidence that Clinton’s server was hacked at all. But we do pretty much know now that this “offshoot” of the Trump campaign was working with the Russians.
The story just didn’t make much sense—that is, until the Journal yesterday published the critical fact that U.S. intelligence has reported that Russian hackers were looking to get emails to Flynn through a cut-out during the Summer of 2016, and this was no idle speculation on my part.
Suddenly, my story seemed important—and ominous.
Matt Tait has now spilled the beans. He’s made it clear that Peter W. Smith convincingly made the case that he was working in concert with the Trump campaign and was dialed into their operation at a very high level. This was evident from the keen insights he had about the internal operations and conflicts within the campaign, and also from his representations that he was working in concert with Michael Flynn and his son, Kellyanne Conway, Steve Bannon, and Sam Clovis. And, yes, there is documentary evidence that Smith made those representations.
The defense here will be that Smith was a rogue operator, but that defense will only stand up if there is no electronic trail to debunk it. All communications Smith had with principals in the campaign will now be subject to review.
A lot depends on what the investigators find.
And now we know why Trump wanted Comey to stop looking at Flynn, and why he fired Comey when he refused to comply.
