Category Archives: Politics

The Democrats’ Winnowing Process

15 Jan 2020 By in Politics Tags: , , , , 5 Comments

On Monday, a depleted Cory Booker dropped out of the presidential race, three weeks before the Iowa caucus.  He had been running for president for nearly a year.  The senator’s departure leaves a dozen Democrats still in the race.  In the incredibly silly yet arduous process used to sift through presidential contenders, sixteen Democrats who were running have already failed.

Yes, they recruited campaign staffs, solicited donations, spoke at rallies, sought friends in wine caves, and pontificated on debate stages, only to gnash their teeth in despair over low statistics gathered through doubtful methods but taken as proof that they wouldn’t catch on.  The reasons remain mysterious, but the polls “say” that these candidates are not what the American Tigger likes.

So Marianne Williamson, Kamala Harris, Julian Castro, Beto O’Rourke, Steve Bullock, Kirsten Gillibrand, Bill de Blasio,  Eric Swalwell, Jay Inslee, John Hickenlooper, Tim Ryan, Joe Sestak, Richard Ojeda, Seth Moulton, Wayne Messam, and now Cory Booker, have all dropped out—beaten before even a single vote has been cast.

Meanwhile, likely voters (and donors) are being looked to determine what the Democratic Party needs.  The Democratic National Committee  is being decidedly hands-off when it comes to the all-important matter of picking a standard-bearer who can beat Trump.  Given the divide that has opened up between progressives and moderates, the candidate who wins the nomination will fatefully determine the tilt of the entire party.

It’s left to the voters to judge the vast assemblage that has shown up in response to what is essentially an open casting call.  The debate stage is an audition for the presidency (a crude test, given what being an effective president actually involves).  Not surprisingly, many voters are holding off in picking a favorite, until they can see what other people think.  Who is a winner?  This is what ordinary voters expect someone else to decide.

Am I a typical voter, I who could imagine voting for Sanders, or Steyer, or Bullock, or Bloomberg?  Even very well-informed voters may well yet be holding fire.  Which makes me wonder about the meaning, at present, of those all-important opinion polls that sites like FiveThirtyEight and RealClearPolitics keep track of for us, and which have caused so many interesting Democratic talents to drop out.

Image: from this source.
Joseph Keppler’s 1884 “An Unpleasant Ride through the Presidential Haunted Forest,” shows Uncle Sam and Dame Democracy riding in terror through a woods haunted with the ghosts of some twenty “dead” presidential hopefuls. Click to enlarge.

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The Second of Two Thoughts (Bernie Sanders and Turnout)

8 Jan 2020 By in Politics Tags: , , , , 9 Comments

I watched Judy Woodruff interview Bernie Sanders on the PBS Newshour last night and saw something different in his demeanor.  His speech was just as direct as ever, just as ardent, but he was unusually composed and calm.  Maybe it was the heart attack that changed him, or maybe it has occurred to him, “I can win this thing.”

New public opinion polling shows Sanders’ popularity among likely Democratic voters beginning to exceed that of moderate front-runner Joe Biden.  In addition, Sanders is an unmatched powerhouse among Dems when it comes to fund-raising.  He is estimated to have raised $100 million in 2019, roughly forty million dollars more than Biden, and far surpassing even the enthusiastically backed Pete Buttigieg, who reportedly raised about $75 million last year.

After years of being a long-shot candidate, Bernie suddenly seems a lot more viable—even more mainstream.   His talking points haven’t changed, but the political atmosphere and the wishes of the American people have.  To a citizenry weary of the bizarre outbursts and imbroglios President Trump is so fond of, Sanders’ consistency and plain speech are almost soothing.  He comes across as an aging hippy uncle who has mellowed and acquired good manners over the decades by rubbing elbows with people of wildly different persuasions on Capitol Hill.  His views are reassuringly humane and, from his having repeated them over and over, no longer sound as crazy as they did at first.  He is a peacenik who believes that the US can figure out how to be fairer and deliver national health care and education more affordably.

His remarks on the Newshour zeroed in on the issue of voter turnout and political energy.  Sanders argues that he is the Democratic candidate best suited to oppose Trump because he’s most capable of energizing voters, especially young voters, and getting them to turn out.  “To beat Trump,” he was saying, “you’re going to need a massive  voter  turnout. And the only way you do that is through a campaign of energy, of excitement. You have got to bring working people. You have got to bring young people into the political process.”  In short, the nominee must inspire voters to get involved.

A crucial point.  Candidates’ varying ability to galvanize voters in the general election is a factor completely left to the side in primary polling.  A positive excitement, a charismatic appeal: precisely the ingredients missing in the Hillary debacle.  This time around, I hope to God Democrats will refrain from choosing a “meh” candidate who can’t rouse the electorate to go to the polls.  If the Dems make this mistake again—a mistake they have made innumerable times, as they did with Dukakis, Gore, Kerry, and Hillary—Trump and the Republicans will almost certainly prevail.  Then a disappointed nation will be feeling the burn.

In Truth, No One Knows What Will Happen

4 Dec 2019 By in Politics Tags: , , , , , 17 Comments


We’ve heard a lot of bluster from Republicans lately, much of it pooh-poohing impeachment and the odds of President Trump’s being removed from office.

In Congress, Republicans used the House Intelligence Committee’s recently concluded public hearings to depict impeachment as uninteresting, unpopular, unfair, unnecessary, unsubstantiated, unpromising, and unwise.  The Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, likewise prejudged the whole endeavor, saying that should the Senate try Trump on impeachment charges, “It’s inconceivable to me there would be 67 votes to remove the president from office.”

So say the Republicans, with impressive bravado.  Meanwhile, the nation is heading straight at a moment of truth that will show what every Republican in the House and Senate is made of.

The public has received a mass of credible evidence that the president violated his oath of office to pursue a delusional personal agenda at the expense of national security.  Trump enlisted other senior White House officials to further this agenda, explicitly empowering a private citizen, former NYC mayor Rudy Giuliani, to orchestrate it.  The House Intel hearings were an effective whodunnit.  A parade of witnesses described a president at ease with sacrificing America’s public interests to those of Russia and to what matters to him personally.  Such are the “goods” Republicans are bent on defending, at the expense of nation, party, and their own place in American history.

For, if the president’s conduct is tolerated, our republic is gone.

Republicans have sought to diminish the gravity of this Constitutional crisis.  They complain mightily about the Democrats, perhaps because it’s painful to admit the turpitude embodied in the leader of their own party.  They evoke the 63 million Americans who voted for President Trump in 2016, as if the mandate he secured then forever freed him from Constitutional limits or Congressional oversight.  Republicans even assert that the riveting testimony given before the House Intel Committee was trivial and boring, whereas this great week of political theater was singularly dramatic, momentous, and often moving.  Americans are far more sophisticated and more concerned with political rectitude than Republican lawmakers care to consider.  No poll can predict what will happen to Republicans who choose to enable Trump’s abuse of power.

Republicans like Jim Jordan and Devin Nunes pander to the sort of voter they imagine forms the unshakable bedrock of Trump’s support: this voter is ill-informed, narrow-minded, and easily hurt.  Republicans point to Trump’s forty-percent approval rating, as though this were a justification for abdicating the responsibilities Congress has to the Constitution.  Congressional Republicans come across as fearful of securing office on their own terms, once this amazing charlatan leaves the public stage (which, given presidential term limits, is destined to happen anyway).

Deference to Trump’s “base” is curious and self-defeating.  Trump is one of the least popular presidents in recent history, on a par with Gerald Ford.  (For graphical comparisons to other presidents, click here and scroll down.)

A simplistic and condescending view of the voter has the Republican establishment running very scared.  Republicans wants citizens everywhere to believe that impeachment is doomed, because otherwise Republican politicians will have to face the crisis of leading their constituents into the post-Trump age.  Will Republicans continue to shirk the responsibility of leading, which, in a republic, involves educating citizens on complex matters and figuring out how to change their constituents’ minds?

Impeachment is now before the House Judiciary Committee.  In the coming weeks, Republicans in power will come under increasing pressure to lead the nation, rather than dither about how hard it is to do the right thing.

Image: Edmund S. Valtman’s “Don’t Put Up Any Resistance! Just Keep In Step,” published 13 April 1973, from this source.

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Devin Nunes Experiments With a Race to the Bottom

14 Nov 2019 By in Politics Tags: , , , , , 5 Comments


How congressman Devin Nunes behaved on the opening day of the House’s public impeachment hearings epitomizes how loyalty to Trump jeopardizes the personal honor of every House Republican while threatening the viability of the Republican Party.

The televised hearings invite a nationwide audience of millions to observe and evaluate the merits of every political actor involved in a momentous and rare Constitutional proceeding.  As the ranking Republican member of the House Intelligence Committee, Nunes used his opening statement to deliver a partisan tirade, airing longstanding grievances irrelevant to the day’s proceedings, maligning his Democratic colleagues as liars, and insulting witnesses George Kent and William Taylor, whose accomplishments and integrity plainly far exceeded Nunes’s own.

Nunes and other Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee are intent on defending President Trump, but they have not really thought far enough ahead to understand how their prejudice in his favor will come across to citizens, who are counting on Congress to examine the president’s behavior fairly and impartially.  The public hearings are a special test of Republican leadership and integrity, because millions of well-informed Americans already know that President Trump has abused his power for personal political gain–not least because the president’s official spokesman, Mick Mulvaney, has already told them so.  Likewise, millions of Americans, including some of Mr. Nunes’s constituents, undoubtedly realize that the president’s behavior is an indefensible deviation from his Constitutionally sworn duties and a challenge to Congress.  They are looking to see whether Republican lawmakers have the courage and independence to admit that Trump’s personal behavior threatens everything republican government stands for.  Will House Republicans fail to admit that Trump must be stopped?

It was doubly ironical to witness Nunes’s crude attacks on the Democrats, given that the hearings were imbued with a concern for our national security and a patriotic determination to safeguard our republican form of government–issues historically central to the strength of the GOP.  Democrats came off as patriotic defenders of our national integrity, whereas Nunes’s petty assertions must have dismayed anyone who cares about curbing Russian aggression or has been part of American efforts to support the principle of self-determination abroad.  The injury that Nunes’s strategy inflicted fell mainly on his own personal reputation, for his fellow-Republicans and he tarnished themselves in defense of indefensible things.

House Republicans may be scared.  Yet what is the nature of the hold Trump has on them?  When will they see that their own best interest lies in being silent and attending solely to the facts presented, rather than whining about the unfairness of the proceedings?  Nunes’s election margins back home in his district are diminishing;  he might fear his chances of reelection are doomed unless he can count on votes from Trump’s base.  It’s depressing to think that Republican congressmen have nothing more valuable or principled to offer voters.  When political analysts say that the Republican Party has become “the party of Trump,” this is what they mean.

Republicans have only to abandon Trump to slip free of all these difficulties.  Perhaps as the evidence mounts, Nunes and his ilk will see the wisdom of cutting Trump loose, a dramatic act that would give new life to embattled republican (and Republican) ideals.

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Impeach Trump, An Enemy of the Constitution
If the GOP Is Wise, It Will Dump Trump Now

If the GOP Is Wise, It Will Dump Trump Now

23 Oct 2019 By in Politics Tags: , , , , , , 3 Comments


From my vantage here in Chicago, I can sense the forces in favor of Donald Trump’s impeachment and removal from office building among Republicans on Capitol Hill.  Even as David Brooks has insisted that impeachment is a political mistake, even as Tamara Keith and other analysts see political “tribalism” as ineluctably binding Republican legislators to President Trump, one can read events as building toward a directly opposite result, and one very liberating and propitious for all the perplexed Republicans now “hiding in the tall grass,” uncharacteristically quiet and desiring at all costs to avoid the press.

One sign of a change in Republican sentiment is that vocal defense of the President has stopped.  Until lately, leading Republicans have eschewed impeachment as a spurious partisan maneuver, insisting in the face of the Democrat-led initiative that the president is innocent of any action meeting the Constitution’s definition of an impeachable offense (“treason, bribery, or high crimes and misdemeanors”).  Since September 19, however, when word of the President’s efforts to strong-arm Ukraine into giving him political dirt against Joe Biden began circulating, the White House has itself supplied prima facie confirmation of Trump’s determination to use his official powers for personal ends.

With remarkable speed, the president has moved from doing wrong in private to openly testing the proposition that he can do no wrong. He has breezily defended his actions as a matter of “style.”  He has gone so far as to make public statements at odds with his Constitutional duties and responsibilities, denying the legitimacy of, and declining to cooperate with, the House impeachment inquiry, and railing against the “phony” emoluments clause.

The President has moved onto dangerous new ground, all but thumbing his nose at anyone who would insist that he adhere to the Constitution.  This was the significance of Mick Mulvaney’s open admission of a quid pro quo: Trump expects his fellow Republicans to tolerate his dirty dealings and “get over it.”  As though the Constitution is something to go beyond.

Everyone who passed civics grasps that Trump is violating federal election laws.  Once fair elections go by the boards, nothing will be left of the republic, either.

As public servants who have their own oaths to uphold, their own powers to wield, Republican lawmakers can hardly fail to notice how Trump is blossoming into a fearful liability: a president without fealty to their own political needs or principles, an interloper who, having cannibalized their once “grand” party, is intent on desecrating its remains, as in his disastrous unilateral decision to withdraw US troops from Syria and abandon the Kurds.  Trump wants Republicans to do more to defend him.  Yet why should congressional Republicans remain loyal to a president deviating so wildly from his Constitutional job description, which is to execute the will of Congress and respect its laws?

Republicans are supposedly afraid of cutting Donald Trump loose.  What, really, would the downside be?  After Trump’s removal from office, the very conservative Mike Pence would be the incumbent president.  Trump’s much-talked-of base supposedly wouldn’t like this, but let’s face it, this is something no one can know.  What will Trump be, when the amplifiers are turned off?  The Republican Party is still lousy with political talent (much of it in abeyance).  Boosted back into a commanding position through a gutsy act of patriotism, the GOP could find redemption, enjoying a new and more broad-based popularity.  It could even remake itself in time to beat the Democrats in 2020.  Nikki Haley, anyone?  She’s on a long list of Republican alternates published the other day in the Rolling Stone.

Image: Black and white screen-shot of Donald Trump just before his inauguration,
© 2019 Susan Barsy

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“If Republicans Ever Turn On Trump, It Will Happen All At Once” (FiveThirtyEight)