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Sunday, April 7, 2019

One of my principles here is not to bother with politician horserace links, especially presidential candidates. One thing I've long held is that a president is only as good as his (or someday her) party, so the big question to ask any presidential candidate is: what are you going to do to get your party elected and make it an effective force? Still, every now and then I have opinions on specific people. When Greg Magarian griped about Tim Ryan and Michael Bennet getting a burst of press attention, as have recent stories about Beto O'Rourke and Pete Buttigieg raising great gobs of money, I commented:

Worth noting that O'Rourke and Buttigieg are principled neoliberals, and are raising money as such. They can do that because their youth and inexperience hasn't saddled them with the sort of baggage the Clinton establishment bears. That's bad news for Biden, who would be the obvious next-in-line for Clinton's donors if they didn't suspect that the brand is ruined. They may also be thinking that running someone young and outside might help crack Sanders' lead among young voters -- something Biden has no prayer of doing.

The one candidate I've been hearing the most (and most negative) about is Joe Biden. He hasn't announced yet, but evidently the decision has been made, the timing around Easter. Biden has led recent polls, but that can be attributed to his much greater name resolution. I've always figured the decision would turn on whether he's willing to risk his legacy on a very likely loss, but I suppose the decision will turn mostly on whether he can line up sufficient funding. (I had some doubts that Bernie Sanders would run, but when I saw his early funding reports, I immediately realized I was being silly.) Clearly, he didn't run in 2016 because Hillary Clinton had locked up most of his possible funding. That's less obvious this year, but a lot of competitive candidates have jumped in ahead of him.

Biden isn't awful, but he has a lot of baggage, including a lot of things that wound up hurting Clinton in 2016 (like that Iraq War vote). Some of those things could hurt him in the primaries, especially his rather dodgy record on race and crime, and with women. Other things, like his plagiarism scandal, will hurt him more in the general election. But the big problem there is that he was a Washington insider and party leader for so long that he makes it easy for Republicans to spin this election into a referendum on forty years of Democratic Party failures. Obama was largely able to avoid that in 2008, but Clinton couldn't in 2016.

Also, there is the nagging suspicion that he isn't really a very good day-to-day candidate. Last time he ran for president he was an also-ran, unable to get more than 1-2% of the vote anywhere. He got the VP nod from Obama after Clinton decided she'd rather be Secretary of State, and one suspects that the Clintons pushed for Biden as VP because they didn't regard him as a serious rival in 2016 (when a sitting VP would normally have the inside track to the nomination). And he's exceptionally prone to gaffes. He managed to avoid any really bad ones running with Obama, but running on his own he'll get a lot more scrutiny and pressure. Nobody thinks he's stupid or evil -- unlike Trump, whose base seems to regard those attributes as virtues -- but nobody is much of a fan either (well, except for the fictional Leslie Knope, which kind of proves the point).

For more, if you care, see Michelle Goldberg: The wrong time for Joe Biden:

Beyond gender, on issue after issue, if Biden runs for president he will have to run away from his own record. He -- and by extension, we -- will have to relive the debate over the Iraq war, which he voted to authorize. He'll have to explain his vote to repeal the Glass-Steagall Act, which, by lifting regulations on banking, helped create the conditions for the 2008 financial meltdown. (Biden has called that vote one of the biggest regrets of his career.) In 2016, Hillary Clinton was slammed for her previous support of the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, which contributed to mass incarceration. Biden helped write the law, which he called, in 2015, the "1994 Biden crime bill." . . . No one should judge the whole span of Biden's career by the standards of 2019, but if he's going to run for president, it's fair to ask whether he's the right leader for this moment. He is a product of his time, but that time is up.

Other political news last week included the death of Ernest Hollings, the long-time South Carolina senator, at 97. I was, well, shocked to see him referred to in an obituary as a populist -- a thought that had never crossed my mind. I would grant that he was not as bad as the Republicans who served in the Senate alongside him (Strom Thurmond and Lindsey Graham), or his Republican successor (Jim DeMent). Still, those are pretty low standards.

By the way, a couple of non-political links below: subjects I used to follow closely in more carefree times. See if you can pick them out.

Some scattered links this week:

• Matthew Yglesias:

  • The Democratic debate over filibuster reform, explained. One way you can tell whether Democratic candidates actually care about implementing their platforms is where they stand on this issue. The strongest position so far is from Elizabeth Warren.

  • Boeing's effort to get the 737 Max approved to fly again, explained.

  • The controversy over Joe Biden's treatment of women explained.

  • The Great Awokening: white Democrats' newfound racial liberalism is transforming politics.

• Jonathan Blitzer: How climate change is fueling the US border crisis: "In the western highlands of Guatemala, the questio is no longer whether someone will leave but when." Two further installments: The epidemic of debt plaguing Central American migrants, and The dream homes of Guatemalan migrants.

• Philip Bump: Nearly everything Trump just said about Puerto Rico is wrong.

• Jane Coaston: FBI director: White nationalist violence is a "persistent, pervasive threat". Related: Weiyi Cai/Simone Landon: Attacks by white extremists are growing. So are their connections.

• Sean Collins: Barack Obama warns against a "circular firing squad" over ideological purity in politics: Sounds like Obama is attacking the left, once again counseling compromises that ultimately prove ineffective, but his centrist-neoliberal allies are every bit as ideological, and if anything have more experience in using their spite against the left to make sure even their lame compromises rarely change anything. I'm reminded how John Lewis refused to purge Communists from the UMW, because he appreciated that they were the union's most passionate and effective organizers. The centrists need to realize that they need the left in order to attain anything significant once they've worked their compromises. And as the article shows, left-leaning polticians aren't actually doing things to undermine party unity -- other than making solid policy proposals and arguing them on their merits. Obama, on the other hand, is showing himself to be irrelevant. Some may feel nostalgic for his basic competence and his devotion to the threadbare pieties of Americanism, but as a politician you have to judge him on his inability to deliver the change he campaigned for and his failure to build a party that could protect, sustain, and extend even his most modest dreams.

• Tara Golshan: Congress passes historic resolution to end US support for Saudi-led war in Yemen.

• David M Halbfinger:

  • An Israel charts a future, color and chaos abound in its election.

  • Netanyahu vows to start annexing West Bank, in bid to rally the right.

  • In Israeli election ads, to stir up the base, anything goes.

  If you've followed Israeli elections, you may have noticed that since the late 1970s, the only time Israeli politics have shifted left was when the Bush I administration made clear its displeasure with Yitzhak Shamir's obstruction of the Madrid Peace Talks. Israeli voters noticed, and voted the more flexible Yitzhak Rabin in, leading to the Oslo Accords, which Clinton allowed Netanyahu and Ehud Barak to turn into a charade. But as Clinton, Bush, Obama, and even more explicitly Trump kowtowed to Israel, Israelis had no reason not to indulge their chauvinist prejudices, with each election pushing the government ever further to the right.

• Sean Illing: How digital technology is destroying our freedom: Interview with Douglas Rushkoff, exploring the theme of his recent Team Human and earlier books like Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation (2009), Program or Be Programmed (2011), Present Shock: When Everything Happes Now (2013), and Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus (2016) -- he's sort of a latter-day Neil Postman. (The one book I've read by him is Nothing Sacred: The Truth About Judaism, where he sees Judaism as an evolutionary step toward atheism. I could make a similar claim for Calvinism, based more on personal history.)

• Sarah Kliff: Trump does have a health care plan. It would cause millions to lose coverage.

• Mike Konczal: Should the Green New Deal repeat the failures of Cap-and-Trade?

• Paul Krugman:

  • Donald Trump is trying to kill you: "Trust the pork producers; fear the wind turbines." I will add this quibble: if you ever find yourself standing under a wind turbine, you'll find that they are very ominous and unpleasant, emitting loud noises as the huge blades screech and whine above your head.

  • Republican health care lying syndrome: "Even Trump supporters don't believe the party's promises."

  • The incredible shrinking Trump boom: "At least corporate accountants are having some fun." I suspect this title could be used for a much broader investigation than this note on the effects of the Trump tax cut.

  • GOP cruelty is a pre-existing condition: "Republicans just won't stop trying to take away health care."

  • Republicans really hate health care: "They've gone beyond cynicism to pathology." Related: Jamelle Bouie: An opening for Democrat: "On health care, this isn't what Trump's voters bargained for." Bouie writes:

    But while Trump's decision to govern for conservatives has netted him high approval ratings with Republicans who remain loyal to him, it has also undermined the coalition that put him in the White House, threatening his prospects for re-election.

    We saw some of this with the midterms. The drive to repeal Obamacare was a major reason Republicans lost their majority in the House of Representatives. The attempt made Trump's approval rating plunge to the mid-30s, lower than that of other presidents at that point in their first term. Large majorities opposed the bill to repeal and replace the health care law, and 60 percent said it was a "good thing" it failed to pass. Forty-two percent of voters named health care as their top issue in the midterms, and 77 percent of them backed Democrats.

    In 2016, Trump ran without the burden of a record. He could be everything to everyone -- he could say what people wanted to hear. And he used that to reach out to working-class whites as a moderate on the economy and a hard-line conservative on race and immigration.

    Now, as president, Trump is a standard-issue Republican with an almost total commitment to conservative economic policy. Those policies are unpopular. And they have created an opening for Democrats to win back some of the voters they've lost.

• Dara Lind:

  • The border shutdown was a reality show threat, but the border slowdown is real.

  • Trump's decision to cut off aid to 3 Central American countries, explained. Related: Kevin Sieff: US officials said aid to El Salvador helped slow migration. How Trump is canceling it.

• German Lopez:

  • Trump is blaming Mexico for the US's drug problem. He should blame a failed war on drugs.

  • Justice Department releases damning report on Alabama's gruesome, violent prisons.

• Jonathan Mahler/Jim Rutenberg: How Rupert Murdoch's empire of influence remade the world: Part 1: Imperial reach, followed by Part 2: Internal divisions, and Part 3: The new Fox weapon.

• Louis Menand: What baseball teaches us about measuring talent: Review of Christopher Phillips' new book Scouting and Scoring: How We Know What We Know About Baseball. Noted because this is a subject I've spent a lot of time on, albeit not very recently.

• Kelsey Piper: Google cancels AI ethics board in response to outcry: I can imagine many angles to this, but the best reported one was opposition to Heritage Foundation president Kay Coles James, underscoring the notion that conservatives have no credibility when it comes to ethics -- although Google's inclusion of a "drone company CEO" was even more blatant.

• Douglas Preston: The day the dinosaurs died: "A young paleontologist may have discovered the most significant event in the history of life on Earth."

• Andrew Prokop: Some Mueller team members aren't happy with Barr's description of their findings.

• Aaron Rupar: Trump plans to nominate a second loyalist to the Fed: Herman Cain: You got to give Trump some credit for learning here. When the Fed chair opened up, his staff gave him two options. While he picked the lesser inflation hawk, he still wound up with a guy who repeatedly raised the Fed funds rate, constricting the economy (and especially speculators and scam artists like himself who benefit most from cheap money). No doubt this got him thinking: Why not pick some loyal political hacks instead of letting the bankers limit his choices? Stephen Moore was his test case, and while Cain isn't as much of a hack as Moore, he's even less "qualified" (in normative terms).

• Amanda Sakuma: Trump attacks Rep. Ilhan Omar hours after a supporter was charged with threatening to kill her: Subhed: "He wants to drive a wedge between Jewish voters and the Democratic Party." TPM emphasized the latter in its coverage of Trump's speech to the Republican Jewish Coalition: Zeke Miller: Trump tries to lure Jewish voters: Dems would 'leave Israel out there'. Related: Matt Shuham: American Jewish orgs to Trump: Netanyahu is ot 'our' Prime Minister. On the other hand, Netanyahu is Sheldon Adelson's Prime Minister -- Adelson owns the newspaper in Israel most closely associated with Netanyahu, and Adelson is the Republican Party's most visible Jewish bankroller, so that's probably close enough for Trump.

• Emily Stewart: What's going on with Mar-a-Lago and Chinese spies, explained. Related: Fred Kaplan: Mar-a-Lago is a foreign spy's dream come true.

• Matt Taibbi: The Pentagon wins again: "In an effort to prevent non-defense cuts, House Democrats grant the DOD exactly the raise it wanted."

• Alex Ward:

  • Saudi Arabia is detaining American activists 6 months after Khashoggi's murder: "The Saudi crown prince is cracking down on free speech and torturing activists. The US won't push back."

  • Trump has a strong foreign policy narrative for 2020: Sure, someone smarter might be able to spin this bullet list into an attractive political spiel, the items don't mesh into a coherent strategy, and he's got a lot of unsettled, and therefore risky, affairs. Still, I'm more worried that Democrats will try to counter Trump's chaos by talking stronger and more belligerent, and thereby turn Trump into the anti-war candidate.

• Philip Weiss:

  • The Israeli spring won't happen next week (and that should cause reflection)

  • Trump brags he blew off calls from world leaders to give Adelsons the greatest gift: Jerusalem.

• Sean Wilentz: The "reputational interests" of William Barr. Related: Benjamin Wittes: Bill Barr has promised transparency. He deserves the chance to deliver.

• TomDispatch:

  • Andrew Bacevich: Behind fronds of fakery, here's some real news.

  • Dilip Hiro: India and Pakistan, and a planet in peril.

  • Rajan Menon: Whose money? Not yours.

  • Danny Sjursen: On leaving the U.S. Army.

  • Tom Engelhardt: Donald Trump naked as a jaybird.

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