Jonathan Chait has a title, and a position, I thought was sarcasm … except he’s serious.
New York Magazine
The Democratic presidential primary has worked to the party’s disadvantage by maneuvering its candidates into unpopular positions. This is not quite a crisis, but it is a serious danger that, if not redressed, could blow up in the party’s face.
Democrats have lots of room to run to attack President Trump from the left on economic and social policy while placing themselves on the right side of public opinion. And while the party as a whole has done so, the presidential contenders have been jostling to stand out by adopting a series of highly unpopular stances. To date, the following positions have been taken by some or all the candidates: replace all employer-provided private insurance with a government plan; decriminalize the border while also providing subsidized health insurance to undocumented immigrants; and provide reparations for the descendants of American slaves.
Chait’s title for this bit is genuinely “Democratic Presidential Candidates Need to Stop Taking Unpopular Stances.” Which made me grin, till I realized he was full-on David Brooks-ing it. Because, as we all know, the only way to actually become president is to be the most boring, risk-averse, middle / muddle nonentity possible.
All these positions would likely be serious liabilities in a general election. What’s more, none of them would appear to stand any plausible chance of enactment in the next administration, given that the (current) House majority and (prospective, unlikely) Senate majority both require the support of Democrats far to the right of the presidential field. So these risks the candidates are taking do not bring with them a concurrent benefit. They’re not laying the ground for a sweeping new progressive agenda they can pass in 2021. They’re merely seeding Donald Trump’s attack ads.
Yes. What we need is a candidate who determines her / his positions by looking at what Donald Trump won’t attack. One who keeps one finger up for the political winds, checks the polling before answering any question, and answers every question in a popular way. Chait proceeds to spend the rest of the article by devoting a single sentence to the most obvious refutation of his “only the milquetoast can win” argument, then spends paragraphs lecturing Democrats on why Mr. Overton’s window can never, ever, possibly slide their direction.
You know, this really makes me wish the title of this piece was “Jonathan Chait needs to stop giving stupid advice.” And … Wait. Who titles these things anyway? Done.
Come on in. Let’s see who else is writing this week.
Paul Krugman on Trump’s discovery that trade wars aren’t “easy to win” or “good.”
New York Times
Donald Trump’s declaration that “trade wars are good, and easy to win” will surely go down in the history books as a classic utterance — but not in a good way. Instead it will go alongside Dick Cheney’s prediction, on the eve of the Iraq war, that “we will, in fact, be welcomed as liberators.” That is, it will be used to illustrate the arrogance and ignorance that so often drives crucial policy decisions.
For the reality is that Trump isn’t winning his trade wars. True, his tariffs have hurt China and other foreign economies. But they’ve hurt America too; economists at the New York Fed estimate that the average household will end up paying more than $1,000 a year in higher prices.
But hey, this extreme position is sure to hurt Trump! Doesn’t he know someone might make an attack ad? Sorry … not sorry. But I will stop that now.
And there’s no hint that the tariffs are achieving Trump’s presumed goal, which is to pressure other countries into making significant policy changes.
What, after all, is a trade war? Neither economists nor historians use the term for situations in which a country imposes tariffs for domestic political reasons, as the United States routinely did until the 1930s. No, it’s only a “trade war” if the goal of the tariffs is coercion — imposing pain on other countries to force them to change their policies in our favor.
And while the pain is real, the coercion just isn’t happening.
Oh, I think there’s some pretty good evidence that coercion is happening, if by coercion Krugman means that policies are being changed in an effort to reduce the damage. It’s just that Trump is the one doing all the bending—and the one desperately throwing money at his most obviously damaged supporters in the hopes they’ll remember the change he tossed their way, while forgetting how he robbed them of relative fortunes.
Art Cullen has a different kind of advice — and it’s also pretty grating.
Storm Lake Times
America’s elite doesn’t have a clue what’s going on in the middle of the country, and that could result in the re-election of President Trump in 2020.
It was evident last week at the Aspen Ideas Festival in Colorado, where I spoke as part of three panel discussions on presidential politics and rural affairs. Aspen is a beautiful place full of beautiful people at 8,000 feet who have very little notion how things are working down below.
Just … first, the people who appear at the Aspen Ideas Festival—an event I can genuinely claim I neither knew was going on last week, or in fact, existed at all—may not be shaping the actions of the Democratic Party. Second, when you’re the one who is talking on a panel at an event, can you really say the people in your audience are the “elite?” Just asking.
The Aspen Institute is trying to do something about that, and I am grateful. It put a special push on rural this year as the coasts continue to fathom how Donald Trump won the last election. They have a long row to hoe.
I was the Tall Corn curiosity on a panel that included writers from the Washington Post, Atlantic Monthly and the New Yorker. They essentially accused Iowa of being racist for electing Trump and Rep. Steve King, R-Kiron. But what about Barack Obama? And, did you ever consider the role that abortion plays in Northwest Iowa politics, or guns, as opposed to whether anyone really cares whether a Mexican is milking cows in Sioux County for $15 per hour?
“They essentially accused Iowa of being racist” is another way of saying that this nameless crew didn’t accuse Iowa of being racist. But this column, and that last paragraph? Man, it comes pretty close.
Joan Walsh has some advice for moderates — like, save your advice for moderates.
The Nation
I didn’t have my glasses on Sunday morning when I dragged The New York Times in from my hallway, but I could see there was an arresting photo taking up most of the top of the paper. I could tell it was a woman walking—maybe on a high wire? A catwalk? A gangway? Was she boarding a cruise, or fleeing danger? I put on my glasses. It turned out to be California Senator Kamala Harris, widely judged the winner of Thursday night’s Democratic presidential debate, striding into a recent speech wearing a stylish plaid suit and shiny black stilettos. …
Harris graced the top of the Times only because, the caption told us, her rise “worries establishment Democrats.” (That’s funny; her lefty critics insist Harris herself is part of the establishment.) “Liberals Ruled the Debates, and the Moderates Are Anxious,” the print headline blared. Those “anxious moderates” include former Chicago mayor (and Obama chief of staff) Rahm Emanuel, whose political career is over. Also James Carville, last seen nationally telling the country on Election Night 2018 that “there’s not going to be a big blue wave,” a night the Democrats won 40 seats in the House of Representatives.
Of course, every member of the Carville League is out there claiming that it wasn’t progressives who won those seats. Nope, it was a whole bunch of mini-moderates who slipped into those chairs and gifted Democrats with control of the House. And, insert finger-shake here, the left should be grateful. Grateful!
But that’s not all! There was another story in the Times A-section warning: “Democrats Veer Further Left on Immigration at Forum, Pleasing Trump.” The fact that they’re pleasing a lot of people who are fighting Trump’s policies of breaking up families and putting children in cages didn’t seem to matter. Amazingly, in Sunday Review, the respected opinion section, there were three warnings about the scary left turn: two conservatives, Times columnist Bret Stephens, and National Review’s Ramesh Ponnuru, telling us Democrats are going too far in 2020, plus a liberal—Nicholas Kristof—warning against “knee-jerk liberalism.” (If you’re confused, yes David Brooks wrote a piece similar to Stephens’s on Thursday, “Dems, Please Don’t Drive Me Away.” Equally sad political gruel, but without the dollop of immigrant-bashing Stephens ladled on his.)
I always feel better when Bret Stephenson is against something. That’s pretty much the guarantee of being on the right track.
Michael Tomasky on how Trump celebrates authoritarianism.
Daily Beast
The text needed to do two or three different kinds of work. It needed to announce bold principles to the world in a way that would stand the test of time. It needed to rally the citizenry.
But most of all, it needed to make a case to the world that the colonists’ cause was justified. That was the main thing, and the main way it did that was in its series of indictments against King George III. The bulk of the text consists of 27 bullet points, as we’d say today, alleging this and that act of infamy and tyranny on the king’s part. His only interest in the people of the colonies, Jefferson wrote, was “to reduce them under absolute despotism.”
That was the point of the document: It was a brief against despotism.
Flash forward to Trump …
And now, here we are, 243 years later, with a man sitting in the Oval Office who yearns to be a despot. You think he’s ever read the Declaration of Independence? He may have started it once or twice. But finished it? Actually, we’d better hope not, because the only lesson he’d take away from those 27 bullet points would be that he ought to try a few of them out (one of them, incidentally, notes that King George “has obstructed the administration of justice”).
We laugh at Trump. We have to laugh at him to stay sane. This military parade is a joke. This speech at the Lincoln Memorial. Is he kidding? Where Martin Luther King summoned our best angels, that buffoon is going to stand there and give a semi-literate lecture about things he knows nothing about? Maybe he’ll mention “Western liberalism” again, which is clearly to blame for all those junkies in L.A. he told Tucker Carlson about.
What Trump would take from the list of grievances is that King George was a piker.
Will Bunch looks at how Medicare for All might affect a failing hospital.
Philadelphia Inquirer
Few other developed nations in the world would even be having this debate — about closing a busy hospital not because the stream of patients isn’t sick enough but because they aren’t rich enough. Most other countries have national health systems that reduce or completely eliminate the kind of profit pressures that have forced Freedman’s AAHS to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
In the short run, it’s completely understandable that the nurses and doctors of Hahnemann are looking to Harrisburg or to City Hall for a reversal of fortune. But in the long run, could the national debate — which has sat on the front burner of the 2020 presidential race — over the dramatic expansion of coverage through Medicare for All or something else closer to true universal health care keep struggling hospitals like Hahnemann open? Many experts offer a resounding “yes.”
I’ve probably mentioned before (he says, knowing that he has) that I had a good experience with the Australian health care system. That system provides a strong public system, and strips away all the paperwork that’s involved in going to the doctor or hospital in the U.S., but also allows people to buy into a tier of private care if they want. And even the price of that “elite” level coverage was vastly less than generic health care in the U.S.
I like the model. But then, they gave me oodles of morphine when I had a massive kidney stone rampaging through my innards demonstrating that what I had previously considered “severe pain” was really a gentle tickle. So … I probably have a somewhat slanted view of those events.
Anyway … someone else was talking.
It’s not only that Medicare for All — the currently most popular variation on progressives’ long-held dream of so-called single-payer health care in America — would both cover more people and help close gaps between the rich and poor. Some of the proposals now before Congress also include plans for “global budgeting” that would stabilize cash flow for the types of hospitals — rural, or in lower-income big-city neighborhoods that handle the poorest and sickest acute-care patients.
While we’re on this subject, keep an eye out for the twisting-of-facts that is “if hospitals had to take Medicare rates for everything, they would all fail.” That one is going to be dragged out a lot over the next few months. Candidates need to have a sharp response.
Virginia Heffernan on how Trump’s July 4 speech was the about … what was it again?
Los Angeles Times
President Trump, ever the psycho, rolled tanks into Washington on Independence Day, surely the first head of state to occupy his own capitol to demonstrate its independence.
The parade and the run up to Trump’s late-afternoon speech were ominous. Along Constitution Avenue, people wore Trump-cult garb and slagged-off private citizen Hillary Clinton, who is not running for office. Elsewhere, vocal devotees of the QAnon nonsense were expecting no less than the resurrection of John F. Kennedy Jr. At least one wore a T-shirt picturing that particular dead Kennedy in a MAGA hat.
From the signs they were carrying, Trump’s July 4th event seemed like a Q-themed convention. I’m interested to know how they explain the fact that JFK Jr, like Robert Mueller before him, failed to appear and spring the trap on Hillary Clinton. Though … I’m not interested enough to actually read a Q-site.
As the public park close to the Lincoln Memorial filled with a vetted audience divided into castes by fences, the atmosphere recalled Trump’s sinister inauguration in 2017. Was menacing Stephen Miller “carnage” rhetoric on deck?
Or maybe Trump’s sniffing would start and, hoo boy, his geezer impairments would flare up again. Maybe we’d get a rollicking military history of the Bowling Green massacres (with a nod to Kellyanne Conway) or the Battle of Covfefe Creek.
Not this time. In the end, Trump gave one of his stilted normcore speeches, filled with plodding doggerel of American self-congratulation that sounded like Newt Gingrich blather — or maybe like an outtake from History Channel Kids. The speech managed to prove that, yes, Trump can read most words. It also suggested that the weak praise he routinely gets — “at least he’s not boring ”— is unwarranted.
Hey, Trump did talk about how the minutemen seized the airports. Really, no one talks about the air war aspects of the Revolutionary War. So that’s impressive. Though … to tell the truth, if I had thought of that first, I’d probably have written an alt-history novel by now. Let’s see … Robert Fulton was born in 1765, so age 12 is probably a little too prescient for him to be building a steam engine to power a revolutionary airship. But the first steamship in the United States was actually built by John Fitch, and he was born in 1743. Boom. So now we just need to solve the issue of how the Montgolfier brothers didn’t get their first manned balloon in the air until 1783. History … it’s not going to alt itself. Unless, of course, Trump is giving a speech about it.
Charles Pierce is praising famous women and our mothers who came before us.
Esquire
Mrs. Warren was quite fed up. It was November of 1775, and the city of Boston was under siege. Its port was closed.
And it’s airport.
British warships made the entire city a clear field of fire. It was seven months since the battles of Lexington and Concord. It was five months since the British army had driven the stubborn American defenders off Bunker Hill. The Second Continental Congress had been meeting since May and, by her lights, had done nothing to indicate that its members realized that a war already was underway. Her husband, James Warren, was the president of the Massachusetts provincial congress and, one day, he sat down to write a letter to a friend of theirs who was sitting in the Congress in Philadelphia, an obstreperous Boston lawyer named John Adams.
"Your Congress can be no longer in any doubts and hesitancy about taking capital and effectual strokes,” James Warren wrote. His wife, finding even these sentiments in adequate to the events at hand, jumped in and added her own thoughts to the letter.
“You should no longer piddle at the threshold. It is time to leap into the theatre to unlock the bars, and open every gate that impedes the rise and growth of the American republic.”
I believe “you should no longer piddle at the threshold” is equivalent to suggesting that someone fish, or cut bait. Or even more directly, that they #$%@ or get off the pot.
Mercy Otis Warren [was] a gifted writer and a true rebel. (It was her thwacking attacks on the proposed Constitution that partly helped change James Madison's mind on the advisability of a Bill of Rights.) She was second only to Tom Paine in her uncompromising devotion to the cause of American independence and American liberty, and she was a close second at that. Where Abigail Adams, another friend of the Warrens, reproved her husband to "remember the ladies" while forming the new republic, Mercy Otis Warren cudgeled her way to an honored place in the intellectual ferment that produced what we celebrate today. She was a proper Bostonian woman, for sure, but she was not civil, not by a long shot.
Far more than fifty percent of Americans are simply left out of the stories we tell about how this nation was founded. Those omissions are really handy for those who want to make it seem that the nation was created by, and for, a select few of a select race, select class, and select gender.
Leonard Pitts is also looking at women thinkers — of more recent times.
Miami Herald
I never considered myself a sexist. I support equal pay, the ERA and reproductive freedom. I stand with the #MeToo movement. I took my granddaughters to see “Wonder Woman,” “Hidden Figures” and “Captain Marvel.” And yes, some of my best friends are women.
But sexism — like racism, like homophobia — isn’t just about what you consciously do or believe. It is also about — maybe even mostly about — what happens down in the substrata of self. It is about the assumptions you make without realizing you’ve made them, the attitudes you hold without realizing you hold them.
People tend to resist that idea. That’s how you get a racist saying, “I’m not a racist” after doing or saying some completely racist thing. By his lights, he’s telling the truth. He has no Klan robe in his closet, no Confederate flag on his car and he listens to Jay-Z. But what he fails to understand, what we all too often fail to understand, is that it is possible to say the right things, feel the right things, do the right things and still be wrong.
Like me, an inveterate reader (and avowed feminist) who didn’t read women. I closed myself off from their stories, their perspectives, their voices, without even realizing I had done so.
You didn’t know that until I told you, and I suppose I could’ve kept it to myself. But I wanted to hold myself accountable. In confronting one’s sexism — or, again, one’s racism or homophobia — it is not enough simply to think good thoughts. No, there is a need to be intentional.
Since I came to work full time at Daily Kos, chewing through the day’s news and churning out editorial and analysis, I’ve found myself reading much less nonfiction on my own time. Instead, I’ve consumed novel, after novel, after novel. And truthfully, when I look back over the last year … women are well in the lead. That’s helped out not just because I’ve continued to read and re-read everything Kate Atkinson has produced (as both a prose stylist, and an experimenter with voice, time, and perspective, Atkinson is just … aces). In that time I’ve also read some simply wonderful sci fi by women authors — notably the Murderbot sequence by Martha Wells and the Wayfarers books by Becky Chambers. I can’t say enough about both series. Get them. Read them. They’re great.
Jennifer Rubin on Justin Amash’s not so fond farewell to the Republican Party.
Washington Post
Writing for The Post on Independence Day, Rep. Justin Amash (I-Mich.) bemoaned the rise in partisanship: “True to [George] Washington’s fears, Americans have allowed government officials, under assertions of expediency and party unity, to ignore the most basic tenets of our constitutional order: separation of powers, federalism and the rule of law. The result has been the consolidation of political power and the near disintegration of representative democracy.”
He continues: “With little genuine debate on policy happening in Congress, party leaders distract and divide the public by exploiting wedge issues and waging pointless messaging wars. These strategies fuel mistrust and anger, leading millions of people to take to social media to express contempt for their political opponents, with the media magnifying the most extreme voices. This all combines to reinforce the us-vs.-them, party-first mind-set of government officials.”
Amash, therefore, declared that he is done with the Republican Party. And he wants voters to follow him. (“I’m asking you to believe that we can do better than this two-party system — and to work toward it.”)
From our vantage point, he did the right thing for the wrong reason. The problem isn’t two-party politics; the problem is President Trump and the Republicans who have abandoned their principles to support him.
Rubin isn’t one of those people I usually bother to mention on a Sunday, in part because on any given Sunday her comments boil down to “Trump is bad … because he’s not a true conservative.” But it’s interesting this week to see Rubin and Amash both struggling with their party from very different perspectives … with Rubin being much closer to the core of the problem.
The Republican Party has adopted the trappings, language and behavior of right-wing nationalist governments in Europe, complete with a fondness for executive power. (Republicans now cheer using executive action as a lame effort to get around the Supreme Court’s ruling on the census, which, of course, applies equally to an executive order.) They have also adopted Trump’s penchant for lies, xenophobia, fiscal sloth, erratic isolationism mixed with bouts of bellicose warmongering, racism and know-nothingism. Not a single Republican member of Congress other than Amash has reached the inevitable conclusion of the Mueller report that the president obstructed justice and that it’s Congress’s job to do something about it.
Amash still hid his departure behind a speech filled with both-siderism. Rubin at least has the honesty to finger the real danger.
As I’m wrapping this up, it’s around 2AM. Here’s hoping that folks on the West Coast can get through the day without another major quake. Everyone out there, please take care and stay safe.