tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-78290132024-03-23T12:53:15.436-05:00Cracker SquireTHE MUSINGS OF A TRADITIONAL SOUTHERN DEMOCRATSid Cottinghamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16622559392638650857noreply@blogger.comBlogger6235125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7829013.post-80759754217844141352018-02-17T11:15:00.003-05:002018-02-17T11:15:47.634-05:00The Left’s Rage and Trump’s Peril - The Democratic base is even worse-tempered than the president. But Mueller could still harpoon him. Peggy Noonan writes in <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-lefts-rage-and-trumps-peril-1517530358" target="_blank">The Wall Street Journal</a>:<br />
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The State of the Union speech was good—spirited, pointed, with a credible warmth for the heroes in the balcony, who were well chosen. They were beautiful human beings, and their stories were rousing—the cop and his wife who adopted the baby, the hardy North Korean defector who triumphantly waved his crutches, the mourning, dignified parents of the girls killed by MS-13. My beloved Cajun Navy. </div>
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The thing about the heroes in the balcony is it reminds you not of who the president is but of who we are. “With people like that we can’t miss.” I had that thought when
Ronald Reagan
gave tribute in 1985 to a young woman who as a child desperately fled Saigon as it fell. She and her family were among the boat people, spotted and saved by a U.S. ship. Reagan called her to stand, and
Jean Nguyen
stood—proudly, in the gleaming uniform of a West Point cadet. She would graduate within the year. </div>
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The recognition of heroes in the balcony is called a cliché. It certainly is. An inspiring and truthful one, and long may it live. </div>
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The Democrats in the chamber were slumped, glowery. They had chosen to act out unbroken disdain so as to please the rising left of their party, which was watching and would review their faces. Some of them were poorly lit and seemed not resolute but Draculaic. The women of the party mostly dressed in black, because nothing says moral seriousness like coordinating your outfits. </div>
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Here it should be said of the rising left of the Democratic Party that they are numerous, committed, and have all the energy—it’s true. But they operate at a disadvantage they cannot see, and it is that they are loveless. The social justice warriors, the advancers of identity politics and gender politics, the young who’ve just discovered socialism—they run on rage. <br />
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #333333; display: inline; float: none; font-family: "exchange" , "chronicle ssm" , serif; font-size: small; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 27px; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; word-wrap: break-word;">But rage is a poor fuel in politics. It produces a heavy, sulfurous exhaust and pollutes the air. It’s also gets few miles per gallon. It has many powers but not the power to persuade, and if anything does them in it will be that. Their temperament is no better than
Mr. Trump’s
. It’s worse. But yes, they are intimidating the Democratic establishment, which robs itself of its dignity trying to please them. It won’t succeed.</span><br />
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As for the president’s base, I am coming to a somewhat different way of thinking about it. It’s true they are a minority, true that his approval ratings are not good, are in fact historically low for a president with a good economy at the end of a first year. But Mr.
Trump
has just more than a solid third of the nation. They are a spirited, confident core. What other political figure in this fractured, splintered country has a reliable third of the electorate? And it’s probably somewhat more than a third, because Trump supporters know they are not and will never be respected, and just as in 2016 you have to factor in the idea of shy Trump voters.</div>
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What they are not sufficiently concerned about is that Mr. Trump has not expanded his popularity. He has kept his core but failed to reach out consistently and successfully to others. He has not created coalitions. </div>
His position is more precarious than his people see. <br />
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He has too much relished the role of divider. When you’re running for office you are every day dividing those who support you from those who don’t, and hoping your group is bigger. But when you win you reach out to your enemies with humility, with patience—with love!—and try to drag ’em in to sup in your tent. You don’t do this because you’re a hypocrite but because you’re an adult looking to win. Or a constructive idealist. That happens sometimes.</div>
His supporters don’t know what he doesn’t know: He must grow or die. <br />
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They are happily watching The Trump Show as he sticks it to people they hate. They don’t know Shark Week is coming.</div>
In November he may lose the House. That’s what the generic ballot says is coming, that’s what was suggested by last year’s GOP defeats in Virginia and Alabama. <br />
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I know what Republicans are thinking. They are going to run on an economy that is expanding thanks to tax reform and deregulation. They are going to run on bigger paychecks and unexpected bonuses. They’ll run on the appointment of conservative judges to balance out
Barack Obama’s
liberal judges at a time when the courts have taken a more powerful role in American culture. They’ll run on We Will Stop Illegal Immigration <em style="background: none; border-image: none; border: 0px rgb(51, 51, 51); font-style: italic; font-weight: 400; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">and </em>Give a Break to the Children of Illegal Immigrants. </div>
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The Democrats, on the other hand, are running on Trump is unpopular and so is his party, he is a fascist, and any limit on immigration is like any limit on abortion, tyrannical on its face.</div>
Republicans are thinking nobody’s noticing but they’re in a pretty good place. I suspect they are right.<br />
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Except. Special counsel Robert
Mueller
will likely, before November, report his findings to the Justice Department, and you have to assume he is going to find something because special prosecutors exist to find something. When
Mr. Mueller
staffed up he hired
Ahabs,
and Ahabs exist to get the whale. You have to assume Mr. Trump will be harpooned, and the question is whether it’s a flesh wound or goes deeper. If it goes deep the Democrats may well win the House, in which case he will be impeached. </div>
Trump supporters don’t view this with appropriate alarm. They comfort themselves with the idea that he is playing three-dimensional chess and his opponents are too stupid to see it. That’s not true—he is more ad hoc and chaotic than they think. They should help him by trying to improve his standing, which means telling him what doesn’t work.<br />
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He thinks he rouses and amuses his supporters with feuds and wars, tweets and grievances. In reality, as Trump supporters know, it’s something they put up with. For everyone else it’s alienating, evidence of instability. </div>
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He calls out fake news and wars with the press while at the same time betraying a complete and befuddled yearning for their approval. Mr. Trump is a little like
Nixon
in this—embittered and vengeful at not getting the admiration of those he says he doesn’t respect. </div>
These things don’t speak of tactical or strategic brilliance.<br />
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His supporters argue the media is against him, and this is true and should be acknowledged. But they were totally opposed to Reagan, too. They more or less admit his greatness now, or at least concede his towering adequacy, in part because Trump-shock has left them reconsidering the bogeymen of the past, in part because they like all dead Republicans. </div>
But Reagan didn’t need the press to feel like a big man or be a success, and Mr. Trump looks unmanned to be so destabilized by their antipathy. <br />
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The president’s supporters should be frank with him about his flaws. They’re so used to defending him, they forget to help him. They should give him the compliment of candor. </div>
<b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike><br />Sid Cottinghamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16622559392638650857noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7829013.post-43890625132508949652017-07-29T17:11:00.000-05:002017-07-29T17:12:08.213-05:00What Truman Can Teach Trump The politically astute Cold Warrior knew how to navigate the tides of populism at home while maintaining America’s leadership abroad.Walter Russell Mead writes in <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-truman-can-teach-trump-1500661673" target="_blank">The Wall Street Journal</a>:<br />
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<b><span style="font-family: Thread-00001e20-Id-0000000c;">The foreign policy </span></b>of the United States hasn’t seen a strategic crisis this profound since 1947, when President Harry Truman summoned the American people to fight Soviet ambitions in Europe. The Cuban missile crisis was more dramatic and the agony of Vietnam more wrenching, but since Truman, American presidents have believed that a global, outward-looking, order-building foreign policy was the necessary foundation for U.S. strategy and a peaceful, prosperous world.<br />
<br />
No longer. President Donald Trump, backed by a substantial segment of the American public, has distanced himself from some of the key foreign-policy assumptions and policies of the postwar era. Longstanding pillars of American strategy—free trade, alliances in Europe and Asia, defense of human rights, commitment to international institutions and the rule of law—have come into question as the new president denounces today’s global architecture as a bad deal for the U.S.<br />
<br />
Responses to the shift have ranged from bewilderment to outrage. Mr. Trump’s exit from the Trans-Pacific Partnership—a carefully negotiated trade agreement intended to lock the major Asian trading states into a relationship with the U.S. that would exclude China—shocked free-trade advocates and Asia experts. His repeated descriptions of NATO as obsolete and <a class="icon none" href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-declines-to-back-core-nato-tenet-to-dismay-of-european-allies-1495730615"><span style="color: #0080c3;">his refusal</span></a> (until his recent trip to Poland) to endorse the mutual-defense commitment at NATO’s heart left many wondering whether Mr. Trump still considers the alliance essential to U.S. security. A drumbeat of news stories pointing to alleged collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign has further muddied the waters, with many concluding that the president’s Russia policies have more to do with his personal concerns than with the national interest.<br />
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What explains this reversal in America’s priorities? A chorus of observers has identified the problem as “populism.” As they see it, ignorant voters, angry about domestic economic conditions and cultural trends, were beguiled by empty promises of prosperity and driven by racism and xenophobia to back an agenda isolating the U.S. from the rest of the world. <br />
<br />
But populism is nothing new in American politics. In 1947, when Truman, George Marshall and Dean Acheson laid the foundations of postwar U.S. foreign policy, populism was every bit as strong a force in our politics as it is now. Determined to engage with the wider world but also deeply aware of their political situation at home, Truman and his team acted pre-emptively to head off a populist revolt. They modified their rhetoric and policies to address the concerns of a skeptical public and found ways to make their assertive Cold War policies appealing to, among others, angry heartland populists. <br />
<br />
This is something that foreign-policy leaders in both parties have failed to do in recent years, and the election of Mr. Trump was in large part a consequence of that failure. His populist attacks on the sacred totems of establishment foreign policy probably attracted more voters to his candidacy than they scared off, and the Trump administration now threatens to undo many of the historic accomplishments of the Truman years. <br />
<br />
For those of us who continue to believe that the policies and institutions devised after World War II served the U.S. well and remain essential today, the question is what to do now. In a best-case scenario, Mr. Trump’s impressive foreign-policy team would convince their chief and his more populist advisers that Trumanism makes sense, and the president would work to make this case to his political base. Failing that, the best alternative is to convince the American people themselves that Trumanism is a better choice for the U.S. than Trumpism. Whatever the case, those of us who want to conserve the achievements of postwar American policy will need to do what Truman did: meet populists on their own turf and engage them. <br />
<br />
In the winter and spring of 1947, as the White House followed the dismal economic and political news from Europe, Truman and his team knew that American public opinion stood firmly opposed to any big new overseas commitments, including foreign aid. Republicans had captured control of Congress, and an angry GOP majority that included the communist-baiting Sen. Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin was intensely skeptical of foreign involvement and entangling alliances.<br />
<br />
The Truman team was clear about its own strategic priorities. The U.S. needed to block Soviet expansionism in a shattered Europe at a time when the continent’s traditional great powers had collapsed and could neither defend themselves nor rebuild their economies without massive American help. The U.S. also needed to take on the global role that the British Empire had played at its zenith: The dollar would replace the pound as the world’s reserve currency, the U.S. Navy would replace the British fleet as the guarantor of freedom of the seas, and American power and diplomacy would replace the British in building international institutions to manage the global economy and the emerging postcolonial world.<br />
<br />
This was all very well in theory, but Truman faced widespread political resistance to this agenda. On the left, many liberals still wanted to conciliate rather than to confront our wartime ally Stalin. On the right, many conservatives were isolationists or unilateralists who had just cut U.S. spending on foreign aid. “Mr. President,” Sen. Arthur Vandenberg told Truman in a meeting at the White House about the urgent need for American aid to Greece and Turkey, “the only way you are going to get this is to make a speech and scare the hell out of the country.”<br />
<br />
Truman and Vandenberg understood something profound about the politics of American foreign policy. While foreign-policy professionals in government, the academy and the media are often motivated by hope—the prospect of building a global trading order, for example, or of making the world more democratic—the public at large tends to be more focused on fear. If the American public had no fears about emerging threats elsewhere in the world, it would be very hard to get public support for an activist foreign policy with high-minded ambitions. Truman took the fears of the public seriously and tried to give them constructive expression: They were a crucial source of the political energy needed to power America’s global engagement. <br />
<br />
To this end, Truman and his team summoned the specter of a global communist conspiracy directed by the Kremlin and told the American people that defeating this enemy was its highest priority. Administration surrogates painted a terrifying picture of communist advances across Europe and warned that if Europe fell, America would be next. And it worked. Congress appropriated the funds and passed the key legislation that gave Truman the foreign-policy tools he needed. American public opinion would continue to support a strong anti-Soviet foreign policy through the long years of the Cold War.<br />
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The Truman administration’s anticommunist rhetoric was denounced by many intellectuals and academics as crude, naive and counterproductive. George F. Kennan, one of the architects of the administration’s strategy, was so distressed by what he saw as the militarism of America’s subsequent containment policies that he left government and became an eloquent critic of U.S. foreign policy. Walter Lippmann, the most influential foreign-policy pundit of the day, made known his displeasure with Cold War fearmongering again and again. Sophisticated Europeans shuddered at what they saw as an excessively harsh and Manichaean view of communism—even as they gratefully accepted the American aid and protection that Truman’s rhetoric made possible.<br />
<br />
Truman’s secretary of state, Dean Acheson, defended the administration’s approach in his memoirs. An official trying to gain public support for foreign policy, he wrote, is not “the writer of a doctoral thesis. Qualification must give way to simplicity of statement, nicety and nuance to bluntness, almost brutality, in carrying home a point.” Acheson estimated that the average American with a job and a family had perhaps 10 minutes a day in which to think about foreign policy. “If we made our points clearer than truth, we did not differ from most other educators and could hardly do otherwise.”<br />
<br />
Today’s advocates of continuing U.S. global leadership and engagement need to keep in mind both parts of Truman’s achievement: formulating a farsighted national strategy to address the issues of the day and then educating the public to support it.<br />
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The world is more complicated today than it was in 1947. America’s challenges are more complex and, in some ways, harder to address, even if no single threat is as urgent and overwhelming as the one posed by the Soviet Union under Stalin. But the fears of the American people are also more complex, and a national strategy that clearly addresses those concerns can succeed both in domestic politics and in the world at large. <br />
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The threat of jihadist terror on a mass scale, the growing danger of nuclear weapons in the hands of radical regimes, the possibility of debilitating cyberwarfare, the economic and political challenge posed by a rising China, the impact of globalization on American jobs—these are widely shared concerns for millions of Americans. Even in our current moment of populist retreat, such fears, together with abiding popular attachment to trusted allies such as the U.K. and Israel, are strong enough and real enough to serve as the political foundation for a new wave of American global engagement. <br />
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The same cannot be said, however, for a cause dear to many in the foreign-policy establishment: There is today very little popular support for the Wilsonian belief that the spread of democracy can solve America’s most urgent foreign-policy problems. <br />
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Promoting our values abroad remains important to many Americans, and our foreign policy cannot succeed in the long run without a clear moral basis, but the serious, recurring failures of this project since the end of the Cold War have gravely damaged its credibility. President George W. Bush turned the Iraq war into a war to make the Middle East safe for democracy. President Barack Obama tried to build democracy in the Middle East by embracing Turkey’s Islamist leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and again by supporting the 2011 revolution that overthrew President Hosni Mubarak in Egypt. Mr. Obama then sought to make a humanitarian gesture by helping to overthrow Moammar Qaddafi in Libya. <br />
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The disasters that have unfolded in all of these countries in recent years have driven home the idea, for many Americans, that foreign-policy experts have no idea what they are doing. It is useful, in this regard, to acknowledge that it’s not just populists who sometimes get foreign policy wrong.<br />
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A Trumanist approach—popular but not populist, moral but not moralistic—would start by showing some trust in the foreign-policy instincts of the American people. To take one obvious instance where popular and elite views diverge: Ordinary Americans are inclined to favor a firm, decisive response to jihadist threats, while foreign-policy elites tend to worry much more about the possible effects of American overreaction. <br />
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This, too, follows a familiar pattern. The same arguments were made about anticommunism in Truman’s day. But just as you could then be worried about communism without wanting to nuke Russia, you can be deeply concerned about the growth of jihadist ideology and violence today without wanting to start a war with Islam. <br />
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Indeed, it is when people think that their leaders don’t share their fears, or are incapable of acting on them, that popular fear often turns to populist rage. If the average American thinks that the political establishment isn’t really worried about terrorism, the public is likely to become more xenophobic, not less. If the public thinks that American trade negotiators don’t put the protection of American jobs first, people are more likely to become protectionist than to study the economics of the issue. If the average American thinks that the political class doesn’t really care about illegal immigration, the demand for border walls will grow, not diminish. <br />
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Truman and Acheson could have joined the intellectuals and the pundits who scoffed at the public’s “naive” and “simplistic” views of the communist threat and the other challenges of the day. But they had better sense than that. They understood that connecting their strategic goals with public fears was the key to success—even if there was a certain cost to be paid at times in policy. They preferred a blunt, accessible strategy that the public and Congress would support to a more intellectually sophisticated one that could never take hold in the real world. As a result, they were able to set the U.S. and the world on a course that, for the past 70 years, has yielded an extraordinary stretch of prosperity and peace. <br />
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We must hope today that American leaders, from the president on down, can be informed and inspired by the example of that historic success. Truman’s combination of strategic vision and political pragmatism is exactly what the U.S. and our turbulent world need right now.<br />
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<em><span style="font-family: Thread-00001e20-Id-0000000d;">Mr. Mead is a distinguished fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C., a professor of foreign affairs at Bard College and editor at large of the American Interest.</span></em> </div>
<b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike><b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike><b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike><b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike><br />Sid Cottinghamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16622559392638650857noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7829013.post-10525653583659899092017-07-29T16:46:00.004-05:002017-07-29T16:55:55.756-05:00The Democrats’ Biggest Problem Is Cultural Since 1968, the party has been alienating working-class voters. President Trump is the latest result.<div class="separator" separator="" style="clear: both;">
Ted Van Kyk writes in <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-democrats-biggest-problem-is-cultural-1501193226" target="_blank">The Wall Street Journal</a>:</div>
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Six months into the Trump presidency, congressional Democrats have begun to frame an alternative agenda. Recognizing their abandonment in 2016 by so-called working-class voters, they have unveiled a handful of spending and tax-policy benefits targeted to that constituency.<br />
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A much larger, comprehensive policy package is needed. Beyond that, Democrats need to recognize a profound voter shift that has been under way since 1968 and is centered on cultural issues.<br />
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Three statements in recent years illustrate why former Democratic voters have abandoned their party. First, Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign remark that small-town Americans “cling to guns and religion.” Second, Michelle Obama’s statement, also in 2008, that “for the first time in my adult lifetime I am proud of my country.” Third, Hillary Clinton’s 2016 characterization of Trump supporters as “deplorables”: “They are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America.”<br />
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None of these statements had anything to do with national security or economics. They revealed a mind-set that many voters find offensive—a huge cultural chasm that cannot be bridged by offering voters economic goodies.<br />
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The Democratic voter exodus began in 1968 when millions of traditional blue-collar and middle-income voters moved to Republican Richard Nixon or third-party candidate George Wallace, a Democratic former governor of Alabama. Alienated by street and campus riots and disorder, these voters bought into the Nixon/Wallace law-and-order themes. Some also were attracted to their message that Great Society programs had overreached. <br />
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As Vice President Hubert Humphrey’s assistant, I stood with him on election night when we learned that he had lost both Ohio and New Jersey, and the national election, because old-style Democrats had defected in those key states. I recalled visiting Democratic Rep. Pete Rodino’s campaign headquarters weeks earlier in New Jersey and seeing posters of Rodino and Wallace but none of Humphrey.<br />
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The shift, and the margin of Democratic loss, became far more dramatic in 1972. I was policy and platform director for George McGovern’s campaign. Our organizers and convention delegates were mostly from the generation that had come of age during the 1968 protests. They opposed the Vietnam War. But they were mostly interested in cultural and lifestyle issues—“acid, amnesty and abortion,” as Republicans called them, picking up a line that turned out to have originated with McGovern’s first running mate, Sen. Thomas Eagleton. Those Democrats gave short shrift to jobs, economic growth, public safety and other traditional voter concerns.<br />
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Their successors in the party have continued to focus on cultural issues with limited appeal. Their focus on political correctness and conformity has left an impression on traditional Democrats that their party leaders care more about transgender bathroom access than employment, the cost of living, education or public safety. Mrs. Clinton’s “deplorables” reference struck home with these voters.<br />
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The Democrats’ post-1972 evolution also has turned upside down the party’s approaches to racial and economic justice. The Great Society approach was to enact laws, such as the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts, removing legal obstacles to justice. Medicare and Medicaid provided a health-care safety net to the elderly and poor. Job training, early education, nutrition, health and other War on Poverty programs were provided to the poor and only incidentally benefited minorities disproportionately. They were designed to help lift disadvantaged Americans to an equal place at the starting line—never to guarantee equality at the finish line. We also talked of “equal law enforcement,” which would protect citizens in minority neighborhoods while at the same time assuring race-blind treatment of offenders and suspects.<br />
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Decades later, urban black communities in particular are in crisis. School dropout and incarceration rates, high black-on-black murder and other crime rates, births out of wedlock far outnumbering intact families, pervasive drug dealing and use, and a disgraceful poverty rate should shame all of us.<br />
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The answer to this crisis does not lie in cries of black victimization by police or other authorities. It lies instead with tangible, practical programs like those we launched in the 1960s. We purposely sought bipartisan sponsorship in Congress and enlisted labor, business, academic and other support in society more broadly. We did it that way because we believed we were all in it together and had to address priorities together. Most Americans today would agree this is the way to go, but their leaders are offering mainly partisanship and polarization.<br />
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Political scientist V.O. Key famously observed that “the voters are not fools.” Millions of them, including traditional Democrats, driven by anger and frustration, abandoned their political roots last November to make Donald Trump president. Many probably sensed that chaos and fumbling would follow. By their lights, it was an acceptable price to pay to rid themselves of leaders who had forgotten them.<br />
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Congressional Democrats are right to begin construction of an alternative agenda. But as they do so, they must recognize that most Americans are not racist, sexist, ignorant or opposed to alternative lifestyles. Most largely accept the cultural and social changes of the past half-century. To recapture traditional Democratic voters, and attract new ones, Democrats must learn empathy for those who believe they are being mocked for working hard, going to church, serving in the military, and trying to instill moral standards in their children. <br />
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Back in the day we spoke admiringly of officeholders and candidates who were “for the people.” Those same people now must come to feel again that there are Democrats who understand them, their values and their aspirations and do not view them as cultural inferiors to be manipulated in campaign years. President Trump is not our problem.<br />
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<em><span style="font-family: Thread-00001e1c-Id-00000028;">Mr. Van Dyk was active for more than 40 years in Democratic administrations and campaigns.</span></em> Sid Cottinghamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16622559392638650857noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7829013.post-21563869206071879392017-07-03T13:54:00.001-05:002017-07-03T13:54:43.478-05:00Democrats’ Broad Challenge: Middle-Class Appeal - As the party debates its path forward, its pitch to the political sweet spot is losing resonance Gerald Seib writes in <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/democrats-broad-challenge-middle-class-appeal-1498487772" target="_blank">The Wall Street Journal</a>:<br />
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Democrats have entered a summer of discontent, in which their disdain for President Donald Trump is matched by their frustration at an inability, so far at least, to notch an election victory that would show they can translate anti-Trump sentiment into success at the ballot box.<br />
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<a class="icon none" href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/house-democrats-point-fingers-at-pelosi-after-georgia-special-election-loss-1498171301"><span style="color: #0080c3;">They are troubled most immediately</span></a> by their failure to capture a seemingly winnable vacant House seat <a class="icon none" href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/gops-karen-handel-beats-democrat-jon-ossoff-in-georgia-house-race-1498011241"><span style="color: #0080c3;">in suburban Atlanta last week</span></a>. That has precipitated a round of backbiting and second-guessing, and a debate about whether the party’s success lies in staking out the political center, to claim the votes of independent and moderate Republicans put off by the coarseness and unpredictability of Mr. Trump, or in moving left to capture and spread the passion of those who want a clean and sharp break from the status quo.<br />
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Democrats might want to pause, though, to consider a broader problem: Why has their hold on the middle class loosened?<br />
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This is the trend that made the Trump phenomenon possible, and that Mr. Trump in turn appears to have exacerbated. The scope of Democrats’ problem is visible in the <a class="icon none" href="http://www.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/17255NBCWSJJune2017Poll.pdf"><span style="color: #0080c3;">latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll</span></a>. Less visible is what the party can do to reverse it.<br />
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For more than a quarter of a century, the Journal/NBC News poll has been asking Americans which party—the Democrats or the Republicans—would do a better job of looking out for the middle class. In 1990, the Democratic advantage was enormous: By a whopping 29-point margin, 47% to 18%, Americans said the Democrats would do the better job for the middle class.<br />
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By 2011, the Democratic margin had shrunk to 20 points. Now, in the latest survey completed last week, the Democratic advantage has shrunk to 13 points, the smallest gap ever.<br />
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This isn’t an incidental data point. In American politics, the middle class occupies hallowed ground that parties yearn to control. Americans with lower incomes want to become part of the middle class, and thus are drawn to the party that can pave the way there. Those already in the middle class want to be assured they won’t slip backward and out of it. And at least some of those who have risen above the middle class are grateful to whichever party and policies gave them the chance to do so.<br />
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So just about every economic policy from both parties is pitched as a magic elixir for the middle class. The question for Democrats is why their pitch doesn’t have the same resonance as before.<br />
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Part of the answer may lie in the party’s priorities. Democrats’ signature domestic achievement in recent years, the Affordable Care Act, was designed in large measure—and admirably so—to extend health coverage to Americans who couldn’t otherwise afford it. But while providing health security to many low- and middle-income people, it also produced a fair amount of health insecurity to others in the middle class, through higher insurance premiums and shrinking coverage options.<br />
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Similarly, Democratic efforts to raise the minimum wage speak more loudly to low-income Americans than to the middle class.<br />
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By contrast, middle-class worries trend more toward finding a way to buy a home and paying for college costs. Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel says that’s a reason one of the most politically successful initiatives he has pursued has been a program to provide tuition-free community-college educations to city high-school graduates.<br />
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Increasingly, middle-class voters also worry about job security. That’s where Mr. Trump has sapped away some of Democrats’ middle-class appeal, particularly with his tough trade rhetoric.<br />
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“Especially in Pennsylvania and the Midwest, there is a real belief the country hasn’t stood by them,” says Larry Cohen, chairman of Our Revolution, an activist group that has absorbed much of Sen. Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign. “In Iowa, somebody said to me, ‘We like to make things and grow things.’ Well, good luck making things today.”<br />
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Part of the issue is cultural. As the Democratic Party has become more centered in urban areas and along the coasts, it has cemented its connection to younger and more highly educated Americans but has lost its appeal to some middle-class and would-be middle-class voters.<br />
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Hints of all these effects lie within the Journal/NBC News poll. Belief that Democrats are the champions of the middle class is notably low in the Midwest (33%), among rural voters (31%) and among white men with less than college educations (25%). Taken together, those voters make up the core Trump constituency.<br />
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The problem as well as the potential for Democrats can be found in another set of numbers. Just 20% of self-identified political independents say Democrats do a better job at looking out for the middle class. But belief in the Republicans is almost identically low. Perhaps the Democrats’ challenge is less to move left or right than to craft a message that appeals to them.Sid Cottinghamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16622559392638650857noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7829013.post-47992938116533542862017-07-02T14:27:00.001-05:002017-07-02T14:36:56.189-05:00Peggy Noonan - On Health Care, a Promise, Not a ThreatPeggy Noonan writes in <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/on-health-care-a-promise-not-a-threat-1498776862" target="_blank">The Wall Street Journal</a>:<br />
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We are coming up on a great American holiday. There will be fireworks and children frolicking in pools; there will be baseball games, cookouts and flags. America will be looking and acting like America. So this is no time for gloom. <br />
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This moment in fact may be, perversely, promising. The failure so far of Senate Republicans to agree on a health-care bill provides an opening. Whatever happens the next few days, moderates and centrists on both sides can and should rise, name themselves, and start storming through. <br />
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The difficulties the Republicans have faced were inevitable. They are divided; they don’t have the will or the base. The party is undergoing a populist realignment, with party donors, think-tankers and ideologues seeing things more or less one way, and the Trump base, including many Democrats, seeing them another. The long-stable ground under Republican senators has been shifting, and they’re not sure where or how to stand. The president, philosophically unmoored and operating without a firm grasp of the legislation he promotes, is little help. He has impulses and sentiments but is not, as the French used to say, a serious man. He just wants a deal and a win, and there’s something almost refreshing in this, in the lack of tangled and complicated personal and political motives. It makes so much possible.<br />
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Many Republican senators see that the American people are not in the mood for tax cuts to the comfortable and coverage limits on the distressed. Democratic senators, on the other hand, are increasingly aware that ObamaCare is not viable, and in some respects is on the verge of collapse. <br />
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This gives both parties motives to join together and make things better.<br />
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Republicans believe they must repeal ObamaCare because they’ve long promised to do so. Keeping promises, especially in our untrusting political climate, is a good thing. But polling suggests America isn’t eager that promise be wholly kept. The Senate’s repeal-and-replace bill is deeply underwater in most polls, barely above water even with Republicans. If you campaign promising mayonnaise but once you’re in office voters start saying they prefer mustard, Politics 101 says, at least for now, hold the mayo. <br />
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Here again is our big wish: that both parties join together and produce a fix. It would no doubt be ungainly and imperfect, but it would be better than the failing thing we have. And Americans, being practical, will settle, for now, for better.<br />
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The GOP’s donor class would likely hate the eventual bill, as the Democratic Party’s nihilist left, which wants no compromise, would hate it. But their opposition would suggest to everyone else the bill must be pretty good.<br />
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There is the beginning of a movement in the Senate for a bipartisan approach. Republican Susan Collins of Maine has it exactly right: Asked if she thinks it necessary for both parties to work together, she said: “That’s what we should have done from the beginning.” Republican Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia said on Fox News Wednesday night: “I’m ready to roll up my sleeves and work with the Democrats.” Republican Ron Johnson of Wisconsin says it’s a ‘mistake’ to attempt a partisan fix. Democrat Joe Manchin, also of West Virginia, says he’s “ready” for a bipartisan effort. The <a href="http://quotes.wsj.com/NYT"><span style="color: #0080c3;">New York Times</span></a> reports senators from both parties met privately weeks ago to discuss core issues. Mr. Manchin was there along with Democrats Joe Donnelly of Indiana and Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota. Among the Republicans were Sens. Capito and Collins, Bill Cassidy of Louisiana and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. <br />
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That’s a good start.<br />
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Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, disappointed in the GOP failure earlier in the week to get to yes, told his own members, in front of the press, that if they can’t get it together, they’ll have to work with the Democrats. It sounded like a threat, not an invitation; he seemed to be saying Republican voters wouldn’t like it. Many wouldn’t, but the polling suggests many would.<br />
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This column respects history and tradition. I’ve banged away on the fact that any big legislative change that affects how America lives, especially on something so intimate and immediate as health care, <em><span style="font-family: Thread-00000a5c-Id-0000000d;">has</span></em> to receive support from both parties or it will never work. <br />
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Franklin D. Roosevelt, in creating Social Security in 1935, knew he had to get Republicans behind it and owning it, or America would see it as a Democratic project, not an American institution. In the end he persuaded 81 Republicans to join 284 Democrats in the House. So too with the creation of Medicare in 1965: Lyndon Johnson wrestled and cajoled Republicans and got a majority of their votes.<br />
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Every president until Barack Obama knew this. He bullied through ObamaCare with no Republican support, and he did it devilishly, too, in that he created a bill so deal-laden, so intricate, so embedding-of-its-tentacles into the insurance and health systems, that it would be almost impossible to undo. He was maximalist. His party got a maximal black eye, losing the House and eventually the Senate over the bill, which also contributed to its loss of the presidency.<br />
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Is it fair that both parties must fix a problem created by one party? No. But it would be wise and would work. <br />
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Here is a thing that would help: a little humility from the Democrats, and a little humanity. <br />
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It would be powerful if a Democratic senator would go on the Sunday shows this weekend and say something like this: “Republicans have proved they can’t make progress. They’re failing in their efforts, and I’m not sad about it, because their bill is a bad one. But I’m not going to lie to you, ObamaCare has big flaws—always did. It was an imperfect piece of legislation and it’s done some things my party said wouldn’t happen, such as lost coverage and hiked deductibles. The American people know this because they live with it. The answer is to do what we should have done in the past, and that is joining with Republicans to hammer out changes that will make things better, that we all can live with, at least for now. We’ll make it better only by working together. I’m asking to work with them.”<br />
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That person would be a hero in the Beltway, which prizes compromise and constructiveness, and admired outside it. “My God, it isn’t all just partisan for her.”<br />
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The Democratic Party made this mess. It’s on them to help dig out of it. If they show some humility, Republicans would look pretty poor in not responding with their own olive branch. <br />
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Show some class, help the country. When it’s over, use whatever words you want: “We forced Democrats to admit the bill was flawed and dying.” “We forced Republicans to back down.” America won’t mind the propaganda, they’re used to it. Just make a bad thing better.<br />
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Don’t give what you produce a grandiose name. Call it the Health Reform Act of 2017. There will be more. Wait till we’re debating single payer in 2020.<br />
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But move now. Do the work, break Capitol Hill out of its shirts-and-skins stasis. Solve this thing. <br />
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A happy 241st anniversary to America, the great and fabled nation that is still, this day, the hope of the world.Sid Cottinghamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16622559392638650857noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7829013.post-40981246054670209512017-06-25T12:37:00.001-05:002017-06-25T12:42:31.922-05:00Rage Is All the Rage, and It’s Dangerous - To the media: Take it down some notches, cool it. We have responsibilities to each other.Peggy Noonan writes in <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/rage-is-all-the-rage-and-its-dangerous-1497571401" target="_blank">The Wall Street Journal</a>:<br />
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What we are living through in America is not only a division but a great estrangement. It is between those who support Donald Trump and those who despise him, between left and right, between the two parties, and even to some degree between the bases of those parties and their leaders in Washington. It is between the religious and those who laugh at Your Make Believe Friend, between cultural progressives and those who wish not to have progressive ways imposed upon them. It is between the coasts and the center, between those in flyover country and those who decide what flyover will watch on television next season. It is between “I accept the court’s decision” and “Bake my cake.” We look down on each other, fear each other, increasingly hate each other.<br />
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Oh, to have a unifying figure, program or party.<br />
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But we don’t, nor is there any immediate prospect. So, as Ben Franklin said, we’ll have to hang together or we’ll surely hang separately. To hang together—to continue as a country—at the very least we have to lower the political temperature. It’s on all of us more than ever to assume good faith, put our views forward with respect, even charity, and refuse to incite.<br />
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We’ve been failing. Here is a reason the failure is so dangerous. <br />
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In the early 1990s Roger Ailes had a talk show on the America’s Talking network and invited me to talk about a concern I’d been writing about, which was old-fashioned even then: violence on TV and in the movies. Grim and graphic images, repeated depictions of murder and beatings, are bad for our kids and our culture, I argued. Depictions of violence unknowingly encourage it.<br />
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But look, Roger said, there’s comedy all over TV and I don’t see people running through the streets breaking into laughter. True, I said, but the problem is that, for a confluence of reasons, our country is increasingly populated by the not fully stable. They aren’t excited by wit, they’re excited by violence—especially unstable young men. They don’t have the built-in barriers and prohibitions that those more firmly planted in the world do. That’s what makes violent images dangerous and destructive. Art is art and censorship is an admission of defeat. Good judgment and a sense of responsibility are the answer. <br />
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That’s what we’re doing now, exciting the unstable—not only with images but with words, and on every platform. It’s all too hot and revved up. This week we had a tragedy. If we don’t cool things down, we’ll have more.<br />
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And was anyone surprised? Tuesday I talked with an old friend, a figure in journalism who’s a pretty cool character, about the political anger all around us. He spoke of “horrible polarization.” He said there’s “too much hate in D.C.” He mentioned “the beheading, the play in the park” and described them as “dog whistles to any nut who wants to take action.”<br />
“Someone is going to get <em><span style="font-family: Thread-000026e8-Id-00000059;">killed</span></em>,” he said. <br />
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That was 20 hours before the shootings in Alexandria, Va.<br />
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The gunman did the crime, he is responsible, it’s fatuous to put the blame on anyone or anything else. <br />
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But we all operate within a climate and a culture. The media climate now, in both news and entertainment, is too often of a goading, insinuating resentment, a grinding, agitating antipathy. You don’t need another recitation of the events of just the past month or so. A comic posed with a gruesome bloody facsimile of President Trump’s head. New York’s rightly revered Shakespeare in the Park put on a “Julius Caesar” in which the assassinated leader is made to look like the president. A CNN host—amazingly, of a show on religion—sent out a tweet calling the president a “piece of s—” who is “a stain on the presidency.” An MSNBC anchor wondered, on the air, whether the president wishes to “provoke” a terrorist attack for political gain. Earlier Stephen Colbert, well known as a good man, a gentleman, said of the president, in a rant: “The only thing your mouth is good for is being Vladimir Putin’s c— holster.” Those are but five dots in a larger, darker pointillist painting. You can think of more.<br />
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Too many in the mainstream media—not all, but too many—don’t even bother to fake fairness and lack of bias anymore, which is bad: Even faked balance is better than none.<br />
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Yes, they have reasons. They find Mr. Trump to be a unique danger to the republic, an incipient fascist; they believe it is their patriotic duty to show opposition. They don’t like his policies. A friend suggested recently that they hate him also because he’s in their business, show business. Who is he to be president? He’s not more talented. And yet as soon as his presidency is over he’ll get another reality show.<br />
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And there’s something else. Here I want to note the words spoken by Kathy Griffin, the holder of the severed head. In a tearful news conference she said of the president, “He broke me.” She was roundly mocked for this. <em><span style="font-family: Thread-000026e8-Id-00000059;">Oh, the big bad president’s supporters were mean to you after you held up his bloody effigy.</span></em> But she was exactly right. He <em><span style="font-family: Thread-000026e8-Id-00000059;">did </span></em>break her. He robbed her of her sense of restraint and limits, of her judgment. He broke her, but not in the way she thinks, and he is breaking more than her. <br />
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We have been seeing a generation of media figures cratering under the historical pressure of Donald Trump. He really is powerful. <br />
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They’re losing their heads. Now would be a good time to regain them. <br />
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They have been making the whole political scene lower, grubbier. They are showing the young what otherwise estimable adults do under pressure, which is lose their equilibrium, their knowledge of themselves as public figures, as therefore examples—tone setters. They’re paid a lot of money and have famous faces and get the best seat, and the big thing they’re supposed to do in return is not be a slob. Not make it worse.<br />
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By indulging their and their audience’s rage, they spread the rage. They celebrate themselves as brave for this. They stood up to the man, they spoke truth to power. But what courage, really, does that take? Their audiences love it. Their base loves it, their demo loves it, their bosses love it. Their numbers go up. They get a better contract. This isn’t brave.<br />
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If these were only one-offs, they’d hardly be worth comment, but these things build on each other. Rage and sanctimony always spread like a virus, and become stronger with each iteration.<br />
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And it’s no good, no excuse, to say Trump did it first, he lowered the tone, it’s his fault. Your response to his low character is to lower your own character? He talks bad so you do? You let him destabilize you like this? You are making a testimony to his power. <br />
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So many of our media figures need at this point to be reminded: You belong to something. It’s called: us. <br />
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Do your part, take it down some notches, cool it. We have responsibilities to each other.Sid Cottinghamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16622559392638650857noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7829013.post-81855720425792080932017-06-25T12:17:00.002-05:002017-06-25T12:17:52.269-05:00Jim Galloway: Handel stitched pro- and anti-Trump Republicans together, and Ossoff let herJim Galloway writes in the AJC's <a href="http://politics.blog.ajc.com/2017/06/21/handel-stitched-pro-and-anti-trump-republicans-together-and-ossoff-let-her/" target="_blank">Political Insider</a>:<br />
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The first Washington recipient of Handel’s gratitude was U.S. House Speaker Paul Ryan. Never mind that social media expert currently at the center of three congressional investigations. It was Ryan’s super PAC that allowed Handel to compete financially with Ossoff. Vice President Mike Pence, who came down here for a public rally with Handel, was mentioned by name, too. <br />
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But when it came to the fellow who lives in the White House, the guy who Tweeted those nice things about her, Handel gave her specific thanks to “the President of the United States,” carefully avoiding the words “Donald” and “Trump.” <br />
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She left it to her audience to fill in the blank. “Trump! Trump! Trump!” they shouted. <br />
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And about those several Election Day tweets from <a href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump">@realDonaldTrump</a>, urging her on to victory. An inspection of<a href="https://twitter.com/karenhandel"> the official Twitter account of the candidate</a> indicates that only one 140-character message from Trump was ever retweeted by the Handel campaign. That was on April 19, when the president congratulated her for making it into the runoff. <br />
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All of which is to say that the first GOP congresswoman from Georgia is headed to Washington this week because she successfully threaded the needle and kept Republicans who love Trump, and Republicans who can’t abide him, stitched together. <br />
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Jon Ossoff and the Democratic machine behind him allowed Handel to do it. <br />
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Thirty million dollars will buy a lot of second-guessing, but that avalanche of cash is largely spent now. So I’ll offer mine for free. It wasn’t that Jon Ossoff wasn’t a resident of the Sixth District — a fact pointed out by Handel time and again. <br />
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No, it was that Ossoff was too much a part of the Sixth, and feared offending Mom and Dad’s old Republican neighbors with attacks that tied his opponent to current events in and current concerns about Washington. <br />
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When Handel slipped in a debate, and said she “opposed a livable wage,” Ossoff made no use of the gaffe. Given that the Sixth is well-heeled and minimum-wage earners are often bused in, I can understand why Democrats might have let that pass.<br />
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But the entire Sixth District runoff coincided with a Washington debate over the repeal of the Affordable Care Act. House Republicans passed their version in early May. Senate Republicans continued to keep their version of Trumpcare — McConnell care? – a very big secret. <br />
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A Journal-Constitution poll showed that three-quarters of the Sixth opposed the House repeal of Obamacare, and that Handel’s Republican supporters were fractured on the issue. <br />
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Trump, in Atlanta for a National Rifle Association convention, held a closed-door fundraiser for Handel. The president’s Tweets posed daily worries for the Republican candidate in the Sixth. <br />
Yet Ossoff scarcely pressed Handel on any of that. <br />
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As a matter of fact, in his quest to label Handel unsuitable for office, Ossoff largely limited himself to attacks with a GOP-stamp of approval. Seriously. <br />
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Handel’s purchase of furniture while secretary of state dated to 2010 and earlier, as did her acceptance of a state allowance for her Lexus. And her allegedly spendthrift trade mission to China. The fracas over Handel’s stint at the Susan G. Komen Foundation, a favorite Ossoff topic, occurred in 2012 – several political lifetimes ago. <br />
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If you looked carefully, some of the TV attack ads leveled against Handel cited previous Republican primary campaigns as the source for their charges. “If they could say it, so can we,” seemed to be the thinking. “If they didn’t, we can’t.” <br />
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National money followed Ossoff’s lead. Federal law stipulates that candidates, who are limited by the amount of cash they can accept from single sources, may not coordinate with groups making independent expenditures. Groups that have no financial limits. <br />
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Yet there are ways of passing messages. On May 23, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QtyiI1WcCL0">the Ossoff campaign posted silent B-roll material on YouTube </a>that featured: a) a shot of a white Lexus SUV; b) a cushy leather armchair; and c) a private jet. All under the headline, “Karen Handel Spends Your Money on Herself.” <br />
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The video and its headline/instruction was there for super PACs to use as they wish. And they did. <br />
But if Ossoff was to get past the 48 percent mark he earned last April 18, he needed to split off at least some of the Republicans lined up and ready to vote for his opponent. <br />
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In the end, reruns of long-ago GOP primaries didn’t do the trick. Forcing a debate over Donald Trump, health care or both might have. But Ossoff and his fellow Democrats chose not to take the chance. <br />
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You have to wonder if the responsibility of spending tens of millions of dollars wisely made the 30-year-old Democrat just a little too risk-averse — conservative would be the wrong word — for his own good. Sid Cottinghamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16622559392638650857noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7829013.post-15850066476725913252017-06-25T12:03:00.004-05:002017-06-25T12:03:50.196-05:00Beyond opposing Trump, Democrats keep searching for a messageDan Balz writes in <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/beyond-opposing-trump-democrats-keep-searching-for-a-message/2017/06/24/6bb05b54-5857-11e7-a204-ad706461fa4f_story.html?utm_term=.efbfb2e3b10c&wpisrc=nl_evening&wpmm=1" target="_blank">The Washington Post</a>:<br />
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The loss in last week’s special congressional election in Georgia produced predictable hand-wringing and finger-pointing inside the Democratic Party. It also raised anew a question that has troubled the party through a period in which it has lost political ground. Simply put: Do Democrats have a message?<br />
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Right now, the one discernible message is opposition to President Trump. That might be enough to get through next year’s midterm elections, though some savvy Democratic elected officials doubt it. What’s needed is a message that attracts voters beyond the blue-state base of the party.<br />
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The defeat in Georgia came in a district that was always extremely challenging. Nonetheless, the loss touched off a hunt for scapegoats. Some Democrats, predictably, blamed the candidate, Jon Ossoff, as failing to capitalize on a flood of money and energy among party activists motivated to send a message of opposition to the president. He may have had flaws, but he and the Democrats turned out lots of voters. There just weren’t enough of them.<br />
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Other critics went up the chain of command and leveled their criticism at House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). She has held her party together in the House through many difficult fights — ask veterans of the Obama administration — but she also has become a prime target for GOP ad makers as a symbol of the Democrats’ liberal and bicoastal leanings. Pelosi, a fighter, has brushed aside the criticism.<br />
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Perhaps Democrats thought things would be easier because of Trump’s rocky start. His presidency has produced an outpouring of anger among Democrats, but will that be enough to bring about a change in the party’s fortunes?<br />
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History says a president with approval ratings as low as Trump’s usually sustain substantial midterm losses. That could be the case in 2018, particularly if the Republicans end up passing a health-care bill that, right now, is far more unpopular than Obamacare. But Trump has beaten the odds many times in his short political career. What beyond denunciations of the Republicans as heartless will the Democrats have to say to voters?<br />
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Though united in vehement opposition to the president, Democrats do not speak with one voice. Fault lines and fissures exist between the ascendant progressive wing at the grass roots and those Democrats who remain more business-friendly. While these differences are not as deep as those seen in Trump’s Republican Party, that hasn’t yet generated a compelling or fresh message to take to voters who aren’t already sold on the party.<br />
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Hillary Clinton, whose rhetoric often sounded more poll-tested than authentic, never found that compelling message during her 2016 campaign. She preferred to run a campaign by demonizing Trump and, as a result, drowned out her economic platform. This was a strategic gamble for which she paid a high price.<br />
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The absence of a convincing economic message did not start with Clinton. Former president Barack Obama struggled with the same during his 2012 reelection. He wanted to claim credit for a steady but slow recovery while acknowledging forthrightly that many Americans were not benefitting from the growth. It was a muddle at best, but he was saved by the fact that Mitt Romney couldn’t speak to those stressed voters either. In 2016, however, Trump did.<br />
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Clinton’s loss forced Democrats to confront their deficiencies among white working-class voters and the vast areas between the coasts that flipped in Trump’s direction. Their defection from the Democratic Party began well before Trump, but until 2016, Democrats thought they could overcome that problem by tapping other voters. Trump showed the limits of that strategy.<br />
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The Georgia loss put a focus on a different type of voter, the well-educated suburbanites, particularly those who don’t live in deep-blue states. While losing ground among working-class whites, Democrats have been gaining support among white voters with college degrees. In the fall, Clinton advisers believed she would do well enough with those college graduates to overcome projected erosion among those without college educations. She fell short of expectations, however, allowing Trump to prevail in the pivotal Midwest battlegrounds.<br />
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The Georgia district had the highest percentage of college graduates of any in the nation. Ossoff tried to win over those suburban voters with a moderate message on economic issues, but it wasn’t powerful or persuasive enough to overcome the appeal of the Republican brand in an election in which the GOP made Pelosi-style Democrats a focus. Loyalty to party was strong enough to allow Karen Handel to prevail.<br />
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The long-running debate over the Democrats’ message probably will intensify as the party looks to 2018 and especially to 2020. It is a debate that the party needs. Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg, writing in the American Prospect, sees a problem that goes beyond white working-class voters to those within the Democratic base who also were left behind by the post-2008 economic gains. He argues that the party’s problem is with working-class voters of all types, not just whites.<br />
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Greenberg has long been critical of the tepidness of the party’s economic message and puts some of the blame on Obama. He believes the former president’s economic message in 2012 and 2016 focused on progress in the recovery largely to the exclusion of the widespread pain that still existed. “That mix of heralding ‘progress’ while bailing out those responsible for the crisis and the real crash in incomes for working Americans was a fatal brew for Democrats,” he argues.<br />
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For progressives, the answer to this problem is clear: a boldly liberal message that attacks big corporations and Wall Street and calls for a significant increase in government’s role in reducing income and wealth inequality. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has been aggressive in promoting exactly that, as he did during the 2016 campaign, with calls for a big investment in infrastructure and free college tuition at public colleges and universities. He has said he intends to introduce legislation he calls “Medicare for All.”<br />
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That kind of message probably will spark more internal debate, particularly among Democrats from swing districts or swing states. It points to one of the biggest challenges Democrats face as they move beyond being the anti-Trump party. That is the question of whether they are prepared to make a robust and appealing case on behalf of government in the face of continuing skepticism among many of the voters they are trying to win over. Trump might not succeed in draining the swamp, but he has tapped into sentiments about Washington that Democrats ignore at their peril.<br />
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Nor can Democrats ignore voters’ concerns about immigration. The Democrats’ message on immigration and immigrant rights (and some other cultural issues) plays well in many blue states, but it draws a much more mixed reception in those parts of the country where Trump turned the election in his direction.<br />
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In this divided era, it’s easy for either party to look at the other and conclude the opposition is in worse shape. That’s the trap for Democrats right now as they watch Trump struggle in office. But Democrats are in the minority in the House, Senate, governorships and state legislatures. Clinton may have won the popular vote, but that proved about as satisfying as coming close while losing last week in Georgia. It’s no substitute for the real thing. If continued frustration with losing doesn’t prompt rethinking about the message, what will?Sid Cottinghamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16622559392638650857noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7829013.post-72896951605292562722016-11-13T15:21:00.002-05:002016-11-13T15:25:02.769-05:00TIME article from after the convention on 8-1-2016 and so true: The Hardest One to Know - Hillary Rodham Clinton has proven she can make history. But can she ever make herself understood?From August 1, 2016 issue of <a href="http://time.com/4416693/hillary-clinton-hardest-to-know/?iid=sr-link1" target="_blank">TIME</a>:<br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #282828; font-family: "georgia" , serif;">The primaries were finally over, the general election loomed, and as Hillary Clinton stood in June to address a friendly audience at a Chicago luncheon, she faced a profoundly unfinished item of business. With history in her pocket and the polls tilting in her favor, the former Secretary of State and First Lady finally named the problem that has dogged her for decades. “A lot of people tell pollsters they don’t trust me,” Clinton told her audience, in a voice that, minus the microphone, would have evaporated. “I don’t like hearing that, and I’ve thought a lot about what’s behind it.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #282828; font-family: "georgia" , serif;">“You can’t just talk someone into trusting you. You’ve got to earn it,” Clinton continued, to a smattering of applause that was tentative and awkward, like the moment.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #282828; font-family: "georgia" , serif;">It’s hard to trust someone you don’t know, and few people should be better known by now than Hillary Rodham Clinton. For years, her every utterance, gesture and hairstyle has been scrutinized, yet she is still something of a mystery to voters.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #282828; font-family: "georgia" , serif;">Millions of Americans still don’t know what to make of this trailblazing, catalyzing, polarizing woman–a fact that her friends chalk up to her bone-deep feminism. Growing up in the vanguard of the women’s-rights movement, Clinton asked NASA how to become an astronaut, only to encounter a no-girls policy. When a professor at Harvard Law School said his august school needed no more women, she made herself a superstar at Yale. She kept her maiden name after marriage, in a time and place where that wasn’t done. She outearned her husband for much of her career. And she scoffed at the notion that she could ever be a cookie-baking, stand-by-your-man kind of woman.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #282828; font-family: "georgia" , serif;">The feminist revolution promised that such freedoms would empower women to forge their own strong identities, but for Clinton the promise remains unfulfilled. Her identity is protean, shape-shifting, no less mysterious today than it was more than 40 years ago, when she entered the national spotlight. Her favorability ratings rise and fall, peaking when she is serving the country and sinking when she is on the campaign trail. No speech, no memoir, no interview or barrage of ads has brought her essence fully into focus. Her foes artfully define her even as she struggles to define and redefine herself.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #282828; font-family: "georgia" , serif;">Former chief of staff Melanne Verveer recalls a limo ride with the then First Lady some two decades ago. Clinton slumped into the leather seat and thumbed through a sheaf of papers. This daily task gave her no pleasure, paging through one unsatisfying, unflattering analysis after another of a particular global figure who seemed impossible to describe. “I wouldn’t like this person either,” she remarked wearily. “This person” was, of course, herself.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #282828; font-family: "georgia" , serif;">Things haven’t changed much as she has moved from the White House to the Senate to the Cabinet and now to the final phase of her second presidential bid. Armchair psychologists still muse about her motives, and critics still comment on her character. “Hillary for prison” is a tuning note for the Republican-convention chorus. From her vantage, her career looks straightforward enough: a life of pragmatic politics in service of idealistic ends, like justice and opportunity for women and children. By any objective or reasonable standard, she is someone who has matched every professional challenge placed before her, from the courtrooms of Little Rock, Ark., to the brutish back rooms of high-stakes diplomacy. But from the outside looking in, the pieces don’t easily fit. The champion of working moms who hobnobs with Wall Street bankers. The “dead broke” (her words) public servant who buys mansions in Washington and New York. The hyperqualified executive who proves “extremely careless” (the FBI director’s words) with her unapproved email system. The feminist paragon who defends a philandering husband.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #282828; font-family: "georgia" , serif;">Clinton’s opponent through an unexpectedly bruising primary, Senator Bernie Sanders, made the most of her amorphous identity. He’s the opposite, a figure of almost cartoon clarity. Clinton is not what she claims to be, Sanders charged. She claims to be on the side of underdogs, but she runs with big dogs. She says she will protect jobs, but she championed free trade. She extols the pragmatism that gets things done, but how is that different from cronyism and corruption?</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #282828; font-family: "georgia" , serif;">Hillary Rodham Clinton is, in the words of one adviser, the most famous woman no one truly knows. And if distortions wrought by white-hot fame are partly to blame, she, too, is at fault. She has never made it easy to know her. She maintains a tiny circle of trust inside a fortress of supreme caution. Her brother-in-law Roger Clinton noticed this not long after Hillary Rodham joined the Clinton clan. “It was fried chicken and mashed potatoes,” he once said of his Southern family, “vs. a concrete wall.”</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #282828; font-family: "georgia" , serif;">To Verveer, Clinton’s trouble is simply the human condition as magnified by the relentless lens of public scrutiny; we all contain multitudes. “At any given time, if you take a snapshot of her, it may not look like the previous snapshot. But in truth, we are all more complex than we may appear on our face,” Clinton’s longtime aide and confidante explained. “Depending on how you look, you see one thing and not another.”</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #282828; font-family: "georgia" , serif;">Clinton’s identity could be a collection of nesting dolls, those nearly identical figures that fit neatly one inside the next. You unpack each lacquered image in hopes of finding something new and essential inside, but there is only another version of the same face in different proportions. For Hillary Clinton, the task between now and November is to make those faces add up to one integral, compelling, believable figure.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #282828; font-family: "georgia" , serif;">CRUSADER</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #282828; font-family: "georgia" , serif;">Picture Hillary Diane Rodham at 21, marching around Lake Waban in the Boston suburbs to 735 Washington Street, the home of Wellesley College president Ruth Adams. Rodham is a familiar visitor. She has lobbied the venerable women’s college on everything from admitting more black students and adding black studies to the curriculum, to grading some courses pass-fail and ditching the skirt-required dress code in the dining hall.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #282828; font-family: "georgia" , serif;">Now it is spring of her senior year; Rodham is the student-government president, and her classmates want a student speaker as part of the commencement ceremony. Coming at the end of the tumultuous and often violent ’60s, the request seems modest enough. “What is the real objection?” the young activist pushes. “It’s never been done,” Adams protests weakly.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #282828; font-family: "georgia" , serif;">This is how Rodham arrived at her first burst of national attention: as a representative crusader in a generation of change seekers. When the Wellesley president backed down, she was given a platform for her speech. And stepping to the microphone on graduation day, she felt compelled to offer an impromptu critique of the milquetoast address delivered by Senator Edward Brooke, the featured orator.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #282828; font-family: "georgia" , serif;">This decision to take on a Senator was a measure of the distance her restless mind and political passions had taken her in a few years. A devout churchgoer and eager Republican–she volunteered as a “Goldwater girl” in high school–Rodham was now scorching the status quo. Her conservative father had done little to seed such confidence. “You must go to a pretty easy school,” Hugh Rodham grunted when shown her perfect grades. It was at Wellesley where she caught fire.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #282828; font-family: "georgia" , serif;">Her speech became one of the most celebrated of that graduation season. “We are, all of us, exploring a world that none of us even understands, and attempting to create within that uncertainty,” Clinton said in a clipped accent few would recognize today. “And so our questions–our questions about our institutions, about our colleges, about our churches, about our government–continue.” The applause when she finished reportedly lasted for seven minutes.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #282828; font-family: "georgia" , serif;">LIFE magazine noted her triumph. Photographed in striped pants and thick glasses, Rodham appeared with a headline borrowed from her speech: Protest is an attempt to forge an identity.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #282828; font-family: "georgia" , serif;">And yet: her soul mates of today, the young activists on campuses across the country, shunned her by the millions in favor of Bernie’s bugle call. In their protests against her campaign machine, they forged their own identities–and she somehow became another institution in need of questioning.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #282828; font-family: "georgia" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #282828; font-family: "georgia" , serif;">“When I go back and read it today, I have to admit it wasn’t the world’s most coherent address,” Clinton has said. What seemed so vivid in 1969 looks to her now like a study in grays. The flaws in her speech reflected a tension within Rodham herself, for she had a mixed view of social protest. She cared less about purity of intentions than about actual results. Student strikes, for example, seemed pointless to her without something to show for them. As she once mused to a friend, she had a liberal’s heart and a conservative’s head.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #282828; font-family: "georgia" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #282828; font-family: "georgia" , serif;">In any event, “the accolades and attacks turned out to be a preview of things to come,” Clinton wrote years later in her memoirs. “I have never been as good as or as bad as my fervid supporters and opponents claimed.”</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #282828; font-family: "georgia" , serif;">PARTNER</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #282828; font-family: "georgia" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #282828; font-family: "georgia" , serif;">After Wellesley and Yale Law School, Hillary Rodham distinguished herself as a young attorney on the team that prepared the impeachment of President Richard Nixon. What happened next shocked many of her friends and admirers. Instead of making her way up through the ranks of Washington, she moved to Arkansas to follow her law-school boyfriend, Bill Clinton, and soon entered the fraught role of wife, placing herself in the outsize shadow of the most talented, magnetic and undisciplined politician of the baby-boom generation.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #282828; font-family: "georgia" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #282828; font-family: "georgia" , serif;">Most marriages are opaque. The seemingly tranquil and loving union can suddenly collapse, while next door an apparently ill-matched pair sails onward through year after stormy year. Hillary Rodham’s marriage quickly became unusually complicated–and therefore hard to read–because it was only one aspect of a larger partnership embarked on a supremely ambitious undertaking. As she alerted a friend in 1974, “Bill Clinton is going to be President of the United States someday.”</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #282828; font-family: "georgia" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #282828; font-family: "georgia" , serif;">When her identity as an individual has clashed with the demands of the partnership, the union has come first. Arkansas voters were put off by this high-powered young woman who dressed like a hippie, loved policy and spoke with a flat Midwestern accent. In 1980, after a single term, they converted Bill from the youngest governor in America into the youngest ex-governor, and many observers assigned a large share of the blame to his wife. What manner of First Lady didn’t even share her husband’s surname, and why call herself Ms. when she ought to be Mrs.?</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #282828; font-family: "georgia" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #282828; font-family: "georgia" , serif;">So Hillary Rodham added Clinton to her handle, lightened her hair and ditched her glasses in favor of contacts. G’s began fallin’ from the ends of her words. Sunday mornings found the lifelong Methodist in her husband’s pew at a Southern Baptist church.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #282828; font-family: "georgia" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #282828; font-family: "georgia" , serif;">This was no casual makeover, but it worked. Bill Clinton was re-elected after two years in the public’s doghouse. Husband and wife returned to the governor’s mansion with a toddler in tow. Chelsea delighted her mother even as she further complicated the question of identity, because it was more urgent than before that Hillary assume the role of chief breadwinner. The governor of Arkansas was paid only a modest salary.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #282828; font-family: "georgia" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #282828; font-family: "georgia" , serif;">Many doors were opened to the governor’s wife, and given Clinton’s talents and education, she made the most of the opportunities. Hillary Rodham Clinton reported a 1992 income of $203,172 compared with her husband’s take-home pay of $34,527. She became a partner at Little Rock’s leading law firm and held plum seats on the boards of </span><a href="http://fortune.com/fortune500/walmart-1/" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0c97d2; font-family: georgia, serif; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">Walmart</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #282828; font-family: "georgia" , serif;">, the frozen-yogurt chain TCBY and the French industrial giant Lafarge. A foray into commodities trading guided by a family friend yielded a tidy 10,000% return. “The ’80s were about acquiring wealth, power, prestige,” Clinton reflected in 1993. “I know. I acquired more wealth, power and prestige than most. But you can acquire all you want and still feel empty.”</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #282828; font-family: "georgia" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #282828; font-family: "georgia" , serif;">She filled the chasm with still more roles. She was her husband’s top adviser in private and his best character witness in public. When Bill Clinton won the White House in 1992, it was Hillary Clinton who carried her husband’s speech in the pocket of her blue suit as they arrived onstage outside the Old State House in Little Rock. She helped the President-elect choose his top aides and his Cabinet. She was the first First Lady to have an office in the West Wing. “She knows more about a lot of this stuff than most of us do,” Bill Clinton told the Wall Street Journal.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #282828; font-family: "georgia" , serif;">WARRIOR</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #282828; font-family: "georgia" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #282828; font-family: "georgia" , serif;">With her assignment to lead the Administration’s ambitious health-care-reform effort, Hillary Clinton upended the traditional role of First Lady. She had spearheaded projects for the partnership before, but never on such a scale. She shaped policy, plotted tactics, lobbied lawmakers and pitched the public as Cabinet members and presidential aides jumped to her command. But the project ended in defeat, helping to fuel the first Republican takeover of Congress in some 40 years. Her failure was so bitter that Hillary Clinton mused in 1996 that someone in her position might “totally withdraw and perhaps put a bag over [her] head.”</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #282828; font-family: "georgia" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #282828; font-family: "georgia" , serif;">Instead, she chose to fight. Dorothy Rodham, Hillary’s mother, loved to tell about a day in the 1950s when her daughter thrashed the neighborhood bully. But most Americans did not see the fighting side of Hillary until she was embattled in the White House. When they did, this aspect of her identity reshaped what they felt about her–whether they liked or hated what they saw.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #282828; font-family: "georgia" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #282828; font-family: "georgia" , serif;">The first gauntlet landed at the site of her own initial triumph. She was paying a courtesy call on the president of Wellesley when she received a call from her attorney. She had been subpoenaed to testify before a grand jury about a long-ago land deal in Arkansas. It was, Clinton believed, a purely political and mean-spirited investigation.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #282828; font-family: "georgia" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #282828; font-family: "georgia" , serif;">She prepared so intensely that she lost 10 pounds. When the morning of her testimony arrived, she chose to walk through the front door of the federal courthouse rather than direct her motorcade into the underground garage. Smiling and waving at the crowd that had gathered to see history–the first presidential spouse to testify in such a forum–Clinton was pure sangfroid. “Cheerio! Off to the firing squad,” she said as she left her lawyers and entered the sealed grand jury room.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #282828; font-family: "georgia" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #282828; font-family: "georgia" , serif;">Afterward, a reporter asked if the First Lady would have preferred to be anywhere else that day. “Oh, about a million other places,” she said drily–but something about Clinton must love the trenches, because she fights so doggedly in them. “I never saw her go into a meeting or a speech or even informal remarks less than fully prepared,” said Bill Galston, a policy adviser in the Clinton Administration. “She has a lot of faith in the capacity of hard work and evidence to win people over.”</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #282828; font-family: "georgia" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #282828; font-family: "georgia" , serif;">On another occasion, when even the White House staff seemed to doubt her innocence of some charge or other, tears welled in her eyes as she said, “I don’t want to hear anything more. I want us to fight.”</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #282828; font-family: "georgia" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #282828; font-family: "georgia" , serif;">And there have been so many, many fights. But as so often in trench warfare, the battle ends in grim stalemate. “Whenever I go out and fight, I get vilified, so I have just learned to smile and take it,” she told White House adviser George Stephanopoulos in 1995, according to his memoirs. “I go out there and say, ‘Please, please, kick me again, insult me some more.’ You have to be much craftier behind the scenes.”</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #282828; font-family: "georgia" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #282828; font-family: "georgia" , serif;">Candidate Clinton was back at the witness table last autumn, when lawmakers grilled her for 11 hours over the deaths of four Americans at a diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya. In public and to the FBI, she has stubbornly defended every inch of crumbling clifftop beneath her feet in the controversy over her private email server. Under attack by Sanders, she refused to release transcripts of her paid speeches to Wall Street audiences, or even to concede that the speeches were a mistake.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #282828; font-family: "georgia" , serif;">Friends muse that the years of combat have left her unrecognizable in public: hedging, defensive, even misleading. “Sometimes, I am saddened by her understandable loss of spontaneity,” the late Diane Blair reflected on this lasting change to her friend’s personality. “It was one of her most endearing qualities. But in public now, she filters out her first response and sometimes her second one, and that contributes to a sense that she is aloof and haughty.” Another friend of long standing put it this way: “There is a wellspring of bitterness and anger and bewilderment, a deep reservoir of hurt.” Clinton’s explanation for her reticence: “The reason that I sometimes sound careful with my words is not that I’m hiding something. It’s just that I’m careful with my words.”</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #282828; font-family: "georgia" , serif;">PRAGMATIST</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #282828; font-family: "georgia" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #282828; font-family: "georgia" , serif;">Identity is not only what we intend to reveal but what is actually seen–and how this is perceived. Now, in the late phase of Clinton’s long career, the face she most wants the public to see, the essential figure at the center of the nesting dolls, is the doer, the person who makes things happen, artist of the nitty-gritty when necessary, a compromiser if that’s what it takes.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #282828; font-family: "georgia" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #282828; font-family: "georgia" , serif;">After her failure with health care, the First Lady embraced her husband’s strategy of pragmatism. To the extent that two huge characters can lower their profiles, they did. They went to work on projects acceptable to a hostile Congress. Some continue to be a source of pride, like the children’s health-insurance plan that now serves 8 million kids.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #282828; font-family: "georgia" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #282828; font-family: "georgia" , serif;">Persuaded to run for a vacant Senate seat in New York in 2000, Clinton took the same approach. Though she was a global celebrity, she put her head down and worked on parochial issues. She passed up a seat on the glamorous Senate Committee on Foreign Relations for one on the Armed Services panel, where she could wrangle the concerns of New Yorkers in uniform and build her national-security credentials.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #282828; font-family: "georgia" , serif;">Senator Clinton also grappled with the decidedly unsexy issue of upstate agriculture, connecting New York City’s restaurant industry to the struggling operations of New York farmers. She ferried a delegation of city restaurateurs to the fields and vineyards of the Empire State, where the foodies found produce as good as any shipped from out of state. At the same time, she nudged the farmers to plant heirloom tomatoes, microgreens and other trendy crops that city diners fancied.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #282828; font-family: "georgia" , serif;">Noting the spicy peppers growing in the elephant enclosure of the Bronx Zoo, she asked a shipping distributor to persuade zoo officials to sell their own line of hot sauce. News that small-business owners in rural New York lacked computer resources sent her to cajole </span><a href="http://fortune.com/fortune500/hp-20/" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0c97d2; font-family: georgia, serif; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">Hewlett-Packard</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #282828; font-family: "georgia" , serif;">executives into donating laptops to enable online sales of moccasins and fishing rods.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #282828; font-family: "georgia" , serif;">It was the same when she served as Secretary of State. Circling the globe to conduct diplomacy face-to-face, Clinton rebuilt a badly frayed U.S. image and along the way specialized in minor, tangible victories, like the clean cookstoves and microloans she put in the hands of poor people. Such achievements don’t tame Putin or stabilize Libya, but as one senior aide put it, a woman in an African village who can feed her children because of a microloan cares passionately about that program. “As an advocate, she is practical about getting results,” said Neera Tanden, a longtime Clinton adviser and friend. “Her real measure is, how do you accomplish something in people’s lives?”</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #282828; font-family: "georgia" , serif;">IN FOCUS</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #282828; font-family: "georgia" , serif;">Among the many faces Clinton has slipped on and off, there was–back in the White House years–the Mystic. Critics had a short but happy romp with the news that she was channeling the spirit of Eleanor Roosevelt during sessions with a “human potential researcher.” Clinton was open about such conversations, dating back to her first days as First Lady. In her own head, Clinton asked Roosevelt, “How did you put up with this?” And that much-criticized First Lady replied, “You’re just going to have to get out there and do it. And don’t make excuses.”</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #282828; font-family: "georgia" , serif;">In that spirit, Clinton has waged many fights, some admirable, some unnecessary, against enemies real and imagined. Over time, she has built up an outer shell, an armor, that makes her difficult to comprehend. Michael Muzyk, a New York trucking executive, tells the story of a day in 2004 when he accompanied the Senator on one of those upstate missions to promote local farmers’ produce. At the state fairgrounds, Clinton received word that her husband had been hospitalized for emergency heart surgery.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #282828; font-family: "georgia" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #282828; font-family: "georgia" , serif;">“I guess you gotta go,” Muzyk said immediately. But Clinton demurred. People were waiting to hear her speak. Her husband, of all people, would understand.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #282828; font-family: "georgia" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #282828; font-family: "georgia" , serif;">“You’re crazy,” Muzyk remembers thinking. And he watched her do her duty, as she has done for years, with admiration–and mystification.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #282828; font-family: "georgia" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #282828; font-family: "georgia" , serif;">Those closest to her have long worried that she has conditioned herself never to let others in. “I just hope people don’t forget,” the late Dorothy Rodham said of her daughter, “that Hillary’s a human being.” But voters can hardly forget what they haven’t been given a chance to see.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #282828; font-family: "georgia" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #282828; font-family: "georgia" , serif;">“I personally know I have work to do on this front,” she told the audience in Chicago in June.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #282828; font-family: "georgia" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #282828; font-family: "georgia" , serif;">But after all that has happened–all the misunderstandings and misdirection, all the identities pried open to reveal other identities that turn out to contain others and so on–perhaps it is too late for a revelation of the “real Hillary,” the authentic champion that her friends tell us we would love, if only we could get to know her. If she opened up, which of the nesting dolls would she be? The activist, pushing for a Sanders-like agenda? The pragmatist, cutting deals with congressional Republicans over a stiff drink? The brawler, leading her band of true believers against a hostile, uncomprehending enemy?</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #282828; font-family: "georgia" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #282828; font-family: "georgia" , serif;">Perhaps the bargain that she struck with herself as a young woman has made these questions as inevitable as they are unanswerable. Free to choose any life she could imagine, Hillary Rodham Clinton tasted many, discarded most and arrived in a place so unique, so vast and variegated, that simply being herself could never be enough.</span></div>
Sid Cottinghamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16622559392638650857noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7829013.post-32774655939637424722016-10-23T12:59:00.000-05:002016-10-23T12:59:15.036-05:00In 1992, non-Hispanic whites made up 84 percent of registered voters. Today, they represent 70 percent of registered voters. The percentage of Hispanics has nearly doubled to 9 percent. Mixed race or others have risen from 1 percent to 5 percent, and blacks have ticked up from 10 percent to 12 percent.Dan Balz of <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/as-trump-delivers-his-gettysburg-address-republicans-prepare-for-a-civil-war/2016/10/22/6d2c5d64-987e-11e6-bc79-af1cd3d2984b_story.html?wpisrc=nl_headlines&wpmm=1">The Washington Post</a> writes:<br /><br />The United States is becoming more diverse racially and ethnically, better educated overall and with a population that is aging. Pew’s analysis found the following: “The Democratic Party is becoming less white, less religious and better-educated at a faster rate than the country as a whole, while aging at a slower rate. Within the GOP, the pattern is the reverse.”<br /><br />By putting together the demographic shifts with changes in party allegiance, the Pew study underscored two big changes — one talked about for some years, the other an ongoing issue for Republicans that Trump’s candidacy has highlighted. Both bode poorly for the Republicans if they cannot adjust their appeal rapidly.<br /><br />In 1992, non-Hispanic whites made up 84 percent of registered voters. Today, they represent 70 percent of registered voters. The percentage of Hispanics has nearly doubled to 9 percent. Mixed race or others have risen from 1 percent to 5 percent, and blacks have ticked up from 10 percent to 12 percent.<br /><br />Both parties have become less white in their makeup, but the changes have moved at significantly different rates. In 1992, whites accounted for 76 percent of Democrats or Democratic-leaning independents. Today, whites make up 57 percent. Meanwhile, whites made up 93 percent of Republicans a quarter-century ago. Today, they’re still 86 percent. In other words, there’s been a 19-point shift inside the Democratic Party and only a seven-point shift in the GOP coalition.<br /><br />As the baby-boom generation retires, the overall age of the population increases. Over the past quarter-century, the median age of registered voters, according to the Pew report, has risen from 46 to 50. What’s happened to the parties? In 1992, the Republican Party had a slightly younger cohort than the Democrats. Today, the GOP is significantly older in its makeup than the Democrats — and older by two years than the median age.<br /><br />The other big shift is the education levels of the two party’s followers. When Bill Clinton was elected president, Republican voters were in general much better educated than Democratic voters. Today’s Democratic Party followers have somewhat higher education levels than Republicans.<br /><br />Trump’s candidacy has drawn its strongest support from white voters who lack college degrees. He has taken advantage of what has been a major movement of these blue-collar voters from their historic home in the Democratic Party. Trump did not trigger the shift toward the Republicans; it began some time ago, though it has accelerated over the past few years.<br /><br />In 1992, whites without college degrees accounted for 63 percent of all registered voters. Today, because of more diversity and higher levels of education, white, non-college-educated voters account for 45 percent in 2016 Pew surveys. Meanwhile, whites with college degrees have increased from a fifth of the electorate to a quarter today.<br /><br />Writing in The Hill recently, Democratic pollster <a href="http://thehill.com/opinion/mark-mellman/299299-mellman-changing-patterns">Mark Mellman observed</a>: “While Republicans are, and have been, making gains with non-college whites, they are suffering continuing — albeit smaller — defections from whites who hold a college degree. In the long run, that’s bad news for the GOP.”Sid Cottinghamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16622559392638650857noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7829013.post-2254350695725913142016-08-15T07:42:00.002-05:002016-08-15T07:45:08.277-05:00Peggy Noonan: How Global Elites Forsake Their Countrymen - Those in power see people at the bottom as aliens whose bizarre emotions they must try to manage. Peggy Noonan writes in <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/how-global-elites-forsake-their-countrymen-1470959258?mod=itp&mod=djemITP_h" target="_blank">The Wall Street Journal</a>:<br />
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This is about distance, and detachment, and a kind of historic decoupling between the top and the bottom in the West that did not, in more moderate recent times, exist.<br />
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Recently I spoke with an acquaintance of <!--
--> <a href="http://topics.wsj.com/person/M/Angela-Merkel/5351">Angela Merkel</a>,<!--
--> the German chancellor, and the conversation quickly turned, as conversations about Ms. Merkel now always do, to her decisions on immigration. Last summer when Europe was engulfed with increasing waves of migrants and refugees from Muslim countries, Ms. Merkel, moving unilaterally, announced that Germany would take in an astounding 800,000. Naturally this was taken as an invitation, and more than a million came. The result has been widespread public furor over crime, cultural dissimilation and fears of terrorism. From such a sturdy, grounded character as Ms. Merkel the decision was puzzling—uncharacteristically romantic about people, how they live their lives, and history itself, which is more charnel house than settlement house. <br />
<br />
Ms. Merkel’s acquaintance sighed and agreed. It’s one thing to be overwhelmed by an unexpected force, quite another to invite your invaders in! But, the acquaintance said, he believed the chancellor was operating in pursuit of ideals. As the daughter of a Lutheran minister, someone who grew up in East Germany, Ms. Merkel would have natural sympathy for those who feel marginalized and displaced. Moreover she is attempting to provide a kind of counter-statement, in the 21st century, to Germany’s great sin of the 20th. The historical stain of Nazism, the murder and abuse of the minority, will be followed by the moral triumph of open arms toward the dispossessed. That’s what’s driving it, said the acquaintance. <br />
<br />
It was as good an explanation as I’d heard. But there was a fundamental problem with the decision that you can see rippling now throughout the West. Ms. Merkel had put the entire burden of a huge cultural change not on herself and those like her but on regular people who live closer to the edge, who do not have the resources to meet the burden, who have no particular protection or money or connections. Ms. Merkel, her cabinet and government, the media and cultural apparatus that lauded her decision were not in the least affected by it and likely never would be. <br />
<br />
Nothing in their lives will get worse. The challenge of integrating different cultures, negotiating daily tensions, dealing with crime and extremism and fearfulness on the street—that was put on those with comparatively little, whom I’ve called the unprotected. They were left to struggle, not gradually and over the years but suddenly and in an air of ongoing crisis that shows no signs of ending—because nobody cares about them enough to stop it. <br />
<br />
The powerful show no particular sign of worrying about any of this. When the working and middle class pushed back in shocked indignation, the people on top called them “xenophobic,” “narrow-minded,” “racist.” The detached, who made the decisions and bore none of the costs, got to be called “humanist,” “compassionate,” and “hero of human rights.” <br />
<br />
And so the great separating incident at Cologne last New Year’s, and the hundreds of sexual assaults by mostly young migrant men who were brought up in societies where women are veiled—who think they <em>should </em>be veiled—and who chose to see women in short skirts and high heels as asking for it. <br />
<br />
Cologne of course was followed by other crimes.<br />
<br />
The journalist <!--
--> Chris Caldwell<!--
--> reports in the Weekly Standard on Ms. Merkel’s statement a few weeks ago, in which she told Germans that history was asking them to “master the flip side, the shadow side, of all the positive effects of globalization.”<br />
<br />
Caldwell: “This was the chancellor’s . . . way of acknowledging that various newcomers to the national household had begun to attack and kill her voters at an alarming rate.” Soon after her remarks, more horrific crimes followed, including in Munich (nine killed in a <!--
--> <a class="company-name" href="http://quotes.wsj.com/MCD">McDonald’s</a><!--
--><!--
--><a class="chiclet-wrapper" href="http://quotes.wsj.com/MCD"><span class="article-chiclet hide up" data-channel="/quotes/zigman/233369/composite"><span class="chiclet-ticker">MCD</span><span class="chiclet-animation"><span class="chiclet-change-wrapper"><span class="chiclet-change ">0.12</span><span class="chiclet-percent">%</span></span><span class="chiclet-triangle"></span></span></span></a><!--
-->) Reutlingen (a knife attack) and Ansbach (a suicide bomber). <br />
<br />
<h4>
***</h4>
<br />
The larger point is that this is something we are seeing all over, the top detaching itself from the bottom, feeling little loyalty to it or affiliation with it. It is a theme I see working its way throughout the West’s power centers. At its heart it is not only a detachment from, but a lack of interest in, the lives of your countrymen, of those who are not at the table, and who understand that they’ve been abandoned by their leaders’ selfishness and mad virtue-signalling. <br />
<br />
On Wall Street, where they used to make statesmen, they now barely make citizens. CEOs are consumed with short-term thinking, stock prices, quarterly profits. They don’t really believe that they have to be involved with “America” now; they see their job as thinking globally and meeting shareholder expectations. <br />
<br />
In Silicon Valley the idea of “the national interest” is not much discussed. They adhere to higher, more abstract, more global values. They’re not about America, they’re about . . . well, I suppose they’d say the future.<br />
<br />
In Hollywood the wealthy protect their own children from cultural decay, from the sick images they create for all the screens, but they don’t mind if poor, unparented children from broken-up families get those messages and, in the way of things, act on them down the road.<br />
<br />
From what I’ve seen of those in power throughout business and politics now, the people of your country are not your countrymen, they’re aliens whose bizarre emotions you must attempt occasionally to anticipate and manage. <br />
<br />
In Manhattan, my little island off the continent, I see the children of the global business elite marry each other and settle in London or New York or Mumbai. They send their children to the same schools and are alert to all class markers. And those elites, of Mumbai and Manhattan, do not often identify with, or see a connection to or an obligation toward, the rough, struggling people who live at the bottom in their countries. In fact, they fear them, and often devise ways, when home, of not having their wealth and worldly success fully noticed. <br />
<br />
Affluence detaches, power adds distance to experience. I don’t have it fully right in my mind but something big is happening here with this division between the leaders and the led. It is very much a feature of our age. But it is odd that our elites have abandoned or are abandoning the idea that they belong to a country, that they have ties that bring responsibilities, that they should feel loyalty to their people or, at the very least, a grounded respect. <br />
<br />
I close with a story that I haven’t seen in the mainstream press. This week the Daily Caller’s <!--
--> Peter Hasson<!--
--> reported that recent Syrian refugees being resettled in Virginia, were sent to the state’s poorest communities. Data from the State Department showed that almost all Virginia’s refugees since October “have been placed in towns with lower incomes and higher poverty rates, hours away from the wealthy suburbs outside of Washington, D.C.” Of 121 refugees, 112 were placed in communities at least 100 miles from the nation’s capital. The suburban counties of Fairfax, Loudoun and Arlington—among the wealthiest in the nation, and home to high concentrations of those who create, and populate, government and the media—have received only nine refugees.<br />
<br />
Some of the detachment isn’t unconscious. Some of it is sheer and clever self-protection. At least on some level they can take care of their own. Sid Cottinghamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16622559392638650857noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7829013.post-91224461084011621552016-07-10T15:39:00.003-05:002016-07-10T15:39:38.351-05:00A Struggle for Common Ground, Amid Fears of a National FractureFrom <a href="http://black%20lives%20matter%20was%20gaining%20ground.%20then%20a%20sniper%20opened%20fire./" target="_blank">The New York Times</a>:<br />
<div>
<br />
It felt like a watershed moment for a scattered and still-young civil rights movement.<br />
<br />
Inside Black Lives Matter, the national revulsion over videos of police officers shooting to death black men in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/100000004517374/deadly-police-shooting-in-minnesota.html">Minnesota</a> and <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/06/us/alton-sterling-baton-rouge-shooting.html">Louisiana</a> was undeniable proof that the group’s message of outrage and demands for justice had finally broken through.<br />
<br />
Even the white governor of Minnesota, Mark Dayton, in a pained public concession, embraced the movement’s central argument. “Would this have happened if those passengers — the driver and the passengers — were white?” he asked. “I don’t think it would’ve.”<br />
<br />
Then, in an instant, everything changed.<br />
<br />
Black Lives Matter now faces perhaps the biggest crisis in its short history: It is both scrambling to distance itself from <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/08/us/dallas-police-officers-killed.html">an African-American sniper in Dallas</a> who set out to murder white police officers and trying to rebut a chorus of detractors who blame the movement for inspiring his deadly attack.<br />
<br />
“What I saw in Dallas was devastating to our work,” said Jedidiah Brown, a Chicago pastor who has emerged as an outspoken Black Lives Matter activist over the past year. The moment he learned of the attack on the police, he said, he immediately sensed that any emerging national consensus would “tear down the middle.”<br />
<br />
“The thing I vividly remember thinking was, this is going to show exactly how divided this conversation is,” he said.<br />
<br />
For those who have harbored doubts or animosity toward Black Lives Matter — among them police unions and conservative leaders — the Dallas attacks are a cudgel that, fairly or not, they are eager to swing.</div>
<br />
In Texas, several state officials, including Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, lashed out at the group, directly linking its tone and tactics to the killings. Mr. Patrick acknowledged that the demonstration in Dallas on Thursday night had been peaceful until the gunman struck, but he accused the movement of creating the conditions for what happened. “I do blame former Black Lives Matter protests,” he said.<br />
<br />
“This has to stop,” Mr. Patrick said, adding of the police officers, “These are real people.”<br />
<br />
State Representative <a href="http://www.texastribune.org/directory/bill-zedler/">Bill Zedler</a>, a Republican, was equally blunt in his assessment of the group’s influence on the 25-year-old gunman, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/09/us/dallas-police-shooting.html">Micah Johnson</a>.<br />
<br />
“Clearly the rhetoric of Black Lives Matters encouraged the sniper that shot Dallas police officers,” he wrote <a href="https://twitter.com/Bill_Zedler/status/751438228323000320">on Twitter</a>.<br />
<br />
But a bigger problem for Black Lives Matter, supported by many liberals, is that Mr. Johnson’s actions could jeopardize the movement’s appeal to a broader group of Americans who have gradually become more sympathetic to its cause after years of highly publicized police shootings.<br />
<br />
In the days before the Dallas massacre, Aesha Rasheed, 39, an activist in New Orleans, felt that at long last, white and black America were watching the same images with the same horror: two Louisiana police officers tackling and then shooting Alton Sterling, 37, at point-blank range; the slumped, blood-soaked body of Philando Castile, 32, after a Minnesota police officer shot him through a car window, with his girlfriend and her daughter sitting inches away.<br />
<br />
“It seemed like a national consciousness was sinking in,” Ms. Rasheed said.<br />
<br />
After the massacre in Dallas, she said, “it turned on a dime.”<br />
<br />She now worries that the episodes involving black men may be overshadowed and overlooked.<br /><br />“Does this get ignored?” she asked. “Do five officers take center stage?”<br /><br />Black Lives Matter usually spurns central planning and management. But in a sign of alarm over the volatile situation, leaders of several organizations associated with the movement put out formal statements that repeatedly described the Dallas attacker as a lone gunman, unconnected to the group’s cause.<br /><br />“There are some who would use these events to stifle a movement for change and quicken the demise of a vibrant discourse on the human rights of Black Americans,” read a <a href="http://blacklivesmatter.com/the-black-lives-matter-network-advocates-for-dignity-justice-and-respect/">statement</a> from the Black Lives Matter Network. “We should reject all of this.”<br /><br />The police have said Mr. Johnson — a military veteran who told the authorities that he had hunted down white police officers as retribution for their abuses — had no direct links to any protest group.<br /><br />But in recounting Mr. Johnson’s final hours, Chief <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/09/us/dallas-police-chief-david-brown-a-reformer-becomes-face-of-nations-shock.html">David O. Brown</a> of the Dallas Police Department mentioned the movement by name. “The suspect said he was upset about Black Lives Matter,” he said.<br /><br />The wider world may now expect or even demand a period of reflection and restraint from the members of Black Lives Matter.<br /><br />But public, nonviolent confrontation, rather than private conciliation, is central to the group’s mission: shouting at police officers, for example, or staging elaborate “die-ins” that evoke death at the hands of law enforcement.<br /><br />This in-your-face style has at times rankled even the movement’s allies: A Black Lives Matter protester <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/video/multimedia/100000003844518/black-lives-matter-protesters-disrupt-bernie-sanders-rally.html">interrupted</a> Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont during a Seattle campaign rally in August and seized control of his microphone, inflaming his aides and some of his supporters. “Excuse me!” Mr. Sanders cried.<br /><br />That combative approach is deliberate. The group is premised, activists said, on a rejection of what they see as a dominant mainstream culture that has marginalized the value of African-American lives for decades.<br /><br />Black Lives Matter was born, as a phrase and a rallying cry, after the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/14/us/george-zimmerman-verdict-trayvon-martin.html">2013 acquittal</a> of George Zimmerman in the Florida shooting death of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed African-American 17-year-old. By the time demonstrators took to the streets of Ferguson, Mo., a year later to protest the killing of Michael Brown, another unarmed African-American, it was the motto and name of a decentralized collection of activists.<br /><br />Today, at least 37 groups operate under the movement’s name, and tens of thousands of supporters identify with its cause.<br /><br />In interviews on Friday, activists scoffed at calls to recalibrate their message or their strategy, or to temporarily pause protests out of respect for the dead police officers in Texas.<br /><br />By Friday night, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/100000004521504/after-dallas-protests-continue.html">protesters had returned</a> to the streets in multiple cities, swarming the Williamsburg Bridge in New York; shutting down a major highway in Atlanta; and marching through downtown Phoenix, where officers used pepper spray and beanbag guns to keep the demonstrators from <a href="http://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/phoenix-breaking/2016/07/08/phoenix-protest-rally-march-city-hall-police-shootings/86878488/">taking over Interstate 10</a>. In each city, the protesters were trailed by the police, as they were in Dallas.<br /><br />But it was clear that the national conversation had changed. On social media, Black Lives Matter activists watched with dismay on Thursday night as a squall of outrage and mourning over the shootings of Mr. Sterling and Mr. Castile was suddenly overwhelmed by a furious outcry over the shooting of Dallas police officers and messages of rage directed at activists and protesters. The hashtag #blacklivesmatter was joined by #bluelivesmatter, a rival reference to police officers.<br /><br />“This anti-cop rhetoric has to stop. It’s sickening,” wrote one Twitter user using the hashtag. “We will not forget or forgive,” wrote another.<br /><br />Sitting in his bed after midnight with an iPhone, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/11/magazine/deray-mckessonwont-be-elected-mayor-of-baltimore-so-why-is-he-running.html">DeRay Mckesson</a>, 30, a Black Lives Matter activist, watched the rapid change in tone. “It suddenly became about blame,” he said. “People wanted to link it to the protesters no matter what.”<br /><br />Undeterred, several activists rebuffed the view of the carnage in Dallas as a potential setback to their cause. Ja’Mal Green, another activist, said the killings were, in their own grisly way, a powerful wake-up call.<br /><br />“It’s not a setback at all,” Mr. Green said. “That’s showing the people of this country that black people are getting to a boiling point. We are tired of watching police kill our brothers and sisters. We are tired of being tired.”<br /><br />He insisted that he was not encouraging violence. But he said there “comes a time when black people will snap.”<br /><br />He added: “It only takes a couple to get past that boiling point. You saw that in Dallas.”<br /><br />As conservative commentators like Rush Limbaugh assailed Black Lives Matter as “a terrorist group committing hate crimes,” activists like Wendi Moore-O’Neal saw echoes of repeated attempts throughout American history, including efforts by the federal government, to discredit civil rights groups and leaders.<br /><br />“It’s just made up,” she said of those who held Black Lives Matter responsible in any way for the Dallas attack. “It’s not true.”<br /><br />“I can’t think of any of the justice or liberation organizations that I know,” Ms. Moore-O’Neal said, “that have an investment in shooting cops.”Sid Cottinghamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16622559392638650857noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7829013.post-65995489389976621042016-05-08T12:53:00.001-05:002016-05-08T12:53:33.449-05:00Trump Was a Spark, Not the Fire - The establishments, both media and conservative, failed to anticipate how they’d be consumed.Peggy Noonan writes in <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-was-a-spark-not-the-fire-1462488099" target="_blank">The Wall Street Journal</a>:<br />
<br />
God bless our beloved country as it again undergoes one of its quiet upheavals.<br />
<br />
<!--
--> <a href="http://topics.wsj.com/person/T/Donald-Trump/159">Donald Trump</a><!--
--> will receive the Republican nomination for the presidency and nothing will be the same. How we do politics in America is changed and will not be going back. The usual standards and expectations have been turned on their head, and more than one establishment has been routed.<br />
<br />
A decent interval should be set aside for sheer astonishment.<br />
<br />
We face six months of what will be a historically hellacious campaign. Yes, we picked the wrong time to stop taking opioids. <br />
<br />
Before I go to larger issues I mention how everyone, especially the media, is blaming the media for Donald Trump’s rise. I hate to get in the way of their self-flagellation but that’s not how I see it. From the time he announced, they gave Mr. Trump unprecedented free media in long, live interviews, many by phone, some possibly from his bathtub. We’ll never know. It was a great boon to him and amounted, by one estimate, to nearly $2 billion worth of airtime.<br />
<br />
But the media did not make Donald Trump’s allure, his allure made for big ratings. Mr. Trump was a draw from the beginning. If anyone had wanted to listen to <!--
--> <a href="http://topics.wsj.com/person/B/Jeb-Bush/8217">Jeb Bush</a>,<!--
--> cable networks would have been happy to show his rallies, too.<br />
<br />
When Mr. Trump was on, ratings jumped, but it wasn’t only ratings, it was something else. It was the freak show at its zenith, it was great TV—you didn’t know what he was going to say next! <em>He </em>didn’t know! It was better than everyone else’s boring, prefabricated, airless, weightless, relentless word-saying—better than <!--
--> <a href="http://topics.wsj.com/person/C/Ted-Cruz/7753">Ted Cruz</a>,<!--
--> who seemed like someone who practiced sincere hand gestures in the mirror at night, better than Marco the moist robot, better than Hillary’s grim and horrifying attempts to chuckle like a person who chuckles. <br />
<br />
And it was something else. TV producers were all sure he’d die on their show. They weren’t for Mr. Trump. By showing him they were revealing him: <em>Look at this fatuous dope, see through him! </em>They knew he’d quickly enough say something unforgivable, and if he said it on their air he died on their show! They took him down with the question! It was only after a solid six months of his not dying that they came to have qualms. They now understood they were helping him. Nothing he says is unforgivable to his supporters! Or, another way to put it, his fans would forgive anything so long as he promised to be what they want him to be, a human bomb that will explode by timer under a bench in Lafayette Park and take out all the people but leave the monuments standing. <br />
<br />
In this regard today’s television producers remind me of the producers of 1969 who heard one day that <!--
--> Spiro Agnew,<!--
--> the idiotic new Republican vice president, was going to make a big speech lambasting the media for its liberal bias. They knew Agnew was about to make a fool of himself. Who would believe him? So they covered that speech all over the place, hyped it like you wouldn’t believe—no one in America didn’t hear about it. It made Agnew a sensation. The American people—“the silent majority”—saw it as Agnew did. “Nattering nabobs of negativism,” from the witty, alliterative pen of <!--
--> William Safire,<!--
--> entered the language. <br />
<br />
The producers had projected their own loathing. They found out they and America loathed different things.<br />
<br />
That’s a little like what happened this year with TV and Mr. Trump.<br />
<br />
My, that wasn’t much of a defense, was it?<br />
<br />
The Trump phenomenon itself would normally be big enough for any political cycle, but another story of equal size isn’t being sufficiently noticed and deserves mention. The Democratic base has become more liberal—we all know this part—but in a way the Republican base has, too. Or rather it is certainly busy updating what conservative means. The past few months, in state after state, one thing kept jumping out at me in primary exit polls. Democrats consistently characterize themselves as more liberal than in 2008, a big liberal year. This week in Indiana, 68% of Democratic voters called themselves liberal or very liberal. In 2008 that number was 39%. That’s a huge increase.<br />
<br />
In South Carolina this year, 53% of Democrats called themselves very or somewhat liberal. Eight years ago that number was 44%—again, a significant jump. In Pennsylvania, 66% of respondents called themselves very or somewhat liberal. That number eight years ago was 50%.<br />
<br />
The dynamic is repeated in other states. The Democratic Party is going left. <br />
<br />
But look at the Republican side. However they characterize themselves, a majority of GOP voters now are supporting the candidate who has been to the left of the party’s established thinking on a host of issues—entitlement spending, trade, foreign policy. Mr. Trump’s colorfully emphatic stands on immigration have been portrayed as so wackily rightist that the nonrightist nature of his other, equally consequential positions has been obscured.<br />
<br />
In my observation it is a mistake to think Mr. Trump’s supporters are so thick they don’t know his stands. They do. <br />
<br />
It does not show an understanding of the moment to say Donald Trump <em>by himself</em> has changed the Republican Party. It is closer to the mark to say the base of the party is changing and Mr. Trump’s electric arrival on the scene made obvious what was already happening.<br />
<br />
For this reason among others, I do not understand the impulse of the NeverTrump people to anathametize and shun those Republicans who will not vow to oppose Mr. Trump and commit to defeating him. They have been warned that if they don’t do these things they will not be allowed to help rebuild the party after Mr. Trump destroys it. Conservatives love to throw conservatives out of conservatism; it’s like an ancestral tic. But great political movements should not be run like private clubs. And have the anathemitizers noticed they aren’t in charge anymore? That in the great antiestablishment disruption of 2016 they have been upended, too?<br />
<br />
We don’t know what’s coming in 2016, or what happens to the GOP if Mr. Trump wins or loses. If there is a rebuilding of the party, as opposed to an ongoing reinvention, we don’t know when that will commence. If it is a rebuilding, on what grounds do the NeverTrump forces think it will be rebuilt? As a neoconservative, functionally open-borders, slash-the-entitlements party?<br />
<br />
I am not sure, whatever happens in 2016, that there will ever again be a market for that product. All this cycle I’ve been thinking of what <!--
--> Lee Atwater<!--
--> said when he wanted to communicate to a politician that a policy was not popular: “The dawgs don’t like the dawg food.”<br />
<br />
Centers of gravity are shifting. The new Republican Party will not be rebuilt and re-formed in McLean, it will be rebuilt or re-formed in Massapequa.<br />
<br />
Finally, can Mr. Trump win? Of course. Uphill but possible. If this year has taught us anything it is what <!--
--> Harrison Salisbury<!--
--> said he’d learned from a lifetime in journalism: “Expect the unexpected.” Sid Cottinghamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16622559392638650857noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7829013.post-86167159761713458082016-05-08T12:53:00.000-05:002016-05-08T12:53:23.829-05:00Simple Patriotism Trumps Ideology - After 16 years, Americans have grown tired of both conservative and liberal abstractions.Peggy Noonan writes in <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/simple-patriotism-trumps-ideology-1461886199">The Wall Street Journal</a>:<br />
<br />
The wind is at <a href="http://topics.wsj.com/person/T/Donald-Trump/159">Donald Trump</a>’s back, and it’s the kind that doesn’t lessen but build. Last week he won the New York primary with an astounding 60% of the vote to <a href="http://topics.wsj.com/person/K/John-Kasich/8332">John Kasich</a>’s 25% and <a href="http://topics.wsj.com/person/C/Ted-Cruz/7753">Ted Cruz</a>’s 15%. This week he swept the five-state Northeast regional primaries with numbers that neared or surpassed the New York results—54% in Maryland, 57% in Pennsylvania, 58% in Connecticut, 61% in Delaware and 64% in Rhode Island. He beat Mr. Kasich in Greenwich, Conn., the affluent enclave of the old moderate Republicanism. Amazingly, he carried every county in all five states, and every county in New York except Manhattan. With 10 million votes, Mr. Trump is on track to become the biggest primary vote-getter in GOP history. He did well with varied demographic groups, old and young, college graduates, rich and not.<br />
<br />
This is the kind of political momentum that tends to grow. A political saying attributed to Haley Barbour is that in politics this is the dynamic: Good gets better and bad gets worse. Very smart analysts and reporters have been translating all these victories into delegate counts, which of course is the key question. But as I look at where we are I think: Get your mind off 1,237; get your mind on the wind at Donald Trump’s back. After all the missteps and embarrassments of the past few months, his support is building.<br />
<br />
“I consider myself the presumptive nominee,” Mr. Trump said in his victory remarks. He is.<br />
<br />
Nothing wrong with Mr. Cruz and Mr. Kasich continuing to forge on. If you added their votes together the other night, Mr. Trump still would have beaten them. But they’re imagining they still have a shot, and Mr. Cruz just brought in<a href="http://topics.wsj.com/person/F/Carly-Fiorina/67">Carly Fiorina</a> as a reinforcement. His admiration of Ronald Reagan is such that he even imitates his blunders. That is what it was for Reagan in 1976 when he picked a running mate before the convention. Desperate gambits are more likely to work when they don’t look desperate.<br />
<br />
Here I note an odd aspect of this cycle. Candidates at this point, roughly nine months in, are supposed to be dog-tired, near the end of their personal resources, exhausted and, if they’re not winning, depressed. That’s how it usually goes. But Mr. Kasich is clearly having the time of his life and told me as much in November. Mr. Cruz told me the same thing last week, at a Journal editorial board meeting. I expected to see him tired and dragging. No, fresh as a daisy. Mr. Trump too is clearly having a ball.<br />
<br />
I find their joy distressing. America is faced with overwhelming problems, the voters are deeply concerned about our future, and they’re happy little chappies in the cable news town hall. I think they’ve absorbed too well the idea of the power of the happy warrior. I would respect them more if now and then they’d outline our problems and look blue.<br />
<br />
In my continuing quest to define aspects of Mr. Trump’s rise, to my own satisfaction, I offer what was said this week in a talk with a small group of political activists, all of whom back him. One was about to begin approaching various powerful and influential Republicans who did not support him, and make the case. I told her I’d been thinking that maybe Mr. Trump’s appeal is simple: What Trump supporters believe, what they perceive as they watch him, is that he is on America’s side.<br />
<br />
And that comes as a great relief to them, because they believe that for 16 years Presidents Bush and Obama were largely about ideologies. They seemed not so much on America’s side as on the side of abstract notions about justice and the needs of the world. Mr. Obama’s ideological notions are leftist, and indeed he is a hero of the international left. He is about international climate-change agreements, and leftist views of gender, race and income equality. Mr. Bush’s White House was driven by a different ideology—neoconservatism, democratizing, nation building, defeating evil in the world, privatizing Social Security.<br />
<div>
<br />
But it was all ideology.<br />
<br />
Then Mr. Trump comes and in his statements radiate the idea that he’s not at all interested in ideology, only in making America great again—through border security and tough trade policy, etc. He’s saying he’s on America’s side, period.<br />
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And because people are so happy to hear this after 16 years, because it seems right to them, they give him a pass on his lack of experience in elective office and the daily realities of national politics. They accept him even though he is a casino developer and brander who became famous on reality TV.<br />
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They forgive it all. Not only because they’re tired of bad policy but because they’re tired of ideology.<br />
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You could see this aspect of Trumpism—I’m about America, end of story—in his much-discussed foreign-policy speech this week. I have found pretty much everything said about it to be true. It was long, occasionally awkward-sounding and sometimes contradictory. It was interesting nonetheless. He was trying to blend into a coherent whole what he’s previously said when popping off on the hustings. He was trying to establish that there’s a theme to the pudding. He was also trying to reassure potential supporters that he is actually serious, that he does have a foreign-policy framework as opposed to just a grab bag of emotional impulses.<br />
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The speech was an attack on the reigning Washington foreign-policy elite of both parties, which he scored as incompetent and unsuccessful: “Logic was replaced with foolishness and arrogance, and this led to one foreign-policy disaster after another.” Mistakes in Iraq, Egypt, Libya and Syria threw the region “into crisis,” and helped create ISIS. He described democracy-promotion efforts as destructive, costing “thousands of American lives and many trillions of dollars.” Our resources are overextended, our allies must contribute more, our friends don’t trust us, nor do our allies respect us. He called for “a coherent foreign policy based on American interests.” His interest is “focusing on creating stability.” “We must stop importing extremism through senseless immigration policies,” including a “pause for reassessment,” which will help prevent the next San Bernardino.<br />
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He positioned himself to <a href="http://topics.wsj.com/person/C/Hillary-Clinton/6344">Hillary Clinton</a>’s left on foreign policy—she is hawkish, too eager for assertions of U.S. military power, and has bad judgement. This will be the first time in modern history a Republican presidential candidate is to the left of the Democrat, and that will make things interesting. It reminded me of how Mr. Trump, in his insistence that he will not cut or add new limits to entitlement spending, could get to Mrs. Clinton’s left on that key domestic question, too.<br />
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He certainly jumbles up the categories. Bobby Knight, introducing him at a rally in Evansville, Ind., on Thursday, said that Mr. Trump is not a Republican or a Democrat. The crowd seemed to like that a lot.<br />
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Those conservative writers and thinkers who have for nine months warned the base that Mr. Trump is not a conservative should consider the idea that a large portion of the Republican base no longer sees itself as conservative, at least as that term has been defined the past 15 years by Washington writers and thinkers.</div>
Sid Cottinghamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16622559392638650857noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7829013.post-87486769501891601352016-04-09T16:26:00.002-05:002016-04-09T16:26:53.147-05:00In Defense of Bill Clinton - No Democrat will speak up for his record in reducing crime.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">From <a href="http://www.wsj.com/article_email/in-defense-of-bill-clinton-1460155621-lMyQjAxMTE2MzA0OTAwNDkzWj">The Wall Street Journal</a>:<br /><br />Unleashing Bill Clinton as a Hillary campaign surrogate carries risks, as the former President can morph from effective advocate to roving liability, often in one sentence. The press is calling Mr. Clinton’s verbal dismantling of Black Lives Matter activists on Thursday an example of the latter, but in this case he is right on the merits and it’s a shame no one else in the Democratic Party will say so.<br /><br />Protestors at a Philadelphia event heckled Mr. Clinton over 1994 bipartisan legislation to reduce crime, blaming the measure for more incarceration. One wielded a sign saying “black youth are not super predators,” a reference to a term Mrs. Clinton deployed in 1996 to describe young gang members, which she’s since apologized for. This is when Bill erupted.<br /><br />“This is what’s the matter,” he said, motioning at the agitators. “I don’t know how you would characterize the gang leaders who got 13-year-olds hopped up on crack and sent them out onto the street to murder other African-American children. Maybe you thought they were good citizens.” He dug in further: “You are defending the people who kill the lives you say matter!”<br /><br />Over some 13 minutes Mr. Clinton ticked off statistics on the drop in crime over the past two decades, including declines in murder and gun violence. He’s right that the bipartisan efforts of that era helped reduce crime enough so that policy makers can now consider criminal justice and sentencing reforms. Progressives at the time were happy to go along with Mr. Clinton’s New Democratic policies when center-right positioning seemed essential to winning the White House. But now they’re too intimidated by Black Lives Matter to tell the truth.<br /><br />Mr. Clinton told a crowd at Penn State-Behnrend on Friday that he “almost” wanted to apologize for the incident, and it’s a sign of the progressive times that even a former President must kowtow to radical children with a political megaphone but no historical memory. The Black Lives Matter agitators should thank President Clinton, not excoriate him.</span>Sid Cottinghamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16622559392638650857noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7829013.post-61269427254677529332016-03-27T19:44:00.000-05:002016-03-27T19:44:03.982-05:00Unite to Defeat Radical Jihadism - Unite to Defeat Radical JihadismPeggy Noonan writes in <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/how-to-defeat-radical-jihadism-1458862004" target="_blank">The Wall Street Journal</a>:<br />
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In striking at the political heart of Europe, home of the European Union, the ISIS jihadists were delivering a message: They will not be stopped.<br />
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What we are seeing now is not radical jihadist Islam versus the West but, increasingly, radical jihadist Islam versus the world. They are on the move in Africa, parts of Asia and of course throughout the Mideast. <br />
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Radical jihadism is not going to go away, not for a long time, probably decades. For 15 years it has in significant ways shaped our lives, and it will shape our children’s too. They will have to win the war. <br />
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It will not be effectively fought with guilt, ambivalence or double-mindedness. That, in the West, will have to change.<br />
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The usual glib talk of politicians—calls for unity, vows that we will not give in to fear—will produce in the future what they’ve produced in the past: nothing. “The thoughts and the prayers of the American people are with the people of Belgium,” said the president, vigorously refusing to dodge clichés. “We must unite and be together, regardless of nationality, race or faith, in fighting against the scourge of terrorism.” It is not an “existential threat,” he noted, as he does. But if you were at San Bernardino or Fort Hood, the Paris concert hall or the Brussels subway, it would feel pretty existential to you. <br />
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ISIS is essentially “medieval” in its religious nature, and “committed to purifying the world by killing vast numbers of people.” They intend to eliminate the infidel and raise up the caliphate—one like the Ottoman empire, which peaked in the 16th century and then began its decline. <br />
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Normal people have seen that a long time, but the leaders of the West—its political class, media powers and opinion shapers—have had a hard time coming to terms. I continue to believe part of the reason is that religion isn’t very important to many of them, so they have trouble taking it seriously as a motivation of others. An ardent Catholic, evangelical Christian or devout Jew would be able to take the religious aspect seriously when discussing ISIS. An essentially agnostic U.S. or European political class is less able. Thus they cast about—if only we give young Islamist men jobs programs or social integration schemes, we can stop this trouble. But jihadists don’t <em>want </em>to be integrated. They want trouble.<br />
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Our own president still won’t call radical Islam what it is, thinking apparently that if we name them clearly they’ll only hate us more, and Americans on the ground, being racist ignoramuses, will be incited by candor to attack their peaceful Muslim neighbors. <br />
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I end with a point about the sheer power of pride right now in Western public life. Republican operatives and elected officials in the U.S. don’t want to change their stand on illegal immigration, and a key reason is pride. They’re stiff-necked, convinced of their own higher moral thinking, and they will have open borders—which they do not call “open borders” but “comprehensive immigration reform,” which includes border-control mechanisms. But they’ll never get to the mechanisms. They see the rise of Donald Trump and know it has something to do with immigration, but—they can’t bow. Some months ago I spoke to an admirable conservative group and said the leaders of the GOP should change their stand. I saw one of their leaders wince, as if I had made a faux pas. Which, I understood, I had. I understood too that terrorism is only making the border issue worse, and something’s got to give. Sid Cottinghamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16622559392638650857noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7829013.post-66043226185706164632016-03-20T11:43:00.000-05:002016-03-20T11:45:38.251-05:00It’s Time for The Speech - Like JFK, Nixon and Obama, the moment is now for a big, campaign-saving speech.<div style="text-align: justify;">
Daniel Henninger writes in <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/its-time-for-the-speech-1456962064">The Wall Street Journal</a> on 3-3-2016:</div>
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It’s time for The Speech.</div>
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Readers who have spent a lifetime absorbing the melodramas of America’s presidential election politics, such as this one, will recognize instantly what I am proposing here. It is time for <a href="http://topics.wsj.com/person/R/Marco-Rubio/6882">Marco Rubio</a> or <a href="http://topics.wsj.com/person/C/Ted-Cruz/7753">Ted Cruz</a> to deliver The Speech—or lose. Lose the campaign, the party, the Supreme Court and an already diminished country’s next four years.</div>
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“The Speech” is the title history has conferred on Ronald Reagan’s 1964 speech called “A Time for Choosing.”</div>
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Reagan delivered the speech in October 1964 on behalf of the foundering presidential campaign of the Republican Party’s nominee, Sen. Barry Goldwater of Arizona. Goldwater suffered a historic loss to President Lyndon Johnson, but the televised, roughly 30-minute speech, launched Reagan’s political career. It was an electrifying—and accessible—definition of conservatism in America’s politics then.</div>
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An understanding of when the moment has arrived to give The Speech requires naming three other masterpieces of the art: Sen. John F. Kennedy’s address in 1960 about his Catholicism to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association two months before the election; Sen. Richard Nixon’s 1952 Checkers speech, also less than two months before the election; and Sen. <a href="http://topics.wsj.com/person/O/Barack-Obama/4328">Barack Obama</a>’s speech on race, “A More Perfect Union,” in March 2008.</div>
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Their purpose: to rescue a campaign on the brink of dying for reasons seemingly beyond the candidate’s ability to control. All these speeches accomplished what no one thought possible. They overcame an enormous political obstacle, reversed the candidate’s fortunes and reopened a path to victory.</div>
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The political obstacle now is <a href="http://topics.wsj.com/person/T/Donald-Trump/159">Donald Trump</a> and a roiling base of support for Mr. Trump—revealed again in Super Tuesday’s results as about 35% of those voting.</div>
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The Trump candidacy is thought to be a political colossus, virtually unstoppable. The problems faced by Kennedy, Nixon and Obama were also said to be campaign killers.</div>
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Nixon’s Checkers speech, derided by some today, was in fact an astonishing feat of political reversal. Accused of financial improprieties, Gen. Dwight Eisenhower’s running mate was regarded as beyond saving. The televised speech, which Nixon paid for, was watched by 60 million people and produced an overnight outpouring of support for the beleaguered candidate.</div>
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Point: The concrete never sets in American politics. Opinions can change, or be changed.</div>
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In Kennedy’s case, a well-organized, public opposition of Protestants alleged that the first Catholic president would be a tool of the pope. It threatened to kill Kennedy’s chances in a tightly fought election. JFK’s reply, in the Houston speech before the ministers, was so powerful that it eliminated the issue from American politics.</div>
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Sen. Obama’s “More Perfect Union” was of course his Rev. Wright speech. The “fiery preacher” stories had brought the Obama campaign to a standstill. Essentially, Mr. Obama used the speech to elevate race in America to such sublime heights that it subsumed the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. The Speech righted the campaign.</div>
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Critics of these speeches to this day carp about the details. Their side lost.</div>
Sid Cottinghamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16622559392638650857noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7829013.post-56357927847458896432016-03-20T11:15:00.004-05:002016-03-20T11:25:13.625-05:00The GOP Establishment’s Civil War - A free-for-all between Christie, Rubio, Cruz and others, while Trump hovers above it all.<div style="text-align: justify;">
Peggy Noonan writes in <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-gop-establishments-civil-war-1452212775" target="_blank">The Wall Street Journal</a> back on 1-9-2016:</div>
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He said he’d build a wall and close the border and as the months passed and his competitors saw his surge, they too were suddenly, clearly, aggressively for ending illegal immigration.</div>
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Mr. Trump touched an important nerve in opposing the political correctness that has angered the American people for a quarter century. He changed the debate when he asked for a pause in Muslim immigration until America “can figure out what’s going on.” In the age of terror, that looked suspiciously like common sense. Americans do not want America to become what Europe is becoming.</div>
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You only have to look at what is reported to have happened in Cologne, Germany, on New Year’s Eve to get a sense that Europe’s establishment, with its politically correct thinking, is losing control. <a href="http://topics.wsj.com/person/M/Angela-Merkel/5351">Angela Merkel</a> is a great lady and most of her leadership has been sound as a drum, but she will probably lose her job eventually because of her epic miscalculation in accepting more than a million Middle Eastern refugees.</div>
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Her decision was no doubt driven by heart and sympathy, but it reminds me of the fall of Margaret Thatcher. In 1989 Thatcher moved to impose a change in the British tax system. This caused resentment and then unrest. She wouldn’t back down, and the next year she fell. Years later she told me what she’d learned. People are afraid, she said; they live closer to the margins than we understand. When you propose a big change you can leave people feeling as if the rug is being pulled from under them. That’s a big thing to learn, and she spoke of it with humility.</div>
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She lost her job by being too tough. Ms. Merkel has imperiled hers by being too soft. But the lesson is the same: know how close to the edge people feel, how powerless, and respect their anxiety. Don’t look down on it, and them.</div>
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Sid Cottinghamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16622559392638650857noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7829013.post-28016517117166011252016-02-22T22:24:00.000-05:002016-02-22T22:24:46.154-05:00How Donald Trump’s Army Is Transforming the GOP - Populist agenda trumps traditional conservative ideologies for the new breed of Republican voterGerald Seib writes in <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/how-donald-trumps-army-is-transforming-the-gop-1456162285?mod=asia&mod=djemITPA_t" target="_blank">The Wall Street Journal</a>:<br />
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Amid all the odd changes unfolding in this election cycle, the most startling may be the way the Republican Party is transforming right before our eyes.<br />
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Whether <!--
--> <a href="http://topics.wsj.com/person/T/Donald-Trump/159">Donald Trump</a><!--
--> is responsible for this transformation, or merely the beneficiary of it, is a chicken-and-egg question for history to decide. But the change now has been unleashed regardless of his electoral fate.<br />
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Through balloting in three states, it appears that a new set of voters is driving the GOP now. Their agenda is more populist and less ideological than has been the case for Republican voters in the past. They are prepared to break with the party’s traditional positions on a number of fronts, particularly on issues important to the Republicans’ core business constituency. They have little respect, and to some degree outright antipathy, for the party’s leaders.<br />
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Some of these voters appear new to the GOP, but many have been bouncing around in the party, lured in over the years by their differences with Democrats on cultural issues. The difference now is that they are energized, as opposed to apathetic, and united behind a single candidate. They are driving the primary process and changing the party in the process.<br />
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The voters Mr. Trump has pulled together in winning New Hampshire and South Carolina and coming in second in Iowa is a coalition of the economically and culturally alienated, voters who look angry but also a bit frightened. It is a far cry from the traditional GOP winners’ coalition. <br />
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In each of the first three states that have voted, Mr. Trump has carried by a wide margin Republican voters with a high-school education or less, according to polls of voters. In New Hampshire, he won almost half of such voters. In South Carolina, he also won 40% of those with some college education but not a college degree.<br />
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He also has won in each of the first three states among ideologically moderate Republicans and among those who consider themselves politically independent. He does better among older voters than younger ones; in both New Hampshire and South Carolina, he won among those age 65 and older. He does better among those on the lower half of the income scale than those on the upper half.<br />
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It’s important to note that Mr. Trump is drawing votes from across a broad spectrum of Republican voters; he fishes in every pond. But his core voters are in this new populist alignment.<br />
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To some extent, the Trump core looks like the voters who propelled <!--
--> Pat Buchanan,<!--
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--> and <!--
--> <a href="http://topics.wsj.com/person/S/Rick-Santorum/6582">Rick Santorum</a><!--
--> in earlier Republican election cycles. But not exactly: Their coalitions were more heavily tinged with evangelical voters, who are part of but not the heart of the Trump crowd. And those earlier contenders eventually became marginal candidates, not front-runners.<br />
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To some extent, this coalition also is a descendent of the tea-party movement that sprang to life in 2010, largely in response to the health-care law of President <!--
--> <a href="http://topics.wsj.com/person/O/Barack-Obama/4328">Barack Obama</a><!--
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This isn’t the country club, Wall Street, Chamber of Commerce or religious-conservative set within the GOP. It isn’t the deficit-hawk coalition, either, for Mr. Trump has proposed a tax plan that, according to outside analysts, would blow the biggest hole in the side of the budget. And he’s the GOP candidate most outspoken about not cutting benefits for Medicare and Social Security recipients.<br />
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Nor is this the coalition of neo-conservatives on security policy, for Mr. Trump has blasted the Iraq war those neo-cons inspired, and has kind words to say about <!--
--> <a href="http://topics.wsj.com/person/P/Vladimir-Putin/6409">Vladimir Putin</a>,<!--
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<!--
--> Ronald Reagan<!--
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This is a populist coalition, and Mr. Trump has won its support in part by breaking defiantly with traditional Republican economic policies. He mocks free-trade agreements that have had broad support within the party, and particularly within its normally powerful business wing. He has shredded the more open Reagan philosophy on immigration. He can sound more like a Democratic populist than a Republican one when talking about taxing hedge funds and private-equity firms. <br />
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He has openly ridiculed the last three presidential contenders of the Republican Party: Sen. <!--
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--> former President <!--
--> <a href="http://topics.wsj.com/person/B/George-W.%20Bush/5369">George W. Bush</a><!--
--> and former Massachusetts Gov. <!--
--> <a href="http://topics.wsj.com/person/R/Mitt-Romney/6591">Mitt Romney</a>.<!--
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The voters drawn to these apostasies have moved from the GOP fringes to its heart—and other candidates trying to catch Mr. Trump ignore them at their peril.Sid Cottinghamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16622559392638650857noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7829013.post-28369931303097470662016-02-21T08:42:00.004-05:002016-02-21T08:49:05.332-05:00The Thorny Economics of Illegal Immigration - Arizona’s economy took a hit when many illegal immigrants left, but benefits also materialized From <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-thorny-economics-of-illegal-immigration-1454984443" target="_blank">The Wall Street Journal</a>:<br />
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MARICOPA, Ariz.—After Arizona passed a series of tough anti-immigration laws, <!--
--> Rob Knorr<!--
--> couldn’t find enough Mexican field hands to pick his jalapeño peppers. He sharply reduced his acreage and invested $2 million developing a machine to remove pepper stems. His goal was to cut the number of laborers he needed by 90% and to hire higher-paid U.S. machinists instead.<br />
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“We used to have many migrant families. They aren’t coming back,” says Mr. Knorr, who owns RK Farms LLC, an hour’s drive from Phoenix.<br />
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Few issues in the presidential campaign are more explosive than whether and how much to crack down on illegal immigration, which some Republican candidates in particular blame for America’s economic woes. Arizona is a test case of what happens to an economy when such migrants leave, and it illustrates the economic tensions fueling the immigration debate.<br />
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Economists of opposing political views agree the state’s economy took a hit when large numbers of illegal immigrants left for Mexico and other border states, following a broad crackdown. But they also say the reduced competition for low-skilled jobs was a boon for some native-born construction and agricultural workers who got jobs or raises, and that the departures also saved the state money on education and health care. Whether those gains are worth the economic pain is the crux of the debate.<br />
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<!--
--> Gordon Hanson,<!--
--> a University of California at San Diego economist who has studied the issue for the nonpartisan Council on Foreign Relations, has detailed <a class="icon none" href="http://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/-immigration-productivity-and-competitiveness-in-american-industry_150136627858.pdf" target="_blank">how large-scale immigration undermines wages for low-skilled workers</a>. In Arizona’s case, he thinks the state is paying an economic price for its decision. “As the U.S. economy continues to recover, the Arizona economy will be weighed down by slower growth and by less export production in traditional industries” such as agriculture where illegal immigrants play a big role, he says. <br />
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Proponents of doing more to curb illegal immigration say the mass departures helped the state economically in several ways. Government spending on health care and education for illegal immigrants and their U.S.-born children dropped. Wages for plasterers, landscapers, farmworkers and other low-skilled laborers jumped because of scarcity, according to employers and federal data.<br />
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“Even if the size of the state’s GDP decreased, the decrease in immigration redistributed income from employers to employees, particularly at the bottom end of the labor market,” says <!--
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--> research director of the Center for Immigration Studies, in Washington, which favors reduced illegal immigration. “That’s a good deal.”<br />
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<strong>Big drop</strong><br />
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Between 2007 and 2012, Arizona’s population of undocumented workers dropped by 40%—by far the biggest percentage decline of any state—according to the Pew Research Center, a nonpartisan think tank whose numbers are cited by pro and anti-immigration groups. California, the biggest border state, lost just 12.5% of its illegal immigrants during that time period. Since 2012, Arizona’s illegal-immigrant population hasn’t grown much, if at all, according to state economists and employers and preliminary data from Pew. Since 2007, about 200,000 undocumented immigrants have left the state, which has a population of 6.7 million.<br />
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The cost of illegal immigration has been a big political issue in Arizona for years. But pinning down exactly how much it costs the state, and how much is collected from illegal immigrants through taxation, is surprisingly hard to do. The state doesn’t count it. Estimates vary widely, depending in part on debatable issues such as whether to include the cost of educating U.S.-born children of illegal immigrants. <br />
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In 2004, the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a Washington-based group that seeks to reduce immigration, calculated that undocumented workers cost Arizona taxpayers more than $1 billion a year for education, medical care and incarceration, after subtracting the estimated taxes they pay. <br />
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Four years later, Judith Gans, then manager of the immigration-policy program at the University of Arizona’s Udall Center for Studies in Public Policy, examined the issue for all immigrants, not just illegal ones. She concluded that immigrants accounted for nearly $1 billion more in annual tax revenue than they cost the state. <br />
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<a class="company-name" href="http://quotes.wsj.com/MCO">Moody’s</a><!--
--> Analytics looked at Arizona’s economic output for The Wall Street Journal, with an eye toward distinguishing between the effects of the mass departures of illegal immigrants and the recession that hit the state hard beginning in 2008. It concluded that the departures alone had reduced Arizona’s gross domestic product by an average of 2% a year between 2008 and 2015. Because of the departures, total employment in the state was 2.5% lower, on average, than it otherwise would have been between 2008 and 2015, according to Moody’s. <br />
<br />
The recession, of course, also hurt the state’s economy. Mr. Hanson, the immigration economist, said the economic downturn led many migrants to leave. <br />
<br />
Economic activity produced by immigrants—what economists call the “immigration surplus”—shrank because there were fewer immigrants around to buy clothing and groceries, to work and to start businesses. <br />
<br />
These days, construction, landscaping and agriculture industries, long dependent on migrants, complain of worker shortages. While competition for some jobs eased, there were fewer job openings overall for U.S.-born workers or legal immigrants.<br />
<br />
According to the Moody’s analysis, low-skilled U.S. natives and legal Hispanic immigrants since 2008 picked up less than 10% of the jobs once held by undocumented immigrants. In a separate analysis, economists <!--
--> Sarah Bohn<!--
--> and <!--
--> Magnus Lofstrom<!--
--> of the Public Policy Institute of California and <!--
--> Steven Raphael<!--
--> of the University of California at Berkeley conclude that <a class="icon none" href="https://gspp.berkeley.edu/assets/uploads/research/pdf/p82.pdf" target="_blank">employment declined for low-skilled white native workers in Arizona during 2008 and 2009</a>, the height of the out-migration. One bright spot: the median income of low-skilled whites who did manage to get jobs rose about 6% during that period, the economists estimate.<br />
<br />
Arizona’s population of illegal immigrants grew nearly fivefold between 1990 and 2005, to about 450,000, according to Pew Research. Starting around 2004, the state approved a series of measures, either by ballot initiatives or legislation, aimed at discouraging illegal immigration. Undocumented immigrants in Arizona, about 85% of whom came from Mexico, are barred from receiving government benefits, including nonemergency hospital care. They can’t receive punitive damages in civil lawsuits. Many can’t get drivers’ licenses and aren’t eligible for in-state tuition rates. Arizona developed a national reputation for tough enforcement of the rules.<br />
<br />
Some current Republican presidential contenders also take a tough line on immigration. GOP front-runner <!--
--> <a href="http://topics.wsj.com/person/T/Donald-Trump/159">Donald Trump</a><!--
--> <a class="icon none" href="http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2015/11/11/donald-trump-models-deportation-plan-on-1950s-program/" target="_self">backs a “deportation force” to send home those here illegally</a>, and he wants to build a wall on the Mexican border to keep out others. Texas Sen. <!--
--> <a href="http://topics.wsj.com/person/C/Ted-Cruz/7753">Ted Cruz</a><!--
--> also wants a wall and would end Obama administration measures that have halted deportations of many undocumented workers.<br />
<br />
On the Democratic side, former Secretary of State <!--
--> <a href="http://topics.wsj.com/person/C/Hillary-Clinton/6344">Hillary Clinton</a><!--
--> and Vermont Sen. <!--
--> Bernie Sanders<!--
--> would allow illegal immigrants already here to become citizens, and would continue the Obama administration policies.<br />
<br />
Arizona’s immigration flow started to reverse in 2008 after the state became the first to require all employers to use the federal government’s E-Verify system, which searches Social Security records to check whether hires are authorized to work in the U.S. That law coincided with the collapse of the construction industry and the recession. The combination persuaded many illegal immigrants to leave for neighboring states or Mexico.<br />
<br />
In 2010, as the state economy began to recover, the Legislature stepped up pressure. Under a new law, SB 1070, police could use traffic stops to check immigration status. Another section of the law, later struck down by the Supreme Court, made it illegal for day laborers to stand on city streets and sign up for work on construction crews.<br />
<br />
“It was like, ‘Where did everybody go?’ ” says <!--
--> Teresa Acuna,<!--
--> a Phoenix real-estate agent who works in Latino neighborhoods. Real-estate agent <!--
--> Patti Gorski<!--
--> says her sales records show that prices of homes owned by Spanish-speaking customers fell by 63% between 2007 and 2010, compared with a 44% drop for English-speaking customers, a difference she attributes partly to financial pressure on owners who had been renting homes to immigrants who departed.<br />
<br />
SB 1070 prompted some unions and other organizations <a class="icon none" href="http://archive.azcentral.com/business/articles/2010/05/13/20100513immigration-boycotts-list.html" target="_blank">to boycott the state</a>, in some cases canceling conventions. In Latino neighborhoods, sales declined at grocery stores and other businesses catering to migrants. At the Maryvale Market, in an immigrant community of ranch homes, <!--
--> Ashok Patel<!--
--> says his business is down by half since 2008.<br />
<br />
On the other side of the economic ledger, government spending on immigrants fell. State and local officials don’t track total spending on undocumented migrants or how many of their children attend public schools. But the number of students enrolled in intensive English courses in Arizona public schools fell from 150,000 in 2008 to 70,000 in 2012 and has remained constant since. Schooling 80,000 fewer students would save the state roughly $350 million a year, by one measure. <br />
<br />
During that same period, annual emergency-room spending on noncitizens fell 37% to $106 million, from $167 million. And between 2010 and 2014, the annual cost to state prisons of incarcerating noncitizens convicted of felonies fell 11% to $180 million, from $202 million. <br />
<br />
“The economic factor is huge in terms of what it saves Arizona taxpayers,” primarily on reduced education costs, says <!--
--> Russell Pearce,<!--
--> who as a state senator sponsored SB 1070.<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><strong>Worker shortage</strong></span><br />
<br />
As the Arizona economy recovered, a worker shortage began surfacing in industries relying on immigrants, documented or not. Wages rose about 15% for Arizona farmworkers and about 10% for construction between 2010 and 2014, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Some employers say their need for workers has increased since then, leading them to boost wages more rapidly and crimping their ability to expand.<br />
<br />
Before the immigration crackdown, Precise Drywall Inc., of Phoenix, would deploy 50 people for jobs building luxury homes. “I could pull out phone books where I had 300 or 400 guys’ numbers” to fill out crews, recalls company President <!--
--> Jeremy Barbosa.<!--
--> No longer. Many immigrants left and haven’t returned, while other workers moved on to other industries.<br />
<br />
“Now you have to put out feelers, buy ads, go on Craigslist, tap job agencies just to get a few men,” says Mr. Barbosa. “Growth is based on the ability to hire.”<br />
<br />
At a <!--
--> <a class="company-name" href="http://quotes.wsj.com/HD">Home Depot</a> store in Maryvale recently, a dozen men from Mexico and Central America milled around the parking lot looking for work. <!--
--> Juan Castillo,<!--
--> a gregarious Mexican who said he had regularly crossed the border illegally over the past 10 years, said he and his colleagues can do landscaping, concrete work, drywall or whatever else is needed.<br />
<br />
Before E-Verify, 30 to 40 men would show up at 4:30 a.m. and would usually find jobs by 10 a.m. Since then, the job seekers rarely thin out during the day despite the worker shortage because employers are shying away from hiring undocumented workers.<br />
<br />
“E-Verify is a problem for us,” Mr. Castillo said. “We can work for a week. It takes that long for the paperwork. Then we’re out.”<br />
<br />
Another would-be worker, <!--
--> Manuel Bernal,<!--
--> noted that because the Mexican economy has improved, laborers with families in that country are more inclined to stay there. Pew Research says that, nationally, <a class="icon none" href="http://www.pewhispanic.org/2015/11/19/more-mexicans-leaving-than-coming-to-the-u-s/" target="_blank">more Mexicans now are heading home than coming into the U.S.</a> The Center for Migration Studies estimated the number of undocumented immigrants fell to 10.9 million in 2014, from 12 million in 2008. <br />
<!--
--><br />
<div class="
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The labor shortage has caused some wages to rise. <!--
--> Carlos Avelar,<!--
--> a placement officer at Phoenix Job Corps, a federal job-training center, says graduates now often mull two or three jobs offers from construction firms and occasionally start at $14.65 an hour instead of $10.<br />
<br />
At DTR Landscape Development LLC, the firm’s president, Dick Roberts, says he has increased his starting wage by 60% to $14.50 an hour because he is having trouble finding reliable workers.<br />
<br />
One immigrant-heavy industry, construction, has added about 15,000 jobs in Arizona since 2011 and now has total employment of 127,000, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, half the number of 2006. Employment in farming, which also depends on immigrants, has rarely exceeded 9,500 since 2008, according to the bureau, whose numbers mainly cover workers on large farms.<br />
<br />
Mr. Knorr, the pepper grower, says he planted just 120 acres last year, down from as many as 550 in years past, because he couldn’t find enough harvest workers. <br />
<br />
Some peppers he was unable to harvest by Thanksgiving turned red on the vine—“chocolate,” in farmer parlance. That made them useless to salsa makers, who want only green peppers. He plowed the plants under.<br />
<br />
He says mechanization is his future. He continues to pour time and money into a laser-guided device to remove stems from peppers, which pickers now do by hand in the field. Another farmer in the area developed a mechanical carrot harvester.<br />
<br />
Mr. Knorr says he is willing to pay $20 an hour to operators of harvesters and other machines, compared with about $13 an hour for field hands. He says he can hire skilled machinists at community colleges, so he can rely less on migrant labor. <br />
<br />
“I can find skilled labor in the U.S.,” he says. “I don’t have to go to bed and worry about whether harvesting crews will show up.”<br />
<br />
<strong>Write to </strong>Bob Davis at <a class="icon " href="mailto:bob.davis@wsj.com" target="_blank">bob.davis@wsj.com</a><br />
<br />
</div>
</div>
</div>
Sid Cottinghamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16622559392638650857noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7829013.post-82221810190840465402016-02-20T12:17:00.003-05:002016-02-20T12:17:42.090-05:00Hillary Clinton’s terrible, horrible, no good, very bad answer on whether she’s ever liedChris Cilllizza writes in <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/02/19/hillary-clinton-no-good-very-bad-terrible-answer-on-telling-the-truth/?wpmm=1&wpisrc=nl_headlines" target="_blank">The Washington Post</a>:<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/news/campaign-2016-hillary-clinton-ive-always-tried-to-tell-the-truth/">CBS's Scott Pelley interviewed Hillary Clinton</a> on Thursday night. One exchange tells you everything you need to know about Clinton's struggles in the Democratic primary race so far and why she continues to be dogged by questions about her honesty and trustworthiness. Here it is:<br />
<br />
<strong></strong><br />
<strong>PELLEY</strong>: You know, in ’76, Jimmy Carter famously said, “I will not lie to you.”<br />
<br />
<strong>CLINTON</strong>: Well, I have to tell you I have tried in every way I know how literally from my years as a young lawyer all the way through my time as secretary of state to level with the American people.<br />
<br />
<strong>PELLEY</strong>: You talk about leveling with the American people. Have you always told the truth?<br />
<br />
<strong>CLINTON</strong>: I’ve always tried to. Always. Always.<br />
<br />
<strong>PELLEY</strong>: Some people are gonna call that wiggle room that you just gave yourself.<br />
<br />
<strong>CLINTON</strong>: Well, no, I’ve always tried —<br />
<br />
<strong>PELLEY</strong>: I mean, Jimmy Carter said, “I will never lie to you.”<br />
<br />
<strong>CLINTON</strong>: Well, but, you know, you’re asking me to say, “Have I ever?” I don’t believe I ever have. I don’t believe I ever have. I don’t believe I ever will. I’m gonna do the best I can to level with the American people.<br />
<br />
<br />
I mean, what? W-H-A-T? "I've always tried to" tell the truth? On what planet is this a good answer for a politician?<br />
<br />
The answer, of course, is on no planet. While I am less familiar with politics on Mars than I am with those on Earth, I am pretty sure that being unable to simply say, "Yes, I have always been truthful with the public," would be a problem on the Red Planet, too.<br />
<br />
This a double whammy of bad for Clinton.<br />
<br />
First, it does nothing at all to quell <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/02/10/hillary-clinton-has-a-major-honesty-problem-after-new-hampshire/">concerns about her ability to be honest and straightforward</a>. In the New Hampshire exit poll, more than one in three (34 percent) of all Democratic primary voters said that honesty was the most important trait in their decision on which candidate to support. Of that bloc, Bernie Sanders won 92 percent of their votes as compared to just 6 percent for Clinton.<br />
<br />
That's broadly in keeping with national polling over the last year, which has consistently shown large majorities of voters voicing skepticism about Clinton's trustworthiness. Her answer to that criticism has, to date, been to blame it on a Republican Party obsessed with her and willing to say or do anything to tarnish her reputation. There's truth in that, but, as the New Hampshire exit numbers suggest, the problem is bigger than just Republicans out to get her.<br />
<br />
Second, the answer from Clinton on honesty reinforces a perception that the former secretary of state tries to play with words, giving a heavily couched response when a simple one would — and should — do. You can imagine people rolling their eyes or saying, "Why doesn't she just answer the question?" while watching that painful response by Clinton.<br />
<br />
I <em>think</em> I understand why she answered the way she did. She knows she has been in public life for a long time and that she has said lots and lots of things. Because of that, it's possible that at some point in the future, someone will unearth a statement in which it could be construed that she wasn't telling the whole truth. Clinton is protecting against the damage incurred by such a revelation.<br />
<br />
But when you have the problems regarding honesty and trustworthiness that Clinton does, the only right answer to Pelley's question is: "Yes, I have always been truthful. Of course." That Clinton didn't give that simple answer suggests she is either (a) unaware of or doubts the depth of voters' concerns with her ability to be honest, or (b) she is so naturally cautious as to get herself in trouble even on a question she has to know is coming.<br />
<br />
Either way, Clinton just made things harder for herself with that answer to Pelley.Sid Cottinghamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16622559392638650857noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7829013.post-8638901451024446842016-01-24T09:33:00.000-05:002016-01-24T09:33:22.930-05:00Will the Supreme Court strike back at Obama’s overreach?George Will writes in <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/will-the-supreme-court-strike-back-at-obamas-overreach/2016/01/22/1af0b1b0-c077-11e5-83d4-42e3bceea902_story.html?wpmm=1&wpisrc=nl_headlines" target="_blank">The Washington Post</a>:<br />
<br />
<div id="U10001680937087DY">
During Watergate, <a href="http://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/politics/item/3492-kissinger-the-illegal-we-do-immediately-the-unconstitutional-takes-a-little-longer" title="www.thenewamerican.com">Henry Kissinger’s mordant wit</a> leavened the unpleasantness: “The illegal we do immediately; the unconstitutional takes a little longer.” President Obama often does both simultaneously, using executive authoritarianism to evade the Constitution’s separation of powers and rewrite existing laws.</div>
<br />
Last week, however, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/courts_law/supreme-court-to-review-obamas-power-on-deportation-policy/2016/01/19/5db355da-bb8a-11e5-b682-4bb4dd403c7d_story.html" title="www.washingtonpost.com">the Supreme Court</a> took a perhaps-momentous step toward correcting some of the constitutional vandalism that will be Obama’s most significant legacy. The court agreed to rule on Obama’s unilateral revision of immigration law.<br />
<br />
Seeking reelection in 2012, Obama stretched the idea of “prosecutorial discretion” — supposedly “<a href="http://www.dhs.gov/xlibrary/assets/s1-exercising-prosecutorial-discretion-individuals-who-came-to-us-as-children.pdf" title="www.dhs.gov">on an individual basis</a>” — to cover <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/us-will-stop-deporting-some-illegal-immigrants-who-came-here-as-children/2012/06/15/gJQANBbseV_story.html" title="www.washingtonpost.com">a delay in efforts to deport</a> <a href="http://www.pewhispanic.org/2012/08/14/up-to-1-7-million-unauthorized-immigrant-youth-may-benefit-from-new-deportation-rules/" title="www.pewhispanic.org">more than 1 million</a> persons who were brought to the United States illegally as children. But he said that with this he had reached the limit of his powers: “If we start broadening [this executive action], then essentially I would be ignoring the law in a way that I think would be very difficult to defend legally.”<br />
<br />
In 2014, however, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/obama-acts-on-immigration-announcing-decision-to-defer-deportations-of-4-million/2014/11/20/9a5c3856-70f6-11e4-8808-afaa1e3a33ef_story.html" title="www.washingtonpost.com">he expanded the sweep and protections</a> of that program. His executive fiat would have shielded perhaps <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/08/20/how-many-children-born-to-undocumented-immigrants-are-there-in-the-u-s/" title="www.washingtonpost.com">4.5 million illegal immigrant adults</a> with children who are U.S. citizens or lawful residents. His expansion made them eligible to work and receive Social Security retirement and disability benefits, Medicare, the earned-income tax credit, unemployment insurance, driver’s licenses, etc.<br />
<br />
Led by Texas, a majority of states (26) asserted standing to sue because of the costs of complying with the new policy. When they won an injunction, the Obama administration appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit. The administration <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/11/10/why-obamas-defeat-on-immigration-matters-for-millions-of-people/" title="www.washingtonpost.com"> lost there, too</a>, and then <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/courts_law/obama-takes-immigration-leniency-plan-to-the-supreme-court/2015/11/20/57ac88b8-8f80-11e5-ae1f-af46b7df8483_story.html" title="www.washingtonpost.com">asked the Supreme Court</a> to rule on the legality of Obama’s action. The court should not, and probably will not, rule for the president.<br />
<div>
</div>
The court has asked to be briefed on a matter the administration must be reluctant to address; the Justice Department requested that the court not insert a “constitutional question” into the case. The question the court will consider is: Did Obama’s action violate the “ <a href="http://www.heritage.org/constitution/#!/articles/2/essays/98/take-care-clause" title="www.heritage.org">take care clause</a> ”?<br />
<br />
Obama has sworn to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution,” which says the president shall “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” Josh Blackman of the South Texas College of Law in Houston and adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute in Washington says that only three times has the court relied on the take care clause to limit executive actions, and the justices have never asked for a briefing on this clause.<br />
<br />
In their brief, <a href="http://www.scotusblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/15-674_bio_State_of_Texas_et_al.2.pdf" title="www.scotusblog.com">the states argue that</a> “Congress has created a detailed, complex statutory scheme for determining” who qualifies for “lawful presence” in this country. No statute empowers the executive to grant this status to <i>any</i> illegal immigrant it chooses not to deport, let alone to confer “lawful presence” status on a class of many millions.<br />
<br />
The states say presidents cannot “change an alien’s statutory immigration classification.” So, Obama is not merely exercising discretion in enforcing the Immigration and Nationality Act. He is altering this act so that previously prohibited conduct no longer violates the act.<br />
<br />
<div id="U100016809370872LH">
Executive overreach has been increasing for decades. For example, although the Troubled Asset Relief Program was for financial institutions, the George W. Bush administration diverted more than <a href="http://www.politico.com/story/2008/12/bush-announces-174-billion-auto-bailout-016740" title="www.politico.com">$17 billion for auto companies</a>. Obama’s usual justification for his unusually numerous acts of unilateral legislating is that Congress refuses to act on this or that subject. But regarding who qualifies for legal status and for the right to work, Congress <i>has</i> acted with notable specificity. Obama simply wants to grant to millions of people various benefits in violation of Congress’s will as written into law.</div>
<br />
For seven years, Obama has treated the take care clause as a mild suggestion. He considers it insignificant compared with his virtuous determination to “work around” Congress to impose his policies regarding immigration, health care, education, contraception, welfare, gun control, environmentalism, gay rights, unauthorized wars and other matters.<br />
<br />
Both leading Democratic presidential candidates praise Obama’s radical understanding of the Constitution’s Article II presidential powers. The leading Republican candidate would replace the Constitution’s 7,591 words with the first-person singular pronoun: He promises many unilateral presidential wonders, including a global trade war and a holier national vocabulary: “If I’m president, you’re going to see ‘Merry Christmas’ in department stores.” <br />
<br />
But no Obama executive action has yet repealed <a href="https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/articleiii" title="www.law.cornell.edu">Article III’s judicial powers</a>. So, come June we will learn whether the judicial branch will do its duty by policing the borders of the separation of powers.Sid Cottinghamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16622559392638650857noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7829013.post-89551779734114607072016-01-12T13:15:00.002-05:002016-01-12T13:15:45.245-05:00Obama Is a Man of Political Paradox Gerald Seib writes in <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/obama-is-a-man-of-political-paradox-1452528688" target="_blank">The Wall Street Journal</a>:<br />
<br /><br />
When President <!--
--> <a href="http://topics.wsj.com/person/O/Barack-Obama/4328">Barack Obama</a><!--
--> makes his final State of the Union address Tuesday, one of the guests seated in the box of first lady <!--
--> <a href="http://topics.wsj.com/person/O/Michelle-Obama/5355">Michelle Obama</a><!--
--> will be <!--
--> Edith Childs.<!--
--> Mrs. Childs enjoyed a brief period of fame when, at an early Obama campaign stop in South Carolina in 2007, she energized the small crowd by starting the chant, “Fired up! Ready to go!”<br />
<br /><br />
That became something of a rallying cry for Mr. Obama’s presidential campaign and aptly captured the excitement that accompanied his historic victory run.<br />
<br /><br />
Over time, the excitement gave way to the more sober realities of governing amid deep partisan divisions. His election will always be a historic one, but what is most striking as Mr. Obama makes his final visit to the well of the House of Representatives are the many paradoxes that have come to mark his presidency.<br />
<br /><br />
He has never become either wildly popular or broadly unpopular with the country. His job-approval rating in the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll in December stood at a mediocre 43%. Over the seven years he has been in office, it has never gone above 61%—a level reached only in his early months in office—and never below 40%. It has generally hovered just below 50%.<br />
<br /><br />
He has never reached either the periods of high popularity enjoyed by <!--
--> Ronald Reagan<!--
--> and <!--
--> Bill Clinton<!--
--> or the levels of unpopularity endured by his predecessor, <!--
--> <a href="http://topics.wsj.com/person/B/George-W.%20Bush/5369">George W. Bush</a>,<!--
--> whose job-approval rating stood at 34% at this point in his presidency.<br />
<br /><br />
The power of his Democratic Party has declined significantly during his time in office. It has lost 13 seats in the U.S. Senate and 69 in the House, as well as 11 governorships, 910 state legislative seats and the majorities in 30 state legislative chambers.<br />
<br /><br />
Yet he remains the Democrats’ strongest figure. He generates higher positive feelings among Americans than either of his would-be Democratic successors, <!--
--> <a href="http://topics.wsj.com/person/C/Hillary-Clinton/6344">Hillary Clinton</a><!--
--> and Sen. <!--
--> Bernie Sanders,<!--
--> and higher than any of his potential Republican successors. His support among African-Americans remains rock solid. His support among young people and Hispanics is diminished, but still strong. The electoral coalition that can win the White House for Democrats remains identified with him.<br />
<br /><br />
Some of the key positions he espouses—action on guns and climate change, keeping troops out of the Middle East, preserving the main elements of his health-care overhaul—are more popular among Americans than is his advocacy for them. Indeed, public polling suggests that attaching his name to a policy position means that some Americans, who otherwise might voice support for it, will oppose it.<br />
How can these paradoxes be explained?<br />
<br /><br />
It may be that Mr. Obama was simply destined to serve in a time of unprecedented ideological division in the nation and a near-even split of partisan power in Washington, a situation that limits everybody’s latitude. Perhaps the divides have been too deep for anybody to overcome. Or perhaps he has so far failed to find the voice or the political operating style that would allow him to continue that sense of unity that greeted his election and inauguration.<br />
<br /><br />
Perhaps his big twin early achievements—a big economic stimulus package and the Affordable Care Act—were always bound to be polarizing. Or perhaps his inability in those early days to win any bipartisan support for them set a polarizing precedent that has stuck.<br />
<br /><br />
Perhaps recovery from the twin traumas he inherited—a costly war in Iraq and a financial crisis that produced broad aftereffects—left the country both angry and cynical.<br />
<br /><br />
Mr. Obama serves at a time when virtually every institution, save for the military, is falling in Americans’ esteem.<br />
<br /><br />
There’s one other little-discussed but inescapable question: Has Mr. Obama always confronted a ceiling in how widely he would be loved or even accepted because he is the nation’s first African-American president?<br />
<br /><br />
In any case, this is where he stands at the beginning of his eighth year. Both Messrs. Reagan and Clinton used a final year to overcome earlier traumas, achieve some goals and rise in public esteem. Mr. Obama now has the same opportunity.<br />
<br /><br />
The political math suggests little chance of big domestic legislative achievements in an election year, with Congress controlled by the opposition party. But the Republicans now running Congress—House Speaker <!--
--> <a href="http://topics.wsj.com/person/R/Paul-Ryan/6420">Paul Ryan</a><!--
--> and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell—have shown they are willing and able to get at least some things done with Democrats.<br />
<br /><br />
Most of the big goals that could be achieved—ratifying a Pacific trade deal, for example, and formally authorizing the fight against Islamic State—lie in the foreign-policy zone. Maybe that is where Mr. Obama can get fired up and ready to go for his stretch run.Sid Cottinghamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16622559392638650857noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7829013.post-3096260158770427222015-12-20T08:58:00.001-05:002015-12-20T08:58:32.036-05:00Why former Pentagon chief Chuck Hagel’s coming out against the White House matters (Hagel also said he felt micro-managed — something that Gates, Panetta and other defense officials have all expressed.)From <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/checkpoint/wp/2015/12/19/why-former-pentagon-chief-chuck-hagels-coming-out-against-the-white-house-matters/?wpmm=1&wpisrc=nl_headlines" target="_blank">The Washington Post</a>:<br />
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When Chuck Hagel resigned as defense secretary last year, the narrative was clear: President Obama and he did not see eye-to-eye on how to prosecute the war against the Islamic State, so Hagel needed to go. White House officials, speaking anonymously, said at the time that <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/defense-secretary-hagel-under-pressure-submits-resignation/2014/11/24/77e75422-73e4-11e4-a5b2-e1217af6b33d_story.html">the president had lost faith in Hagel’s ability to lead</a> — a charge that Hagel’s advisers brushed aside.<br />
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Now, a little over a year later, Hagel is swinging back. In an <a href="http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/12/18/hagel-the-white-house-tried-to-destroy-me/">interview with Foreign Policy magazine published Friday</a>, he said he remains puzzled why White House officials tried to “destroy” him personally in his last days in office, adding that he was convinced the United States had no viable strategy in Syria and was particularly frustrated with National Security Adviser Susan Rice, who he said would hold meetings and focus on “nit-picky” details.<br />
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“I eventually got to the point where I told Susan Rice that I wasn’t going to spend more than two hours in these meetings,” Hagel told Foreign Policy. “Some of them would go four hours.”<br />
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Hagel said the administration struggled with how to handle Syria — hardly a surprise, given the way Obama <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/obama-issues-syria-red-line-warning-on-chemical-weapons/2012/08/20/ba5d26ec-eaf7-11e1-b811-09036bcb182b_story.html">said in August 2012</a> that it would be a “red line” for the United States if Syria moved or used its chemical weapons stockpiles, but did not intervene militarily the following year when Syria did so. Hagel said that hurt Obama’s credibility, even if declared stockpiles eventually were removed through an agreement reached with Damascus.<br />
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“Whether it was the right decision or not, history will determine that,” Hagel told Foreign Policy. “<span class="pull-quote has-quote" data-pullquote="“There’s no question in my mind that it hurt the credibility of the president’s word when this occurred.”">There’s no question in my mind that it hurt the credibility of the president’s word when this occurred.”</span><br />
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The White House declined to comment on the article. However, an administration official disagreed anonymously with many assertions in Hagel’s interview. Waiting before launching cruise missiles provided a window for the chemical weapons agreement reached, the official said.<br />
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Hagel is far from the first former Pentagon chief in Obama’s administration to later criticize the president and his staff. But he just might be the most unlikely. A former Republican senator from Nebraska, he <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/bob-woodward-why-obama-picked-hagel-for-defense-secretary/2013/01/27/b87eb8ce-68ae-11e2-af53-7b2b2a7510a8_story.html">saw eye-to-eye with Obama on many national security issues</a> before he was nominated. Like Obama, he also was a <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/06/obama-chuck-hagel_n_2421363.html">strong critic of President George W. Bush’s war in Iraq</a> — one of the first in the Republican Party.<br />
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The two men also still have a friendly relationship, Hagel told Foreign Policy. Nonetheless, he just took several large steps down the same road as Robert Gates and Leon Panetta, who preceded Hagel at the Pentagon and later laid out their grievances in memoirs written after they left office.<br />
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Gates, who served for both President George W. Bush and Obama, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/robert-gates-former-defense-secretary-offers-harsh-critique-of-obamas-leadership-in-duty/2014/01/07/6a6915b2-77cb-11e3-b1c5-739e63e9c9a7_story.html">wrote in a book released early last year that he was “seething” and “running out of patience with on multiple fronts” with the administration</a>. All too often, he wrote, “suspicion and distrust of senior military officers by senior White House officials — including the president and vice president — became a big problem for me as I tried to manage the relationship between the commander in chief and his military leaders.”<br />
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Panetta followed last fall with his own book, saying Obama had a “frustrating reticence to engage his opponents and rally support for his cause” and too frequently “relies on the logic of a law professor rather than the passion of a leader.” In an interview promoting the book, he added that the president had “<a href="http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2014/10/06/leon-panetta-memoir-worthy-fights/16737615/">kind of lost his way</a>” and was partly to blame for the collapse of the Iraqi government last year because he didn’t press harder to keep American troops in the country in 2011, ahead of a complete military withdrawal.<br />
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Hagel, for his part, told Foreign Policy that he got “the hell beat out of him” figuratively at the White House for delaying in signing transfer orders to release detainees from the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, when he had concerns about the individuals involved. He also said he felt micro-managed — something that Gates, Panetta and other defense officials have all expressed.<br />
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“There is a danger in all of this,” Hagel told Foreign Policy, referring to White House micromanagement and the administration’s expanding national security staff. “This is about governance; this isn’t about political optics. It’s about making the country run and function, and trying to stay ahead of the dangers and the threats you see coming.”Sid Cottinghamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16622559392638650857noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7829013.post-21434822735171469632015-12-19T07:28:00.001-05:002015-12-19T07:35:10.302-05:00Nonprofits and Governors Clash Over Syrian Refugees - As states push back, settlement groups say they plan to continue helping new arrivals find homes, jobs and assistance aid From <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/nonprofits-and-governors-clash-over-syrian-refugees-1450434601?mod=itp&mod=djemITP_h" target="_blank">The Wall Street Journal</a>:<br />
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The debate over Syrian refugees in the U.S. is stoking an unusual struggle between nonprofit groups helping people from broken lands and governors in about two dozen states who object to their arrivals.<br />
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Once the Department of Homeland Security clears refugees after reviews by multiple agencies, the heavy lifting falls to nine resettlement agencies, all nonprofits, and their hundreds of local offices and affiliates. The agencies, many with religious affiliations, perform a range of tasks, from meeting Syrian refugees at airports to helping them find jobs and apartments. They also aid families in navigating states’ public-assistance systems and enrolling children in schools.<br />
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But lately, these groups have found themselves at odds with many governors, almost all Republicans, who are voicing concerns about Syrian refugees or actively trying to halt their settlement, citing possible security risks in the wake of the Nov. 13 terror attacks in Paris. Perpetrators included Europeans radicalized after travel to Syria, and French officials said one attacker posed as a Syrian refugee in order to enter Europe.<br />
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Georgia Gov. <!--
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“Until the federal government and Congress conducts a thorough review of current screening procedures and background checks, we will take every measure available to us at the state level to ensure the safety of Georgians,” he said at the time.<br />
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<span class="wsj-article-caption-content">That didn’t stop World Relief, an agency based in Baltimore, from placing a Syrian family in Atlanta. <!--
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The Obama administration plans to bring in at least 10,000 Syrian refugees in the current fiscal year, part of an overall rise to 85,000 refugees from around the world, up from 70,000 the prior fiscal year. Proponents have said refugee screening, which can take years, is the most intensive vetting process for any travelers to the U.S.<br />
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Those reviews may include several hours of interviews with the U.N. refugee aid agency, which also collects personal documents and could take months to complete its security review. The U.N. agency also scans applicants’ irises. From there, the U.S. reviews include interviews and screening by multiple intelligence and security agencies. Syrians go through an added security layer with classified details, according to the State Department.<br />
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The State Department pays the resettlement agencies $2,025 per refugee to cover the cost of helping them for their initial 30 to 90 days in the U.S. After that, the Department of Health and Human Services offers support, though the amount differs from state to state.<br />
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A State Department representative said the agency gives state refugee coordinators detailed reports each month on recent and coming arrivals. Each quarter, the State Department provides lists of refugees who could be sent to given states because of family or personal contacts there. But personal details regarding individual refugees are considered confidential.<br />
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Although nonprofits have helped refugees for decades, the 1980 Refugee Act solidified the resettlement process, said <!--
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Officials with resettlement groups said they were surprised by the states’ positions because they are accustomed to bipartisan support for their work. “We’ve never seen anything like this before,” said Mark Hetfield, the chief executive at HIAS Inc. Previously known as the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, the New York-based resettlement agency traces its roots to 134 years ago, when it helped Jews escape pogroms in Russia and what is now Eastern Europe. Today, it helps refugees from around the world, including Syria.<br />
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Catholic Charities in Indianapolis challenged Indiana by settling a Syrian refugee family there this month. The family, with two small children, had lived in a refugee camp in Jordan, according to <!--
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A spokesman for Gov. <!--
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The Texas Health and Human Services Commission sought a temporary restraining order in federal court to block refugees. But a judge denied the latest request, ruling that concerns about terrorist infiltration are too speculative.<br />
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Sid Cottinghamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16622559392638650857noreply@blogger.com0