Are Iowa Trump Voters Having Buyer's Remorse?

In many ways Iowa has been surprisingly progressive over the decades be it in public education, women having the right to vote or same sex marriage.  Yet, in 2016, all of that was thrown aside for Donald Trump who carried the state despite promises to seeks to dismantle public education, who is a self-confessed sexual predator and who promised to wage war against LGBT equality. Worse yet, he vowed to pull the USA out of NAFTA which would hit Iowa's agricultural industries extremely hard. Now, as the Washington Post reports, Trump's approval rating in Iowa is in the toilet and the public mood has appeared to shift against Republicans.  Perhaps Iowa voters have discovered that while Trump's calls to racism made them feel good about themselves (the state is over 93% white) as perhaps did his fraudulent calls to support "family values," the true GOP agenda of taking from the 99% to give to the 1% doesn't treat them all that well. Indeed, Democrats are optimistic that the newly passed Trump/GOP tax bill will give them plenty of fodder to run on in November, 2018, and in state elections. Here are article highlights:

Iowa has seemingly soured on the president and his party. The end-of-year Iowa Poll, an industry standard conducted by Des Moines-based Selzer and Co., found Trump with just 35 percent approval in the state. Only 34 percent of Iowans said they would back Republicans for Congress in 2018, and 61 percent said they were turned off by politics altogether.

The discrepancy between the rosy economic picture and the public’s distaste for Trump in Iowa has confounded both parties and complicated one of the major political stories of the decade — the Republican romp through the Midwest.

Why Iowa has turned against Trump and Republicans is a mystery that both parties are eager to figure out ahead of the 2018 midterms, looking to understand whether it’s an aberration or a sign of a greater political trend.

Republicans took charge of Iowa’s legislature last January and since then have advanced the agenda they promised voters — pushing through tax cuts, passing labor rules that require unions to hold fresh elections and maintaining a privatized version of the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion.

Some conservatives saw it as a strong start and suggested polling that showed dark voter moods about Republican governance reflected a cynicism that would fade as the policies took effect.

A swing state for decades, Iowa broke so dramatically in 2016 that Democrats wondered if it had become a demographic write-off. Thirty-one of Iowa’s 99 counties voted for Barack Obama twice, then flipped in 2016 to support Donald Trump. 

For the first half of the year, Democrats looked at Iowa as a cautionary tale. White voters without college degrees had wiped the party out in the eastern part of the state, where it had always won strong. National groups had tied Rep. Rod Blum (R) to Trump, expecting a wipeout in a district that had voted for Obama by 14 points in 2012. But Trump won the district, and Blum, a member of the House Freedom Caucus, became a reliable voter for his agenda.

Now, Iowa Democrats believe they’ve begun the climb back. On Jan. 31, the party easily held a state House seat in the first special election of the Trump era. On Aug. 8, it did the same, but in a southeast Iowa district where Trump had won by 21.3 points. And on Dec. 12, when most national political attention was focused on Alabama, Democrats lost a special state Senate race in red northwest Iowa by nine points. The seat had been so safely Republican that Democrats had not run a candidate in 2010 or 2014.

Jeff Kaufmann, the Iowa GOP chairman who has presided over the Republican surge, did not sugarcoat the matter. . . . .  “I see that Senate race as a wake-up call."

In Iowa, Trump’s trade protectionism was a risk and came during a slump for farmers who depend on open markets. Longtime governor Terry Branstad (R) left Des Moines to become the administration’s ambassador to China, and his successor, Gov. Kim Reynolds (R), has found herself lobbying the administration to go slow on changes to trade policy.

“Whenever we talk about pulling out [of NAFTA], commodity prices are affected immediately, and that will be one of the first casualties that we’ll see,” Reynolds said at a Dec. 19 news conference. “So we’re going to hold them accountable.”

Democrats talked confidently about running against the just-passed tax cut. It was, they said, going to sail right past the sort of Iowans who had trusted the GOP the previous year.

“They’re going to see who the winners and losers are in this, and they’re going to identify the corporations and wealthy people who came out way ahead of their families,” said Nate Boulton, a state senator who is running for governor in 2018.

One can only hope the Iowa Democrats field quality candidates in every race and replicate the ground game that proved so effective in Virginia.

Oklahoma Tried the GOP’s Tax Plan. Now, It’s Electing Democrats.

Congressional Republicans are strive to pass on a national level what Oklahoma Republicans tried a few years ago with disastrous results (Kansas likewise used this template with equally horrific results).  Here in Virginia Ed Gillespie's attempt to do the same thing as in Oklahoma and Kansas went down in flames when he lost by 9% to Democrat Ralph Northam.  Apparently, Virginians are smarter than their countrymen/women in the Mid-West. What is telling about Congressional Republicans is that they care nothing about how the Oklahoma and Oklahoma tax cuts for the rich combined with slashing spending on education and social programs (i) nearly bankrupted the states and (ii) seems to have Oklahomans now electing Democrats.  It would seem that the only thing that counts with Republicans is giving huge tax cuts to the very wealthy and large corporations while they can.  The long term consequences be damned.  A piece in New York Magazine looks at the Oklahoma example.  Here are highlights:

The backlash to the Republican tax agenda is already getting Democrats elected — in Oklahoma. On Tuesday night, 26-year-old mental-health counselor Allison Ikley-Freeman won election to the Sooner State’s Senate, in a district that backed Donald Trump by 40 points last November.

Ikley-Freeman did not win on the strength of her fundraising or political experience. She boasted little of the former and none of the latter. But like the three other Oklahoma Democrats who have evicted Republicans from state-house seats this year, Ikley-Freeman enjoyed one decisive advantage: She bore no responsibility for the regressive tax policies that had left the state in fiscal ruin.

Oklahoma was a low-tax state even before the 2010 GOP wave crashed over it. But tea-party Republican governor Mary Fallin and her conservative allies weren’t content with the low baseline they’d inherited. Like President Trump and congressional Republicans, Fallin believed that cutting taxes on wealthy individuals and businesses was the way to grow an economy, no matter what level those taxes were currently at, or how novel circumstances might change the government’s budgetary needs.

So, when global oil prices crashed in 2014, and took Oklahoma’s budget down with them, Fallin was unfazed. Faced with giant, annual revenue shortfalls, the governor didn’t just refuse to raise taxes — she cut them even further. Last year, the Sooner State found itself with a $1.3 billion budget gap — and Fallin responded by implementing a $147 million tax cut for Oklahoma’s highest earners, and preserving a $470 million tax break for oil companies that start new horizontal wells.

Instead of asking wealthy citizens and businesses to pay a bit more (or, in the former case, to pay as much as they had been previously), Fallin decided to strip resources from the state’s beleaguered public-school system. Between 2008 and 2015, Oklahoma had slashed its per-student education spending by 23.6 percent, more than any other state in the country. But Republicans felt there was still more fat to cut: While rich Sooners collected their tax breaks, Oklahoma schools suffered a 16.5 percent funding cut in the latter half of 2016. Many of the state’s school districts now make due with four-day weeks. Others struggle to find competent teachers, as the state’s refusal to pay competitive salaries has chased talented educators out of state or into other professions. Oklahoma’s health-care and criminal-justice systems are plagued by similarly draconian cuts. Bridges in the state are literally crumbling. Potholes litter roads.

But even this austerity has not been nearly enough to plug the state’s budget holes. Fallin and the GOP have become reliant on raiding emergency reserves to make up the rest. This has left Oklahoma profoundly vulnerable to the next recession.

This week, Republicans in Oklahoma’s House of Representatives passed an emergency budget bill in a special session. The legislation does increase taxes on oil production. But instead of raising taxes on the wealthy, or ending the state’s exemption for capital gains — as Oklahoma Democrats had proposed — Republicans opted to cut $60 million from state agencies, and drain another few million dollars from the state’s rainy-day funds.

Oklahoma’s overwhelmingly Republican voters do not like this idea. As polling by the (left-leaning) Oklahoma Policy Institute demonstrates, there is no majoritarian support for gutting public schools, so as to let rich people pay low taxes, even in the heart of red America.

That poll also found 74 percent of Oklahomans saying that increasing teacher pay should be a major priority for their government — and 64 percent saying that expanding health-care access should be one — compared to just 38 percent who said the same about “lowering taxes.” This goes a ways toward explaining why Democrats keep winning special elections in the state. . . . Now, the discrepancy between the GOP’s fiscal priorities, and its voters’ material needs, has become stark enough to challenge partisan loyalties.

In Washington, Republicans are working hard to make Oklahoma’s experience a national one. On Thursday, the House passed multitrillion-dollar tax cuts on corporations and the wealthy, even as exigent circumstances — among them, increasingly frequent hurricanes, the decay of long-neglected infrastructure, a drug-overdose epidemic, and the retirement of the baby-boomers — are making it more expensive for the federal government to meet its basic obligations to the American people.

[L]ike Kansas and Louisiana before it, Oklahoma has demonstrated that the Republican Party’s prescription for prosperity is a snake-oil tonic with life-threatening side effects.

And when “conservative” voters see what the trade-offs of small government actually are — bigger McMansions for the elite, four-day school weeks for the rabble — they start longing for a new deal.

Congressional Republicans don’t seem the least bit concerned by the abject failure of their economic model in these states.  A Quinnipiac poll released this week found that only 16 percent of Americans believe President Trump’s tax plan will lower their taxes, while 59 percent say the plan will favor the wealthy over the middle class. These are shocking figures given how much money Republicans and conservative outside groups have devoted to propaganda for their bill.

Republican voters in deep-red states like Oklahoma may cling to their partisan identities tighter than most. But they also know the true costs of the GOP’s economic orthodoxy on a more visceral level than other Americans do. On Tuesday, that knowledge helped a 26-year-old, lesbian Democrat win a seat in the Oklahoma Senate. Someday, it just might turn large swathes of the American heartland purple — if Democratic donors decide to spend a bit less on pointless, pro-impeachment ad campaigns, and a lot more on liberating red states from reactionary rule.

The GOP Base - Wrath of the Conned

I and others have repeatedly said that the rise of Donald Trump is something that was created by the so-called Republican establishment which for decades now, especially over the last 15+ years, has used calls to racism, homophobia and other forms of hatred to dupe voters into voting for a party's whose agenda is diametrically opposed the the economic interests of those voters.  Moreover, in order to win short term electoral victories, every kind of right wing extremist - nasty, ignorance embracing people my Republican grand parents would never have affiliated with - were welcomed with open arms into the GOP.  Now, the so-called establishment has lost control of the monster that it nurtured and unleashed on the nation.  A column in the New York Times looks at the phenomenon and contrasts it with the Democrat experience.  Here are excerpts:

Both parties make promises to their bases. But while the Democratic establishment more or less tries to make good on those promises, the Republican establishment has essentially been playing bait-and-switch for decades. And voters finally rebelled against the con.

First, about the Democrats: Their party defines itself as the protector of the poor and the middle class, and especially of nonwhite voters. Does it fall short of fulfilling this mission much of the time?   Are its leaders sometimes too close to big-money donors? Of course. Still, if you look at the record of the Obama years, you see real action on behalf of the party’s goals.

Above all, you have the Affordable Care Act, which has given about 20 million Americans health insurance, with the gains biggest for the poor, minorities and low-wage workers. That’s what you call delivering for the base — and it’s surely one reason nonwhite voters have overwhelmingly favored Mrs. Clinton over a challenger who sometimes seemed to dismiss that achievement.

Maybe you think Democrats could and should have done more, but what the party establishment says and what it does are at least roughly aligned.

Things are very different among Republicans. Their party has historically won elections by appealing to racial enmity and cultural anxiety, but its actual policy agenda is dedicated to serving the interests of the 1 percent, above all through tax cuts for the rich — whicheven Republican voters don’t support, while they truly loathe elite ideas like privatizing Social Security and Medicare.

What Donald Trump has been doing is telling the base that it can order à la carte. He has, in effect, been telling aggrieved white men that they can feed their anger without being forced to swallow supply-side economics, too.

Yes, his actual policy proposals still involve huge tax cuts for the rich, but his supporters don’t know that — and it’s possible that he doesn’t, either. Details aren’t his thing.

Establishment Republicans have tried to counter his appeal by shouting, with growing hysteria, that he isn’t a true conservative. And they’re right, at least as they define conservatism. But their own voters don’t care.

If there’s a puzzle here, it’s why this didn’t happen sooner. One possible explanation is the decadence of the G.O.P. establishment, which has become ingrown and lost touch. Apparatchiks who have spent their whole careers inside the bubble of right-wing think tanks and partisan media may suffer from the delusion that their ideology is actually popular with real people. And this has left them hapless in the face of a Trumpian challenge.

Probably more important, however, is the collision between demography and Obama derangement. The elite knows that the party must broaden its appeal as the electorate grows more diverse — in fact, that was the conclusion of the G.O.P.’s 2013 post-mortem. But the base, its hostility amped up to 11 after seven years of an African-American president (who the establishment has done its best to demonize) is having none of it.

The point, in any case, is that the divergent nomination outcomes of 2016 aren’t an accident. The Democratic establishment has won because it has, however imperfectly, tried to serve its supporters. The Republican establishment has been routed because it has been playing a con game on its supporters all along, and they’ve finally had enough.

And yes, Mr. Trump is playing a con game of his own, and they’ll eventually figure that out, too. But it won’t happen right away, and in any case it won’t help the party establishment.

Is America Now a Liberal Nation?

One upon a time the Republican Party supported progressive ideas or what today's GOP would certainly call progressive policies.  That phenomenon ceased as the Christofascists and their first cousins hiding under the radar of the Tea Party label high jacked the GOP base after being insanely invited into the party by a cynical and short-sighted GOP establishment. Now, the GOP stands for the embrace of ignorance, efforts to undo progressive policies of the last century, theocracy, hate and bigotry.  In contrast, the Democrats have grown even more progressive in their policies.  A piece in The Daily Beast argues that the Democrats are actually following the desires of a majority of Americans while the GOP remains in decline in the death grip of the increasingly alienated Christofascist/Tea Party.  Indeed, polls show majority popular support for nearly every policy that the GOP opposes.  Here are highlights (note that even a nation like Chad has paid maternity leave while the USA does not):

I keep hearing Joe Scarborough go off on how the great unwritten story of this election season is how far left the Democratic Party has moved—a drum he’s been beating for months now. The idea, I suppose, is that this will be the Democratic Achilles Heel this fall; that the whole topic is one huge Drudge siren that no one has bothered to look or listen for because everyone is so fixated on the Republican chaos.

Nonsense. To the extent that the Democratic Party has moved left, it’s mostly as a consequence of following, not leading, public opinion. So if the Democratic Party is left wing, then the American people are too.

Let’s start with some of Bernie Sanders’s positions. . . . . So what are the main things he’s saying?

1.  That the system is rigged in favor of the 1 percent. That’s not left wing, that’s just a statement of the obvious. Everyone agrees with that; not least the 1 percent themselves, who are investing billions of dollars in this election in the hope that things stay that way. Anyway, for those who need such things, here’s a poll result from this month. Is the system rigged? Saying yes, 85 percent. Saying no, 4 percent.

2. That Citizens United is corrupt and should be overturned. Here, the Sanders position (really the Democratic Party position, since virtually the whole party holds it) doesn’t fare as well. I mean, only 78 percent of America thinks Citizens United was a bad decision; 17 percent take the Republican view that it was well decided.

3. That the minimum wage should be $15 an hour. Here’s one poll of many showing high support for that—63 percent. Also, 82 percent support indexing it to inflation. The Republican position that any increase is a job killer isn’t even asked, but based on those who “strongly” oppose an increase, it would seem to be a view held by around 10 percent of Americans.

4. Free college tuition. This one’s tighter, but even here, a poll last year showed people supporting it by 46-41 percent. 

Bernie Sanders isn’t a Democrat, the Democratic Party isn’t going to be nominating him. But I use his positions because generally speaking they’re to the left of Hillary Clinton’s, and large majorities and pluralities support even them. Levels of support for Clinton’s versions of the above policies run higher. For example, she gets attacked from the left for saying the minimum wage could be $12 in rural and less expensive areas. Well, fully 75 percent support that, 12 points higher than the 63 percent who back a $15 minimum.

What about some of Clinton’s signature proposals? Paid family leave, is that radical? If so,185 countries are left wing. Chad—Chad—gives mothers 14 weeks, paid at 100 percent! As for the polls, 79 percent of America is irresponsibly left wing on this question.

[H]ere’s one more. Marijuana legalization—maybe that’s radical? I mean, after all, it’s drugs. Nope, sorry; 58 percent support legalizing pot. The story is the same on same-sex marriage, contraceptive rights, and a whole bushelful of things.

Here’s what I’m getting at: The Democrats’ new positions look radical if you can only look at the world through a Beltway-specific, and indeed Capitol Hill-specific, lens.

Out in the real country, only crackpots think these things. As I’ve shown above, 70 percent of Americans agree with these non-left-wing, common sense positions. But the crackpot community is dramatically overrepresented in Washington and skews the way all these things are discussed and described on shows like Morning Joe.

So no, these positions aren’t radical. Or come to think of it, if they are, then it is because the American middle class has been somewhat radicalized. After the meltdown and the good-but-not-good-enough recovery, the people in the middle, making from $35,000 to $70,000 or thereabouts, said “we’ve had it.” They’ve spent 35 years treading water, watching the rich have a party while listening to politicians tell them that the money for their needs just wasn’t there. They’re sick of it. There’s a lot about Sanders I’m not crazy about, but it’s obvious why he’s struck such a nerve.

And this fall, Clinton can’t succumb to this “radical Democratic Party” frame for a second. It’s not radical to tell the 1 percent the party’s over. It’s radical—in the other, malevolent direction—not to. 

America’s Stacked Deck

In the 2016 presidential nomination contests, there is much anger afoot on both sides of the political aisle.  In both cases, the anger is focused on America's rigged society and economy which increasing funnels wealth and privilege to a tiny percent of the population.  Yet the enraged Republican base is rallying to those who have most supported - and continue to support - the policies that have tilted the playing field strongly against them.   These individuals foolishly allow themselves to be motivated by GOP sound bites that play to their religious and racial prejudices and point to scapegoats to distract the knuckle dragging based form recognizing the true culprits: the GOP and its vulture capital cronies and hedge fund donors.  Despite their failings to recognize the possible, at least the Democrat base seems to recognize the real enemies of average Americans.  A piece in the New York Times looks at America's increasingly rigged system.  Here are highlights:

It’s a little bizarre this political season to see wealthy candidates in both parties denouncing our political system for representing mostly the interests of, well, wealthy people.

Bizarre, perhaps, and sometimes a tad hypocritical, but also accurate. America’s political system is rigged. The deck is stacked against ordinary people. That’s the frustration that has fueled, in very different ways, the anti-establishment campaigns of Donald Trump, Ted Cruz and Bernie Sanders in particular, and that is leading other candidates, like Hillary Clinton, to grab their pitchforks as well.

“Yes, the economy is rigged in favor of those at the top,” Clinton declared in the Democratic debate last week.

One glimpse of the structural unfairness in America is this: A dumb rich kid is now more likely to graduate from college than a smart poor kid, according to Robert Putnam of Harvard University.

Another: The 20 wealthiest Americans, a group that would fit comfortably inside a luxury private jet bound for a private Caribbean island, are worth more than the poorer half of the American population, according to a recent report from the Institute for Policy Studies. Forbes’s wealthiest 100 are worth as much as all 42 million African-Americans, the report says.

Wendell Potter and Nick Penniman write in their eye-opening new book about money in politics, “Nation on the Take.” They call for a “profound course correction,” like those the United States has periodically undertaken before.

So it’s healthy for American voters to be demanding change. But when societies face economic pain, they sometimes turn to reforms, and other times to scapegoats (like refugees this year). So the historic question for 2016 is which direction the popular revolt among American voters will ultimately take. A President Trump or President Cruz would build walls and waterboard suspected terrorists, a President Clinton or President Sanders would raise the minimum wage and invest in at-risk children.

It seems to me to make more sense to target solutions than scapegoats, but sense is often in short supply in politics. . . . . n the solutions domain, a starting point should be to reduce the influence of money in politics.

The pharmaceutical industry, for example, has used its lobbying heft — it spent $272,000 in campaign donations per member of Congress last year, and it has more lobbyists than there are members of Congress — to bar the government from bargaining for drug prices in Medicare. That amounts to a $50 billion annual gift to pharmaceutical companies.

In this election season, many Americans feel that they are living that rigged Monopoly game.

Two business school professors, Michael Norton and Dan Ariely, showed people charts of the distribution of wealth in egalitarian Sweden and in highly unequal America and asked them which kind of society they would prefer to live in, without saying which country each chart represented. Some 92 percent of Americans chose Sweden’s distribution.

So American voters are right to feel angry. Yet the challenge is not just to diagnose the problem but also to prescribe the right fixes and achieve them in this political environment.

Can Jeb Bush Survive Trump and His Own Reverse Robin Hood Tax Plan?

I have always viewed Jeb "Jebbie" Bush as seeing himself as entitled to the presidency.  Never mind that he has never disavowed the Policies of his cretin brother that bankrupted the country, started an unnecessary war, and threw away thousands of lives among our servicemembers.  After all, he's a Bush and what he wants should be his.  Thus, it is entertaining in a cynical way to see Jebbie languishing in the polls and being blown away by Donald Trump.  Adding to Jebbie's lack of appeal is his new tax change proposals that would give most of the tax relief to the 1%.  A piece in Politico looks at Jebbie's woes and the growing fear among the GOP donor class that his presidential ambitions may be toast.  Here are highlights:

Nobody is more nervous about this week's debate than Jeb Bush’s top fundraisers -- and no audience will have more to say about his future viability as a candidate.

New York Jets owner Woody Johnson knew it. He recognized the group assembled at his Rockefeller Center office in Manhattan last Wednesday was in need of some reassurance after Bush’s unimpressive performance in last month’s GOP debate, so Bush’s national finance chairman, recalled one attendee, gave a personal pledge: Jeb would be “well prepared” for the second debate this week.

He’d better be. Five-plus months before the first ballots are cast, Bush faces the kind of do-or-die moment most top-tier candidates confront far later in the primary process – a chance to revive a campaign that has shattered fundraising records, but sunk as low as 6 percent in recent national polls.

Bush, one former adviser to his father said, "needs to show he’s the tough-minded guy we know he is." If he doesn’t, the former aide added, "Well, you know, it might be over."

The Bush campaign privately thinks Bush’s slow-burning fuse – evidenced on the golf course and in sometimes-testy debate sessions – has at long last been lit. But the biggest fear, expressed by Bush allies, donors and party operatives to POLITICO, is that another lousy debate performance will precipitate an exodus of the big money ($100 million-plus in super PAC and campaign cash so far) that has kept the former Florida governor afloat despite his dismal poll numbers. 

Bush's problem isn’t merely a matter of being labeled the scion of the loathed GOP political elite, it’s a question of tone. He’s polite, reasonable, bilingual — and the party’s base wants a fighter like Trump who is blustery, visceral and a defiant monolingual speaker of the language his new buddy Sarah Palin calls “American.” 

Bush is fond of saying he’s his “own man,” with an emphasis on the “own” part -- to shrug off the gilded albatross of his family’s mixed political legacy -- but these days Trump is making Bush answer for the word “man” too.

In the five weeks since the first debate, he’s ceded his second-place position to Ben Carson, sinking from 10 percent of the national vote to high single-digits.

But several Bush advisers said he’s given up illusions of being a frontrunner, and of emerging from the Republican primary without getting down in “the mud” with Trump. But how far to go? The key, people close to Bush say, is coming up with a tough approach without making the candidate want to crawl out of his own, deeply civil skin. To that end, he has been huddling with his team, whenever time permits, to work out a plan of attack for the primetime showdown with Trump at the Reagan Library Wednesday.

While Bush wallows in the polls, his recently unveiled tax reform plan, as mentioned, is a bonanza for the 1% and offers little for working Americans.  The chart below says it all:

 In short, like most in the GOP, Bush wants to screw most of us while giving away the store to the very wealthy, something his brother did as well.  Will average voters allow themselves to be seduced yet again by voodoo economics and the GOP's reverse Robin Hood agenda?

Hillary the Tormenting Candidate

From my years as a political activist, there are ultimately two main questions to be asked about a candidate: (i) are they electable, and (ii) will they further the best interests of the majority of Americans.   Liking the candidate on a personal level is fine and good, but we are not electing someone with whom we would most want to be sitting down and sharing a beer with or chatting with over drinks at a cocktail party.   Which brings me to Hillary Clinton.  As a column in the New York Times points out, Hillary (and Bill Clinton) have lots of negative baggage they bring with them.  But when the two questions noted above are asked, of the current declared candidates, she's the only one that seemingly gets a yest answer on both points.  The GOP clown car clearly stands for the 1% and those who want the USA to become a racists theocracy.  Of the other candidates on the Democrat side, I don't thank any are electable.  Thus, while one may have to hold their nose and vote, voting for Hillary may be your best option.  Here are column highlights:

 I’ve been running into people even more put off by the Clintons than the nefarious operatives in the “vast right wing conspiracy” ever were.  They’re called Democrats.

I had breakfast with one last week. I’d quote him directly, but The Times doesn’t permit profanity.

He’s furious at Hillary and Bill, because they’ve once again created all these ugly, obvious messes that they could and should have avoided. He’s disgusted, because he has come to believe that they’re tainted.

He’s also resolute: He’s voting — even rooting — for Hillary.

Party loyalty motivates him. On top of which, he’s worried about the Supreme Court and how a Republican president might pack it.

And he keeps hearing the voices of little girls in his life who have asked him whether a woman can be president of the United States in reality, not just on some TV show.

He wants them to see: Yes, she can.

So here he stands, or rather squirms, exhilarated by what Hillary embodies and repelled by what she represents, wanting to see her take the oath and wanting never to lay eyes on her and Bill again, determined that they reclaim the White House and despairing of the muddy road there and the certain muck beyond. He’s a riot of warring emotions, a paradox with a pulse. The Clintons will do that to a person.

And it’s different from politics as usual. It’s politics as a peculiar form of psychological torture, because the Clintons have a way — it’s their trademark — of being the best, most exciting vessel for people’s hopes even as they make those people feel icky about their investment in the couple.

Just ask Democrats who were in Congress during Bill’s impeachment. Many fought to save his presidency, and thus gave the requisite interviews and said the right words, all the while roiling with outrage over the selfish, reckless manner in which he’d put his and the party’s agenda at risk.

It’s never as simple and humdrum as being for or against the Clintons. And while countless other politicians force supporters to make special allowances, stomach imperfections and come to terms with a tangle of good and bad, few do so on the Clintons’ operatic scale.

[V]oting for her [Hillary] may require of many Democrats what voting for him [Nixon] did of many Republicans, which is the suppression of profound misgivings. Thomas said that in 1968, people backing Nixon often felt that “there really wasn’t any other choice.” At least for the nomination, he was inevitable.  As is she . . . .

At some point over the last year Democrats placed just about all of their chips on Hillary, reassured by the depth of her experience, aware of how much money she could raise, and inspired by what a perfect sequel to Barack Obama she’d be. He broke the color barrier. Now she’d shatter the glass ceiling that she put all those cracks in.

Perhaps my views may change.  One of the husband's well heeled clients has talked of hosting an event for Hillary and we may get to meet her if the event comes to pass.  Maybe Hillary will wow me in a way I don't expect.  I like the Democrat quoted at the outset of the column am very worried about what a Republican president would do to the Supreme Court.  That alone argues for making sure Hillary is elected.

 

Bloomberg Poll: Almost Half of Americans Are Stupid

The Republican Party has indeed become the party of stupid.  Hence, it is little surprise that almost half of Americans are stupid.  Yes, you guessed it, the GOP base in particular.  How else to explain a refusal to accept modern science, the desperate clinging to the writings and myths of unknown Bronze Age goat herders, and denial of climate change even as the polar ice masses melt.  Politicususa looks at the poll findings.  Here are excerpts:

As comedian George Carlin once said, “Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups” and he was certainly referring to Americans loyal to the Republican movement. It is possible that in many Americans’ cases, stupid is the wrong term and denial a more apt descriptor; although a combination of the two terms is likely apropos when referring to half of America. In fact, it is safe to say that the two terms accurately describe Republican voters as a whole because it takes a particularly stupid person to deny what they know have experienced and seen with their own eyes; something results of a Bloomberg poll released yesterday revealed in grand fashion.

[T]he poll revealed that overall the President’s approval rating is positive in no small part due to a recovering economy that even Republicans cannot deny or take any credit for after spending six long years doing nothing. Those numbers are bad news for Republicans who continue claiming errantly that the economy is lagging regardless corporate profits are raging, unemployment is falling, GDP is up, the debt is falling, and the stock market continues setting new records. Even for stupid Americans, it is obvious that the economy under President Obama has been steadily improving and shows no signs of slowing any time soon according to economic experts forecasting continued growth with one caveat; the majority of the population is not seeing their personal finances keep pace with the rich and corporations in a growing economy. It was the one part of the poll results that a substantial majority of Americans were in complete agreement about.

What was curious about the poll results, though, was that although 69 percent of Americans say a growing problem is the widening income gap between the very rich and the rest of the population, there was a relatively even split on how best to address the economic discrepancy favoring the one percent; that is where the stupid factor is manifest. Americans who agreed that it is “better for the government to implement policies to shrink the income gap” made up 46 percent of respondents, and 47 percent said it is better “for the government to stand aside and let the market operate freely; even if the income gap gets wider.” Now, it is belligerently stupid for respondents, 69 percent of them, to acknowledge that, on the one hand, there is a growing income gap between the richest one percent and the rest of the population that has to be confronted and solved, and yet 47 percent believe the best way to address the problem is for government to ‘stand aside‘ and let the market take care of the problem; “even if it makes the gap wider.” Maybe the 47 percent agreeing with that statement failed to read the last phrase.

Obviously the stupid 47 percent who want to solve the income gap issue by, as Republicans preach, “getting government out of the way” have spent an inordinate amount of time getting their economic policy solutions from Republicans and Fox News. They also apparently have a serious issue with reality because study after report after study after life experience has revealed that nationally and particularly in states where Republicans have “got government out of the way,” economic growth is non-existent, job creation is lagging, people are getting poorer while the rich get richer, and deficits are exploding.

For example, Republicans attempted to get government out of the way by eliminating overtime pay, blocked Democrats attempt to pass an equal pay for equal work law, obstructed every attempt by President Obama to create jobs, and slashed federal spending that killed jobs. Republicans have also spent the last few months getting government out of the way of the rich getting richer by attempting to pass legislation giving the rich greater tax breaks as part of their failed trickle down scam . . .

Either 47 percent of the respondents are too stupid to understand that the Republican anti-government approach to the economy has failed every economic test over the past thirty years, or they know it increases the income gap and foolishly think that if the richest one percent gets richer, their own financial situation will improve. If left on its own, the market will always favor the rich. . .

The only reason there is a destructive income gap in America is because for the past thirty years Republicans have been on a crusade to get government out of the way and it has created an environment that is conducive to corporate profits and increased wealth for the richest one percent at the expense of the rest of the population. One has to hand it to Republicans for convincing nearly half of the Bloomberg poll’s respondents that going forward with an economic agenda that enriches the already wealthy at the expense of the rest of the population by eliminating government is the solution to the widening income gap. Republicans understand that at least half of America is stupid and will continue falling for the same failed approach to the economy regardless the disastrous economic consequences, and there is little doubt they will work tirelessly to convince the rest of the population that eliminating government will make them filthy rich.

The GOP: Warriors of the Aristocracy

With Hillary Clinton having announced that bringing relief to the the plight of the working and middle classes will be a theme of her presidential campaign, we can expect lip service from GOP candidates that will show feigned concern for average Americans.  Talk, of course, is cheap and talk is all the GOP will actually bring to the table.  Since 1977 - the year I graduated from law school - inflation has been in the neighborhood of 287.3%.  Rest assured, that wages for average Americans has not kept pace.  Even in the legal realm, fees for things such as a real estate settlement have nowhere near kept up with the rate of inflation.  A piece in Salon looks at the true GOP agenda as being warriors for the "aristocracy."  Here are excepts that look at GOP policies rather than GOP lip service:

It’s been quite interesting to see Republicans embrace the notion that wealth inequality (or any inequality) is something to worry their pretty little heads about. Over the winter we heard numerous reports of various GOP luminaries expressing serious concern that average Americans were getting the short end of the stick while the wealthy few reaped all the rewards. Ted Cruz might as well have put on a blond wig and called himself “Elizabeth” when he railed against it after the State of the Union:

“We’re facing right now a divided America when it comes to the economy. It is true that the top 1 percent are doing great under Barack Obama. Today, the top 1 percent earn a higher share of our national income than any year since 1928,”

And here we thought that was supposed to be a good thing. Aren’t they the “job producers”? That’s how weird the GOP’s messaging has gotten lately. Mitt “47 Percent” Romney clutched his very expensive opera-length pearls, wailing that “under President Obama, the rich have gotten richer, income inequality has gotten worse and there are more people in poverty than ever before.” Rand Paul channeled his heretofore unknown inner Bernie Sanders, proclaiming that “income inequality has worsened under this administration. 

This certainly wasn’t something they lost any sleep over before now. . . . this sort of thing is called “issue-trespassing,” where one party attempts to co-opt an advantage of the other by pretending to care about something nobody thinks they care about. In this case, the GOP seemed to be admitting that their reputation as the party of the 1 percent wasn’t helpful to their cause, so they decided to try to shift the blame to President Obama.

[I]t’s hard to see how anyone can possibly believe that the Republican Party, which fetishizes low taxes for the rich above all other priorities, truly cares about wealth inequality; but perhaps this is one of those times when the mere pretense of caring signals that they understand how badly their reputation of callous disregard for everyday Americans’ economic security has hurt them.

[T]his shallow attempt at appearing to give a damn was short-lived. This week the GOP is voting, as they always do, to ensure that the heirs to the Wal-Mart fortune won’t be faced with the terrible responsibility of having to pay taxes on their inheritances. Dana Milbank of the Washington Post pointed out just how successful these protectors of the progeny of the one percenters have been in recent years:

It had long been a conservative ideal, and the essence of the American Dream, to believe that everybody should have an equal shot at success. But in their current bid to end the estate tax, Republicans could create a permanent elite of trust-fund babies. The estate tax was a meaningful check on a permanent aristocracy as recently as 2001 . . . The current exemption of $5.4 million (the current estate tax has an effective rate averaging under 17 percent, according to the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center) does little to prevent a permanent aristocracy from growing — and abolishing it entirely turns democracy into kleptocracy.

This is nothing new, of course. The conservative project has always been fundamentally about aristocracy. Sure, they love to wax on about freedom and liberty but the freedom and liberty they care about is the freedom to attain property and pass it on to their heirs. Everything else is secondary. What’s more interesting is the way they are able to make ordinary people who will never benefit from this scheme — in fact, they will suffer  – agitate for it as if it meant the bread on their own table and the roof over their own heads.

Paul Waldman tackled this phenomenon in a piece for the American Prospect a while back. He concluded that voters didn’t understand that the tax only kicks in for very high amounts, and that most people instinctively think it should be okay to bequeath your fortune to your kids — regardless that the consequences of vastly wealthy people doing this are fundamentally un-American.
Waldman mentioned this silly notion as well:

Americans tend to think that no matter what their current situation, eventually, they’re going to be rich. Most of us are wrong about that, but that’s what we think. It’s practically our patriotic duty to believe it. So most everyone thinks that this tax will apply to their estate upon their death, no matter how modest that estate might be at the moment.

This is one of the main keys to the perpetuation of the aristocratic project: Convincing average people to support “their betters” with the promise that they will themselves benefit. In the old aristocracy, this used to be a simple pledge of fealty to ones noble house, but American conservatives have “democratized” it to make the serfs and peasants believe that they too will be nobles one day if only they agree to allow the rich to keep every last penny of their wealth. It’s a very sweet scam.

Unfortunately for the conservatives, inequality is becoming impossible to ignore and the people are starting to wake up to what is happening. The confusion on the right about how to handle it is a sign that it’s verging out of their control.

 

[S]imply paying lip service to a democratic, egalitarian concern is probably not going to be enough to give them cover when the Republican stereotype of being servants of the rich is so deeply embedded in our political culture. (Thanks Mitt!) Voting for the Paris Hilton tax exemption bill certainly won’t help.