February 3, 2019 --
This week’s doggerel and tweets–
Your country’s ill
What can abate it’s awesome headache?
You need a pill
A cure to make
A Pelosi nostrum is the one to take.
When on the government we close the door
Leaving empty space galore
There ought to be a ban
Some kind of Sturm und Drang
To signify we’ll not be using it any more.
When congressional members speak and bipartisanship employs
Nothing meaningful can be heard from all the raucous noise
When Trump rules it’s a shame
It means no way we can claim
That we can reach the desired point of equipoise.
E.J. Dionne Jr., WaPo: The real wall is between conservatism and fresh ideas
The contest for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination seemed to have little relationship to the madness that engulfed the nation’s capital over the government shutdown. But there is a much closer relationship between the Washington meltdown and the campaign than you might think.
You also hear a lot about Democrats veering left. This, too, misses the point.
What we’re actually seeing is a shift in the intellectual energy of American politics. This is the lesson of the disarray in the Republican Party, and the ultimate capitulation of President Trump in the shutdown fight he initiated. Trump’s decision to close the government in the vain pursuit of an essentially meaningless goal showed a party and ideological movement lost in the wilderness.
Trump’s rise itself was a symptom of this. Traditional conservative nostrums of tax cuts for the best-off and business-friendly deregulation were not answering the needs of less affluent Republicans. Frustrated, they embraced Trump’s nationalism and protectionism along with, in many cases, his racialized appeals. They also noticed that Trump defended key social-insurance programs, especially Social Security and Medicare, which serve an aging Republican base.
In practice, Trump has stuck resolutely to the old conservatism, with the corporate tax cut being his major achievement. His administration is a coterie of millionaires and billionaires whose insensitivity to the shutdown’s victims suggested a worldview inspired by French Bourbons, not prairie populists.
Trump has asked his blue-collar loyalists to live on a diet of rhetoric and empty symbols — the border wall being Symbol No. 1. Trump’s deteriorating poll numbers showed that all but the most extreme of his supporters were losing faith in his project.
In the meantime, liberals and the left have absorbed key lessons from the Trump insurgency. One of them is that a progressive movement seen as speaking primarily for affluent metropolitan areas will never command a durable majority. Another is that there is room for bolder political thinking given the discontent in the country with unevenly shared economic growth.
What is interpreted as a leftward lurch can thus be better seen as an effort to pull the entire political spectrum away from the premises that have dominated U.S. politics since the Reagan era. These exerted a gravitational pull even on the Barack Obama and Bill Clinton presidencies.
Conservatives succeeded in selling the poppycock that showering money on the investing class — the “makers not the takers,” the “job creators” — would lead to prosperity for all. Influential books were essential to conservatism’s rise, and you can see this billionaire-friendly notion now under assault from both moderate progressives (Steve Pearlstein’s “Can American Capitalism Survive? Why Greed Is Not Good, Opportunity Is Not Equal, and Fairness Won’t Make Us Poor”) and voices further left (Robert Kuttner’s “Can Democracy Survive Global Capitalism?”).
Presidential candidates — those thinking of running and other Democratic politicians — are also responding to the policy vacuum on the right embodied by the shutdown-for-a-symbol. For starters, supply-side economics is so yesterday. There is now room to talk about a wealth tax, proposed last week by Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, and a large middle- and working-class tax cut offered by Sen. Kamala D. Harris of California. Meanwhile, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York has inspired serious debate (unimaginable even a few years ago) about a 70 percent tax rate on earnings over $10 million.
The underlying assumptions of the right are under assault as well. Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) has made “the dignity of work” his battle cry, making a case for the priority of labor over capital. Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Ind., has called on Democrats to reclaim the concept of “freedom” from the right by insisting that, in many areas of everyday life, beginning with civil rights and health care, it takes government action to make freedom a reality.
Nibbling at the edges of problems is no longer fashionable. Thus is Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) making universal paid family leave a centerpiece of her presidential bid. Former housing and urban development secretary Julián Castro is pushing for universal pre-K programs, while former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg has said that if he runs, he wants to highlight bold action to curb gun violence and climate change.
During Jimmy Carter’s administration in the late 1970s, conservatives launched an intellectual revolution that left liberals gasping for breath and helped create the presidency of Ronald Reagan. Trump is doing all he can to become the latest one-term president to empower a philosophical and policy rebirth among his opponents. The real wall is between conservatism and fresh ideas.
Tom Nichols: Sorry, Republicans. You can’t call out Northam for racism and give Trump a pass.
Tom Nichols is a professor at the Harvard Extension School.
Finally, the GOP is calling out a chief executive for his appalling insensitivity on an issue of race: Saturday, via Twitter, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) decried that chief executive’s “past racist behavior” and said “He should resign.” In two tweets posted on Saturday, Republican Party chair Ronna McDaniel listed off what she sees as that same chief executive’s callousness on race, including, apparently, his appearance in a photo, 35 years ago in which one person is in blackface and the other is wearing a Ku Klux Klan hood. The conduct that these Republicans denounced clearly deserves condemnation, no matter how or when it occurred.
Unfortunately, they’ve reserved their scorn for one chief executive, Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam, a Democrat, and have held back when it comes to criticizing a chief executive from their own party, President Trump, for his racially divisive statements and public positions. That is naked hypocrisy.
Northam, without doubt, brought this criticism on himself: Friday he released a statement apologizing for appearing in a 1984 medical school yearbook photo “in a costume that is clearly racist and offensive,” saying, “I am deeply sorry for the decision I made.” Then on Saturday, he went before live cameras to say, “I believe then, and now, that I am not either of the people” in the photo in question. A risible, flimsy explanation, unacceptable for anyone, let alone the governor of a state.
Republicans, sensing a relatively rare moment when, for once, the other party had to own a race-relations debacle, joined Democrats in calling for Northam’s ouster. In addition to McCarthy and McDaniel, Virginia GOP chair Jack Wilson called on Northam to step down, saying the governor has “lost the moral ability” to lead. Ever since Election Day 2016, when Trump’s supporters promised he wouldn’t be as awful as his critics — including me — warned he would be, Republicans have longed for a moment when they could at least pretend to gain the high moral ground.
But while Democrats, and decent people everywhere, have a right to demand that Northam step down, Republicans who continue to support a party dominated by Trump can’t be taken seriously on this point.
Trump’s record on race-related issues is abysmal. For years, he fueled birtherism to attack President Barack Obama. He once argued that a federal judge, Gonzalo P. Curiel, couldn’t be impartial in a case involving Trump because, as Trump said, “He’s a Mexican. We’re building a wall between here and Mexico.” Early in his presidential candidacy, Trump called for a “total and complete ban on Muslims entering the country.” In office, he ruminated on the United States needing more immigrants from places such as Norway and fewer immigrants from “shithole” countries, referencing Haiti, El Salvador and African countries.
Despite polls taken at various times during his presidency that show significant percentages of Americans either see Trump as racist or, at a minimum, someone who has “emboldened” racists, the president still enjoys the support of Republicans in Congress and 78 percent approval among Republicans in the latest Washington Post/ABC News poll. For the most part, the party has indulged his race-baiting comments and his crude handling of racial issues. But somehow party leaders, who stand firmly behind him, and a national party that just passed a resolution expressing “undivided support” for him, seems to have no qualms about calling out Northam.
How Northam got all the way to the Virginia statehouse without the yearbook photo being discovered will wind up as a case study in future training for political opposition researchers and for reporters. Regardless of how it happened, it’s fair to view his inconsistent statements and conclude that he never thought he would have to explain any of this until after it became public. That disingenuousness is damning in itself, and if the voters and elected leaders of Virginia decide that this episode disqualifies him from serving honorably in office — it appears they do — that’s their choice. (I happen to agree with them.)
Democrats don’t have completely clean hands on race issues; if nothing else, the Northam episode illustrates that. But when commentators such as David Limbaugh ask if Trump supporters must “forfeit the right to pass any moral judgments” because of their continual excuse-making for him, the only reply is: yes. Criticizing Northam for “past racist behavior” and his present equivocation after more than two years of overlooking an astonishing record of divisiveness reflects little more than a self-serving, morally repellent double standard. There are plenty of good arguments for kicking Northam out of his job. The newfound racial piety of a party that sold its soul to Trump isn’t one of them.
Eugene Robinson, WaPo: The scariest thing about Trump’s tweets
Of all the crackpots on social media, is any more untethered to reality than the president of the United States?
Seriously, there are tinfoil-hatted lunatics yelling on street corners who make more sense than President Trump’s increasingly loopy Twitter feed. Think about it: Most mornings, and some evenings as well, the most powerful man in the world rants and raves like someone you’d urgently tell the gate agent about if you were waiting to board the same airplane. This is not normal. This is alarming.
I know, there is a school of thought that says Trump’s tweets are nothing more than weapons of mass distraction and should be ignored. But if you want to know the administration’s policy on just about anything, what other reliable source is there? Surely not press secretary Sarah Sanders and the other White House mouthpieces, whose main job is to invent “evidence” to back up Trump’s misstatements, distortions and pants-on-fire lies.
And surely not Trump’s own high-level appointees. After Director of National Intelligence Daniel Coats told Congress this week that North Korea is unlikely ever to give up its nuclear weapons, Trump tweeted that there is a “decent chance of Denuclearization . . . Progress being made — big difference.” After CIA chief Gina Haspel said that Iran is abiding by the terms of the nuclear deal that Trump renounced, the president used a tweet to slap her down: “The Intelligence people seem to be extremely passive and naive when it comes to the dangers of Iran. They are wrong! . . . Perhaps Intelligence should go back to school!”
Take a moment to absorb how crazy this is. The informed assessments of the president’s intelligence chiefs disagree with Trump’s uninformed or misinformed prejudgments — so he attacks and belittles his own handpicked team.
What are Coats, Haspel and all the others who work for Trump supposed to do? Grin and bear it? Shrug and carry on? Quit and write books telling how the chaos and dysfunction inside Trumpworld are worse than we could possibly imagine?
The president also uses Twitter — where he has nearly 58 million followers — to cut the legs from under members of Congress who are gamely trying to carry his water. This week’s victims are the GOP members of the bipartisan committee that is supposed to be negotiating a spending package for border security. Those Republicans “are wasting their time,” Trump tweeted, because Democrats do not want to approve money to build the imaginary border wall that Mexico was supposed to pay for.
One way to end this farce would be for the committee to come up with funds to replace or upgrade existing border fences and barriers. Trump could say this was money for the wall, Democrats could say it wasn’t, and there would be no threat of another government shutdown or an unconstitutional declaration of national emergency. But another Trump tweet seemed to rule that solution out: “Lets just call them WALLS from now on and stop playing political games! A WALL is a WALL.”
I guess Shakespeare was wrong; a rose by any other name would not, in fact, smell as sweet. But I digress.
One of the scariest things about Trump’s tweets is that you can read them and immediately know what he’s been watching on television. He often repeats what he has just heard on Fox News — to the point that the hosts of his favorite show, “Fox & Friends,” often appear to be setting the administration’s agenda. If I worked for the president, I’d watch the show to get my marching orders for the day.
To review: The president won’t accept the conclusions of the intelligence community, which are synthesized by thousands of public servants with great expertise in their subject areas. But he treats three blow-dried talking heads sitting on a couch in Manhattan as Delphic oracles.
Perhaps above all, Trump uses his Twitter feed to lie and mislead. On Thursday morning alone, he claimed in four separate tweets that his promised border wall is already “being built.” That’s an utter, shameless lie. Some existing fencing has been replaced, but not a single mile of new wall has been constructed. Not one.
Rare is the Trump tweet that does not include at least one lie, exaggeration or distortion. I’ll leave it to my Fact Checker colleagues at The Post to keep track of them all. But think about it: We have a chief executive who gushes toxic falsehoods like Drunk Uncle at closing time.
How can the nation respect the presidency when it can’t believe a word the president says?I don’t know, either.
Paul Krugman, NYT: Attack of the Fanatical Centrists
Why is American politics so dysfunctional? Whatever the deeper roots of our distress, the proximate cause is ideological extremism: Powerful factions are committed to false views of the world, regardless of the evidence.
Notice that I said factions, plural. There’s no question that the most disruptive, dangerous extremists are on the right. But there’s another faction whose obsessions and refusal to face reality have also done a great deal of harm.
But I’m not talking about the left. Radical leftists are virtually nonexistent in American politics; can you think of any prominent figure who wants us to move to the left of, say, Denmark? No, I’m talking about fanatical centrists.
Over the past few days we’ve been treated to the ludicrous yet potentially destructive spectacle of Howard Schultz, the Starbucks billionaire, insisting that he’s the president we need despite his demonstrable policy ignorance. Schultz obviously thinks he knows a lot of things that just aren’t so. Yet his delusions of knowledge aren’t that special. For the most part, they follow conventional centrist doctrine.
First, there’s the obsession with public debt. This obsession might have made some sense back in 2010, when some feared a Greek-style crisis, although even then I could have told you that such fears were misplaced. In fact, I did.
In any case, however, eight years have passed since Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson predicted a fiscal crisis within two years unless their calls for spending cuts were heeded, yet U.S. borrowing costs remain at historical lows. These low borrowing costs mean that fears of snowballing debt are groundless; mainstream economists now tell us that “the risks associated with high debt levels are small relative to the harm cutting deficits would do.”
Schultz, however, still declares debt our biggest problem. Yet true to centrist form, his deficit concerns are oddly selective. Bowles and Simpson, charged with proposing a solution to deficits, listed as their first principle … reducing tax rates. Sure enough, Schultz is all into cutting Social Security, but opposes any tax hike on the wealthy.
Funny how that works.
In general, centrists are furiously opposed to any proposal that would ease the lives of ordinary Americans. Universal health coverage, says Schultz, would be “free health care for all, which the country cannot afford.”
And he’s not alone in saying things like that. A few days ago Michael Bloomberg declared that extending Medicare to everyone, as Kamala Harris suggests, would “bankrupt us for a very long time.”
Now, single-payer health care (actually called Medicare!) hasn’t bankrupted Canada. In fact, every advanced country besides America has some form of universal health coverage, and manages to afford it.
The real issue with “Medicare for all” isn’t costs — the taxes needed to pay for it would almost surely be less than what Americans now pay in insurance premiums. The problem instead would be political: It would be tricky persuading people to trade private insurance for a public program. That’s a real concern for Medicare-for-all advocates, but it’s not at all what either Schultz or Bloomberg is saying.
Finally, the hallmark of fanatical centrism is the determination to see America’s left and right as equally extreme, no matter what they actually propose.
Thus, throughout the Obama years, centrists called for political leaders who would address their debt concerns with an approach that combined spending cuts with revenue increases, offer a market-based health care plan and invest in infrastructure, somehow never managing to acknowledge that there was one major figure proposing exactly that — President Barack Obama.
And now, with Democrats taking a turn that is more progressive but hardly radical, centrist rhetoric has become downright hysterical. Medicare and Medicaid already cover more than a third of U.S. residents and pay more bills than private insurance.
But Medicare for all, says Schultz, is “not American.” Elizabeth Warren has proposed taxes on the wealthy that are squarely in the tradition of Teddy Roosevelt; Bloomberg says that they would turn us into Venezuela.
Where does the fanaticism of the centrists come from? Much of the explanation, I think, is sheer vanity.
Both pundits and plutocrats like to imagine themselves as superior beings, standing above the political fray. They want to think of themselves as standing tall against extremism right and left. Yet the reality of American politics is asymmetric polarization: extremism on the right is a powerful political force, while extremism on the left isn’t. What’s a would-be courageous centrist to do?
The answer, all too often, is to retreat into a fantasy world, almost as hermetic as the right-wing, Fox News bubble. In this fantasy world, social democrats like Harris or Warren are portrayed as the second coming of Hugo Chávez, so that taking what is actually a conservative position can be represented as a brave defense of moderation.
But that’s not what is really happening, and the rest of us have no obligation to indulge centrist delusions.
Gail Collins, NYT: Help Pick the Worst of Trump
Time to vote for Donald Trump’s Worst Cabinet Member.
No fair just yelling “Wilbur Ross!” Our secretary of commerce appeared to be trying to sweep the field last week when he expressed bafflement that federal workers were going to food banks during the government shutdown rather than taking out loans.
Ross also volunteered that 800,000 people going without pay for a month was only “about a third of a percent on G.D.P. So it’s not like it’s a gigantic number over all.” I am convinced he heard that a Worst contest was on the way and wanted to nail down first place.
But let’s look at some other top contestants. For instance — after all the horrific stories about children separated from their parents at the border, what about our Department of Homeland Security chief?
“D.H.S. Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen has earned the mantle of Worst Cabinet Secretary,” argued Austin Evers, executive director of the watchdog group American Oversight. “Nielsen has enthusiastically generated false evidence to justify the president’s xenophobic immigration policies, zealously executed those policies in ways that have shocked the world, and then brazenly lied about both.”
Nielsen is definitely a contender. I’ve had my eye on her ever since she claimed she didn’t know whether Norway was a predominately white country.
And she’s been pretty effective in carrying out her plans, which is important when you’re part of a crew where ineptitude often cancels out bad intentions.
For instance, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos would certainly like to privatize the nation’s public schools, but she barely seems organized enough to get dressed in the morning. Still, Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, believes DeVos should get Worst points for having “basically spent her time in that office working for everyone but the kids.”
Same story for Secretary of Energy Rick Perry. Many people were offended that a job Barack Obama gave to a nuclear physicist went to a guy whose most important recent achievement was appearing on “Dancing With the Stars.” But we haven’t seen much of Perry since he learned, to his chagrin, that his job is about the safe handling of nuclear materials, not drilling for oil.
Some cabinet-watchers are discovering, to their shock, that they miss Scott Pruitt, who won last year’s competition as the anti-environment head of the Environmental Protection Agency. Pruitt was famous for his public relations disasters. Remember security agents who were sent to pick up his dry cleaning and drove him from one place to the next in a search for a special moisturizer?
Now we’ve got E.P.A. Acting Administrator Andrew Wheeler, a former coal industry lobbyist who’s way better at the job. Presuming you believe the job is screwing up the air and water.
“He’ll never buy lotion at the Ritz-Carlton, but the decisions he’s made are far worse than any Pruitt made,” said Scott Faber of the Environmental Working Group, ticking off a long list of initiatives, including the repeal of the Clean Power Plan and a rollback on efforts to regulate mercury pollution. “Andy knows which levers to pull, and he hasn’t let any moss grow under his feet.”
If Wheeler keeps getting his way, there probably won’t be any moss for the rest of us, either.
A quarter of the cabinet members are the high-end governmental equivalent of temps, including the acting heads of E.P.A., Defense, Justice and Interior. “I like acting — it gives me more flexibility,” the president said recently. This was not a reference to his years playing a pretend chief executive on “Celebrity Apprentice.”
People who care about land conservation were unnerved when the inept Ryan Zinke was replaced by Acting Secretary of the Interior David Bernhardt, a former oil industry lobbyist. Can you imagine Bernhardt and Wheeler plotting together? “They must have lunch at their own Merchants of Death table,” moaned Faber.
Still more to choose from! There’s Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, a former drug company executive and pharmaceutical lobbyist who’s supposed to be coming up with a plan to control prescription drug prices. While we’re waiting, family planning advocates continue to reel from the department’s war on contraception and abortion.
Or Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who tried to rebrand State as the “Department of Swagger.” Really, he’s been promoting a new Swagger seal. “I thought it was a parody or a joke,” said David Wade, who was chief of staff at State during the Obama administration. But no such luck.
One challenge in picking a Worst Cabinet Member is that there’s so much competition. Norman Ornstein, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, ticked off Pompeo, DeVos, Nielsen, Steve Mnuchin (“Certainly the slimiest Treasury secretary ever”) and Housing Secretary Ben Carson.
“But the winner is Wilbur Ross,” Ornstein concluded. “Lied about the citizenship question on the census. Powerful allegations of insider trading. Dissembled about his holdings before that. And wins the Marie Antoinette award to boot.”
Don’t let all this Wilbur lobbying sway you. Your vote counts! Let me know your Worst Cabinet Member pick and we’ll crown some winners next week.
Dana Milbank, WaPo: The Roger Stone clown show is the Trump presidency in microcosm
For once, Roger Stone was at a loss for words.
The longtime confidant of President Trump had given nonstop interviews and news conferences since Friday morning, when the FBI pounded on his door, then charged him with seven criminal counts related to alleged lies during the probe of Russia’s election interference.
But in Washington on Monday, as his lawyer entered a not guilty plea on his behalf, the flamboyant politico uttered just eight words during his 13-minute arraignment (two “yes, your honors” and an “I do”), and then just four more as a scrum of journalists followed him to the exits: “No comments. No questions.”
Stone didn’t need to speak. He already was in his element: a maelstrom, with himself at the center.
Scores of photographers and spectators poured into the street outside the courthouse. Chants of “We love Roger!” dueled with “Lock him up!” A portable sound system boomed “Back in the U.S.S.R.,” and two men waved Russian flags. A giant inflatable rat sat in the back of a pickup, and people spelled out “TRAITOR” with giant letters.
Stone made his way through the sea of signs (“Free Stone, Jail Hillary,” “You helped Putin steal our democracy”) and zoomed off in a black SUV, leaving Federal Protective Service police to disperse the crowd. One of the last to be shooed away wore an orange wig and carried a sign saying, simply, “This is a sign.”
Yes, it is a sign — that Stone has created another circus. He was caricatured by Steve Martin on “Saturday Night Live.” Others go silent when indicted, Stone went on CNN, ABC and Fox News (both Hannity and Tucker Carlson) to tout his website and his next book (“Woodward and Bernstein: The Godfathers of Fake News”) and to raise $2 million for his legal defense (so what if his lawyers aren’t certified to practice in Washington?).
Sure, the 66-year-old is facing up to 45 years behind bars. But now everybody gets to see his natty outfits. His pocket squares! His felt homburg!
“The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about,” he told reporters after his arrest.
Or, as he told The Post’s Manuel Roig-Franzia: “It’s better to be infamous than not to be famous at all.”
In this sense, Stone’s clown act of the past few days — simultaneously self-promoting and self-defeating — has been the Trump presidency in microcosm. Like his outrageous friend and adviser, Trump loves attention, even the bad kind.
Now Trump is trying to say Stone “didn’t even work for me anywhere near the Election!” (Too bad a campaign official sent Stone a congratulatory “well done” message after WikiLeaks released stolen Hillary Clinton campaign emails.) But Stone has forever been at Trump’s side (when I watched Trump test the waters for a presidential run in 2000, Stone, and his dog, were on Trump’s 727) and Trump could no more disown Stone than his orange pompadour.
Like Trump, Stone is vulgar. He informed George Stephanopoulos that the indictment is “thinner than piss on a rock.” Like Trump, Stone loves conspiracies. He alleges his arrest is part of a conspiracy to install Nancy Pelosi as president, who would “make Hillary Clinton vice president and then step aside.”
Like Trump, Stone is post-factual. He first said the FBI agents were “extraordinarily courteous” on Friday but later complained about “Gestapo tactics,” an attempt to “terrorize” his dogs, and “greater force than was used to take down bin Laden or El Chapo or Pablo Escobar.”
Like Trump, Stone can sound barking mad. He threatened the fluffy-white therapy dog of another witness, the indictment alleges. A dirty trickster for Richard Nixon in 1972 (the late president’s visage is supposedly tattooed on Stone’s back), he was dropped by Bob Dole in 1996 over an ad he and his wife placed for sex partners in a swinger’s magazine.
And, like Trump, Stone is a portrait of eccentric vanity. At the defense table in Courtroom 3, his face was tan (he favors tinted creams), his white hair oxidized, his blue shirt coordinated with his pocket square, his dark eyebrows unnaturally suspended in a look of cartoonish surprise.
Stone, who has chronicled his excellent adventure on Instagram, complained that FBI agents seized him before he could don “a suit and tie for my mug shot” (tragically, his polo shirt exposed his midriff when he flashed a victory sign for the cameras).
By the time he arrived in D.C., Stone was suitably attired in tweed, turtleneck and homburg. Reporters mobbed him. Stone was not displeased. “As a person of fashion will it bother you if you have to wear orange?” somebody asked.
“I look good in pinstripes,” he replied. “Those are the only stripes I look good in.”
Perhaps the Bureau of Prisons will take that into consideration.
E.J. Dionne, Jr., WaPo: Howard Schultz is suffering from the Frappuccino Syndrome
Holy chestnut praline latte! There was Howard Schultz, the former Starbucks chief executive, making a case Wednesday for why Americans would flock to him if he decided to run for president as an independent. “They’re not going to vote for a left-wing Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris candidate,” he explained.
The crashing you heard just then was the sound of thousands of caramel macchiatos hurled at televisions broadcasting “Morning Joe,” where the coffee king appeared.
Was I alone in wondering why the man who thinks he will save our nation yoked together two very different female candidates as the collective image of all he sees wrong with the Democratic Party? Was it really just about their views on health care or taxes?
First, let’s put the most sympathetic spin on Schultz’s exertions: He’s hawking books. I’ll even help him here: His memoir is called “From the Ground Up.”
His toying with the presidency might thus be another illustration of the marketing genius that persuaded so many to believe (wrongly, in my view) that Starbucks is better than Dunkin’. We’re all talking about him! Promote, Howard, promote!
But if Schultz is serious about throwing some small share of his billions into a presidential campaign, the backlash against him is appropriate — and the rebukes aren’t just a response to the arrogance of thinking that selling us on drinks such as “Cold Foam Cascara Nitro” or on the idea of saying “venti” rather than “large” qualifies him to be president of the United States.
The primal response to Schultz among so many Americans who believe that defeating President Trump should now be the country’s main priority reflects a considered and intelligent judgment: Things are way too serious to go soft on a vanity candidate.
The case that Schultz would help Trump by splitting the opposition vote has already been made well by many, including Eugene Robinson in The Post, Michelle Goldberg in the New York Times and William A. Galston (who, by the way, leans to the center) in the Wall Street Journal. Schultz should read them all.
But the reaction against Schultz is also a pushback against the deep misunderstandings about our politics that animate his candidacy. What the heck: Let’s call it the Frappuccino Syndrome, after my own favorite Starbucks concoction.
First, this syndrome pretends that because calling yourself “independent” is more popular now than in bygone years, these voters must constitute a large, coherent group looking for a “centrist” alternative to the two parties. Indeed, there was Schultz on Wednesday morning touting the “42 percent” who are independents as his potential base.
This is nonsense. I asked Scott Clement, The Post’s polling director, to run the numbers. More than 6,000 interviews in Post/ABC News polls between January 2018 and January 2019 found the country split 36 percent independent, 32 percent Democratic and 25 percent Republican.
The independent share seems impressive until you consider the follow-up question, which found that 46 percent of independents lean toward the Democrats, and 33 percent lean Republican. So: (1) Independents are divided like the rest of us, and (2) the remaining “pure” independents who decline to lean either way account for only 8 percent of adults, and many of them rarely vote.
Second, enabling the syndrome depends on the claim that the two major parties are equally “extreme.” It’s a word Schultz loves. But this, too, is false. Polarization, as my political scientist friends (and, recently, co-authors) Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein have been arguing for years, is “asymmetric.” The Republicans have, objectively, become significantly more extreme than the Democrats.
Exhibit No. 1 for GOP extremism is the man in the White House. And just compare the House intakes from the Republican landslide in 2010 and the Democratic landslide last fall. The 2010 Republicans were swept in by the tea party. The Democrats’ Class of 2018 is chock-full of very moderate progressives elected from very moderate districts. And if the Democrats are equally “extreme,” why are moderate Republican state legislators switching to the Democrats in states as different as California, Kansas, Hawaii and New Jersey?
I get why billionaires don’t like progressive taxes. But high marginal tax rates were the law under President Dwight Eisenhower — nobody’s idea of a socialist. Also: Notice that Schultz is directing most of his fire against Democrats. That’s strange behavior from someone who claims that beating Trump is a priority.
But, hey, maybe you have to understand the appeal of a cinnamon shortbread latte to grasp Schultz’s political genius. We Dunkin’ folks like our coffee simple.
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