Trump can hurt Clinton without winning
From Jeet Heer, at The New Republic: If winning the presidential election were all that mattered, Trump would be Clinton's dream opponent. The Democratic front-runner struggles with poor approval ratings — 55.6 percent unfavorable, according to Huffington Post's aggregation of the polls — which means she needs to compete against someone who is even less popular than her. Trump fits that bill handsomely, standing at 63.6 percent unfavorability.
Furthermore, Trump’s racism and misogyny are likely to motivate the very voters that Clinton most needs to attract: people of color, single women, and young people. And not surprisingly, in head-to-head polls, Clinton enjoys a hefty lead over Trump, even as she trails behind the less-polarizing John Kasich and enjoys a significantly smaller lead (of roughly 5 percentage points) over Ted Cruz.
Yet there are reasons why the real estate mogul should be a far greater cause for fear than Cruz or Kasich. Cruz might be a political extremist, further to the right than any serious presidential candidate since at least Barry Goldwater. But the Texas senator is still bound by the rules of normal politics, still beholden to donors and constituencies that serve as a check on what he can say or do. Cruz would be a predictable opponent in that he’d follow a hyper-conservative script and make largely ideological arguments. Trump, in contrast, is not predictable in that manner and has no loyalty to traditional Republican causes. He could, as he has in the primaries, present himself as an opponent of the Iraq War and interventionism, a supporter of Planned Parenthood in non-abortion funding, an enemy of free trade pacts, and a defender of Social Security and Medicare.
And Trump’s unpredictability goes far beyond policy. He is wealthy enough not to worry about donors, and his core supporters have shown every sign that they will stick with him no matter what. Rather than being repulsed by his excesses, they thrill at Trump’s subversion of the rules of political decorum. This makes Trump a potentially more destructive opponent on a personal level, because he could do considerable reputational damage to his Democratic opponent.
Republicans have put Reaganism in the past
From Mona Charen, at the National Review: Republicans are not voting on issues, they are voting on personality and attitude, and thus revealing themselves to have fallen for one of the worst errors of the Left — the progressive belief that all will be well provided the "right" people, the "best people" if you will, are running the government.
“This is the end of Reaganism,” former Sen. Tom Coburn, a conservative hero, told me. The three-legged stool of strong defense, small government, and conservatism on social issues has been smashed. Republicans, or at least a plurality of Republican primary voters, no longer distrust government per se, they simply distrust this government. They dislike Obama and the Republican leadership. But they’re ready to believe that an outsider will be able to bring his annealing touch to the economy, to the culture, and to national greatness.
If a Republican politician today were to tell the joke about “I’m from the government and I’m here to help you” — a reliable punch line in the Reagan repertoire — he or she would be greeted by incomprehension. This is a signal victory for the Left: The triumph of faith in the state. Trumpites are reprising Obama’s “Yes We Can” with a new lead. Republican politicians cannot rely on the healthy skepticism about government that was once woven into the fabric of the party.
People used to know that bigger government enables more corruption, that the mediating institutions of society such as family, church, and community organizations are better at nearly every task than bureaucracies, and that government undermines these institutions when it expands too much. “All kings is mostly rapscallions as fur as I can make out” explained Huck Finn, a good American constitutionalist. It’s a lesson the Republican Party will have to relearn when this season passes.
Trump’s policy speech aimed at the faithful
From Jonathan S. Tobin at Commentary: Unsurprisingly, the media and his critics misunderstood the purpose of the foreign policy speech Donald Trump delivered last week. Of course, it was not aimed at convincing serious thinkers that he knew what he was talking about when it came to defining the purpose of American foreign policy in a Trump presidency. …
The purpose of that speech was no different than the rest of the Trump campaign on other issues: an appeal to the unthinking prejudices of a segment of the American people that believe their country is a perpetual victim. Though he read it from a teleprompter, unlike his other scripted speech yesterday’s effort sounded like vintage Trump rather than the product of wiser heads versed in the issues. That applies to international trade, immigration or, in this case, a world filled with nations that are either friends taking advantage of U.S. generosity or enemies that perceive weakness.
As with everything else in Trump’s world, foreign policy is an opportunity for the candidate to appeal to the narrowest nationalism in a way that allows Americans to feel he is standing up for them after the elites have supposedly sacrificed their interests.
Is Sanders really all that radical?
From Sean Illing at Salon: Lost in the discussions about Bernie Sanders's "socialism" is an obvious and important fact: What he's actually proposing is not only not radical – it's mainstream. Sanders decided not to dodge the "socialist" label and instead own it by contextualizing it in the broader American tradition. He even gave a sweeping speech in which he grounded his philosophy in the tradition of FDR:
“Almost everything he [FDR] proposed was called ‘socialist.’ Social Security, which transformed life for the elderly in this country was ‘socialist.’ The concept of ‘minimum wage’ was seen as a radical intrusion into the marketplace and was described as ‘socialist.’ … Yet these programs have become the fabric of our nation and the foundation of the middle class.”
All Sanders has done is challenge the gospel of neoliberalism, which has systematically gutted our country’s public institutions. America’s economy has been steadily deregulated since the 1980s, when President Reagan first surrendered to the privatization scheme of neoliberalism. What we’re left with now, as Sanders pointed out in that speech, is a system “which during the 1990s allowed Wall Street to spend $5 billion in lobbying and campaign contributions to get deregulated.
Then, 10 years later, after the greed, recklessness, and illegal behavior of Wall Street led to their collapse, it is a system which provided trillions in government aid to bail them out.” In other words, we now have socialism for the rich and free market capitalism for everyone else. This is a perverse inversion of the historical norm, and Sanders is right to attack it.
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