Sanders flew to the Vatican that night to underscore his vision of himself as the moral candidate. And Hillary headed to California, underscoring Bernie’s portrayal of her as the mercenary candidate. She attended fund-raisers headlined by George and Amal Clooney in San Francisco and at the Clooneys’ L.A. mansion that cost $33,400 per person and $353,400 for two seats at the head table in San Francisco ..
.. As my colleague Tom Friedman has warned, we can hurt Israel by loving Israel to death.
.. Hillary may be right that Bernie is building socialist castles in the sky. But Bernie is right that Hillary’s judgment has often been faulty.
.. And even then, she leaves the impression that she is merely sorry to be facing criticism, not that she miscalculated in the first place.
On the server, she told Andrea Mitchell of NBC News that she was sorry it had been “confusing to people and raised a lot of questions.” She has never acknowledged, maybe even to herself, that routing diplomatic emails with classified information through a homebrew server was an outrageous, reckless and foolish thing to do, and disloyal to Obama, whose administration put in place rules for record-keeping that she flouted.
.. And she is the queen of homework, always impressively well versed in meetings. But that is what makes her failure to read the National Intelligence Estimate that raised doubts about whether Iraq posed a threat to the U.S. so egregious.
.. What worries me is whether Hillary has the confidence to make decisions contrary to her political interests. Can she say, “But it’s a really terrible idea”?
Who’s Really Corrupting Politics with Huge Gobs of Money?
It’s about political and cultural influence as well, and here the Left’s base of financial power dwarfs the Right’s. The Right simply doesn’t have any institution that competes on equal terms with big labor. The Right’s educational institutions are dwarfed by the Ivy League alone. And conservatives would happily trade the influence of Fox News and talk radio for the influence of every other major broadcast and cable network, every major newspaper, and NPR. Conservatives have only the smallest presence in movies, television, and pop music.
.. I have no problem with money in politics, or with private citizens, corporations, and educational institutions using their resources to influence fellow Americans. That’s everyone’s right as an American. But it is almost unbearably hypocritical to see the Left decry the use of private financial resources to influence public debate while . . . using private financial resources to influence public debate.
.. They both work for a university that last year had $4.5 billion in operating revenue and net assets of $44.6 billion. All of that immense wealth services the needs of an ideological monoculture that is stocked top-to-bottom with thousands of liberals who dedicate themselves to both living out their worldview and fostering those same commitments in the students they educate.
.. The obsessive focus on campaign cash and the Koch brothers represents an effort to silence or limit the few methods through which the conservative movement can get an unfiltered message to the American people
Some Free Advice for Trump, Cruz and Kasich
Trump has intermittently been said to consider acting more “presidential.” He is now reportedly planning to give a series of speeches on policy issues, for example, something normal presidential campaigns do from the outset.
.. Trump should probably just double down on his existing strategy: winning bound delegates on the first ballot. In particular, he should make a big push for primary votes and delegates in California’s June 7 primary. But maximizing his vote in that gigantic state would require spending more money than he has previously been willing to part with.
Folks Before Kochs
To save itself, the Republican Party must finally put the working class ahead of the donor class.
.. While conservatives have traditionally emphasized the central importance of limited government, Trump has built his campaign around the promise of an unlimited government that will solve every problem that ails America, provided it is fully under his command.
..No candidate was more ideologically orthodox than Bobby Jindal, the government-slashing, hard-right governor of Louisiana, yet Trump ridiculed his campaign out of existence...Barack Obama’s rhetorical gifts mask the many ways in which he is a deeply conventional political figure, a man who trusts the wisdom of technocrats rather than seeking to overturn the established order... One could argue that the Obama presidency rescued America’s upper classes from a more ferocious post-crisis backlash, at least for a time. The twin insurgencies of Trump and Sanders demonstrate that the anger is still there—that it was just waiting for the right person to conjure it up... He is channeling the Republican id .... Why can’t his GOP opponents convince Republican voters that they would do a far better job than Trump of defending middle-class economic interests? The answer is that they are trapped by the delusions of the donor class, and they can’t break free... But whether or not they succeed, the GOP establishment must acknowledge that the Trump campaign has surfaced important and uncomfortable truths. Those truths can no longer be evaded... There is only one way forward in the post-Trump era. The GOP can no longer survive as the party of tax cuts for the rich. It must reinvent itself as the champion of America’s working- and middle-class families... For high-income Republicans, skilled immigrants are their colleagues, neighbors, and friends, and less-skilled immigrants provide them with the low-cost child care, restaurant meals, and other services that allow them to lead comfortable lives... To unite the right, the GOP ought to embrace a simple immigration reform principle: The U.S. will only welcome immigrants who can pay their own way. Immigrants who earn high wages are less likely to need public assistance than those who earn low wages. They are in a better position to provide for their families, and their children are more likely to flourish as adults. Republicans should not shrink from advocating immigration policies that protect the interests of American workers. That means welcoming immigrants who are economically self-sufficient and who can help finance social programs for poor Americans—whether native- or foreign-born, of every racial and ethnic group—rather than relying on those social programs themselves... Republicans might back a package of reforms that would encourage older Americans to work by slashing or eliminating their property taxes and that would ensure that all seniors receive a benefit that would keep them from falling into poverty, which is not currently the case... Republican anti-poverty rhetoric often reeks of condescension. When George W. Bush spoke of compassion for the downtrodden, it was very clear that he meant well... this proposal will still be difficult for supply-siders to bear. And that’s to the good. For too long, Republican have been excessively beholden to voters at the top of the income spectrum, and swearing off tax cuts for the rich would be an excellent way to prove that they’ve turned over a new leaf... What defenders of the Republican status quo fail to realize is that unless the party speaks to the interests of working-class voters, they won’t just face slightly higher capital gains taxes or more wasteful spending under a Hillary Clinton administration. They will face a backlash from within that threatens to profoundly damage a party that, at its best, is a champion of the core social and economic institutions that made America great in the first place.