Why the G.O.P. Candidates Don’t Do Substance

Mabe I missed it,” Richard Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, said in a tweet on Friday morning, “but we just had an entire #GOPDebate on economics and #TPP was never mentioned.”

.. Rather than focussing on topics like these, the ten candidates spent much of their time attacking CNBC’s moderators (my colleague Amy Davidson has more on this) and competing with each other over who could offer Americans the lowest tax rates.

.. It was left to John Kasich, the governor of Ohio, who is seeking to position himself as the voice of sanity in the asylum, to state the obvious: “You know, these plans would put us trillions and trillions of dollars in debt…. Why don’t we just give a chicken in every pot, while we’re, you know, coming up—coming up with these fantasy tax schemes.”

.. The first problem the candidates face is that the field is still too crowded. Like Wall Street analysts (and media commentators), they therefore have an incentive to adopt extreme positions, because outliers get noticed.

Trump’s appeal to a declining middle class

Israel told me that most voters see their own position as fragile, vulnerable to collapse in hard times. People who in the past blamed structural forces for their difficulties, including globalization and trade, now “blame politicians.”

.. Members of the middle class are living paycheck to paycheck, they are anxious about terrorism coming to their own backyard, and they believe that the rule of ‘if you work hard and play by the rules, you can get ahead’ is in danger of disappearing from the American ethos. Most important, the middle class believes that the rich play by a different set of rules and just get richer, but they also believe that the poor get all the programs and benefits, and all they get is the bill.

.. The American dream used to mean something – that you could count on good American wages and benefits for a hard day’s work. But that’s changing as big corporation have been shipping our jobs overseas and lobbyists have been rewriting all the rules. In just the last eight years, the average white family has lost about one-eighth of its wealth and seen its income drop for the first time in 80 years. If you were African-American or Latino just starting to catch up through hard work and determination, you’ve lost more than half of everything you put away. Ordinary people, whether white, black or brown, shouldn’t be paying for a crash they didn’t cause. We can’t afford to be a nation of haves and have-nots, where young people can’t find their first job and middle-aged construction workers may have seen their last. We can’t afford to be a nation where white kids are living in their parents’ basements, where too many young men color are living on the streets. It’s time to return to America where everyone willing to work and play by the rules can count on a fair shot. Opportunity should knock on every door no matter how humble the home, or who lives in it. That’s what I promised my children, that’s the American dream.

.. The 2014 real median income number is 6.5 percent below its 2007, pre-crisis level. It is 7.2 percent below the number in 1999. A middle-income American family, in other words, makes substantially less money in inflation-adjusted terms than it did 15 years ago.

Donald Trump Is Reagan’s Heir

Trump is running on essentially the same message as Reagan. Reagan insisted that America’s problems were not as complicated or intractable as everyone seemed to think. “For many years now, you and I have been shushed like children and told there are no simple answers to the complex problems which are beyond our comprehension,” Reagan said at his 1967 inauguration as governor of California. “Well, the truth is, there are simple answers—there are not easy ones.” He made a similar statement in his famous 1964 speech on behalf of Barry Goldwater, and he never wavered from it. The simple answer was to be tough—tough on cutting the budget, tough on domestic protesters, and above all, tough on the world stage. Reagan’s 1980 foreign-policy slogan promised “peace through strength.” He told audiences, “We have to be so strong that no nation in the world will dare lift a hand against us.”

.. When a Washington Postreporter asked him recently if he had encountered any campaign issue that turned out to be more complex than he initially thought, he wouldn’t take the bait. “This is not complicated, believe me,” Trump maintained.

.. The message—that simple solutions exist, but other leaders lack the strong will to implement them—was a central aspect of Reagan’s appeal and is key to understanding the Trump phenomenon. But in the long term it won’t pay off for Trump as it did for Reagan because of two major differences between the 1980 election and the 2016 election: the opposing candidates and the voters’ mood.

Reagan’s message worked beautifully against Jimmy Carter in 1980 because it drew on their differences. Carter’s speeches as president emphasized that there were no simple solutions—restoring America’s confidence and prosperity, he said, would take years of hard work and sacrifice (most memorably, he told people to turn down their thermostats and drive less). It was very refreshing for voters to hear someone saying the opposite.

.. And even if Trump were running against a Jimmy Carter, his task would be much harder than Reagan’s, for in 1980 the public’s mood verged on desperation. Events in Iran and Afghanistan dealt a serious blow to the confidence and pride of a supposed superpower still reeling from the humiliation of leaving Vietnam to the communists. Of even greater concern to most voters, the economy was in shambles, with real GDP shrinking at an alarming rate and inflation soaring to nearly 15 percent (the highest figure since the aftermath of World War II).

.. A recent poll found that 86 percent of Republican voters believe the country is on the wrong track, compared to 67 percent of independents and 48 percent of Democrats.