This is when I’m supposed to bring up the Lincoln-Douglas debates. Why can’t we go back to L-D? Here’s the reason: Life was veeerrry slow then, and people had a stupendous attention span. So they flocked to an event in which the first candidate spoke for 60 minutes; second candidate spoke for 90; first candidate got the last 30. Outdoors, in front of a huge crowd with no microphones. Today, we’d have to have a Lincoln-Douglas Twitterfest.
.. Face it, this is the Donald Trump moment. Even if he doesn’t win the presidency, he’s defined the campaign. And this is not a man anybody could take seriously if the conversation was in measured tones.
.. Yeah, I know we’re supposed to be getting a new Trump. Could happen, but I doubt it’ll last if he feels he’s losing the crowd’s attention. And it’s hard to imagine him sticking to someone else’s script.
.. My own view is that with the nomination sewn up, Hillary should run as a reasonable centrist and resist the pull of the Sanders-loving left, no matter how intense the gravitational field feels out on the campaign trail. Adopting the themes of political reconciliation could even pull in a few million quiet people on the center-right. But of course I would think these things.
.. The key is that offering up new ideas doesn’t require becoming a spittle-flecked simulacrum of her challenger. In fact, the best way to raise up the bottom half — if that’s the real goal — is actually pretty sane stuff.Putting kids’ interests first when it comes to education, proposing tax reform that would stimulate job growth — these kinds of steps would give a huge lift to vulnerable communities and could also bring conservatives and liberals together. On the other hand, offering a boatload of free gimcrackery and vitriol against wealthy people plays well on campuses, but it doesn’t help poor people at all.
What We Can Learn from Bernie Sanders’s Tax Return
But it’s quite ironic that the candidate who spends the most time arguing that the rich are under-taxed makes $205,000 per year and pays a lower tax rate than the average American. He is himself an example of precisely the phenomenon he decries every day on the campaign trail; he cuts himself slack he would never extend to any wealthy person he so vehemently demonizes.
.. If Democrats really believed their own rhetoric, there was no way they could possibly nominate the former board member of the legendarily anti-union Walmart, who made millions in speaking fees for speeches to big banks and financial firms, who “sounded more like a Goldman Sachs managing director” than a critic, according to attendees. Her net worth is four times what it takes to reach America’s one percent. You don’t usually find populist crusaders eager to dismantle an emerging plutocracy posing for pictures at Donald Trump’s wedding.
.. The reform camp has failed to achieve the fusionist consensus that Buckley and Meyer forged decades ago, which brought together the three main strands of conservative thought — economic, social and foreign policy — under one anti-communist umbrella.
.. A lot of Trump’s offerings — vehement opposition to illegal immigration and free trade, a somewhat isolationist foreign policy, more than a little “blood and soil” nationalism — was offered by Pat Buchanan in past decades; you notice there was no clear Buchanan heir in Republican politics until now. Among GOP lawmakers, there’s pretty broad support for border security and some deportations, but there were only a handful of trade skeptics and another handful of isolationists — certainly few Republican lawmakers are dismissing NATO as obsolete or calling for arming South Korea and Japan with nuclear weapons as Trump has done.
.. Most of his biggest-name endorsees are those who departed elected office and aren’t likely to return: Sarah Palin, Scott Brown, Ben Carson. Or you could argue the Trump movement’s middle isn’t policymakers, it’s pundits: Ann Coulter, Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity, Andrea Tantaros, Eric Bolling, and arguably Rush Limbaugh.
The Pastrami Principle
If you ask how that’s possible — Bernie Sanders just won seven states in a row! — you need to realize that those seven states have a combined population of about 20 million. Meanwhile, Florida alone also has about 20 million people — and Mrs. Clinton won it by a 30-point margin.
To overtake her, Mr. Sanders would have to win the remaining contests by an average 13-point margin, a number that will almost surely go up after the New York primary, even if he does much better than current polls suggest. That’s not impossible, but it’s highly unlikely.
So the Sanders campaign is arguing that superdelegates — the people, mainly party insiders, not selected through primaries and caucuses who get to serve as delegates under Democratic nomination rules — should give him the nomination even if he loses the popular vote.
.. Mrs. Clinton didn’t win big in the South on the strength of conservative voters; she won by getting an overwhelming majority of black voters. This puts a different spin on things, doesn’t it?
Sanders is bad on detail, but he has what Hillary lacks: the spirit of protest
But at a recent meeting with the editorial board of the New York Daily News Sanders could not put forth any coherent specifics on how he would go about breaking up the big banks – one of the demands he’s most associated with in the public consciousness. He wasn’t sure whether the Fed had the power do it or Congress, where the legal authority resided.
.. Not that the fuzziness mattered to Sanders supporters. His devoted following, mostly white and young, will remain steadfast to the end. Their loyalty to him is reminiscent of the Donald Trump supporters who don’t seem to care whether anything that comes out of his mouth is based on fact.
.. When Sanders talks about economic inequality and the 1%, the rallying cry of Occupy, he uses morally charged terms to describe them. This language is central to his appeal.