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.
Schumer: Trump ‘right on the money’ defending NY
Schumer also noted that Cruz’s wife worked for Goldman Sachs.“Maybe he wants to go to Wall Street and talk about New York values, you know, where his wife worked,” Schumer said.
Book: Bush Aides Called Evangelicals `Nuts’
A new book by a former White House official says that President Bush’s top political advisors privately ridiculed evangelical supporters as “nuts” and “goofy” while embracing them in public and using their votes to help win elections.
The former official also writes that the White House office of faith-based initiatives, which Bush promoted as a nonpolitical effort to support religious social-service organizations, was told to host pre-election events designed to mobilize religious voters who would most likely favor Republican candidates.
The assertions by David Kuo, a top official in the faith-based initiatives program, have rattled Republican strategists already struggling to persuade evangelical voters to turn out this fall for the GOP.
.. National Christian leaders received hugs and smiles in person and then were dismissed behind their backs and described as ‘ridiculous’ and ‘out of control.’ ”
.. Kuo is not the first insider to accuse the White House of politicizing the faith-based program. John J. DiIulio Jr., the first director of the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, resigned after seven months and was quoted as saying that the White House was run by “Mayberry Machiavellians” who sometimes put politics ahead of other causes.
The Political Virtues of Hypocrisy
For legislators, cooperation is a form of political currency. They act in concert with other legislators, even at the expense of their own beliefs, in order to bank capital or settle accounts: “Because parliamentary bodies have to arrive at binding decisions on the full range of human activity in an atmosphere lacking the structure provided by either money or hierarchy, members have to find ways to bring some order out of what could be chaos,” Frank writes. So trading votes is how the business of politics is conducted. “Once you have promised another member that you will do something—vote a certain way, sponsor a particular bill, or conduct a hearing—you are committed to do it.”
.. As Frank has it, legislators have to act in ideologically inconsistent ways in the short run if they want to advance their larger objectives in the long run, as those larger objectives can only be achieved with teamwork. And the other members of their legislative team are only going to play ball with them if they know that they’ll take one for the team, that they’ll vote for something they don’t like because the team needs it.
.. Frank’s view of hypocrisy is a self-serving narrative, to be sure, but it’s also a very rare example of a legislator choosing to actually explain such behavior, rather than pretending that such behavior does not exist.
.. “Legislators who accommodate voter sentiment are denounced as cowardly, and those who defy it are just as fiercely accused of rejecting democratic norms,” he writes. And while “both of these opposing views of a representative’s obligations are wholly defensible,” something “less” defensible to Frank is “the tendency of most voters to alternate between them, depending entirely on whether or not they agree with the official’s substantive position.”
.. “In a partisan political system, pleas of political self-interest outrank a claim to know better than one’s party colleagues what is best for the country.” Privileging partisanship over personal beliefs, Congress rewards those who look past the strength of the available evidence or the depth of their own convictions, choosing instead to vote to accrue credit or pay political debts.
.. Posner and Sunstein think we can close some of that gap with new approaches: introducing a veil of ignorance into certain decision-making by removing partisan markers from policy proposals