First, this administration has zero legislative accomplishments and seems unable to negotiate with members of its own party. Kelly, who has been openly scornful of Congress, is unlikely to help in that regard.
.. (“If lawmakers do not like the laws they’ve passed and we are charged to enforce, then they should have the courage and skill to change the laws,’’ he said about congressional critics of immigration enforcement. “Otherwise they should shut up and support the men and women on the front lines.’’)
.. as the administration faces deadlines for the debt ceiling and the budget. Ironically, Trump needs help to close deals, and Kelly doesn’t have those skills.
.. Second, the president refuses to learn in office or master any level of detail. He therefore is far less influential in pressing lawmakers to pass his initiatives. Without understanding individual lawmakers’ objections, his ability to persuade and cajole them is limited to repeating empty talking points. The same problem that afflicted him in the health-care debate will be evident no matter what the topic.
.. it seems no one — not even Trump’s relatives and lawyers — can prevent him from digging himself a deeper hole.
.. Fourth, Kelly is more likely to accentuate Trump’s alienation from Republicans. Already strained because of health reform, the president’s serial outbursts and the Russia scandal, the relationship between Congress and Trump seems more like that between a president and the majority of the other party. In point of fact, Trump’s never really been a Republican
.. Kelly has no particular ideological leanings, no ties to the conservative movement and no experience in domestic policy. That leaves Trump even less tethered to his party than he was at the onset of his term.
.. Fifth, Trump refuses to be disciplined. He rejects the overwhelming sentiment among voters that Twitter is a dangerous distraction. Trump doesn’t agree. He tweeted againTuesday: “Only the Fake News Media and Trump enemies want me to stop using Social Media (110 million people). Only way for me to get the truth out!” Without a disciplined boss, the administration and Congress will be tied up in whatever controversy of the day Trump creates. Trump remains the obstacle that’s impossible to overcome. As long as he is there, effective leadership will be a fantasy.
A Conversation With Rory Sutherland
16:30: It can be advantageous to describe a benefit or trade-off to a
Normally when you travel by air, you expect an airbridge to your terminal, but one pilot said “I’ve got bad news and good news: The bad news is .. the good news is we have a bus that will take you right to passport control”
There always was an upside to the bus, but pointing it out creates value.
Prius: By enabling people to have a small, modest car without having any stigma about it. (21 min)
If there was a limit on how much you could save, people would use to as a target (29 min)
Economics is an analysis with all the other interesting variables set to zero.
If you have 5% Muslims, the kitchen will go halal because non-muslims don’t care.
Wine is the universal donor.
If you hire 10 at a time, you hire for diversity, rather than hiring the median. Family gets a van and a small car.
In Search of the American Center
helps explain one of the mysteries of American politics — given that the Republican economic agenda is unpopular and the country has swung left on social issues, why can’t Democrats win more elections? The answer (one of them, at least) is that as the country has moved left, the Democratic Party’s base has consolidated even farther left, and in the process the party has lost the ability to speak to persuadable voters who disagree with the liberal consensus on a few crucial issues.
.. On abortion, where public opinion has been stable, Democrats have ditched their old attempts at moderation, undercutting the gains that secularization and the liberal turn on other culture-war issues should have naturally delivered them. And the party’s base has no patience anymore for the kind of careful triangulation that Bill Clinton practiced on issues like crime and welfare policy, or for the then-Democratic voters who were reassured by it... Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton supporters didn’t differ very much on the actual issues... Whether the Sanders or the Clinton faction rules, the demands of its large, consistently liberal core won’t allow much room for the experiments in outreach that a minority party needs... On both sides of the Atlantic, if you tried to build a consensus politics based around what voters actually want, it would be very moderately culturally conservative and very moderately economically liberal, and it would sit low in the upper left quadrant of our chart — the place where Trump won voters who had previously voted for Obama... But on both sides of the Atlantic, if you sought to place the elite consensus on the same chart, it be much closer to the emptiest of quadrants — the land of austerity and open borders, free trade and the permanent sexual revolution, the Simpson-Bowles plan and Emmanuel Macron... Both Bill Clinton’s self-consciously moderate liberalism and George W. Bush’s compassionate conservatism were rooted in a recognition that what the Acela Corridor wants is not quite what the country wants.
How to Do Persuasion Wrong
Regular readers of this blog might recognize the “too risky” persuasion play. It was the play that took supply-side economics off the table during the Dole/Kemp campaign against Clinton/Gore. When things are going well, you don’t introduce risk. Jack Kemp wanted to overhaul the tax plan in the United States while the economy was working fairly well. It makes no sense to introduce risk when things are going well. As soon as Bill Clinton and Al Gore labelled supply-side economics as “risky” it was all over. It was a kill shot.
What you might not know is that the “risky” gambit gave Trump’s current campaign manager, Paul Manafort, one of his rare campaign losses. He was working on the losing Dole campaign. John Podesta was on the winning side, as a Bill Clinton insider, so I assume he knows the thinking behind the “risky” kill shot and decided to use it against Trump.
But…he’s using it wrong.
In 2016 the mood of the country is that things are trending in the wrong direction. That is the opposite of the country’s mood when Clinton/Gore ran for reelection and everything looked good.
The entire reason that Trump is so popular is that the public sees the system as broken and also sees no standard/normal way to fix it. When things are broken, and trending in the wrong direction, that’s exactly the time you want to introduce risk.