Donald Trump’s oafish hegemony over the news cycle leaves little room for the House speaker’s earnest pleas to talk about congressional policy.
.. The event generated no buzz—unlike Ryan’s press conference that day, in which he rejected Trump’s call for a ban on Muslim immigrants. That definitely got people’s attention.
.. It’s hard enough getting people to embrace complicated policy debates in normal times. How the heck is Ryan supposed to get anyone focused on reform when there is a trash-talking, thin-skinned, bomb-throwing carnival barker busy turning the presidential race into the political equivalent of The Jersey Shore?
.. After its scorching affair with Trump, Republican voters may well find themselves ready for a more boring suitor—one whose idea of sexy talk involves an in-depth critique of Article One authority.
Sanders Over the Edge
You could argue that policy details are unimportant as long as a politician has the right values and character. As it happens, I don’t agree. For one thing, a politician’s policy specifics are often a very important clue to his or her true character — I warned about George W. Bush’s mendacity back when most journalists were still portraying him as a bluff, honest fellow, because I actually looked at his tax proposals. For another, I consider a commitment to facing hard choices as opposed to taking the easy way out an important value in itself.
.. Mrs. Clinton, asked about that interview, was careful in her choice of words, suggesting that “he hadn’t done his homework.”
But Mr. Sanders wasn’t careful at all, declaring that what he considers Mrs. Clinton’s past sins, including her support for trade agreements and her vote to authorize the Iraq war — for which she has apologized — make her totally unfit for office.
This is really bad, on two levels. Holding people accountable for their past is O.K., but imposing a standard of purity, in which any compromise or misstep makes you the moral equivalent of the bad guys, isn’t. Abraham Lincoln didn’t meet that standard; neither did F.D.R. Nor, for that matter, has Bernie Sanders (think guns).
Budget Policy and the White Racist Vote
But among white people, the big issue is that ethnocentricity drives attitudes about social welfare spending. And not in a totally unambiguous way.
When it comes to programs targeted at the poor, ethnocentrism correlates with stinginess (you may have to take my word for it that that’s what this math means
But when it comes to programs targeted at the elderly, ethnocentrism correlates with generosity:
.. Now to be clear—there’s no particularly good reason for people to react like this. Blacks and Latinos benefit from Social Security and Medicare and most of the people on food stamps and Medicaid are white. But the politics are what they are. And so the point is that if you were to try to rework the GOP coalition to be less white-centric
Why Left-of-Center Wonks Are Skeptical of Bernie Sanders
Most recently, Mr. Friedman projected a growth rate of 5.3 percent a year under a Sanders administration, compared with a Congressional Budget Office projection of 2.1 percent annual growth over the coming decade. Mr. Friedman, a professor at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, also estimates that Mr. Sanders’s policies would bring an unemployment rate of 3.8 percent (the lowest since 1969) and 3.2 percent annual productivity growth (more than double the C.B.O. projection).
.. Now comes a man who has had to answer only to voters in the most liberal state in the nation, who has never had the responsibility to actually pull together the disparate center-left coalition that is the Democratic Party to enact concrete legislation.
.. But if Mr. Sanders wins the nomination, a fascinating test for how he will govern will be whether he mends fences with left-of-center policy wonks — or views them as part of the problem of establishment thinking he is trying to overcome.