“When Mexico sends its people” Mexico isn’t sending anybody. That’s a huge falsehood. The reality is, individuals in Mexico are deciding, based on their own free will and ambition, to move to a completely different country. Simple market forces at work. And these people are hardworking and ambitious: You have to be, if you are to get up, leave behind everyone you ever knew, and travel thousands of miles, often in dangerous conditions, just to find work.
Contrast that to an actual example of sending people with problems: The Mariel Boat Lift. In 1980, Fidel Castro announced that Cuba’s borders were open, so people could flee to the US. Unbeknownst to us, though, he freed all the violent criminals from Cuba’s prisons and mental health hospitals, and sent them to the US. Most of them wound up in foul business in South Florida (Brian de Palma’s film Scarface is a dramatization of this process), and that was Castro’s goal.
.. Mr Trump’s statement (people are bringing problems) exploits an ambiguity in English between an episodic reading, where it happens sometimes and ageneric reading, where it’s the typical case. The generic reading is completely false, and offensively false. You bring up the episodic reading, but the thing is: The episodic reading is true, but trivially so. Every population has rapists and criminals among it. The episodic reading is true if only two out of a million immigrants are rapists.
Jeb Bush Works to Recover From a Shaky Start
Mr. Bush’s new campaign manager, Danny Diaz, is widely known in Republican circles as a hard-edge operative who is driven by trying to dominate daily news coverage with his candidate’s message or his rivals’ weaknesses. (The previous manager, David Kochel, is known as more cerebral.)
Mr. Diaz, who seared John Kerry in 2004 and Mitt Romney in 2007 with charges of flip-flopping on issues, and other Bush aides are determined to develop new lines of attack against Senator Marco Rubio of Florida and Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin, the two Republicans who represent the greatest threats to Mr. Bush’s nomination, according to his advisers and allies.
.. By hiring Mr. Diaz, Mr. Bush wanted to send a clear signal that “the culture of the Bush operation will now be a Pickett’s Charge engagement campaign with his main opponents,” according to one Bush ally.
.. But it was worth doing, they argued, because so few voters are closely following the race and because Mr. Bush’s team is expected to announce a huge fund-raising sum in July that will far outstrip his rivals and, they hope, give him momentum. This money is intended partly to give him a big advantage on the airwaves in the weeks before and during the burst of primaries and caucuses in March.
.. By standing his ground — rather than opening himself up to the flip-flopping charges that his aides intend to aim at Mr. Walker
.. Florida is critical to Mr. Bush for another reason: He believes that whoever loses the shared home state primary — he or Mr. Rubio — is not likely to recover.
Progressives: “Fairness” trumps everything
For progressives, ‘fairness’ trumps everything; for conservatives, ‘freedom.’ Balancing either against anything else is a moral violation — but, as luck would have it, the need never arises. If you’re a progressive, you can raise tax rates without discouraging effort, and mandate higher wages without reducing the demand for labor. If you’re a conservative, you can cut taxes without harming essential public services, and roll back regulation without putting anybody at risk. If centrists didn’t always try to be polite, I’d call this aversion to trade-offs infantile.”
The Mobilization Error
Politics is broken today because those sorts of leaders have been replaced by highly polarizing, base-mobilizing politicians who hew to party orthodoxy, ignore the 38 percent of voters who identify as moderates and exacerbate partisanship and gridlock. If Clinton decides to be just another unimaginative base-mobilizing politician, she will make our broken politics even worse.