Coming to Terms with the Aftermath

It's been nearly two weeks since the Nov. 8 election as I write this. The liberal bubble that is my Facebook newsfeed was a landscape of despair for the first several days after the election, but that has since given way to seething anger and outrage. Needless to say (for the two or three of you who read my occasional scribblings here), the election didn't end the way I wanted or expected it to. I genuinely believed (and still do) that Clinton was the most qualified of the entire field of candidates, Democrat or Republican, but I was also conscious of the baggage she brought along for the trip, some of it real, much of it fictional. One might have thought that a substantial plurality of the electorate would have considered those failures, real and imagined, to pale in comparison to Trump's manifest lack of fitness for the presidency (in case you've forgotten, a quick look at James Fallows's Trump Time Capsule series should refresh your memory); one would have been wrong.

So here we are. We had an election and Trump won. As I write this, the latest counts show that Clinton won nearly two million more popular votes, but the Electoral College result—sadly—is what counts. Like it or not, that's the system we have and we all knew the rules going in. I don't think you can excoriate Trump before the election for saying he'll only accept the results if he wins and then say after the election that the Electoral College result is not legitimate because you don't like how the Electoral College is going to vote. I personally think that institution is an obsolete anachronism and would like to see it eliminated. That would take a constitutional amendment, which is a complicated process, but I'm holding out some hope that the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact will render an amendment unnecessary in time for the 2020 election. 

Now candidate Trump is president-elect Trump; I wince every time I hear that term. In the first few days after the election he made kind of a sobered impression. To some he was looking presidential and statesman-like; to me he just looked like the dog who finally caught the car he was chasing and now has no clue what happens next. Since then he's gone to the White House for a little "Presidency 101" from Obama, for whom it must have been a profoundly bitter experience, the professor preparing to hand over the keys to the carnival barker.

I have mixed feelings about the protests that have followed the election. I won't hesitate to condemn the violence that occurred around protests in Portland, OR; it's morally unacceptable, but also just tactically stupid. As for the peaceful protests elsewhere, those people are exercising their first amendment rights, and I understand the anger, but the fact that they are essentially protesting against the result of a free election makes me uncomfortable at some level. I tend to apply the "if the shoe were on the other foot" standard—if those were Trump supporters protesting a Clinton victory, wouldn't we be sounding warnings about "Trump's brownshirts" and worse to come? At the same time I recognize that we are facing something unprecedented here, a genuine moral crisis, which makes it harder for me to say people shouldn't be out in the streets making their feelings known, as long as they can do it in a peaceful manner. I see the value in reminding Trump and his pals that while they won the election, they did not win a popular mandate for their plans.

Ambivalence about protests at this early stage not withstanding, I accept the election results as the legitimate outcome of the system we have, stupid though it may be, but not the "now all Americans must come together behind our new president" crap I've heard from some quarters. In his acceptance speech Trump said "I will be president for all Americans". Technically that's of course true, but Trump spent the entire presidential campaign demonstrating that in practice he intends to be anything but. If he wants my support he can earn it; the last eight years of Republican obstructionism have taught me that I'm under no obligations here. The role he awarded to Steve Bannon, as one of his very first official appointments, speaks for itself as far as any claim of being "president for all Americans" goes. His appointments of Jeff Sessions and Mike Flynn are equally indicative of where this is going.

At least part of his constituency thinks it knows where it's going: back to a time when the white man ruled and everyone else knew his place. The rise in incidents of open racism following Trump's victory, many of which cite his name in one form or another, is well documented, as here or here. Trump has issued a sort of weak, half-hearted directive to his followers to "stop it", but only after he was prompted on national television, and he hasn't publicly said a word since then on the topic, even though racist incidents citing his name continue unabated. In Bannon, he's very publicly elevated to his inner circle a man who is intimately associated with the so-called "alt-right", so how can anyone take his "stop it" as anything other than an obvious ploy to establish plausible deniability? So many Trump voters deny racist inclinations and claim to be insulted to be associated with the bigotry of a few, but they've heard their candidate speak and they knew exactly who and what they were choosing when they cast their votes. If you voted for this man, you are a knowing accomplice in whatever comes next. Oh yes, I know, you were just following orders.

The Shape of Things to Come

The Monday-morning (or Wednesday morning, I guess) quarterbacks have been dissecting the election results ever since the election, amidst general finger-pointing on the Democratic side. Hardcore Sanders supporters have assured me that he would have beaten Trump if he had gotten the nomination, but let's not kid ourselves. If Sanders had been the candidate of the Democrats, all we would have heard after the convention is how he's a self-proclaimed socialist, "just like Stalin or Mao or Castro", and how he's going to take away our property and nationalize private enterprises and force us all onto collective farms and set up gulags and reeducation camps and other such nonsense. Trump would have dubbed Sanders "commie Bernie" and the same people who lapped up his "crooked Hillary" line still would have voted Trump into office.

The consensus diagnosis that has now developed goes something like this: The Democratic Party used to be the party of the working man. Then it decided to focus more on college-educated professionals as its core constituency and embraced globalization as an organizing principle for society. In the meantime, white working-class men have seen their economic and social status consistently eroded, and Democrats have done nothing to help them, preferring instead to belittle them as a bunch of stupid hicks. After eight years of Obama, things haven't gotten any better for them, they're angry as hell about it and so, looking for a radical change and also just to make a point, they've voted en masse for Trump and elevated him to the presidency.

I have no doubt that this analysis explains a lot, but it's hardly the whole story, as exit poll results (reported here, among other places) show. Yes, Trump did better among whites of all ages. But he also did better than Clinton in the upper income groups, among white college-educated voters, and in the suburbs. Downwardly mobile working-class whites may be a core Trump constituency, but they clearly have no shortage of allies among what are considered to be the better-off white elites. Demagogues always have friends in high places who are looking for a way to harness and exploit the anger of the masses for their own ends.

I took out my ancient pocket calculator and tried to dig into some of the exit poll numbers a little further. A few things I noted (apologies for all the calculations that follow, I just think I should show my work before I state my conclusions):

• The most up-to-date numbers I could find on the vote (here, as of 11/17/16—may have changed by the time you read this) indicate these results in the popular vote. These are the numbers I used for the following extrapolations: 
• Trump: 61,864,015
• Clinton: 63,541,056
• Other: 7,034,595
• Total: 132,439,666.
• Of the 24,537 respondents polled, 33% said that only Trump is qualified to be president, 46% said only Clinton is, 14% said neither is. Of the last two groups, 2% and 69%, respectively, were Trump voters. Extrapolating to the total vote count of 132.4 million voters noted above, that means that (.02 x .46) + (.69 x .14) = 10.6%, or around 14 million people, voted for Trump even though they do not consider him qualified to be president.
• Asked whether Trump has the temperament to be president, 63% said no, and 20% of those respondents were Trump voters. So .20 x .63 = 12.6% of voters, or around 16.7 million, voted for Trump but don't think he has the temperament to be president.
• 39% of all respondents said that the candidate quality that mattered most was "can bring change"; this was mostly driven by Trump voters (83% of the 39%). 21% said the most important quality was "right experience", 20% said "good judgment"; these choices were mainly driven by Clinton voters (90% and 66%, respectively).

So after all that fiddling with numbers, my brilliant conclusion is that statistically speaking, Trump voters mainly just want a change, but a substantial contingent of them don't give a damn about the qualifications or temperament of the guy they've selected to bring it. That pretty much aligns with the anecdotal evidence from multiple TV, radio or print interviews of prospective Trump voters I saw/heard/read in the weeks leading up to the election, in which this or that person expressed reservations about Trump's readiness for the presidency while at the same time pledging to vote for him nonetheless. Now there's a recipe for success (not).

Trump's voters are going to get changes, but I have no doubt that those changes are not going to make many of those Trump voters happy, especially that core constituency of working-class white men. Let's ignore for a moment (but only for a moment) things like Trump's pick of Jeff Sessions to be AG, and the impact that's going to have on civil rights actions by the DOJ, since the people who will be affected were very probably not Trump voters.

Let's focus instead on things like his tax "reform" plan, which economists think will add trillions to the national debt while benefiting almost exclusively taxpayers with very high incomes. Let's consider Trump's plan to repeal the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare), which is likely to leave millions of formerly uninsured people once again uninsured. Let's think about how much the cost of living will rise for low-income people who depend on all those Chinese imports at Walmart and elsewhere if Trump really slaps a tariff on them. Let's look at the loss of millions of export-related jobs that could occur from a Trump-incited trade war (and are not going to be replaced by an equal or larger number of new jobs mining coal and making steel). Let's ask how those who voted the whole Republican crew into office are possibly going to come out ahead if Trump signs off on Paul Ryan's plans to "reform" Medicare and Social Security.

We should also consider the less direct impact on Trump's core supporters (and all the rest of us too). There's the environmental impact to be expected from Trump's plan to withdraw from global climate deals and destroy the EPA from within—soon we can all be living in Flint. There is the infrastructure program that I think is actually a good idea but which I also think, based on statements from Trump's guy Bannon, will be so uncoordinated and poorly thought out that it—assuming the Republican Congress will even vote for it—will probably waste a massive amount of money without delivering any real long-term benefit (and, I bet, will probably see a lot of that money siphoned off into dubious channels).

Even more generally, there are the already-apparent massive conflicts of interest that I think will make this the most scandal-plagued administration since Harding was president. And then there's the infighting within Trump's transition team that I believe is just a preview of what we will see once the Trump administration is sworn in and which will keep it more preoccupied with itself than with the good of the country.

In short, I hardly think we have grounds for optimism with a Trump administration, and I think the people who are going to get screwed over the most are the people he convinced to vote for him for the sake of "change". They have not merely cut off their metaphorical nose, they have ripped their whole head off—and mine, and my family's, and all of my friends'—to spite their face. Let none of these people complain to me a year from now that they've been negatively affected by this or that Trump administration action, because that will be a very short conversation, possibly involving a lot of yelling.

My heart tells me I should now be pushing my own solidly Democratic Massachusetts congressional delegation and all of the rest of the Democrats to fight every stupid policy the Trump White House and it's allies in the Republican-controlled Congress may cook up in any and every way possible. I should be donating to the ACLU and other such organizations. I should be out on the street demonstrating against every anti-progressive policy this administration will try to implement.

But there's also a little voice in my head that says that maybe what needs to happen here is for Trump & co. to get everything they want; let Democrats put up token, symbolic resistance but otherwise step aside and let the country have this foolish populist experiment and see it end in the disaster that I expect. It has been popular leading up to the election to draw parallels with pre-Hitler Germany. Maybe it's time to look ahead to some parallels with post-Hitler Germany, whose citizens drew certain conclusions from the self-inflicted smoking ruins of their own country and of the countries all around them, owned up to (and 70 years later continue to seek atonement for) their country's heinous crimes, and established a prosperous and relatively egalitarian society that undeniably has its problems and shortcomings, but in which even an arch-conservative leader like Merkel is perceived by many in our own country to be one of the world's remaining champions of human rights and democratic institutions.

I hate to end on a dark and cynical note, but maybe it's going to take letting the likes of Trump and Ryan and their pals fuck up the country so badly that the "government is the problem" rhetoric that has been the Republican mantra since Reagan, the stupid idea that the best way to help average people is to award the wealthiest among us an ever-larger slice of the pie, and the ridiculous notion that the best way to make the country work right is to choose an inexperienced outsider to lead it, can be thoroughly and definitively discredited. Maybe, just maybe, we can all learn something and then pick up the pieces and agree to do something a little more constructive. I don't know that that's what I truly want, because of all of the people who will be made to suffer through no fault of their own. But with a vain, ignorant and amoral man like Trump elected to the highest office in the land with the approval of nearly half of all voters, I have to wonder if the only way we're going to get out of our national addiction to stupid and short-sighted policy prescriptions is to finally hit rock bottom hard enough that we're ready to swear off the drug for good.

Home to Roost

You know, I warned those Republicans. Back in December of 2015, after Donald Trump had insisted that we must ban Muslims from entering the country, I urged the the Republican National Committee to disqualify him from running for the nomination of their party because he had promulgated views that were entirely incompatible with American values. I have no idea why they didn't listen to me. I could have saved them a lot of trouble.

Following Romney's defeat by Obama in 2012, the Republicans performed a so-called "autopsy" (officially known as the "Growth and Opportunity Project") of the election results. Among the key recommendations was that the GOP should work to make itself more attractive to ethnic minorities and women. Hah!

What's happened instead? The party has embraced a presidential candidate who has gone out of his way to insult and marginalize Muslims and Hispanics. He has made statements about the African-American community that came across to that very same audience as condescending and clueless. And now, with the release of the Access Hollywood tapes, we can conclude that Trump's idea of outreach to women is pretty much limited to reaching out to them to grab them by their, um, lady parts.

See? I'm reaching out to women.

It didn't have to be this way. The Republican leadership could have stood up at the beginning of this sordid affair and said no way will this guy represent our party. Let him open up a third-party challenge, let him siphon off Republican votes, we don't care, there is no f-ing way that we will let this guy be the face of our party, and if he runs as an independent and takes away enough votes to cost us the election, at least afterward we are going to stand before the voters of this country with our dignity and integrity intact.

But they didn't do that. With a few notable exceptions such as Lindsey Graham and Mitt Romney, who opposed him from the start, eventually all of the GOP's heavyweights fell in line and endorsed him. Reince Priebus, who even hinted that any Republican not endorsing Trump was in for trouble with the party. John McCain. Mitch McConnell. Paul Ryan. Marco Rubio. Even Ted Cruz, fer crissakes. And many, many others. No matter what offensive statements Trump may have made about whole groups of people, no matter what insults and abuse Trump may have hurled at them personally, no matter what they themselves may have said about Trump's manifest unfitness for the presidency, in the end they all got in line to kiss his orange butt. Most if not all are experiencing some serious buyer's remorse now, but it changes nothing about how ready all of them were to hitch their wagons to an odious, demagogic huckster against their own better judgment.

Hey guys, why the long faces?

Last week I listened to an episode of On Point, an NPR program produced here locally and syndicated nationally. The topic was the Weimar Republic, Hitler's rise to power, and parallels (or the lack thereof) between that historical period and the one through which we are living now, occasioned by the recent release of the book Hitler: Ascent by Volker Ullrich. One of the guests, the historian Eric Weitz, was asked by host Tom Ashbrook about what commonalities there may be between the rise of Trump and the rise of Hitler. Weitz answered that there is really only one: the courting of both by conservative elites who thought they would somehow harness Hitler or Trump, respectively, for their own ends, in the process lending each an aura of legitimacy and respectability that neither previously had.

Well, better late than never, I guess. Now that Trump's campaign is turning into a kind of slow-motion train wreck, these opportunistic fools, these disgusting Mitläufer, are tripping over each other to reach the exits as the whole affair blows up in their smirking faces. It is with a fair amount of satisfaction that I observe the corner into which many of them have painted themselves, fearing punishment from mainstream constituents on election day if they continue to support Trump, but facing the wrath of Trump's supporters at the ballot box for withdrawing that support. These guys aren't a bunch of uneducated hicks who fell for Trump's populist snake oil; they knew exactly what they were doing and why. They created this monster and now that it's turned on them, all I can say is: Good.

Time to Make the Right Choice

Much has been written in this campaign season about how this year's major party presidential candidates are the most disliked candidates ever. Articles such as this one, or this one, or this one (just a tiny sample) have dissected this phenomenon in great detail.

I hear from friends and acquaintances on the left how they would never even conceive of voting for Trump, but they just can't bring themselves to vote for Clinton. They talk of voting for the Libertarian candidate Johnson, or the Green Party candidate Stein, or just not voting at all. The anguish among no small number of lifelong Republicans who can't stomach Trump, but can't bring themselves to vote for Clinton either, is also "a thing", as we say nowadays.

I can understand why a lot of people, even die-hard liberals, have their problems with Clinton. Bill and Hillary Clinton are perceived as the secretive power couple who play by their own rules and feel accountable to no one. While (in my opinion, anyway) much of that reputation has been manufactured by their political enemies, some of it is a product of their own actions. The matter of Hillary's private email server, however much she may seek to downplay it, is incredibly problematic, and symptomatic. The FBI investigation found no evidence of offences warranting prosecution, but in his statement to the press FBI Director Comey also made it clear that there was serious negligence involved. In talking about the matter, Clinton continually emphasizes the former while ignoring the latter, perpetuating the existing narrative that the Clintons are pathologically secretive and, when accused of wrongdoing, will defend themselves with legalistic arguments while appearing tone-deaf to the political and moral issues raised. To some extent I can empathize with the Clintons' intensive pursuit of privacy, given the long list of discredited conspiracy theories that have dogged them now for decades, but they just don't seem to get how their perceived lack of transparency fuels these very conspiracy theories.

But let's get serious here. Donald Trump is, as I previously wrote—good lord, was it really almost a year ago?—at best Berlusconi and at worst Mussolini, and my assessment leans more and more to the latter. He is a man with demonstrable fascist tendencies. He is, to quote the Washington Post, "a unique threat to American democracy". This man must under no circumstances become President of the United States. I am not the sort of person who is given to hyperbole, but I believe that the election of this man to the highest office in the nation could set in motion events that would make the disastrous end of the George W. Bush administration look trivial by comparison.

And after the inauguration, it's bunga bunga time!

While the rest of us are distracted by this current circus of a presidential campaign, the Trump team is making its transition plans. In a recent New Yorker article, Evan Osnos writes about those plans, not as a matter of speculation but as a product of good old-fashioned journalism. If you like what was achieved during eight years of Obama, too bad, because you can expect to see all that undone as quickly as possible if Trump wins. And you are not going to like where it goes from there. Read that article.

Consider also that regardless of who wins the presidency, the chances are good that we will still have a Republican majority in both houses of Congress post-election. Trump will need congressional support to put many parts of his program in place and congressional leaders will want something in return. So you can expect plenty of collateral damage not initiated by Trump himself, such as when he signs off on that infamous hypocrite Paul Ryan's pet project of destroying Social Security as it currently exists.

Come on, Paul, just kiss his ass one more time. It's for the good of the party.

Then, at a more visceral level, consider the man's performance in the first presidential debate against Clinton, which took place a couple of days ago as I write this. He was obnoxious and rude. He was petulant and childish. He showed no evidence of preparation beyond his few pet talking points. He demonstrated no knowledge of history and no grasp of how government actually works. He lied and he blustered. He complemented his third-grade vocabulary (and inability to form complete sentences) with the arrogant, bullying antics of an actual—extremely spoiled—third-grader. He was Trump at his trumpiest. The next day he blamed his erratic performance on his microphone, like that same third grader making lame excuses for not doing his homework. We have heard so much in this campaign about how he's going to negotiate or renegotiate all kinds of deals with NATO or Mexico or Russia or China or Iran or whomever. God help us if that's how he plans to do it.

Who's laughing now?

And so it is time to make a choice, and let's be clear about what that choice is. The choice is between Clinton and Trump, period. Forget Gary Johnson. Forget Jill Stein. Forget about writing someone in on your ballot. And don't even think about not voting.

Coming back to those people who don't want Trump, but don't want to vote for Clinton: disaffected, disappointed Republicans generally say they'll vote for Johnson instead; erstwhile Democratic voters tend toward Stein (or say maybe they'll write in Sanders). They think they are registering some kind of symbolic protest. I have empathy for their frustration with the candidates on offer, but as far as I'm concerned they are just registering their political immaturity.

Gary Johnson seems like a nice enough guy, but I've listened to a number of interviews with him over the last few months and he always sounds kind of incoherent to me, talking out of both sides of his mouth about how we should drastically roll back government regulation, but we should have a legal, regulated market for marijuana and we should strengthen the EPA, which, the last time I looked, was a regulatory agency that perpetually angers anti-regulation ideologues. I could cut him some slack for his "what's 'Aleppo'?" moment if he had then come back and said sorry, I'm tired and had a little memory lapse there, and then made a coherent policy statement, but instead we got some vague nonsense of an answer once he understood what the question was. I saw him and his running mate, Bill Weld, on Chris Matthews' show tonight and that topic came up; he owned up to his little brain freeze on Aleppo but then dismissed it by saying words to the effect that knowing every detail is not so important anyway. Then he and Weld went on to assert that we will only find a solution in Syria by cooperating with Russia, which may well be true, but then they talked about how completely untrustworthy Russia is. So where does that leave us? We look to a president to make the hard decisions, not just to tell us that the decision is hard.

I've also listened to some interviews with Jill Stein, and to me she comes across as well-meaning, idealistic, but just a little bit nutty. That impression notwithstanding, I will say that I actually find a huge amount of stuff in her party's platform that I personally could sign up to under other circumstances.

But here's the thing: Jill Stein is not going to win this election. Neither is Gary Johnson. Neither is Bernie Sanders, or Mickey Mouse, nor anyone else you might think of writing in. Sorry. Like it or not, it's just a fact that the solid core of committed Trump and Clinton voters is too large for any other candidate to have even a remote chance of winning. Your vote for any of the above is a vote that is not going to the only candidate who actually does have a legitimate chance to defeat Trump, and that is playing with fire for the sake of making some kind of statement that is going to change exactly nothing if it gives Trump the presidency. Presidential races are won in the states, not at the national level, and sometimes state races are won by very small margins. Remember Florida in 2000.

A variant on the "I'll protest by voting for Johnson/voting for Stein/writing someone in/not voting" approach I heard someone mention in an NPR interview today was "I'll register a protest vote if Clinton is clearly ahead, but I'll vote for Clinton if the polls say the race is tight." That's the wrong approach on two counts. First, all polls have a margin of error, many that the media like to report on are poorly designed and therefore not very accurate, and they tend to focus on the national mood overall rather than on the individual state races. Second, and more importantly, Trump needs to not just lose, he needs to lose big. The electoral vote in the individual states and the popular vote overall need to send a very clear message that the Trump program of "make America hate again" is rejected and repudiated by the vast majority of American voters. He needs to lose by such clear margins in every state that his almost certain charge that the voting was "rigged" will look ludicrous.

I myself will vote for Clinton, and I will do so gladly and not reluctantly. I am painfully aware of her flaws, but I am equally aware of her very genuine qualifications for the office. If you have to hold your nose to do the same, I understand, but do it. With a Trump presidency averted, by all means focus your attention on remaking the Democratic Party into something more to your liking, or on building up the Green Party, or on whatever other cause is near to your heart. There is a time for symbolism, and there is a time for pragmatism. Every one of us needs to be clear on which time we're currently in.

Out of Gas

I'm glad that election day is nearly upon us. I'd really like to get this thing over with. I can't take the suspense much longer. Or the campaign advertisements. My mind was made up long ago, so let's just get to it. I don't need another couple of weeks to figure out who should get my vote.

I'm sort of amazed that in the presidential race there are still supposedly large numbers of undecided voters out there. I don't see what there is at this point that anyone thinks he or she is going to learn about either candidate that we don't all know already. Interesting that the second presidential debate was built around undecided voters questioning the candidates directly.

I thought the range of topics covered by the questions was reasonable. Except for the one to Romney about how he is different from George W. Bush, they were the kinds of topics I would have expected. One question, though, really irritated me. It was this one: "Your energy secretary, Steven Chu, has now been on record three times stating it's not policy of his department to help lower gas prices. Do you agree with Secretary Chu that this is not the job of the Energy Department?" It irritated me because it is symptomatic of an attitude toward energy use that shows that nearly forty years after the oil shock of 1973, we Americans still haven't learned a whole lot about energy policy. Our notion of energy policy still comes down to the price of a gallon of gas.

It's symptomatic of this foolishness that as the vital signs of his presidential campaign were growing fainter and fainter, Newt Gingrich decided to focus it on gas prices. Elect me, he said, and I will bring the price of gas down to $2.50 per gallon. I guess that's your proof that Gingrich is a historian and not an economist.

The Fool On His Errand

The honest, and proper, answer to that question would be this: "Yes, I agree with Secretary Chu. The price of gasoline is determined by supply and demand in the world market for petroleum. There is little that the president or the Department of Energy can do in the short run to influence either. In the longer term, we can pursue policies that encourage exploration and technological innovation that can increase the supply. If demand remains stable, that may bring prices down, but not necessarily, because as we extract oil from ever more difficult-to-reach sources, the cost of extracting that petroleum continues to rise, as does the environmental impact.

But we know that demand will not remain stable. As our own economy continues to recover, we know from history that domestic demand will rise. We also need to consider that the combined population of India and China is now about 2.6 billion people out of the world's total of around seven billion, and as those countries continue on a path of rapid development, we know that world petroleum demand is going to steadily increase, keeping pace with, and probably outpacing supply. Moreover, we know that the extraction, transport, refining and consumption of petroleum all take an enormous toll on our environment. And I should also note that a not inconsiderable part of our national defense budget is attributable to the need to ensure that Persian Gulf oil continues to flow unhindered to our shores.

With all this in mind, I believe it should be the policy of US government to raise gas prices, not to lower them. We should impose taxes that reflect the real cost of our continued dependance on oil as an energy source. That will give our citizens an incentive to conserve and our manufacturers of automobiles and home heating equipment an incentive to improve the efficiency of their products. That would be a much more market-oriented approach than trying to directly mandate efficiency standards such as we do with the CAFE standards for automobile gas mileage. Other industrialized countries follow this approach; gasoline taxes in France, Germany or Japan mean that consumers there pay significantly more for a gallon of gas than we do, but their per-capita petroleum consumption is also around half of our own, and nobody who has visited any of those places would seriously claim that their standard of living is lower than ours.

I understand that for some lower-income Americans, who have no alternative to driving in order to get to their jobs or to care for their families, any increase in the price of gasoline does represent a genuine hardship, and we need to address that. We can do so indirectly by using some of those increased tax revenues to make smart investments in public transportation where it makes sense to do so, and some of them to provide commuter mileage tax credits or other subsidies to lower-income Americans for whom public transportation is still not a realistic option.

Whatever happens, we need to recognize that focusing our national energy policy on keeping down the price of a gallon of gas is not the right answer for our country. We need to develop creative, market-driven policies to reduce our dependence on petroleum, especially petroleum that comes from some of the most politically unstable places on the planet, but also petroleum that is extracted in ways that represent a huge risk to the environment. It may be a very long time before we can fully wean ourselves from our dependence on petroleum as an energy source, but we need to start that process, and recognize that it is not a problem we can drill our way out of."

That's the answer I wanted to hear from Obama, but I didn't get it. At least in his answer, Obama did make a case for developing alternative energy sources along with the more traditional ones. Romney sort of paid lip service to that, but in the end, he also said, "I'll get America and North America energy-independent. I'll do it by more drilling, more permits and licenses. We're going to bring that pipeline in from Canada. How in the world the president said no to that pipeline, I will never know. This is about bringing good jobs back for the middle class of America, and that's what I'm going to do."

And notice that line about "America and North America". I'm not sure what the difference is in Romney's mind. Romney likes to talk about North American energy, which is apparently Romnese for "energy from sources that are in North America but not in the US". That oil that's somehow going to usher in a new era of mass consumption is in Canada, not the US. In Romney's mind that may be "our" oil, but in reality that oil is going to go wherever it brings the best price. That may be to refineries in New Jersey or Texas or California. It may also be to customers in Shanghai or Mumbai. That's just how markets work.

For a guy who likes to go on and on about his successful career in business, market economics somehow doesn't seem to be Romney's strong suit. You'd think he'd really know better than to point out that at the beginning of Obama's term, gas was selling for less than $2 per gallon. "It's because the economy was in the toilet!", I found myself screaming at the TV (I'm not normally one for screaming at the TV—that function is normally performed by My Favorite Wife, when she watches the German national team in some soccer match). So there's that old supply-and-demand thing again. I'm glad that Obama made exactly the same point (though he didn't use the word "toilet").



When he moves a few more inches to the left, I pounce!

Romney's peculiar notions about economics, and mathematics, are also apparent in his tax proposals. I was glad to see Obama being a little more articulate this time around in dissecting Romney's plans for mending the budget. For my money, neither candidate has put a credible plan on the table. But Romney's plans to substantially reduce tax rates, vastly increase defense spending and pay for it all by closing some as-yet unspecified loopholes is simply insulting; it's Romney's "read my lips, no new taxes" moment. Don't take my word for it, ask the Tax Policy Center.


Hey Dad! Kind of reminds you of your tax policy, doesn't it?

The one area in which Romney sort of scored a point or two in my book was during the discussion of the attack on the consulate in Beghazi. The undignified yes-I-did-no-you-didn't exchange regarding whether and when Obama uttered the magic words "act of terror" that was clarified in Obama's favor by narrator Candy Crowley made Romney look a little ridiculous, but it doesn't change the fact that a lot of very confused and contradictory information was (and continues to be) disseminated about what happened. Sure, Obama did use those words in his Rose Garden statement the day after the attack, but in his statement he also connected "efforts to denigrate the religious beliefs of others" to "this type of senseless violence", i.e., he was putting events in Benghazi in the same category as riots that resulted from the insulting (and just plain stupid) film about the prophet Mohammed that had appeared on the Internet shortly before (something I commented on ranted about previously).
 

Did so! Did not! Did so! Did not! Did… Moooommmmmm!

But the real issue, that of whether this attack on the Benghazi consulate could/should have been foreseen and prevented, still does not have any satisfactory answer from Obama. I find it sort of curious that Romney chose not to drill down on that, but instead preferred to split hairs over whether or not the president called it an "act of terror". I also reject his assertion that "this calls into question the president's whole policy in the Middle East"; to conflate this potentially preventable tragedy with what is happening in Syria or Iran, as Romney went on to do, is just incoherent and stupid.

It's too bad that with so much at stake in this election, the most memorable thing from this debate seems to be the "binders full of women" quote. Apart from the awkward peculiarity of the expression itself, it turns out to be yet another application of the Romney/Ryan facts-don't-matter approach. The source of the binder (not "binders") in question, the non-partisan group MassGAP, has made it clear that it was not Romney who reached out to them to recruit potential candidates; on the contrary, MassGAP provided the information to all of the gubernatorial candidates prior to the election.

Tonight's Bedtime Story: Mitt and the Terrible, Horrible,
No Good,Very Bad Debate

So now we're down to one last presidential debate. I'll be glad when that's behind us. It's all about foreign policy. I hope that the niveau of the discussion is going to rise above, "I got Bin Laden!" "You always apologize for America!"

Meanwhile, let's check in on what the VP candidates have been up to while their bosses have been duking it out on stage. It turns out that Joe Biden can read babies' minds! He demonstrated this neat trick recently at a campaign rally.

Paul Ryan is staying fit on the campaign trail! Apparently these pictures published in Time Magazine were actually shot some time ago, but I find them immensely inspiring. Congressman Ryan's own little Rocky montage!


Wants To Be Vice President—Doesn't Know How To Operate A Hat

The congressman is also apparently feeling himself drawn back to his fictional working class roots (we previously reported). He recently turned up at a St. Vincent De Paul Society soup kitchen in Youngstown, OH with his family and photographers in tow and proceeded to waste everyone's time with an unwanted and unneeded demonstration of his dishwashing prowess. Apparently the only lasting effect of this little stunt is that some of the organization's donors have pulled their funding because it is supposed to be strictly apolitical. Gee, Paul! I'll bet there are a lot of poor people in Youngstown who are grateful for your terrific charity work!

Dishwatergate Conspirators

Pants On Fire

I have, to a large extent, stopped reading political blogs lately, and haven't posted any commentary of my own in some time either. To a large degree it's the result of being in another one of those phases in which I spend so much time every day hacking away at a keyboard on the job that the idea of doing that as a leisure activity loses its appeal. But it's also in no small part due to a general state of disgust and despair as I watch the current presidential campaign unfold. It's on my mind enough as it is, and reading and writing about it just leaves me that much more aggravated. Lies and more lies.

I realize that wild exaggeration and selective presentation of the facts to demonize the opposing side is a standard feature of any modern American political campaign. Having lived through numerous local and national elections while living in Europe for more than a decade, I will say I'm embarrassed by the infantile niveau of most American campaigns. I can personally attest to the fact that there are at least some places in the world in which candidates for high office have to make and defend actual policy proposals. They can't win merely by outspending their opponents on shrill television adds featuring scary music and menacing narration detailing all the ways that the opposing candidate will surely bring about the doom of the nation. In part that's because they have mainstream journalists who understand that passing scurrilous political assertions on to their readers and viewers, unfiltered and unchallenged, is poor journalism and not journalistic neutrality. They also have actual rules about how much candidates can spend and how they can spend it. But like it or not, I'm at least resigned to the fact that here in the land of my birth, elections from the local to the national level can be won by just shouting the loudest and spending the most. That's just how we do it here in the Beacon of Democracy™. USA! USA! USA!

Anyone who knows me personally, along with the two or three people who don't but occasionally read my impotent rantings here, knows where my political sympathies lie. Still, I would like to be fair. I'd like to be able to convince myself that both sides are equally dishonest and sleazy and it makes no difference who gets into office and how. Maybe then I wouldn't have to work myself up into such a lather for the duration of every election season. I could just tune the whole thing out. "A pox on both your houses!", I would gleefully shout, as I went skipping off to my cabin in the wilderness to raise my cabbage and asparagus. I've tried… I look at web sites like FactCheck.org to see where either side is trying to pull the wool over my eyes. I find articles like this one that clearly document that both the Obama and Romney presidential campaigns have made plenty of assertions that that are misleading or inaccurate. 

Still, and maybe this is just my underlying political leanings talking (full disclosure), it sure looks to me like both parties are guilty of the sins of quoting their opponent's statements out of context, playing games with statistics or selectively exaggerating some facts while downplaying others, but the Republicans win hands down when it comes to just plain making stuff up. They're aided and abetted by the unwillingness of journalists to press those who profess obviously invented "facts" to supply evidence for such claims or to simply call them out on statements that are patently false. I despair to think that a substantial part of the electorate is so ill-informed and so devoid of any capacity for critical thinking—and so utterly clueless about where their own naked self-interest lies—that the tactic of just "making stuff up" is likely to be a powerful one in the coming presidential election.

Add to that the fact that we now live in an environment in which vast sums of money can be funneled through super PACs and 501(c)(4) organizations to spread any kind of B.S. on an unprecedented scale. The people who have the kind of money that finances those kinds of efforts tilt lopsidedly in favor of Republican policies; that's not surprising, since they stand to benefit the most from them. At the same time, the Democratic incumbent is extremely hesitant to even get mixed up with the super PACs; in my book that's commendable, but I don't know that I want to see Barack Obama stand on principle and lose the election (see this article in The New Yorker for a pretty interesting analysis of that situation). It looks less and less like this election is going to be fought on that proverbial level playing field. But even beyond this election, in the wake of the Citizens United decision all signs point to a reshaping of the political system into a pay-for-play model that can't possibly be good for the future of American democracy. I don't relish the thought of living in the world's most powerful banana republic.

The more overt instances of the Republican presidential team's invention of an alternate universe are well documented. There's Romney's repeated claim that Obama began his presidency with an "apology tour", something he loves to repeat even though that claim has been roundly refuted. The most famous example would probably be Paul Ryan's acceptance speech for the vice-presidential nomination. Thankfully, that's been extensively discussed in the media, so I won't go into that here, but you're welcome to refresh your memory with this article. But there are other examples, such as Ryan's (discredited) claim to have run a marathon in under three hours or (strongly questioned) report that he climbed 38 of the highest mountains in Colorado. Where does this stuff come from? I'd like to say that it's intentional lying intended to bolster his image as a macho outdoorsman to play to the working-man faction of the party. But it actually comes across to me more as just a casual but pervasive disregard for the facts, which I find much more insidious. If the biography you have isn't good enough, you can just enhance it with a few embellishments here and there—who's ever going to notice?

No, seriously! I swear it's this big!

Ryan wants to enhance his biography in other ways. From his nomination acceptance speech: "Now when I was waiting tables, washing dishes, or mowing lawns for money, I never thought of myself as stuck in some station in life. I was on my own path, my own journey, an American journey, where I could think for myself, decide for myself, define happen as for myself. That is what we do in this country. That is the American dream." Apparently he is rather fond of this theme; this article about one of his other campaign speeches quotes a variation of it in which he adds de-tasseling corn and painting houses to his resume. Quite the young entrepreneur, our Paul! I guess these tales of working minimum wage jobs for pocket money are supposed to tell us a lot about the character of Mr. Ryan, how he worked his way up from being a lowly dishwasher to become a candidate for high national office. These stories of course ignore the fact that he came from a reasonably affluent family and never actually had to live off any of those low-wage jobs, and that after high school he went to college, and after college basically became a career politician who pushes policies that are anything but in the interest of the working man. It's an insult to someone such as myself who, though moderately successful now (thanks to an affordable public university education), actually did spend a few years of my youth supporting myself from low-wage jobs without drawing from that the conclusion that in life it should be every man for himself and if you're poor it's your own damned fault.

Of course, when it comes to defining and re-defining oneself, Ryan can take an example from his perhaps future boss Mitt. Mitt, who, as quoted here, a decade before was telling us, "I think people recognize that I am not a partisan Republican. That I'm someone who is moderate, and that my views are progressive." Mitt, who was a driving force behind the Massachusetts healthcare law that was more or less a model for "Obamacare", an achievement that he has been trying to run away from ever since. Mitt, who has mutated into a "severe conservative".

Today's Lesson in Quantum Physics

I'm going to let you in on a very dark secret here. I voted for Mitt Romney when he ran for governor of our fair Commonwealth back in 2002. Yes, your dear Charlie, the bleeding-heart, tax-and-spend liberal, has occasionally voted Republican. Back then it was a clear choice for me; Romney appeared far more qualified for the job to me than his Democratic challenger, Shannon O'Brien, whose campaign seemed to consist mainly of silly personal attacks on Romney without any clear ideas of her own on offer. And I have to say that in some respects I wasn't disappointed; that aforementioned healthcare law was put in place by finding common ground with an overwhelmingly Democratic legislature, and I think that by and large it's been a success that the majority of people here are fairly satisfied with—including the "personal mandate" to purchase insurance. The one thing that really irked me after a while was that for the last two years or so of his term he seemed to have just sort of lost interest in being governor and was putting all of his energy into chasing the 2008 presidential nomination.

During the primaries for this year's Republican nomination, I thought Romney stood out among his challengers as the only one who, with the exception of Jon Huntsman (whose terminal integrity quickly eliminated him from serious consideration by the party faithful), didn't come across as a dangerous nut. It became clear fairly early on that he was going to be the nominee. I had no intention whatsoever of voting Republican, but thought that in a worst-case scenario, if Romney were to beat Obama, it would not be a complete disaster because Romney is, above all, a pragmatist and not an ideologue; he may say anything to get elected, but presumably once in the White House, he would moderate his rhetoric and reach across the aisle and maybe get something useful done, with his time as governor of Massachusetts as a precedent.

Now I'm not so sure; his rhetorical transformation from reasonable moderate to "severe conservative" has been so complete that I would be pretty apprehensive about seeing him elected, because I just have no idea what he might actually do. Take his tax policies: we know he wants to cut a number of tax deductions, but we won't find out which ones he has in mind until after the election. No doubt he will want to receive a second term, which guarantees that for at least the first term he may feel obligated to make all kinds of dangerous concessions to the wingnut faction of his party. I was glad to see him pick Ryan as his running mate, because it really draws a stark contrast and a clear choice between two candidates, two political philosophies, two world views. But the thought of Romney and Ryan in the White House doesn't exactly help me to sleep at night.

In the meantime, Romney will supplement his revised biography with fairy tales about how great things will be when he is president. A recent example: energy independence by 2020. We're going to drill so much that "[w]e're not going to have to buy oil from the Middle East, Venezuela, or any other place we don't want to… We may even be an exporter of energy, considering all our resources." What's wrong with this picture? Well, I confess that I haven't done extensive research into the numbers, but for starters, that's a lot of oil and gas wells. Assuming it's even there, it will probably take a lot more than eight years to bring all that capacity online. So apparently Mitt thinks that while he is doing away with all of the regulations that would need to be eliminated to even begin to achieve what he is proposing (something that I guess will somehow happen overnight), he is going to get rid of the laws of physics as well. 

Another consideration is that demand for energy is growing substantially as economies like those of India and China expand, and all that oil isn't "America's oil", it's Exxon's oil, and BP's oil, and Chevron's oil. If they can get a better price for it in India or China, that's where it will go. That's of course unless we decide to slap export tariffs or other restrictions on energy exports to other countries, but that's hardly compatible with Republican free-market ideology. So in the end this is not a serious proposal, it's just another fantasy being sold to a gullible public, like so many other ideas he has promulgated during the campaign.

Romney/Ryan Campaign Theme Song: My Nomination