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West Virginia Primary Results: 2016 Election - NBC News
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COMMENTS
Tuesday, May 10, 2016
SHE LOSES AGAIN !!!
Trump Won with the Working Class Voters the GOP Forgot
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by JOHN HAYWARD10 May 20161,454
Where did all the Trump voters come from, and where did the Cruz evangelicals go? One of the great mysteries of the 2016 primary is how so many assessments of the Republican electorate turned out to be wrong. The primary electorate that gave us Donald Trump as the presumptive nominee was dramatically different from the one that chose Mitt Romney in 2012.
Jeb Bush thought there was a huge, quiescent moderate majority nostalgic for a return to the Bush era, or looking for a doggedly inoffensive candidate like himself, blessed with endorsements from all the right people and a campaign war chest so huge it was supposed to scare other candidates out of the race. Senator Rand Paul thought the GOP’s libertarian moment had arrived, driven by young voters who were deeply concerned about privacy issues in the online era and weary of interventionist for Bush and Obama alike. Senator Marco Rubio thought he had crossover appeal to every faction of the Republican Party and so much electability that GOP voters would be crazy to turn him down. Governors like Rick Perry and Scott Walker thought voters in other states would be impressed by their successful resumes.
Most baffling was the miscalculation of Senator Ted Cruz, who was counting on a Southern conservative and evangelical firewall that should have made him an early front-runner. Cruz had every reason to think those voters were out there and every reason to suppose they would be unwilling to support Donald Trump, on both moral and policy grounds.
Instead, Trump cleaned up with evangelicals, and his eventual victory in the primary was heralded by many observers as a death knell for “movement conservatism.” At the very least, we were told, conservatives were in such disarray that they couldn’t unite around a candidate who could stop Trump, even though well over half the party didn’t want him as the nominee.
The alternative theory of Trump’s primary victory is that he’s bringing new voters into the Republican primaries, and it’s clearly not just a few saboteurs looking to set Hillary Clinton up with her preferred GOP opponent.
NBC News is the latest outlet to run a story on Trump bringing new voters into the GOP fold, noting that the 2016 Florida primary saw tens of thousands more votes cast than Mitt Romney’s take in the 2012 general election, and the lion’s share of the new votes went to Trump. In Establishment-friendly Northeastern races, Ohio Governor John Kasich pulled vote totals comparable to Romney’s primary vote in 2012, but Trump’s new voters swamped him.
Mitt Romney, accompanied by Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fl at the University of Miami, Wednesday, Oct. 31, 2012, in Coral Gables, Fla.
Sean Trende at RealClearPolitics suggested in January that neglected white working-class voters were coming back to the GOP after taking a pass on Mitt Romney in 2012. Trende described them as “mostly lower-income, blue-collar voters who lived in areas that had also voted for Ross Perot,” who had been turned off by “Mitt Romney’s wealth and upper-class demeanor.”
As Trende noted, President Obama’s re-election campaign shrewdly exploited this sense of distance, through such measures as an Ohio ad blitz that rather blatantly asserted Romney was “not one of us,” while Obama’s friends in the media slammed Romney as “a car-elevator-owning businessman who made statements such as ‘I like being able to fire people.’” (Notice how the same media is now serenely untroubled by the fabulous wealth and opulent lifestyle of Hillary Clinton, who somehow raked in multi-millions without any positive economic activity or job creation whatsoever, as detailed in “Clinton Cash.”)
“Missing voter” theories abound after big elections, because so much of the eligible American electorate consistently chooses not to vote. With voter participation well under 60%, even in big presidential elections, the “missing electorate” is big enough to be a theoretical game-changer in virtually every race. It’s arresting when a missing electorate returns, as Trende suggests is happening with Trump.
Along the way, he makes the point that Ted Cruz was fundamentally wrong about who the missing voters were, as he frequently quoted analysts who misunderstood what Trende was saying in his 2012 election post-mortem.
They weren’t evangelicals miffed that Mitt Romney was a Mormon, or a moderate. The missing voters weren’t mainly conservative Christians at all, since Trende notes that that cohort has always maintained a level of voter participation far above the national average. Many of the missing voters disengaged from politics long before 2012, and it’s mostly because they didn’t think either party had anything to offer them.
The key to understanding this theory is to remember that Ross Perot brought a lot of disengaged working-class people into politics too, and besides his famous disdain for deficit spending, the big planks in his platform were opposition to illegal immigration and criticism of big trade deals, particularly the North American Free Trade Agreement, which both Bill Clinton and George H. W. Bush supported. In the second presidential debate in 1992, Perot famously spoke of “a giant sucking sound going south” to describe the effect NAFTA would have when American jobs went to Mexico.
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Ross Perot speaks at the “No To This NAFTA” rally on Saturday, Sept. 18, 1993 on the steps of the state Capitol in Lansing, MI. (AP Photo/Lennox McLendon)
It’s no surprise that Donald Trump is talking about NAFTA too, and getting a huge response at his campaign rallies, even as analysts on the Left and Right scratch their heads and wonder why he’s talking about a “settled issue” from two decades ago after Bill Clinton signed it into law.
To the missing voters, NAFTA has never been a settled issue, or a forgotten one. They’re still hurting from the shift of jobs and opportunities out of the country. They were told not to worry about it, because new high-tech jobs with better pay and working conditions would replace the “jobs Americans just won’t do”… and then thosejobs got sent overseas as well, or filled with H1-B visa workers.
There is a line of argument from free trade enthusiasts that insists such policies are good for the country overall. We’re told that controlling legal immigration, or even cracking down on illegal immigration could significantly damage the U.S. economy. These grand strategies overlook the fact that the people who have been getting clobbered for decades to provide this higher level of national prosperity are tired of being the designated losers. On both the Left and Right, there is anger from people who believe they have been exploited to make others wealthy. That’s the fundamental argument of liberal ideology, but Republican leaders really should have noticed when a substantial number of theirtraditional constituents began feeling that way.
These disaffected working-class people are especially weary of master plans that deliberately injure Americans for the benefit of big U.S. investors and foreign interests. That’s why a willingness to speak frankly about immigration was such a powerful signal to the missing voters, a sign that Trump was aware of them, in a way that few other Republicans were.
Trump supporters at a Reno, Nevada, rally (AP Photo/Lance Iversen)
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The core element of any fair deal for neglected American workers is the acknowledgement that America exists, and its government understands that it has a unique responsibility to American citizens. There is nothing inherently hostile or xenophobic about that understanding. The put-upon citizens of the most open and generous country in the world are tired of being insulted as selfish and hateful for insisting our national priority should be our nation.
For decades now, our central government has asserted the wisdom and moral stature to pick “winners and losers.” Those assertions are especially loud from Barack Obama, but he wasn’t the first to make them. The people who feel they’ve been picked as losers, for generations, are tired of it.
Trende talked about the shifting “priorities” of these voters, which could go a long way toward explaining why Cruz didn’t get the support he was looking for in the South. It’s not so much a question of those votersrejecting Constitutional conservatism, as their political priorities shifting to more immediate concerns.
They’re under attack by the federal government, and they want relief. Intellectual discourse on the Constitutional basis for freedom of religious expression has less political value when the federal government is sending a battalion of lawyers to escort men into the women’s restroom. They still care about our future of unsustainable government debt, but their more immediate concern is getting the economy moving for their regions and income brackets again. Abstract discussion about the proper limits of government gives way to more concrete concerns: What will you do to bring the jobs back, nourish our wages back to health, and make us feel like something more than targets?
Romney got creamed because he couldn’t appeal to these disenfranchised working-class voters. He should have been able to do it, because his message of creating a business-friendly environment where jobs could flourish was reasonable and consistent with what the missing voters want. They’re looking for opportunity, not food stamps and welfare checks.
The problem was that Romney never made his message directly relevant to the alienated working class. He didn’t speak their language or act like he personally cared about them, the way Trump does. Romney was so thoroughly defined by the Obama campaign’s early attacks that he would have needed enormous populist charisma to overcome it. He had no detectable populist energy at all.
Romney would bring a hundred entrepreneurs onstage to support him, but not their employees. For some reason, it didn’t occur to his campaign that they could repel Obama’s foolish assault on venture capitalism by deploying an army of regular folks whose jobs had been saved by capital investment. He took great umbrage at Obama’s “you didn’t build that” speech, http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/05/10/trump-won-working-class-voters-gop-forgot/
MSNBC: ‘Clinton Cash’ Documentary ‘Devastating,’ ‘Powerfully Connects the Dots’
The rise of militias: Patriot candidates are now getting elected in Oregon
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www.theguardian.com
Like Trump, the Patriot Movement’s surge is due partly to fear and the perceived indifference of political leaders to places that didn’t recover from the 2008 crash
Duane Ehmer rides his horse Hellboy at the Malheur national refuge on the sixth day of the occupation. Photograph: Rob Kerr/AFP/Getty Images
Joseph Rice’s manner is a long way from militia stereotypes. The Patriot Movement leader does not present as a crazed gun nut, nor as a blowhard white supremacist. He’s genial, folksy, and matter-of-fact in laying out his views. But talk to him for long enough, and time and again the Patriot Movement leader returns to what really drives him: land.
Rice is running for Josephine county commissioner in south-west Oregon, and believes that the federal government’s current role in land management is illegitimate and even tyrannical.
His campaign is well-advertised around the county and appears well-organised. His growing experience in organising Patriot groups and community watch organisations has polished his skills in retail politics. He’s clearly done a lot of work to make himself politically palatable to conservative rural voters.
He has positions on education (kids should finish high school), legalised marijuana (it presents an economic opportunity) and Donald Trump (“people are tired of career politicians, and they know the country’s in trouble”).
But county supremacy is what really drives him.
Joseph Rice, who advocates for community members who would take policing into their own hands. Photograph: Jason Wilson for the Guardian
It’s this notion that is once again becoming central to local politics in the Pacific north-west. Throughout the region, people whose ideas about land management broadly align with Rice and the now infamous Bundy clan are aiming for elected office in cities, counties and even the state houses.
Taking notice of the trend, progressive watchdog group Political Research Associates even pointed to “a wave of Patriot-affiliated candidates in Oregon”.
Rice talks proudly of his connection with the Oath Keepers – a group which recruits from serving and retired law enforcement officers and military personnel. The group asserts that the oath taken by soldier and police “is to the constitution, not to the politicians”, such that serving personnel are obliged to disobey unconstitutional orders.
He’s also proud of his role in founding the Pacific Patriots network, which aims to coordinate members of various patriot groups in the Pacific north-west.
Both groups, and Rice himself, were prominent actors in the standoff at the Malheur national wildlife refuge last January. On Rice’s account, “we acted as a buffer between the federal government and the refuge”.
In practice, this meant that they were a constant presence in and around Burns, Oregon, as the occupation unfolded. Their actions included everything from warning law enforcement officers against attempting a forceful resolution of the situation to forming an armed perimeter around the refuge.
Members of the Oath Keepers walk with their personal weapons on the street during protests in Ferguson, Missouri . Photograph: Lucas Jackson/Reuters
While the Malheur occupiers are mostly in custody awaiting trial, the ideals that fuelled their protest are still very much at large.
Gradually, these ideas are taking hold in local Republican parties. While the nation has been transfixed by the Trump tilt in presidential politics, at the grassroots level in Oregon, candidates who have sympathies and connections with the Patriot movement have already successfully sought office under the GOP banner.
Josephine County local elections are non-partisan, but Rice is clearly well-integrated with the GOP there, meeting reporters in their offices and running as a precinct committee person in the primary.
David Niewert, an author and journalist who has spent decades watching the right, says that as recently as 10 years ago, Rice’s message would have been unpalatable to most GOP voters. But the Tea Party movement established a conduit for more radical ideas “to flow right into the mainstream of the Republican party”.
GOP legislators have been floating these ideas in the Oregon state house. In Oregon Congressional District 3, Carl Wilson is seeking re-election. After an initial stint in the state house between 1998 and 2003, he successfully ran again in 2014. He has wasted no time in pushing an agenda that borrows, like the Bundys, from the so-called “land use movement”. Wilson also lent his support to the Sugar Pine Mine occupation, which was a dress rehearsal for Malheur.
Wilson – who did not respond to interview requests from the Guardian – proposed Oregon Bill HB3240, which sought to set up a taskforce to investigate the transfer of federal lands in Oregon to state ownership.
The bill went nowhere in the Democrat-dominated state house, but Wilson’s stance has drawn a large number of donations. Notably, according to Oregon electoral filings, last year Koch Industries donated $2,500 to his campaign committee.
This kind of support in a sleepy Oregon district only makes sense when it is seen as a part of the right’s bottom-up strategy to push and legitimate the view that federal land management needs to be rolled back.
Those ideas get a hearing in Oregon’s rural counties because communities there are squeezed in a social and economic vice. In the last three decades, counties like Josephine have been hit with a series of shocks.
First, the timber industry declined, though only partly because of changes in federal land management practices. This led to diminished prosperity and a collapse in funding for public services. Federal timber payments declined 90% over the course of the 1990s. Later, the 2008 bust and recession hit rural Oregon hard, and many areas have yet to recover.
Supporters hold signs during a rally in support of rancher Cliven Bundy. Photograph: John Locher/AP
Since 2012, when the last federal payments dried up, Josephine County has struggled to provide the basic elements of public order.
The budgets of the sheriff’s office, juvenile justice centre, adult jail and district attorney’s office have been cut by more than 65%. In 2012, they set free county prisoners they could no longer afford to house, and a sheriff’s department that had once boasted 30 deputies was reduced to six. Large sections of the county are still not effectively policed, especially after dark. State police highway patrolmen have been diverted to answer emergency calls.
Jessica Campbell, co-director of the progressive Rural Organizing Project, says that this has led to unacceptable outcomes, particularly for local women. In particular, she says it has made women more vulnerable to domestic violence, with perpetrators knowing that night-time 911 calls will be unlikely to get a response.
In 2012, a woman was raped in her home in Josephine County after she called 911, and was told no officers were available to help her. At the time, the county sherriff admitted that he did not have the resources to collate crime statistics.
While Rice plays down the issue of violent crime, Campbell says his position depends on “a whole lot of privilege”. Efforts to raise special levies for public safety have repeatedly failed at the ballot box, scuppered in part by anti-tax campaigns.
Finally, last March, the county declared a “public safety fiscal emergency”, starting the path to emergency state funding. For Rice, this is not only an unforgivable renunciation of county sovereignty, but “a perpetual marketing thing” that the county commissioners employ in order to claim more money.
He advocates beefed-up neighbourhood watch programmes and “resident deputies” – community members who would take policing into their own hands. In effect, self-organized, patriot-style organisation would fill the void left by permanently weakened county institutions.
In addition, he offers the economic panacea of reopening federal lands to extractive industries. It’s a message with undeniable appeal in parts of the country that feel abandoned, economically and politically.
Like Trump, the Patriot Movement’s surge is due in part to fear, pain and the perceived indifference of both economic winners and political leaders to the fate of communities that have never recovered from the 2008 crash. In places that need radical solutions, the only radical proposals they are hearing come from the right.
It remains to be seen whether this will translate into big successes on 17 May. Either way, until significant efforts are made to repair the wreckage in rural America, the patriot movement will continue to find an audience.
COMMENTS
Buchanan: Who Promoted Private Ryan? ‘Losers Don’t Make Demands, They Make Pleas’
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by BREITBART NEWS9 May 20162,991
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Patrick J. Buchanan writes at WND Commentary:
Forty-eight hours after Donald Trump wrapped up the Republican nomination with a smashing victory in the Indiana primary, House Speaker Paul Ryan announced that he could not yet support Trump.
In millennial teen-talk, Ryan told CNN’s Jake Tapper, “I’m just not ready to do that at this point. I’m not there right now.”
“[T]he bulk of the burden of unifying the party” falls on Trump, added Ryan. Trump must unify “all wings of the Republican Party, and the conservative movement.” Trump must run a campaign that we can “be proud to support and proud to be a part of.”
Then, maybe, our Hamlet of the House can be persuaded to support the elected nominee of his own party.
Excuse me, but upon what meat has this our Caesar fed?
Ryan is a congressman from Wisconsin. He has never won a statewide election. As No. 2 on Mitt Romney’s ticket, he got waxed by Joe Biden. He was compromise choice as speaker, only after John Boehner went into in his Brer Rabbit “Zip-a-dee-doo-dah” routine.
Who made Ryan the conscience of conservatism?
Who made Ryan keeper of the keys of true Republicanism?
Read the rest of the story here.
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Big Government, 2016 Presidential Race,Donald Trump, Paul Ryan
Former Facebook Workers: We Routinely Suppressed Conservative News
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gizmodo.com
Facebook workers routinely suppressed news stories of interest to conservative readers from the social network’s influential “trending” news section, according to a former journalist who worked on the project. This individual says that workers prevented stories about the right-wing CPAC gathering, Mitt Romney, Rand Paul, and other conservative topics from appearing in the highly-influential section, even though they were organically trending among the site’s users.
Several former Facebook “news curators,” as they were known internally, also told Gizmodo that they were instructed to artificially “inject” selected stories into the trending news module, even if they weren’t popular enough to warrant inclusion—or in some cases weren’t trending at all. The former curators, all of whom worked as contractors, also said they were directed not to include news about Facebook itself in the trending module.
In other words, Facebook’s news section operates like a traditional newsroom, reflecting the biases of its workers and the institutional imperatives of the corporation. Imposing human editorial values onto the lists of topics an algorithm spits out is by no means a bad thing—but it is in stark contrast to the company’s claimsthat the trending module simply lists “topics that have recently become popular on Facebook.”
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These new allegations emerged after Gizmodo last week revealed details about the inner workings of Facebook’s trending news team—a small group of young journalists, primarily educated at Ivy League or private East Coast universities, who curate the “trending” module on the upper-right-hand corner of the site. As we reported last week, curators have access to a ranked list of trending topics surfaced by Facebook’s algorithm, which prioritizes the stories that should be shown to Facebook users in the trending section. The curators write headlines and summaries of each topic, and include links to news sites. The section, which launched in 2014, constitutes some of the most powerful real estate on the internet and helps dictate what news Facebook’s users—167 million in the US alone—are reading at any given moment.
“I believe it had a chilling effect on conservative news.”
“Depending on who was on shift, things would be blacklisted or trending,” said the former curator. This individual asked to remain anonymous, citing fear of retribution from the company. The former curator is politically conservative, one of a very small handful of curators with such views on the trending team. “I’d come on shift and I’d discover that CPAC or Mitt Romney or Glenn Beck or popular conservative topics wouldn’t be trending because either the curator didn’t recognize the news topic or it was like they had a bias against Ted Cruz.”
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The former curator was so troubled by the omissions that they kept a running log of them at the time; this individual provided the notes to Gizmodo. Among the deep-sixed or suppressed topics on the list: former IRS official Lois Lerner, who was accused by Republicans of inappropriately scrutinizing conservative groups; Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker; popular conservative news aggregator the Drudge Report; Chris Kyle, the former Navy SEAL who was murdered in 2013; and former Fox News contributor Steven Crowder. “I believe it had a chilling effect on conservative news,” the former curator said.
http://gizmodo.com/want-to-know-w...
Depending on whom you ask, Facebook is either the savior or destroyer of journalism in our time. An … Read more Read more
Another former curator agreed that the operation had an aversion to right-wing news sources. “It was absolutely bias. We were doing it subjectively. It just depends on who the curator is and what time of day it is,” said the former curator. “Every once in awhile a Red State or conservative news source would have a story. But we would have to go and find the same story from a more neutral outlet that wasn’t as biased.”
Stories covered by conservative outlets (like Breitbart, Washington Examiner, and Newsmax) that were trending enough to be picked up by Facebook’s algorithm were excluded unless mainstream sites like the New York Times, the BBC, and CNN covered the same stories.
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Other former curators interviewed by Gizmodo denied consciously suppressing conservative news, and we were unable to determine if left-wing news topics or sources were similarly suppressed. The conservative curator described the omissions as a function of his colleagues’ judgements; there is no evidence that Facebook management mandated or was even aware of any political bias at work.
Managers on the trending news team did, however, explicitly instruct curators to artificially manipulate the trending module in a different way: When users weren’t reading stories that management viewed as important, several former workers said, curators were told to put them in the trending news feed anyway. Several former curators described using something called an “injection tool” to push topics into the trending module that weren’t organically being shared or discussed enough to warrant inclusion—putting the headlines in front of thousands of readers rather than allowing stories to surface on their own. In some cases, after a topic was injected, it actually became the number one trending news topic on Facebook.
“We were told that if we saw something, a news story that was on the front page of these ten sites, like CNN, the New York Times, and BBC, then we could inject the topic,” said one former curator. “If it looked like it had enough news sites covering the story, we could inject it—even if it wasn’t naturally trending.” Sometimes, breaking news would be injected because it wasn’t attaining critical mass on Facebook quickly enough to be deemed “trending” by the algorithm. Former curators cited the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 and the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris as two instances in which non-trending stories were forced into the module. Facebook hasstruggled to compete with Twitter when it comes to delivering real-time news to users; the injection tool may have been designed to artificially correct for that deficiency in the network. “We would get yelled at if it was all over Twitter and not on Facebook,” one former curator said.
“Facebook got a lot of pressure about not having a trending topic for Black Lives Matter.”
In other instances, curators would inject a story—even if it wasn’t being widely discussed on Facebook—because it was deemed important for making the network look like a place where people talked about hard news. “People stopped caring about Syria,” one former curator said. “[And] if it wasn’t trending on Facebook, it would make Facebook look bad.” That same curator said the Black Lives Matter movement was also injected into Facebook’s trending news module. “Facebook got a lot of pressure about not having a trending topic for Black Lives Matter,” the individual said. “They realized it was a problem, and they boosted it in the ordering. They gave it preference over other topics. When we injected it, everyone started saying, ‘Yeah, now I’m seeing it as number one’.” This particular injection is especially noteworthy because the #BlackLivesMatter movement originated on Facebook, and the ensuing media coverage of the movement often noted its powerful social media presence.
(In February, CEO Mark Zuckerbergexpressed his support for the movement in an internal memo chastising Facebook employees for defacing Black Lives Matter slogans on the company’s internal “signature wall.”)
When stories about Facebook itself would trend organically on the network, news curators used less discretion—they were told not to include these stories at all. “When it was a story about the company, we were told not to touch it,” said one former curator. “It had to be cleared through several channels, even if it was being shared quite a bit. We were told that we should not be putting it on the trending tool.”
(The curators interviewed for this story worked for Facebook across a timespan ranging from mid-2014 to December 2015.)
“We were always cautious about covering Facebook,” said another former curator. “We would always wait to get second level approval before trending something to Facebook. Usually we had the authority to trend anything on our own [but] if it was something involving Facebook, the copy editor would call their manager, and that manager might even call their manager before approving a topic involving Facebook.”
Gizmodo reached out to Facebook for comment about each of these specific claims via email and phone, but did not receive a response.
Several former curators said that as the trending news algorithm improved, there were fewer instances of stories being injected. They also said that the trending news process was constantly being changed, so there’s no way to know exactly how the module is run now. But the revelations undermine any presumption of Facebook as aneutral pipeline for news, or the trending news module as an algorithmically-driven list of what people are actually talking about.
Rather, Facebook’s efforts to play the news game reveal the company to be much like the news outlets it is rapidly driving toward irrelevancy: a select group of professionals with vaguely center-left sensibilities. It just happens to be one that poses as a neutral reflection of the vox populi, has the power to influence what billions of users see, and openly discusseswhether it should use that power to influence presidential elections.
“It wasn’t trending news at all,” said the former curator who logged conservative news omissions. “It was an opinion.”
[Disclosure: Facebook has launched a program that pays publishers, including the New York Times and Buzzfeed, to produce videos for its Facebook Live tool. Gawker Media, Gizmodo’s parent company, recently joined that program.]
COMMENTS
Monday, May 9, 2016
Trump the Hamiltonian: 8 Words that Tell You Donald Trump Is Serious About American Jobs and Manufacturing
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by JAMES P. PINKERTON9 May 20161,396
Only rarely does water flow uphill, do clocks run backwards, or does hell freeze over. And it’s even more rare when an MSM-er doesn’t trash Donald Trump.
Michael Hirsh is a certifiably blue-chip establishment journalist: His resume includes stints at Newsweek and National Journal, and he is now the national editor atPolitico.
And yet, on May 5, even as most of the MSM was busy flailing away, as usual, at Trump, Hirsh raised eyebrows when he published a provocative article headlined, “Why George Washington Would Have Agreed With Donald Trump/ Watch Out, Hillary: The Founding Fathers would have loved ‘America First,’ and they might have been right.”
Hirsh’s story was mostly a discussion of Trump’s foreign policy, and it must be said that he was, shall we say, judicious in his actual personal praise for Trump. Yet at the same time, Hirsh afforded Trump — and, as we shall see, Trump advisers — plenty of pixels to make their argument. And the result was a piece that ended up displaying more than a little sympathy for the Trumpian worldview.
Deploying a broad-gauge historical perspective, Hirsh put Trump’s campaign — notably, his April 27 speech to the Center for the National Interest in DC — into useful context:
Trump is also correct in suggesting that the current global system is an aberration in American history, that it may not be sustainable forever under current conditions, and that America should focus more on fixing our own economic house for a long time to come (a view shared, incidentally, by Barack Obama, who loves to say “it’s time to focus on nation-building at home”). The U.S. share of global defense spending has soared to more than a third of the total, while the American economy has dropped in size to one-quarter of global GDP; America spends more in total than the next seven largest countries combined: China, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Britain, India, France and Japan. And to what end exactly? No one can quite say.
Yes, that is a good question to ask about our far-flung commitments: To what end exactly? And since it’s the American taxpayers — as well as their sons and daughters in uniform — who are bearing the burden of internationalism, maybe we, the people, should start demanding some better answers. (As an aside, we can add that the Washington Post’s David Ignatius, another high-ranking MSM-er, asked some of the same probing questions in his latest column, even if he seemed more sure than Hirsh that Hillary Clinton has all the answers.)
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In his concluding paragraph, Hirsh observed that, through it all, Trump is undeniably connecting with his audience:
At a time when many Americans are angry and feel dispossessed, and when they blame the rest of the world for their ills — egged on by Trump’s rhetoric about getting “raped,” for example by China — it may be that voters do want another choice. Trump appears to be offering one, and a lot of people are listening.
Interestingly, it wasn’t too long ago that Trump’s views on foreign policy and national security were seen by many as crippling to his candidacy. After Trump attacked George W. Bush’s handling of 9/11 and the Iraq War in the February 13 debate in Greenville, SC, an unnamed Republican “strategist” chortled to Katie Glueck, another Politico reporter, “Trump’s attack on President George W. Bush was galactic-level stupid in South Carolina.” Well, not so fast there, Mr. Insider-Expert; Trump, of course, triumphed in the Palmetto State primary a week later.
Looking back on that moment, we might today observe that Bush 43 is popular in much of the Republican Party, and yet at the same time, there’s considerable disgruntlement about the way that the “Great War on Terror” has been fought over the last 15 years — especially by those who actually did the fighting and the bleeding.
Indeed, when one thinks about Republican politics in this young century, we can see that at times, the GOP platform has seemed to consist mostly of foreign wars, open borders, and cuts to earned entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare. By that reckoning, maybe it’s hard to believe that Republicans have done indeed as well, politically, as they have done. (Thank God for Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi!)
Still, the landslide defeats that the Republicans suffered in the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections speak to a deep weakness in the party’s national agenda — what might be called, uncharitably, the Bush-McCain-Romney agenda. And that’s what Trump obviously seeks to change.
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But does Trump really mean it? Or, to put it another way, can he really do it? In view of his track record, in life and, more recently, in politics, it would be a mistake to underestimate him. Yet, at the same time, whether one loves him or loathes him, it must be observed that he will not be governing alone — the Constitution guarantees that.
As veteran anti-tax activist Grover Norquisttold the Washington Post, if the New Yorker wins in November, his “art-of-the-dealing” will be put to the test. Speaking of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker Paul Ryan, Norquist said, “The three of them have to agree.” And so, Norquist — who is regarded as more libertarian than Trump — added, thinking of a President Donald, “I sleep well at night.” That is, our constitutional system guarantees a carefully modulated outcome.
This stipulation, about the stubborn power of the separation of powers, brings up another point: Politics is a team effort. And speaking to the importance of team-building, former Reagan education secretary Bill Bennett said of Trump, in the same Post article, that this is not the time to criticize Trump for his alleged faults, but rather, “Now is the time to surround him with good people and work with him at the convention.”
Norquist and Bennett are correct. As our possible 45th president, Trump would still have to negotiate with the Congressional leadership — maybe even Democratic leadership. Yes, the White House is the bully pulpit, but politics is always, and only, the art of the possible. Or, as Washington wits say, “The President proposes, and the Congress disposes.”
So we should pay close attention to the team that Trump pulls together. For starters, there’s the question of his running mate. As an astute analyst here at Breitbart observed the other day, the most important decision that Trump will make between now and the election is his vice-presidential pick.
Yet the rest of the Trump team is important, too. As they also say inside the Beltway, “personnel is policy.” And so, already, people are starting to flyspeck the Trump campaign for portents of things to come.
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And so far at least, fans of American jobs and domestic manufacturing — which is to say, almost all Americans — should be heartened by what there is to see. As bespeaks his background as a builder, Trump has always been a champion of the “tangible economy” — that is, of the America that actually makes things, as opposed to just moving around zeroes on a spreadsheet. And certainly, Trump’s proposed tax and trade policies signal his strong commitment to factories and blue collars.
Yet, in our continuing examination of the campaign tea leaves, we might wish to pause over this intriguing quote from that Michael Hirsh article in Politico; a senior adviser told Hirsh that at the base of Trump’s foreign-policy vision was a “Hamiltonian emphasis on having financial independence through manufacturing.”
So, there are the eight words that mean so much. There are the eight words — Hamiltonian emphasis on having financial independence through manufacturing — that mean so much to our economy, offering us a way out of the zero-sum financialism of recent decades and also the solid prospect that we will continue to preserve our political sovereignty in the next century.
So let’s think about those words and parse them out.
First, “Hamiltonian” refers, of course, to Alexander Hamilton. Having dropped out of college to join the fight, Hamilton served as George Washington’s aide-de-camp through most of the American Revolution, although toward the end of the war, in 1781, he took command of a combat battalion and led it to victory at the Battle of Yorktown.
After the war was won, later in the decade, he co-authored The Federalist Papers — a body of work that helped persuade the states to ratify the Constitution. Then, in 1789, President Washington appointed him to be our first Secretary of the Treasury. And oh yes, he’s the guy who’s also remembered for having been killed in an 1804 duel. Even great soldiers can get outgunned.
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Hamilton has always been prominent; his image has graced the $10 bill since 1929 —and with no end in sight, even as other dead white males find themselves on the outs.
However, Hamilton has gone from big to bigger, having enjoyed a huge revival in recent decades. In 1997, the prominent American historian Michael Lind publishedHamilton’s Republic: Readings in the American Democratic Nationalist Tradition; that work, as well as other of Lind’s writings, inspired scholars to rethink, and revise upward, their assessment of Hamilton’s role as a key nation-builder. Then, in 2005, another historian,Ron Chernow, wrote a highly regarded biography of Hamilton, further raising his standing.
Of course, the most startling breakthrough came in 2015, when Lin-Manuel Miranda debuted Hamilton, the musical, on Broadway. Who knew that a man who had been dead for more than two centuries could be such a sensation? Miranda’s opus managed to combine rousing entertainment with solid scholarship — Chernow was closely involved in its production. In fact, the show has been honored with a record 16 Tony nominations.
Yet amidst all the hoopla, it’s important not to lose sight of exactly what Hamilton, the man, actually stood for in his life and why he is important today — and important to Trump.
First and foremost, as we have seen, he was a staunch American patriot.
Second, he was both a visionary and a policy wonk. He could see a Greater America, but he also had the patience to navigate his way through the mass of detail that is actual governance.
http://www.breitbart.com/2016-presidential-race/2016/05/09/hamiltonian-8-words-tell-donald-trump-serious/