Talking about how smart they are while not realizing they have been had.
Slee
Some days, you just can’t win! I only today heard someone, on National Public Media, accusing Obama of deliberately letting the Syrian government’s abuses go uncontested. So some say he’s escalating war, and others say he’s shirking the need for armed intervention.
As I posted earlier, I think we are experiencing a political crisis in which Washington DC can no longer solve big problems. It is not capable of taking big action on a whole range of important policy areas: rebuilding crumbling infrastructure, simplifying the out-of-control tax system, fixing the broken immigration system, mitigating climate change, tamping down health spending, reducing too big to fail financial firms, or…you know…actual budgets. And it’s getting worse. It might be that we can no longer appoint Supreme Court justices. Almost every candidate acknowledges this. It’s also happening during a time of wage stagnation and increasing income inequality that large numbers of people wrongly correlate to Washington’s inaction.
As time goes on, that crisis will deepen. And the direction of US politics over the next century depends on how the public diagnoses the nature of the crisis. What I believe Obama’s presidency has done, among Democrats, is decreased the number who think the crisis can be resolved by a President with the right temperament and appreciation of the crisis, or by a President leading a groundswell of grassroots support. It’s part of the reason they are more inclined to support Hillary than last time.
If Trumps is elected and loses, I think it would decrease the number of people–probably the plurality of the people who have a diagnosis for the crisis–who think the problem can be solved by electing outsiders as President.
That might sound overly theoretical and academic, but I don’t think it is. Which popular conception about the nature of the crisis prevails may well determine the next few decades of our political trajectory. If a majority of people come around to Sanders’s belief that the principal problem is inflated corporate power, for example, then that’s going to be a pretty big deal. One consequence of Trump’s failure to do anything meaningful about any of the intractable problems is that Sanders explanation will become more popular (which would be a big mistake, in my view).
Firstly, the emphasis added part: I don’t understand this. Hillary is only more popular relative to Sanders. If Sanders got the African American support Obama got, he’d be winning. If anything, I see her as less popular, on an absolute scale, than in 2008.
As for the other stuff, which candidate is going to get any of those things done that you say need to get done? if HRC wins, how is she going to get anything thru Congress wrt infrastructure spending, or do anything about wage stagnation? I’m not seeing any crisis of a “failed” Trump presidency that wouldn’t also be there with Hillary, at least on the domestic front.
The one area that Trump could totally screw up is our foreign policy. But I’m not sure he’d be any worse that GWB, and as bad as it was, there still were not riots in the streets.
Well, obviously we don’t know how she would fare in a hypothetical 2016 election in which she is pitted against Obama if Fauxbama had just spent eight years largely unsuccessfully fighting these intractable battles. My hypothesis is that she would do a little better, at least among the demographic I’m addressing.
That’s correct. If you took me to be implying otherwise, I was not. My own view is that this is about institutions and some underlying social trends, not political personalities. It doesn’t matter who you elect. They will all fail to address these problems until something more fundamental changes.
Correct. I think foreign policy only matters to voters when it starts to cost money. Otherwise, no one really cares.
OK, got it. Can’t disagree with any of that.