The idea of “The Loyal Opposition” emerged in early parliamentary government. It meant that whatever the issues that divided the major parties, whether that was based on their different class interests or ideologies, both of those holding for Tories and Whigs and Labor in Great Britain, the parties would come together in some national emergency in the interests of the nation, to which all parties felt themselves loyal. That certainly played itself out in World War II when Clement Attlee, the leader of the Labor Party, took up his role as the Deputy Prime Minister in Churchill’s Government of National Unity, even though it was clear that Churchill was calling the shots. The same thing happened in the United States during World War II. Frank Knox, a former Republican Vice-Presidential nominee, took over as Secretary of the Navy in the FDR administration, and Henry Stimson, a long time Republican Party stalwart, who had been Secretary of State under Hoover, became Secretary of War, which meant the civilian in charge of the army and air force. The two managed production and procurement and manpower for the armed services, although it was clear that FDR reserved grand strategy to himself. Other issues than warfare are regarded as ones about which men of good will can disagree and that they do so should not prevent any of them from being considered people with the best interests of the nation at heart.
Read MoreThe Second Super Tuesday
The results of Tuesday’ selection, what with clear victories for Joe Biden in Mississippi, Missouri and Michigan, led James Carville to say that the Democratic Party had decided to move on from contesting who would be the nominee to opening the general election campaign against Trump. The Democrats had settled on their candidate. The end, to all intents and purposes, of the primary season, gives time to pause to consider the shock that was delivered to the political system by the fortunes of some of its contenders. Elizabeth Warren did not get many votes, She had about eight percent of the male vote in North Carolina, and even if you doubled that so that her female vote was 16%, that means she just wasn’t a popular candidate, regardless of gender. That may be because her policies were not all that attractive, or it may be because the electorate will not abide a woman candidate. Warren herself said that if you say that sexism played a part in her political race, you will be considered a whiner, but the truth of the matter is that the American people, male and female, just don’t accept the idea of a woman President. A woman in that role just does not sit well with them.
Read MoreSuper Tuesday
The past week in national political events has been satisfying to me because it put my candidate, Joe Biden, back in the race, and I saw the week before last that something like this was necessary-- either a Biden resurgence or a Bloomberg surge-- so that Sanders would not run off with the nomination because and I thought, as apparently did so many other people, that Sanders was the candidate most likely to be defeated by Trump. Most voters, I think, are not like me, who will support anyone but Trump, but will instead settle for the known evil rather than what they suspect to be the worse evil of a Democratic Socialist. Now we will see what happens with Biden. The week has also been satisfying because it provided a splendid example of political drama, something that happens more often than we might expect because the forces that make it a drama are arranged fortuitously rather than by the hand of a playwright. This political drama brought together engaging and distinctive personalities, noble rhetoric, a clash over issues and constituencies as well as personalities, all occurring, mostly in public view, in the course of a brief period of time that allowed for plot complications as well as for the reversal of expectations. Playwrights should do as well, and certainly Shakespeare did in “Julius Caesar'' and Oscar Wilde did in “An Ideal Husband”.
Read MoreThe Nevada Debate
Yes, the Democratic debate last night was certainly a food fight and the candidates had nothing new to say for themselves. The candidates are also getting a little testy out there. But the debate was illuminating nonetheless and pointed a way forwards. Joe Biden gave a very solid performance. He clearly laid out a tax package that made sense, more so than any of the others, and even though no one bothers to mention that Warren's wealth tax is unconstitutional. Biden has to do well in South Carolina and then the media, who are very fickle, and are at the moment conceding the race to Bernie, who they found to have a lot of integrity until it seemed possible he might actually triumph as the nominee and surely to be beaten by Trump, may will come to recoil from Bernie and reconsider the Veep. Mayor Mike had a worse night than was even expected and did not come up with answers to questions he knew he would face. When Elizabeth asked him to release women from their NDA's, he should have said NDAs are not a bad thing and that the #metoo movement had in fact thought women should get training in negotiating them. So where did Elizabeth stand on that? Bloomberg should also have said that Stop and Frisk was a policy supported by many Black politicians because it was a way of protecting little Black girls from being killed by random or drive-by shooters. For some reason or other, New York City Mayors, like Lindsay and Guiliani, never make it in national politics. Mayor LaGuardia became Mayor after serving as an influential Congressman in Washington.
Read MoreThe Iowa Caucuses
One week before the Iowa Caucuses, one poll showed Biden ahead, another showed Sanders ahead, and a third showed the race to be a dead heat. At that point, forty percent of Iowans said they were still undecided about their final choice. What do these Iowan prima donnas want? A third or fourth or fifth encounter with a candidate at a coffee shop so they can make up their minds? They have had since last summer to look these candidates over: to evaluate their programs and savor their characters. The main influence of a Bloomberg candidacy, which is already, by one poll, at double digits, may be to rid us of the influence of the “ethanol” state on national politics. Other candidates have already caught that message in that they were scheduled to spend less time in Iowa than in past presidential years because they are aware that Nevada and South Carolina and then Super Tuesday will quickly diminish whatever victory Iowa seems to provide.
Read MoreThe Dershowitz Argument
Alan Dershowitz, the retired Harvard Professor of Law and well known defense attorney, has offered up a very interesting defense of Trump that deserves to be taken seriously, although I think it displays the limits of legal reasoning rather than the inadvisability of the impeachment proceedings. Dershowitz argues that an impeachment must be based on a violation of criminal law or something close to that, something that can be identified as a crime whether or not in the statutes, rather than on the rejection of a policy of the President where he is doing something of which the Congress may disapprove but is not outside his authority. Dershowitz argues that the Congress had in effect confessed to having engaged in this impropriety when they charged the President with “abuse of power” and “obstruction of Congress” because these charges are too vague to be impeachable offenses. They could have charged him with bribery or extortion, but did not, notwithstanding assertions that have been made by supporters of impeachment that a charge of bribery would run afoul of the way that crime is defined by statute as requiring a monetary transaction, which is not what happened in the case of Ukraine, where what Trump was asking for was an exchange of favors. Dershowitz cites Supreme Court Justice Curtis as his authority. At the time of the Johnson Impeachment, Curtis had argued that impeachment was not appropriate for this same reason. There was no crime, only the violation of the Tenure of Office Act, which had been passed only in order for Johnson to run afoul of it while carrying out his legitimate powers to pick his own cabinet. No real crime; no impeachment.
Read MoreThe January Democratic Debate
Not much has changed since the December debate. The Iran crisis dissipated quickly because Trump got cold feet about following up on the assassination of an Iranian general and the Iranians gave him no excuse to take further action. The impeachment process continues, very slowly, and will fizzle out unless Mitch is somehow convinced to have witnesses even though all that they can say is that Trump did indeed hold up aid to Ukraine, which is what the Republicans have always been willing to accept. The polls have remained remarkably steady: Biden is ahead in national polls, and tied or close to tied in New Hampshire and Iowa. Bernie is steady at about twenty percent, but not moving up. So it is time for people to vote. They know what the Democratic candidates stand for and are familiar with their personalities. And voting is, in fact, three weeks away.
Read MoreThe Political Doldrums
Everyone I know is depressed about politics. Maybe it is because we are in mid-winter, and so caught up in Shakespeare “A Winter’s Tale”, where people cannot help but engage in sin for no reason at all and so, one can surmise, are cursed with original sin. Maybe it is because we are almost up to the Iowa caucuses and no Democratic candidate has caught fire, Democrats, as the axiom has it, wanting to fall in love with a candidate while Republicans only care about who is next in line. The Democratic primary candidates all seem unsuited for the role of someone who offers a new day. Warren and Sanders are too Left; Biden is too old; Buttigieg is too young; and Amy Klobuchar seems to be everybody’s idea of a perfect vice-presidential candidate: charming, left of center, a good ticket balancer-- even if Blacks may demand that place on the ticket-- but too narrow a vision in that winning every county in Minnesota is not exactly what you want to go on a bumper sticker.
Read MoreThe December Democratic Debate
The Democratic candidates have settled into their grooves. We pretty much know what each of them will sound like when they go into their spiels and so we had last night a repeat performance which lets the citizenry retaste the flavors to help them decide which one to favor. Joe Biden sounded confident and well informed and crisp on foreign policy. Unlike Warren, who said we weren’t up to the challenge, he said that the reason Obama had not closed down Guantanamo was because the Administration didn’t have the votes in Congress to do so. In answer to a question about the Administration hiding the true facts of what was going on in Afghanistan, Biden sidestepped the question of whether the Administration had mislead the public and said that he had been against the Afghan policy, including the Surge, all along, and that he, if he became President, would get out of Afghanistan as soon as possible, leaving behind only special forces to act as a counter-terrorist force rather than as a counter-insurgency force. Crisp answers. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders were full of their righteous indignation about the woes that still prevail in American society and blaming it on the few who have great wealth rather than on the many who voted for Trump and his policies. Warren says the economists who disagree with her are just wrong, and some of the commentators on PBS during the breaks in the debate wondered how long she could get away with that. Steyer said once again that he had always wanted to impeach Trump, and that is certainly true, even if it was before the Ukraine revelations that made the task necessary, which is the way Pelosi and I both see it. The Republicans who claim that Democrats wanted to impeach Trump from Day One are thinking of only a few Congresspeople plus Steyer.
Read MoreThe Impeachment Follies
The current impeachment proceedings are both a tragedy and a farce. They are a tragedy in that the nation has been brought so low by a character who has neither the grandeur of Richard III nor the fatal flaw of character that plagued Lyndon Johnson who, despite his political sophistication, thought he could negotiate with Ho Chi Minh as if the North Vietnamese leader were the head of the United Auto Workers. They are a farce because everybody is fighting against the obvious truth of the charges and defending Trump by saying that he is, at bottom, too stupid and disorganized to carry out any conspiracy. We are in the presence of a very unusual bad guy. It would take Mel Brooks to do him justice, although Alec Baldwin does a very good job.
Read MoreThe November Democratic Primary Debate
It isn’t easy to run for President, or so my reading and what I have observed on television informs me. The primary candidates are in a grind that will get even worse when one of them gets the nomination. Each of them attend four of five meetings a day at civic auditoriums, as well as in living rooms and in diners, marching in local parades, chatting with as many voters as they can, Elizabeth Warren famous for taking selfies with all comers. And, at the same time, the candidates are getting briefed on the news of the day, which means, at the moment, what is being said at the House impeachment hearings, so that they can provide instant judgments on unfolding events, those required by the journalists who trail them, the candidates knowing that any word out of place will be interpreted in the worst possible way. Also, at the same time, the candidates have to keep in touch with their donors, their staff back at headquarters and, for their own sanity, with their own families. How to manage that? It takes a lot of determination as well as a bank of stamina which few healthy people in their younger years would lay claim to, much less septuagenarians, Maybe the staff of the candidates schedule time for a snooze just so the candidate from tiredness will not lapse into a gaffe. (I remember when the Republican candidate for Vice President in 1960, Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. was criticized for changing into pajamas for his naps). Maybe it is just that the candidates have been at campaigns for so long that the rigors of campaigning are second nature to them.
Read MoreFrom Whence Contemporary Authority Flows
Max Weber defined “authority” as the ability to convince people to follow your lead, which was different from its companion concept, ”power”, which is the ability to get people to do what you want even if they don’t want to. One of the main and perhaps original sources of that thing he called “power” was what Weber labelled as “charisma”, which meant the ability of a person to be so compelling a figure that people would do what he said, they somehow mesmerized because of that person’s personal appeal. And so Hitler was charismatic, even while FDR, however charming, was also the bearer of the TR-Wilsonian ideology, somewhat modified, that the purpose of government was to make the lives of people better and so to expand the role of government to accomplish that end, a principle Democrats come back to even if not in so many words, it certainly different from the alternative principle, which is that the purpose of government is not to make things better but to put as many brakes as possible on progressive impulses so as to further feather the nests of already rich people.
Read MoreTrump and Decorum
Now that events are moving quickly and Trump may not be in charge for much longer, it is time to consider what it was that made him such a galvanizing figure and why that ran out of steam so quickly. It is important to answer these questions in part to create a historical record while the flavor of him is still with us and also because the way he exits office, whether in chains or on a gurney, as opposed to in a Nixonian display of bravado, may lie in his character, and the clue to that character is why people were drawn to support him in the first place as well as in the three years of his Presidency.
Read MoreThe End of The Imperial Presidency
The concept of “The Imperial Presidency”, first coined by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., was that the United States as a result of World War II had become a superpower and so implicitly ruled over the entire planet, every other country an ally, a dependency or a sphere of influence, except those that had fallen under the sway of the Soviet Union, the only other super-power because it had both a massive army and atomic weapons. The result of this geopolitical situation was that the President of the United States had almost unlimited powers in foreign policy. He could unleash nuclear war without an act of Congress that authorized war because only he could quickly respond to the threat posed by a foreign power’s nuclear arsenal. Moreover, he could engage in wars that Congress might feel the need for a role in declaring because he could manipulate the laws and sentiments of the United States citizenry in the pursuit of his policies. So Truman did not declare war in Korea because he knew it would not get through Congress and instead called the war “a police action” and no one seriously challenged that. It was a phrase that suited the purpose of legitimizing what seemed expedient during the Cold War even if Congress had not authorized it. Congress found itself reluctant to restrict Presidential military initiatives during the Cold War and so the Congress authorized the Bay of Tonkin Resolution, which was supposed to empower the President to negotiate with the Vietnamese, even as it, after the Cold War, also authorized, as a bargaining device, the resolution to go to war in Iraq, no one wanting to challenge the ability of the President alone to form foreign policy. The Javits War Power Act of 1973 was meant to circumscribe the President’s actions by requiring him to go back to Congress after thirty days to authorize whatever he had done on his own, but it has worked out that such a procedure is meaningless because if we are engaged in a major operation for thirty days, the Congress is not likely to pull the plug on an ongoing military operation, and so the President has carte blanche.
Read MoreThe Jim Garrison Standard
There are a lot of conspiracy theories out there at the moment. There is the now old one of Vice President Biden having intervened in Ukraine to help his son. There is the theory pushed by Rudolph Guiliani, that there is a link between the 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign and Ukraine in that the real intervention into the Democratic Party servers originated there. And, of course, there is still the lingering suspicion that somehow Russia had the goods on Trump and so Trump acts like Putin’s lap dog. Added to this is the most recent, which is the accusation by Hillary Clinton that Tulsi Gabbard is a Russian asset, the Democratic primary candidates running away from that. How are we to evaluate these claims? Or are we just supposed to go on the basis of who backs them? Republicans will back pro-Trump conspiracies and Democrats will back anti-Trump conspiricies and it is too soon to tell who will back the anti-Gabbard theory. Is there no way out of this mess so that a rational person can decide on his or her own who to believe? I believe there is.
Read MoreThe October Democratic Debate
Despite the complaints that the Democratic field is too large, there being too many candidates on the stage, and the usual criticism that these debates aren’t really debates because they are not sustained interchanges where people get to answer people’s answers, the CNN debate on Tuesday was very successful in that it gave a sense of each of the candidates and gave the audience an education on a range of issues. The topics touched on could have been expanded into an entire political science course. Most of all, the debate provided a sense that what unites the Democratic Party is that it sees the purpose of government as satisfying whatever needs the populace has. There is no limitation on the ways government can help people, which is the opposite of what Republicans used to say, before Trump, which was that smaller government was better government, that government had its limits because government was the enemy of liberty rather than its enhancer-- or that was the case before Trump appeared on the scene to play Mr. Bluster from the Howdy Doody show: all talk, no delivery. But before getting to the issues, let’s talk about the horse race.
Read MoreThe Necessity of Impeachment
Conservatives and moderates will say that the phone call between Donald Trump and President Zelensky of Ukraine is just Donald Trump’s usual bluster and so not to be taken seriously or, if it is, that it does not rise to the level of an impeachable offense because it is, after all, just one phone call, and that even if it is an impeachable offense, it is too late in Trump’s term to pursue impeachment because the election about a year from now is available as the preferable device for getting rid of him and so not give the Republicans the excuse of saying that the Democrats are not willing to go to the ballot box to get their way. My view is that the charges are very serious, very impeachable and, most important, it is necessary to pursue these charges because we cannot wait for the next election to correct the problem Trump presents.
Read MoreSamantha Power: Human Rights Activist
The top national security people who work in the White House are usually meritocratic appointments, the selection made from people who had been working previously in ever more important positions in either Republican or Democratic Administrations, and so you could count on how they would conduct themselves in office because they were already known quantities. That tradition goes back a long time, John Foster Dulles was the heir apparent for Secretary of State if Thomas Dewey had beaten Harry Truman and he got the office when Dwight Eisenhower won the Presidency four years later. Dean Acheson and Dean Rusk were old Washington hands. The same is true closer to the present. Madeleine Albright was a Democratic fund raiser turned professor of international relations and Condoleza Rice was a student at the University of Denver under Albright's father and she had learned a lot about deterrence theory before she signed on to educate George W. Bush about foreign policy. Colin Powell had been a political general before working in the White House.
Read MoreA Third Try at Impeachment
Here we are at the start of the third round of impeachment talk, and it is a good question whether anything will come out of it when nothing came of it in its previous iterations. First there was the Mueller investigation into connections between Trump and the Russians during 2015 and 2016. Mueller got so tied up in legalities that he couldn’t conclude that the communications between the Rusians and the Trump camp amounted to a conspiracy because there was no proof of criminal intent, which is a version of what I would call the clown defense. Trump is such a clown that he doesn’t know he is entering a conspiracy only that he is acting conspiratorially and then can deny it was malevolent because he goes public with what others would try to hide. He asked Russia at a public rally to go after Hillary’s emails and a few days later Wikileaks released a lot of information. So how could Trump be conspiring right in front of us? He is a fool rather than someone like Nixon, who worked hard to cover up what he knew to be wrong conduct on his part even if it were warranted by his sense that both political parties do it.
Read MoreThe September Democratic Primary Debate
Commentators quickly summed up the horse race aspects of last night’s Democratic Primary Debate. Heidi Heitkamp and Claire McCaskill, two former United States Senators, said on different networks that nothing had changed in that the three leading candidates, Biden, Sanders and Warren, were still in the lead, having provided acceptable though not outstanding performances, and that some of the outlier candidates, like Amy Klobacher and Corey Booker, had made some well put points. Only Julian Castro and Andrew Yang seemed to falter, Castro for aiming a haymaker at Biden that failed and which made Castro look cruel, and Yang for offering an Oprah like gift to some citizens, an offer that drew laughter from most of the candidates. So things are settling in, the longer Biden remains in the lead, the longer he is likely to maintain it, his occasional stumbles notwithstanding. So much for the feel and strategies of the candidates vis a vis one another.
I want to attend, instead, to what were the topics selected by the journalists to ask questions about, and what were the presumptions embodied in both the questions and answers. It is interesting to note, as some commentators have, that neither impeachment nor Warren’s wealth tax, both worthy of debate, were brought up in the course of the debate. Nor was abortion or the Supreme Court. What was brought up and how was that handled?
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