Meanwhile, at the Democratic Ranch

There was an unusual amount of attention paid to the race for the chairmanship for the Democratic National Party in the press, and all of our Democrat friends could hardly talk about anything else. Given the currently sorry state of the party, which now finds itself out power in the White House and both chambers of Congress and any minute now in the Supreme Court and much of the rest of the federal judiciary, not to mention in the governor’s mansions and legislatures and county commissions of most states, we can well understand the interest in what’s usually a back page story about someone whose only the politically obsessed sorts would usually recognize.

As the sorts of politically obsessed and retrograde Republicans who are as distressed as ever about the state of our own party, we’re not encouraged by how the race played out. From our old-fashioned right-wing perspective it came down to the far-left Tom Perez, President Barack Obama’s former Secretary of Labor and head of the Justice Department’s civil rights division, and the even farther-left Minnesota Rep. Keith Ellison, who is best known as the party’s left-most member and the only Muslim ever elected to Congress. Perez was naturally backed by both Obama and failed party presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and the rest of what can charitably be called the Democratic establishment, so naturally all of our Democratic friends were avidly for Ellison. All of our Democratic friends are in the same anti-establishment mood that overwhelmed so much of the Republican Party last election it wound up with President Donald Trump, and we try in vain to tell them that no good ever comes of it.

All of our Democratic friends were big for self-described socialist and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders in the past primaries, who was big backer of Ellison, and they all either enthusiastically voted for Green Party nominee Jill Stein or reluctantly for Clinton in the general election, and none of them have much more regard for Clinton than we do. They all regard her as dishonest and corrupt, which causes us to respect their political integrity, and they also find her insufficiently liberal, which causes us to question their sanity. As far as we can remember any party that loses power to a more conservative or liberal platform figures that it lost because it wasn’t sufficiently conservative or liberal enough, and all our Democrat friends are repeating the pattern. Having lost a winnable presidential race to a Republican who promised a Muslim ban and an immigration crackdown had an undeniable appeal to the sorts of white working class voters who once voted for Democrats, they figure the shrewd move was to pick a black and Muslim and formerly Black Muslim and still race-baiting and left-most-in-the-party kook to head up the party apparatus.

Any honest Republican should recognize the impulse. After it lost a winnable election against Obama in ’16 a huge chunk of the Grand Old Party was hating on failed nominee Mitt Romney, convinced that he’d been far too dignified and reasonable and otherwise establishment to prevail against those hated Democrats, and after Trump’s electoral victory we’re disappointed but not at all surprised our Democrat friends have concluded that she was just too damned dignified and reasonable and otherwise establishment to beat Trump. All of our Democratic buddies are convinced that Sanders’ unabashed socialism would have won the day, especially if it had been fused to the racial identity politics that Ellsion represents, and given the eight years of darkness the Republicans endured during the Obama years it’s altogether too plausible, but we still think the Democrats would have done better last time around with those relatively moderate candidates that were the first to drop out of the primaries.

If we were inclined to offer advice to adversaries, we would remind our Democrat friends that they just went six-for-seven in the last popular presidential votes, their last redoubts are the most populous and influential states, the states that made up the electoral majority were decided by razor-thing margins, and that nothing ever lasts forever in politics. In politics as in chess the center is usually the best space to occupy, and its not as if the victorious Perez isn’t far enough to the queen side. His establishment credentials suggest he might even be more effective in spreading Democratic nonsense than Ellison would have been, which alarms all our Republican friends, but at this point we were hoping at least one party will remain relatively sane.

— Bud Norman

The Good News is Killing Us

On Wednesday the experts at the Federal Reserve once again reported that the  economy is not at all well, something plainly obvious to all the non-experts who have given up all hope of finding a job, and the stock markets celebrated with yet another record-setting close. In the convoluted world we now live in, bad news is good news.

The bad news that the economy is sputtering and will likely continue to do so is good news for the stock markets, because it means that the Fed will continue to flood the economy with newly-printed dollars that have nowhere to go in our low-interest world except Wall Street. That record number of former workers now resigned to long-term idleness is good news, too, as they’re no longer counted among the unemployed and thus unemployment rate is falling. Should the bad news ever get so good that economy comes grinding to a complete halt that will also be good news, as America’s carbon emissions will also come to an end and we’ll all be saved from global warming, although the stock market might see that differently no matter how many dollars are printed onto recycled paper.

Those of a more glum disposition might think that the good news about an over-inflated stock market is actually bad news, or will be when the Fed is at long last forced by economic reality to stop printing money and the bubble is inevitably popped, and that a 7.3 percent unemployment rate is insufficient compensation for the lowest work force participation rate in decades, but that is why they aren’t editors or producers at the big news media outlets. The cheerier sorts of people who do get those jobs are content to report a record closing at the stock market and a declining unemployment, then move on quickly to the latest murder spree or celebrity divorce. Much of the public is therefore unaware of what the Federal Reserve is or what it’s been up to or what the consequences might ultimately be, and we’ve doubt they’re cheerier yet.

Many of the public officials who have to worry about this stuff as a requirement of their jobs are more concerned with other matters, judging by the debate about who will be the new boss at the Fed. Current Chairman Ben Bernanke is coming to the end of legally-limited term, during which he has been so obliging to the stock markets, and some of the Senators who will be voting on his successor seem more interested in the applicants’ race and gender than their monetary theories. President Barack Obama had hoped to appoint former Treasury Secretary, White House economic advisor, president of Harvard, and lifelong white male Larry Summers to the post, but so many Democrats objected to Summers’ past friendliness to business and his white maleness that he politely declined to be considered.

One of the leading foes was Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, the fake Indian and bona-fide left-wing nutcase, who was serving on the Harvard faculty during Summers’ presidency there and apparently developed a personal dislike for him. Much has been made about Obama’s inability to get a high-level appointment past his own party, with some seeing it as another encouraging indication of his weakened political standing, but even the shrewdest politician would find it difficult to placate a personally offended Ivy League professor.

There are good reasons that Larry Summers shouldn’t be the Fed chairman, but his whiteness, maleness, and insufficient anti-capitalism are not among them. The poor fellow has a strange record of being fired for the wrong reasons, though, and was pushed out of his post at Harvard by the likes of Warren not because he had badly mismanaged the school’s finances but because he quite reasonably stated that the Harvard math faculty was mostly male for reasons other than sexism. This is how positions of responsibility are now filled and vacated, though, and it looks likely the next several years of monetary policy will be determined by the same sort of silly identity politics.

The two most likely candidates are now Janet Yellen, currently a vice chairman of the Fed but invariably described as someone “who could become the Fed’s first woman chairman,” and Roger Ferguson, a former Obama advisor who is invariably described as someone “who could become the Fed’s first black chairman.” There are no doubt good reasons that either should Fed chairman, even if that “former Obama advisor” line on Ferguson’s resume is distressing, but their femaleness are blackness are not relevant qualifications any more than another candidate’s maleness or whiteness would be. Any applicant who is invariably described as “most likely to keep the foot on the pedal even after the car has gone flying over the cliff” would be the clear frontrunner for the gig, and you’ll want to be in the market on the day that good news is announced.

— Bud Norman