Bernie Burns Out

Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders suspended his presidential campaign on Wednesday, which caused much wailing and gnashing of teeth among his fanatical supporters but was largely overlooked by most of the country.

Once a front-runner in the Democratic primary after race after wins in the Iowa caucus and New Hampshire primary, he was largely knocked out of contention after a string of losses to former Vice President Joe Biden, and since then the primaries have been mostly postponed by the coronavirus and mostly ignored by the media, so Sanders’ departure wound up getting less press coverage than the death of a minor figure from the Lewinsky scandal way back in President Bill Clinton’s administration. There were a few think pieces about how self-described socialist Sanders’ two failed attempts to win the Democratic nomination succeed in dragging the party further to the left, but we think they overstate his influence.

Both campaigns ended with Sanders losing to severely flawed centrists from the Democratic establishment, and although such far-left acolytes as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez won in the mid-terms the Democrats won back a majority of the House of Representatives mostly because of centrist candidates who did well with the college-educated suburbanites who have deserted the Republican party in droves since the election of President Donald Trump. Biden wound up winning a majority of Democratic votes because even some Democrats who liked Sanders’ policy positions worried he couldn’t win in a general election.

Our guess is that they were right, and the Democrat party dodged a bullet when Sanders faltered. Trump was eager to run against socialism and so worried about Biden that he got himself impeached trying to dig up dirt on him, and for all of his undeniable flaws Biden will be a more formidable opponent. Sanders fanatical supporters argued that he could beat Trump by bring out young voters and a multi-ethnic working class coalition that have typically abstained from voting, but they didn’t show up in the primaries and probably wouldn’t have in a general election.

Trump got a small bump in his approval rating when the coronavirus came along, but it was smaller than the rally-’round-the-flag bumps that previous presidents saw in times of national crisis. President Jimmy Carter saw a bigger bump after the American embassy workers in Iran were taken hostage after the Islamic Revolution, but by the time election day came around the the embassy staff were still in captivity it was one of the big reasons that he lost to President Ronald Reagan by a landslide. The latest polling shows Trump’s approval rating back in the low-to-mid 40s, where it’s been since the day he took office, and if the coronavirus continues to kill and keep much of the American population in captivity on Election Day it will probably be even lower.

For now Biden is unable to campaign except on the internet, and for now a lot of Sanders fanatics are vowing to sit out the election or vote for the Green Party or the Socialist Party or the Communist Party or some other option, but we expect that the Democrats’ loathing of Trump will ultimately unite the party. Trump will continue to blame President Barack Obama and certain Democratic governors and the World Health Organization and his erstwhile pal and Chinese dictator Xi Ping for the lack of testing and medical supplies that have exacerbated the toll of the coronavirus, but he’ll find it hard to blame Biden, who has been happily out of the news ever since it started.

The stock markets had a pretty good day when investors learned that Sanders wouldn’t become America’s first avowedly socialist president,  but that also suggests they weren’t at all terrified that Biden might win. It’s long time between now and Election Day, and things could change, but for now Biden sees to have a very good shot at beating Trump.

— Bud Norman

The Damn Democrats Duke It Out

What’s left of the contenders for the Democratic party’s presidential nomination had another knock-down-drag-out free-for-all of a televised debate in South Carolina on Tuesday, and as gruesome as it was we couldn’t look away. The Democrats’ grotesque reality show is as binge-worthy as Republican President Donald Trump’s.

If you’ve been following the complicated plot so far, you already know that the self-described socialist and Vermont Sen. Bernie won most of the votes in Iowa and New Hampshire and Nevada and is already the clear frontrunner, and that the former frontrunner and relatively sane centrist former Vice President Joe Biden needs a big win in Saturday’s South Carolina after three disastrous finishes to remain a viable contender in the race. Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth is still vying with Sanders for the party’s sizable loony left faction, while South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg and Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar continues trying to win over the still-sizable relatively sane and centrist portion of the party.

The debate also featured self-made high-tech multi-billionaire Tom Steyer, who has no previous government experience but lands somewhere between the loony left and the relatively sane and centrist positions in the party, and self-made media mogul and multi-billionaire Mike Bloomberg, who was actually a pretty successful two-term mayor of New York City by doing things that have not endeared him to the Democratic party’s loony left. Democrats of all stripes have by now had enough of billionaire presidents, however, so both seem minor characters in the plot.

Which made for quite a freewheeling debate, with everyone weighing in on topics from Mideast peace to the legalization of marijuana to Medicare for All and that coronavirus that lately has been dragging down the international stock markets. Everyone took care to attack anyone who was a rival for the loony left and relatively sane centrist votes, both sides attacked one another, and everyone agreed that Trump was even worse.

No one was a clear winner in the shouting match, but in the long run these debates matter very little. What we’ll be watching for on Saturday is if Biden can beat out Sanders and keep the relatively sane and centrist portion of the party in the race. Given Americas’ complicated politics, it’s hard to say. Most of the white folk in South Carolina are now proud members of the Grand Old Party that once waged war on the Confederacy, which means that the state’s sizable black population comprises a majority of the state’s Democratic votes, which gives Biden a natural advantage.< Black Democrats are more likely than their white counterparts to attend worship services and serve in the military and start a business, and most white Republicans don’t understand how especially in the south they’re a moderating influence on their party. Biden was a loyal Vice President to first black President Barack Obama and is tying himself to that mixed record, and we expect that will be enough to keep him in the race after South Carolina.

No matter what happens on Saturday in South Carolina Sanders seems to be winning black and Latino votes and hurtling toward the Democratic nomination, Which naturally has all the relatively sane and centrist and “establishment” media and politicos in a panic, fretting that Sanders is a bridge too far toward socialism and worse yet someone who could lose a general election even to the likes of President Donald Trump.

We can well sympathize with their plight, as we well remember a time four years ago when we and the rest of the boring Republican establishment types thought that Trump’s isolationism and protectionism and populist nationalism and know-nothingism was a bridge too far into the crazy right, and that he might even lose an election to the likes of Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. Trump lost the popular vote by a landslide  our = eked out a victory in the Electoral College, and has s been about as bad as  expected, so we invite the Democrats to learn whatever they can from the past.

We hope they’ll conclude that Sanders would be awful, and come up with some better centrist alternative than Biden, especially that nice and more electably heterosexual Klobuchar, but they might rightly conclude that Sanders could also beat the likes of Trump. Any Republicans and Russians rooting for Sanders should also keep that in mind, as there’s really no telling how either of these grotesque reality shows might turn out.

— Bud Norman

On the Sidelines of the Great Schism

Public opinion polls rarely tell us anything we didn’t already know, but it’s nice to have our observations corroborated and quantified. So it was with a recent poll by the Pew Research Center, which shows that right and the left increasingly hate one another these days.

According to Pew’s research the number of Republicans with a “cool” attitude toward Democrats has risen 14 percent over the past two years, with most them being “very cold.” Since 2016 there’s been a 16 percent increase in the Democrats’ coolness toward the Republicans. Some 55 percent of Republicans now say the Democrats are “immoral,” and 47 precent of Democrats say the same thing about Republicans. Some 63 percent of Republicans think Democrats are “unpatriotic,” and they’ll be glad to know that only 23 percent of Democrats say the same about them, although that might be because many Democrats have the same flag-waving and jingoistic definition of patriotism as many Republicans.

You’ve probably already noticed the trend, if you ever venture to talk about politics at the local tavern or church potluck or the line at the Department of Motor Vehicles. The animosity has always been there, and we old-timers who can recall the ’60s have seen worse, but there’s no shaking a sense that it’s gotten worse in the last two or three years.

President Donald Trump obviously has a lot to do with it. He deliberately infuriates Democrats, knowing how it endears him to Republicans, and has normalized name-calling and mud-slinging and a Manichaean worldview, with both sides now playing by the new rules. He didn’t create the divide, though, just took shrewd advantage of it.

Back in the ’60s there were only three channels on your television and a few radio stations that would deliver a few minutes of minutes of strictly factual news, but for a long while people have been able to tune into whatever they want to hear. If you want to hear that those damned Democrats are a bunch of perverted dope-smoking hippies who hate God and while folks and America and everything there plenty of programs purveying that. If you’re more inclined to hear that those awful Republicans are a bunch of rich-off-the-poor racists who hate gay people because they’re repressed homosexuals and are intent on destroying the environment, you won’t have any trouble finding it.

The schism is rooted in geographic and demographic and cultural economic realities, too. All the polls, including the reelection results, show that the right is mostly inland and rural and religious and anxious that a fast-changing economy will leave them behind along with the rest of the culture. The left is mostly coastal and urban and secular and firmly convinced that with its smart phones and great and unmatched wisdom it can lead America to a more socialist and sexually liberated Utopia. Those fine folks at the Pew Research Center also found that majorities in both parties say they don’t share even the non-political values of their counterparts, and can’t even agree on the basic facts of what they’re arguing abut. Acrimonious arguments about everything from guns to gay wedding cakes to health care are bound to result, even without all this media fanning the flames.

These days we’re watching all this from the sidelines, where we tend to get along with everybody well enough. We’ve considered ourselves staunch conservative Kansas Republicans since way back when Trump was a registered Democrat and contributing to the Clintons, so we have no argument to make when our more newfangled Republican friends fulminate about the damned Democrats and their unabashed socialism and often outright hostility toward God-fearing and gun-toting and heterosexual white folk. When our Democrat friends fulminate about Trump we rarely have any argument to make, on the other hand, as he also offends our old-fashioned conservative Kansas Republican sensibilities, and we don’t entirely disagree that there’s some racism and sexism and at least some measure of homophobia involved in his appeal.

Sometimes we’re asked to pick a side, but we assert our right as Americans not to, and for now that seems to work. We’re trying to keep everything civil with the dear friends we know to be good and patriotic people on both sides of the political divide, and we’re hoping it doesn’t turn out like the 1960s or the 1860s.

— Bud Norman

A Brief History Lesson for the Young Democratic Whippersnappers on the Other Side of the Generation Gap

Ryan Grim strikes us as another one of those wild-eyed liberals looking to take over the Democrat party, and the sort of revisionist young whippersnapper who still calls President Ronald Reagan “a C-list actor,” but we think his op-ed piece in Sunday’s Washington Post correctly identifies the current fissure among the Democrats as a generation gap.

So far as we can tell Grim is a bit too young remember the late ’60s and early ’70s when the hippies and the hard hats were fighting it out on the streets and “generation gap” was a familiar part of the political lexicon, but he’s familiar enough with Reagan’s landslide victories and the Republican party’s ascendancy in the ’80s to understand why some Democrats are still spooked by it. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer and front-running Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden are all aged enough to remember how President Richard Nixon a landslide over the hippie favorite Democratic nominee Sen. George McGovern in ’72 despite an increasingly unpopular war in Vietnam. They remember that the carefully centrist President Jimmy Carter won office in ’76 only because of the Watergate scandal, but was decisively ousted four years later by Reagan, who won a record 49 states in his reelection bid.

They also well remember how many of their longstanding congressional colleagues were voted out along the way. Such liberal lions as McGovern and Sen. Frank Church and Birch Bayh and the most senior Sen. Warren Magnuson from the New Deal era were voted out during the ’70s, and the likes of wild-eyed conservative Rep. Newt Gingrich were voted in. Reagan won a third term of sorts when his Vice President George H.W. Bush, and any Democrat old enough to remember that still shudders at the thought. President Bill Clinton ended the Republicans’ 12-year White House reign in 92′ and won reelection in ’96, but he ran as a centrist and won by mere pluralities with considerable help from nutcase third-party populist candidate Ross Perot peeling off conservative votes. In ’94 the Republicans even took the House of Representatives after 40 years of Democratic control, a result of Clinton offending the public with such divisive ideas as allowing gays to serve in the military and the government taking a greater role in the health care system, but Clinton won reelection mostly because he and Gingrich had come up with a rare balanced budget and revived the Reagan economic expansion after a short and mild recession.

Republican President George W. Bush succeeded Clinton with a plurality and razor-then electoral majority and then won reelection with a slight majority of the popular, which drove all the Democrats crazy, even though the increasingly wild-eyed conservatives in the Republican party found both Bushes far too centrist for their tastes. President Barack Obama succeeded the second Bush and then easily won reelection, which drove all the Republicans crazy even if the younger of the increasingly wild-eyed Democrats now consider Obama far too centrist for their tastes. All of which explains why such liberal but seasoned septuagenarians as Pelosi and Schumer and Biden are reluctant to veer too far left of the center.

Much younger and less experienced and better-looking and more wild-eyed Democrats as New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and former Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke and Sen. Kamala Harris and New Jersey Sen. Corey Booker now have considerable sway in the Democratic party, and although the aging self-described socialist Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and ripened Massachusetts Sen. Warren are on their side Grim seems correct in surmising that a generation gap will be the story of the Democrats’ upcoming presidential primaries. Grim apparently believes that youthful idealism and its resulting recklessness will eventually overwhelm old age’s hard-earned experience and its resulting caution, and he seems to wish for it, and although we hope he’s wrong we worry he might be right.

At this point in our late middle age we must admit, however begrudgingly, that a lot has changed since Nixon won a landslide reelection but lost a popular culture back in ’72, and that things have changed far even more rapidly ever since. The “don’t ask, don’t tell” that allowed homosexuals to serve in the military so long as they remained closeted cost Clinton the House back in ’94, but it seems quaint in this age of constitutionally guaranteed same-sex marriage. The government intrusion into health care that Clinton’s wife proposed was less ambitious than what Obama wound up getting passed, and lately it polls well, and the Republicans couldn’t come with any alternative they could pass even when they held the White House and both chambers of Congress, so the crazy ideas that these young Democrats are proposing will have some appeal to a significant portion of the population. “Socialism” is no longer the damning term of opprobrium that it was during most of our lives, although it still should be, as far as we’re still concerned, and will probably get a lot more votes than Eugene Debs ever did back in a more sensible era of America.

Which is a shame, especially given the currently wild-eyed state of the Republican party in the era of President Donald Trump. It’s not the admirably wild-eyed conservatism of the Republican party that opposed the New Deal programs President Franklin Roosevelt wrought during his party’s six-decades dominance of American politics, nor is it the centrist and internationalist Republicanism of President Dwight Eisenhower that ended that long reign. It’s not the small government and free markets conservatism of Republican nominee Sen. Barry Goldwater, who lost by a landslide in ’64. Trump has the same tough-talking anti-hippie and pro-law-and-order rhetoric that Nixon won with in ’68, but Nixon won reelection after establishing the Environmental Protection Agency that Trump rails against and abandoning the Gold Standard monetary policy that Trump’s Federal Reserve Board appointees want to reinstate, and Trump has made his disdain Republican nominee back to Reagan quite clear.

Despite a pretty good economy America is adding the same trillion or so to the national debt that Obama was racking up in the wake of a deep and long lasting recession, The Repubicans’ big tax cut bill went mainly to the rich while the poor are probably paying even more for Trump’s tariffs every time they go to Wal-Mart. As bad as Obama was Trump has done even more to buddy up to dictatorships while undermining our the post-World War II military and trading alliances that Eisenhower and both Republican and Democratic presidents wisely established. We also note that his promise of proposing such a wonderful health care policy that your head will spin has not yet been kept.

On the other hand, Trump has outraged those damned Democrats even more than Nixon or Reagan or either of the Bushes ever did, and the more wild-eyed Republicans seem satisfied with that. He’s threatened governmental retribution against the free press and promised to lock up his political opponents, enforced our border laws with extreme cruelty and questioned the legitimacy of any federal judges of Latino heritage, has kinder words for the leaders of Russia and North Korea than he can must for our North Atlantic Treaty Organization partners, and is even coarser than Nixon ever was in his “twitter” denunciations of the damned hippies.

As much as the die-hard fans love it, it’s not at all the conservatism and Republican party we signed up with. With ur old-school sensibilities we’re free press absolutists, and we worry how that Third World “lock ’em up” stuff might play out if the damned Democrats control the White House and both chambers of Congress yet again. We have nothing against Latino citizens and legal immigrants, and rather enjoy their music and food and construction and road-paving efforts and occasional judicial opinions. We prefer our classically liberal democratic allies to the authoritarian populists popping up around the world, and by now we’re friends with a lot of dope-smoking hippies, and our hard=hat friends are also taking atoke  or two.

Which is not to say that we agree about anything with anyone on the left. Even the aged and relatively wised-up Democrats toward the center have always been too far left for our centrist tastes, and Grim’s favored youngsters strike us as at least as crazy as Trump.

There’s always some hope that the upcoming congressional impeachment investigations will result in some deus ex machina that delivers the Republican party some nominee other than Trump, and that the Democrats won’t go full-blown socialist. We can’t envision any scenario where the budget gets balanced, or any sort of budget actually gets passed and signed into law, or health care becomes universal and inexpensive, or all the ethnic and sexual groups learn to love another, but we hold out hope the center will hold and the republic will somehow persist.

When we were born Eisenhower had reconciled the Republicans with Social Security and most of the rest of Roosevelt’s New Deal,  and until recently the Democrats have only arguing about how much to tax the free markets that Goldwater and Reagan had championed, everyone more or less agreed on the post-war world order that Presidents Truman and Eisenhower and Kennedy and Nixon had sustained, and for the most part it worked out well enough. At this point in our late middle age we believe the sole purpose of the Democratic party is to keep the damned Republicans from imposing their worst ideas on a great nation, and that the Republicans exist solely to save the country from the Democrats dumbest ideas.

For now both parties are seized by a wild-eyed youthful idealism, which we’ve noticed from our reading of history is the most destructive force on the planet, but old age and experience and its resulting caution still stand a fighting chance. We’ll probably wind up casting another futile protest vote on some write-in candidate, but hope the rest of the country chooses as wisely as possible, given the circumstances..

— Bud Norman

‘Crazy’ Bernie Sanders, Crazy Like on Fox

More pressing matters kept us from watching independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sander’s two-hour “town hall” on the Fox Network Monday night, but despite an infuriatingly busy day of play rehearsal and car troubles on Tuesday we couldn’t help hearing about it. President Donald Trump was apparently watching, as he “tweeted” quite a bit about it.

Trump is usually a big fan of Fox News’ programming, but was quite displeased about it giving Sanders two full hours to make the case for his presidential run. “So weird to watch Crazy Bernie on @FoxNews,” Trump “tweeted,” adding “Not surprisingly, @BretBaier and the ‘audience’ was so smiley and nice. Very strange, and now we have @Donnabrazile?”

In case you’re only a casual fan of the media game, the
@” thing with the missing spaces is newfangled internet lingo, “Crazy Bernie” is Trump’s usual nickname for the duly elected Senator, along with Chris Wallace Bret Baier is one of the few Fox News journalists who occasionally poses hard questions to the Trump administration, and Donna Brazile is the former Democratic National Committee chairwoman recently hired by Fox News to add some balance to its panel debates. The audience Fox News chose for the “town hall” reflected the mix of Republicans and Democrats and independents and right-wingers and left-wingers that make up the swing district in the swing state of Pennsylvania where the broadcast took place, and although it was hardly “so smiley and nice” we can see how it was a bit too civil and fair and balanced for Trump’s tastes.

As old-fashioned Republicans wer’e not at all fans of Sanders’ self-proclaimed socialism, but neither do we care much for Trump, and as old-school newspaper journalists we reckon that Sanders got the best of it.

The town hall was held in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, one of those de-industrialized Rust Belt towns that have been left behind in high-tech and service economy, and a majority of its citizens twice voted for President Barack Obama based on his promises of a futuristic revival, and when that predictably pan out a majority voted for President Donald Trump’s promises turn back time to the good old days of his steel-making and coal-mining and less-Mexican youth. Now that those promises are predictably proving hard to keep, the district and the state’s sizable and potentially crucial 20 electoral votes are one again up for grabs. Sanders’ unabashed tax-and-spend and even more-socialistic-than-Obama shtick almost certainly won’t work out well for the people of Bethlehem, but they’ve already fallen for both Obama’s pie-in-the-sky futurism and Trump’s for Technicolor promise to turn back the clock to the good old days of hard and sweaty and life-shortening labor in the steel mills and coal mines, and “Crazy Bernie” might well convince them he couldn’t do worse.

Sanders was shrewd enough to not describe those Rust Belt Obama-voters-turned-Trump-voters as racist “deplorables,” as the last Democratic presidential nominee stupidly did, and he emphasized his policy disagreements with Trump more than the president’s undeniable character flaws and countless scandals. Sanders has his own character questions and political scandals, including an out-of-wedlock son he recently declined to endorse in a Vermont political race, and a wife who runs a currently bankrupt college, but in an age when the sitting president is a boastfully adulterous womanizer who apparently cheated on his nude-model third wife a porn star, and an openly homosexual mid-sized city mayor is climbing in the Democratic primary polls, that sort of old-fashioned stuff doesn’t seem to matter much.

At times got Sanders got some big applause from all segments on the Bethlehem audience, at other times he got some boos and hisses, so we can well understand why Trump didn’t like what Fox News was doing. He’s come to rely on the highly-rated Fox News network for unceasing hosannas, is understandably perplexed why they should hand over two hours of prime time to someone who could very well beat him the crucial state of Pennsylvania, and why they should fine air time for that awful Brazile woman. As old-fashioned Republicans we can empathize, but as old-school newspaper journalists we have no problem with how Fox News handled it.

As crazy as he quite arguably is, Sanders is a leading contender for the Democratic nomination, and seems to have a good chance of knocking off Trump in Pennsylvania and the rest of the Electoral College next time around, so that’s a solid reason for Fox News or any other journalistic outlet to grant him a couple of hours to expound his crazy ideas. Bret Baier and his co-host did ask some pretty tough questions, and if they were civil if not quite “smiley and nice” about it, that doesn’t bother us a bit.

One of the other character questions about Sanders is that the self-proclaimed scourge of the millionaires and billionaire and 1 percent has learned more than a million dollars over the past two years, putting him well into hated 1 percent, so the self-proclaimed billionaire of course “tweeted” about that hypocrisy, given that Sanders got a huge break from Trump’s tax reform bill. Trump should have noticed that even Brett Baier asked about that, and that Sanders accurately responded he’d voted against the bill. We’re no fans of Sanders’ soak-the-rich socialism, nor Trump’s wildly overstated tax cuts that worked out best for the wealthy, but we have to admit that Sanders voted against the bill and his self-interests and seems to have the courage of his quite arguably crazy convictions, which is more than we can say for Trump and whatever convictions he’s espousing today.

There’s been some grumbling among the Democrats that Sanders would boostt ratings in two highly-rated hours for the hated Fox News, and the Democratic National Committee has determined that none of its primary debates will be aired on the network. Most Republican politicians these days are similarly wary of the Cable News Network and MSNBC and the rest of the widely-watched broadcast and cable and print media, but they’d probably do well to follow Sanders’ example and wade into enemy territory. They won’t find a nice and smiley audience, to be sure, and there are likely hard questions to be asked, but it will likely be at least civil, and we still hold out hope an old-fashioned Republican who doesn’t make grandiose promises should be able to make a persuasive case to at least some of those people in such crucial places as Bethlehem.

In an ideal world there’d be an old-fashioned Republican party telling the white underclass what its been telling the brown and black underclass for decades, that it needs to get off its lazy ass and relocate and reinvent itself for the modern economy, but that now seems unlikely, and the damned Democrats don’t have anything better to offer. For now we have little regard for either side of the political divide, but we still hold out hope that a free and open press might somehow hold the center.

— Bud Norman

Meanwhile, Far South of the Border

The weather around here has been awful lately, but we’ve taken some comfort in reading about how much worse it’s been to the north and east. Similarly, no matter how bad America’s politics get we can still be glad that we’re not living in Venezuela.

Not so long ago in our lifetimes the oil-rich nation of Venezuela was prosperous and peaceful by Latin American standards, but the socialist regimes of President Hugo Chavez and then President Nicolas Maduro have wrought an unmitigated economic disaster. Unemployment is sky-high, such basic necessities as toilet paper are desperately hard to find, and the inflation rate is a staggering one million percent. Mass protests are filling the streets of the capital and other cities, the guy who lost the last presidential election under highly suspect circumstances is plausibly claiming to be the legitimate head of state, and it makes America’s protracted and seemingly intractable partial government shutdown look like no big deal.

President Donald Trump’s administration has pleasantly surprised us by siding with opposition leader Juan Guaido’s claim to the Venezuelan presidency, which is backed by those hundreds of thousands of protestors packing the streets, as well as the governments of several of the country’s South American neighbors. It’s surprising in part because Russia and the Venezuelan military and the more autocratic government of America are still backing Maduro, as well as the fact that Trump typically admires his strong man style of governance, and that Trump doesn’t usually much care what goes on south of America’s border so long as it stays there. We’ll attribute it to a traditional Republican revulsion for Latin American socialism and the clout of the very traditional Republican Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, but give Trump some credit nonetheless.

Which is not to say that it will prove helpful to Venezuela, and it’s possible it could make things worse. There’s an understandable if not entirely unjustified resentment of Yankee imperialism throughout Latin America, which Latin American dictators have long used to rally public opinion against even the best-intended and well-considered efforts to intervene in their affairs, and Maduro should and Maduro should be able make even more hay of it when the Yankee imperialist is the hated-throughout-Latin-America Trump. Maduro retains the the support of the military, which we doubt Trump wants to tangle with, as well as Russia and Cuba and Bolivia and other countries Trump is eager to make deals with, while China and Mexico and other important trading partners are staying on the sidelines, and Trump is known for making his own sudden expedient policy shifts to the sidelines.

Even so, for now Trump finds himself on the side of Canada and most members of the Organization of American States and those hundreds of thousands of protestors taking to the streets, and we’re hopeful he’ll stay there. Chavez and to a lesser extent Maduro were once the darlings of America’s radical left, and the American right’s favorite cautionary tale about the consequences of socialism, and for now the right is clearly winning that argument. Although Maduro is a classic populist strongman autocrat and that Guaido fellow is a thin and youthful and handsome and glib fellow who reminds of a Venezuelan version of America’s Democratic center-left darling Beto O’Rourke, Trump is probably politically astute enough to know his stand will play well with all sorts of freedom-loving Americans.

Meanwhile, most of the rest of the world also seems worse off than we are here in frigid Kansas. Crazy Venezuelan-style left wing populism has much of Central America heading to the United States border, and crazy Trump-style populism is currently making things worse in Brazil and Poland and Hungary and Italy and the Philippines. The sensibly centrist governments of France and the United Kingdom are currently in crisis, too, with the streets of Paris once again burning and the Parliament in London trying to find its way out of a slumping European Union.

Better by far to be here in frigid Kansas than in China or Russia, or anywhere in Africa and the Arab world, or even the most up-to-date and well-heated cities of Asia and Europe. We’re still eagerly awaiting spring and the reopening of the federal government, and in the meantime we’ll warm ourselves with the knowledge of how much worse most of the rest of world’s unlucky folks have it.

— Bud Norman

Socialized Medicine and the State of the Union

Self-described socialist Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders has officially proposed a Medicare For All Act, which is basically a socialized single-payer insurance scheme, and although it’s not likely to become law in the near future it’s nonetheless an ominous development.

The bill already has 15 Democratic Senators signed on, including several who are considered contenders for the party’s next presidential nomination, and all the polls confirm our anecdotal evidence from conversations at the local hipster bars that the party’s increasingly leftward base is enthusiastic for the idea. For now they don’t comprise a majority of popular opinion, much less the needed congressional majorities, and there’s also a putatively Republican president to veto anything they might get passed, but the idea no longer seems so far-fetched.

Democrats have been chasing the white whale of socialized medicine for a century or so, and Republicans have been successfully fending off the bogeyman of their efforts for just as long, The left has long noted that America is alone among the industrialized nations in not offering some sort of universal health insurance, and the right has long been able to reply by noting how much longer people in those countries have to wait for a medical procedure, and how much they pay in taxes, how puny their militaries become to pay for it, how free markets are as always more efficient than the government-run variety, and all those arguments still stand.

Even the editorial board at The Washington Post acknowledges the budget-busting implications of Sander’s proposal, and such relatively centrist Democrats as recent Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton are warning against Sanders’ influence on the party. The Democrats had a hard enough time getting the semi-socialized Obamacare passed with bigger majorities in congress and a more true-blue Democrat in the White House, they suffered huge electoral losses on the lower ticket right down to the city council levels as a result, and for now there are only 15 Democratic senators and the usual number of House members signed on.

That’s for now, though, and these days there’s no telling how long that will last. For four consecutive electoral cycles the Republicans gained everything but the presidency on a promise to repeal Obamacare, and on the fourth try a putatively Republican won the White House on the same promise, but so far it’s proved as impossible as ever to undo any entitlement program that has a couple of million telegenic beneficiaries. The Republicans are betting that when Obamacare inevitably fails with vast human consequences both public opinion and the Democrats will come crawling for some free market solution, and not notice they didn’t try to at least stave it off, but we wouldn’t make that bet.

Some Trump-wary Republican pundits we respect think the Democrats are lurching so far leftward with a socialized single-payer system that they’ll wind up with a ’72-style loss, but these days seem even weirder than that weird year. Once upon our young lifetimes the words “socialized medicine” were a career-ending slut, but that was before a self-described socialist won 45 percent or so of the Democratic votes. It’s not good to root for other party going to the extremes, whether you’re a Republican or a Democrat, because there’s always a good chance that your party will as well.

Those sound arguments about the inefficiencies and far-reaching costs of socialized medicine still persuade most Republicans and the more sane sorts of Democrats, but the vast majority of the country is as always susceptible to promises of coverage for everyone at a vastly lower price. We can easily believe that next time around those silly Democratic primary voters will buy it, as the last time around the Republican party nominated a candidate peddling the same snake oil. All indications are that after an illegal-immigrant-bashing campaign Trump is eager to sign the illegal-immigrant-friendly “DREAM Act” that Obama and those bigger Democratic majorities couldn’t get passed, and he’s also capitulated to the Democrats’ budget and debt ceiling proposals, so there’s no telling how he might come out on a deal to immortalize him as the man who brought universal health coverage to America.

For now, at least, there are clean-ups from the floods and “Russia” leaks and plenty of other things to worry about.

— Bud Norman

Who Knew Health Care Was Hard?

President Donald Trump was speaking to a meeting of the National Governors Association about health care reform a couple of weeks ago, and he offered up yet another one of those occasional quotes of his that cause us slap to our foreheads. “I have to tell you, it’s an unbelievably complex subject,” he said. “Nobody knew that health care could be so complicated.”

Every sentient American already knew that health care is darned tricky, and certainly each of those governors hearing the speech were especially well aware of it, so it’s a sobering thought that pretty much the only person in the country who thought it was easy is the president. Even the minimal amount of regulation that a free-market purist would agree to for the ever-evolving and increasingly high-tech medical sector that comprises a full sixth of the nation’s $17.4 trillion economy is bound to be tricky, managing every aspect of it is beyond the ambitions of even the most arrogant Democrats, and any compromise you might find somewhere in between is bound to be exponentially more complicated. The policy questions are daunting enough, but as Trump as surely figured out by now, the politics involved are even more convoluted.

Trump and the Republicans running the two chambers Congress rolled out the first of three promised phases of their plan to repeal and replace the current Obamacare system earlier this week, and if they thought that getting it passed into law was going to be easy they should now be wised up. There are still enough Democrats left in Congress to make trouble for for any changes in Obamacare, although the law is unpopular enough throughout the districts and states that it’s largely responsible for a Republican White House and an electoral victory for a Republican president, and there are still enough pre-Trump sorts of Republicans left in both chambers who won’t stand for any aspect of Obamacare, even those several provisions that poll extremely well with the general public, and what with politics making strange bedfellows they can cause all sorts of complications together.

Unless you’ve been too busy with your reality television show or branding negotiations to have been paying attention, for the past seven years or so the repeal and replacement of the hated Obamacare has been the metaphorical Moby Dick to the Republican’s Captain Ahab. Not one single Republican, even though squishy ones that you still find up way up northeast, voted for the damn thing, everyone last one of them has cast meaningless votes for its repeals on a regular basis ever since. From the most staid conservative publications to the most shrieking talk radio shows the entirety of the party was opposed to Obamacare, which was forced on a resistant public with some procedural legerdemain and a variety of lies about lowered costs and keeping your plan and your doctor that were eventually exposed, and conferred unprecedented powers on the federal government, and had monogamous couples paying for sexually-transmitted disease coverage and Catholic nuns paying for contraception and otherwise permanently altered its social contract with citizens, and generally offended every old-fashion Republican principle. As the false promises about lower costs and freedom of choice were exposed the Republican majorities in Congress grew, and with a Republican president who wouldn’t have gotten his party’s nomination without an unequivocal promise to repeal and replace Obamacare it should have been easily accomplished.

Politics is always complicated, though, and Trump’s apparent belief that it’s actually all quite simple adds another layer of complexity. The parts of Obamacare that allow young people to remain on their parents’ plan until age 26 and let people sign up for insurance at the usual rate after a pre-existing condition have been discovered poll well with the public, the subsidies that are being provided to a reported 20 million or so people are even more more popular with that reported 20 million or so people, and among them are some folks who will have tear-jerking stories to tell on the nightly news, and at this point it’s hard to tell how the unpopular Trump will fare against the unpopular Obamacare. All the Republicans are taking care not to call the new policies Trumpcare, even Trump, who usually loves to put his name on things, because at the moment both Trump and Obamacare seem equally unpopular.

As the pre-Trump sorts of Republicans, we were hoping for that most minimal sort of regulation no matter how complicated that might prove. If the insurance wants to sell policies that allow include children to any old age we’d be happy to let them, and expect that many would find it profitable to do so, but we wouldn’t force them do so no matter what the polls have to say about it. The preexisting conditions thing about Obamacare comes with all those heartbreaking stories, but you could just as easily interview people who couldn’t get flood insurance after their house was underwater, and no matter how heartbreaking it just doesn’t make economic sense. We have some red-in-tooth-and-claw solutions to the whole matter of rising health care costs, too, but we acknowledge they won’t poll well, and admit that the ever-changing high-tech world of medical marvels makes it very complicated.

Interstate health insurance plans and no mandated coverage of unnecessary producers and much of what else we were hoping for wasn’t included in the latest proposal but is promised to come in phases two and three of the great Republican health care reform roll-out, and for now we’ll take their word for it. Still, we can’t help wondering why they’re dishing it out like that. Something in phase one might make sense if it were done in conjunction with something in phase two or three, but not otherwise, these things being very interrelated, and the uncertainty of what’s to come only complicates matters further. Coming up with something better than the undeniably disastrous Obamacare system should have been a relatively simple matter, but of course Trump complicated matters by promising something “wonderful,” which of course is a whole lot harder to achieve.

Trump was all over the place on the issue during his improbably victorious campaign, wowing the Republicans with the usual repeal and replace rhetoric, but also promising the broader public some spectacular but unspecified plan where everyone would be covered and the government would pay for it and the costs would go down and quality of care would go up, and he really should have expected that would prove complicated. He’s already abandoned a campaign position in favor of that stupid individual mandate that requires poor people to pay a penalty for not having insurance, but endorsed a plan that would allow insurance companies to charge a 30 percent fee on people whose insurance have lapsed, and he’s no longer talking about the government paying to insure everybody, but he has abandoned enough longstanding Republican positions about the proper role of free markets and individual liberty and meddling bureaucracies in the nation’s health care to lose some Republican support. On the other hand he’s still retreating from the Democrats’ positions on those very vital questions, and won’t likely get any support from a single one of them.

We’re hopeful that at the end of all this complicated fuss that’s going to consume the next several months we’ll wind up with something that’s at least better than that dreadful Obamacare, but we don’t expect that it’s going to wind up being something as wonderful as what was promised. Obamacare wasn’t altogether bad, otherwise its repeal and replacement wouldn’t be so thorny, but it’s dreadfulness was made all the more apparent in contrast to the sales pitch, and what’s likely to known as Trumpcare surely won’t be altogether good, so its promises should be made accordingly. That’s not the Trump style, of course, and some painful but necessary procedures will probably be left out of the care, and we expect the fuss over it will outlast us all.

One of the few old-fashioned Republicans who has somehow enthusiastically embraced this newfangled Trumpist party is Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton, who has been surprisingly outspoken in his opposition to what’s thus-far been rolled out. He “tweeted” that the Democrats were too hasty in passing that darned Obamacare when they enjoyed a Democratic White House and majorities in both chambers of Congress, and urged that his own party not repeat the mistake. We like Cotton’s old-fashioned Republicanism, and despite our disappointment with his enthusiasm for Trump’s newfangled party we think his advice to slow down and get it right is sound. The Republicans should take at least enough time to hear all three phases of what they’re doing, gauge just how free-market the party can get away given the current political climate, do what’s doable, and be satisfied if the results are somewhat better than Obamacare even if it so wonderful that nobody dies.

— Bud Norman

The Sanders Series Comes to an End

The strange saga of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’ quixotic presidential campaign came to its inevitable inglorious end on Tuesday, and we have to admit that we’re sorry to see the series finale of such a compelling reality show. Sanders is a self-described socialist and an absolute kook whose policies would surely be the Venezuelan-style ruination of America, and it’s slightly discomfiting to our red-in-tooth-and-claw capitalist souls that his campaign went so far into the July of an election year even in the Democratic Party, but there was a certain endearing quality to his kookiness and it was always great fun to see him bedevil that awful woman who had been picked by the party bosses before the battle even began.

All kids dug the balding and white-haired 70-something throwback to an Old Left that they didn’t even know had been supplanted by a New Left, even the gray-haired New Left throwbacks we know from the local arts and hipster scenes were “Feeling the Bern,” and our atypically homosexual and Democratic neighborhood here in an otherwise reliably Republican city in a reliably Republican state has long been sprouting “Bernie 2016” yard signs like dandelions, and even we found something endearing even if discomfiting about him. The best explanation in every case is that Sanders is indeed “authentic,” something that both parties and much of the rest of the country seems quite enamored of after so many years of politicians reading from poll-tested and focus-grouped texts, and neither we nor any of our more liberal friends ever once doubted that he quite sincerely believed all that nonsense he was shouting. He’d long been poor and never been conspicuously rich, despite a long career in politics he was so cleanly outside the party system he wasn’t even a Democrat until he sought the party’s nomination, and despite all the wacky anecdotes about his dirt-floor days and a family history that used to be considered scandalous and of course those ruinous policies no one has come up with anything on him that smacks of hypocrisy.

Which we’d like to think is the main reason he so long bedeviled that awful woman whose victory was already determined when Sanders started tilting at those Democratic windmills. Presumptive Democratic nominee and former First Lady and Senator and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is the epitome of a politician reading from a poll-tested and focus-grouped text, and she’s never been as poor as she likes to brag about and she’s become very rich from her long tenure in the political process, and at this point even most Democrats will admit she might or might not believe any of that slightly-more-mainstream kookiness she’s spouting. It endears us to our Democratic friends that they still take such character issues in account, even as if discomfits us that they prefer a self-described socialist.

We can well imagine our Democratic friends’ pain as they watched their anti-establishment hero formally endorse the nomination of the establishment’s pre-ordained candidate on Tuesday, siding with a woman he had rightly denounced as aligned with the nefarious Wall Street sorts at the uppermost tier of every Democrats’ demonology, and accurately pointed out had voted for the Iraq War that the arch-demon George W. Bush had lied us into, and so far they seem rather sore about it. The “comments” section on our former employer The Kansas City Star’s story features people so miffed about it they’re vowing to vote for presumptive Republican nominee Donald J. Trump, and other media have logged similar threats by the rank and file, and for the now the storyline even in the most Democratic outlets is that there’s party disunity afoot. Trump is already talking and “tweeting” about the undeniably rigged process that handed Clinton the nomination, even if she did win a majority of the primary and caucus votes, and making explicit appeals to the disgruntled supporters of a self-described socialist. He can legitimately make the case that he’s on board with that storyline about Bush lied and people died and sticks to his illegitimate claim that he knew better, but the self-described billionaire will be harder pressed to make an economic case to a bunch of kids who liked all the free stuff that Sanders was offering to be paid for by awful billionaires without exacerbating the disunity in his own formerly conservative party.

Our best guess is that some of those Sanders supporters will wind up voting for the Green Party’s admittedly authentic and scandal-free-except-for-being-a-kook Jill Stein, some will wind up voting for Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson, whose economic platform is the antithesis of the self-described socialist’s but is for legalized marijuana, which is likely to come in handy during the coming years no matter how this all turns out, few will vote for Trump and most will wind up glumly voting for Clinton. Sanders has volunteered his efforts to Clinton’s campaign, and if his fans aren’t so loyal that they’d vote for him even if he shot someone on Fifth Avenue they’ll probably follow him to the polls to vote against Trump. The possibility of a Trump presidency strikes the same terror in the soul of a Democrat that the possibility of a Clinton presidency does in a Republican soul, and that’s how the race is shaping up despite Sanders’ best efforts.

Even in the abject defeat of that awkward appearance with Clinton Tuesday, Sanders’ quixotic campaign has slewed a couple of windmills along the way. He’s dragged Clinton and the rest of the party to the left on such kooky ideas as free college education, the by now bi-partiasan consensus for protectionist trade policies, ever more profligate deficit spending, and henceforth being a self-described socialist and admitted agnostic won’t be immediately disqualifying traits in at least one of the country’s two major parties. It’s not much of a legacy, but it was interesting to watch.

— Bud Norman

In the Age of Whatever Works

Latin America faces a crucial choice between liberty and tyranny, as always, just like the rest of us, and the President of the United States’ advice is that it go with “whatever works.” Barack Obama actually said that nonsense in a speech to the Young Leaders of the Americas Initiative while on his recent south-of-the-border tour, and although that also included him doing the wave at a baseball game with the communist dictator of Cuba and embarrassingly doing the tango for his Peronista variety of fascist hosts in Argentina while the capital of the European Union reeled from yet another terror attack it was probably the low point of that disastrous vacation.

Any President of the United States worthy of that once-august office would be making the plain case that liberty is the only thing that has ever worked in the entire history of organized humankind, and that tyranny has never worked out, but these days that is apparently too much to ask for. The runaway winner of five of the last six state contests in the Democratic nominating process is the self-described socialist Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who worries that there are too many kinds of deodorants on America’s supermarket shelves and prescribes the same solutions that have resulted in toilet paper shortages in Venezuela, and the party’s putative front-runner struggles to explain why she’s not a socialist. Meanwhile, the putative Republican front-runner is issuing threats that his press critics will “have problems, such problems” and “tweeting” like a South American caudillo and promising nothing but “better deals” with all these pesky foreigners, which sounds to us like pretty much like the equivalent of “whatever works.”

The sole remaining long-shot possibility for the leadership of what was once called the free world is Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, whose much criticized father endured the tortures of the same communist Cuban dictatorship that the “whatever works” president was doing the wave with, and went on to a formidable career and as a legal and Senatorial advocate for the conservative cause, and he strikes us as a full-throated advocate of liberty and the Judeo-Christian tradition and red-in-tooth-and-claw capitalism and other higher values than whatever might work. He’s bogged down with a report in the front-runner’s buddy’s National Enquirer, though, and is just within the margin-of-error in the polls in the important states of Wisconsin and California. We’d love to see a match-up of Cruz’ hard-edged advocacy of capitalism and constitutionalism against Sanders’ unabashed socialism and whatever works, but such stark choices are perhaps too much to wish for in an age when people are more concerned with whatever works for them, if not necessarily everyone else.

— Bud Norman