Wrongdoing or evil actions are often masked by good intentions, and sometimes good intentions, when acted upon, may have unforeseen tragic consequences.
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It’s early. Polls don’t matter. Bernie Sanders isn’t going to beat Hillary in a primary. Yeah, I get it.
But Holy Workers Party Revolution, guys. The Republican brand is so bad right now that Bernie Democratic Socialist Sanders is beating every single major Republican candidate in a CNN poll released yesterday.
Among the adult population, Sanders beat Jeb Bush 48-47, Scott Walker 48-42 and Donald Trump by a massive 58-38 margin. When narrowing the field to registered voters, Sanders trails Bush by one point, but maintains solid leads among all other Republican challengers.
To be clear, 41 percent of respondents had never heard of Sanders, so his leads over the Republican candidates could be in many respects a function of voters selecting a generic Democrat ahead of any Republican. But at the end of the day, isn’t that significant in and of itself? To the extent that voters are paying attention to the Republican primary campaign, they know that it’s a hot mess, and that whichever candidate emerges from the fray is going to be someone who doesn’t come close to sharing their values.
So sure, you can say that Sanders has little to no chance of beating Hillary Clinton in a primary campaign, but what you can’t say is that you shouldn’t vote for him because the general electorate would write him off as a beyond-the-pale extremist.
Bernie Sanders speaking at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, via John Pemble / Flickr
It’s also important to note that the CNN poll’s toplines recorded adults, while filtering for registered voters, and that likely voter models normally produce less favorable results for Democratic candidates. However, as Demos’s Sean McElwee pointed out earlier today, the kinds of policies Sanders is advocating — debt-free college, universal pre-K, basic income, ending corporate welfare — are the kinds of policies that turn unlikely voters into voters. Sanders isn’t electable simply because heisn’t as extreme as his opponents make him out to be, and he isn’t electable simply because the American public agrees with him on his core issues. The real reason Sanders is electable is that he has the potential to turn people out who otherwise wouldn’t vote at all.
As McElwee noted, 54 percent of unregistered voters — over 25 million people who are disproportionately comprised of low-income, minority and liberal voters — believe that politics is too corrupt; 42 percent believe that there’s no difference between the two parties. And when they say “no difference,” they may well acknowledge that one party wants to tweaks the marginal tax rate for the top one percent, or even that the two parties diverge significantly on social policy, but that isn’t their point. When they say “no difference” they mean that politicians in both parties are beholden to a donor class that is fundamentally opposed to addressing the root causes of structural inequality; neither party really cares about people like them. Bernie Sanders is the only candidate who can make a credible claim to understanding this grievance, let alone wanting to do something about it, and for this reason he has a monopoly on the disaffected vote.
(You could make the argument that Donald Trump is tapping into similar disaffection on the right. He is, but those voters are turning out to vote for the eventual Republican nominee either way.)
There’s a reason why a poll last week found that Sanders is the only politician in either primary field with a net positive favorability rating: They like what he has to say, and they don’t think he’s sold out to the donor class.
Armchair political observers have a tendency to measure electability in terms of endorsements and fundraising as opposed to, you know, the number of people who say they want to vote for a given candidate. But by that metric Bernie Sanders is in a position to do just fine in a general election.
Jon Green Jon Green graduated from Kenyon College with a B.A. in Political Science and high honors in Political Cognition. He worked as a field organizer for Congressman Tom Perriello in 2010 and a Regional Field Director for President Obama's re-election campaign in 2012. Jon writes on a number of topics, but pays especially close attention to elections, religion and political cognition. Follow him on Twitter at @_Jon_Green, and on Google+. Article archive.
In an updated extract from his book The Narcissist Next Door, Jeffrey Kluger writes that being Trump is probably less fun than you'd think
Even as the comet that is The Donald continues to streak across the political sky—as babes peer in wonder out their windows, dogs bay in fear in the night and scholars debate the source of the great apparition—it’s worth taking a moment to feel some compassion for the man who’s causing all the mischief.
The fact is, it can’t be easy to wake up every day and discover that you’re still Donald Trump. You were Trump yesterday, you’re Trump today, and barring some extraordinary development, you’ll be Trump tomorrow.
There are, certainly, compensations to being Donald Trump. You’re fabulously wealthy; you have a lifetime pass to help yourself to younger and younger wives, even as you get older and older—a two-way Benjamin Button dynamic that is equal parts enviable and grotesque. You own homes in Manhattan; Palm Beach; upstate New York; Charlottesville, Virginia; and Rancho Palos Verdes, California; and you’re free to bunk down in a grand suite in practically any hotel, apartment building or resort that flies the Trump flag, anywhere on the planet—and there are a lot of them.
But none of that changes the reality of waking up every morning, looking in the bathroom mirror, and seeing Donald Trump staring back at you. And no, it’s not the hair; that, after all, is a choice—one that may be hard for most people to understand, but a choice all the same, and there’s a certain who-asked-you confidence in continuing to make it. The problem with being Trump is the same thing that explains the enormous fame and success of Trump: a naked neediness, a certain shamelessness, an insatiable hunger to be the largest, loudest, most honkingly conspicuous presence in any room—the great, braying Trumpness of Trump—and that’s probably far less of a revel than it seems.
Contented people, well-grounded people, people at ease inside their skin, just don’t behave the way Trump does. The shorthand—and increasingly lazy—description for Trump in recent weeks is that he is the id of the Republican party, and there’s some truth in that. Trump indeed appears to be emotionally incontinent, a man wholly without—you should pardon the expression—any psychic sphincter. The boundary most people draw between thought and speech, between emotion and action, does not appear to exist for Trump. He says what he wants to say, insults whom he wants to insult, and never, ever considers apology or retreat.
But that’s not someone driven by the pleasures of the id—which, whatever else you can say about it, is a thing of happy appetites and uncaring impulses. It’s far more someone driven by the rage and pain and emotional brittleness of narcissism, and everywhere in Trump’s life are the signs of what a fraught state of mind that can be.
There is Trump’s compulsive use of superlatives—especially when he’s talking about his own accomplishments. Maybe what he’s building or selling really is the greatest, the grandest, the biggest, the best, but if that’s so, let the product do the talking. If it can’t, maybe it ain’t so great.
There’s the compulsive promotion of the Trump name. Other giants of commerce and industry use their own names sparingly—even when they’re businesspeople who have the opportunity to turn themselves from a person into a brand. There is no GatesWare software, no BezosBooks.com; it’s not Zuckerbook you log onto a dozen times a day.
But the Trump name is everywhere in the Trump world, and there’s a reason for that. You can look at something you’ve built with quiet pride and know it’s yours, or you can look at it worriedly, insecurely, fretting that someone, somewhere may not know that you created it—diminishing you in the process. And so you stamp what you build with two-story letters identifying who you are— like a child writing his name on a baseball glove—just to make sure there’s no misunderstanding.
On occasion, there is an almost—almost—endearing cluelessness to the primal way Trump signals his pride in himself. He poses for pictures with his suit jacket flaring open, his hands on his hips, index and ring fingers pointing inevitably groinward—a great-ape fitness and genital display if ever there was one. After he bought the moribund Gulf+Western Building in New York City’s Columbus Circle, covered it in gold-colored glass, converted it into a luxury hotel and residence, and reinforced it with steel and concrete to make it less subject to swaying in the wind, Trump boasted to The New York Times that it was going to be “the stiffest building in the city.” If he was aware of his own psychic subtext, he gave no indication.
It’s not just real estate Trump seeks to own or at least control. There was his attempt to trademark the words “You’re fired,” after they became a catchphrase on his reality show, The Apprentice. There was his offer to donate $5 million to a charity of President Obama’s choosing if Obama would release his college transcripts to him, Donald Trump. In both cases, Trump wants something—possession, attention, the obeisance of no less than the President—and so he demands it. The behavior is less id than infant—the most narcissistic stage of the human life cycle.
The petulance of Trump’s public feuds—with Rosie ODonnell (“a total loser”), Seth Meyers (“He’s a stutterer”), Robert De Niro (“We’re not dealing with Albert Einstein”) and Arianna Huffington, (“Unattractive both inside and out. I fully understand why her former husband left her for a man . . .”)—is wholly of a piece with the fragility of the narcissistic ego. In Trump’s imaginings, it is Fox News’s Megyn Kelly who owes him an apology for asking pointed questions during the Republican debate, not Trump who owes Kelly an apology for his boorish behavior and school-yard Tweets (“Wow, @megynkelly really bombed tonight. People are going wild on twitter! Funny to watch”). As for his sneering misogyny—his reference to blood coming out of Kelly’s “wherever”? Nothing to see here. It’s Jeb Bush who really should apologize to women for his comments about defunding Planned Parenthood.
Trump was right on that score; Bush was indeed clueless to suggest that the annual cost of protecting women’s health should not be as high as $500 million—or just over $3.14 per American woman per year. So Bush did what people with at least some humility do: He acknowledged his mistake and at least tried to qualify the statement. That option, however, is closed for the narcissist. The overweening ego that defines the condition is often just a bit of misdirection intended to conceal the exact opposite—a deep well of insecurity and even self-loathing. Any admission of wrong shatters that masquerade.
To call Donald Trump a narcissist is, of course, to state the clinically obvious. There is the egotism of narcissism, the grandiosity of narcissism, the social obtuseness of narcissism. But if Trump is an easy target, he is also a pitiable one. Narcissism isn’t easy, it isn’t fun, it isn’t something to be waved off as a personal shortcoming that hurts only the narcissists themselves, any more than you can look at the drunk or philanderer or compulsive gambler and not see grief and regret in his future.
For now, yes, the Trump show is fun to watch. It will be less so if the carnival barker with his look-at-me antics continues to distract people from a serious discussion of important issues. It will be less still if Trump actually does wind up as the nominee of a major political party or mounts an independent campaign and succeeds in tipping the vote one way or the other.
But that kind of triumph is not the fate that awaits most narcissists. Their act becomes old, their opponents become bold, and the audience—inevitably—moves onto something else. Trump the phenomenon will surely become Trump the afterthought. He is a man who desperately hungers for respect and attention and who, by dint of that very desperation, will likely wind up with neither. The pain will be his; the relief will be ours.
Goldman
Sachs alum Jon S. Corzine kisses Democratic presidential candidate
Hillary Rodham Clinton in 2007. (Photo: AP / Mel Evans)
She eats at Chipotle. (Order: chicken burrito bowl.) She travels by van. (Model: A Chevy Express Explorer Limited SE nicknamed
the "Scooby" van.) She barely figures in her own presidential campaign
announcement video. (Entrance timing: A minute and a half into the two-minute clip.)
Her campaign staff is so cheap they don't have business cards, they
commute by Bolt Bus, and they aren't even equipped with real phones.
This is the "new" Hillary Clinton in the early days of her 2016
presidential bid. Absent -- for now -- are the swagger, the grand
pronouncements, the packed gymnasiums and auditoriums, and the claques
of well-paid consultants falling over each other to advise and guide her
that we saw in Clinton's last presidential bid. This time around,
Clinton is casting herself in a new role: as the humble and understated
people’s candidate. She cares about "everyday Iowans" and "everyday
Granite Staters." She really does! Her carefully staged events with
those "everyday" Americans at small-town coffee shops and local
businesses give her the chance to "share ideas to tackle today’s
problems and demonstrate her commitment to earning their votes.
This effort to recast Clinton as a folksy, down-to-earth, woman of
we-the-people is, however, about to collide with the reality of American
politics in the money-crazed, post-Citizens United era.
Winning the White House in 2016 will cost somewhere between $1 billion
and $3 billion -- money raised by the candidate's own campaign and
outside groups like super PACs and dark-money nonprofits. And this in an
election where it’s already estimated that the overall money may hit $10 billion.
Jeb Bush, arguably the most formidable candidate in the GOP field, is
on his way to raising $100 million in just the first few months of 2015,
a year and a half before the actual election. The prospect of being
drastically outgunned by Bush has prodded Clinton to speed up her
fundraising schedule and hit the donor circles in New York City and
Washington in settings that couldn't be more removed from the local
Chipotle. "I need to get out there earlier," Politicoquoted her telling one of her aides.
In the coming months, whatever hours Clinton spends introducing
herself to voters in small-town America, she will spend hundreds more
raising money in four-star hotels and multimillion-dollar homes in
Hollywood and San Francisco, New York and Boston, Washington and Miami.
She will court wealthy liberals across the land and urge them to
collectively give tens of millions of dollars to her campaign. The
question underlying this inevitable mad dash for cash isn’t "Can Hillary
Clinton raise the funds?" The Clintons are practiced buckrakers.
The question is: "Can Clinton claim to stand for 'everyday
Americans,' while hauling in huge sums of cash from the very wealthiest
of us?"
Bernie Sanders’ entrance into the
2016 presidential race isn't a footnote to the inevitable coronation of
Hillary Clinton as the Democratic nominee.
Win McNamee/Getty
Many years ago I pitched a magazine editor on a story about Bernie
Sanders, then a congressman from Vermont, who'd agreed to something
extraordinary – he agreed to let me, a reporter, stick next to him without restrictions over the course of a month in congress.
"People need to know how this place works. It's absurd," he'd said. (Bernie often uses the word absurd, his Brooklyn roots coming through in his pronunciation – ob-zert.)
Bernie wasn't quite so famous at the time and the editor scratched
his head. "Bernie Sanders," he said. "That's the one who cares, right?"
"Right, that's the guy," I said.
I got the go-ahead and the resulting story was a wild journey through
the tortuous bureaucratic maze of our national legislature. I didn't
write this at the time, but I was struck every day by what a strange and
interesting figure Sanders was.
Many of the battles he brought me along to witness, he lost. And no
normal politician would be comfortable with the optics of bringing a Rolling Stone reporter to a Rules Committee hearing.
But Sanders genuinely, sincerely, does not care about optics. He is
the rarest of Washington animals, a completely honest person. If he's
motivated by anything other than a desire to use his influence to
protect people who can't protect themselves, I've never seen it. Bernie
Sanders is the kind of person who goes to bed at night thinking about
how to increase the heating-oil aid program for the poor.
This is why his entrance into the 2016 presidential race
is a great thing and not a mere footnote to the inevitable coronation
of Hillary Clinton as the Democratic nominee. If the press is smart
enough to grasp it, his entrance into the race makes for a profound
storyline that could force all of us to ask some very uncomfortable
questions.
Here's the thing: Sanders is a politician whose power base is derived
almost entirely from the people of the state of Vermont, where he is
personally known to a surprisingly enormous percentage of voters.
His chief opponents in the race to the White House, meanwhile, derive
their power primarily from corporate and financial interests. That
doesn't make them bad people or even bad candidates necessarily, but
it's a fact that the Beltway-media cognoscenti who decide these
things make access to money the primary factor in determining whether
or not a presidential aspirant is "viable" or "credible." Here's how the
Wall Street Journal put it in their story about Sanders (emphasis mine):
It is unclear how much money Mr. Sanders expects to raise, or what he thinks he needs to run a credible
race. Mr. Sanders raised about $7 million for his last re-election in
Vermont, a small state. Sums needed to run nationally are far larger.
The Washington/national press has trained all of us to worry about
these questions of financing on behalf of candidates even at such an
early stage of a race as this.
In this manner we're conditioned to believe that the candidate who
has the early assent of a handful of executives on Wall Street and in
Hollywood and Silicon Valley is the "serious" politician, while the one
who is merely the favorite of large numbers of human beings is an
irritating novelty act whose only possible goal could be to cut into the
numbers of the real players.
Sanders offers an implicit challenge to the current system of
national electoral politics. With rare exceptions, campaign season is a
time when the backroom favorites of financial interests are marketed to
the population. Weighed down by highly regressive policy intentions,
these candidates need huge laboratories of focus groups and image
consultants to guide them as they grope around for a few lines they can
use to sell themselves to regular working people.
Sanders on the other hand has no constituency among the monied crowd.
"Billionaires do not flock to my campaign," he quipped. So what his race
is about is the reverse of the usual process: he'll be marketing the
interests of regular people to the gatekeeping Washington press, in the
hope that they will give his ideas a fair shot.
It's a little-known fact, but we reporters could successfully sell
Sanders or Elizabeth Warren or any other populist candidate as a serious
contender for the White House if we wanted to. Hell, we told Americans
it was okay to vote for George Bush, a man who moves his lips when he
reads.
But the lapdog mentality is deeply ingrained and most Beltway scribes
prefer to wait for a signal from above before they agree to take anyone
not sitting atop a mountain of cash seriously.
Thus this whole question of "seriousness" – which will dominate
coverage of the Sanders campaign – should really be read as a profound
indictment of our political system, which is now so openly an oligarchy
that any politician who doesn't have the blessing of the bosses is
marginalized before he or she steps into the ring.
I remember the first time I was sold on Bernie Sanders as a
politician. He was in his congressional office and he was ranting about
the fact that many of the manufacturing and financial companies who
asked him and other members of congress for tax breaks and aid were also
in the business of moving American jobs overseas to places like China.
Sanders spent years trying to drum up support for a simple measure
that would force any company that came to Washington asking for handouts
to promise they wouldn't turn around and ship jobs to China or India.
That didn't seem like a lot to ask, but his fellow members treated
him like he was asking for a repeal of the free enterprise system. This
issue drove Sanders crazy. Again showing his Brooklyn roots, Bernie gets
genuinely mad about these things. While some pols are kept up at night worrying
about the future profitability of gazillionaire banks, Sanders seethes
over the many obvious wrongs that get smoothed over and covered up at
his place of work.
That saltiness, I'm almost sure of it, is what drove him into this
race. He just can't sit by and watch the things that go on, go on.
That's not who he is.
When I first met Bernie Sanders, I'd just spent over a decade living
in formerly communist Russia. The word "socialist" therefore had highly
negative connotations for me, to the point where I didn't even like to
say it out loud.
But Bernie Sanders is not Bukharin or Trotsky. His concept of
"Democratic Socialism" as I've come to understand it over the years is
that an elected government should occasionally step in and offer an
objection or two toward our progress to undisguised oligarchy. Or, as in
the case of not giving tax breaks to companies who move factories
overseas, our government should at least not finance the disappearance of the middle class.
Maybe that does qualify as radical and unserious politics in our day
and age. If that's the case, we should at least admit how much trouble
we're in.
Congratulations, Bernie. Good luck and give 'em hell.
US
Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) formally announces his candidacy for president
during an event in Louisville, Kentucky, April 7, 2015. (Photo:
Reuters/John Sommers II)
With
bravado and big ideas, Kentucky Senator Rand Paul on Tuesday announced
that he is running for the Republican candidacy in the upcoming 2016
presidential elections.
"I have a message, a message that is loud and clear and does not mince words. We have come to take our country back," Paul declared
before a crowd in a Louisville hotel ball room. "We have come to take
our country back from the special interests that use Washington as their
personal piggy bank, the special interests that are more concerned with
their personal welfare than the general welfare."
In a speech that lambasted Washington bureaucracy, foreign
intervention, government surveillance, radical Islam, corporate taxes,
public education, liberals and conservatives alike, the Tea Party
favorite announced his candidacy as a political outsider who has come to
bring salvation to the United States, "with the help of liberty lovers
everywhere."
During his speech on Tuesday, Paul channeled a more populist tone by touching upon themes such as economic inequality.
"Under the watch of both parties, the poor seem to get poorer and the
rich get richer," he said. "Politically connected crones get taxpayer
dollars by the hundreds of millions and poor families across America
continue to suffer. I have a different vision, an ambitious vision, an
ambitious vision, a vision that will offer opportunity to all Americans,
especially those who have been left behind."
However, observers note that his policy proposals would only worsen the situation for America's poor.
As Matt Bruenig wrote for the Demos think tank Policy Shop blog,
Paul supports a tax platform that effectively redistributes wealth from
the poor to the rich. Further, Bruenig notes, the Kentucky Senator
subscribes to a "college-student-inflected libertarianism where he
thinks things like taxes and social insurance are the forceful
aggression of the government."
Vox reporter Dylan Matthews outlines
what exactly Paul would attempt to do as President of the United
States, based on detailed, federal budgets put forth by the Senator
annually. Proposals include eliminating or drastically cutting two of
the biggest programs for the working poor, the Earned Income Tax Credit
and the Child Tax Credit, as well as eliminating Section 8 housing
vouchers.
Senator Paul's father, Rand Paul, former U.S. Representative for
Texas, ran two presidential campaigns on a similar platform—though he
has been widely dismissed as "bonkers" or "woman-hating crazy."
Paul now joins Senator Ted Cruz
of Texas in the bid for Republican candidacy and will likely be joined
in the months ahead by other hopefuls including former Florida Governor
Jeb Bush, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, and Wisconsin Governor
Scott Walker. Florida Senator Marco Rubio is expected to launch his
campaign next week.
A recent CNN poll has Paul placing third for the party nomination at 12%, behind Bush at 16% and Walker at 13%.
According to his campaign website, Paul will immediately hit the
campaign trail with scheduled stops in New Hampshire, South Carolina,
Iowa and Nevada.
Despite the obvious attempt to distance himself from the pack with a
pledge to "defeat the Washington machine," critics say that according to
the Senator's own record, he is no better than the rest.
As the Nation's John Nichol's wrote
Tuesday, "Unfortunately, the supposedly 'different' Rand Paul talks a
better line than he delivers." Nichols points to the recent example of
Paul's thwarting of the District of Columbia Budget Autonomy Act,
a power-to-the-people measure designed to give DC voters and their
elected officials more authority over the spending of their tax dollars.
"When it counts, Paul reveals himself as an rather too predictable
contemporary Republican," Nichols continued. "He is not interested in
winning the battle of ideas. He is simply interested in winning—and if
that means using the power of big government to thwart the legitimate
and honorable democratic aspirations of citizens, so be it."
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Well gang, it’s officially here. It’s Presidential primary season! The festivities got off to a real bang early Monday morning with the first hat thrown conclusively into the ring. That Stetson belongs to Texas’ junior Senator and government shutdown advocatorTed Cruz. Ending months of very little suspense, Cruz tweeted “I’m running for President and I hope to earn your support!” to his 370,000 followers.
In a piece entitled Ted Cruz Hopes Early Campaign Entry Will Focus Voters’ Attention, writers Jonathan Martin and Maggie Haberman of TheNew York Times quote longtime Republican strategist Dave Carney as saying, “It’s the shiny object principle. He wants to be first, get in the conversation, not show any doubt or hesitation.” If there are two things at which Cruz excels, it is the use of shiny objects to distract constituents from real issues and a refusal to second guess himself. Thus the announcement bore a fitting similarity to the man making it.
After capturing the zeitgeist and the ire of lawmakers from both parties during October 2013’s partial government shutdown, GOP rainmakers no less authoritative than longtime Arizona Senator John McCain labeled Cruz’s pointless stoking of the House, “a fool’s errand.” New York Republican Congressman Peter King minced a few less words in observing, “My sound bite is to say he’s a fraud…I start with that, and then I go on. It takes me two or three minutes to explain it.”
With just three years on the Senate floor, Cruz has certainly cut some kind of figure. Love him or hate him, he’s made sure we all know his name. However when it comes to gearing up for general elections, it’s easy to dissipate into a footnote. As theTimes piece notes, “in recent months, Mr. Cruz has been overshadowed by other potential Republican candidates in the early competition for donors, staff, volunteers and news coverage. Most notably, Mr. Walker has drawn attention from those interested in an alternative to former Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida.”
There are only so many right wing base unifying government shutdowns a man can leverage. Unfortunately for Cruz he’s now going to have to deal with highly skeptical Republican moderates who rightfully question whether the Senator’s loyalties lie with the nation – or with number one.
Though numerous GOP strategists have concluded that a prolonged primary season is bad business for the party (as it was in 2012 when Romney’s conservative pandering pivot fell completely flat), this part of the show is actually kind of fun for the rest of us. As our own Jason Easley wrote this week, disingenuous circus clown Donald Trump beat low-class liberals to the fray by immediately launching a fake birther conversationabout Cruz’s legal right to run. Whee!
And if there’s anything more delightful than watching a senior statesman with a long record of accomplishment flat out dismiss the idea of a one-trick narcissist in the Oval Office, I’ve yet to discover it. On this past Sunday’s edition of NBC’s Meet the Presswhile addressing the topic of climate change, California Governor Jerry Brown told host Chuck Todd, “That man betokens such a level of ignorance and a direct falsification of the existing scientific data. It’s shocking and I think that man has rendered himself absolutely unfit to be running for office.”
Here’s the thing though. I struggle to believe that Cruz is delusional enough to think he can win the nomination. Smarmy and dangerous? Yes. Stupid? Not at all. He pulled in just 4 percent of Republican primary voters in the latest CNN/ORC poll. And as I’ve argued already, the support of the GOP establishment is far from guaranteed. So why put himself and his family through the grueling, often humiliating process that is party vetting?
I offer that Cruz and Trump are actually fairly similar. Ignore either man too long and like a pouty puppy, he’s going to do something to get attention. The conversation has shifted away from Cruz for far too long. He can stand the ignominy of primary season. He can handle being called “a wacko bird” by McCain. But what he can’t suffer is our silence. That gnawing, aching need for limelight, even more so than Cruz’s disingenuous flouting of science in exchange for base adoration, is what makes him unfit to lead. See: Sarah Palin 2008.
Former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton speaks during a news conference at the United Nations in New York …
All in all, Hillary Clinton offered a plausible response this week to the allegations of missing emails. She thought it easier to carry just one device rather than two. She assumed her emails with staff were being archived. And then a bunch of other stuff about servers and bureaucratic process that I frankly missed because it bored me into a near coma, causing me to have a strange dream in which Senate Republicans sent a letter to Iran claiming to be a Nigerian prince and asking the ayatollahs to send them $400 billion for the federal deficit.
If Clinton thinks, however, that her explanation is going to end speculation about whatever sinister secrets she is said to be keeping, she’s mistaken. And that’s not because she’s an especially nefarious person, or because she’s a woman, or because the media is bent ondestroying her.
No, to understand why truth and transparency are Clinton’s main vulnerability in 2016, you need to understand the moment in which the Clintons entered American politics, and how they came to dominate it.
First, let me say that I have a hard time getting too worked up about Clinton’s vanishing emails, although maybe I should. It’s possible, I guess, that in the many thousands of unreleased emails is evidence of her having endangered national security by talking policy on unsecured servers. It’s possible that some emails refer to meetings that Clinton or her aides would rather not make public.
And yet what Clinton said about her daughter’s wedding and family vacations being off limits resonated with me; even our highest public officials should probably be able to fire off notes to friends, or even ruminate on substantive decisions, without having every word scrutinized by reporters and enemy campaigns. Emailing for most of us now is more like having an impromptu chat than writing a letter, and no executive expects to have every chat archived.
What’s really going on here, though, doesn’t have much to do with emails, public or private. Rather, it has to do with the Clintons themselves and the assumption that they’re always holding something back.
It’s not an unfounded perception, but neither is it entirely their fault. You have to remember that when Bill Clinton and his wife rose quickly through the ranks of Democratic politics, during the 1980s, the country was in the throes of both a cultural and political transformation.
At 32, Bill Clinton wasn’t only the youngest governor in the country when Arkansans elected him in 1978; he was also on the leading edge of a generational transition, as the ’60s generation emerged from social movements to begin their ascent in electoral politics. The boomers, of course, were self-analytical, idealistic, permissive — different in every way from the World War II generation that still held sway politically.
At that time, too, American politics was just beginning to undergo a tectonic realignment. The South in which Clinton had grown up — a South dominated by Democrats, both segregationist and reformist — was fast becoming the base of a new, socially conservative Republican Party. A lot of older Democrats would hold on to their seats in the former Confederacy for many years to come, but few young Democrats would rise from it.
There was no way to navigate these turbulent currents, to somehow bridge the divide between one generation and the next in American politics, without creating some artifice and living by it. In Arkansas in the late 1970s, Bill Clinton had to maintain a persona that was a little more Southern than he probably felt after years spent in Washington, England and New Haven. (His wife, having grown up in Illinois, had to work even harder at fitting in.)
Somewhat out of step with the both the culture and the politics of the older power structure in Arkansas, which didn’t go in for antiwar protesters and draft dodgers, the Clintons had to seem less liberal than they really were. Clinton’s centrist, “new Democrat” argument was substantive and based in genuine conviction, but it also happened to be the only tenable political strategy available for a Southern Democrat in the 1980s.
Later, after Clinton became the first boomer politician to win the nomination and then the White House (and after Hillary became the first Ivy League-educated lawyer to serve as first lady), he and his wife worked to present themselves as a more traditional couple, with more traditional gender roles, than they or most of their contemporaries really were. Having arrived just as the media decided to treat politicians as celebrities, the Clintons had to stage their marriage in a way that no previous president and first lady, most of whom had less than perfect unions themselves, had ever been forced to do.
All politicians present an idealized version of themselves and their families, of course. All modern candidates are in some part performance artists. But with the Clintons, the artifice isn’t incidental; it was born of necessity, and it’s integral to their political identities.
We think they’re always hiding something essential about themselves, because they always have. The truth is that an America cleaved by generational and ideological change would never have accepted them any other way.
This is why Hillary Clinton will never be easily afforded the same zone of privacy that the media has generally extended to Barack Obama. No one assumes Obama is keeping secrets. With Hillary, there’s always some suspicion that what’s private is being kept private because it contradicts the public script.
What struck me, watching Clinton parry questions Tuesday, is how little she seems to appreciate this circumstance and her own role in creating it. Her words were sensible enough, but her manner was, as ever, contemptuous, her exasperation barely concealed. It wasn’t that she couldn’t answer the questions coming at her; it was that she didn’t think she should have to.
If I’m a Clinton adviser, that’s a problem for me. Because this isn’t 1992, when politics could be staged for the evening news. Transparency and authenticity are paramount in the social media culture, and the lack of them is fatal. Ask Mitt Romney.
This email fiasco should cause Clinton to think twice about the kind of campaign she wants to run, assuming she’s still hell-bent on running at all. To become president, she may need to dispense with the artifice, after all these years, and ask America to accept her for who she really is, rather than the part of herself she feels safe in revealing.
Old habits die hard. Presidential campaigns, not so much.
