This morning the editors of the Wall Street Journal provide their analysis of the main reason Mr. Trump lost the 2020 presidential election. He faced a very formidable opponent: himself. They explain:

As important is why he lost, and for that look no further than Mr. Trump’s own pollster, Tony Fabrizio. His firm’s post-election analysis was first reported by Politico, but it’s worth resurfacing for Republicans to ponder.

Mr. Fabrizio looked at data from exit polls and AP’s VoteCast in 10 highly competitive states that Mr. Trump won in 2016. Mr. Trump lost five of them in 2020—Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin—while winning Iowa, Florida, North Carolina, Ohio andTexas a second time.

One stunning conclusion: Mr. Trump lost even though the electorate was more Republican in 2020 than in 2016. Mr. Fabrizio reports that Mr. Trump lost “largely due to a massive swing” among independents and erosion among Republicans. This helps explain how the GOP gained a dozen seats in the House even as Mr. Trump became the first President to lose re-election since George H.W. Bush.

Much of this erosion in support was based on dislike for Mr. Trump personally and the way he handled the Presidency. “While a majority of voters said they didn’t find either Presidential candidate honest or trustworthy, Biden held a double-digit advantage over POTUS,” especially in the five states that flipped to Mr. Biden in 2020, says the Fabrizio analysis.

concluding:

We rehearse all this not to rub an open political wound. The point is to remember, as time passes and Mr. Trump blames everyone else for his defeat, that 2020 was a winnable race. Mr. Trump had many accomplishments to tout, and voters recognized them. But Mr. Biden’s consistent campaign message of a return to a calmer, more unifying politics resonated with millions of voters who had tired of the constant Trump turmoil.

Mr. Trump didn’t lose to Joe Biden. He lost to himself.

IMO Democrats should consider this possibility. Perhaps it might temper their rush to implement measures which are as highly divisive as some of the bills that have come up in the House lately.

ABC 7 Chicago reports that former Illinois House Speaker Mike Madigan has announced his intention to resign his office as Illinois representative:

After 50 years in the state legislature, Mike Madigan is finally calling it quits.

On Thursday, the legendary political figure sent a letter to the House speaker announcing that he will be resigning from the state representative post he has held since 1971.

Madigan said in a statement his resignation from the position in the 22nd District will be effective at the end of February.

There is no individual more responsible for the fiscal disaster that is Illinois than Mr. Madigan. This resignation follows hard on the heels of the end of his 40 year tenure as Illinois House Speaker. He’s still the Chairman of the Illinois Democratic Party. I expect that to change soon.

I also expect that there will be developments in the ongoing investigation of his involvement in a corrupt scheme involving Commonwealth Edison. We won’t have heard the last of Madigan for a while.

In his latest Wall Street Journal column Walter Russell Mead recaps the status of the Biden Administration’s attempted reset of our relationship with our presumed European allies:

It hasn’t been the most promising start. Less than a month into Joe Biden’s presidency, and his administration is already engaged in spats with China, Russia and Iran. It is also discovering that U.S. allies are not quite as happy with Mr. Biden’s Feb. 4 announcement that “America is back” as many Democrats might have hoped.

In Asia the administration’s Myanmar policy—imposing sanctions that signal displeasure without materially affecting the army’s ability to rule—has attracted little enthusiasm. On Feb 15, India’s foreign minister hailed Indo-Japanese cooperation on regional infrastructure projects that link Myanmar with its neighbors, a not-so-subtle signal that India intends to go on cooperating with Myanmar no matter what Washington wants. Simultaneously, the large portion of the Indian press that supports the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party is aflame with resentment that Vice President Kamala Harris’s niece, Meena Harris, seems to be siding with protesters against BJP policies.

European leaders are also dismissive of American moralism. French President Emmanuel Macron denounced the importation of U.S.-academic and cultural wokeness as a threat to the French way of life, while pragmatists on the Continent are pushing to strengthen economic relations with Russia and China—virtually ignoring the Biden administration’s efforts to raise the pressure on human-rights abusers in Moscow and Beijing. With the U.S. trade representative’s recent announcement that Trump-era retaliatory tariffs on European wine, cheese and food imports aren’t going away soon, this has been one of the shortest and coldest diplomatic honeymoons on record.

In the Middle East, Iran is showing no eagerness to ease the administration’s path back into the 2015 nuclear deal. And both Israel and the conservative Arab states resent the American shift in that direction. As for restless NATO ally Turkey, Mr. Biden promised during the campaign to help President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s opposition. The new administration has so far criticized a crackdown on pro-LGBTQ student demonstrators and called on Ankara to release the dissident Osman Kavala.

Closer to home, the unceremonious cancellation of the Keystone XL pipeline miffed Canadians. The Biden administration appears headed for a fight with Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro over deforestation in the Amazon basin—a sensitive issue for the Brazilian right. Mexico’s left-populist President Andrés Manuel López Obrador delayed congratulating Mr. Biden on his election, passed a law limiting U.S.-Mexican collaboration over drug trafficking, and offered political asylum to Julian Assange.

His summation: some turbulence was inevitable.

I have never understood American diplomacy predicated on the assumption that European countries are waiting, longing for American leadership. I don’t see that it has any basis in fact. Any notion that we can lead European countries by example is fatally flawed as well. We may not have been providing leadership but they haven’t been providing a good deal of followership lately.

Put the editors of the Wall Street Journal firmly in the camp of “too dependent on wind power” cf. my previous post this morning:

The problem is Texas’s overreliance on wind power that has left the grid more vulnerable to bad weather. Half of wind turbines froze last week, causing wind’s share of electricity to plunge to 8% from 42%. Power prices in the wholesale market spiked, and grid regulators on Friday warned of rolling blackouts. Natural gas and coal generators ramped up to cover the supply gap but couldn’t meet the surging demand for electricity—which half of households rely on for heating—even as many families powered up their gas furnaces. Then some gas wells and pipelines froze.

In short, there wasn’t sufficient baseload power from coal and nuclear to support the grid. Baseload power is needed to stabilize grid frequency amid changes in demand and supply. When there’s not enough baseload power, the grid gets unbalanced and power sources can fail. The more the grid relies on intermittent renewables like wind and solar, the more baseload power is needed to back them up.

But politicians don’t care about grid reliability until the power goes out. And for three decades politicians from both parties have pushed subsidies for renewables that have made the grid less stable.

If they’d change that to “too dependent on government subsidies, generally”, I’d be inclined to agree with them. Leaning on subsidies is a way of life in Texas, cf. the oil industry, the agricultural sector, the financial sector, and on down the list.

For those who see hypocrisy in such an attitude, that sort of hypocrisy is very much in keeping with the Jacksonian temperament. If you see a twenty left on a table, it would be immoral to leave it there wouldn’t it? Taking it is a valuable lesson for the careless person leaving that twenty.

As you are no doubt aware the power outages in Texas, caused by the cold weather, are the news of the day. Here’s how Reuters reports it:

LUBBOCK, Texas (Reuters) – A historic winter storm has killed at least 21 people, left millions of Texans without power and spun killer tornadoes into the U.S. Southeast on Tuesday.

The brutal cold has engulfed vast swaths of the United States, shuttering COVID-19 inoculation centers and hindering vaccine supplies. It is not expected to relent until the weekend.

Officials in Texas drew criticism as the state energy grid repeatedly failed, forcing rolling blackouts. Freezing weather stilled giant wind turbines that dot the West Texas landscape, making it impossible for energy companies to meet escalating demand.

I have read any number of different reactions to the story including

• Glee because Texas is a Red State. Serves them right.
• Texas is too dependent on wind power.
• Texas is too dependent on natural gas.
• Texas is too dependent on its state-run power distribution system.
• Individuals should be better prepared for such outages.

Unlike those who are glad that Texas is suffering, I don’t rejoice in anyone’s suffering. Unlike the most minarchist-minded, I think the pressures on private power companies and private distribution are such that resilience is rarely built in adequately. I don’t much care for the claim that people should be prepared better because it pretty much literally leaves the poor out in the cold.

I think it’s far too early to determine the underlying cause of Texas’s power woes but my intuition is that it’s a combination of the power distribution system and not enough reserve capacity full stop.

I thought I’d pass along this snippet of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s Wall Street Journal op-ed:

There is a modern reflex to demand total satisfaction from every news cycle. But impeachment is not some final moral tribunal. It is a specific tool with a narrow purpose: restraining government officers. The instant Donald Trump ceased being the president, he exited the Senate’s jurisdiction.

I respect senators who reached the opposite answer. What deserve no respect are claims that constitutional concerns are trivialities that courageous senators would have ignored.

One House manager who lauded the Constitution when the trial began now derides it as “a technicality.” Another called this pivotal question “a loophole.” Talking heads fumed that senators had let legal niceties constrain us. I even heard that only senators who voted for conviction had any right to abhor the violence. That’s antithetical to any notion of American justice. Liberals said they condemned the former president’s rules-be-damned recklessness. But many apparently cannot resist that same temptation.

He concludes:

Here’s what the scheduling critics are really saying: Senate Republicans should have followed a rushed House process with a light-speed Senate sham. They think we should have shredded due process and ignited a constitutional crisis in a footrace to outrun our loss of jurisdiction.

This selective disregard for rules and norms is a civic disease that is spreading through the political left. Senate Democrats relished the legislative filibuster and used it frequently when they were the minority party. Now only two of them pledge to respect it. Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has threatened Supreme Court justices by name, and other Democrats submitted a brief demanding the court rule their way or be “restructured.” As recently as September, fewer than half of Democrats professed confidence that elections are free and fair. In November, that number shot up to more than 90%—because they liked the result.

The nation needs real constitutional champions, not fair-weather institutionalists. The Senate’s duty last week was clear. It wasn’t to guarantee a specific punishment at any cost. Our job was to defend the Constitution and respect its limits. That is what our acquittal delivered.

I cannot judge what is in people’s hearts and I believe it would be immoral of me to evaluate their actions based on my assessment of their motives.

We presently have three feet of snow on the ground here in Chicago and we expect more. While not the greatest snowfall ever, this is certainly the greatest accumulation of snow of recent memory.

It took me a half hour to dig my way from our door to the sidewalk. A neighbor was kind enough to sweep our sidewalk using his snowblower. We’re getting old enough that it’s probably time for us to start thinking along those line. I’m considering a power shovel—essentially a small snowblower.

The Eurasia Group presents its ten largest global political risks for 2021. They are:

1. 46* (Biden legitimacy)
2. COVID-19 isn’t going away soon
3. Net zero meets G-Zero (Biden Administration’s embrace of opposing global warming)
4. US-China tensions broaden
5. Global data reckoning
6. Cyber tipPing point (immanence of cyberwar)
7. Turkey
8. Continuing low oil prices threaten stability in the Middle East
9. Europe after Merkel
10. Latin America

What do you think of that list? They consider the prospect of conflict with Iran a red herring. It will be a red herring until it isn’t. If Israel engages in a pre-emptive attack against Iran, does anyone question that will be the greatest risk in the world?

I think that civil unrest in the U. S., something not mentioned by them, is also a grave risk.

What are the top political risks of 2021?

In a piece at RealClearWorld Daniel Davis effectively refutes Adm. Stavridis’s argument to maintain a force in Afghanistan indefinitely, cited here last week:

Many supporters of keeping U.S. troops indefinitely fighting in Afghanistan claim – with some justification – that we cannot trust the Taliban’s promises and base our security on mere words. Washington should never entrust our security to promises given by any adversary. Fortunately, American national security is secured by our own, powerful intelligence and military capacity.

The U.S. military has the ability to identify emerging or imminent threats against our country and then to project combat power anywhere on the globe to conduct a direct, targeted strike against the target. The U.S. government has demonstrated this capability in several high-profile strikes in recent years, including taking out al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in 2013 and ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in 2019.

This same unblinking intelligence-strike capability already keeps the U.S. safe from terror attacks, no matter where in the world the threat may materialize. We do not need combat troops permanently on the ground in Afghanistan in order to strike at threats to our country that may arise from there.

The best thing the Biden Administration can do after it completes its assessment of the 2020 agreement with the Taliban is to remain on schedule and complete the military withdrawal by May. The problems in Afghanistan are only going to be resolved by the parties that must live with the results. Keeping American troops beyond May will only extend our military futility and do nothing to focus the two sides on reaching a negotiated settlement.

To that I would add that Adm. Stravidis completely ignored the extent to which our continuing military presence in Afghanistan is a rallying cry and recruiting tool for terrorism. It’s possible that the harm we do by remaining would exceed the benefit to the American people. The benefits are primarily to the ruling regime in Kabul and secondarily to Afghan women but that’s a different subject.