Can anybody explain to me how the State of the Union address was a white supremacist manifesto? I’m seeing that claim being made, wholly unsubstantiated, and I don’t get it. Other than by definition, of course.

You know, after reading George Will’s latest Washington Post column, I’m beginning to wonder whether today’s mood is populist at all. He laments the decline of the political parties:

Doing something similar in presidential politics is difficult. The process has no gatekeepers: Remember the 2012 cycle, when Herman Cain had his 15 minutes as a front-runner? Misguided campaign finance regulations have diverted money away from experienced parties to unseasoned groups with minority agendas. The 2016 process illustrated the difficulty of aggregating voters’ preferences when there are many candidates: A demagogic charlatan won without winning a majority of primary votes until after the nomination was effectively settled. Sanders’s success so far this year demonstrates La Raja and Rauch’s warning that in a congested field of candidates, many will shun coalition-building in favor of wooing purists.

In 1924, the parties’ professionals blocked the presidential ambitions of industrialist Henry Ford, a racist and anti-Semite. In 1976, Democratic insiders helped clear the field in Florida’s presidential primary to enable Jimmy Carter to end the candidacy of the racist George Wallace. Today, however, the power of party professionals is negligible compared with that of the media. They prefer flamboyant political showhorses to transactional, coalition-building workhorses, and become accomplices of fringe candidates and combative amateurs.

La Raja and Rauch suggest various “filters” by political professionals to mitigate the “democracy fundamentalism” of today’s nomination process: e.g., more political professionals as “superdelegates” eligible to vote on conventions’ first ballots; pre-primary votes of confidence in candidates by members of Congress and governors; “abolishing or dramatically increasing” contribution limits to the parties. But a precondition for all improvement is, they acknowledge, “to change the mindset that regards popular elections as the only acceptable way to choose nominees.”

Limiting and influencing voters’ choices by involving professional politicians early in the nomination process would require risk-averse political professionals to go against today’s populist sensibility. But if this November the choice is between Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, the professionals might consider letting go of the wolf’s ears.

Is this really true?

Misguided campaign finance regulations have diverted money away from experienced parties to unseasoned groups with minority agendas.

or is what we are seeing the outcome of plutocracy? Only very well-heeled individuals or organizations have the dough to lay out enough money to finance the sorts of campaigns we’re seeing. I find it difficult to think of any campaign with three billionaires in it as “populist”. The reforms that would be required to curb that are exactly the sort that George Will has opposed for as long as I’ve been reading him.

Here’s David Brooks’s assessment in his New York Times column of President Trump’s 2020 State of the Union address:

Trump’s speech reframes the election around this core question: Is capitalism basically working or is it basically broken?

Trump can run on the proposition that it’s basically working. He has a lot of evidence on his side: The unemployment rate is the lowest in decades. Wages are rising. The typical family income is higher than it has ever been.

Americans seem to accept this position. Confidence in the economy is higher now than at any moment since the Clinton administration. According to Gallup, 59 percent of Americans say they are better off than they were a year ago. Three-quarters of Americans expect to be even better off a year from now.

Democrats, by contrast, have congregated around the message that capitalism is fundamentally broken and that the economy is bad. As Matthew Yglesias noted recently in Vox, when Democrats were asked in the PBS NewsHour/Politico debate if the economy was good, they all gave the same answer.

Joe Biden: “I don’t think [Americans] really do like the economy. Look at the middle-class neighborhoods. The middle class is getting killed. The middle class is getting crushed.” Pete Buttigieg: “This economy is not working for most of us.” Elizabeth Warren: “A rising G.D.P., rise in corporate profits, is not being felt by millions of families across the country.” And so on down the line.

An opposition party can retake the White House in a time of rising economic conditions, but it can’t do it by denouncing capitalism and it can’t do it by denying the felt reality of a majority of Americans.

Democrats now face a choice. Which is the higher risk? Nominating Bernie Sanders or not nominating him? Neither is risk-free.

My take: blue collar workers are being “crushed” by illegal immigrants workers while middle class workers are being “crushed” by legal immigrant workers. Most of the workers brought in by the outsourcing companies are not the skilled workers for which the H1-B program was developed but entry level workers. That doesn’t augment the middle class; it supplants it.

Financialization of the economy is hammering both blue collar and middle class Americans. Business investment ain’t what it used to be. We can hardly expect what passes for much of business investment these days to have the some results as investing in expanded facilities would.

Capitalism isn’t fundamentally broken. It’s falling into disuse.

Speaking of James Carville, here he is quoted at The Hill:

Longtime Democratic strategist James Carville went off on the current state of the party on Tuesday, asking why Tom Perez “is still the chair” of the Democratic National Committee.

“We gotta decide what we want to be,” the “Ragin’ Cajun” said on “The Beat” with Ari Melber on MSNBC. “Do we want to be an ideological cult, or do we want to have a majoritarian instinct — to be a majority party?”

In another part of the interview, Carville said Democrats need to “wake up” while avoiding being seen as the equivalent of the United Kingdom’s Labor Party, which has suffered a string of crushing losses recently.

“This party needs to wake up and make sure that we talk about things that are relevant to people,” Carville implored. “We don’t need to become the British Labor Party. That’s a bad thing. It’s not going well over there.”

“We’re, like, talking about people voting from jail cells,” Carville said at another point. “And not having a border.”

Maybe his instincts are all wrong. Maybe all that’s necessary for the a Democratic candidate, any Democratic candidate to prevail in November is Trump-hatred.

As I said in an earlier post, feel lucky, punk?

Well, here’s something different. A political scientist at Christopher Newport University has a heretical theory of American elections. At Politico David Freedlander writes:

What if everything you think you know about politics is wrong? What if there aren’t really American swing voters—or not enough, anyway, to pick the next president? What if it doesn’t matter much who the Democratic nominee is? What if there is no such thing as “the center,” and the party in power can govern however it wants for two years, because the results of that first midterm are going to be bad regardless? What if the Democrats’ big 41-seat midterm victory in 2018 didn’t happen because candidates focused on health care and kitchen-table issues, but simply because they were running against the party in the White House? What if the outcome in 2020 is pretty much foreordained, too?

Here’s her prediction:

And today her model tells her the Democrats are a near lock for the presidency in 2020, and are likely to gain House seats and have a decent shot at retaking the Senate. If she’s right, we are now in a post-economy, post-incumbency, post record-while-in-office era of politics.

and here are the details:

Bitecofer has already released her 2020 model, and is alone among election forecasters in giving the Democrats—who, of course, do not yet have a nominee—the 270 electoral votes required to claim the presidency without a single toss-up state flipping their way. She sees anyone in the top tier, or even the second tier of candidates, as strong enough to win back most of the Trump states in the industrial Midwest, stealing a march in the South in places like North Carolina and Florida, and even competing in traditional red states like Georgia, Texas and Arizona. The Democrats are likely to pick up seats again in the House, she says, pegging the total at nine pickups in Texas alone, and have a decent chance of taking back the Senate.

If Dr. Bitecofer is right, it doesn’t just mean that legions of political forecasters are wrong. It means that a lot of the savviest pols around, like Rahm Emanuel and James Carville, are not only wrong but have been wrong all along.

The opportunity of confirming or disproving Dr. Bitecofer’s theory will come soon enough, on Tuesday November 3, 2020. Whose base will be the most motivated to come out? She’ll either be hailed as a prophet or we’ll never hear from her again.

The editors of the Wall Street Journal summarize the outcome of the entire investigation, impeachment, and acquittal process this way:

In the bitter end, what has all of this accomplished? The House has defined impeachment down to a standard that will now make more impeachments likely. “Abuse of power” and “corrupt motives” are justifications that partisans in both parties can use.

Mr. Trump remains in office, but he will now claim vindication and use it as a rallying cry for re-election against what he will call an attempted insider coup. The partisan furies have intensified, and this election year will be even more bitterly fought. Mr. Trump’s political standing has even improved during the impeachment struggle, as voters concluded early on that his behavior was wrong and unwise but not impeachable.

I think it’s actually a bit worse than that. Democrats have actually improved the likelihood that Trump will be re-elected and both Trump and the Democrats have removed some of the last shreds of decorum from our political process. I don’t think this is an egg that can easily be uncracked.

It had to happen eventually. Finally, someone has posted something about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict I can agree with. In this case it’s Hussein Ibish at Bloomberg and here it is:

The stage is perfectly set for Abbas to present a bold new Palestinian vision for peace with Israel. The easy, and wrong, thing to do—and going by his track record, what he is most likely to do—would be to simply frame the Palestinian position as a vague, two-state formula based on UN Security Council resolutions 242 and 338, and the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative. This was exactly the position he took at the UN last year, but times have changed dramatically.

A reprise of that speech might be politically popular with Palestinians, where Abbas would be seen as sticking to their national talking points. But it would achieve nothing for them: the Trump plan has already altered the political landscape, and it may not be long before Israeli annexation irreversibly changes facts on the ground too.

I don’t entirely agree with his assessment of the Europeans or Arab League. Other than being a cause célèbre the Palestinians aren’t particularly popular with other Arabs and there have been some signs that Saudi Arabia would quietly support the Trump plan. I don’t think the Europeans care much one way or another. They’ll disapprove of anything that comes from the Trump Administration or, indeed, most American administrations.

We’ll now see if the Palestinians will live up to Abba Eban’s wisecrack about them: “They never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.”

Staunch Democrat William Galston provides some advice in his Wall Street Journal column—stop Sanders!

The Vermont senator’s ideologically aware defenders will retort that he is not the scary kind of socialist who wants government to take over the means of production. Rather, they cast him as a warm and fuzzy social democrat who wants to use government to reduce insecurity and bolster opportunity for all. But Mr. Sanders has proposed not only the complete nationalization of the U.S. health-care system but also a $2 trillion federal takeover of electrical power production. Public support for Medicare for All plummets when people are told that it would eliminate private health insurance, a core feature of Mr. Sanders’s plan.

Because there are more conservatives than liberals in the electorate, Democratic presidential nominees cannot triumph unless they win a strong majority of moderate voters. But only 11% of these voters have a positive view of socialism, compared with 53% who oppose it.

Unless a Sanders candidacy could somehow reconfigure the political map, he would need to retake at least Pennsylvania and Michigan to have a serious shot at 270 electoral college votes. But the less-educated white voters who dominate these states’ electorates are hostile to socialism, even more so than whites with college degrees. Only 12% of white voters without college degrees are favorable toward socialism, while 63% disfavor it—and 54% view socialism in a very negative light. Whatever the case in Vermont, socialism is not a winner in the Midwest.

Mr. Sanders claims his uncompromising message gives him a unique opportunity to translate popular passion into votes. If so, the NBC/WSJ poll results don’t show it. Only 13% of voters report being “enthusiastic” about his candidacy, compared with 43% who are “very uncomfortable.” (The comparable numbers for Joe Biden are 14% and 35%.) Among swing voters, 31% are very uncomfortable with Mr. Sanders, compared with only 19% feeling the same about Mr. Biden.

The longer all of the present Democratic field remains in the race, the smaller the plurality of delegates the eventual notional winner is likely to have, increasing the likelihood of campaigns that continue right to the Democratic Convention.

I’m quite confident Mr. Galston’s advice will not be taken. For one thing it’s just too late. The DNC should have called a halt to Sanders’s campaign long ago. Not doing so was a misjudgement on their part.

The great Italian composer Giacchino Rossini had a practice following the premier of one of his operas. He would send a drawing of a bottle to his friends, a small bottle if the opera went reasonably well, a large one if it went horribly. “Fiasco” means bottle in Italian.

The editors of the Wall Street Journal respond to the fiasco of the Iowa caucuses:

There’s no shortage of mordant fun to be had at the expense of the Democratic National Committee and Iowa Democratic Party after the fiasco of the inaugural 2020 presidential contest, which has yet to yield definitive results apparently as a result of coding errors in a tabulation app created by party insiders. The college of cardinals at least lets the world know with white or black smoke how the vote for pope is going.

Here the party that waxes sanctimonious about election security couldn’t secure its own election from itself. Here the party that has spent three years questioning the legitimacy of the 2016 election will see the legitimacy of its own custom-designed process questioned. Here the party that promises technocratic management of American health care, energy and finance proved less able to tally votes even than the ancient Athenians.

What is the worst aspect of the face-plant of the Iowa caucuses:

1. It may help Bernie Sanders.
2. It may hurt Joe Biden.
3. It provides a graphic demonstration of the fecklessness of present Democratic Party leadership.
4. The reactions by prominent Democrats to the situation.
5. All of the above.
6. None of the above. It went swimmingly.
7. Other
8. Pass the popcorn.

I think E but especially D.