At The Hill Republican speechwriter Douglas MacKinnon remarks on the Trump presidency:
From day one, a continual knock against President Trump from these elites has been that “Trump is a one-man-band who can’t be controlled.â€
Newsflash: It is precisely because he is a one-man-band who can’t be controlled that he got himself elected president and is transforming a calcified government into a more fluid process that better reflects his vision and experience.
Because Trump is the outsider-of-all-outsiders to these elites, they refuse to give him credit for any positive momentum or accomplishment — none.
continuing by pointing out that the outsider defeated 16 seasoned, well-financed Republican opponents to get the Republican nomination. He concludes:
Yes, Trump has reinvented the presidency. He plays by his own rules. He has changed the tenor and tone of the Oval Office, made it his own — as every president does to a degree.
You don’t like that? There is a solution. Stop whining and wasting your time trying to steal back the White House and simply gear up to try to beat him at the ballot box.
That’s not quite right. Assuming that the Democratic leadership, unlike in 2016, has actually read the Constitution, get out the vote campaigns in New York, Massachusetts, and California will not be enough to defeat Trump in November of next year. They will actually need to collect more electoral votes than Trump does and that may be more difficult than it sounds.
I genuinely wonder what the Democratic leadership want? Are they planning to draw themselves up to their full height and stand firmly on principles that are shared by, perhaps, 15% of the American people?
Let’s consider the state of the Democratic field. Joe Biden’s support has never gone below 26% of Democrats been as high as 41% of Democrats. There’s a three-way contest for second place. Let’s look at that tier of candidates.
It needs to be said. Bernie Sanders is not going to be the Democratic nominee. There’s a simple reason for that: he’s not a Democrat. A president is not only the leader of the executive branch of government, he or, perhaps someday, she is also the leader of her or his party. Nominating an independent undercuts the very notion of party affiliation. The DNC simply cannot allow that and expect the party to survive.
Elizabeth Sanders is, basically, Hillary Clinton 2.0 without as much political experience and a thinner resume. What states will she carry that Hillary Clinton did not? Fraudulently claiming Indian ancestry to get a job isn’t going to help her, either.
The reason that Joe Biden has held his lead is that he’s supported by blacks as a known quantity. That’s the reason Pete Buttigieg won’t become the Democratic nominee.
All of the other candidates are in single digits. A whole group of solid, experienced candidates have dropped out of the race, largely because they’re just too moderate to gain the support of Democratic primary voters, darn it.
That’s the reason that everybody who can finance his own campaign and has ever wanted to be president is jumping into the candidate. There’s a solid leader in the race for whom very few have any real enthusiasm.
” they refuse to give him credit for any positive momentum or accomplishment”
Who is this mysterious they? The right wing press routinely declares him the best POTUS ever. Sure, the left wing press declares him the worst ever (just like the right wing press said Obama was the worst ever) bu the rest of the media covers Trump tased on his merits and what he says. It is the latter which generates so much bad press. The guy is a compulsive liar and routinely takes credit for things he didnt do. That worked well in the real estate world, not so much anywhere else.
There just isn’t that much that is positive that you can really attribute to Trump. If any other GOP candidate had won you would have still had conservative judges and a tax cut. DAES was already losing, mostly through the efforts other than ours anyway. In conservative world giving Israel and KSA everything they want plays well. Pulling out of the Iran deal and having nothing to replace it seems great. Takingendlessly about the wall and not doing much else about immigration counts as a win. Declaring the North Korean problem solved convinces conservatives everything is fixed with North Korea. For the rest of us? None of this helps the US so we just arent impressed.
Steve
“Democratic leadership”
Who dat? Tom Perez? Ed Buck? George Soros? Nancy Pelosi?
The Democratic party is now a loose coalition of special interest groups that cannot define who they are or what they want. I suspect that what they want is a return to the comfortable status quo where soaring but vague and empty speeches promising all, delivering nothing were the ticket to re-election and their own cradle to grave prosperity. And power, never forget the seduction of power.
“From day one, a continual knock against President Trump from these elites has been that “Trump is a one-man-band who can’t be controlled.â€
A which implies that a President SHOULD be controlled. We should accept that the most powerful man in the world ‘should’ be controlled? And by whom? Friends? Advisors? The bureaucracy? The self-appointed ‘elite’? I like that idea even less than I liked Her Odiousness, and that’s saying a lot. A President IS controlled by the voters, every four years.
A president is put into office by “the people.†Their objectives should also be a President’s objectives. This is where the democrat party has failed.
Voter ID, immigration management with border security, a good economy with jobs, affordable healthcare have long been top concerns of the American public, at least shown in polling done over and over again. But, the democrat party is always too preoccupied with the social warriors whims and needs, rather than working citizens. So, instead, we have closed debates on climate change (no matter new evidence being introduced to the contrary of CO2 not being the main culprit). Then there are gender issues, where using the wrong pronouns or not having correctly named bathrooms, showers etc is a sin, and sometimes subject to a fine. Pushing free everything for everyone, is a democrat “must,†with the undefined “rich†being the sugar daddies funding these freebies, Sanctuary cities are another democrat favorite, where being an undocumented criminal poses less liability than having citizen status. Religion is out, making way for a more secular society. Late term abortions, even minutes before birth, are ok, as babies continue to be impersonally viewed as nothing more than human tissue, despite imaging demonstrating otherwise. Finally, the big one is to keep divisive issues such as race, ethnicity, class alive and in the limelight, as unending fail safe measures to rope more voters into a cul de sac of promises that go unfulfilled once an election is over.
I wince when I see such horrific positions gaining traction via the platforms of the 2020 Democrat candidates. I also lament a biased news media who only fans the flames as to how enchanting these policies are, as they neglect to explore the unintended consequences of their implementation. Just look at the promises made and not kept under Obama’s massive healthcare transformation under the ACA!
Is this truly how most of American society has evolved? Or, is this where the democrat party “wants†us to devolve, becoming a “Matrix†of people, firmly hooked up to destructive, somewhat inhumane mantras of a party-controlled government out of step with what used to be main stream American values.
I think it’s a bit more of a mixed bag than you. For example “a good economy with jobs” is a valence issue. Nobody’s against it—they just have different opinions about how to accomplish it and in how much they’re for it. Republicans tend to remain silent about health care except vague handwaving about “market strategies”, something on which cold water has been thrown again and again by actual results.
My own view of health care reform is that a genuinely free market, something that practically no one supports, would, indeed, result in health care prices going down to the market-clearing prices which are significantly lower than present prices but practically no one would support the secondary effects of such a system. So it’s a non-starter.
The way I would start reducing health care prices is by slowing the pace at which Medicare reimbursement rates rise (something Congress has refused to do for 20 years) and treating employer-supported health care insurance as income. Those are non-starters, too.
“would, indeed, result in health care prices going down to the market-clearing prices which are significantly lower than present prices”
When Singapore tried to have market based health care total spending increased. A lot of individual prices would likely decrease, but then health care would have a pure profit motive and the most expensive, highest profit care is what would be pushed, or at least that is what happened in Singapore and they had to back off from market based care. We should remember that the US is not the only place worried about health care costs and no one has figured out how to make market based care work, even though in theory we all agree that it could bring down costs. But hey, I could be wrong. I volunteer Texas to institute 100% market based care and lets see what happens!
“Voter ID, immigration management with border security,”
This is also supported by Democrats, they just dont want to do it with more wall. They have supported building fencing/wall in high population areas in the past, check the votes, where a barrier makes sense.
Voter ID? Polls looking at the issue show that 80% favor voter ID. Compare that with the 89% who favor background checks for gun purchases. The big difference is that the kind of voter fraud that would be stopped by voter ID pretty much doesn’t exist. Republicans have been looking for it for years and they just cant find any, but they just know it exists. That is opposed to gun violence, that really does exist. Only a small percentage of homicides are committed by buying weapons that would have ben stopped by a background check, but that number is higher than the number of illegal voters.
Steve
A nitpick, is Bloomberg really serious about winning the President nomination?
Last I looked he was spending around $20 million / week. It might sound a lot but not really in the context of someone with (a) strategy to ignore the early states to focus nationally so the spending effects are diluted (b) starts with little support with only 12 weeks left in the campaign
A sign that Bloomberg is serious was if he spent $1 billion / week. About 10 billion over 12 weeks – which is only 1/3rd of his estimated wealth. It might sound crazy; but this is Bloomberg’s last chance to run.
To the best of my knowledge Singapore has never had pure market-based health care in the modern period. To do that you would need
– no licensing or other accreditation for physicians
– all pharmaceuticals would be available over the counter
– no patents on pharmaceuticals
– no government-owned or supported hospitals
and, as I said, practically no one wants that anywhere.
I think he and Deval Patrick are both hoping to be drafted.
Just got off the phone , making an appointment for an upper G I scope. (unrelenting heartburn). Hung up laughing because appointment is six weeks off. I told them it’s unlikely I’ll follow through on that because:
A. I’ll get better.
B. I’ll feel much worse and go to the ER.
I’ve heard this is typical under socialized medicine, and now I wonder if private insurance patients are seen sooner than Medicare.
“and now I wonder if private insurance patients are seen sooner than Medicare.”
Not generally. Our waits for routine stuff are about 2-3 weeks. Urgent stuff gets done sooner. (The majority of patients having GI procedures in most practices are on Medicare. Those practices might worry if it was found out that they prioritized patients just on the basis of insurance. ) That said, if you have good insurance and you know someone the urgency of your procedure will probably get upgraded.
Steve
I strongly believe that something like that is the norm, i.e. waits for routine stuff while urgent stuff is handled quickly.