Okay, maybe it’s Monday or something, but a pass through the opinion pages at The NY Times has me asking “What just happened?” Normally it’s a lot of concern trolling aimed at liberals, but today?
Joe Klein advises Democrats Need to Stop Playing Nice It’s rehashing the problem of reflex Democratic civility in the face of in-your-face gut punching by the the Right. Klein says Biden did a good job at the SOTU — but he can’t be the only “Celtic warrior” out there. And, while taking Trump to court is proving to be justice delayed and denied, Trump is busy fighting it out in the court of public opinion — so...
...Wouldn’t it be fun if Mr. Biden got tough with Mr. Trump directly, in person, in a debate?
It might be educational for the American public to see how the bully responds to a rhetorical punch in the nose rather than to a lawsuit.
Peter Wehner is not pulling any punches with If There’s One Thing Trump Is Right About, It’s Republicans Here’s how The NY Times summarizes where Wehner is coming from.
Peter Wehner (@Peter_Wehner) is a contributing Opinion writer and a senior fellow at the Trinity Forum who served in the administrations of Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush. He is the author of “The Death of Politics: How to Heal Our Frayed Republic After Trump.”
So, for someone who has been a career Republican insider, Wehner is very clear about what has happened to the party:
...Since 2015, I have repeatedly warned Republicans about Mr. Trump, describing him as the kind of demagogue the founders feared, malignant and malicious, a man with a disordered personality. At this point eight years ago, I said that while the struggle for the Republican nomination was over, the struggle for the soul of the party was not.
Once Mr. Trump won the presidency, I knew it was. He and the Republican Party fused ideologically; it’s now a populist rather than a conservative party. It’s instincts are nativist, protectionist and isolationist. But the most significant fusion is ethical and moral. The Republican Party keeps getting darker. It has become anti-intellectual, conspiracy-minded and authoritarian, intemperate and brutish, transgressive and anarchistic. And there’s no end in sight.
Mr. Trump is a human blowtorch, prepared to burn down democracy. So is his party. When there’s no bottom, there’s no bottom.
The next 34 weeks are among the more consequential in the life of this nation. Mr. Trump was a clear danger in 2016; he’s much more of a danger now. The former president is more vengeful, more bitter and more unstable than he was, which is saying something. There would be fewer guardrails and more true believers in a second Trump term. He’s already shown he’ll overturn an election, support a violent insurrection and even allow his vice president to be hanged. There’s nothing he won’t do. It’s up to the rest of us to keep him from doing it.
David French is a conservative voice at the Times, but one who can “still tell a hawk from a hand saw”. He’s gotten death threats for speaking out against what Trump is and what he is doing. So, French is making a case for Why Haley Voters Should Support Biden.
...But here’s what’s not debatable: While the ideological alignments of the two parties are in a state of flux, only one party is nominating a man who’s been impeached twice, indicted in four criminal cases, found liable for systemic financial fraud, and found liable for sexual abuse and for defaming his victim. He is a man who inspired and gave at least tacit support to a violent assault on the Capitol in an effort to overturn an American election.
It’s plain, however, that the corruption argument alone isn’t pulling sufficient numbers from Trump. Reagan conservatives don’t just need reasons to vote against Trump. They also plainly need reasons to vote for Joe Biden. In 2024, we have two presidential records to compare. And this time it’s the Democrat who can say that he’s tougher on Russia and better on crime, and overseeing an economy that’s the envy of the world. That’s a case for conservatives. The question is whether it’s a case they’re willing to hear.
Jacob Soll has a refreshing assertion that arguments the government should have no role in shaping the economy are bunk, going back to one of the Founding Fathers to make the case that There Is a Secret Hamiltonian in the White House.
President Biden has been called a lot of things, but Hamiltonian is not usually one of them. In spite of his economic successes, hardly anyone has thought to compare the president to the architect of the American economy.
And yet, more than any president in generations, Mr. Biden shares Alexander Hamilton’s fundamental vision for the country: America needs a strong industrial strategy to support its long-term security. Mr. Biden’s CHIPS and Science Act and his Inflation Reduction Act reflect this idea. These policies channel government money into the semiconductor, solar energy and electric vehicle sectors in the hope of reducing reliance on foreign producers and bolstering national security, while helping American companies become more competitive with Chinese state-subsidized industries.
...As an economic historian, I can’t help being struck that this argument over industrial policy versus unfettered free markets has happened before, during the presidency of George Washington. It’s also hard to ignore the irony that Republican champions of historical originalism are attacking an economic playbook that looks much like the one written in 1791 by Hamilton when he was Washington’s secretary of the Treasury. While some historians have called Hamilton’s project for state support of American manufacturing a failure, the reality is that Hamilton’s plan was not only successful at the time, it also laid a template for almost two centuries of security-driven economic policy, which Mr. Biden is merely revamping.
...In an age of rising autocracy and militarism around the world, the president is thinking not just tactically in terms of the country’s economic well-being, but also strategically about how industrial policy is crucial to America’s security, in every sense of the word.
Biden isn’t just fighting for an economy that works for people from the bottom up — he’s shaping an economy that can prove strong enough to prevail in the face of global authoritarian threats.
Ezra Klein has made no secret that he wishes Biden would step down so that he could enjoy the spectacle of an old-fashioned political convention that would award the nomination on the basis of wrangling and horse-trading by political insiders, rather than by seeing which candidate can actually get voters to turn out in a primary. He has a grudging admission after seeing Biden give the SOTU: Fine, Call It a Comeback.
...“I came to office determined to get us through one of the toughest periods in the nation’s history,” Biden said. “We have. It doesn’t make news, news — in a thousand cities and towns, the American people are writing the greatest comeback story never told.”
Biden’s refrain of the American comeback is a sharp one. It does two things simultaneously. It reminds voters that there is something America is coming back from — namely, the dislocations of the pandemic, and the wild, erratic management style that Trump brought to it — and it lets Biden point to progress without declaring victory. It’s the right message for an incumbent: There are good things happening. Let’s keep going.
It also describes the way the Biden team actually imagines a second term. When I talked to administration officials in the weeks leading up to the State of the Union, I was struck by how many told me that the top priority of a second term was bringing the legislative accomplishments of the first to fruition. Biden’s record is atypically physical: The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, the Inflation Reduction Act and the CHIPS and Science Act are all about building real things in the real world. It’s slow work that takes time — too much time, if we’re being honest.
Klein has to point out the problems that are slowing that work in progress, the perception that the economy isn’t working by too many people, but he concludes with this:
“Turning setback into comeback,” Biden said on Thursday. “That’s what America does.” It’s a good message. And it has the added benefit of being true.
And by implication, the messaging coming from the Right is nothing but lies and worse — although Klein doesn't take time to point that out.
Finally, Gail Collins and Bret Stephens go at it in their weekly feature “The Conversation”. It’s The NY Times version of a morning drive time shock jock radio show, where the hosts sit around trying to top each other while talking trash about stuff. Which gives us: And the Award for Best Performance at the State of the Union Goes to …
Gail Collins, the supposedly liberal voice gets off a left-handed ‘compliment’ to Biden, while Stephens is actually praising Biden — and finding a target for a less than profound observation.
...Gail Collins: Well, he probably won over some reluctant Trumpians. But the great thing about the speech, Bret, wasn’t that he changed people’s minds about who to vote for in November. It’s that it moved a ton of Biden voters who had been saying all along they wished he’d just get out and let some younger politicians have a chance at the presidency.
Bret: He also did a very good job defining the stakes of the election. Will we support the free world against Vladimir Putin or abandon it to him? Will we fight for reproductive rights or lose them? Will we do something about gun massacres or resign ourselves to periodic slaughter?
Also, I marveled at the many ways Mike Johnson, the speaker of the House, managed to approximate the expressions of a constipated turtle.
They go on to touch on a variety of other topics — Hochul sending the National Guard into the subways, Britt’s bizarre counter to the SOTU, the anti-semitic maniac with the GOP nomination for governor in North Carolina. This little exchange towards the end is rather interesting:
Gail: How about all the other elections coming up this fall? Are you hoping the Republicans expand their House majority? I’ve noticed you’re not madly in love with Speaker Johnson.
Bret: The only way to be in love with Speaker Johnson is if you’re mad.
Gail: On my end, of course, it’s cheers for a Democratic takeover.
Bret: I used to be a middle-of-the-road Republican. Nowadays, I think of myself as a Scoop Jackson Democrat — and my views have barely shifted. If my taxes go up, I’ll live. If my democracy goes down, I won’t.
Gail: Wow, you should be an election ad.
Bret Stephens is still irredeemable (the rich already pay too much in taxes, yada yada yada) but even he has occasional moments of sanity. So much for this pair from chattering classes. They’re still going for cheap laughs, but the Overton Window they’re gazing through seems to be shifting.
So, what’s up with the Gray Lady?
Is this just a random event, a chance aligning of the constellations? Did Biden’s dynamic performance at the SOTU make it too difficult to keep pushing the “Biden is too old, feeble, too senile” narrative? Did they finally realize that nothing is going to stop Trump from becoming the Republican nominee — not the courts, not the fines, not the continuing scandals, not any other candidate? Did they finally accept that Biden is going to be the Democratic nominee? Did they finally start paying attention to what Trump looks and sounds like these days? Did the pushback from media critics finally get through to the people running the paper? Is it the people who keep writing in comments about how awful the Times news and opinion coverage is? Is this just a black swan event? Will their regular news coverage do a better job reflecting the real world, or we still be going back to diners in the Midwest?
I don’t know.
The State of the Union Address and Trump’s clearing the field on Super Tuesday have made it clear that the campaign for the general election is now on. Trump never stopped campaigning, but Team Biden is now starting in earnest to promote Biden and make a case for Democrats. They raised a record amount from the SOTU speech, and they are starting media efforts. Bidenomics should continue to manifest more and more as shovels go into the ground and jobs get filled.
Fingers crossed, take nothing for granted, and let's GOTV! Never give up and never surrender. Forward momentum!
UPDATE 6:00pm ET 3-11-24
Digby links to a newsletter from Melissa Ryan about what it was like just before the Covid lockdown started in 2020, and how we as a country are still reluctant to face up to how horrible it was and how Trump made it worse. It is an explanation for why people seem to have forgotten just how bad the Trump presidency was — nobody wants to revisit the trauma of that time.
This paragraph from Ryan seems very apropos to what happened in the Times today:
It’s interesting that as the last normal week of our lives meme is popping online, the media post-Super Tuesday finally seems to have resigned itself to the fact that yes, this election will be Trump vs. Biden again, yes, we’re going to have to remember just how catastrophic Trump and his administration was for the world, and yes, Trump is still vulnerable in the same ways he was in 2020. The timing is coincidental but perhaps if people are ready to engage on how Covid impacted their lives, they’re also ready to acknowledge what a danger letting Donald Trump back in the White House again is for humanity. And engage in the election accordingly.
emphasis added
UPDATE 3-12-24 8:30am ET
More at The NY Times today. Paul Krugman talks about Sex Trafficking, De Facto Lies and Immigration
To really understand the significance of her de facto lie, [Senator Britt creating the impression that her story of sex trafficking and rape took place on Biden’s watch] however, we need to put it in political context.
Over the past few months, there’s been a palpable shift in Republican rhetoric away from attacks on the Biden economy and toward dire warnings about “migrant crime.”
This shift has in part been forced by the fact that the Biden economy is actually doing very well these days, with inflation receding while unemployment remains near a 50-year low. In political terms, the narrative of a bad economy seems to be fading.
If I were a Republican strategist, I’d be especially worried about the changing tone of news coverage. The San Francisco Fed maintains a daily index of “news sentiment.” In the summer of 2023, although the economy was arguably already performing pretty well, this index was roughly as low as it was in the depths of the Great Recession. Since then, however, it has shot up to levels roughly comparable to those that prevailed on the eve of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Republicans are flogging the border issue as hard as they can because they’ve really got nothing else.
Jamelle Bouie has a few things to to say: Mitch McConnell Doesn’t Wear a MAGA Hat. I’m Not Fooled.
There’s no question that McConnell is one of the most consequential politicians of his generation. This isn’t a compliment. McConnell is not consequential for what he accomplished as a legislator or legislative leader — he’s no Robert F. Wagner or Everett Dirksen. He’s consequential for what he’s done to degrade and diminish American democracy.
McConnell, as the journalist Alec MacGillis noted in “The Cynic: The Political Education of Mitch McConnell,” was never driven by ideology. He was a moderate, pro-choice Republican before he became a hard-right, conservative one. “What has motivated McConnell has not been a particular vision for the government or the country, but the game of politics and career advancement in its own right,” MacGillis wrote in 2014.
It is a politics of the will to power, in which the only thing that matters is partisan victory. “At some point along the way,” MacGillis wrote, “Mitch McConnell decided that his own longevity in Washington trumped all — that he would even be willing to feed the public’s disillusionment with its elected leaders if it would increase his and his party’s odds of success at the polls.”
A bit of a change from the reflex media position to take McConnell at face value as an ‘establishment’ Republican when, like Trump, it was always about his own self-aggrandizement. This, after all, is the man who long before Trump proclaimed his highest priority was to make Obama a one-term president, and one who deliberately stole a Supreme Court seat from Democrats.
...This is why the most fitting coda to McConnell’s career was not the speech he gave announcing his decision to step down as Republican leader, but the statement he made the following week. “It is abundantly clear that former President Trump has earned the requisite support of Republican voters to be our nominee for president of the United States,” McConnell announced, following Trump’s victory on Super Tuesday. “It should come as no surprise that as nominee, he will have my support.”
There are a lot of things about McConnell’s reign in the Senate that will not look good in the history of these times — assuming we will still have objective history after 2024.
Once more The NY Times goes out to talk to Republican voters — but this time it’s a bit different: ‘He Lost Me’: Why 10 Voters Who Backed Trump in 2016 and 2020 Have Moved On.
If we’ve seen an enduring trend from the Republican presidential primaries this winter, it’s that a sizable fraction of G.O.P. voters don’t want Donald Trump as their nominee again. Why is that? And what do these people — who made up 20 to 30 percent of primary voters in some states — think of the Republican Party and the issues facing the country?
For our latest Times Opinion focus group, we gathered 10 independents and Republicans who voted for Mr. Trump in 2016 and 2020 but who aren’t supporting him this time around to explore when he lost them.
What’s clear is that Mr. Trump is no longer the outsider voice that resonated with these voters in 2016. Some said that role has been taken on by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. They are responding pretty viscerally to things he has said and to his antiestablishment, beholden-to-nobody image. Indeed, a major takeaway from the focus group is that the Kennedy factor in this election should be taken pretty seriously in the swing states where he’s likely to make the ballot this fall.
For several in the group, the Republican Party has become MAGA nation, and it’s too hard line and hard right — and, some said, hateful — to be a political home for them. As for losing faith in Mr. Trump, some of the voters described how his taking top-secret documents to Mar-a-Lago was a turning point for them, and others mentioned the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. Still, their concerns about him do not necessarily make Mr. Biden or Democrats look better by comparison. For all but one of these voters, Mr. Trump’s shortcomings do not translate into increased support for Mr. Biden at this point.
Note that although some of the 10 claim to be independents, in practice they are Republican voters by habit and inclination. What are their priorities? The Times asks “Do you think the country is on the wrong track? [Everyone raises a hand.] OK. Here are five issues: The economy, immigration and the border, American democracy, abortion and the conflict between Israel and Gaza.”
The economy got 5 out of 10, the border and immigration got 2, and democracy got 3. Nobody raised their hand for abortion or Gaza.
This story is of interest mainly in that it shows where support for Trump has weakened. It’s not good news for Biden in that only one of them was willing to consider voting for him — but that was never likely in any case. Several of them admitted their chief reason for voting for Trump was because they hoped “he’d shake things up” — not so much that they were drawn to Trump as that they were that disenchanted with “the establishment”. RFK Jr. appeals to them as an outsider they hope will fundamentally change things — again.
I’m going to share a full access link to this article because it’s useful to see where these people are coming from and what they believe. They’ve absorbed the Fox News/Talk Radio view of the world. A lot of them are not happy with the Republican Party — but they still see Trump as somehow separate from it. 9 out of 10 of them think Trump will win.
It’s instructive to see the way the team who worked on this article never challenges their subjects on their beliefs, never asks them to explain why they believe what they do versus what objective facts are in those cases, or point out things Biden has done that address their concerns. They don’t ask obvious follow up questions. Covid is only mentioned twice — and not the by the interviewers. I also wonder if they will be trying to turn RFK Jr.’s campaign into part of the horse race narrative.
Still, it’s useful in that it shows how much trouble there is out there for the GOP. These people may not turn out for Biden — but will they turn out at all? That’s the question.
UPDATE 3-12- 24 2:20pm ET
Tom Sullivan at Digby’s place has a reminder of what the press has — and hasn’t — been doing. By His MAGAsty’s Decree “Journalists seem bored by the biggest story of our lifetimes”
“These are not the actions of an innocent man,” says Jacob, criticizing the press for whitewashing this as politics as usual.
Sargent writes:
Over the weekend, The New York Times published a news analysis titled, “The Biden-Trump rerun: A nation craving change gets more of the same.” This has become a constant refrain in the press: One of the candidates is running on an explicit set of promises to destroy American democracy, yet the press keeps calling this a “rematch” of 2020, almost as if it’s all a sporting event.
And…
Jacob writes:
Yes, it’s a race between two old white guys we already know. But the choice is stark. When the Times argues ridiculously that neither Biden nor Trump is a “change candidate,” it’s ignoring the fact that both of them have clear visions for transforming American politics.
Biden’s agenda calls for making the super-rich pay more taxes, capping prescription drug prices, restoring abortion rights, addressing the climate crisis and creating stronger alliances to confront the growing threats facing the world’s democracies.
Trump’s agenda calls for him to become a dictator and create alliances with other dictators, as well as to harass his opponents with the Justice Department, send troops into American cities, put millions of immigrants in camps and crack down on the press.