Don’t worry. While I’m always ready to take a jump to the left, I’m not about to step to the right. And I’m certainly not going to sing.
This is just one of those weeks in which I feel compelled to remind you that many of the pundits wrote their columns, oh, say around Zero-dark-January, and though yesterday’s voting in both parties is of high interest today, few of the columns are going to reference the results. Though it’s easy to visualize a few of them phoning up the editorial desk to say “looks like Trump is going to pull it off, so open the red envelope.”
That said, let’s go straight to some of those which slip in after the horses had crossed the line.
Elizabeth Williamson looks at Hillary’s victory.
With about 80 percent of results tallied, Hillary Clinton was the projected winner of the Nevada Democratic caucus, a win the campaign, now headed to South Carolina for its Feb. 27 primary, attributed to support from African-Americans….
… Exit polls showed Mrs. Clinton had solid support among African-Americans, women and people who would like to see President Barack Obama’s policies continued. Mr. Sanders won among Latino voters, youth and independents, a sign of the challenges awaiting Mrs. Clinton as she looks to build momentum heading into Super Tuesday contests on March 1.
And… see? We kind of already knew these things. Which is why Sunday-morning recaps of Saturday night election results makes for pretty blah reading for people who sit up to watch every district trickle in. It’s more interesting to look at articles like this next one.
Jill Filipovik on Hillary and women voters
The poll numbers and primary results so far tell a simple story: Younger Democratic women are mostly for Bernie Sanders; older women lean more toward Hillary Clinton.
The mothers-versus-daughters narrative, long an election-year trope, is particularly pronounced now, and tinged with stereotypes on both sides. The idealistic but ungrateful naïfs who think sexism is a thing of the past and believe, as Mr. Sanders recently said, that “people should not be voting for candidates based on their gender” are seemingly battling the pantsuited old scolds prattling on about feminism.
Instead, the reality may be another kind of simple numbers game: More time in a sexist world, and particularly in the workplace, radicalizes women.
It’s an interesting argument; one that says Hillary’s support among older women isn’t generated by an obsolete view of society, but by simply a greater awareness of and experience with the obstacles, small and large, which women continue to face once they’ve stepped outside academia and settled into the workplace. It’s also a different take on the relative position of the candidates. Rather than painting Bernie as the revolutionary, here Hillary is the real #@!$-you to the existing system. Worth a read, especially in view of yesterday’s results.
Ok. Come on inside. Let’s look at the rest of ‘em.
Frank Bruni finds just one difference between Cruz and Rubio.
Ted Cruz described Marco Rubio last week as “Donald Trump with a smile,” saying that both are quick to call their critics liars, though Rubio does it amiably.
Cruz is right about Rubio’s affect, wrong about which candidate it distinguishes him from. He and Rubio are the pair twinned in so many respects beyond the curve of their lips.
That makes these two United States senators — both in their first terms, both Cuban-American, both lawyers, just five months apart in age — a uniquely fascinating study in how much the style of a person’s politics drives perceptions of who he is and in how thoroughly optics eclipse substance.
The gist of it is that Rubio is already accepted as part of the Republican team, though he’s a first term Tea Party senator with radical right ideas every bit as awful as those espoused by Cruz. He’s just much less creepy and assholely than Cruz. But then, so is John Wayne Gacy.
Ross Douthat thinks that this week brought arguments from another pair of twins—Donald Trump and Pope Francis.
The Book of Daniel predicted it. The Book of Revelation confirmed it. The Necronomicon spelled it out in language too terrible for human ears to hear. And if you read “The Art of the Deal” backward in the original Sanskrit, you’ll find it foretold there as well: Before the seventh seal is opened, before Famine and Pestilence are loosed, the Man in White must do battle with the Combed-Over Titan, amid the ravening shrieks of Twitter and beneath the unblinking eye of Cable News.
See. I think that’s funny. It strikes me that moving to Threat Level Trumpcon One has given Douthat a big dose of WTF-itis. One that’s just a bit short of “excuse me while I slam my head in this car door a few times to relax.”
The obvious drama of the collision lay in the contrasts between the two men: The celibate and the lecher, the ascetic and the billionaire, the mystic and the frank materialist. But their similarites are also fascinating. For all the ways in which Francis and Trump differ, as figures on the global stage they’re also strangely alike — in the forces that they’re channeling, their style of public salesmanship, and their relationship to the institutions they either head or aspire to lead.
Oh, and it also strikes me that had anyone else written this column, Douthat would have devoted his column to debunking it, and of course explaining why liberal colleges are leading to the downfall of Western Civilization.
Kathleen Parker provides her version of the Pope v. Donald, round one.
The popular wisdom that opposites attract is true in both romance and politics.
But rarely do adages prove so profoundly — and absurdly — true as during the recent, media-created dialogue between Pope Francis and Donald Trump. ...
At first, the exchange, all of which took place through stories ricocheting and pinging around the vast media-verse, seemed a bit nasty. But as the conversation continued and messages began bubbling up in the Magic 8 Ball, things seemed less hostile — and even more ridiculous.
Meanwhile, South Carolinians, whose Republican primary was just a couple of days away when the cycle started, wondered why the pope was getting in their business.
‘Cause, you know, Republicans are really PO’d when someone mixes religion with politics.
Thomas Jefferson once famously produced an edited version of the Bible, from which he excised miracles and scenes he found improbably. I wonder if the Republicans have their own version of the Bible. One that’s paired down to just the smiting and the hate.
Ruth Marcus complains that Trump’s budget proposals aren’t serious. Then writes a column with an absolutely incoherent understanding of both the budget process and the budget. If there’s a Republican argument she hasn’t digested and taken to heart, it’s hard to see.
The New York Times reminds you that Scott Walker still exists, and is still a dick.
What’s a politician to do after his ballyhooed campaign for the Republican presidential nomination flames out before the first vote is cast? In the case of Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin, it means returning home to the anti-labor obsession that got him noticed in the first place — and signing into law, less than two weeks ago, a “reform” plan that promises to gut much of the state’s historic Civil Service system.
Gone are objective Civil Service examinations; instead, as of July, hiring for state jobs will be based on résumés and the impressions they leave on administrators perusing them. Gone, too, is seniority as a bulwark for job protection; administrators will now be able to do layoffs based on subjective evaluations of a worker’s job performance. ...
Patronage, anyone? Mr. Walker hailed the changes as “common sense” efforts to “get the best and brightest in the door and keep them there.” He did not mention energetic toadying as a possible qualification, nor the political cronyism the law so obviously invites.
Having completely ruined pensions and benefits in corporate life, it’s the role of Republicans to stamp out the last examples of decent relationships between employees and employers. It hasn’t been a generation yet, but already people are forgetting what it was like to have a decent benefit package for the ordinary worker.
Alex MacGillis is asking the surely rhetorical question: why is Mitch McConnell being a jerkwad?
In early 2009, as Barack Obama was about to take office, Mitch McConnell, the leader of the Republican minority in the Senate, assembled his caucus at a retreat in West Virginia. There, he laid out his strategy for taking on the new president, who was sweeping into office on a tide of popularity, historical resonance and great expectations barely diminished by the economic free fall then underway.
The key, Mr. McConnell told his fellow Republicans, was to stymie and undermine Mr. Obama, but to do so in subtle ways. As one of the senators present, Robert F. Bennett of Utah, later recalled to me: “Mitch said, ‘We have a new president with an approval rating in the 70 percent area. We do not take him on frontally. We find issues where we can win, and we begin to take him down, one issue at a time. We create an inventory of losses, so it’s Obama lost on this, Obama lost on that. And we wait for the time where the image has been damaged to the point where we can take him on.’ ”
Seven years later, with the Republicans now in the Senate majority, the opposition led by Mr. McConnell is as frontal as can be.
In seven years, how many times has McConnell been confronted over his obstructionist strategy? How many times has he blamed Obama for “not reaching out” or “not working with Republicans?” This is, to me at least, the most under-reported story of the last seven years.
Robert Levine on the government vs. Apple
The dispute between the Justice Department and Apple over access to the phone of Syed Rizwan Farook, one of the gunmen in the San Bernardino massacre, comes down to this question: Shouldn’t the government have more legal and moral authority to weigh complicated issues of privacy and national security than a company that makes phones?
It should. After all, nobody ever elected Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, to public office. …
The government, not Apple, should guarantee our privacy rights. But this dispute has arisen precisely because the government hasn’t done so. Instead, it squandered much of its legal and moral authority when the National Security Agency engaged in widespread surveillance of American citizens for so long. Some N.S.A. abuses targeted Silicon Valley directly.
The NSA privacy violations, water-boarding by the CIA, and the hateful speech from Trump area all of a piece — they all assume that we’ve not only abandoned the moral high ground, but that there is no such ground. The only thing which counts is power and the ability (and ruthlessness) to wield it.
Miguel A. Estrada and Benjamin Wittes don’t believe there are any rules for nominating judges.
Here’s a simple piece of advice for anyone confused by the partisan politics of replacing Justice Antonin Scalia: Assume that anyone who claims to be acting out of a pristine sense of civic principle is being dishonest.
We have both argued for a world in which judicial nominees receive prompt hearings and up-and-down votes based solely on their objective qualifications — education, experience and temperament. But that has not been our world for at least two decades. The savvy citizen should recognize as much and heavily discount anyone who speaks in the language of principle about the rules or norms that do or should govern the treatment of either a judicial nominee or the president who sends that nominee to the Senate. As recent history demonstrates, the only rule that governs the confirmation process is the law of the jungle: There are no rules. There is no point in pretending otherwise, as much as many of us wish it were not so.
The New York Times looks at some unemployment numbers almost as bad as those the GOP candidates are claiming for the nation as a whole.
The staggering problem of chronic unemployment among minority men was starkly presented in a report from the Great Cities Institute at the University of Illinois at Chicago. It found that in Los Angeles and New York City about 30 percent of 20- to 24-year-old black men were out of work and out of school in 2014. The situation is even more extreme in Chicago, where nearly half of black men in this age group were neither working nor in school; the rate was 20 percent for Hispanic men and 10 percent for white men in the same age group.
The outrage is that there are strategies, which Congress has rejected, that could help rescue a generation of young men from failure and oblivion. Among these is the employment subsidy program that was passed as part of the Recovery Act in 2009. It created more than 260,000 temporary jobs for young people and adults. Governors and employers were ecstatic. But Republicans in Congress denounced the program as useless a year later and blocked proposals that would have extended it.
Well of course they did. The more effective the program, the faster is must be squelched.
Alan Lightman looks at the effort behind the first detection of gravity waves.
Nobody in the scientific community doubted the existence of gravitational waves. They are absolutely required by Albert Einstein’s theory of gravity and have been indirectly inferred from other astrophysical observations. The great achievement here was the construction of the most sensitive scientific instrument ever built — able to measure changes in distance a thousand times smaller than the nucleus of an atom. ...
As I watched the Feb. 11 news conference broadcast from the California Institute of Technology, I was struck by the fact that the leaders of this scientific project are well into their senior years. Caltech’s Kip Thorne is in his mid-70s, and MIT’s Rainer Weiss is in his early 80s. (Ronald Drever, the third leader of the team, is 85 and suffers from dementia.) These guys are not hot-shot young mavericks like Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg. They have been working on this project, called the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), for 40 years.
A lot of science, particularly a lot of physics in this age, is like that. Getting answers requires building a machine so large, or launching a space mission so long, that each lifetime can accommodate gaining the answers to only a few questions.
