Margaret Sullivan/WaPo:
Trump joking with Putin over eliminating journalists is a betrayal of America. So is ignoring it.
In the past couple of weeks, President Trump has accused the New York Times of “a virtual act of treason” because of an accurate story he didn’t like. It reported that the United States “is stepping up digital incursions into Russia’s electric power grid.”
And he’s been credibly accused of rape by a well-known magazine journalist, to which he responded that it never happened and what’s more, she was “not my type.”
Apparently deadened by the constant barrage of outrages and scandals surrounding him, Congress and many Americans don’t seem to care about any of it.
So there’s absolutely no reason to think that what happened between the president of the United States and Russian leader Vladimir Putin on Friday will make a difference or change minds.
But it really should.
According to Bloomberg News reporter Jennifer Jacobs, who was traveling with the president to the G-20 summit in Osaka, Trump “bonded with Putin” over his scorn for journalists. She quoted their exchange in a tweet:
“Get rid of them. Fake news is a great term, isn’t it?” Trump said. “You don’t have this problem in Russia, but we do.
Bookmark these:
Compare Medicare-for-all and Public Plan Proposals (Kaiser interactive)
We read 9 Democratic plans for expanding health care. Here’s how they work. (Sarah Kliff/Vox)
Nearly every Dem candidate supports multiple paths to Universal Coverage...which is perfectly fine. (Charles Gaba aka Brainwrap)
The above go over in detail the difference between Medicare for All, Medicare for America (the latter keeps private insurance) anda host of different plans. It’s a disservice to treat these as “raise your hand, yes or no”. That said, moving forward, the candidates need to better articulate what they stand for. If there were a Mueller report on health care proposals, the public wouldn’t read it.
David Rothkopf/Daily Beast:
Hey Dems, Take It From This Ex-Centrist: We Blew It
New Democrat ideas are past their sell-by date and old labels are meaningless. Time to listen to voters.
As the first round of debates among Democratic candidates for president clearly showed, the intellectual vitality of the Democratic Party right now is coming from progressives. On issue after issue, the vast majority of the candidates embraced views that have been seen as progressive priorities for years—whether that may have been a pledge to provide healthcare for all or vows to repeal tax cuts benefiting the rich, whether it was prioritizing combating our climate crisis or seeking to combat economic, gender, and racial inequality in America.
Indeed, as the uneven or faltering performance of its champions showed, it appears that the center is withering, offering only the formulations of the past that many see as having produced much of the inequality and many of the divisions and challenges of today.
During the debates and indeed in recent years, it has been hard to identify one new “centrist” idea, one new proposal from the center that better deals with economic insecurity, climate, growth, equity, education, health, or inclusion. You won’t find them in part because the ideas of the center are so based on compromise, and for most of the past decade it has been clear, there is no longer a functioning, constructive right of center group with which to compromise.
That is in part the fault of the corruption of the GOP and its near exclusive service to the one percent and corporate interests. It is also due, however, to the fact that so many products of Clinton and Obama-era centrism primarily served those elites as well—from the Clinton era repeal of Glass-Steagall to the failure of Obama to really push hard to implement meaningful financial reforms after the crash. The innovation of “Third Way” or New Democrats—a group of which I was part—was, well-intentioned as it may have been on some level, also seeking a way to buy into the popularity of Reagan-era policies (damaging as they were).
Nice counterpoint to the conservative haranguing about who Democrats should nominate.
By the way, if you feel a little unsettled by last week’s debates, you’re not alone. There’s reason to be, and it is not just media coverage. The following pieces cover the ‘disjunctive’ moment, the feeling that politics and policy are going in different directions because the old coalitions have gone stale. But that raises questions: Is the best policy really the best way to get elected? What if it’s not? What if the right thing to do is the wrong way to win?
Whether it’s impeachment or taking on systemic racism, I’m not saying don’t go there. I’m saying that if your job is to be elected/re-elected, the clearest path forward on those issues is not so clear, it’s your job to work out the best way to get both done (policy and politics) and watching candidates figure that out in the open is bound to be messy. It’s a good thing, not a bad thing, but doesn’t lend itself to simplistic cable news analysis.
Julia Azari/twitter and consolidated (lightly edited):
It's jarring to have studied intra-party politics for this long, be all geared up to observe an intra-party fight among Democrats about reparations, and then realize over the course of a few days that what's happening is an intra-party fight over... busing in the 1970s?
After thinking about it, it makes sense through the lens of both parties having disjunctive elements right now. Explained at some length here:
His [Pete Buttigieg] rhetorical rejection of partisan politics goes beyond that: He talks about morality, efficiency, governance. These are recurring themes in American politics, of course, but they are especially strongly associated with two Democratic ex-presidents: Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama. The connections suggest something we don’t see much in the conversation about Buttigieg (or anyone else in the Democratic field). Perhaps the reform-minded outsider isn’t so much positioning himself to be the next transformative president. Maybe his appeals sound more like someone who might be the final leader of a Democratic coalition that’s struggling to adapt to new political circumstances.
I want to be clear that this isn’t intended to be a criticism of Buttigieg. It’s intended as a commentary on the implications of some of the things he has said. Looking at this particular candidate through this lens also allows us to consider both the common features of a disjunctive president who flounders in the face of competing political pressures and a reconstructive president who’s remembered as the founder of a new political era. The crowded 2020 Democratic field also shows there are competing visions for what the Democratic Party should be. Candidates like Buttigieg, who seem invested in reconciling old and new visions, might be part of an important stage in a more fundamental transformation. …
i have also been thinking about whether the Democrats are experiencing some disjunctive symptoms given the narrative out of the first debates is about whether these candidates can win in a general.
Admittedly, this comes from commentators like David Brooks and Bret Stephens so bring your salt truck. But i've heard it elsewhere... and it seems that the reality of primaries mean that there is a political logic to running a "factional candidate" strategy in which instead of trying to win endorsements or unite groups you try to get a solid 30-40% coalition. Combined with a various kinds of general election strategies, you get a situation in which national majorities are elusive and both parties have trouble reconciling party priorities with national policy questions. I’m not sure i think this is definitely happening among Democrats - probably too early to tell - but the potential is there.
Give the above a read, it’s a good analysis of where we are at. The original article in Vox on Mayor Pete’s rhetoric is here:
Democratic presidents, in this story, serve as preemptive leaders who navigate being opposition presidents even as the default political frameworks — shrinking government is good, public-private partnerships are more efficient, entitlement programs require serious reform — and the dominant coalition remain Republican. However, the theory allows for other possibilities. One in which Obama’s presidency was a very limited reconstructive presidency, motivated by reviving New Deal liberalism in ways that are opposed to Reagan conservatism.
Scott Lemieux has argued this, resting on two important ideas. One is that unlike a lot of preemptive leaders who borrow policy issues from the other side, Obama wasn’t really a “third way” president. Lemieux argues in particular that the Affordable Care Act had more in common with the New Deal/Great Society political tradition than anything that came after it.
The other is that the Reagan period didn’t really wipe out the Democrats’ core commitments and constituencies. If the New Deal era remained at least somewhat robust, then maybe Democratic presidents are still working through the different stages of political time in parallel with Republicans, not just filling the “preemptive” role of opposition presidents.
Lemieux has argued that Obama most closely resembled an “articulator” of a Democratic order; the 44th president pursued policies in line with the party’s values, both in the legislative arena and in executive branch policymaking. If this characterization is correct, then it stands to reason that the Democrats, like the Republicans, might be in for a disjunctive leader. And one of the candidates in particular has really fit the mold.
And this one better defines what it means to be disjunctive:
2019 has been Trump’s most disjunctive year yet. And it’s only February.
What does this mean? According to Stephen Skowronek’s theory of presidents and parties in cyclical “political time,” disjunctive presidents are the ones who go down in history as the worst. These presidents have some commonalities across historical eras, but a few things stand out: they come at the end of a “regime” started 40 to 60 years prior where a president of the same party set the terms of debate. But those terms, and the coalition that united behind them, have gone stale and no longer meet the demands of the era.
We can understand how disjunctive politics is shaping the Trump administration, the shutdown, and even what’s going on to some extent on the Democratic side, by thinking about three gaps.
Oh, and here’s another reason to be unsettled (in a good way):
Virginia Heffernan/LA Times:
Even the Harris-Biden showdown was balm for our Trump-battered psyches
“That little girl was me,” said Harris. “So I will tell you that on this subject, it cannot be an intellectual debate among Democrats.”
Her words threw into relief the lofty detachment of the party’s aged grandees, front-runners Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). These men like to position themselves as gung-ho for civil rights, but their records are mixed, and they have not lived the struggle as Harris has.
The Castro-O’Rourke exchange was illuminating. Harris and Biden’s was historic. But neither undid the spookiness of the night.
Hours after the second debate, why it was unsettling still eluded me. But then it came into focus: We’d been transported back through the looking glass. In prime time, our political conversation was rational, civil, normal, sane and enlightening.
WaPo editorial:
The first Democratic debate offered plenty to cheer for
FOR THOSE who listened dutifully through four hours of debate among 20 Democratic presidential candidates this week, the party’s large field may have seemed like a curse. Several improbable also-rans ate up time during which more plausible candidates could have been speaking, and there were moments of confusing cross-talk and interruption. But that shouldn’t obscure the underlying reality: There is an unusually large, diverse group of well-qualified candidates.
Onstage were a former vice president, current and former members of Congress, governors, a former Cabinet member and a mayor. Women, particularly Sen. Kamala D. Harris of California and Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, featured prominently. Candidates of color, including Ms. Harris, former housing and urban development secretary Julián Castro and Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey, reflected the nation’s diversity. The party’s first serious openly gay candidate held the stage.
More importantly, the discussion focused on issues. There was far more policy substance than personal sniping. Even Ms. Harris’s attack on former vice president Joe Biden, which got the biggest headlines, was trained on his record.
Portland Press-Herald:
Migrant influx to Portland [ME] prompts emergency declaration, flood of generosity
City officials and others are now focusing on the difficult next phase of the relief effort: moving the families out of the temporary shelter at the Expo into more stable housing
Over the coming days and weeks, more than 330 migrants who fled the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Angola and traveled thousands of miles through Central America and Mexico arrived in Portland on Greyhound buses. The influx overwhelmed the city’s network of homeless shelters, and, as noncitizens, the new arrivals are ineligible for state or federal financial assistance and not allowed to get jobs and earn their own money.
The sudden arrival of so many migrants thrust city and state officials into an ongoing discussion about how to house the families, what public assistance can be offered and who will pay. While some voices in the community have argued that the newcomers will take scarce resources from citizens in need, those were drowned out by more than $500,000 in cash donations, a flood of 1,200 volunteers and a variety of offers to house the newcomers in college dorms, vacant apartment buildings and spare bedrooms.
Meanwhile, Jennings responded to the warning from Texas by getting the blessing of city councilors to declare an emergency and quickly convert the Portland Expo, home arena for the Red Claws basketball team, into a temporary shelter.
Doing the right thing is the answer, but it’s never without complication.
The immigrant story is the story of America.
Know nothingism is also the story of America.