Columnist.
Which party is going to control the House and hold a majority in the Senate in January 2017? Even if you regard the presidential contest as over — a proposition for which there is powerful evidence, including Donald Trump's current campaign message choices — the answers to those questions are, respectively, mildly and very unclear. The Trump campaign has a legitimate gripe against mainstream media for their nonstop coverage of the groping charges against him and their downplaying — or complete blackout — of the WikiLeaks and other revelations about Hillary Clinton and her supporters inside and outside the Obama administration. Does she really, as she swore under oath, have no recollection of key facts about her email servers?
"It is so nice that the shackles have been taken off me and I can now fight for America the way I want to," Donald Trump tweeted at the reasonable hour of 10 a.m. on Tuesday. Shackles? There were no visible shackles on Trump when he launched his several-news-cycles-long assaults on Judge Gonzalo Curiel in May, Khizr Khan and his family in July and Alicia Machado in September.
Robin Hood is dead. Or at least seriously ailing. The politics of taking from the rich and giving to the poor — the politics that philosophers from Aristotle to James Madison dreaded — just doesn't seem to be working as it used to. That's not to say that the United States is about to give up on progressive taxation. With its graduated income tax, the American tax system is by some measures the most progressive in any advanced country. For a generation, the jousting between Republicans and Democrats has been waged within a pretty narrow range. The former want a top rate of 33 percent, the latter 42 percent. However, Hillary Clinton, evidently trying to win over wary Bernie Sanders fans, now says she wants to raise it to 65 percent.
"The president believes the world will be a better place if all borders are eliminated — from a trade perspective, from the viewpoint of economic development and in welcoming people from other cultures and countries." That's a paraphrase of a speech former President Bill Clinton made only months after leaving office, on Sept. 10, 2001, in Melbourne, Australia. There's apparently no transcript; the quotation is from the businessman who hosted the forum, appearing in an article in the next day's Melbourne newspaper, which, thanks to time zone differences, was about 12 hours before the airliners hit the twin towers.
You've heard and read by now lots of spin and speculation about who won and where the polls are going to move after Monday's presidential debate. We'll know the answers to these questions soon. The more important question for the long run is how each of these candidates would govern. The debate provides no certain answers to that question, but it does offer some useful clues. Hillary Clinton started off with a laundry list of incremental economic programs — none of which would promote economic growth. Some have already been legislated (equal pay for women, 1963), others are tilted to the upscale (debt-free college). A possible exception: the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement, which she has renounced but which she might, as Donald Trump predicted, manage to find acceptable once elected.
Let's step back, as we approach the first presidential debate of the 2016 campaign, and look back to try to understand how voting patterns have changed over a generation, by comparing the 2012 presidential results with those of 1988 — keeping in mind possible shifts since 2012 suggested by 2016 polling. My thesis is that changes in states' voting behavior can best be explained by surges of migration over the past generation — not just immigration, a subject of obvious interest this campaign season, but even more of internal migration within the United States. The overall picture is one of Republican decline, from the 53 percent George H.W. Bush won in 1988 to Mitt Romney's 47 percent in 2012. But the decline was not uniform.
There's been lots of speculation about the fate of the Republican Party if (as most of the prognosticators expect and hope) Donald Trump loses. There's been less speculation, though recent polling suggests it may be in order, about the fate of the Democratic Party if Hillary Clinton loses. Certainly there's reason to think — or fear — that the Republican Party will change. Republicans likely won't supply the bulk of support for free trade agreements as they increasingly have for 40 years. Prominent Republicans probably won't press for mass legalization of illegal immigrants, as they did in 2006, 2007 and 2013. If Trump loses, the Republican electorate will have become more downscale and elderly — a continuation of a process that's been in train since the middle 1990s. The long-term migration of voters southward along Interstate 95 will have made the East Coast just about as solidly Democratic as the West Coast, leaving a Republican rump in the interior South and the Great Plains.
Success breeds failure. That's one of the melancholy lessons you learn in life. The success of policymakers in stamping out inflation in the 1980s and minimizing recessions for two decades also produced policies that contributed to the collapse of the housing and financial markets in 2007-08. It's the same in politics. Strategies and tactics that seem certain to produce victory can eventually produce defeat. Prognostications that one party or platform will prevail far into the future usually turn out to have a surprisingly early sell-by date. That becomes apparent when you look at the shrinking margin for Hillary Clinton in the polls. As of Friday, the Real Clear Politics average of recent polls shows Clinton's margin down to 1.5 percent in two-way pairings with Donald Trump and down to 1.1 percent in four-way pairings that include Gary Johnson and Jill Stein.
The thought came to me as I watched the Cleveland police clear away protesters from the city's Public Square. Half a dozen on horseback, nearly a dozen or so on heavy-duty bikes, the cops deftly corralled the protesters without so much as touching anyone, much as a border collie channels a flock of uncomprehending sheep. Then it struck me: What I was seeing was not the real thing, not a genuine spontaneous protest, stoked by anger and with the constant potential of breaking into unstoppable violence. Instead, I was watching a group of re-enactors, wearing costumes copied from the past and carrying signs minimally updated.
When Air Force One landed in China last week for the G-20 Summit, Chinese authorities didn't wheel out the usual staircase for the president to disembark. Instead he had to exit through an opening in the back of the enormous aircraft. It was, you might say, a pivot to Asia. That wasn't the last insult Barack Obama absorbed in Hangzhou. The president of the Philippines, long considered a U.S. ally, called him a name family publications usually don't print. It's rare for an American president to be treated with such contempt. It's what happens when you draw red lines and do nothing when people step over them.
Maybe Hillary Clinton isn't going to be elected president after all. That's a thought that's evoking glee in some, nausea in others, terror in some and relief at the removal of an increasingly tedious figure from public view in still more. The thought is prompted by the CNN/ORC poll showing Clinton trailing Donald Trump in four-candidate pairings by a 45 to 43 percent margin. Clinton's lead in the RealClearPolitics.com average of recent polls is down from 7.6 percent on Aug. 9 to 2.8 percent today. The FiveThirtyEight website has Trump's chances of winning up to 30 percent.
Would he go hard or go soft? That was the mainstream media template for judging Donald Trump's speech on immigration in Phoenix last Wednesday. The verdict: hard. "How Trump got from Point A to Point A on immigration," was the headline in the Washington Post's recap. Similarly, the often-insightful Talking Points Memo blogger Josh Marshall characterized Trump's discourse as "hate speech." "Precisely what solution Trump is calling for is almost beside the point." That's precisely wrong. Marshall found the Phoenix crowd's raucous shouts distasteful, and so did I. But a search through Trump's prepared text and his occasional digressions fails to disclose anything that can be fairly characterized as "hate speech."
Anyone contemplating this year's appalling presidential campaign may be tempted to explain what's happening by applying the third rule of bureaucratic organizations, enunciated by the late poet and definitive scholar of Soviet terrorism Robert Conquest. "The behavior of any bureaucratic organization," Conquest explained, "can best be understood by assuming that it is controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies." The Republican and Democratic parties aren't exactly bureaucratic organizations; they just aspire to be. But their behavior this year certainly looks like it might have been scripted by their fervent foes. Is it known, for example, just who whispered in Donald Trump's ear that this was a good year to run for president? He's been mulling it before, and accumulating national fame as a reality TV star.
"Borders are the worst invention ever made by politicians." Those were the words of Jean-Claude Juncker, president of the European Union's European Commission, at the Alpbach Media Academy last Monday. Nonsense, most readers will surely think, in numbers going far beyond the legions of Americans dismayed with the choices they face in this year's presidential race. But it's worth thinking a bit more about where Juncker is coming from, and the implications of his statement in what is, in Europe as well as America, a fraught political year. Literally, Juncker comes from Luxembourg, a 998-square-mile country wedged between France, Germany and Belgium, where he served as prime minister from 1995 to 2013. If you look up Luxembourg in lists of world economic statistics, you'll find it rated No. 2 in gross domestic product per capita.
Is the political map, so familiar that even non-pundits offhandedly refer to red, blue and purple states, changing before our eyes? Yes, at least to a limited extent — and it's probably about time. The political map has been pretty static for almost two decades, the longest since the 1880s. In the last four presidential elections 40 states and the District of Columbia, with 422 electoral votes, have voted for nominees of the same party each time. In only a few cases were the margins very close, as was the case with the five states with 41 electoral votes that voted for a second party just once (North Carolina, Indiana, Iowa, New Mexico, New Hampshire). That leaves only five states, with 75 electoral votes, supporting the winning candidates, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, in all of the last four elections. You will recognize them as the purplest of purple states: Florida, Ohio, Virginia, Colorado, Nevada.
Victims aren't always virtuous. That's a sad lesson that people learn from life. Human beings have a benign instinct to help those who are hurt through no cause of their own. But those they help don't always turn out to be very grateful. And sometimes it's hard to be sure just who the victim is. The most heavily publicized and violence-prompting police killings of young black men — in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, and Milwaukee this month — appeared to be, as the facts became known, justifiable responses to felons' assaults. Such incidents are, unhappily, frequent, because young black men, again unhappily, commit a wildly disproportionate number of violent crimes. The real victims of this are, again unhappily and disproportionately, law-abiding black people.
Donald Trump has just made changes, again, in his campaign's top leadership, shoving aside the seasoned Paul Manafort and installing Breitbart News Chairman Steve Bannon and veteran pollster Kellyanne Conway. He's obviously acting in response to his falling poll numbers nationally, in target states and even in some states that have been safely Republican in recent elections. Choosing the right people for important jobs is one of the chief responsibilities of a president. History underlines this. It took a president as brilliant as Abraham Lincoln several years to find the generals — Ulysses S. Grant and William T. Sherman — who would win the Civil War. Franklin Roosevelt, in contrast, picked the right generals and admirals for the right jobs before or just after Pearl Harbor.
On Friday, Republican National Committee and Trump campaign staffers held what one described as an "emergency meeting" at the Ritz Carlton in Orlando. The obvious subject: what to do about Donald Trump's flagging campaign and how Republican down-ballot candidates can avoid the possible (likely?) downdraft. Current polling shows Trump losing to Hillary Clinton by 6 percent. He's within range in 2012 Obama-carried target states with older populations and many non-college-graduate whites (Florida, Ohio, Iowa and Nevada) but has fallen behind in Pennsylvania and is well-behind in younger-population, higher-education target states (Virginia, Colorado and New Hampshire).
Google "Donald Trump" and "nationalism" and you'll get 1,090,000 results, the large percentage of which are, to judge from the top hits, negative. "Nationalism" is deemed to be bad stuff, maybe even akin to Nazism. But is nationalism always so bad? Not, it seems, for the millions of people around the world watching the Rio Olympics. They watch as the TV networks keep track of the metal count — and they root for the men and women they see representing their nations. Americans were thrilled to see Michael Phelps propel the U.S. team to gold in the freestyle relay and excited to watch 19-year-old Katie Ledecky destroy the field in the 400 meter freestyle. People who watch gymnasts at only four-year intervals were amazed at the skill of the 4-foot-9-inch Simone Biles.
