Columnist.
"'Shut up,' he explained." That's a sentence from Ring Lardner's short story "The Young Immigrunts." It's an exasperated father's response from the driver's seat to his child's question, "Are you lost, Daddy?" They also can be taken as the emblematic response of today's liberals to anyone questioning their certitudes. As with the father in the story, it's a response that indicates uneasy apprehension — the fear that they have no good answer.
What happens when an irresistible force meets an immoveable object? That's one question raised by the 2016 presidential campaign. The immoveable object is the close and bitter partisan division that has prevailed in general elections for the last two decades. The irresistible force is the corrosive discontent of American voters, their sense that the nation is headed off on the wrong track and that experienced leaders are more the problem than the solution.
Free college! That's what the Democratic candidates were offering in their presidential debate. And it's likely that, if the subject had come up, they would have offered something like free home mortgages as well, to judge from Hillary Clinton's statement that she had urged Wall Street to stop mortgage foreclosures. Sounds a lot like free houses!
Nothing new there. Nothing to see here. Time to move on for good. That was the attitude of most in the mainstream media to the 11-hour questioning of Hillary Clinton by the House Select Committee on Benghazi. It was not the prevailing attitude, as I remember, toward the hearings of the Senate Watergate Committee or the impeachment debate at the House Judiciary Committee (on whose staff Clinton served) 40-something years ago.
Joe Biden has made it official: He is not running for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination. It's the latest development in a presidential campaign cycle that has not been going according to script. Biden said that personal factors played a part in his decision. At a time when few children die before their parents, he has had to endure the grief of losing two of his four children — his daughter Naomi in December 1972, his son Beau last May. "There's no timetable for this process," he said in announcing his decision Oct. 21.
You may not have noticed, but Lincoln Chafee, the erstwhile Republican U.S. senator and Independent-turned-Democratic governor, had one penetrating comment at the Democrats' debate Tuesday night. "But let me just say this about income inequality," he said toward the end. "We've had a lot of talk over the last few minutes, hours or tens of minutes, but no one is saying how we're going to fix it."
Going into the Democrats' first presidential debate Tuesday night, Hillary Clinton seems to have banked on one thing: that far fewer Americans would be watching than watched the Republican debates in August and September. That assumption proved correct. Early Nielsen ratings indicate that 13 million viewers tuned in. That's more than the previous Democratic record of 11 million. But it's not much more than half the 23 and 24 million who watched the Republican debates.
Important parts of our two great political parties seem bent on demonstrating that their parties are incapable of governing coherently. House Republican rebels have pushed Speaker John Boehner out the door without advancing a plausible successor and have risked leaving the speaker's chair vacant. Hillary Clinton has backpedaled and flip-flopped to fortify her flagging campaign so much that she risks making herself a figure of fun.
You win the presidency, Richard Nixon supposedly observed, by tacking to the right in the primaries and to the center in the general election. Hillary Clinton seems to be following that strategy except, as a Democrat, she is tacking to the left. This strategy has risks, as Nixon, who lost the presidency once and won it once by narrow margins, understood. Your right- or left-wing stances in the primaries can hurt in the general.
Not all important public policy reforms come from Washington. Really lasting reforms can percolate from the bottom up, brewed by citizens with a grievance pushing state and local governments to act. Consider the case of Right to Try legislation. These are state laws that allow doctors to prescribe investigational medicines being safely used in clinical trials for patients diagnosed as terminally ill. You may not have heard about these laws. But you may have heard a lot if a loved one or Facebook friend is facing advanced cancer or ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease) and cannot obtain medicine that might alleviate symptoms or extend life because it has not gained final approval from the Food and Drug Administration.
Sherlock Holmes famously solved the mystery of the Silver Blaze by noting the dog that didn't bark in the night. It strikes me that in this wild and woolly campaign cycle there have been numerous dogs not barking in the night, or in the daytime either. Start with the race for the Democratic nomination, which has not unrolled as predicted. Every observer knows Hillary Clinton's numbers have been falling and Bernie Sanders' numbers have been rising, leading her in Iowa and New Hampshire. Every observer is waiting to see if Joe Biden will run, perhaps in time for the Democrats' first debate two weeks from now.
In November 1964 a crowd of 5,000 attended the opening of the Verrazano Narrows Bridge, then the longest suspension bridge in the world. Presiding were New York Mayor Robert Wagner, Gov. Nelson Rockefeller and transportation and parks czar Robert Moses. Also in the crowd was a teenager named Donald Trump. Trump later told a New York Times reporter that he remembered that on that occasion no one mentioned the name of 85-year-old Othmar Ammann, designer of New York's famous bridges for more than 50 years. "I realized then and there that if you let people treat you how they want, you'll be made a fool," he told the Times. "I don't want to be anyone's sucker."
Scott Walker's abrupt withdrawal from the Republican presidential race Monday afternoon shows how different, in ways noticed and unnoticed, this campaign cycle is from those of recent years. One obvious difference is the size of the Republican field — 17, before Walker's withdrawal and Rick Perry's withdrawal 10 days before. That has made debates unwieldy and has placed a premium on somehow emerging from the scrum. Walker didn't. He spoke for just seven minutes in the two-hour Fox News debate on Aug. 6 and the three-hour CNN debate (in which he was asked just three questions) on Sept. 16. It was not a format that favored Midwestern reticence.
As the 2016 presidential selection process proceeds, there is increasing evidence that the political patterns we have grown used to, that we have come to consider permanent, might be suddenly changing. Those patterns include a polarized and closely divided electorate, with partisan preferences highly correlated with degree of religiosity, with clearly defined demographic constituencies within each party and general elections decided consistently by narrow margins. With just a few exceptions, you could have forecast pretty well the state-by-state results of the 2012 presidential election from looking at the 2000 presidential elections. You could have forecast the 2010-2014 popular vote for House of Representatives by looking at that of the 1994-1998 popular vote.
Human beings are hard-wired to protect young children. That's the easiest explanation of the rush of Europeans — especially, but not only, elites — to welcome huge numbers of refugees after publication of the picture of a dead three-year-old boy on a Turkish beach. In response, Chancellor Angela Merkel said Germany would take in 800,000 as refugees. That's 1 percent of Germany's population. The proportionate equivalent in the United States would be 3 million — three times the level of legal immigration.
In this presidential cycle, voters in both parties, to the surprise of the punditocracy, are rejecting experienced political leaders. They're willfully suspending disbelief in challengers who would have been considered laughable in earlier years. Polls show more Republicans preferring three candidates who have never held elective office over 14 candidates who have served a combined total of 150 years as governors or in Congress. Most Democrats are declining to favor a candidate who spent eight years in the White House and the Senate and four as secretary of state.
Some time in the early evening of Wednesday, London time, Queen Elizabeth II broke a record: she became the longest-serving monarch in British history, beating her great-great-grandmother Victoria's reign of 63 years and 216 days. She is also, at 89, by a solid stretch the longest-lived British monarch. And still busy at work, with hundreds of public appearances every year and reading official papers every day in red boxes and meeting with the prime minister every week. The sovereign, as Walter Bagehot wrote in "The English Constitution" some 150 years ago, has "the right to be consulted, the right to encourage and the right to warn."
I've seen this movie before. And for the last 25 years, I thought I'd never have to watch it again. But now it's playing, not in theaters, but all over mainstream media, with something like rave reviews from the president and his administration. The theme of the movie is that there is an epidemic of racist white policemen, gunning down innocent black people. The movie's message, implicit but unambiguous, is that the police must be restrained from vigorous enforcement of the law. That was the message of the Black Power movement half a century ago, and it is the message of the Black Lives Matter movement today.
Aside from the court-ordered dribbling out of Hillary Clinton's classified-material-filled emails, the big presidential campaign news of the summer has been the boom for Donald Trump in the race for the Republican nomination. Trump has risen from 3 percent in the polls (when he announced on June 16) to where he now stands at 26 percent — 14 percent ahead of any other candidate. Trump is drawing support from a constituency that in many ways resembles that amassed by another celebrity candidate who defied the usual political rules, Ross Perot in 1992. Like Perot, Trump runs better among whites than blacks, among men than women, among non-college graduates than college grads, in the suburbs and countryside than in big cities. Like Perot, he does not run especially strong among traditionally religious voters.
In my last column, I looked at the possibility of two impossible things — impossible things in the sense used by Alice and the Red Queen — happening in the already turbulent 2016 presidential cycle. Here I'll look at another: the possibility that the partisan division lines that have endured with little change for two decades might suddenly shift and change. This has happened before. History teaches two lessons pointing in opposite directions: Partisan divisions can stay the same for a long time. And they can change suddenly and without much warning.
