Columnist.
The upshot of the Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump phenomena is that both parties are moving to the left. Sanders' and Trump's styles and affects are very different — the rumpled, oddball lecturer in Socialism 101 vs. the boastful, power-tie-wearing business mogul — but they have worked in tandem to ensure that the center of gravity in this fall's presidential election will be further to the left than it has been in decades.
The authors of The Federalist Papers neglected to explain the fearsome powers that inhere in the "Dear Colleague" letter under our system of government. It is the instrument by which middling bureaucrats impose their will on the nation, as the assistant secretary for civil rights at the Department of Education and the principal deputy assistant attorney general for civil rights at the Department of Justice just did in the matter of transgender bathroom policy in our schools and colleges.
Prior to the 2012 election, Democrats had a theory: Republicans were in the grip of a "fever" that had led them to oppose and attempt to obstruct President Barack Obama at every turn. If Obama won a second term, the fever would break. President Obama himself floated the idea. It turned out to be completely (and predictably) wrong. It wasn't an irrational mania that led congressional Republicans to do all they could to block the president's agenda, but abiding philosophical and policy disagreements that weren't going to dissipate with Obama's re-election. Sure enough, the president's second term was as acrimonious as the first.
Down through all the millennia that mankind has smoked tobacco, no one would have believed (or even imagined) that a battery-powered contraption with no tobacco would one day be considered a tobacco product. We've long had smokeless tobacco; now we have tobaccoless tobacco. This conceptual breakthrough is the work of federal bureaucrats who are bringing the regulatory hammer down on e-cigarettes in a misbegotten extension of the war on smoking.
Every Trump critic had "Oh, hell" moments during the primary season. They were when Donald Trump demonstrated a keen, gut-level political instinct that even an exceptionally talented conventional politician would be hard-pressed to match. An example: During a Republican debate in Florida in February, Trump was asked about former Mexican President Vicente Fox's comment that his country wouldn't pay for Trump's "[expletive deleted] wall."
Donald Trump is lucky in his enemies. Every time leftist protesters disrupt one of his events or stage a riot outside, he benefits. They aren't on the Trump payroll, but they might as well be. The protests are catnip to cable TV — as if Trump needed any more free media attention — and provide the perfect framing for Trump's message that only he has the strength to defy the forces of chaos and political correctness.
When the Americans defeated the British at Yorktown, the surrendering British forces supposedly played "The World Turned Upside Down." The song should be on the soundtrack at Donald Trump rallies. The mogul is marching toward the Republican nomination by trampling every single assumption about presidential politics, especially on the GOP side.
During an era of headline-grabbing advances in medicine, the United States is experiencing a health cataclysm. The latest straw in the wind is last week's report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showing that life expectancy for white women declined slightly from 2013 to 2014. Other studies indicate rising death rates for a white working class that is in a slow-motion economic and social meltdown. Self-destructive behaviors are outpacing medical advances against killers like heart disease and cancer. Hopelessness may not be a condition studied by epidemiologists, but it is cutting a swath through a segment of white America.
Harriet Tubman was literally a freedom fighter. The "Moses" of the Underground Railroad liberated herself and dozens of others from slavery over the years in a biopic-worthy life of bravery and idealism. She has now been selected to eventually replace Andrew Jackson on the $20 bill, bumping him to the back in the worst defeat for Old Hickory since John Quincy Adams "stole" the presidency from him in 1824.
It's not easy to make one of the world's biggest fossil-fuel companies a sympathetic victim, but a collection of state attorneys general, led by Eric Schneiderman of New York, has managed it. They have launched a campaign against Exxon Mobil that is a transparent — nay, an explicit — attempt to punish dissent on climate change. The members of the self-described "Green 20" are demonstrating a banana-republic-worthy understanding of the law and their responsibilities. They shouldn't be entrusted with the power of a meter maid, let alone a top position in law enforcement.
Give Donald Trump credit for planning ahead. He is preparing to be a sore loser. Trump's complaints that he is being undone by a rigged system crafted by a corrupt Republican Party is the dress rehearsal for his campaign's closing argument should it come up short in Cleveland. Trump will, in his telling, have been stabbed in the back by insiders and be fully justified in wreaking a terrible revenge on the party that he briefly sought to lead.
Bill Clinton trespassed against the cardinal rule of contemporary Democratic politics, which is that Thou Shalt Not Contradict Black Lives Matter Protesters. Clinton's lapse came at a Philadelphia rally last week. When demonstrators inveighed against the 1994 crime bill signed by Clinton, the former president gave much better than he got. He rebutted them in finger-wagging detail, repeatedly returning to the point that the crime bill sought to diminish the rampant criminality that was destroying black lives.
If the Republican Party is to be saved from Donald Trump, Ted Cruz's runaway victory in Wisconsin will have been the inflection point. If you thought this service to the GOP would be met with plaudits from the party's insiders, you obviously don't know anything about their relationship to the Texas senator. St. Augustine famously prayed, Dear Lord, make me chaste — but not yet. The GOP establishment's prayer is, Dear Lord, deliver us from Donald Trump — but not with Ted Cruz.
Students at the University of Michigan called police the other day — because someone had written Donald Trump's name in chalk. No arrests were made. The episode is part of a nationwide trend of Trump supporters writing pro-Trump messages on sidewalks, stairs and other surfaces at college campuses, where fainting fits are sure to ensue.
Donald Trump never ceases to amaze, but his answer at a CNN town hall about the pledge he had taken to support the Republican Party's nominee was still jaw-dropping. Not only did Trump say that the pledge is null and void as far as he's concerned, he also went further and told CNN's Anderson Cooper that he doesn't want the support of Ted Cruz.
Donald Trump has made his first threat to sue over the procedures for selecting delegates to the Republican convention. It surely won't be his last. The Wall Street Journal reported that Ted Cruz may come out of Louisiana with as many as 10 more delegates than Trump, even though the mogul narrowly beat Cruz in the popular vote there. In a tweet, Trump pronounced it "unfair," and worthy of litigation. The Louisiana delegate picture isn't evidence of anything untoward. Trump and Cruz both won 18 delegates on election night. Marco Rubio, since dropped out, won five, and another five are uncommitted. The Cruz campaign has done the nitty-gritty work to see that those delegates are likely Cruz supporters.
This truly is a year when the rules don't apply. If they did, John Kasich would be back in Columbus trying to figure out whether he sells his soul to Donald Trump or endorses Ted Cruz. Instead, the Ohio governor is still out on the trail running a delusional vanity project masquerading as a presidential campaign. There is no appetite for his pragmatic, "can't we all get along" campaign among Republican primary voters, who have made that abundantly clear.
President Barack Obama inadvertently found the perfect photo-op for his Cuba visit at a wreath-laying ceremony at the Jose Marti Memorial in Havana. A news photo at Revolution Square caught Obama standing together with American and Cuban officials, with an enormous mural of the iconic revolutionary Che Guevara looming over his shoulder on the adjacent Ministry of the Interior building. Che is, of course, ubiquitous on dorm-room walls and T-shirts in the United States, and a hero of the Cuban revolution. He also was a coldblooded killer who set up the Cuban gulag and presided over summary executions of political prisoners (trials were, per Che, "an archaic bourgeois detail"). No doubt, he would have been astonished at the Yanqui president coming to Revolution Square to pay his respects — and exceedingly pleased.
Marco Rubio's speech suspending his campaign after his crushing loss in the Florida primary was a requiem for an entire style of Republican politics. Rubio represented an upbeat, opportunity-oriented vein in the GOP that ran through George W. Bush's compassionate conservatism back to the late supply-sider Jack Kemp, who practically made a civic religion out of optimism and inclusivity. Donald Trump has grabbed this Kempian tradition by the collar and frog-marched it from the room with all the delicacy of one of his security guards ejecting a troublesome protester from a rally.
George Wallace knew how to handle the hecklers who routinely disrupted his events. "These are the folks," he declared at a rally in 1968, "that people like us are sick and tired of. You've been getting a good lesson in what we've been talking about. They talk about free speech but won't allow it to others." Wallace knew the protesters were priceless to him in stoking passions and drawing media attention. "They on our payroll," he joked.
