WORSE THAN NIXON

WORSE THAN NIXON

In the annals of American history, one President stands alone in his infamy.

That President is Richard M. Nixon.

Of the forty-four men to become President of the United States, only Nixon has resigned.  Among that same group of men, it is also clear that only he, upon being impeached, would have been removed after a Senate trial.  In fact, he resigned only after the House Judiciary Committee had sent a bi-partisan bill of impeachment to the full House.  Republican leaders in the the House and Senate -- Arizona's Rep. John Rhodes and Sen. Barry Goldwater and Pennsylvania Sen. Hugh Scott  -- then marched to the White House to tell their Republican President that the gig was up. 

The good news is that Nixon was unique in his ignominy.

The bad news is that, if Donald Trump becomes President, things will be worse.

Nixon's "high crimes," the standard required for impeachment and removal, are well-known.  He covered-up the break-in, burglary and bugging of the offices of his political adversary, the Democratic Party. His cover-up was explicit and fully endorsed.  Within days of the arrest of the burglars, the White House tapes show him instructing the CIA to have the FBI stop its investigation on the trumped-up ground that its continuation would impede national security, and promising to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars in hush-money for those arrested. 

In July 1972, at the time Nixon committed his crimes, he was about to be re-nominated for President, and the Democrats were about to nominate South Dakota's Sen. George McGovern.  

McGovern favored American withdrawal from Vietnam, amnesty for draft evaders, a close to 40% cut in defense spending, and a de facto guaranteed annual income. He would become the most liberal nominee ever put up by the Democrats.  Consequently, he was Nixon's dream opponent --  an unwashed leftie whose supporters were at war with a mainstream America comfortable at that time with neither acid, amnesty nor abortion, the three-word sobriquet hung around McGovern's neck. 

Watergate, therefore,  was an act of unmitigated self-destruction.

Volumes of ink have been spilled attempting to explain Nixon's behavior.  He has been deemed paranoid, irredeemably dishonest, and at times unhinged.  In fact, though he may have been all of these at one point or another, his flaws were much more quotidian.  His lying was selective, his obsessions particularized.  As President, he had governed largely from the center, annoying conservatives not as much as liberals, the latter of whom by 1969 could not stomach any more (let alone four more) years of Vietnam, but a lot nevertheless. In fact, his creation of the EPA and OSHA and his endorsement of wage and price controls and the Family Assistance Plan (which would have guaranteed an income to all)  sent conservatives off the deep end.  And as a politician, he no doubt thought that what he was covering-up in the summer of '72 was nothing other than what his opponents had been doing for years.  

About this, of course, he was wrong.  

But not so wrong as to be deemed crazy.

Politics was dirtier then.

So, Nixon deserved what he got.  But withal, he was and remains a recognizable political entity.

Not so Trump.

Trump does not lie about a few things or select things.  He lies about more than most things.  Fact-checkers at PolitiFact have rated 69% of his statements as either false, mostly false, or "pant-on-fire" false. Unlike Nixon, Trump's narcissism knows no bounds.  His only apparent requirement (from anyone) is adulation.  Nixon obsessed about his enemies in general and the Kennedys in particular.  Trump obsesses about himself and condemns anyone who either refuses to join in the obsession or says anything at odds with its self-congratulatory assertions of personal triumph, unparalleled intelligence or sexual prowess. Nixon was stuck in some sort fear that Ivy Leaguers never respected his intelligence.  

Trump is just stuck . . .

At about age 13.

Despite his flaws, Nixon also was a student of policy.  He was at home in the world of legislative mark-ups, in-depth briefs, and give and take with  Henry Kissinger and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, two of the many Ivy League intellectuals who actually worked for him. Trump has the attention span of a gnat and is at home with Steven Bannon, the alt-right take down artist adept at put-downs and put-ups.  To his credit, Nixon actually ended segregated schooling in the south and enforced the Supreme Court's landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision.  Trump, on the other hand, was catapulted onto the national scene via the racist lie that Obama was born in Kenya, a lie Trump continued to tell until just last week.

Nixon turned out to be a crook.

Trump will turn out to be a lot worse.  

On foreign policy, which Trump somehow thinks is his strength in this election, the comparison is even deadlier.  Nixon spearheaded detente with the Soviet Union and the opening to Red China.  The opening was a product of strategic design.  He and Kissinger wanted to send a message to the Soviets that their monopoly on bi-lateralism with the Chinese was over.  And it worked.  After the Chinese thaw, Nixon began to negotiate SALT II (the second Strategic Arms Limitations Talks). President Ford achieved a significant breakthrough in those talks in 1974, and President Carter signed the SALT II agreement in 1979.  Though never ratified by the Senate, both the Carter and Reagan Administrations abided by it,  and ultimately President Reagan did his dance with Gorbachev that later brought the Cold War to an end.

Now, compare Trump.

On the one hand, he begins his negotiations with insult.  Exhibit A -- Mexicans are rapists.  On the other, he praises the autocracy that has emerged in Russian under Vladimir Putin.  Nixon is turning over in his grave (in fact, on this point, so is Reagan).  Were he going one on one with Putin, the last thing Nixon would do is give Putin leverage.

But that is exactly what Trump has done (and the reason Putin likes him).

Trump alienates NATO allies by turning American's unconditional defense against any Russian incursion into a defense conditioned on the payment of back dues, a move that simultaneously emboldens Putin into believing America will turn a blind eye to any designs he has on the Baltics and ultimately end the sanctions designed to reverse his seizure of Crimea.

Similarly, Trump weakens the leverage inherent in America's nuclear superiority by announcing that, maybe, the Japanese and South Koreans should go nuclear to defend themselves from North Korea, on the one hand watering down America's guarantee to defend Japan and South Korea and on the other endorsing nuclear proliferation in a world that needs to move in the opposite direction.

This is not strategy.

It is stupidity.

Trump constantly supports his absurdities with the line that he doesn't want "to show his hand" in any subsequent negotiations.  But in his all-the-world's-a-real-estate-deal that only he can close, he isn't holding his cards; he's just proving he has no idea what is in the deck or how to use it.  Nixon didn't weaken NATO before he went to China or negotiated with Brezhnev.  He didn't open relationships with China by insulting the Chinese.

And then, of course, there is Trump's temperament.  Solipsistic, mercurial, bombastic and totally unfit to be anywhere near the nuclear codes.  The list of seasoned foreign policy operatives opposing him grows by the day.  And that list is replete with Republicans, ranging from Brent Scowcroft and Robert Gates to numerous officials who served in the Reagan and both Bush Administrations, all of whom believe Trump does not have the temperament to be Commander-in-Chief.

The verdict is in.  Trump has all of Nixon's flaw and none of his talents.

It did not seem possible in 1974.  But with Donald Trump as President, we would in truth have someone . . .

Worse than Nixon.

THINKING

THINKING

I am tired of pollsters asking me what I think.

And I am tired of them asking you what you think.

We all need to stop thinking about what we are thinking.   We need to just . . .

Think.

This week's post-Labor Day, now-is-the-real-start-of the-campaign news is that Hillary and His Tweetness are starting to get pretty close in the polls.  No matter that Clinton still has a 75% plus chance of winning when all the relevant data is analyzed.  No matter that the Donald literally has to run the table on close to all of the eleven states in play to have any chance of winning.  No matter that he is close to losing in Texas, which hasn't voted for a Democrat for President in forty years.   No matter that Trump still refuses to disclose his tax returns . . . or his medical history . . . or, for that matter, any policies beyond those he can squeeze into 140 characters.  Indeed, no matter that, regardless of what he says, anything coming out of Trump's mouth has the half life of a mayfly.

We are now told the race is close.

This is also the new conventional wisdom.  Writ large, Trump's disaster of a Republican convention and Hillary's eight point bounce in the wake of her own has now supposedly  evaporated into the hair-splitter that campaign professionals always predicted.   Trump can do no wrong great enough to disqualify himself and Hillary can make no mistake  small enough to be ignored.  Neither is loved so both must be equally hated.

Hence the current cynical stalemate all the polls are selling us.

Are you buyin' it?

I -- decidedly -- am not.

Roughly 126.8 million Americans cast ballots in the 2012 Presidential election.  In the 2008 election, that number was 129.4 million and in the 2004 election it was 121 million.  If any of those numbers accurately predict the 2016 turnout, more than 60 million people -- and a lot more if the 2008 or 2012 turnout numbers apply -- will have to vote for Trump for him to win.  And a good chunk of those votes will have to come from non-white, Hispanic, female and college educated white male voters, all of whom Trump is now losing by large margins, in places like Arizona, Nevada, Florida and Colorado, where in all places he is currently behind.

That is not going to happen. 

So, what explains the current this-is-too-close-call narrative?

Here's my answer.

First, we have become so enamored of polls that we no longer understand they are just snapshots, and wildly divergent snapshots at that.  The real data driven wonks who accurately predict these things (think Nate Silver) long ago told us not to be taken in by any single poll.  They warned of outliers (polls consistently biased in one direction or the other), and constantly reminded us that the Presidential election is really fifty separate contests, making national polls pretty useless when it comes to predicting results (just ask Al Gore).  Polls fluctuate.  Turnout models can be wrong, as was the case with all the polls that predicted a Romney victory in 2012.  And these fluctuations and underlying models matter.  

If the notion that millions -- perhaps more than ten million -- of your neighbors changed their minds between August and now, and not once but twice, strikes you as strange, that is nevertheless what the polls are telling us.  These people went from liking Trump enough to get him close to Clinton, to hating him enough for her to be thinking landslide, to now liking him enough once again so as to once again make it close.  If this is the case, this race will not be decided by whoever wins the undecideds.  It will be decided by whoever wins the indecisive.

But I'm not convinced people are really that indecisive.  Maybe they're just tired of being asked about it so much and are just playin' with the pollsters.

Second, the political reporting class really cannot analyze anything other than the horse race.  Their collective expertise on issues of policy is embarrassingly shallow.  They simple do not have the ability to talk about the relative worth of each candidate's actual policies.  

Here's a good example.  Trump's economic policy is to cut income taxes and corporate taxes  (without touching Social Security or Medicare), as well as unspecified regulations in general, and repeal Dodd-Frank, all ostensibly in order to generate jobs. He would also impose high tariffs on imported goods from countries he thinks got the better of us on trade deals, and deport undocumented workers. Clinton's is to increase the minimum wage, cut middle class taxes, fund an infrastructure bank, pre-school and national R & D (principally on scientific research), and strengthen unions.  She would also retain Dodd-Frank and re-jigger the capital gains tax rate so that long term (but not short term) gains got preferential treatment.  The latter policy is intended to help change Wall Street's time horizon and wean it off its addiction to short term financial fixes designed to goose quarterly share prices. 

To evaluate either set of policies, journalists would have to analyze whether those policies would generate the fiscal stimulus needed to put money in people's pockets and boost demand.   This type of analysis is complicated and dry.  It has none of the excitement of shifting polls, His Hairness' latest insult, Hillary's meandering accounts of her emails, or Bill's sex life.

In my opinion, any fair evaluation would make it a no contest. Trump's approach will either weaken or at the very least not strengthen demand because it will raise the deficit, kill the ability of the government to fund infrastructure spending, put money in the pockets of the rich (who won't spend it) and corporations (who will hoard it, as they do now, waiting for a rebound in consumer demand that won't happen). It will not put cash in the pockets of the middle and lower classes (who need it and will spend it). Hillary's approach, on the other hand,  would increase short-term demand, albeit slowly depending on how fast the infrastructure bank and R & D is funded and the minimum wage hike comes on line; and it would increase long term demand assuming labor law reforms that actually boost the power and membership rolls of unions. The proper criticism of her approach is that it is still weak tea (or not enough immediate tea); the proper criticism of Trump's is that it is no tea at all.

Third, and for the same reason they focus on the horse  race, the media is in love with a "both of them are equally hated" narrative. Part of this love affair is due to the fact that it's true -- Hillary and Trump are the two most disliked candidates for President in polling history.  The problem, however, is that one of them will be President.  It would therefore be nice if the media were able to distinguish between the reasons each of them is disliked and provide something other than either the false equivalence that characterizes much reporting (as in the both of them are equally bad) or the grading-on-a-curve now being applied to Trump.

This last problem is critical.  As Paul Krugman pointed out in his Sunday column  in The New York Times, the media is doing to Clinton and Trump what it  did to Al Gore and George W. Bush in 2000 . Clinton's mistakes are being magnified beyond reason and Trump's ineptness is being forgiven with abandon. 

This has to stop.  

The Clinton Foundation was not some pay to play adjunct of the State Department while Hillary ran Foggy Bottom. To the contrary, it has a stellar record of providing much needed medical and other assistance to some of the most impoverished parts of the world and has been given high marks for transparency and efficiency by all  the charity watch-dog groups.  Moreover, if helping Bill Clinton cure AIDS or malaria in Africa was perceived as the requirement for a ticket to see Secretary Clinton, I'm not particularly clear on why that was such a bad thing.  Similarly, Hillary's private email server was not remotely a crime, nor was it designed to allow her to avoid the need to archive her public records. The latter problem bedevils even today's government servers as we attempt to get our hands around the complex task of saving and archiving virtual data.

Similarly, Trump's demonstrated lack of knowledge about large swaths of policy and his penchant for lying and insult whenever he is challenged does not evaporate if he behaves for the next two months as his handlers (or, more likely, his kids) finally dog-house his inner beast. Put simply, Trump's demonstrated racism and sexism, along with his thin-skinned bullying that often appears to border on the psychotic and in any event simply shields enormous gaps in knowledge and attention to policy detail, has already disqualified him from getting anywhere near the nuclear codes.  And silence for the next two months will not etch-a-sketch away that disqualifying past.

Where to from here?

That's simple.

Hang up when the pollsters call.  Stop telling them whether you're still thinking, or what you're now thinking, or what you will be thinking about thinking in the two months ahead.

Just think.  

It will have the desired outcome.   Your eventual vote will not be the product of an ennui brought on by prognosticators telling you how bad the choices are.  Or the product of an ignorance brought on by a drumbeat of false equivalence.  Or even the product of a desperation born of the desire that it just be over.

It won't be any of this.

Instead, it'll  be . . .

Thoughtful.

TURNING THEM OFF

TURNING THEM OFF

I am angry.  

For four days, I have barely turned on the television.  I've caught snippets of the speeches from the Republican National Convention -- Chris Christie encouraging delegates to "lock her up"; Rudy Giuliani blaming blacks for the death of cops; countless walk-ons claiming Hillary Clinton was responsible for the death of our ambassador and others in Benghazi; Melania plagiarizing Michelle.

But every time I tried to focus, the screen went blank.  

I am, by reputation and long practice, what many would call a political junkie.  Not the sort of political junkie who makes his living at it -- like the pundits and all those politicians who keep getting re-elected each year.  But at one point I wanted to be one of them. Only the voters saved me. In 1992 I ran for Congress and lost.  

In 1993, I met Bruce Babbitt -- then Secretary of the Interior in the first Clinton Administration -- at a fundraiser in upstate New York.  A photographer was following him. I told him about that run for Congress  and asked if he'd take a picture with me.  He said "Sure." And just before the camera was about to click, he whispered in my ear . . .

"You still have the virus."

I know he was right.

Because a year later, I ran again.

And lost again.

The addiction, however, was still there.  From 1996 to 2001, I served on the New York State Democratic Committee and for a couple of years was even one of the vice-chairs of the party.   In 2000, I pulled an all-nighter waiting for the networks to decide who won the Presidency. As we all know now, they couldn't.  Throughout this period,  I helped other people run. And when it came to the political conventions, I was all in.

Much to the chagrin of my family, I spent a week during the summer of 2004 screaming at the Republicans maligning John Kerry.  They were in New York City at their convention.  I was on the Outer Banks in North Carolina. 

On vacation.  

But that didn't matter.  For me, at convention time, it was gavel-to-gavel.

Until this year.  

And this GOP convention.

Cleveland was gavel-to-gavel bile.  Sheer hatred.  Packaged in paranoia.  The "Melania loves Michelle" kerfluffle was a respite, an unforced time-out from the otherwise steady diet of lies . . .

Served up by a retinue of C-list speakers . . .

To an audience that had more in common with a lynch mob than a nominating convention. 

Trump is their strong-man in waiting.  He has no ideas, just loud- mouthed pronouncements.  And I mean it when I say "loud"; he spent most of his seventy-seven minute "speech" last night . . .

Shouting.

He is an an out-sized ego married to a lazy brain.   He pretends his opponents have brought us to the brink of catastophes that do not exist -- impugning illegal immigrants as the criminals they are not; asserting ISIS was brought to you by Clinton when its true parents were the neo-cons and  Bush II; claiming the number of cops killed has risen when over the last four decades it has been steadily declining; making the same claim about homicides generally; and even asserting that a professional like FBI Director James Comey is corrupt because he refused to indict someone who did not commit a crime.

By force of will, he then claims these made-up problems will disappear with his ascension to the Presidency. He tells you this will happen "fast," but he never tells you how.   Or, if he does, the means are either things that won't happen (the "wall"), haven't worked (the "tax cut" or combat troops  in Iraq), are truly dangerous (the effective renunciation of NATO),  or are  . . .

Just plain crazy.

Falling into this last category was the ludicrous offer -- reported during the GOP Convention this week --  that, in an effort to induce Gov. Kasich to accept the Vice-Presidential nomination, Trump -- through his son, Donald, Jr.-- told Kasich that Trump would make him the most powerful Vice-President in history by giving him absolute authority over all domestic and foreign policy.

In other words, before he even assumed the office, Trump wanted to out-source the Presidency to his running mate.

No wonder critics think he's more interested in getting the job than he is in actually doing it.

These people -- Trump, Christie, Rudy, the assorted hangers-on,  and the audience of lunatic-fringers --  have no judgment, no perspective.  They cannot distinguish what is critical from what is important, what is important from what is advisory, what is advisory from what is secondary, and what is secondary from what is irrelevant.  They do not separate fact from fiction.  They lie with impunity.

And they think the rest of us are going to stay-tuned for the continuing show.

Not me.

I just turned it off.

And on election day this November, so will the country.

We are not the fools they take us to be.

WHEN "WILL IT WORK" BECOMES A SUBSTITUTE FOR "IS IT RIGHT"

WHEN "WILL IT WORK" BECOMES A SUBSTITUTE FOR "IS IT RIGHT"

It's almost impossible to get a handle on what is going on.

For the past twenty-four hours, the media buzz has been all about Donald Trump's racism.  The proximate cause for this outburst was Trump's repeated claim that the Indiana-born judge in the faux Trump University civil case has an inherent conflict of interest because of his Mexican heritage. This has taken Muhammad Ali's death and Hillary Clinton's presumptive nomination and placed these stories, if not off the front page, then decidedly below the fold.

Erstwhile GOP supporters (or, as they now call themselves, those in the party who intend to "vote" for him) have claimed that Trump's attack on Judge Curiel was "completely unacceptable" (Newt Gingrich), "flat out wrong" (John Kasich), and  "absolutely unacceptable" (Sen. Susan Collins of Maine).  House Speaker Paul Ryan called Trump's claim a "textbook . . . racist comment."  And South Carolina Sen. Lindsay Graham, who won't endorse Trump but has of late at least cozied up to him,  said those who have endorsed Trump should now "rescind" their support.

For a number of reasons,  however, I  don't get it.

To begin, anyone surprised to discover that Donald Trump is a racist wins this year's Captain Renault award.

Renault, for all of you young enough not to know, was the Vichy police chief in the film-version of French Morocco's Casablanca who, on enforcing his Nazi superior's order that Rick's be closed immediately, told Humphrey Bogart that he was "shocked" to discover gambling going on in the Cabaret. Within seconds of this announcement, Renault pockets his evening's "winnings."

Roughly the same thing is going on now with Trump.

The Donald has run a racist campaign from the get-go.  Whether he was calling Mexicans rapists, or banning non-citizen Muslims from entering the country, or feigning ignorance of David Duke's white supremacy, or eating Taco bowls in service to a self-proclaimed love of Hispanics, or pointing out his "African-American" at a recent rally, the campaign's central trope has been overtly racist. The birther-in-chief who questioned Obama's nativity was appealing to all those out-of-work blue and not-so-blue collars quite certain that the cause of their demise was not Wall Street . . . or corporate greed . . .  or the lack of any fiscal policy worthy of the name, but rather was on account of . . .

Them.

Where "them" was always some group whose identity "they" either could not change  (nationality, race, country of origin) or were ostensibly free to choose without adverse consequence (religion).

The notion that Trump has only now crossed some unacceptable line is a farce.

He crossed that line long ago.  

In fact, he began his whole campaign on the wrong side of it.

The elites cannot have it both ways.  They cannot endorse or say they will "vote" for Trump on the one hand but condemn his racism on the other.  The former cancels out the latter and turns any pretense of disapproval into hypocritical word salad.  

The same, moreover, is true of the media.  On today's edition of Morning Joe, Mika Brzezinski said that any Republican endorsing Trump in light of his attack on Judge Curiel would be forever "stained."  As a guest on the show, the Washington Post's Eugene Robinson echoed both those comments and  his own in an op-ed published the day before.  In that op-ed, Robinson  warned "GOP leaders" that those "who choose 'party unity' over principle should know that there is no way back; when you embrace Trump, you make a decision that will stay with you forever." 

Both of them are right.  

But both of them are also late to the game.  

Why the delay?

As part of her analysis this morning, Brzezinski also said that Trump's comments on the judge were different from his Mexicans-as-rapists and ban-all-Muslims assertions earlier in the year.   The latter, she said, worked; in other words, they helped Trump win the primaries and the nomination. Brzezinski, however, contended that the attack on Judge Curiel "will not work."

And therein, I think, hangs the tale.

The answer, as it were, to the riddle of Trump's endurance.

Too many pundits and politicians, for too long, asked "will it work" either before or instead of "is it right."  And as long as it worked, the sheer depravity of Trump was either ignored or tabled.

This is dangerous.  My guess is that Trump will not win the general election and that, when all is said and done, we will have dodged the ethical and utterly insane bullet that is the Donald.  I am willing to speculate that the coming general election campaign will render him toothless and his elite supporters spineless.  

Nonetheless, because Hillary is not loved,  and Trump is for good reason actually hated, the distance from here to there will give mud-slinging new meaning.  And, at the end of the day,  our frustrated electorate will heap even more negative ratings on the political class.

It didn't, however, have to be this way.

The elites could have rejected Trump long ago.

They could have stood for something other than themselves.

This week we celebrate the life of a boxer  willing to go to jail because he wouldn't go to war.  

Muhammad Ali did not ask himself or his advisers what would work. Had he done so, the answer would have been obvious -- enlist; you are the heavyweight champion of the world; you will be sent to some safe haven, called upon to build up troop morale, and then sent home when your time is up. Robbed of his livelihood at precisely the time his gifts were supreme, he still chose conscience over accommodation.

Lots of  Republican office holders will be at Ali's funeral in Louisville this Friday, mourning his loss and singing his praises.  

That's fine.  

But when they go home . . .  

They need to start following his example.

PROFILES IN (DIS)COURAGE(MENT)

PROFILES IN (DIS)COURAGE(MENT)

It is, frankly speaking, depressing.

The Grand Old Party is about to nominate a grand old fraud.

The misogynist, congenitally uninformed, race-baiting birther and tweeter-in-chief, Donald Trump.

What went wrong?

Even the post-mortems are depressing.

The conventional view is that the Republicans are now reaping the whirlwind they have been sowing for over forty years.  Going back to Nixon's tough-on-crime appeals to the silent (and mostly white) majority, through George H.W. Bush's turning Willie Horton into a poster child for liberalism's ostensible idiocy, to Romney's trope on the 47% who believe they are "victims" "dependent on government" (we all know who they are), the dog whistles on race have, it is said, come home to roost.  The party of Lincoln has been reduced to a rump caucus where (mostly) angry, un- or under-employed white men easily swallow the Trump lie that illegal immigrants, affirmative action, feminists, foreigners and minorities (including the current President) are responsible for their plight.

There is a lot of truth to this view.

But there is also a lot about it that is false.

Because it lets the GOP elites off the hook . . .

Way too easily.

The plain fact is that opposing Donald Trump should have been a no-brainer for any Republican office-holder in this country.  The list of disqualifiers was so long that none of them needed to wait much longer than a nano-second before declaring their opposition. 

Whether you focused on Trump's support for the birthers (a truly psychotic bunch who spent years questioning Obama's birthright citizenship), his misogynistic comments on women ("fat pigs," "dogs," "disgusting animals"), his racism (undocumented Mexican immigrants as "rapists" and "criminals"), his equivocation on David Duke (who everyone knows is a white supremacist but about whom Trump professed ignorance), his modern day brown-shirtism (telling supporters to "punch the crap out of" protesters; he'll pay the legal fees if the "punchers" are charged), or his ignorance on fundamental issues of policy  (as in what constitutes the nuclear triad or whether, after seventy years of bi-partisan non-proliferation, we should be encouraging any country to go nuclear), Trump  offered an almost daily-reason to say "be gone."

And even if  none of the Republican elite, being politicians, needed to analyze the necessity of disavowing Trump much before seeing the poll numbers he was generating last year in the run up to the primaries and caucuses, the responsibility to get rid of him -- or at least try very hard -- became unavoidable once he started winning.

But the vast majority of them sat on their hands . . .

And are still doing so.

The latest equivocator is Indiana Governor Mike Pence.  He announced yesterday that he thought Trump was "great" but would vote in the next week's Indiana primary for Cruz.  This was considered an endorsement for Cruz.  In truth, however,  it was more in the nature of a "who cares."  It's as if a German in the summer of 1932 said "I'm voting for the Centre Party but congrats to Adolf, who sure is telling the post-Versailles world -- and all those bankers -- a thing or two." Lindsey Graham lauded Pence for "standing up for conservatism" in endorsing Cruz.  But Chris Cillizza of the Washington Post was right when  he called Pence's "stand"  more of a "crouch."

Pence's approach, however, has been pretty typical.  Just before the Pennsylvania primary last week, that state's incumbent Republican Senator Pat Toomey announced that he too was voting for Cruz. 

Others have not been even that forthright.

New Hampshire's top Republican (and Senator), Kelly Ayotte, has remained neutral in the Presidential contest, as has Republican Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin.  Both are up for re-election this year. Though only ten members of the Republican caucus in the House have endorsed Trump, of the remaining 236 GOP members, 233 of them have been silent on the choice that remains.  The other thirty-three have endorsed Cruz, who has thirty-two supporters, or Kasich, who has one (to go along with his long list of former members endorsing him).  On the Senate side, of the fifty-four Republican Senators, six have endorsed Cruz, two have endorsed Kasich, and one has endorsed Trump.  That means forty-three GOP Senators remain neutral.

These people should be embarrassed.

For years, the whole group of them has regularly criticized Obama for ostensibly "leading from behind" (which, to them, means "not at all"). In their world, the current President has taken a back seat to Islamic fundamentalism (and its terrorist results), refusing to credibly engage while allowing or encouraging power vacuums and issuing false threats .  The charge is false; in fact, what Obama has done -- in the face of a reality that renders American ground troops ineffective in what are now civil religious wars in Mesopotamia -- is lead through persuasion and diplomatic initiative, something the neo-cons decided to put on the shelf over a decade ago, much to our everlasting chagrin, but which  has created (albeit slowly) measurably positive results (e.g., the nuclear deal with Iran, and the multi-lateral (and largely local) pushback against ISIS).  To the GOP, this is all still a failure.

Nevertheless, you would think that a group hell bent for leadership would  at least have seized the obvious opportunity to exhibit some as a fraud like Trump hijacked their presidential nomination.

Because . . .

If those 233 GOP members of the House of Representatives and forty-three GOP Senators had collectively led the fight to rid their party of Trump, there was at least a reasonable chance he would not be the GOP's presumptive nominee today.

Dante is reported to have said that "The hottest places in Hell are reserved for those who in time of moral crisis preserve their neutrality."  In fact, he didn't say it.  Instead, President Kennedy attributed the quote to him, as have many others using variations on the theme.  

Never mind.  

JFK's Dante was right.

And today he is looking at all those Republican office holders . . .

Sitting on the sidelines . . . 

As the Donald marches on.

A TERRIBLE BEAUTY

A TERRIBLE BEAUTY

Here's the weird part.

I may have to thank Donald Trump.

Who got me thinking about immigration.

I am Irish and proud of it.  My full (and formal) name -- Cornelius Patrick McCarthy -- shouts Irish from the rafters.  I will regale any who listen with tales of great grandparents and grand uncles and aunts from Cork who came and manned the mills in Lawrence, Massachusetts and the precincts of New York City.

Of course, I am not  actually Irish.  I am American.

And though Americans whose grand parents were born in Ireland  can become dual nationals, I am not one of them either.  All my grandparents were born here.  In fact, that fourth paragraph is a bit of a stretch.  

Because, truth be told, three quarters of my great grandparents were born here as well.

So, is this whole Irish thing a big put on?  Am I just one of those white-haired, fair-skinned, unmistakably celtic-looking pretenders who wears green,  eats corned beef (which the Irish themselves do not eat),  and dodges drunks  on Paddy's Day?

Or am I the real thing?

In fact, what is the real thing?

And that's where The Donald comes in.

After the insults, adolescent narcissism and misogyny,  Trump's signature move in this presidential season has been his stand on immigration.  There are three parts to his dance.  First, there is "the Wall."  "A nation without borders is not a nation," says Trump; what he really means, however,  is that "a nation which can't keep out illegals is not a nation."  So Trump will build a wall across the 1,954 mile border between the US and Mexico, and every time Mexico complains, the wall will get bigger.  

Second, there is the racist xenophobia.  At the announcement of his candidacy, Mexican immigrants became "rapists" and "criminals" -- who were "not you" -- being sent north by a country off-loading its undesirables.  

Finally, xenophobia and nativism on immigration is side-carred with religious bigotry as a tool in the fight against terrorism. In this phase of Trumpism, the need for better intel and -- in Europe -- interstate coordination and information sharing is either jettisoned (or put on hold) as the principal approach in exchange for a wholesale ban on non-citizen Muslim entrants into the country until the government "can figure out what is going on."  It is apparently irrelevant that the government has already "figured out" that the vast  majority (99.99%) of Muslims are not terrorists.  

Or that most terrorist acts since 1985 have been committed by non-Muslims.

It's very easy to chalk all this up to Trump's inherent flaws.  He is a clown, a charlatan and a con-man. He has no respect for truth or facts.  He is immature in ways that are both clinical and scary.

Nevertheless, his views on immigration are shared by a large group of Americans who share none of these flaws.  Which begs the ultimate question.

Which is . . . 

Why?

Here is my answer.

Trump is plowing very fertile ground.

At least three myths define the story of immigration in America.  The first is the myth of the melting pot and its first cousin -- assimilation.This is a myth about history. It claims that, in our nation of immigrants, everyone who came somehow morphed into an androgynous American whole.  The second is the southern border myth; this is the one Trump highlights with impunity in  his "a nation without borders is not a nation" mantra; it treats the line between Mexico and the US as inherent (and sacred) when in fact it was accidental (and utterly profane).  The third is the illegality myth, the notion that the number of illegal or undocumented aliens is increasing and reeking economic havoc, principally in the form of wage suppression.

These are myths because none of these claims are factually correct. As a general rule, immigrants historically have learned English and integrated into the American economy.  They have not, however, assimilated, at least not in the sense set forth in the dictionary, which defines the word to mean one who conforms to or resembles the group. In fact, to the contrary, immigrant groups stuck together and still do.  Each group brought its distinctive cultures, foods, and prayers to these shores. They may have acquired a new identity, but they did not lose their old one.

The southern border myth is equally mistaken.  There was nothing pre-ordained about our southern border,  and it certainly cannot be used to define the nation.  The border itself was the product of a war -- the Mexican-American War of 1846 -- fought largely as a consequence of a linguistic dispute over which river properly constituted the Rio Grande separating the two countries.  Texans thought it was the southern Rio Grande and Mexicans thought it was the northern one, which Texans called the Nuesces.  Today that dispute would be arbitrated.  In 1846, however,  it became the pretext for a show of force designed to provoke an attack that would allow the US the seize the greater part of what was then northern Mexico (and is now our southwest plus California).

It did.

And then the US did.

One of the ironies is that the Mexican-American War was itself rooted in the earlier war between Texas and Mexico, an earlier war caused by Mexico outlawing slavery in 1829 and making American immigration into Texas (then a Mexican province)  illegal.  This, however, did not stop the Americans, who entered illegally anyway and then later fought for and won their independence. (Remember the Alamo!)

The irony, of course, is that Americans were illegal immigrants into Mexico long before any Mexicans violated "our" southern border. Another irony is that, once the US prevailed in the war, the largest part of the new southwestern US and California was composed of hitherto Mexican citizens and was marked by an Hispanic culture that left its imprint on law, architecture, and names.  Today, the oldest capital city in the US is not located in New England or Virginia.  It is located in Santa Fe, New Mexico.  And the coast of California is not dotted with cities and towns named for dukes or English shires. The names are largely those of Catholic saints provided by Spanish missionaries.

In any case, so much for the sanctity of the southern border.  It definitely established a boundary.  It did not, however,  define a culture or a nation.

Then there is the illegality myth, the myth that more illegals are entering than leaving and that they are doing some kind of permanent damage to our economy.  It is false on both counts.  On the one hand, the population of undocumenteds or illegals has declined significantly over the last nine years and more are now leaving than coming.  On the other, economic studies have shown that immigration -- including the work of undocumented immigrants -- is a huge plus for both the economy as a whole and even for low income workers.  In fact, President Bush's own Council of Economic Advisers estimated in 2008 that American workers actually make $30 billion annually in wage gains as a result of immigration.

So, where to from here?  

Trump is only the latest xenophobe.

There is, however,  no way we can even hope to make him the last unless we eliminate the myths.

And tell a new -- and more accurate -- story about our "nation of immigrants." 

In that new narrative, America is not a melting pot.  It is a mosaic.  It is stitched together to be and remain whole.  But its parts are distinct -- multi-colored and multi-textured.  Each of us who claims immigrant heritage (and, since most of us must, even those who blindly ignore it) is a hyphenated American.  (Or, as Will Ferrell put it in a recent SNL skit, "Unless your name is Running Bear, we are all anchor babies.").  What makes me American are the values enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution, not the the line drawn between me and Canada or me and Mexico. 

And what makes me Irish are my ancestors and (therefore) my genes. There is nothing phony about it.

The poet William Butler Yeats once wrote: 

               
                                Now and in time to be,
                                Wherever green is worn,
                                Are changed, changed utterly:
                                A terrible beauty is born.

Though he  was speaking of the Irish Rising of  1916, his words are as apt for the Irish immigrants who peopled these shores by the millions in the 19th century.  In art, literature, music, politics and sport, those immigrants changed the face of America.

Which today basks in the "terrible beauty" they -- and all their immigrant neighbors -- created.

PS --  A larger version of this essay was presented as the Spring Honors Lecture at Mt. Aloysius College in Cresson, Pennsylvania on St. Patrick's Day.  For any who are interested, the link to that lecture is available here.

THE DONALD DILEMMA

THE DONALD DILEMMA

The last Republican debate took place last night and by their standards it was a remarkably civil affair.

No name calling or insults.  No references  -- as my daughter put it after their last debate --  to the size of anyone's "downstairs."  No shameless hawking of vodka or steak or wine.

And therein lies Donald Trump's problem.

Here's what I mean.

For the last eight months, Donald Trump has run a campaign for the Presidency based largely on the notion that he is not politically correct and is just saying things others are thinking but do not have the courage to broadcast.  Hence his condemnation of Mexican immigrants as "rapists," his wholesale exclusion of non-citizen Muslims, his "punch him in the face" thuggery when confronted by protesters.  

At the same time, he has abjured any argument or real details on policy in taking on his fellow candidates.  So, instead of really explaining how his positions on Social Security or trade or immigration or beating terrorism were better than those offered by his opponents, he touted his poll numbers and spouted phrases and one liners (he'll make "great deals" on trade; it'll be a "great wall" excluding Mexicans; our military will be so "powerful . . . we're never going to have to use it").  

And then simply belittled his adversaries.

The puerile ad hominems are now the stuff of minor legend.

Jeb Bush was "low energy."  Chris Chistie was "the bridge."  Carli Fiorina was "that face" that could not be President.  Dr. Ben Carson was "pathological" and the voters "stupid" in being taken in by Carson's  knife-on-belt assault story.  And, of course, Senator Rubio was "little Marco" and Senator Cruz "lyin' Ted." With no body part to pick on, and no doubt running out of rhetorical steam, Trump's train of insults slowed when it got to John Kasich -- he was merely an "absentee Governor" and a "lost cause."

Last night, however, we got none of that.  Instead, Trump's competitors were left to more less trot out their positions at length, as was Trump himself.  The problem, however, is that Trump really doesn't have any positions.  He has slogans and one liners.  But  if you throw him into any pool that requires mildly deep analysis of policy, he drowns.  

As he did last night.

The best example of this in the debate was the back and forth on the Administration's new Cuba policy. As he is on a number of issues, Trump is actually to the left of the GOP field when it comes to Cuba. In deriding the recent status  quo, he correctly asserts-- and said last night -- that "50 years is enough."   Though he claims he would have "made a better deal, " he thinks -- and said last September -- that rapprochment "is fine." 

Seizing an opening, and playing to the anti-Castro home crowd at the University of Miami where the debate was held, Senator Rubio then pounced, laying out  five things he would have had Cuba do before agreeing to a renewed diplomatic relationship -- free elections, free speech, removal of Chinese listening stations, no assistance to North Korea, and the extradition of criminal defendants who have taken refuge on the island.

Rubio's -- and (sans Trump) the entire GOP's -- essential criticism of the new policy is that it does not eliminate or even mitigate Cuba's human rights violations, which is true.  The problem, however, is that the embargo imposed on Cuba for the past five decades hasn't stopped those violations.  In addition, and as is the case with most embargoes that fail, the rest of the world has not been on our side. Consequently, while the embargo hurt Cuba and stopped it from trading with what should be its natural and largest trading partner -- namely, us -- it did not cripple the regime or the island. 

Engagement may not end anti-democratic abuses in Cuba.  

But disengagement clearly did not end such abuses and Cuba itself is on the cusp of change.  

The Castro brothers are old.  Fidel has retired and Raul, the current President, is 84.  Neither will last forever and when they are gone, there is no one who can combine the offices of Presidency and Premier the way they have. 

A few years ago I had lunch with a minor Cuban official working at the UN.  He told me that the Castro presidency was unique and would not be duplicated; that Castro was their "George Washington" (he left out the fact that Washington resigned his military commission after the Revolutionary War and left after two terms as President, but never mind for now); that once gone, the Cuban President would simply be a head of state and the Cuban Premier would do policy.  

This is important.  Because, without the power inherent in the duopoly the two Castro brothers  have enjoyed, dictatorship is not as possible or likely and space opens for a more pluralistic politics.  This does not mean a new Cuba will reject socialism.  But it very well may reject Castro-ism, a hard line variant of socialism that rejects even the type of market approaches China has adopted over the last two decades.

And even at this early stage, there are some signs that this may be the case.  Cuba itself, as we all know, is in love with baseball  (that love has even spawned the apochryphal tale that Fidel tried out for the major leagues).  Until now, Cuban ball players have been barred from playing in the United States, and those that are doing so have effectively renounced the island and their relatives.  With the rapprochment, however, Cuba's athletes will soon be able to try out and play in the major leagues without having to flee the island.

That's small progress.  

But it is progress.

And it would not have happened under the old policy that Senator Rubio and the rest of the GOP would have us return to.

An informed opponent could have pointed some or all of this out in last night's GOP debate.  But Donald Trump is not such an opponent and therefore did not do so.  In fact, beyond the repetitive "I-would-have-made-a-better-deal" mantra, he said nothing in response to Rubio's critique. 

Which is why he needs the insults, the narcissim, the thuggery.

It fills the space -- at debates, at rallies, at press conferences -- that would otherwise be filled with the exhibition of knowledge and policy 

Hence the Donald dilemma.  

He either gets to show us -- as he did last night on the Cuba issue and many others -- that he is uninformed.

Or he gets to show us that he is an insulting, narcissistic and even dangerous boor -- as he has throughout the entire primary campaign.

Either way . . .

He loses a general election.