Rubin gets it right

I’ve been telling people (mostly my wife, but she at least pretends to listen) that a Trump presidency would look a lot like Reagan, in the sense that he would go around spouting a lot of nonsense, and there would be an army of people following him around saying “Oh no, he didn’t mean that at all, what he really meant was we will continue with the current policy”. So we see that concept springing into action with Trump saying he would default on the national debt, followed by his “people” “clarifying” that “No, he didn’t really mean that at all”. I guess that how he is going to start looking more presidential.

It appears that people think that Trump is going to create a big change in things and they (Ryan for example) are trying to pre-position themselves for the upset. But remember a few months ago, when the conventional wisdom was that Trump was going to self-destruct, and Cruz was pre-positioning himself to pick up all the Trump voters by not saying bad things about Trump? An upset may be coming, but it’s not clear that pre-positioning oneself according to the conventional wisdom is going to work.

I posed the question, was anyone ever elected President who had never before held elective office, and was not a General? Because Grant, Eisenhower, etc., but one can say that being a military leader at that level is to a certain extent a political position, although not an elected one. I can think of candidates, for example Wendell Willkie, but not very many. William Jennings Bryan was elected to the House, so he doesn’t count.

It’s not uncommon among right-wing pundits to propose that Condoleeza Rice be put up for various positions, most recently as the Trump VP. She’s never been elected to anything. Hillary may have had some advantages out of the gate, but at least she can say that she fought and won a Senate campaign.

Herbert Hoover never held elective office before winning the Presidency in 1928 (he served as Commerce Secretary in the Harding & Coolidge Administrations).

I guess it is nice that Rubin appears to have come at least partially to her senses, but really I think it is too late for sanity.

Even in a GOP primary, there is no majority looking to … give huge tax breaks to upper-income Americans.

This is a slightly odd thing to say since Trump’s plan also gives “huge” tax breaks to upper-income Americans: http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/publications/analysis-donald-trumps-tax-plan
(I guess he has maybe already said he was just joking bout this, but the idea that he won’t actually support very large tax cuts for the rich seems unlikely, and he has certainly run on the idea.)

This is also a bit odd: They need to stop pretending that climate change is not occurring Since Donald Trump is right there with the rest of them on climate change, and it hasn’t hurt him at all with Republican voters:

http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/05/donald-trump-global-warming

I think a bit more reflection is still needed.

The neocon/militarist leg of that GOP stool (double-entendre only half unintended) on which Rubin situates herself has always been the most willing to consider detaching itself and finding other hosts. The neocons are perfectly willing to fan the Kulturkampf-ish flames of “social conservatism” and line the pockets of the wealthiest at the expense of the rest of us, if doing so helps get them in power. But their commitment to these programs, especially in their maximalist GOP versions, is pretty light…especially when they don’t help the militarists get in power.

“These differences are barely within the margin of error.”

I am guessing you mean something like “almost within the margin of error” or “barely outside the margin of error”.

Jennifer Rubin is probably even more intellectually dishonest a neocon than Mr. Six Months himself. She is to conservatives what Joe Klein or Richard Cohen is to the left.

The Republican Party will have to change. Assuming he loses. On some level we are lucky, as Clinton is the worst Democratic candidate in decades yet still has a great chance of winning. But it worries me, because any chance of Trump winning is much too great a chance.

Surely an economist knows how to correctly compare polling data between groups! The margin of error has little to do with the posterior distribution of the difference in likelyhood between Trump and Cruz supporters supporting vaccines. This is a 2×2 contingency table exercise.

/statistics grump

“They need to stop pretending that climate change is not occurring (the extent and the proposed solutions can be rationally discussed) or imagining that there is a market for pre-New-Deal-size government. Conservatives must end their infatuation with phony news, crank conspiracy theories, demonization of well-meaning leaders and mean rhetoric”

‘For why?’ is the question that occurs at this point. Whilst I hail from across the pond, it would seem that on a state level this approach seems to succeed often enough – and if Republicans try to run on any other ticket, they get outflanked by someone from their own party.

I agree a lot with Rich Puchalsky about the climate-change element. Republican leaders can’t claim ignorance: they’ve been briefed, and they’ve had leading authorities testify to them directly. They choose to act as if they believe it’s all a con job, and their followers do believe that; I suspect that most of the leaders are approaching it partly as their own con to run as long as they can and as something to simply demand that flunkies fix, just like they treat most problems.

There’s no room for actual serious discussion with someone who says things that boil down to “Well, okay, you weren’t lying and conspiring about the stuff that you said then needed response and now can’t be contained, but that doesn’t mean I owe you any apology, or giving up my claim that now you’re lying and conspiring.”

Ze K @25

‘Any change, whatever it might be, it could not hurt’

Famous last words.

Oh yes, Hoover. I should have known that since the church he attended in his youth is a 20-minute walk from here, and there’s a school named after him even closer. You miss what’s under your nose.

J-D: It is correct to say that every US President has previously held some public office, elective, appointive, or military.

Very good point. So the American political system has consistently selected people who have experience with the mechanism of government. Some presidents were better than others, of course. But at least they weren’t complete beginners.

This year’s field of Republican candidates had a few with no governing experience, like Carson, Fiorina and of course Trump. There have been some others in the past like Pat Buchanan. I’m not that familiar with the historical list of unsuccessful presidential candidates, but Willkie I think was the last one in that category (that was nominated).

Now more than ever I miss Walt Kelly. What he could have done with the present situation.

On previously non-elected candidates: If only Kingman Brewster had run for and won the Presidency in 1968, world history might have been very different. We will never know.

It seems to me like you’re seeing the Trump you want to see. Luckily we’ll never have to test this.

Contrast that with, say, Will and Krauthammer, who denounce Trump in extreme terms, but peddle lunatic conspiracy theories themselves.

The price of admission to the modern conservative movement is holding crackpot ideas. Rubin mostly writes about Republican politics, where you can be relatively sane by merely recognizing that Trump is an asshole. And sure, yeah, credit where due: She acknowledges there’s an issue with climate.

But when Rubin ventures into discussions of policy, we discover that Obamacare is on the verge of collapse and the Iran deal was a fraud on the American public.

She’s just another nut — just one who’s nutty agenda differs from that of Trump.

I find Rubin’s position interesting because her history shows her to be a single-issue voter: she wants to know whether it’s good for Israel or not. By which she means, Netanyahu.

The lies she told in support of Romney last time were utterly hilarious, but made perfect sense in light of the fact that Romney had sworn fealty to Netanyahu, and Obama had not and will not.

So I find her position on Trump interesting as an indicator of how one group in DC measures Trump’s policies: he is not reliable on Israel.

That’s enough to turn Rubin into a truth-teller about Trump, when she produced the most laughable, Baghdad-Bob like nonsense about Romney.

And it’s probably right, both because his America-first-ism hearkens back to the anti-semitism of Lindbergh in the pre-ward period and Pat Buchanan in more recent times, and because his unreliability on Israel follows as a direct corollary of his not being reliable on anything other than his own interests.

Ze K @42

‘“…not being reliable on anything other than his own interests” sounds like a bad thing, except in this context it merely means something like: ‘not necessarily conforming to the establishment/neocon party line’. And that’s a small flicker of hope…’

Just as much fear as hope. ‘Not the same’ can just as easily be worse as better.

Rich@40: I suppose in the end, trying to give credit to a prominent Republican is a mug’s game. I fell prey to the same misplaced charitable impulse that I was critiquing in the original post.

@3: Even in his foggiest moments Reagan was never as loopy as Trump, and even the “little green men” musings that Colin Powell used to joke about were limited to cabinet meetings. He had a solid record, whatever you thought of it, as the governor of a big diverse state, and a general notion of how the economy worked, if only so he could wreck it.

Trump is still only a candidate and not yet formally the party’s nominee. If he had made those remarks about the national debt from the White House, we’d still be feeling the aftershocks in the market.

Ryan is less concerned about Trump’s ”big changes” than his own run for the White House at some future date. He doesn’t want to give away too many hostages to fortune by endorsing Trump. Picking a fight with Trump is unlikely to do him much harm. He’ll become the Reasonable Republican – in fact, he’s already being promoted as such by The New York Times, which should be ashamed of itself.

mw: “But many libertarians dislike Trump on those grounds specifically. Reason has been bashing Trump over eminent domain abuse for years, for example”

I was amused to see that in the linked article about Trump’s comments approving of _Kelo_, there was included a Sanders quote opposing _Kelo_, after which the people in the comment thread proceeded to say how horrible Trump was and then how Sanders was much worse. “Dislike” is never going to trump tribal affiliation.

“I was amused to see that in the linked article about Trump’s comments approving of _Kelo_, there was included a Sanders quote opposing _Kelo_, after which the people in the comment thread proceeded to say how horrible Trump was and then how Sanders was much worse.”

I hadn’t looked at the comments thread before, but now I see only two that mention Sanders at all. Those are completely buried among 170 that almost uniformly bash Trump. There’s certainly no evidence in the article or comments that Reason writers and readers feel Trump is their kind of guy or that they’re ready to jump on his bus any day now.

“So “bashing Trump over eminent domain abuse” means nothing.”

Well it’s not just over eminent domain abuse — they’ve been bashing him on multiple dimensions (free speech, excluding Muslims, the border wall, protectionism, general incoherence, etc). They had this to say about Rand Paul keeping his pledge to support the Republican nominee:

“The libertarian-leaning Republican isn’t wrong about Clinton’s awfulness. But Trump—a thin-skinned lunatic who peddles conspiracy theories, encourages violence and censorship, prefers big government, and loathes the free market—is just as bad, and arguably much worse, including and especially from a libertarian perspective. ”

Clearly, they despise the man. Will some libertarians conclude Trump is the lesser evil and vote for him over Clinton? Probably. And others will do the reverse. But I’d expect most to cast a Libertarian Party protest vote. Regardless, though, those few libertarians who do hold their noses and pull the lever for Trump certainly won’t be doing it enthusiastically or with a sense that Trump is their kind of guy.

If I’m not mistaken though (and I very well might be) the anti-vaccination thing crosses ideologies; there’s a good chunk of people on the left who also buy into it.

And if you take out that one question, where there is indeed little difference, on the remainder, the Kasich people look quite a bit saner than the rest of the Republicans.

This is not in any way an endorsement of the guy who does have some other kooky economic ideas (balanced budget amendment for example)

thanks