My job affords me the opportunity to pay close attention to what is going on in U.S. presidential politics all the time. I get to write about it, talk about it, and express the odd opinion. Moreover, I do my best to approach things from as neutral a perspective as possible-- although I acknowledge that my training predisposes me to certain positions some would never call neutral.
Yet, there's a difference between the analysis and opinion I might offer as a scholar and the way I think about it all as a voter. My eligibility to vote in U.S. elections is a responsibility I take quite seriously. When I was a junior (3rd year) in university, a roommate gave me a book into which he jotted a phrase from Pericles that I've never forgotten:
We do not say that a man who takes no interest in politics is a man who minds his own business; we say that he has no business here at all-- Preicles' Funeral Oration, Thucydides's, History of the Peloponnesian Wars.As a voter, I am fed up and worried about the choices presented to me by both parties. The more I see, the less I like Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton.
Winston Churchill was spot on about democracy being the worst form of government except for all the others. In this presidential election cycle, the Democrats and Republicans have served up lemons. Like many Americans, I feel as though I'm being asked to choose between the lesser of two evils. Some will undoubtedly choose to sit this election out. I think that would be a mistake.
I've seen enough already. I'm giving the Libertarians, Gary Johnson and William Weld a look.
1968 Redux?
The 2016 U.S. Presidential Campaign has already been one for the ages. In my lifetime there has never been a campaign that has unfolded in as charged a political environment. I wasn't alive in 1968, but this campaign has had me thinking about '68 as we've watched the anger and discord of 2016 unfold in a period of social upheaval. Needless to say, I am thrilled 2016 has NOT become 1968. We have had violence at campaign rallies (Trump), insurgent campaigns inside both major parties (Sanders and Trump), all fueled by a degree of angst (American decline, immigration, and terrorism) and social upheaval we have not seen in a very long time (Black Lives Matter, police violence, reconsideration of capitalism).
There are parallels to be found between 2016 and 1968 in terms of America's place in the world. The Tet Offensive in January 1968 wasn't much of a strategic victory for the North Vietnamese as it was an enormous psychological triumph since it completely undercut Pentagon and White House assertions that America was "winning" the Vietnam War. Public opinion about the war shifted and Lyndon Johnson announced he wouldn't seek re-election. The Tet Offensive contributed to a sense of angst about America's ability as a global power to alter the course of events overseas. More than a decade of, often futile, intervention in the Middle East and economic uncertainty at home has done much the same; to borrow from Trump, "America isn't winning anymore."
However, the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. (April) and Robert F. Kennedy (June) were like body blows to the progressive optimism of the 1960s. The violence outside the Democratic Convention in Chicago that August (to say nothing of the chaos inside) simply punctuated it all. It was over. The end of an era. The beginning of a darker, more frustrating period for America.
While the only assassinations in 2016 have been character assassinations, 2016 has many of the same foreboding qualities of 1968. Americans are not happy. Terrorism. Economic and social insecurity. Decline. Fear. Loathing. It's a stew of negative feeling that 2016's crop of candidates have mainly tried to exploit. At the top of the exploitation heap is, of course, Donald Trump.
The Fear in "Making America Great Again"
The Convention was hardly the fine-tuned picture of a party unified behind their candidate. Indeed, the opposite.
However, it was still a golden opportunity for Mr. Trump to "pivot" toward a general election campaign wherein conventional wisdom dictates that appealing to voters in the middle of the electorate is the surest path to November victory. Indeed, between the end of the primary season, throughout which appeals to your party's core are mandatory, and July's convention, political pundits and campaign veterans from across the spectrum saturated the cable news airwaves with this bit of free advice: pivot to the middle or face long odds in November.
Trump chose to ignore it. Rather than use his small post-Convention "bounce" as a momentum builder for November, he squandered it by spending the following week attacking Khizr Khan, father of a U.S. Army captain killed in Iraq, and easily one of the most compelling speeches of the Democratic Convention.
Trump badly needed to demonstrate to the country that he was developing the kind of competence and temperament in policy-making we expect from the Commander in Chief. Instead, his foolish decision to pick a fight with the Khan Family not only made him seem petty and thin-skinned, it knocked Hillary Clinton's own political problems (more below) off the front pages. This should have presented a perfect opportunity for the Trump to shut up and let the other side score a few own goals. Instead, Mr. Trump reinforced perceptions of him as an intolerant, impulsive, ill-disciplined narcissist prone to misogyny and dog-whistle bigotry unfit for the Oval Office.
The final straw (for me at least) was this past Wednesday when Trump traveled to Mexico City at the invitation of President Pena Nieto. It was a remarkable piece of political theater that, amazingly, made Trump seem presidential (although, the reaction of Mexicans has been categorical). For a few hours, it looked like Trump had won a public relations victory and cemented himself at the top of the news cycle for the next several days.
Then, he flew to Phoenix and gave a much anticipated speech on immigration policy. It should have been an opportunity to substantively build upon the measured, statesman-like atmosphere Trump managed to convey in Mexico City. U.S. immigration policy is a political mine field, and I give Trump credit for taking it on directly where so many want to sweep the issue under the rug. However, Trump's Phoenix speech presented as stark and draconian a set of prescriptions for dealing with the issue as you'll ever hear. Moreover, it was delivered in an angry tone unbecoming of the serious issues being addressed. Border fences, deportation forces, and picking fights with Mexico will not resolve a complex of issues for which both countries share responsibility.
As an aside, one of the only smart things Former Texas Governor Rick Perry ever said in his short-lived presidential campaign was that "if you build a 30-foot wall from El Paso to Brownsville, the 35-foot ladder business gets real good."
I've had enough Trump.
The chaos in the Trump campaign itself (three different campaign managers in the last several months) undercuts his own claims about the competence with which he runs organizations. His lack of depth on a range of policy areas, notably foreign policy is, to be kind, worrisome. His team of foreign policy advisers have been drawn from the fringes of America's expertise on foreign affairs-- most credible folks have run away from association with the campaign. His willingness to reconsider America's support for the NATO Alliance, or apparent openness to a East Asian countries building their defenses with nuclear weapons is stunning. Even more worrisome, however, is his evident unwillingness to study-up on policy areas he clearly knows nothing about. Trump claims he gets a lot of his political news from "the shows." I am a fan of the Sunday morning political shows too. However, drawing your knowledge of foreign policy from "shows" that intentionally invite partisan hacks to debate, in part for ratings, is a terrible place for a President to be forming opinions about real-time problems.
Donald Trump has hijacked the Party of Lincoln, perhaps fatally so. In the aftermath of the 2012 loss that returned President Obama to the White House, the GOP did a bit of a forensic self-assessment of where it stood and where it needed to go. Trump is taking parts of the GOP in exactly the opposite direction, threatening to completely destroy the party. I thought 2012 was the moment when the GOP would engage in some serious soul searching about how it was going to survive a pretty obvious demographic problem; there simply aren't enough angry white guys in the United States to win elections anymore, and those that remain are getting pretty old.
Even if Republicans finally get serious about their viability after November, they are going to have to do it with Donald Trump lurking around. Conservatives of all stripes-- fiscal, social, TEA Party, or Log Cabin-- better get used to Trump. He may only be the Party standard bearer for one cycle, but he's not going anywhere.
Americans will be poorer and less secure under a President Trump. While there are certainly areas of American foreign policy that need work (see my previous posts on Obama's challenges here, here, and here), a President Trump will undo 70yrs of postwar American foreign policy and, I believe, hasten American decline.
Loathing of "Hillary for America"
I am among them.
Much has been written about the qualities lacking in Hillary Clinton as a candidate. She is a brilliant policy wonk, deeply committed to a range of progressive causes. Having built up her bona fides on national security while in the Senate, and more recently as Secretary of State, Clinton is sufficiently hawkish on those issues for my taste. Indeed, for a while in 2008, I thought hers was the winning ticket. It still should be.
But, let's be perfectly honest, she is a terrible politician. Her default mode is wooden, robotic, and too wonkish for the campaign trail. It's sad that competence and intelligence are not enough, but voters want to "connect" with their candidate viscerally. John Heilimann and Mark Halperin brilliantly chronicled the 2008 campaign in their book Game Change. Most of the press from that book (and HBO film) was focused on the McCain-Palin circus in the GOP, but two-thirds of that book was actually about the Democrats. It depicts the Clinton campaign as disorganized, bloated, bleeding cash, and infused with a sense of entitlement that blinded it to the phenomenon that became President Obama.
Even the appearance of being relaxed and at ease comes across as scripted and calculated for the cameras. She knows it. And her campaign knows it. Yet, the Clinton campaign has also compounded that perception with leaked memos that plan additional spontaneity. The late night comics, of course, had fun with that:
Why do I have a viscerally negative reaction to Secretary Clinton? Sleaze!!!!
Has Hillary Clinton broken the law? No. But the smell of impropriety never seems to be far from her or her campaign. I highlighted the problems that currently dog her campaign in a post from almost exactly a year ago: "if you're explaining, you're losing." Secretary Clinton is doing a lot of explaining these days-- sort of.
I understand some of the defensiveness of the Clinton's (Bill, Hillary, Chelsea, and everyone in their inner circle). After more than two decades with every Republican in the country coming after you, I think I'd be a little twitchy and defensive too.
What is depressing about all of the "scandals" that have followed the Clinton's around is that every last one of them is small beer. Remember Whitewater... the pseudo-scandal that seemed to launch a thousand other investigations, uncovered the Monica Lewinsky mess, and ultimately led to Bill Clinton's impeachment in 1998? Things turned out to be pretty scandalous, but Whitewater itself was about incompetence in small-time Arkansas real estate.
Earlier this year, Russian hackers released e-mails from the Democratic National Committee demonstrating what Bernie Sanders fumed about for months; the fix at the DNC for Hillary Clinton was in. It was a set of systemic preferences detrimental to the Sanders campaign that, once revealed, forced the resignation of Debbie Wasserman Schultz as Chair of the DNC on the eve of the Philadelphia Convention. Sleaze!
Then there are the murky relationships between the Clinton's themselves and the activities of the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI). That sounds like right wing conspiracy stuff, but I am simply unsure about the judgement of the Clinton's on this one given that Hillary was certain to run for president in 2016. Only recently has Bill Clinton announced that he will remove himself from all CGI activities if Hillary becomes president. Oh really? When did it dawn on him that might be a good idea? I don't think the CGI should be shut down, but because the CGI finances some of its activities from donations from abroad, there needs to be a big fat fire wall between it and the White House.
If you are the Clinton's, you ought to know that your actions will be held to a higher standard than others (including Trump) simply because you are the Clinton's. It may be a double-standard we apply to our politicians that is not applied to business people like Trump-- who takes the cake where sleaze in business is concerned. Tough bananas!!! It comes with the territory the Clinton's occupy as political royalty.
What bugs me here is that there doesn't seem to be a very bright line in the sand between the public and the private where the Clinton's are concerned. This flows into my worries about Hillary Clinton's e-mail practices while she was Secretary of State.
I very much doubt the FBI, Russian hackers, or the "vast right-wing conspiracy" are going to find any smoking guns in Hillary's missing e-mails (where ever they are). Indeed, it's just more sleaze!!!! What amazes me is that Team Clinton seems uniquely capable of ignoring every opportunity to undercut the idea that they are collectively hiding things. Instead, their lawyer-like defensiveness has allowed this bit of sleaze to become the sort of "drip, drip, drip" of pseudo-scandal that is certain to hobble Hillary Clinton if she wins the White House.
Clinton's story about the e-mails continues to "evolve" with every passing day. She eventually apologized and said housing a private server in her New York home wasn't the smartest thing to have done. Yet, her own State Department issued repeated warnings to Department of State staff about cyber-security. Moreover, the multiple mobile devices that FBI Director James Comey said the Secretary used turns out to be 13 of them. Worse still, no one seems to know where any of them are.
Oh, and Benghazi? Tragic bit of incompetence by the Administration, including Secretary Clinton, in Libya? Yes. But the subsequent Congressional fishing expedition in search of a cover-up was a ridiculous bit of theater staged by Republicans (HRC's 11 hours of testimony were epic, I was impressed).
Over in Trump Land, we have proclamations of competence, but plenty of evidence of incompetence as embodied in campaign management and willful ignorance in broad swaths of policy. In Clinton-vile, we have a shifting story about e-mails that increasingly strains credulity and should have been nipped in the bud a long time ago with something like "I'm sorry, I f@#$ed up."
Sigh....
State of the (very big) State
Yet, I think the biggest set of reasons I cannot vote for either Trump or Clinton concern foreign policy, and economic policy in particular. I have fewer worries about Hillary Clinton where traditional conceptions of national security are concerned. However, I find it hard to separate national security matters from economic policy since the first is tough to manage without the other. As noted above, my distrust of Trump's temperament and competence on national security run deep. However, I'm alarmed by both candidates' populist dishonesty with respect to a central pillar of American national security; the economy.
In an earlier post, I lamented the populist turn of the entire 2016 presidential campaign and about the dangers of populists bearing jobs. Both Clinton and Trump have shamelessly pandered to voters by decrying the supposed evils of trade liberalization. In Trump's case, the ills of America's economic openness have been blurred into a series of supposed threats from economic migrants from Mexico and beyond that are depressing wages and stealing American jobs (see Trump's speech in Phoenix last week). The effect of trade liberalization on wage rates is not as linear (surprise, surprise) as the political debate depicts (see story from The Economist).
Every student of trade policy knows that there are "winners and losers" created from liberalization. What bothers me is that we never hear from the "winners" and the "losers" are too often pandered to with promises that cannot be kept. I don't think Clinton or Trump honestly think large numbers of manufacturing jobs will return as promised. What I'd like to see is a debate about how best to get the "losers" into a more competitive position with the rest of the world.
Saying that we are going to scrap existing deals and renegotiate them so we can presumably incentivize the re-establishment of a small number of jobs will simply make the rest of us poorer. As the tariff barriers required to bring a small number of jobs back kick in, they will result in higher costs for imports, higher costs for inefficiently produced domestic goods, and give us fewer, and less high-quality goods to choose from.
Since Trump manufactures a lot of products under his "Trump" labels outside the United States, I don't think be believes what he is saying intellectually. It is an open question whether (like most presidents on trade) he'd change his tune once in office. His stubbornness on many issues suggests not, but he also likes power, so who knows...
I'm not sure what Hillary Clinton really thinks about trade liberalization. She's flip flopped so many times on the issue, I simply don't know. In the mid-1990s, she at least aquiesed as her husband was approving deals such as the NAFTA, PNTR for China, the Uruguay Round (WTO), and launched others such as the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). Then, when running for president in 2008, she was vehemently opposed to trade liberalization. As Secretary of State between 2009 and 2013, Hillary Clinton played an important role in the revitalization of U.S. trade policy under President Obama, including the negotiation of the controversial Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP). Yet, when the TPP was concluded in October 2015, Hillary Clinton repudiated the deal.
Bernie Sanders, of course, pushed Hillary Clinton further toward anti-trade populism during the Democratic Primary season than she might have ordinarily gone. However, because I have no idea where her convictions on economic policy rest, I nervous about supporting her.
Indeed, both Clinton and Trump peddle dangerous forms of economic nationalism that could have profound consequences overseas. Our trading partners are not stupid and will immediately retaliate should the United States impose protectionist trade measures. It is a self-defeating story of "beggar thy neighbor" that students of economic history know well, but is, a real threat to the modern world.
Would Hillary Clinton be more likely than Trump to again flip flop on trade once in the White House? Sure. In fact, I would bet the farm that she would have the exact same change of heart on trade as Obama once she entered the White House (see link again). However, I am less sure that a Clinton Presidency would do what is required in dealing with the adjustment costs from liberalization. In other words, I fear a Clinton Presidency would enjoy the policy latitude and diplomacy trade liberalization affords the White House, but would punt the growing political challenges (backlash) of adjustment to the next president.
Finally, we have yet to have a debate in POTUS 2016 about things like entitlement reform or the national debt that are long-term, fiscal threats to America's prosperity. Clinton has vague plans for these issues on her web-site. Trump has none. Instead, what I see in both of them to this point is a continued belief in the growth of the state; big government progressives or big government conservatives. Clinton wants to put in place lots of progressive sounding programs that will cost money we don't have. Trump wants to expand the power of the state on things like border fences and deportation forces. No thanks.
Giving Johnson-Weld a Look
In the past couple of presidential cycles, libertarians could always count on someone from the Paul family (Ron or Rand) to run and represent what they often called the "liberty ticket." Sadly, apart from the big rallies Ron Paul was able to put together on a lot of college campuses, libertarians have largely been in the political wilderness.I get that. There are some wacky ideas among them. If you watched any of the Libertarian Party national convention that eventually nominated Gary Johnson and William Weld, well.... it was a gong show (although a lot more civil than the GOP debates).
It has always been my thought that young people have gravitated to candidates like Ron Paul, Rand Paul, or Gary Johnson, in part, because the Libertarian message is so straight forward and easy to understand; get the power of the state out of nearly every aspect of our social, economic, and political lives. How hard is it to be fiscally conservative and socially liberal, right? And, while we're at it, let's kill the Internal Revenue Service, audit the Federal Reserve, and slash the defense budget by 50%, and stay out of Americans' bedrooms.
It sounds simple, but in practice a far more difficult challenge given the postwar growth of both the welfare and national security state. Moreover, as a piece in Rolling Stone Magazine points out, if you are either solidly liberal or conservative, there are plenty of reasons you won't like libertarians. Yet, one of the reasons I am fond of libertarians is because their positions "stick it" to some of the most sacrosanct positions on the traditional left and right.
Johnson and Weld are the most serious Libertarian candidates (https://www.johnsonweld.com/) we've seen in a long time and I'd like to at least see them get the 15% popular support required by the National Debate Commission to have them participate in the debates.
Throwing it all away.....
Finally, over the past couple of months I have thought long and hard about whether, despite my deep misgivings, I ought to vote for Hillary Clinton as my two-cents worth in stopping the more odious Donald Trump from getting into office?
The short answer is no! I may yet be persuaded by events over the next couple of months. But I don't feel obligated to validate one or the other when a system dominated by two parties managed to serve up such uninspiring options.
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