Trump Has A SINO Problem

I will never be mistaken for President of the Chuck Todd Fan Club, but I will give the host of Meet The Press his due. Politics has a lexicon all its own and Todd recently created a worthy new entrant to that nomenclature: “SINO” – a “Supporter In Name Only” of Donald Trump. The SINO phenomenon has been seen with regularity among Washington’s political class: tepid endorsements, the he-who-must-not-be-named treatment by people like Mitch McConnell, and twisted-into-a-pretzel justifications being used by those who once deemed him a “cancer” or a “con man” for their change of heart.

But the problem with SINOs is that they are sort of like the sell swords on Game of Thrones – they have no loyalty to you and as soon as the worm turns, they run away. As Trump’s attacks on people based on their religion, ethnicity, and gender have intensified, he is in danger of becoming a man without a country. The SINOs who grudgingly siddled up to him are now distancing themselves.  

Consider the reaction to Trump’s inflammatory comments about Judge Gonzalo Curiel. Not only is no one in Trump’s own party rising to his defense, they are stepping over each other to criticize the real estate mogul’s comments. When Hillary Clinton dropped a foreign policy speech that peeled the paint off Trump’s spray tanned façade, no one in the Republican Party rushed to his defense – there was no rapid response, no surrogates parachuting onto cable television to defend him, no point-by-point rebuttal, just Trump and a few lame tweets.  

This should surprise no one. Politicians are, if nothing else, pragmatists. As Trump’s star fades, Republicans will continue distancing themselves from him. After all, why should they lose their cushy jobs and stellar perks for a guy who will not be remembered one second after the polls close on November 8^th? More importantly, why should they risk the future of their party by being associated with a man who is single-handedly alienating every voting group critical to its future; they are doing a good enough job of that without Trump’s help.

But political survival is one thing, upholding the tenets you claim to revere is another. If SINOs truly valued country over party, they would do more than issue hyperbolic press releases denouncing their own standard bearer – they would come out and renounce their support of him and confess a dirty little secret many of them have long known: far from being a Rush Limbaugh-tarred-Femi-Nazi, Hillary Clinton is a roll-up-her-sleeves policy wonk who likes to get things done. In the Senate, she helped pass bi-partisan legislation and as Secretary of State, she took an active interest in the smallest of issues, like a gefilte fish company in a Republican Congressman’s district that was having trouble getting its shipment to Israel.

Of course, the problem in admitting this fact is the electoral support that has sustained many members of Congress and the ocean of money that has flowed into political consultants’ coffers for the past 25 years would dry up immediately and the bald-faced lies that sustain the vast right-wing conspiracy against Hillary would be exposed. Instead, SINOs will retreat from the dumpster fire in order to protect themselves and prepare for battle with another President Clinton.

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Deficits Do Not Matter

Before our economy blew up in 2008 and before George W. Bush invaded Iraq under false pretenses, a guy named Paul O’Neill, who you might remember as Bush’s first Treasury Secretary, was shut down by Vice President Cheney when O’Neill attempted to throw cold water on another round of tax cuts the Bushies were plotting for 2003. According to O’Neill, Cheney brusquely observed that “Reagan taught us deficits don’t matter.” The tax cuts got enacted and O’Neill was shitcanned shortly after his face-to-face with Cheney. 

But a funny thing happens any time a Democrat is handed the keys to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Suddenly, those profligate Republicans who gladly starve the government of actual money and borrow it instead, become very concerned about budget deficits and debt. It happened when Bill Clinton was President and came back with even greater force once Barack Obama took office. 

Once Republicans took over the House, and continuing when they assumed power in the Senate, any time Obama wanted to do something like extend unemployment insurance to people who were out of work because of the crippling effect of the Great Recession, there was a demand for a so-called “offset” - a dollar for dollar removal of funds from place A to fund priority B. It got so bad that emergency funding for New Jersey and New York after Superstorm Sandy was held up for weeks while Congress quibbled over the small details. That tens of thousands suffered needlessly seemed of no moment. Of course, none of this was required when George W. Bush was spending hundreds of billions in Iraq, Medicare was expanded to provide a prescription drug benefit, or when tax cuts were enacted in 2001 and 2003 that drained the Treasury of needed money just as we were embarking on that grave error of an invasion in the Middle East.

There were few voices louder in demanding austerity and cuts to social programs, while simultaneously cutting taxes even more than Paul Ryan. While his economic view was roundly panned when he was made Mitt Romney’s Vice Presidential running mate in 2012, Ryan never gave up the ghost. Now that he has risen to the third-most powerful office in the land, you would think a journalist such as Chuck Todd would devote a significant portion of time when interviewing now-Speaker Ryan about the recently enacted federal budget and a companion bill that cut taxes by nearly $700 billion over ten years. Yes, you read that right, SEVEN HUNDRED BILLION DOLLARS - but you would be wrong. Here is their entire exchange:

What does this even MEAN? “by keeping taxes where they are that means we’re keeping them where they are.” Yes, yes you are, sir. “Not raising taxes is not cutting taxes.” WHAT? This is the same guy who helped block a $9.7 billion unemployment extension in 2014 because it did not have offsets and the same guy who voted against the emergency relief bill after Superstorm Sandy, but is totally fine with handing almost $700 billion in tax cuts, mostly to corporations and businesses, without cuts elsewhere to make up the difference. No mention of how this will require more borrowing and increase the deficit over time. No questioning of why it is suddenly okay to increase the deficit when it was supposedly such a huge problem less than five years ago. Nope. Nada. Nothing. 

Unsurprisingly, this steaming pile of horse manure got no follow-up from the guy who hosts the top rated Sunday morning talk show in America. The media literally spent months not too long ago obsessing over the need for a “grand bargain” that would rein in the supposedly swollen deficit that risked destroying the nation. Of course, as the budget deficit has receded, less and less time has been spent reporting on it and even less interest in calling out shameless politicians who are happy to stick it to people without jobs or a home so long as the bill being signed has a whiff of bipartisanship and a novelty beard attached to it. 

To recap, Chuck Todd asked a whole ONE question about this apparent hypocrisy, Paul Ryan gave a word salad answer that literally made no sense, and Chuck Todd moved on. So, the next time Republicans refuse to pay for something or claim we cannot afford it, do not expect Chuck Todd, or anyone else in the Beltway media to question it. 

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The Campaign About Nothing

Russell: What's the show about?

George: Nothing.

Russell: Then why am I watching it?

George: Because it's on TV. [1]

A quarter century after Seinfeld parodied itself, the Republican candidates for President have taken that iconic program to its logical conclusion - a reductio ad absurdum exercise in banality aided and abetted by a willing press corps more interested in acting performances, manufactured slap fights, and triviality than the important business of deciding who should be our nation's leader.

This bizarre incentive structure encourages over-the-top behavior to garner media attention. As was noted on (of all places) The McLaughlin Group, many of the questions posed in the second GOP debate were modeled on (of all things) The Real Housewives franchise, where one "housewife" says something mean about another "housewife" and then the latter is asked to comment on what the former said. Essentially, Jake Tapper acted as that smarmy kid in school who walks up to someone and says "you won't believe the shit so and so said about you" and then steps away to watch the fight.  

Further, because so much of the "reporting" that goes on these days focuses on the horse race aspect of the primary (that is, on polls, not policy), it is no wonder that a guy like Donald Trump spends most of what passes for his stump speeches patting himself on the back for leading in those polls. Polls = popularity = attention by the chattering class = more popularity = higher polls in a virtuous cycle that redounds to the benefit of whoever is riding the crest of that wave.

While the media has done its best to ridicule and mock Trump, demand policy prescriptions from him, and otherwise attempt to pierce his balloon, the dirty little secret they are reluctant to admit is that his popularity, along with that of Ben Carson, Carly Fiorina, and even Ted Cruz, reflects the true mainstream of Republican orthodoxy. The longer this goes on, the conventional wisdom inside the Beltway that the "adults in the room" - the Jeb Bushes or John Kasichs - will bubble to the surface once Republican primary voters get their wits about them, looks more and more foolish. 

Perhaps this is because the idea that policies matter is no longer applicable in a party that does not live in the (to borrow from a W-era apparatchik) "reality-based world." When a large portion of your party does not believe the President is a Christian or that the deficit has gone down on his watch not up, objective "truth" no longer matters. That insiders are stunned at Trump's rise is amusing if only because he espouses little more than the greatest hits from Fox News in the age of Obama - anchor babies, illegal immigration, repealing Obamacare, a weak foreign policy - while putting some New York attitude behind it. 

And even if policies did matter, the media is doing a lousy job reporting about them. Do not get me wrong, it is not like they provide no coverage of policy pronouncements, it is just that the proportion of that coverage is a fraction of the ink and airtime used on the latest dust-up or Trump insult. Examples abound, but to take just two, consider Jeb Bush's tax policy. It was announced about 2 weeks ago to almost no fanfare even though an analysis of it indicated that more than 53% of the benefits of his policy would benefit the top 1% of income earners. [2] What coverage was provided focused mainly on his willingness to scrap the so-called "carried interest" loophole, an idea championed by Democrats for years and recently supported by Donald Trump. Bush got a lot of credit in the media for including this idea, but the reality is that the loophole's closure would bring in less than $20 billion a year to the Treasury - less than 1% of the overall "cost" of Bush's plan - and his other giveaways to the wealthy would more than make up for this loss. In other words, Bush got credit for taking a penny away from the rich and no criticism for giving them a dollar in return. 

Similarly, Carly Fiorina was roundly praised for her performance at the second GOP debate. She was declared the winner because she seemed in control of the room and fluent in both foreign and domestic policy. Of course, a riff about the Sixth Fleet and increasing troops in Western Europe sounded impressive, and she spoke with great passion (but little accuracy) about Planned Parenthood, but within a day, four (!) falsehoods or misstatements she uttered in a scant 15 seconds were flagged. [3] Those errors, which once upon a time would have mattered - flat out lies used to mean something - were brushed aside because she was being judged not on the probity of what she said, but what it did for her, wait for it, poll numbers. She was, to use the media's preferred buzzword this cycle, "authentic," even if she was lying through her teeth.

In Matt Bai's outstanding book All The Truth Is Out he argues that the tabloidization of national media coverage began in 1988, when Gary Hart's campaign was taken down amid rumors of an extramarital affair and peaked during Bill Clinton's time in office. Since then, while sex still sells, caricaturing candidates has proven equally effective in belittling them - Al Gore was a phony, John Kerry was an effete flip-flopper, Mitt Romney, a soulless corporate takeover artist (ok, that last one was true) - while excusing the press from doing its job of questioning the ideas, not the motivations or personalities, of those they cover. If Jeb Bush's idea to privatize Medicare, Mike Huckabee's suggestion that the rule of law can be ignored, or Lindsey Graham's call for tens of thousands of troops in Iraq get a <shoulder shrug emoji> from the press because they are too busy dissecting Donald Trump's latest insult, why should they be surprised that candidates traffic in invective, the populace is so ill informed, and we blankly stare at the freak show on television?

That candidates are going to respond to the best ways to get attention is unsurprising - after all, they are politicians trying to get elected, but the media has abdicated its role as fact checker in favor of becoming carnival barkers because their incentive structure is no longer built on objectivity, but rather, on ratings, clicks, and page views.  

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END NOTES

1. The Pitch, Season 4, Episode 3.

2. On this, he has outdone his brother, who "only" handed over 40% of the benefits of his tax cuts to the 1%. http://www.vox.com/2015/9/15/9326453/jeb-bush-tax-plan-distribution

3. http://www.msnbc.com/all-in/watch/watch-carly-fiorina-make-4-bogus-claims-in-15-seconds-529726531954

Trump, McCain, & The Latest Media Pile-On

This weekend, the Beltway media is doing what it does best - grabbing its pitchforks in search of someone to burn at the stake. The unlucky victim is Donald Trump, who made some intemperate remarks about John McCain in Iowa on Saturday, seeming to question McCain's military heroism when that conduct is plain to all (though an earlier Trump zinger about McCain graduating at the bottom of his class at the Naval Academy was right on the mark). 

Trump's competitors for the Republican nomination for President quickly joined the pile on, denouncing him and coming to McCain's aid (as if the senior senator from Arizona, an object of reverence among the DC chattering class, needed it). Everyone seems to agree this is the moment the Trump bubble will burst as quiet calls to bar him from the upcoming debate grow louder and his foolishness is put on greater display. 

The other question which has been raised by people like Chuck Todd is whether the comment itself disqualifies Trump from being President (this is a favored Chuck Todd trope, he famously declared Alison Grimes disqualified from being a Senator because she would not disclose to a reporter who she voted for for President). It is a layup question that appeals to the facile nature of political analysis, but is what Trump said about McCain any more disqualifying than Rick Perry not remembering which three federal departments he wants to shutter, or Ted Cruz's climate denialism, or Scott Walker refusing to say whether he believes in evolution, or Jeb Bush's treatment of Terri Schiavo, or Rick Santorum darkly warning on "man-dog" love if gay marriage was legalized, or McCain, for that matter, when he selected Sarah Palin as his running mate when she was clearly unfit to hold national office?

The other hypocrisy in all of this is the reflexive protection of military service. Once upon a time, Republicans made it a part of their playbook to disparage Democrats who had served - think the "purple heart band-aid" brigade at the 2004 Republican National Convention mocking John Kerry or the disgusting attacks on triple-amputee Max Cleland in 2002. Where once the Republican National Committee led such attacks, now they suddenly care about what one of their own says about another? Puh-leaze. 

UPDATE: Oliver Willis  has unearthed a letter Jeb Bush wrote to the Swift Boat Veterans in 2005 thanking them for what they did to John Kerry. I'm sure the media will ask Jeb about this the next time he chats with them (sarcasm, mine).

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