RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Republican-party establishment is caught in an existential paradox.

Without Donald Trump’s populist and nationalist 2016 campaign, the GOP probably would not have won the presidency. Nor would Republicans now enjoy such lopsided control of state legislatures and governorships, as well as majorities in the House and Senate, and likely control of the Supreme Court for a generation.

So are conservatives angry at the apostate Trump or indebted to him for helping them politically when they were not able to help themselves?

For a similar sense of the paradox, imagine if a novice outsider such as billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban had captured the Democratic nomination and then won the presidency — but did not run on either Bernie Sanders’s progressive redistributionism, Barack Obama’s identity politics, or Hillary Clinton’s high taxes and increased regulation. Would liberals be happy, conflicted, or seething?

For now, most Republicans are overlooking Trump’s bothersome character excesses — without conceding that his impulsiveness and bluntness may well have contributed to his success after Republican sobriety and traditionalism failed.

Republicans concentrate on what they like in the Trump agenda — military spending increases, energy expansion, deterrence abroad, tax and regulatory reform, and the repeal and replacement of the Affordable Care Act — and they ignore the inherent contradictions between Trumpism and their own political creed.

But there are many fault lines that will loom large in the next few years.

Doctrinaire conservatives believe that unfettered free trade is essential, even if it is sometimes not fair or reciprocal.

Hillary Clinton recently took “full responsibility” for her 2016 loss. Only she didn’t. Instead of explaining what the historian Thucydides once called the “truest causes” (aitiai), she went on to list at least three pretexts (prophases) for her defeat: sexism, FBI director James Comey, and the purported Russian hacking of her unsecured e-mail server and the John Podesta e-mail trove.

Clinton’s accusations also raise the larger question of why a presidential candidate wins or loses an election.

In general, there seem to be five hinges of fate: personality, positions on the issues, the general political atmosphere of the era, the quality of the campaign, and sudden and unforeseen outside events such as depression, scandal, or war. Even a biased media or lots of money pales in comparison.

The Pretexts

We can fairly dismiss Clinton’s pretexts.

Take sexism. Hillary Clinton found her sex an advantage in being elected to the U.S. Senate from New York. For a generation, among the most powerful and successful figures in U.S. politics were three progressive, multimillionaire, Bay Area women who, in a most non-diverse fashion, lived within 50 miles of one another: Barbara Boxer, Diane Feinstein, and Nancy Pelosi.

From 1997 to 2013 women of both parties were in charge of U.S. foreign policy as secretary of state, for twelve out of 16 years. One could make the argument that “the first female president” was an advantageous campaigning point, not a drawback; it was certainly designed to bookend Barack Obama’s successful trumpeting of being the first African-American president.

Blaming a deer-in-the-headlights FBI director James Comey is equally problematic. His passive-aggressive pronouncements irrationally first exonerated her, then did not, then did again. Faulting the FBI for her own likely felonious behavior of sending and receiving classified communications on an unsecured server (or of Bill Clinton’s trying to leverage Attorney General Loretta Lynch on an airport tarmac) is sort of like blaming the defeat at Pearl Harbor on the Japanese — true, but hardly the whole story given America’s responsibility for its own unpreparedness.

In similar fashion, had Donald Trump lost, he might have faulted the Washington Post for airing the decade-old Access Hollywood tape that nearly destroyed his campaign, as if the clear ill will and partisanship of Jeff Bezos’s Post were not empowered by Trump’s own private, hot-mic — but nonetheless crude — statements. The Germans claimed that harsh snows and the last-minute campaign in the Balkans had delayed and thus doomed their 1941 Russian offensive, as if the Red Army did not have a say or as if Germans were a tropical people.

He has a very good message! rsk

NBA legend Shaquille O’Neal announced plans to run for sheriff on Friday, although it is unclear where in the country he will do so. The bombshell came after he denied plans to run for mayor of Atlanta, Ga.

“Mayor no, I would never run for mayor,” O’Neal told 11Alive News. But then the basketball start dropped a bombshell. “In 2020, I plan on running for sheriff.”

The NBA star explained his goal — to support the public image of police. “This is not about politics. This is about bringing people closer together,” Shaq said. “You know, when I was coming up, people love [sic] and respected the police, the deputies. And, I want to be the one to bring that back, especially in the community I serve.”

Shaq added that he would do well, because he can relate to everyone. “I can put on a suit and have a conversation with Bill Gates. I can go in the hood and talk to the homies, and talk to the children.”

As a prominent black celebrity, O’Neal can speak to the racial tensions inspiring the Black Lives Matter movement and defend police against the accusations that law enforcement across America is racist.

In an interview with Esquire in November, Shaq put forth his answer on the police-race tension in America. “As an African-American male, I understand. I’ve been through it. As a police officer, I understand. I’ve been through it. I understand people. I listen. We’re not put on this Earth to change people’s minds—we just have to listen to them,” he said.

The NBA star explained his respect for the police, and why he is not afraid of traffic stops.

When I get stopped by the cops, I’m not worried. And it has nothing to do with being Shaq. You know why? I show respect. “Yes, sir. No, sir.” That’s how I was taught. I was raised by a drill sergeant, and that’s who I am. Doesn’t matter if it’s a black guy, white guy, whatever. I’m not going to make it uncomfortable for you, because I don’t want it uncomfortable for me. There’s not going to be any talking back—none of that.

Chelsea Victoria Clinton was named after the Joni Mitchell song “Chelsea Morning,” and as of the spring of 2017, it’s Chelsea Morning in America. Boom, she’s in Variety . . . CBS This Morning . . . The New York Times Book Review. She even picked up a Lifetime award! Okay it was from Lifetime, as in the cable channel, not for a lifetime of achievement, but still, Chelsea Clinton is everywhere. America, whether it asked for it or not, has become the setting for an invasion-from-inside thriller: The Chelsening.

She’s not just a little girl anymore, you know, not just someone’s daughter or campaign prop. Chelsea Clinton is a person, no, a citizen, no, a global citizen, and she is done being quiet. Hear, world, as Chelsea speaks out. She is speaking out about social media: “I’ve recognized, as a lot of people have, that Twitter is a vehicle for me to share my thoughts.” She’s speaking out on movies: “Of course I’m going to see Furious 8. I’ve already seen Logan. I love that Logan is being succeeded by a little girl.” She’s speaking out on the Clinton Foundation: “At its most distilled level, we try to make a positive, impactful, empowering difference in whatever ways we can.” She’s speaking out on speaking out: “This is not the time to be silent or stay on the sidelines.”

With the exception of a few resentful Twitter pokes at the man responsible for rendering her mom an isolated forest monster — Chappaquatch — instead of the most powerful woman in the history of the planet, everything Chelsea says is pretty much like this. The positions she articulates on progress (pro), climate change (anti), and gauzy, inspirational, make-the-world-a-better-place-for-girls-and-women goodness (super-duper pro) are verbal fentanyl. Everything she says is a platitude wrapped in a cliché washed down with a bromide. She’s the dusty end of the greeting-card section, the lite FM of famous-person chatter, a human press release. In short, Chelsea Clinton is becoming the champion dullard of our time. This didn’t happen by chance: We’re talking about the ever-calculating Clintonworld here. The dullness is a strategy, a demented post-last-ditch effort by the Clinton gals to finally power Hillary into the Oval Office. But I’ll come back to that.

It’s not like Chelsea Clinton lacks for interesting things she could talk about. What’s it like being in college when your dad humiliates your mom with an intern your own age? What’s it like watching said mom humiliate herself by losing the presidency, after a lifetime of preparation for the task, to a cheesy reality-television star running on a whim? What’s it like living in a $10 million New York condo with 250-foot-long hallways? Oh, and do you have any comment on longtime Clinton Foundation officer Doug Band’s claim, in a private e-mail uncovered by WikiLeaks, that the foundation paid for your “wedding and life for a decade”?

Yet Vogue writer Jonathan Van Meter, after spending much of the spring and summer of 2012 with Chelsea, was so lost for a juicy anecdote about her that he led off his lengthy profile with this tidbit: “I am pretty intrigued by Joplin Avenue Coffee Company,” Chelsea told him in Joplin, Mo., adding, “When in doubt, coffee.” Van Meter italicized the final noun in a heroic attempt to make the remark sound a little more electrifying than it was.

Variety’s writer Ramin Setoodeh whipped up this pulse-pounder to open his profile: “Chelsea Clinton is about to tell you some things you may not know about her. In an interview with Variety, she lists the last great movie she saw (Hidden Figures), her most surprising job (an internship at a cattle ranch in 1999), and her favorite food growing up (cheddar cheese).”

Supposedly the media have an intriguing new angle. After 20 years of declaring that Chelsea has at last found a niche for herself, they’re now saying that Chelsea has at last really found a niche for herself. Said niche is her new social-media role as the tart-tongued Trump tormentor of Twitter. “Now on Twitter: Chelsea Clinton, Unbound,” proclaimed the New York Times in a story of more than 1,100 words — longer than the same newspaper’s April 18 story about the Fresno Islamist who slaughtered three people while yelling “Allahu akbar.”

Against the odds, House Republicans have regained momentum on health-care reform, and they’re nearing a majority coalition. While there may be more swerves before a vote, they ought to appreciate the importance of demonstrating that a center-right Congress—working with President Trump —can govern.

There are still holdouts and others are undecided in the GOP’s moderate and conservative wings, but their differences are narrowing. More members are also recognizing their political mistake in trashing the original ObamaCare repeal and replace bill. The House now has a rare second chance, and a generational opportunity to start to solve some U.S. problems.

On Wednesday Fred Upton of Michigan and Billy Long of Missouri worked out the latest compromise, meant to assuage concerns about insurance for pre-existing medical conditions. The amendment would add $8 billion over five years to a 10-year, $130 billion fund to create risk pools to protect people in the individual insurance market who need high-cost treatments.

Pre-existing conditions are an understandable concern, but the critics traffick in demagoguery, not substance. Their opposition has less to do with vulnerable patients than preserving ObamaCare. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer claimed that risk pools are “like administering cough medicine to someone with stage 4 cancer,” which exploits cancer victims and shows he knows nothing about risk pools.

By targeting funds at the sickest patients, states can make insurance markets more affordable and stable. These subsidies siphon off some of the costs that contribute to rising premiums in the overall market, and the idea is that the resulting cheaper plans for everyone else will encourage more people to enroll.

In Alaska, ObamaCare premiums rose 40% annually over multiple years, one of the two participating insurers exited the business, and the other was on the brink. So the state received a federal waiver last year to create a risk pool. Premiums rose 7.3% on average for 2017.

Opponents say risk pools are underfunded, but the Alaska rescue mission cost merely $55 million (albeit in a low-population state). The results came despite ObamaCare’s restraints, and the GOP’s American Health Care Act promises more regulatory flexibility to experiment. Opponents also argue that risk pools are ghettos for the sick, but the Alaska payments are “invisible,” meaning that all consumers use regular insurance.

We’ll learn soon if risk pools are enough to win over GOP moderates, but they should know that Democrats will demagogue the pre-existing conditions issue in the 2018 election whether the bill passes or not. Better to pass the bill, and explain to their voters why their reform is better for patients, than defend a failure. HillaryCare’s crash didn’t save vulnerable Democrats in 1994—though unlike Democrats, this time Republicans have a good product to sell.

Forty-nine years ago, Vice President Hubert Humphrey was the Democratic candidate for president.

The year 1968 was a tumultuous one that saw the assassinations of rival candidate Senator Robert F. Kennedy and civil-rights icon Martin Luther King Jr. Lyndon Johnson’s unpopular lame-duck Democratic administration imploded because of massive protests against the Vietnam War.

Yet Humphrey almost defeated Republican nominee Richard Nixon, losing the election by just over 500,000 votes (43.4 percent to 42.7 percent).

Infighting Democrats could have defeated the unpopular Nixon if not for a few unforeseen developments.

Their convention in Chicago turned into a creepy carnival of televised rioting and radical protests. Hippies and leftists were seen battling police in the streets on prime-time news.

The former Democratic governor of Alabama, George Wallace, ran as a states’ rights third-party candidate and drew 13.5 percent of the vote. Wallace destroyed the Democrats’ traditional hold on the old “solid South” by winning five Southern states outright. He also siphoned off enough traditional Democratic supporters to give Nixon astonishing Republican victories in half a dozen other states in the region.

Nixon won over a few Northern blue-collar states that had often voted Democratic, such as Wisconsin and Ohio — again with help from Wallace, who appealed to fed-up, working-class Democrats.

What was the lesson from 1968?

The Democrats could have recalibrated their message to appeal more to working-class voters.

They should have rebuilt the old Franklin D. Roosevelt–era coalition that had elected Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy, mostly by appealing to paycheck issues and avoiding radical agendas.

Yet despite picking up twelve House seats in the 1970 midterm elections, and instead of attributing the 1968 loss to Wallace’s third-party populism and voter pushback against radicalism, the Democrats went off the rails and veered hard left in 1972.

The lowering of the voting age to age 18 in 1971 also tricked Democrats into wrongly thinking that most new young voters were leftists and would vote in record numbers for leftist candidates.

So the Democrats in 1972 foolishly nominated die-hard left-wing South Dakota senator George McGovern.

Ex-President Barack Obama is the mystery man of American politics. Given the absence of a viable paper trail, nobody can say for sure who he is. He manifests for us as a figure of multiple identities: a Christian, a Muslim, a secularist, a socialist, a humanist, an intellectual, a man of the people. His lack of definable substance, his inner absence, has been an important political advantage. As Obama himself confessed (or boasted) in The Audacity of Hope, this layering of anonymities enabled him to “serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.”

Obama’s enigmatic personae and antecedents are an issue most people are reluctant to pursue, whether out of mere indifference, partisan allegiance or fear of ridicule. Even though he represents one of the most pivotal moments in American history, which saw a polarizing cipher with a neo-Marxist blueprint reduce the country to a social, political and economic shambles, Obama doesn’t get much traction in the news these days. Few wish to investigate his shadowy heritage, to confront the ongoing implications of the debacle he was instrumental in causing or to pursue its resolution. The unwillingness to grapple with what Obama signifies — in fact, personifies — is a sign of the failure of political will, a tendency to allow a crucial feature of national existence to subside beneath the welter of current events. “Nothing to see here,” seems to be the consensus, “time to move on.”

But there is more to see than meets the eye. The question that may exercise future historians is how a man so obviously unfit for the presidency and so patently inimical to the well-being of the nation could have been elected—twice. Was the race card in itself sufficiently instrumental to persuade a nation to embrace eight years of mayhem? Could a voting majority have been swept up in an access of reparation euphoria? Did John Dewey’s “progressivist” education gradually work to dumb down a significant portion of the electorate, rendering it ultimately susceptible to socialist manipulation? Was the influence of the Frankfurt School and its leftist agenda powerful enough to subvert the academy, the press, the entertainment industry and the culture at large, and thus to transform a free democratic society into a nascent authoritarian state? All these elements were certainly in play, but likely could not have borne their tainted fruit had Obama not appeared on the scene, like a diabolus ex machina. He acted as both catalyst and embodiment of a looming catastrophe.

The fact that there was little in the way of reliable biographical and formative data — vital records were (and are) either disputed or inaccessible — was not the liability one might have imagined. Rather, it may have been the critical factor in determining Obama’s electoral triumphs and the malign consequences that inevitably followed.

A full recitation of the differences between Barack Obama and Donald Trump would fill a book.

Since this is a blog, not a book, I won’t assay that gargantuan task. But I wanted to say a word about two of the things that have repeatedly struck me about the differences between the two men.

I am going to leave to one side what might be the largest difference: that Obama was above all a man of lofty-sounding rhetoric, at once pragmatic in tone and utopian in aspiration, while Trump is a man of demotic and sometimes involuted rhetoric but decisive, almost impatient action.

An example on everyone’s mind is Syria. Obama had his red line, rendered inert (Whew!) by the as-it-turns-out-false assurance that “100 percent” of Syrias’s chemical weapons had been removed. Trump saw footage of the results of Assad’s early April sarin gas attack and responded a couple of days later with with 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles against the air base from which the attack originated.

Red line and inaction vs. infraction and response.

Many more examples of that sort could be adduced, but I wanted to call attention to two things that are more modest.

One concerns the character of their more personal interventions. Again, I am going to leave one large category out of consideration: everything that has to do with race. Instead, I would simply ask you to think about some of Obama’s signal actions with respect to race: his support of Eric Holder, the most patently racialist attorney general in history, his intervention while president into local controversies like the Skip-Gates-Cambrdige-Policeman episode or the “If-I-Had-A-Son-He–Would-Look-Like-Trayvon-Martin” wheeze. Such things, I believe, tell us a lot about Obama’s unspoken Weltanschauung: the value-laden background of assumptions out of which his immaculately accoutered pronouncements were uttered.

There is not, so far as I have been able to determine, anything similar in Donald Trump’s makeup. His approach to problems, to events generally, is less ideological than pragmatic. “What’s the right thing to do in this particular case?” That seems to be his cynosure. You might not like the answers he gives, but it is easy to see that they come not from a previously adopted program or ideology but from an ad hoc response to the case at hand. Critics call that “confusion” or “inconsistency” or “contradiction.” I’m not sure those categories have much purchase in this context.

In any event, this difference between Obama and Trump results in some striking contrasts between the two men. In 2014, Obama made headlines when he traded five senior Taliban leaders held captive in Guantanamo Bay for the release of Bowe Robert Bergdahl, the Army solider who deserted his post while on guard duty in June 2009 after announcing his loathing for America and hatred of the Army. “I am ashamed to be an American,” he wrote in an email to his parents. “And the title of US soldier is just the lie of fools. . . . The horror that is America is disgusting.” Who can forget the spectacle of Bergdahl’s parents, who came to the White House and praised Allah for the release of their son?

Donald Trump, through diplomatic intervention with Egyptian President al-Sisi when he visited Washington earlier this month, quietly secured the release of the Egyptian-American charity worker Aya Hijazi, her Egyptian husband, and four other humanitarian workers who had been held for three years by Egyptian authorities. Trump sent a government plane to pick up the entoruage and welcome Hijazi to the White House for a photo-op. CONTINUE AT SITE

Since losing the most winnable presidential election in modern American history, Hillary Clinton has, among other things: given a series of high-profile speeches, joined Gov. Cuomo at his public unveiling of tuition-free college, refused to rule out a run for mayor of New York and issued an online video message exhorting fellow Democrats to fight on in her name.

“The challenges we face,” she said, “as a country and a party, are real.”

Clearly, Hillary still sees herself as the leader of the Democratic Party. And why shouldn’t she? Democrats have been locked in an abusive relationship with the Clintons for decades, enabling, explaining, convincing themselves that next time will be different. Party faithful hew to Hillary’s excuses for losing to Donald Trump: It’s James Comey’s fault, plus the Russians, white supremacists, misogynists, the deplorables and immobilized millennials, among other things.

Her losses in 2008 and 2016 have been framed as things that happened to Hillary — not one, but two Black Swan events that stymied her historic destiny.

How is it that Democrats have fealty here, let alone sympathy? How is it that Hillary routinely walks into standing ovations at Broadway theaters? Where is the realization that Hillary is to blame or the rational rejection of a two-time loser?

Any debate about what happened last November ends with Tuesday’s publication of “Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign.” Journalists Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes spent the past two years talking to Hillary’s most trusted advisers, and what emerges is damning.

Every mistake made in her 2008 run was compounded in 2016: the paranoia, the staff infighting, the underestimation of the intra-party wild card, the self-righteousness, the failure to connect with average voters, the belief that because it was her turn the presidency would be hers. It’s “Groundhog Day” with global consequences.

The September 2016 article in Politico championing Hillary Clinton’s use of “data analytics” now looks—how shall we put it?—rather premature.

Politico swooned that computer algorithms “underlie nearly all of the Clinton campaign’s most important strategic decisions.” Computer guru Elan Kriegel had crunched the numbers for campaign manager Robby Mook, allowing Team Clinton to precisely target her potential voters and thus not waste one dime on appealing to the deplorables.

“Clintonites saw it as their secret weapon in building an insurmountable delegate lead over Bernie Sanders,” Politico reported. And come the general election the Clintonistas were downright giddy about the edge Big Data was giving them. With the hopelessly old-school Trump team “investing virtually nothing in data analytics during the primary and little since, Kriegel’s work isn’t just powering Clinton’s campaign, it is providing her a crucial tactical advantage.” Ah, hubris.

We were reminded of that Politico article in reading the first of what promises to be a sizable library of books autopsying the Clinton campaign, Shattered, by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes. The consensus among the Clintonites interviewed is that Mook and Kriegel and all their overhyped whizbang hooey are to blame. Fair enough: That’s what they get for taking their victory lap too soon.

But don’t put all the blame on the geek squad: The reason Hillary Clinton lost, first and foremost, is that Hillary Clinton was the dismalest, dreadfulest of candidates. That said, the emphasis on data analytics was of a piece with Hillary’s overall awfulness. Understanding the data approach, Politicowrote before the election, “is to understand how Clinton has run her campaign—precise and efficient, meticulous and effective, and, yes, at times more mathematical than inspirational.” The reporter was more right than he knew.

Still, the Clinton team’s overconfidence in data analytics was a typical error made with new technologies. It isn’t just overconfidence in what the technology can achieve, it is that the people using the technologies are ever tempted to push out to the edge of what the technologies can do as a way of proving not only the power of the new machines and methods and materials, but the prowess of the technologists themselves.