RUTHFULLY YOURS

Trump supporters opposed to bailouts ought to think twice before casting their vote. They’re about to bail out the Democrats.

Barack Obama has presided over the veritable collapse of the institutional Democratic party. Start with the statistics: Republicans have their largest majority in the House of Representatives since 1931, and they have commanding control of the Senate. At the state level, Republicans control 68 of 98 partisan state legislative chambers, and 31 governor’s mansions. Twenty-four states boast a GOP trifecta, where both legislative chambers and the governor are Republicans. That is largely thanks to President Obama, whose health-care takeover, rammed through Congress, gave rise to the Tea Party, and whose constitutional end runs (now that he can’t ram things through Congress) solidified the Tea Party’s gains in subsequent elections.

But the agenda and tactics that prompted a leftward shift in his own party threaten Democrats this election season. Hillary Clinton was supposed to waltz to her nomination, every lane having been cleared for her. Instead, she’s likely to arrive at the Democratic convention black and blue, thanks to Bernie Sanders — a curmudgeonly socialist who managed to tie Clinton in Iowa and beat her in New Hampshire. There’s reason to believe that, if Sanders partisans can’t vote against Hillary, they’ll likely stay home. And in a national contest, low turnout helps Republicans.

This is all on top of Hillary’s baked-in problems. She’s unlikeable. She’s a lousy campaigner. The stench of her ambition is detectable miles downwind. Combining various polls, the Huffington Post finds that 54 percent of voters view her unfavorably (only 40 percent view her favorably), and Quinnipiac found in February that seven in ten voters believe her dishonest and untrustworthy. No wonder: She’s the subject of three federal investigations, and it’s not impossible that the FBI will recommend an indictment to the Justice Department sometime before November. Meanwhile, RealClearPolitics’ polling averages show that, in head-to-head matchups, Marco Rubio leads Hillary Clinton by five points, and Ted Cruz leads her by a point and a half.

The Republican party is poised to take the presidency and to hold both houses of Congress — and Republican voters are about to squander that opportunity on Donald J. Trump.

Trump supporters love polls, so perhaps they should note that polls show Trump with a higher unfavorable rating (58 percent) and lower favorable rating (37 percent) than Clinton. Neither Ted Cruz nor Marco Rubio has such lopsided numbers.

Super Tuesday was defined by change. The Democrats have had enough change. Solid majorities in key states said that they did not want a more liberal candidate than Obama. The one major exception was Vermont which went for Bernie Sanders. Sanders also won Oklahoma where around a third backed a turn even further left than Obama. But beyond them, there was no great appetite for outsiders.

“This campaign is not just about electing a president; it is about transforming America,” Bernie Sanders bleated back in Vermont. But the Democrats may be suffering from transformation fatigue.

Most Democrats have made it clear that they want another two terms of Obama. Exit polls from Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee and Virginia showed solid support for a continuation of Obama’s policies. The Sanders change agenda plays well with younger voters, particularly with white voters, but fails with a Democratic Party whose base is in thrall to Obama despite his legacy of economic misery and failure.

Hillary Clinton had initially hoped to run as a historic candidate while touting her own experience, but was instead forced to run as a proxy for Obama in order to preserve her minority firewall which saved her in South Carolina and other states with large black Democratic constituencies. It’s a humiliating comedown for Hillary to have to run as Obama’s shadow. But she’s willing to do that and abandon the dream of creating her own legacy beyond Obama for the opportunity to make it to the White House.

On the Republican side there was a great appetite for outsiders and for change. The two big winners, Trump and Ted Cruz, both ran as outsider candidates on platforms of change. In an extraordinary turn of events, Rubio, the establishment candidate, had the poorest performance of the top three candidates.

Democrats may no longer be interested in transforming America, but Republicans are. Hope and Change has lost its luster for the party that inflicted two terms of Obama on the country. But Change is running strong among Republicans, even if Hope has not always come along for the long ride of the primaries.

While the establishment lane prevailed for the Democrats, the anti-establishment lane dominated among Republicans. These two different snapshots of Super Tuesday from both parties also help explain the dramatic difference in voter turnout. Republican voter turnout quadrupled in Virginia and increased by hundreds of thousands in Tennessee, Texas, Georgia and Massachusetts. Democratic voter turnout was underwhelming. Voting for the safe establishment choice does not really rally primary voters.

‘……….They wonder whether they can accept as president a man who threatens a free press with libel laws redolent of the 1798 Sedition Act (which nearly destroyed the American republic in its infancy), openly advocates war crimes as an instrument of state policy, approvingly tweets a quotation from Benito Mussolini, and embraces Kremlin thug Vladimir Putin as a kindred spirit.

There is abundant evidence that Mr. Trump is, as Sen. Marco Rubio pungently puts it, a con man. But suppose we give Mr. Trump more credit than he deserves and take him at his word. It is abundantly clear that no Mexican leader or government would ever agree to pay for his border wall. What then? He would lack the legal authority to impose tariffs on countries such as China and Mexico that run persistent trade surpluses with the U.S. What then? He has proposed a massive tax cut and other programs that, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, would add between $11.7 trillion and $15.1 trillion to the national debt over the next decade. This plan, which would be ruinous if enacted, would not be adopted, and candidate Trump has no other economic agenda. What then?

Tom Coburn, a conservative Republican who retired from the Senate last year, said in a statement Monday supporting Sen. Rubio’s candidacy for the Republican nomination that Mr. Trump is “perpetuating a fraud on the American people. His empty promises, bullying and bloviating rhetoric will only deepen the frustration and disillusionment that gave rise to his campaign. He simply lacks the character, skills and policy knowledge to turn his grandiose promises into reality.”

If you think the American people are angry and mistrustful now, imagine how they will feel after three months of (God forbid) a Trump presidency.

Then there is the way Mr. Trump has chosen to conduct his campaign, which has degraded democratic discourse and made the U.S. a global laughingstock. CONTINUE AT SITE

It’s still a horse race, but only just: Donald Trump’s Super Tuesday victories in Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, Virginia, Arkansas and Massachusetts outweigh the Ted Cruz victory in his home state of Texas and neighboring Oklahoma. The Republican Establishment will not close ranks around Cruz as the last candidate capable of beating Trump. Marco Rubio’s consolation price was the Minnesota caucuses with 37% of the vote.

For the past six months my Republican friends and I have Donald Trump’s ascendancy and asked ourselves whether the voters had gone crazy. The voters aren’t crazy. We in the Republican elite were crazy: we thought we could allow the American economy to remain a rigged game indefinitely. The voters think otherwise. That’s why Trump is winning. That’s also why Bernie Sanders, the least likely presidential candidate in living memory, gave Hillary Clinton a run for her money. If you don’t give people capitalism, the late Jude Wanniski used to say, they’ll take socialism.

Americans are shrewd. You can’t spit on them and tell them it’s raining. They know the game is rigged against them. They know it’s rigged the same way that they know a lottery is rigged: There aren’t any winners. They know that they are downwardly mobile because they aren’t upwardly mobile. Americans don’t mind playing against bad odds–they play the lottery all the time–but they think that they are playing against zero odds. Ordinary Americans had an outside chance to get rich until 2008. Now they have no chance at all.

Upward mobility is America’s gauge of well-being. It’s not the decline of median family income that gets under Americans’ skin, but the perception that the elites have pulled the ladder up behind them. During the quarter-century after Ronald Reagan’s inauguration, it was only a slight exaggeration to say that someone in every family got rich. They bought a cable television franchise, started a website, got some stock in a high-flying tech company, flipped real estate, or ran a small business that became a big business. Inequality didn’t bother Americans as long as they had a chance at a winning ticket–not necessarily a fair chance, but at least the kind of chance that paid off occasionally for ordinary people. As long they could see that people like them were becoming rich, they kept playing the game.

The US primaries system is confusing, convoluted and apt to confound those who like their democracy short, sharp and certain. Yet for all it’s flaws and eccentricities, there is much to inspire jealousy in an Australian observer — especially if that spectator happens to vote Liberal and reside in North Sydney
An American presidential election is always of worldwide importance. This is especially true of the 2016 election. In many ways it could well be a turning point, with a series of crucial issues for determination.

Will the US continue the Obama policies and become little different from a European welfare state, gradually relinquishing its leadership role in the world? Will it continue to be ruled to a considerable extent by a committee of un-elected judges who have decided that the Constitution is what they say it is, and not what the nation’s founders intended? Will the federal government continue to be the taxing-and-regulating leviathan it has gradually become, emasculating not only the states but the traditional freedom of individual Americans? Will the borders of the United States be made as secure as they once were, with illegal immigration brought to heel ? In summary, will the United States return to being the constitutional republic it was intended to be and once was?

As in Australia, the election is marred by the mainstream media not so much reporting matters but advancing their political agenda and concentrating on personalities. Their games may be different in the two countries but the agenda is the same – diminishing the chances of any candidate for leadership who is perceived by them, and the political class, to be too conservative. In Australia , the target was Tony Abbott. In the US it is Senator Ted Cruz.

The mainstream media seems to be holding off recalling Trump’s business and personal record, investigating the inconsistencies between his stated policies and his previous positions. Above all, there is scant attention to the question whether he has the gravitas and, above all, the character to be the president and commander-in chief. Some observers even suspect that the mainstream media is holding off subjecting Trump to a rigorous investigation unless and until he becomes the Republican nominee, and then only to ensure a Democratic victory.
Similarly, they have avoided reporting on Senator Marco Rubio’s apparent betrayal of his Republican Tea Party constituency over his attachment to an amnesty for illegal immigrants. Border security and illegal immigration are even bigger issue in the United States than they were in Australia before John Howard and then Tony Abbott resolved the issue.

Thus, whenever Cruz referred to Rubio’s role in the “Gang of Eight” amnesty bill or his indication that as president he would not immediately revoke Obama’s executive amnesty, Rubio’s reaction has been positively Trump- like. Instead of answering the charge, he has unleashed the all-purpose mantra, ”That’s a lie!” This has been reported by the mainstream media, but without any investigation as to whether Cruz’s allegations are true. So the constant themes have been that Cruz is accused of being a liar, or that Cruz is indeed a liar. Rubio’s other tactic has been to allege that Cruz even supported his amnesty bill, whereas on all the evidence it is clear that Cruz was one of its strongest opponents. This again was reported but rarely investigated.

In the meantime, it seems likely that the Democratic nominee for the general election will be Hillary Clinton, subject to there being no proceedings against her concerning alleged breaches of official secrecy laws, or that the Clinton Foundation received money from foreign governments while she was Secretary of State. The authorities seem reluctant to act in either case, in marked contrast to the speed with which they moved against General David Petraeus, a person of some eminence and achievement, for having revealed classified information to his biographer, who also happened to be his mistress.

Americans have seen living standards stagnate, habits of neighbourhood co-operation undermined, job opportunities reduced and their sense of moral equality with the new American educated class decline. The establishment grasps as much, but only Donald Trump stands poised to exploit it.
Australians and New Zealanders, like most people outside the United States, have been gazing with a kind of bafflement, amused or horrified according to taste, at the early results in America’s season of primaries and caucuses. Donald Trump’s dominance in the Republican early primaries, though shaky, seemed to be spreading to more and more groups in the broad Republican coalition; and Senator Bernie Sanders won the first primary and tied in the first caucus against the well-funded but scandal-haunted favourite, Hillary Clinton, by drawing high levels of support from white progressives and young voters with a campaign rooted in undiluted socialism.

Both party leaderships (or “establishments”, as it has become fashionable to call them) have been rattled and undermined by these results. Mrs Clinton enjoyed the barely concealed backing of the Democratic machine, but it was unable to deliver the votes it once did. It modestly compensated for this failure by giving her most of New Hampshire’s Democrat office-holders as “super-delegates” to the Convention. Having been beaten better than sixty-to-forty by Sanders, Clinton left New Hampshire with more delegates.

Carnage was far greater on the Republican side. Most of the establishment’s starting candidates—governors, senators, CEOs—did so badly that they pulled out of the race before and after New Hampshire. The most establishment candidate, Jeb Bush, who is also the best-funded one, struggled to remain fourth or fifth in the polls and has now called it quits as well. And the two self-proclaimed anti-establishment candidates, Trump and Texas Senator Ted Cruz, between them have about the same support as all the other candidates put together.

All this could change, of course, as different states hold primaries. But the big picture remains a kind of stable instability. Sanders is pulling even with Clinton nationally, buoyed by polls that show his supporters and half the Democrats believing in socialism. Trump seems to be consolidating his lead (and Cruz his second place) in a field divided among too many moderate opponents for any single one to challenge the leaders effectively. And political certainties are crashing with every poll release:

• Does money dominate US politics? Candidates in both parties who spend the least are winning the most. Clinton is embarrassed by her ties to Wall Street and high lecture fees. And the moderate GOP candidates who stuck with liberal immigration reform in obedience to “the donor class” (another variant of establishment) watched helplessly as Trump soared past them by responding to long-ignored voter concerns on the scale and illegality of immigration. Money has insulated the political class from the voters.