Tag Archives: Hillary Clinton

May 21, 2016 · 6:00 pm

You’ve got to pick a side

index

Note: Since I originally posted, this commentary has been published on The Daily Caller. See http://dailycaller.com/2016/05/30/youve-got-to-pick-a-side/

*******

As I’ve told my son’s little league squad, you win as a team and you lose as a team. If your pitcher is missing the strike zone, you don’t take your bat and ball and go home. That will not get you to the championship.

And yet that is what a lot of conservatives are trying to do these days.

Donald Trump is now the Republican pitcher. He is the GOP standard bearer. Whether or not, in Paul Ryan’s words, he lives up to our standards.

It is true that Trump breaks with conservative orthodoxy on a number of issues. He embraces protectionism on trade. He refuses to address entitlement reform. He does not say mean things about Planned Parenthood.

He also rejects traditional GOP foreign policy tenets even as he advocates for renewed strength abroad. He disavows the war in Iraq and other neoconservative projects to implant Western democracy in places that have never known it. He questions the relevance and viability of NATO. He second-guesses strategic aid to countries that refuse to foot the bill.

Maybe some of Trump’s loose policy pronouncements are ill informed or shortsighted. If so, and if he makes it to the White House, maybe he will change course. It would not be the first time he has abandoned positions. In fact, it is Trump’s lack of adherence to principle (not to mention a mixed history of supporting Democrats and their agenda) that has driven so many of the GOP establishment and pundit class to pledge allegiance to #NeverTrump.

Unwavering conservative principle girded the Ted Cruz campaign. Consider where that got him.

Some of the fiercest rivals and critics of Donald Trump have been quickest to reverse course. Last year they took turns deriding Trump as a “narcissist egomaniac” (Bobby Jindal), “like being shot” (Lindsay Graham), and as a “barking carnival act” and “cancer” (Rick Perry). Now each has climbed aboard the Trump train.

For this, some members of the conservative punditocracy label them pathetic traitors.

What is their alternative plan? William Kristol pines on about drafting a true conservative third party candidate. Peter Wehner blithely promises to vote for someone else or abstain.

Mitt Romney and the Bush brothers literally commit to stay home, refusing to pay tribute to the presumptive nominee by attending the nominating convention in Cleveland.

This crowd needs to wise up. Isn’t anything other than an embrace of Trump de facto a vote for Clinton?

Exactly. And some implacable critics like Robert Kagan are openly planning to join the other team.

Seriously? How can anyone who opposes the heavy-handed, growth-depressing, world-destabilizing policies of the Obama era do anything other than work to block a third Obama term with Clinton at the helm?

Many Republicans have personal animus for Clinton. They detest the way she holds herself above the law and makes blatantly false statements to avoid accountability. They resent the way her ruthless quest for power and wealth has trampled on helpless civilians, from the women her husband abused to the families of the Benghazi terror victims. They cringe at the sound of her voice.

But Clinton could be the most honest, gracious, and likeable public figure, and she would still usher in another span of liberal governance that undermines liberty, squelches growth, and damages American global interests.

At the end of the day, I think that conservative hold-outs simply cannot countenance the idea of a crass person like Donald Trump headlining the party of the conservatives. He does not fit their ideals. He does not fit the model. They do not want to settle until they meet Mr. Right.

George Will counsels conservatives to fight Trump in the general election. Then, after a single Clinton term, the voters will see the error of their ways and come around to a principled conservative that meets Will’s standards.

How bad do things need to get before Will and others recognize that change is needed now?

Trump wasn’t my first choice either. I got over it. The benefits of a Trump presidency far outweigh the potential flaws. On the critical issues of Supreme Court nominations, tax and regulatory policy, healthcare reform, and homeland security, Trump is squarely better for conservatives than Clinton could ever be.

Points where I strongly disagree with Trump – trade policy and entitlement reform come to mind – are tough pills to swallow. But again, I can’t see a Clinton White House doing any better.

Electing Trump will undoubtedly ruffle feathers in the office of diplomatic protocol. We will see behavior and comments that we would never expect from a commander-in-chief.

Well okay. But like I said, Trump’s on the mound now. And I want to go to the World Series.

11 Comments

Filed under Electoral Politics, Presidential Campaign

Tagged as Donald Trump, Elections, GOP, Hillary Clinton, Presidential Campaigns

February 2, 2016 · 1:39 pm

Winners capture minds and hearts

images A funny thing happened last month while the media obsessed over presidential primary horse races: President Obama’s approval ratings ticked up. The latest Real Clear Politics average of polls now shows virtual parity between people who approve of the president’s overall performance and those who don’t. This after over a year of approval deficits ranging from 5% to 8%.

As far as I can tell, nothing good has happened in 2016 to justify Americans raising their appreciation for our commander-in-chief. To the contrary, economic and foreign policy troubles continue to weigh on the minds of voters. By margins of 2-1, they continue to see things in our country “off on the wrong track”.

So what gives? Why might people be softening their views of the president even as the race heats up to take his job?

On the left, the president’s approval ratings have remained consistently high, just as they remain consistently low on the right. What’s changed is the view of independent voters. The primary campaign must be having an impact on them.

Notwithstanding Ted Cruz’s theory about the missing conservative voter, it’s fairly well-established that these independent votes swing elections. And while it doesn’t determine outcomes itself, the approval rating of the incumbent president is a fairly good indicator of his party’s chances in the election that follows.

Herein lies the quandary for true believers. Independent voters make the difference, and yet they don’t line up neatly with the ideology of either “movement conservatives” or the “progressive left”.

Donald Trump generates mass appeal because he speaks to the anxieties and aspirations of people who resent the government’s failures — not those who find salvation in lower marginal tax rates. Hillary Clinton does throw a few leftist barbs at Bernie Sanders for his more measured views of gun control. By and large, though, while Sanders calls for a revolution, Clinton wraps herself in virtues of the status quo.

So as partisans descend into petty attacks and ideological purity tests, the president’s even-keeled demeanor begins to resonate again with the mushy middle.

The people do want change. Most of us just won’t run off a cliff with a pied piper who divides us into camps of us and them. Especially if too many of us find ourselves in the camp of “them”.

Assuming she dodges the criminal investigations surrounding her mishandling of classified information while serving as Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton still has a good chance to win both the Democratic primary and the general election. Yes, people may find her untrustworthy and uninspiring, but at the end of the day she projects an image of stability that will ultimately win out over rabble rousing by the likes of Sanders on the left, Cruz on the right, and Trump in the populist middle.

You can see the outlines of Clinton’s stay-the-course strategy taking foot in her stump speeches and among her media advocates. Supporters tout the perceived successes of the Obama administration: ending wars, disarming Iran, increasing health care coverage, reining in Wall Street.

For a challenger to knock Clinton off her game, it will take more than piling on her negatives. These are too easily dismissed as rants of the Fox News-talk radio industrial complex — partisan and self-serving, rather than thoughtful and substantive.

Here is where I take issue with the Trump phenomenon and ill-considered comparisons to the campaigns of Ronald Reagan.

Like Trump, President Reagan connected with the middle class. He was an iconoclastic entertainer who mastered the media channels of his generation.

Unlike Trump, however, Reagan disarmed his adversaries and appealed to the better natures of us all. More important, he upended the status quo by touching the minds as well as the hearts of the people.

To dislodge the liberal establishment from the levers of power in Washington, a conservative candidate must use more than sloganeering. He or she must dismantle the fallacies of Obama era success by picking them off one by one with an unapologetic but rational and good humored argument.

Don’t give us platitudes. Explain the reasons in a way everyone can understand.

Why does disengagement in the Middle East make us less safe at home? Why does government interference undermine our prosperity? Our health care? Our ability to make ends meet? Spell it out in plain English and don’t make us turn against our neighbors to pursue a better life for ourselves and our loved ones.

For this reason I applaud Rich Lowry for engineering National Review’s online symposium Conservatives against Trump. To its credit, NRO assembled a diverse collection of voices, ranging from talk-radio mavericks (Glenn Beck), to neoconservative defenders of the establishment (William Kristol), to heroes of the tea party grassroots (Erick Erickson). Each took a measured and thoughtful shot at the reality-show blowhard — his lack of principle, his authoritarian impulses, his betrayal of conservative norms. Anyone taking the time to absorb this multifaceted critique would see virtue in backing another horse.

But pundits do not turn elections. The candidates themselves must embrace a rational and uplifting message to match their bouts of righteous indignation. This is why I was rooting for Carly Fiorina early on, but now her time has passed. Of the candidates with a realistic pathway to the nomination, Marco Rubio is the only one who fits the bill. If Republicans hope to win back the White House, they better fall in line.

A sudden case of rule of law

The executive branch of the U.S. Government — yes, the same one administered by President Obama — appears to be looking closely into the conduct of Democratic presidential nominee-in-waiting Hillary Clinton.

Following a request in late July by inspectors general for the State Department and the intelligence agencies, the FBI has begun investigating the potential mishandling of classified information by Clinton during her tenure as Secretary of State. Despite her best efforts to ignore, deny, deflect, misdirect, and redirect criticism over her decision to conduct official business through a private email server, and then to scrub the server clean, the wheels of justice have started to turn on Clinton.

Perhaps this development seems reasonable. After all, if an official who is charged with safeguarding our nation’s most sensitive communications circumvents policies and procedures designed to protect them, then something should be done about it.

Then again, the agency that can do something is the Department of Justice. Under President Obama, this agency does not have a track record of objectivity. Consider the lack of accountability for the Operation Fast and Furious gun-running debacle, the IRS targeting of conservative advocacy groups, the self-dealing and gross malfeasance by VA bureaucrats, and the strong-arming of investigative journalists. While a few political appointees have been eased out of their jobs under pressure from lawmakers, DOJ has not pursued charges against any ringleaders of the scandals. If there still are investigations underway, DOJ is setting new standards for foot-dragging. When is the last time we heard from the White House about any of these shameful episodes?

It’s not as if DOJ couldn’t move quickly if it wanted to. Take the events in Ferguson, MO and Baltimore over the past year. When white police officers harmed unarmed blacks, the government found a way to move federal investigations — and their resolutions — to the front of the queue.

When it suits a political agenda, the White House is all in. In 2009, President Obama appointed a special prosecutor to investigate possible abuses by intelligence agencies in the wake of 9/11. None of the alleged abuses occurred on his watch, so there was little political risk to the move (even if he later elected to quash any charges to avoid friction with the intelligence apparatus).

But when it comes to wrongdoing within his own administration, the president demurs. In the case of IRS misconduct, he flatly dismissed the idea of a special prosecutor. “I think we’re going to be able to figure out exactly what happened, who was involved, what went wrong,” he told the press, “and we’re going to be able to implement steps to fix it.” More than two years later, we are no closer to resolving the issue or restoring confidence in IRS impartiality.

From the very start, this administration has used a cherry-picker approach to law enforcement. The letter of the law matters little when it comes to our immigration or drug statutes. States are free to legislate in direct opposition to federal prohibitions against the sale of marijuana and cities are free to shield illegal aliens from ICE detention, all without fear of reprisal from the feds. Despite laws on the books he once claimed tied his hands, President Obama issued executive orders blocking authorities from deporting whole classes of undocumented immigrants. Defenders called it “prosecutorial discretion.” Of course, when Arizona or Texas employed measures to beef up inadequate border security, no such discretion could be found. The Obama administration came down hard.

All of which makes the probe into Clinton’s email practices curious. Why would the president green-light an investigation of his would-be successor if he has the power to quash, or at least to slow-walk it? Some attribute the decision to the independence and integrity of his new attorney general. Others see Frank Underwood-style maneuvers behind-the-scenes to engineer a Joe Biden candidacy. There may be a bit of truth in both explanations, but my bet is simply that there is fire behind the smoke. Hillary has tested the limits of our collective tolerance for the Clinton way of doing business. Even President Obama lacks the stomach to run interference on this one.

2 Comments

Filed under Domestic Policy, Electoral Politics, Justice

Tagged as Department of Justice, Email Scandal, Hillary Clinton, White House

June 18, 2015 · 6:20 am

Who are you fighting for?

Hillary Clinton officially officially launched her presidential campaign last weekend.

After plenty of analysis and calibration since her unofficial official launch via video recording in April, the Democratic frontrunner delivered an address on New York’s Roosevelt Island setting forth the theme of her campaign. “I’m not running for some Americans, but for all Americans,” she assured the crowd. “I’ll wage and win four fights for you” — most of all a populist economic program to uplift struggling poor and middle class Americans.

The speech went on to recite a litany of liberal policy prescriptions, what commentators have interpreted as a nod to the Democratic Party’s increasingly vocal progressive wing.

If the fighter proposition represents Hillary’s long-awaited “reason to run,” then it’s worth asking how well the progressive agenda has delivered for its purported beneficiaries.

In recent months, progressives have gone to bat for raising the minimum wage, denounced proactive policing methods, and blocked the president’s bid for Trade Promotion Authority. For his part, President Obama has taken the Supreme Court to task for threatening the viability of Obamacare.

All these positions the left portrays as salves for the downtrodden. But who pays the bill for all this medicine?

Let’s start with the minimum wage. It sounds good that workers should receive more pay for their labors. Economists debate the macroeconomic impact, but one thing is for sure: raising the wage destroys jobs at the lowest end of the wage scale. Employers of hourly wage earners make do with fewer workers, reduce plans to expand headcount, or go out of business altogether. Those workers remaining on the payroll get a boost, but those shut out of the workforce do worse. What’s better for workers — low wages or no wages?

Liberal advocates (who seemingly have never had to make a payroll) like to imagine that mandated wage increases make for better, more productive employees, which compensates for the increased costs. But if the benefits were so self-evidently compelling, it would not take the force of law to generate an increase. Costco and other large corporations can absorb the impact, so they are happy to gain a competitive advantage while they play the role of good corporate citizens. In contrast, small businesses, the true engines of job growth, have tighter margins and less room to give.

How about proactive policing, such as New York’s supposedly oppressive “stop-and-frisk” policies? Under Mayor de Blasio, who pulled the plug on these measures, criminal shootings and homicides are on the rise. The so-called “Ferguson Effect” seems to be causing police to shy away from aggressive tactics as they fear mistakes that could jeopardize their freedom, let alone their careers. The changes are emboldening criminal elements throughout our nation’s biggest cities, destroying any hope of economic development and revival. It’s not affecting affluent white suburbs. Poor, minority communities of the inner city are paying the price.

Free trade? Progressives lambast the supposed horrors trade inflicts on working men and women. But nothing has lifted more people out of poverty than the economic growth driven by the free exchange of goods and services across borders. Would the left be so parochial as to say job security measures stop at the water’s edge? Putting aside the universal benefits of economic growth, free trade has a direct impact on the cost of consumer goods. Who is most sensitive to fluctuations in the price of food, clothing, and other staples? The people who shop at Whole Foods? More like those roaming the aisles at Wal-Mart.

And then there’s the showpiece of the Obama presidency, the Affordable Care Act. Far from bending the cost curve down, the ACA, with its assortment of taxes, regulations, and mandates, has made health care less affordable not more. Yes, the most impoverished uninsured have gained premium support or access to Medicaid, but at a cost of diminished benefits and increased out-of-pocket costs for the vast majority of the population. The result hardly comports with a commitment to fight “for all Americans.”

The list goes on and on. Liberal environmental decrees, labor regulations, and energy policies all sound good from the ivory tower, but cut deep in the real world where people struggle to pay the bills. In their fervor to coerce societal change, the left rarely takes account of the damage left behind. Nothing does more good for more Americans than economic growth, and the surest way to help the most vulnerable in our society is to unshackle the economy.

Now that’s something worth fighting for.

1 Comment

Filed under Domestic Policy, Economic Policy, Electoral Politics

Tagged as Ferguson Effect, Free Trade, Hillary Clinton, Minimum Wage, Obamacare

April 7, 2015 · 9:53 pm