John F. Kennedy’s Pulitzer Prize winning book (with much help from speechwriter Ted Sorensen) , Profiles in Courage, focused on eight white men (yes, no women and no minorities) who stood up for principle at the expense of continuing their political careers. With one exception (James Comey), there seems to be no one who has served the administration of Donald Trump who would remotely qualify as a profile in courage.

Even before Trump was anointed president by the antiquated and anachronistic Electoral College, F.B.I. Director James Comey took unpopular stands in defense of what he thought was right. It was within the jurisdiction of his agency to investigate Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s unconventional method of storing e-mails. Comey was caught between the proverbial rock and the hard place. One option was to stay silent and let Attorney-General Loretta Lynch announce that no indictment would be forthcoming. However, Comey knew that Lynch’s credibility was tainted. She had recently hosted a 30-minute private meeting with Bill Clinton on her plane at the Phoenix airport. With Lynch compromised, Comey took option two, stepping up to say that while there was not sufficient evidence to indict Clinton, her conduct had been “extremely careless.”

He irritated the Clintons and many of their supporters, but his honesty shined through when he recognized that he was in a conundrum and he spoke openly about not having any simple answers.

When Donald Trump became president, Comey utilized the same balanced thinking that made him such a straight shooter with Clinton. If Comey had not previously been aware of Trump’s emotional and mental inadequacies to be president, he learned quickly upon having private meetings in the White House. Donald Trump clearly did not understand the role of the F.B.I., of the Department of Justice, and how the White House related to both. More importantly, Trump gave no indication that his top priority was the well-being of the United States and the world in which we live. Rather it was his personal aggrandizement.

Once Comey met Trump, his primary concern was the well-being of the country. He had the audacity to take contemporaneous notes from his meetings with Trump. Ultimately, he shared them with a friend, who at Comey’s request, leaked to the media. Comey wanted American citizens to know about the dangers that lurked while Donald Trump was president. With this knowledge, he wanted Congress, and possibly the president’s cabinet, to consider legal actions to reduce or eliminate the threat that he presented.

In contrast to Comey, there is a man named Mad Dog. You may know him as former Secretary of Defense James Mattis. He was one of Trump’s original cabinet appointees and by all regards, acquitted himself well at the Pentagon. But by the end of his second year as Secretary, he resigned, saying that he objected to Trump’s precipitous withdrawal of American troops from Syria.

His departure from the Cabinet was very disturbing to those Americans who had serious concerns about Trump. Mattis was considered to be one of the adults in the room. Presumably he could talk truth to power, and if necessary, implement, or not implement, Trump orders in a way that minimized danger to the country.

Once Mattis left the Cabinet, and Trump’s position of Chief of Staff was filled with Trump worshipers, a huge vacuum was evident. There was no one in the higher reaches of government who could straight-talk Trump, and if necessary, leave the administration on principle.

Now we learn that General Mattis has written a book which includes accounts of his service in the Trump Administration. Unfortunately, he fails to include in the book or in any of his recent magazine articles and on-air interviews that Donald Trump was putting America further at risk.

Perhaps Mattis was not the adult in the room who we thought that he was. Perhaps his comfort zone is adhering to military protocol and following the line of his commander-in-chief.

To many “adults outside the room,” it is very disappointing that Mattis has not offered legitimate criticism of Trump. Instead, he is going on to be a lobbyist.

There are many on the left who hold a grudge against James Comey because his actions clearly hurt Hillary Clinton’s chances of becoming president. This may be true, but he stood alone among those who have “served” Donald Trump, because he publicly talked truth to power. Had he not, we probably would not have had a Robert Mueller and all the misdeeds revealed in his investigation. If only Mattis had been a little more like Comey.

The post A Tale of Two Jameses appeared first on Occasional Planet.

One of the lessons of the presidential defeat of the Democrats in 2016 is that Hillary Clinton paid minimal attention to the voters who “had no identity.” We’re actually talking about those who are not part of the mosaic of the identity politics that has become fundamental to the Democratic Party ever since the 1960s.

These people excluded from the mosaic are often known as white, sometimes as poor whites, or even as angry whites. But Donald Trump took a page out of George Wallace and Richard Nixon’s playbook in 1968 and referred to them as “forgotten Americans.” There is nothing demeaning about that and it has the cachet of other identity groups of including a victim status.

But there was a time when the so-called forgotten Americans were in the political tent of the Democratic Party. It was a time when identity was based more on economic well-being rather than ethnic identity. It was at the time that Franklin D. Roosevelt became president in 1932 and he saw that the route to getting America moving again was not trickle-down economics, but rather priming the pump from the bottom. Having the government be the distributor of income to those who were poor was much more efficient and effective than leaving it to unrestrained capitalists. In fairness to Republicans, it must be said that FDR’s distant cousin Theodore Roosevelt took many steps in his 1901-1909 presidency to curb the abuses of unbridled capitalists.

In his book Listen Liberal, Thomas Frank argues that the Democratic Party has gotten away from its roots as champions of the economically oppressed and become much more concerned about protecting professional classes and ethnic minorities. He wisely points out that there is no logical reason to exclude the “forgotten Americans” from the coalition except that they are an easy punching bag for professionals and minorities. “Forgotten Americans” and those who speak on their behalf are constant fodder for late-night comedians and elitists elsewhere in our society.

Democrats seem to have learned part of the lesson. They are making more of an effort to “talk the talk;” to include “forgotten Americans” in their lists of special interest groups. This is not without difficulty for Democrats. As Thomas Franks points out in his previous book, What’s the Matter with Kansas, “forgotten Americans” are concerned about something besides the economic considerations that were so fundamental to the New Deal and even the Great Society. They have become joined at the hip with so-called “values issues.” Barack Obama may have summed it up best at a time when he thought that he was off-the-record, and he talked about those Americans who “cling to God and their guns.”

What would help Democrats would be if their leaders would do more of “walking the walk” with those among us, of any ethnicity, who are getting short-changed. For Democratic leaders such as Obama and Hillary Clinton, this could mean going back to their roots – what they did in their twenties.

Barack Obama was a community organizer. He walked the streets on the south side of Chicago where tenants were being taken advantage of by the Housing Authority. On a daily basis, he worked with the very people that the New Deal Democratic Party wanted to help.

Certainly, Barack Obama is entitled to a break after the stresses of the presidency, particularly with the vitriolic hate of Republicans like Mitch McConnell. But does there come a time when Obama can step away from the life of fund-raisers and hobnobbing with the likes of Richard Branson and instead live in a world where he is closer to the people who are most in need of the Democratic Party.

In her twenties, Hillary Clinton worked for the Children’s Defense Fund and also as an attorney for the Senate Watergate Committee. She was clearly in the legal trenches for those who were oppressed. Her “Goldwater Girl” days were long past, and she was a champion for social justice.

It is not unprecedented for a former president or presidential candidate to get back in the trenches. Look no further than Plains, Georgia and Jimmy Carter.

What would it say, what would it mean to the Democratic Party and those who run with under its banner if Barack Obama spent a couple of days a month knocking on the doors of economically depressed people and used his legal skills to provide protection for them? What would it mean if Hillary Clinton argued cases for the Children’s Defense Fund?

It would be interesting if Obama and Clinton re-acquainted themselves with “the other America,” if even on a limited basis. The message to Democrats should be that our constituents include everyone, and we never should be above being with “the people.”

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All of us strive for perfection; none of us achieve it. But some come closer than others and James Comey seems to be one who has those special characteristics that make a human being about as good as it gets. His June 8, 2017 testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee demonstrated his many strengths. The key may be the way in which he skillfully applied situational ethics to complicated issues.

No longer hamstrung with the constraints of still holding public office, Comey was able to give reason to his seemingly unfathomable public engagement with the Hillary Clinton e-mail issues.

Committee Chairman Richard Burr (R-NC) asked Comey, “Let me go back if I can very briefly to the decision to publicly go out with your results on the email. Was your decision influenced by the attorney general’s tarmac meeting with the former president, Bill Clinton?”

COMEY: Yes. In an ultimately conclusive way, that was the thing that capped it for me, that I had to do something separately to protect the credibility of the investigation, which meant both the FBI and the justice department.

Probably the only other consideration that I guess I can talk about in open setting is that at one point the attorney general had directed me not to call it an investigation, but instead to call it a “matter,” which confused me and concerned me. But that was one of the bricks in the load that led me to conclude I have to step away from the (Justice) Department if we’re to close this case credibly.

This is the first time that I have heard that former Attorney-General Loretta Lynch may have been applying pressure to Comey to downplay the FBI investigation of the e-mails. I think that I mistakenly assumed that Bill Clinton crossed the Phoenix tarmac to try to influence Lynch and she could find no polite way to ask him to leave. Whether that meeting influenced her or not, it became clear to Comey that the AG’s office would inaccurately downgrade the investigation by calling it a “matter” rather than the investigation that it actually was.

Some might say that the Director of the FBI has no business pre-empting the Attorney-General. It is true that that the FBI gathers information for Justice Department and standard protocol is for a spokesperson for the Justice Department to announce decisions on prosecutions. But Comey was concerned that Lynch had a political motivation to not prosecute Clinton. Comey preferred that a non-prosecution be the result of insufficient evidence rather than political preference. The way he announced the non-prosecution on July 5, 2016 seemed awkward, because it was. But he wanted the decision to close the case (at least before Anthony Weiner’s laptop), to be one based on the same standards as other decisions to not prosecute cases.

It obviously hurt Hillary Clinton that Comey made the announcement rather than Attorney-General Lynch. But it seems that Lynch forfeited the right to make that call. It probably would have been good if Bill Clinton had never crossed the tarmac, but wittingly or unwittingly, Lynch gave the Clintons what they wanted. Comey felt that he had to do what he did not want to do, influence the election.

Comey’s honesty also came through when he said that he used non-legalize language to describe his concerns about Donald Trump. “I was honestly concerned he might lie about the nature of our meeting so I thought it important to document. That combination of things I had never experienced before, but had led me to believe I got to write it down and write it down in a very detailed way.” In Comey’s mind, the situation required him to do what he had not done for two previous presidents – write contemporaneous memos to document the meetings.

Throughout his testimony, Comey referred to common sense. That is not a legal term, but it is a human term. He rose above the restraints of his office to utilize good judgment. That is a rare occurrence in Washington and must be fully appreciated.

Comey also repeated acknowledged that he “might be wrong” about recollections or even decisions that he made. That humility makes him an approachable human being with whom others can engage in non-threatening conversation.

In the past, when Comey has confused us, it was because he was never free to give full explanations. One June 8 he did. Not only did he acquit himself well, but he also made a good case for the logic of situational ethics.

The post Comey’s Situational Ethics Make Common Sense appeared first on Occasional Planet.

There are several theories that attempt to explain why Hillary Clinton was defeated in November, and most of them are at least somewhat credible. Russian interference has been confirmed by 17 different intelligence agencies, that certainly had an effect. Former FBI Director James Comey sending his damaging letter to Congress days before the election apparently tipped the polls in Trump’s favor according to Nate Silver of 538. There are some on the left who argue that Clinton didn’t visit the Rust Belt enough, which is a fair criticism (she famously never visited Wisconsin). The new campaign tell-all book “Shattered” suggests that Clinton was a fundamentally flawed candidate with no political vision to offer to voters hungry for change; that’s harder to quantify but I don’t disagree with the thesis.

All of these explanations are well and good, but they don’t explain what happened down-ballot. If it were an issue of visiting Wisconsin or being progressive, then why did Sen. Ron Johnson (WI-R) not only beat a very progressive opponent, but outperform Donald Trump by 70,000 votes? If it were an issue of being flawed or out of touch with voters looking for change, then why did incumbent Sen. Roy Blunt (MO-R) whose name is synonymous with insider politics, defeat young, popular, earnest, political outsider Jason Kander? How did Republicans end up winning the popular vote in elections for the House of Representatives by 2 million votes?

In 2016 voters were capable of splitting their ballot even though the environment was hyper-partisan. Take Montana for example, where Democratic Gov. Steve Daines was re-elected while Clinton lost by 20 points or Vermont where Republican Phil Scott was elected Governor while Trump lost by 26 points.

So, what happened not just in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Missouri, but across America? Broadly speaking, Democratic candidates put resources into turning out minority voters, maintaining the urban white vote, with an emphasis of reaching out to suburbanites, but in the process actively ignored rural voters.

These rural voters made up 17%  of the electorate in 2016. By contrast, black voters and Latino voters only comprised 12% and 11% of the electorate, respectively. It’s not that these voters are just unreachable either, as recently as 2008, 45% of Americans living in rural communities were casting ballots for Democrats. But in 2016, Hillary Clinton managed to only win 34% of these voters, and Democrats running for statewide office suffered in similar margins. These voters aren’t necessarily becoming more conservative either, Barack Obama narrowly lost Missouri by 5,000 votes and Montana by 9,000, most of the people who voted in that election also voted last November.

The entire Democratic Platform in 2016 was a whopping 25,967 words, the section dedicated to rural Americans however was a mere 268 words, just a little over 1% of the platform. It wasn’t just the platform, Hillary Clinton’s website dedicated almost as many words to an anecdote about Tim Kaine going to church as they did to rural voters on her issues page. Even her very detailed fact sheet was somewhat lacking compared to the considerable effort that was put into other issues. In Hillary Clinton’s biggest moment, her convention speech, there were zero uses of the phrases “rural”, “small communities”, “farmers”, or even “agriculture”. It doesn’t make sense not to at least acknowledge these people.

There was a time when the Democratic coalition depended on rural voters and they were represented at every convention and in every speech, for generations the Democratic Party was the party of the farmer. Democrats authored legislation to build infrastructure in rural communities, provide subsidies to people working in agriculture, and ran candidates who might not have been the most socially progressive people but at least believed in economic populism. Then at some point over the last 20 years, Democrats slowly pulled back, allowing a void to be created and subsequently filled by cultural resentment.

Rural America has been preyed upon by Republicans. These largely white, not especially wealthy, and deeply religious areas of our country have been sold a bill of goods that if only there were fewer immigrants, that if only women had fewer rights, and if only brown people weren’t given assistance to buy food that magically things would improve. There’d be no more lead in the water, the hospitals would stop closing down, and maybe they could afford to send their children to college. Republicans have never had any intention of delivering to these voters, but as long as Democrats refuse to try for their votes, the urban-rural divide will continue to widen.

The Democratic Party is a big tent party, and that means fighting for every vote. Donald Trump is a great foil right now, and presumably will be in the 2018 and 2020 elections, however the hemorrhaging of rural voters is a structural problem that could persist for decades. Frank Church in Idaho, Kathleen Sebelius in Kansas, Brad Henry in Oklahoma, Mel Carnahan in Missouri, Bob Kerrey in Nebraska and so many others weren’t elected because they ran as Republican lite. They won because they had a liberal platform that offered something to people living in rural areas, actual tangible things and not just some hokey feel good talk.

Democrats can’t just wait for the demographic trends we’ve been hearing about for so long to finally win us elections. The country is in trouble now. If Democrats ever hope to win back state legislatures and be competitive not just statewide, but in the 2,600 counties that President Trump swept in 2016, then the party needs to invest in “unwinnable races” and so called “lost causes”. It’s time to forget about expanding margins in Miami-Dade and Cuyahoga, but rather, rebuilding in Salina, Kansas and Fremont, Wyoming. Democrats are the party of the people; they should act like it.

The post It Wasn’t Just Russia: Democrats Have Larger Problems appeared first on Occasional Planet.

This past Monday, Hillary Clinton formally announced her post-2016 election plans. She will be establishing a political organization aimed at funding “resistance groups” that are standing up to President Donald Trump.

On the one hand, we can have empathy for Clinton because of the pain of losing 2016 presidential election. But among the reasons why she lost was the fact that she was virtually inseparable from big money and the people who have it. Unlike her primary opponent, Bernie Sanders, she did not raise the bulk of her money from individuals. Rather she consistently went to wherever the big money was, whether it was on the west coast with George Clooney or on the east coast on Wall Street.

When it comes to money for political purposes, Democrats are going to have to move beyond Hillary Clinton. For that matter, they are going to have to also move beyond Barack Obama. If you’re talking about “resistance,” what could you be resisting more than the entrenchment of big money?

Bernie Sanders showed that you can fund a campaign “by the people.” Barack Obama might have been able to do it in 2008 but he chose to forgo public financing and went where the big dollars were.

Hillary Clinton’s Democratic Party is the party of yesteryear, or at least we should hope that it is. If she were to turn her personal clock back fifty years and be the student she was at Wellesley, she would probably agree. Somehow, in her evolution, both as an individual and as a Clinton, she became enamored with money and the accouterments that surround it. For the base of the Democratic Party – the working poor, the non-working poor, the middle class, professionals, progressives, it is time to move on. The kind of communication that is necessary in political movements and campaigns is relatively inexpensive. There is no need to rely on mass mailings and television advertising is become less effective.

One of the reasons that Barack Obama’s Organizing for America was such as failure is that what was supposed to be a political movement to support his policies became just another fund-raising enterprise. Asking for money is a pain in the ass for everyone. It promotes false bragging and unseemly begging.

Democrats need to walk the walk along with talking the talk. That means acting in a fashion that is commensurate with the way in which its primary constituencies live. It need not be elitist. It is essential that it is real and honest.

Most of the money that Hillary Clinton would raise for resistance groups would be tainted, and if the organizations are really grassroots, that money would not be needed. Hillary Clinton has done a great deal for the country, particularly in her younger and less varnished years. While she has a clear understanding of what was done to her in the 2016 election, she is very unenlightened about what she did to herself. Until she can reach that level of understanding and acceptance, she is of very little value to the Democratic Party and the country. Let’s hope that she takes time away from secluded circles and can reconnect with her roots. Then it will be time to listen.

The post Please, Hillary, spare us appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Rep. Chris Stewart, a Republican from Utah made this statement on Monday at the House Intelligence Committee, “Every media organization, every political organization, every government organization that I’m familiar with last fall thought that Secretary Clinton would be the next President of the United States.” and FBI Director James Comey replied “I think the Russians agreed”. The prevailing argument among spurned liberals is that Comey thought the election was close and some bias of his caused him to send his letter to Congress days before the election, knowing that it would shift votes to Donald Trump. But Comey’s statement seems to suggest that not only were the Russians sure of an impending Clinton victory, but so was Jim Comey. If Comey didn’t think Clinton could lose, then the argument about him purposefully trying to elect Trump becomes a little dubious. So why then did he send that letter to Congress?

Jim Comey needed to appear objective, because he was building a case for prosecuting Trump associates, and after Trump had threatened to appoint prosecutors to investigate Clinton during the campaign, he understood he needed to build credibility because he’d be accused of playing revenge politics for President Clinton. Which is understandable, because he’d be leading an investigation, after a very bitter election of the would-be President’s former opponent and whether or not his campaign committed treason.

Or so he thought, but as we know Hillary Clinton won the election and Donald Trump won the presidency.

The FBI had been investigating the Trump campaign and its connections to the Russians since July, and it seems likely that at some point in the fall, the FBI discovered some fire underneath all that smoke. Through that investigation, and leaked documents from intelligence agencies, we now know some things that we might not have known otherwise.

We know that Trump’s former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, had been on the payroll of several projects aiding the interests of Vladimir Putin, as recently as May of 2016.

We know that a senior policy advisor, Carter Page, has financial interests in the Russian energy sector and contacted Russian officials on more than one occasion while employed by the Trump campaign.

We know that Trump confidante Roger Stone, had contact with Julian Assange and seemed to have foreknowledge on WikiLeaks document leaks.

We know that the hackers who stole information from the DNC and distributed other classified materials with the intent of helping Trump, did so at the direction of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

We don’t know to what extent the Trump campaign was involved in the Russian interference in this election or whether President Trump knew, and if he did when did he know it.

But Comey didn’t need the leaks to know what we’ve all slowly been piecing together in the last few weeks, because as Rep. Trey Gowdy said “I would hope that you had access to everything as the head of the world’s premier law-enforcement agency…So if you had it all, the motive couldn’t have been to help you, because you already had it.”

It would seem that Comey had intelligence linking Trump associates to Russia, had intelligence that Russia was intervening on behalf of Trump, and perhaps had intelligence pointing to collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign for months. Yet, none of that was revealed to us until it was much too late.

Despite taking a very active role in the election, Comey tried his best to appear as a non-political figure with no partisan loyalties. Comey after all was a Republican when he was appointed by former President Obama, a Democrat, to his current position. Commenting on Trump would give the appearance of the FBI being a tool of a Democratic White House, and when he did comment on Clinton many observers maligned Comey as just another part of the “vast right wing conspiracy” against the Clintons.

I don’t imagine Comey wanted to comment on Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump unless he absolutely had to. The recent hearing showed a man who is deeply uncomfortable with making even the vaguest of political statements. But once it became clear, or at least most of us thought it had become clear, that Hillary Clinton was without a doubt going to become President, Comey made a judgement call. He decided that it was worth pissing off his future boss, if it meant that he’d get to see his investigation of the Trump campaign to fruition.

He’d found no criminal wrongdoing the first time he investigated Clinton, he knew that whatever files were on Anthony Weiner’s computer likely weren’t going to amount to the 18½ minutes of missing Nixon tapes. But he announced his re-opening of the investigation anyway. He probably figured that with a week left, voters had already made up their minds, and he had a sure-fire plan for saving face.

Sabotaging Hillary Clinton, in Comey’s mind, might’ve been the only way to maintain his legitimacy. Imagine if after the election, it was leaked that the FBI hid an investigation of Clinton in the final weeks of the campaign. Her presidency would be crippled, the FBI would lose the confidence of the public, he’d be removed from his post and justice would be delayed in the case of the Trump-Russia connection. Russia would intervene in 2018, 2020, or as long as they needed in order to get results. Jim Comey must’ve been cognizant of that. But Hillary lost in the biggest upset since 1948, and now Comey is in the awkward position of investigating the President of the United States of America who is much more powerful than if he were just a loser billionaire.

That’s the theory, Jim Comey was too confident in polling, tried to save America and maybe ended up handing the reins of government to a Russian puppet. There’s also the possibility that Jim Comey is just really bad at his job. Which, isn’t a total stretch of the imagination either. Whatever happened then doesn’t matter now, what matters is following the facts about Trump wherever they may lead.

And so far, they lead to the Kremlin.

The post Theory: Comey’s Pre-Election Letter Was Well Intentioned appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Remember when you might have thought that Donald Trump was a Democrat at heart? We know that he was once pro-choice, that he had little to do with “Republican values” and that doing business in New York required closer relationships with Democrats than Republicans.

When Ted Cruz accused Trump during the 2016 Republican presidential debates of not truly being a conservative because of his “New York values,” was Cruz on to something?

When Trump supported Hillary Clinton’s senatorial races in 2000 and 2006, did he not have a flirting interest in the Democratic Party?

According to Ballotpedia, prior to 2011, Trump donated more money to Democrats than Republicans. But after 2011, Trump contributed only $8,500 to Democrats and $630,150 to Republicans.

His switch to giving primarily to Republicans came four years prior to his announcing his own candidacy for president in June 2015. Was there something that occurred around 2011 that gave Trump cause to distance himself from Democrats and solidify his affiliation with Republicans? And whatever the reason might have been for his switch in political loyalties, did it have anything to do with his personal and financial ties to Russia?

Ah, how much easier it would be to investigate what happened after the first decade of the 21st century if we had access to Trump’s tax returns. But we don’t, and as we all know, that has nothing to do with any decision or non-decision made by the Internal Revenue Service.

What we do know about 2011, is that two years earlier, Democrat Hillary Clinton really angered Russian President Vladimir Putin. On March 6, 2009, she presented Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov with a red button with the English word “reset” on it. She and the Obama Administration were concerned by the Russo-Georgian diplomatic crisis and then the Russo-Georgian war. If the U.S. was going to disapprove of Russia’s behavior, it was offensive to Putin, especially when he interpreted the U.S. as scolding Russia like a little child.

CNN reports,

Back in 2011, Putin faced the biggest protests the country had seen since the collapse of the Soviet Union. He had served two terms as president, the maximum allowed, and in 2008 had become prime minister, in a maneuver that allowed him to effectively hold power while his ally, Dmitry Medvedev, was president. Then he announced — to much anger, but little surprise — that he would seek a third term as president. Three months later, the opposition erupted in fury when his party won a landslide victory in legislative elections amid allegations of fraud.
Then-Secretary of State Clinton openly sided with the protesters. “The Russian people, like people everywhere,” she said, “…deserve free, fair, transparent elections.”

Putin knew that Clinton would likely run for president of the United States in 2016. He was angry with her and feared possible interference on her part in Russian affairs. It should be no surprise that he would want someone other than Hillary Clinton to be the new U.S. president. Russia had already been actively involved in trying to influence elections in other countries. Specifically, with the Ukraine, they had maneuvered to have American political operative Paul Manafort become a top aide to pro-Russian Victor Yanukovych, who was running to become president of Ukraine.

Manafort succeeded in that task, but he had never been involved in a U.S. presidential race. Why did Donald Trump choose Manafort to be his campaign chairman? This is one of dozens of questions that can mildly be called oddities in the tangled web of close connections between Donald Trump and Russia.

The central question remains. Did Donald Trump’s movement away from the Democratic Party and into the Republican Party have anything to do with his relations with Russia? Did Russia make its financial help to him contingent upon him walking on the other side of the street from Hillary Clinton?

In 2017, we know that in terms of temperament and thinking, he is much closer to Republicans than Democrats. We also know that Barack Obama’s skewering of Trump at the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner put Trump in a mood for revenge. But is it possible that he never would have landed in the Republican camp had it not been for his relations with Russia and Putin’s desire to manipulate him? These might be questions that investigative reporters with resources might want to study. Where did Trump’s “New York values,” go and why did they seem to disappear?

The post Did Trump become a Republican because of his Russia troubles? appeared first on Occasional Planet.

James Buchanan did something that Hillary Clinton could not do, nor could any other Democrat since the election of Buchanan in 1856. Buchanan succeeded another Democrat by election without previously having ascended to the position because of the death of his predecessor. Hillary Clinton could not do this nor could a number of other Democrats since 1856.

Here is the list of back-to-back Democratic presidents from the time of Franklin Pierce’s election in 1852, followed by Buchanan’s four years later.

However, if presidential elections were decided by popular vote rather than the Electoral College, there would have been three more examples of Democratic back-to-back presidencies.

What can we learn from these results? The first is obvious. The United States should elect its president by popular vote. The second is that Democrats have not succeeded recently in providing the American people with an agenda that they can embrace for an extended period of time.

When it comes to economic issues, Democrats have clearly had preferable agendas to Republicans from the time of FDR to the present. However, Democrats have lost when the so-called social issues have seemingly been more important to a wide swath of American voters than economic ones. The social issues that propel Republicans to office are often fueled by hate. That seemed to be the winning formula that propelled Donald Trump to win the electoral college, although we all know that Trump may well have lost that as well were it not for the PC factor (Putin-Comey).

The economic platforms of “losing candidates” Al Gore and Hillary Clinton definitely would have benefited many of those who voted against them. However, what Democrats have been missing almost since the FDR-Harry Truman days and perhaps LBJ days is a visceral appeal to the white working class. For too long, the people in this group have been tag-alongs for the Democrats. We now need to include them much more prominently in our politics of identity.

The post A very unfair 160-year streak that Hillary Clinton could not overcome appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Are you having post-election buyer’s remorse? There are many reasons people did not cast a ballot for Hillary Clinton. Some people, including myself, generally lean Green-Left, but we actually found several of Trump’s policy positions put forth during the election to be more appealing. Mrs. Clinton is a staunch defender of the status quo (hardly a leftist perspective). She primarily ran against Trump’s flagrantly flawed character. Whenever she got any sort of a lead in the polls, she lunged to the right. These numerous ideological differences may have encouraged many well-intended voters to vote for Jill Stein, the Libertarian, not vote at all, or even support Trump. Now that we know about his major appointments and have witnessed several pronouncements via Twitter and elsewhere, let’s revisit those issues where Trump provided more hope than Clinton.

Before getting started, please note that this dreary review is not meant to be snarky about those who did not vote for Hillary. I have a lot of sympathy for alienated voters, non-voters, reluctant Trump voters, and Trump supporters who may already have doubts. The political system is rigged to favor the rich.

I erroneously voted for Nader in 2000 instead of Gore and did not want to make the same mistake again, so I reluctantly voted for her. Trump appears unstable and is congenitally dishonest. He launched his Presidential campaign by promoting the odious, racist Big Lie that President Obama had been born outside the United States. His casual, misleading retraction revealed his complete contempt for facts. Thus, I never took seriously any of his campaign positions. I hoped he was lying about the most awful ones, such as the nonexistence of climate change. Overall, the good stuff is being discarded while the worst stuff is metastasizing on the table.

Massive nuclear war

Trump claimed he would work with Russia, while Hillary supported NATO’s expansion into Eastern Europe, a policy her husband began. She might have shot down Russian planes in Syria by the end of next month. But Trump merely switched “official enemies.” We are now supposed to hate China more than Russia. A 2016 update of Orwell’s 1984. Given Trump’s inherent volatility, the risk of massive nuclear war appears greater than under Clinton. Trump’s proposal to re-escalate the nuclear arms race is frightening.

No second Cold War

Clinton appeared to want another Cold War with Russia. The only thing worse than a Cold War is a Hot War. Now, we probably will have Cold War II with China. Hardly an improvement. Neither Party seems interested in peace.

Smaller wars

Trump claims he will not revisit Obama’s greatest foreign policy accomplishment, the deal with Iran. But who would more likely invade Iran? There are a lot of aggressive people in the Trump Cabinet, while there would have been different members of the War Party in the Clinton Cabinet. Neither leader would do much for the Palestinians. Once again, Trump’s bellicose personality suggests he is a greater threat to world peace.  But don’t forget that Obama has bombed seven countries and probably sent special forces in many more, while Hillary has always been inclined to use violence.

Free trade

Just as I am not a fan of unregulated markets, I oppose unconditioned trade and open borders. Trump stopped TPP, while Obama would probably have pushed it through Congress as Secretary Hillary feigned disapproval. However, Trump’s plan to impose a huge tariff on Chinese goods suggests that his trade policy will be part of his (hopefully only) Cold War against China. Jobs probably will continue to flow to most other countries. Already, the increased value in the dollar makes it less attractive to manufacture products in the United States.

Immigration reform

The Democrats were going to serve their corporate masters; Clinton advocated, “open borders” and Schumer said it was one of the first things they were going to do after their hoped-for victory. I doubt if it will be all that different under Trump. There may or may not be a wall, but the wealthy want illegal and legal immigration to reduce labor costs, increase labor competition, and weaken unions. You can be sure no employers of illegals will face legal sanctions.

Drain the swamp

Trump attacked not just the Clintons’ corrupt behavior but also the appalling ethics of the Beltway. He frequently mocked his Republican opponents for their subservience to people like him.  However, his appointments of political hucksters and leaders from Goldman Sachs indicate business as usual or worse.   His personal conflicts of interest are astounding, rivaling or exceeding the Clintons’ grubbing for money while she was Secretary of State.  So far, it does not look like there will even be “an appearance of propriety.”  It would be real progress if Trump, unlike Obama, indicts a few corporate criminals. Given the appointments, what are the odds? Perhaps a bit better than under Clinton.

The Fed

Trump talked about taming the Federal Reserve Board, the institution that primarily implements “socialism for the rich” while Congress maintains “capitalism for the poor.” But will there even be a real audit of that secretive institution dominated by private bankers? The Goldman appointments indicate “No.”

Personal corruption

Trump claimed he was so wealthy that the elite would not capture him. True, they will have more than usual trouble controlling his outbursts, but he won’t resist their giving money to his family and creating immediate financial opportunities for his businesses. It will be interesting to see how much his family’s wealth has increased by the end of his Presidency.  I am sure he is envious of Putin’s billions.

Infrastructure

There was a possibility that Trump would have created a substantial infrastructure program. But Republican opposition in Congress may prevail. Do you think he cares? Our best hope may be that one of his children enters the construction business.  Either way, any decent Trump proposals will probably share the same fate as any reasonable Clinton initiatives.

The ACA

Trump once supported “single payer,” the cheapest, best solution to providing national care. But his cabinet appointments indicate millions of Americans’ health and finances will soon rapidly deteriorate.

Jobs

Trump asserted he would enable the working and middle class to have better jobs. Clinton only wanted to tinker. While talking about reducing student loan debt, she failed to mention that her husband received millions to promote a for-profit educational institution that extracted millions from the desperately underemployed. Given Trump’s appointments, it looks like the average person will have to wait at least four more years before they have a President who actually cares about them.

LGBT

The President-elect has been quite good on LGBT rights. Peter Thiel spoke at the RNC. Trump said the Supreme Court should not revisit the gay marriage decision. This position is the remaining glimmer of decency, similar to Clinton’s support. There was a passing hope that Trump could convince his base to let go of this stupid, divisive issue. But Senator Cruz is proposing an Orwellian Bill that will undermine vital First Amendment rights (along with many other constitutional rights) by permitting business owners to discriminate against gays for “moral reasons.” It will be OK to keep African-Americans out of your public restaurant if their patronage violates your “religious liberty.” Will Trump speak out against this divisive, dangerous bill? Will he veto it? Will he closely vet Supreme Court nominees to prevent legalized gay bashing and racism? With Hillary, we wouldn’t need to ask these questions.

Helping poor minorities

“What have you got to lose?” While the Democratic Party elite has not made a serious effort to ease the plight of the urban poor for decades, it looks like every average person will lose a lot over the next four years: the ACA, workers’ rights, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, public schools, HUD, public services, and on and on and on.

Character

A lot of people, including myself, disliked and distrusted Hillary Clinton. When Trump won, those who despised Clinton might have been temporarily pleased, thinking, “At least that lying, greedy, militaristic Hillary and her corrupt, sexually predatory husband will not regain power.” Yeah, but Trump’s a lying, greedy, sexually predatory Wildman who may be inclined to replace our beloved republic with an authoritarian or Fascist State.

The bad stuff

We haven’t even considered all the bad things he said he would do that he will do and all the bad things he will do that we haven’t heard about yet. Nor all the venomous, greedy, and cruel legislation that Clinton might have vetoed.

It already looks like it was a grave mistake not to vote for Clinton. I certainly would already be second-guessing that tempting decision. If you did not support Hillary, don’t feel too guilty. It is never shameful to vote your conscience, and there are more powerful ways to move society in a more humane direction than periodically casting a vote. We must organize, developing community-based institutions that provide companionship and direction. To paraphrase Joe Hill, “Don’t mourn the election, organize!”

The Left always tends to finger point and sub-divide. If we are going to deal with looming catastrophic environmental problems, terrorism, religious fanatics, class and racial divisions, and the threat of war (including nukes), we need a much bigger tent, extending deep into the Republican Party’s current base. Then anti-democratic garbage like voter suppression, the filibuster, gerrymandering, and the Electoral College won’t matter. It will not be easy to get there. Even this brief essay pointed its finger (and we know which one) at both Clintons.

But there may be some good effects resulting from this rapid deflation of fragile, desperate hope. If Trump had made an effort to extend his political support by helping most people instead of doubling on austerity economics (socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor), he might have created a much broader base, enabling him to fulfill many other, even more odious and dangerous aspirations that may lurk within.

The post Buyer’s remorse? Perhaps you should have voted for her appeared first on Occasional Planet.

What happens when a narcissist is overwhelmed with kindness? I really can’t call Donald Trump a narcissist since I am not a trained therapist and I have never examined him. But using the word narcissist is a lot easier than saying “a person who appears to an ordinary layman to have narcissistic tendencies.”

There is no need to run down the litany of insults that he has thrown to virtually everyone who has registered on his radar screen, but recently the two people who have most been in his crosshairs are President Barack Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

For both of them, the results of the 2016 presidential election were extremely painful. It would be understandable of either of them had lashed out at Trump, at the media, at the voters, at the system, and virtually anything and everything that might have had something to do with the crushing defeat for the Democrats. But neither of them did, at least publicly.

In her concession remarks, Secretary Clinton said, “Last night I congratulated Donald Trump and offered to work with him on behalf of our country. I hope that he will be a successful president for all Americans.”

Later that day, President Obama said, “Because we are now all rooting for his success in uniting and leading the country. The peaceful transition of power is one of the hallmarks of our democracy. And over the next few months, we are going to show that to the world.”

Compare the words of Clinton and Obama with those of Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell shortly after President Obama was elected. He said that his number-one goal was to make sure that Barack Obama was a one-term president.”

McConnell did not reach his goal of making Obama a single-term president, but in the long-run, he may have won the war. He and his House colleagues blocked virtually everything that the President wanted to achieve with Congressional approval. What they didn’t stop, they aim to reverse upon Trump’s ascension to power.

There is no easy path as to how others might best respond to Donald Trump the president, nor is there to how to respond to those who voted for him. We do know that there was and is a tremendous amount of anger within them.  This raises two key questions:

1. What made them angry?
2. Why did they channel so much of it towards Hillary Clinton as they did?

There are no clear answers, but in coming posts we are going to try to explore what they might be. In the past we have written about the Republican Brain. Certainly the last eighteen months have taught us more about it, but if progressives had a good idea of how to tend to the Republican Brain, we wouldn’t be in the fix that we’re in now.

There are those who think that the societal causes which influence a person to be narcissistic include a lack of warm parenting and a lack of warm friendships. The “cures” to narcissism are few and far between. We might think that we could try to “kill Trump with kindness,” but that seems have never worked with him and the rough and tumble of politics and government is no place to start.

But this should not cause is to lower our own standards for decency and compassion. Secretary Clinton and President Obama set the examples for us. We probably won’t change Trump, but what can we do to make his followers less angry and obstinate? The answer is not for us to become that way, but rather to try to better understand what frustrates them and what they do with that frustration. We have a little time now, so let’s engage in a little reflection.

The post We can learn a lot from the President and Hillary Clinton about how to respond to Trump appeared first on Occasional Planet.