Kathianne
08-02-2016, 05:56 PM
I know most here are in serious disagreement with me this year on Presidential race. Honestly, that's ok.
I've been reading Glenn Reynolds for well over a decade, while it's always a bit difficult to figure out exactly who he'd vote for, it seemed to me in the past 6 months or so he'd sort of swung to Trump. While I still can't say for sure, I found the following essay pretty much spot on with why I've made the choices I have. I will support neither of these unacceptable candidates. Unacceptable says it all.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2016/08/02/hillary-trump-unpopular-gallup-poll-ratings-emails-immigration-principal-agent-column/87924646/
<section id="module-position-PPDEBtGZcdQ" class="storytopbar-bucket story-headline-module story-story-headline-module" style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 22.4px;">Glenn Reynolds: Who's to blame for Hillary and Donald?
</section><section id="module-position-PPDEBtH3rsY" class="storytopbar-bucket story-byline-module story-story-byline-module" style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 22.4px;">Glenn Harlan Reynolds2:47 p.m. EDT August 2, 2016
</section><section id="module-position-PPDEBtGWth4" class="storytopbar-bucket piano-module story-piano-module" style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 22.4px;"></section>Perhaps we should require reading “The Boy Who Cried Wolf” in journalism schools.
We’re moving into a general election with two very unpopular candidates at the top of the tickets: <culink class="culinks" culang="en" href="http://curiyo.com/en/topic/Hillary Clinton" title="" style="border-bottom: 1px dashed rgb(100, 98, 94); cursor: help; z-index: 9000; display: inline !important; float: none !important; padding: 0px !important; margin: 0px !important; background: inherit !important;">Hillary Clinton</culink> and <culink class="culinks" culang="en" href="http://curiyo.com/en/topic/Donald Trump" title="" style="border-bottom: 1px dashed rgb(100, 98, 94); cursor: help; z-index: 9000; display: inline !important; float: none !important; padding: 0px !important; margin: 0px !important; background: inherit !important;">Donald Trump</culink>. Substantial majorities of Americans dislike them both. Gallup last week found them with precisely equal, and awful, approval ratings (http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2016/07/28/102-days-now-sprint-november/87642456/): 37% favorable, 58% unfavorable. Each says the other is a corrupt tool. They’re both probably right.
How did we get to this situation? It boils down to failure at every level, from the political class, to the media, to the voters themselves. The consequences, I’m afraid, may turn out to be severe.
The political class failed in both parties. The Trump phenomenon is a result of the GOP establishment taking a large part of its voting base for granted. GOP donors want open borders (http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/feb/23/gop-must-embrace-pro-immigration-policy-big-donors/) in order to save on wages. Many GOP voters, seeing their wages forced down by immigration (both illegal immigration and legal-but-abused programs like the H1B visa program (http://www.latimes.com/opinion/editorials/la-ed-visas-tech-workers-h1b-20150217-story.html) that allows tech companies to pay near-slave wages for foreign programmers and engineers) felt differently.
In a huge GOP field, only one candidate, Trump, actually spoke to their concerns. Others, who might have done better, were disqualified, to a large plurality of the primary electorate, by their positions on immigration. A few tried toughening their stances, but it was too late, and Trump steamrollered the opposition. He may not be the best GOP nominee, but the GOP didn’t give voters who cared about the subject any other options.
On the Democratic side, the entire primary was more-or-less rigged as a coronation for Hillary, to the point that <culink class="culinks" culang="en" href="http://curiyo.com/en/topic/Bernie Sanders" title="" style="border-bottom: 1px dashed rgb(100, 98, 94); cursor: help; z-index: 9000; display: inline !important; float: none !important; padding: 0px !important; margin: 0px !important; background: inherit !important;">Bernie Sanders</culink> fans are still claiming fraud (http://www.dailykos.com/story/2016/7/29/1554022/-Election-Justice-USA-Study-Finds-that-Without-Election-Fraud-Sanders-Would-Have-Won-by-Landslide). Fraud or not, there’s no question that the <culink class="culinks" culang="en" href="http://curiyo.com/en/topic/Democratic National Committee" title="" style="border-bottom: 1px dashed rgb(100, 98, 94); cursor: help; z-index: 9000; display: inline !important; float: none !important; padding: 0px !important; margin: 0px !important; background: inherit !important;">Democratic National Committee</culink> put a thumb on the scales for Hillary, to the point that, when hacked DNC emails (https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=wasserman%20schultz%20usa%20today) were released on<culink class="culinks" culang="en" href="http://curiyo.com/en/topic/WikiLeaks" title="" style="border-bottom: 1px dashed rgb(100, 98, 94); cursor: help; z-index: 9000; display: inline !important; float: none !important; padding: 0px !important; margin: 0px !important; background: inherit !important;">Wikileaks</culink>, DNC chair <culink class="culinks" culang="en" href="http://curiyo.com/en/topic/Debbie Wasserman Schultz" title="" style="border-bottom: 1px dashed rgb(100, 98, 94); cursor: help; z-index: 9000; display: inline !important; float: none !important; padding: 0px !important; margin: 0px !important; background: inherit !important;">Debbie Wasserman Schultz</culink> had to resign. Hillary’s track record of money-grubbing and foreign-affairs incompetence is unattractive, but the Democratic Party didn’t really allow any other options.
The media, meanwhile, didn’t do much of a job either. Questions about the <culink class="culinks" culang="en" href="http://curiyo.com/en/topic/Clinton Foundation" title="" style="border-bottom: 1px dashed rgb(100, 98, 94); cursor: help; z-index: 9000; display: inline !important; float: none !important; padding: 0px !important; margin: 0px !important; background: inherit !important;">Clinton Foundation</culink>’s financial dealings (http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2015/04/26/clinton-foundation-foreign-donations-disclosure-mistakes/26409299/) were soft-pedaled or ignored. Hillary’s failure to hold a real press conference at all in 2016 received sporadic attention. And the scandal over her illegal email server and the exposure of classified information to hackers didn't get the attention it deserved until, all of a sudden, Donald Trump became the email bad guy. (https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/clinton-campaign--and-some-cyber-experts--say-russia-is-behind-email-release/2016/07/24/5b5428e6-51a8-11e6-bbf5-957ad17b4385_story.html)
With Trump, meanwhile, the press treated him as a novelty candidate until he had the nomination wrapped up, and then started calling him, basically, Hitler. This didn’t get much traction because they do that with every Republican nominee. As David Mastio wrote here, “No one is listening anymore. When mild-mannered technocrat (http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2016/07/29/trump-polls-winning-clinton-democratic-convention-speech-column/87700524/)<culink class="culinks" culang="en" href="http://curiyo.com/en/topic/Mitt Romney" title="" style="border-bottom: 1px dashed rgb(100, 98, 94); cursor: help; z-index: 9000; display: inline !important; float: none !important; padding: 0px !important; margin: 0px !important; background: inherit !important;">Mitt Romney</culink> was running for president, Clinton’s obscure Obama-administration colleague <culink class="culinks" culang="en" href="http://curiyo.com/en/topic/Joe Biden" title="" style="border-bottom: 1px dashed rgb(100, 98, 94); cursor: help; z-index: 9000; display: inline !important; float: none !important; padding: 0px !important; margin: 0px !important; background: inherit !important;">Joe Biden</culink> told a black audience that Republicans ‘are going to put ya’llback in chains (http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2012/08/vp-biden-says-republicans-are-going-to-put-yall-back-in-chains/).’ If you listen to Democrats, every Republican who has run for anything in my lifetime has Klan robes in their closet and secret Confederate memorabilia collection.”
Perhaps we should require reading “The Boy Who Cried Wolf” in journalism schools.
And, of course, voters are to blame, too. One of the flaws of democracy is something called “rational ignorance.” Voters know that their individual vote isn’t likely to make a difference, so it’s rational for them not to put a lot of effort into informing themselves. Instead, politics is more like sports, with people cheering on a team or an idol regardless of real-world issues. <culink class="culinks" culang="en" href="http://curiyo.com/en/topic/Tyler Cowen" title="" style="border-bottom: 1px dashed rgb(100, 98, 94); cursor: help; z-index: 9000; display: inline !important; float: none !important; padding: 0px !important; margin: 0px !important; background: inherit !important;">Tyler Cowen</culink> writes that much of American politics is about which groups will rise in status (http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2008/07/xxxxxxx.html) over others, rather than policy per se. An electorate (http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2015/02/22/obama-bush-patriotism-politicians-america-column/23842055/) that views things this way is not likely to make political decisions that benefit the nation as a whole.The Framers of our Constitution knew this, of course. This is why they created a representative democracy, a republic, rather than a pure democracy. As <culink class="culinks" culang="en" href="http://curiyo.com/en/topic/James Madison" title="" style="border-bottom: 1px dashed rgb(100, 98, 94); cursor: help; z-index: 9000; display: inline !important; float: none !important; padding: 0px !important; margin: 0px !important; background: inherit !important;">James Madison</culink> wrote in Federalist No. 55 (http://www.constitution.org/fed/federa55.htm), “Had every Athenian citizen been a <culink class="culinks" culang="en" href="http://curiyo.com/en/topic/Socrates" title="" style="border-bottom: 1px dashed rgb(100, 98, 94); cursor: help; z-index: 9000; display: inline !important; float: none !important; padding: 0px !important; margin: 0px !important; background: inherit !important;">Socrates</culink>, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob.” The idea was that while voters might be rationally ignorant, the better sorts of people would be more informed, and more vigilant. The voters would be like a reset button, but mostly the machinery of government would be run by elites, who had a stronger incentive to know what was going on, and to deal with it effectively on behalf of the nation.
The problem is that today’s elites aren’t really the better sorts of people. As Richard Fernandez notes, today we have a (http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2016/07/29/trump-polls-winning-clinton-democratic-convention-speech-column/87700524/)principal-agent problem (https://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/2016/07/27/why-does-putin-own-everything/?singlepage=true). Those happen when the agent (a lawyer, say, or a public official, or a journalist) cuts deals for himself instead of for the benefit of the people he’s representing. Our elites seem to be doing that now — looking after themselves, rather than after the country, with traditional limits on self-dealing having vanished.
We need to fix that. And maybe we need to work on voters (http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2015/02/22/obama-bush-patriotism-politicians-america-column/23842055/), too.
Fixing these problems will be difficult. The consequences of not fixing it are likely to be unpleasant. Will we get around to it? Perhaps eventually. As <culink class="culinks" culang="en" href="http://curiyo.com/en/topic/Winston Churchill" title="" style="border-bottom: 1px dashed rgb(100, 98, 94); cursor: help; z-index: 9000; display: inline !important; float: none !important; padding: 0px !important; margin: 0px !important; background: inherit !important;">Winston Churchill</culink> said, “You can always count on Americans to do the right thing (http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/w/winstonchu135259.html) — after they've tried everything else.” We’re getting close.
I've been reading Glenn Reynolds for well over a decade, while it's always a bit difficult to figure out exactly who he'd vote for, it seemed to me in the past 6 months or so he'd sort of swung to Trump. While I still can't say for sure, I found the following essay pretty much spot on with why I've made the choices I have. I will support neither of these unacceptable candidates. Unacceptable says it all.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2016/08/02/hillary-trump-unpopular-gallup-poll-ratings-emails-immigration-principal-agent-column/87924646/
<section id="module-position-PPDEBtGZcdQ" class="storytopbar-bucket story-headline-module story-story-headline-module" style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 22.4px;">Glenn Reynolds: Who's to blame for Hillary and Donald?
</section><section id="module-position-PPDEBtH3rsY" class="storytopbar-bucket story-byline-module story-story-byline-module" style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 22.4px;">Glenn Harlan Reynolds2:47 p.m. EDT August 2, 2016
</section><section id="module-position-PPDEBtGWth4" class="storytopbar-bucket piano-module story-piano-module" style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 22.4px;"></section>Perhaps we should require reading “The Boy Who Cried Wolf” in journalism schools.
We’re moving into a general election with two very unpopular candidates at the top of the tickets: <culink class="culinks" culang="en" href="http://curiyo.com/en/topic/Hillary Clinton" title="" style="border-bottom: 1px dashed rgb(100, 98, 94); cursor: help; z-index: 9000; display: inline !important; float: none !important; padding: 0px !important; margin: 0px !important; background: inherit !important;">Hillary Clinton</culink> and <culink class="culinks" culang="en" href="http://curiyo.com/en/topic/Donald Trump" title="" style="border-bottom: 1px dashed rgb(100, 98, 94); cursor: help; z-index: 9000; display: inline !important; float: none !important; padding: 0px !important; margin: 0px !important; background: inherit !important;">Donald Trump</culink>. Substantial majorities of Americans dislike them both. Gallup last week found them with precisely equal, and awful, approval ratings (http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2016/07/28/102-days-now-sprint-november/87642456/): 37% favorable, 58% unfavorable. Each says the other is a corrupt tool. They’re both probably right.
How did we get to this situation? It boils down to failure at every level, from the political class, to the media, to the voters themselves. The consequences, I’m afraid, may turn out to be severe.
The political class failed in both parties. The Trump phenomenon is a result of the GOP establishment taking a large part of its voting base for granted. GOP donors want open borders (http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/feb/23/gop-must-embrace-pro-immigration-policy-big-donors/) in order to save on wages. Many GOP voters, seeing their wages forced down by immigration (both illegal immigration and legal-but-abused programs like the H1B visa program (http://www.latimes.com/opinion/editorials/la-ed-visas-tech-workers-h1b-20150217-story.html) that allows tech companies to pay near-slave wages for foreign programmers and engineers) felt differently.
In a huge GOP field, only one candidate, Trump, actually spoke to their concerns. Others, who might have done better, were disqualified, to a large plurality of the primary electorate, by their positions on immigration. A few tried toughening their stances, but it was too late, and Trump steamrollered the opposition. He may not be the best GOP nominee, but the GOP didn’t give voters who cared about the subject any other options.
On the Democratic side, the entire primary was more-or-less rigged as a coronation for Hillary, to the point that <culink class="culinks" culang="en" href="http://curiyo.com/en/topic/Bernie Sanders" title="" style="border-bottom: 1px dashed rgb(100, 98, 94); cursor: help; z-index: 9000; display: inline !important; float: none !important; padding: 0px !important; margin: 0px !important; background: inherit !important;">Bernie Sanders</culink> fans are still claiming fraud (http://www.dailykos.com/story/2016/7/29/1554022/-Election-Justice-USA-Study-Finds-that-Without-Election-Fraud-Sanders-Would-Have-Won-by-Landslide). Fraud or not, there’s no question that the <culink class="culinks" culang="en" href="http://curiyo.com/en/topic/Democratic National Committee" title="" style="border-bottom: 1px dashed rgb(100, 98, 94); cursor: help; z-index: 9000; display: inline !important; float: none !important; padding: 0px !important; margin: 0px !important; background: inherit !important;">Democratic National Committee</culink> put a thumb on the scales for Hillary, to the point that, when hacked DNC emails (https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=wasserman%20schultz%20usa%20today) were released on<culink class="culinks" culang="en" href="http://curiyo.com/en/topic/WikiLeaks" title="" style="border-bottom: 1px dashed rgb(100, 98, 94); cursor: help; z-index: 9000; display: inline !important; float: none !important; padding: 0px !important; margin: 0px !important; background: inherit !important;">Wikileaks</culink>, DNC chair <culink class="culinks" culang="en" href="http://curiyo.com/en/topic/Debbie Wasserman Schultz" title="" style="border-bottom: 1px dashed rgb(100, 98, 94); cursor: help; z-index: 9000; display: inline !important; float: none !important; padding: 0px !important; margin: 0px !important; background: inherit !important;">Debbie Wasserman Schultz</culink> had to resign. Hillary’s track record of money-grubbing and foreign-affairs incompetence is unattractive, but the Democratic Party didn’t really allow any other options.
The media, meanwhile, didn’t do much of a job either. Questions about the <culink class="culinks" culang="en" href="http://curiyo.com/en/topic/Clinton Foundation" title="" style="border-bottom: 1px dashed rgb(100, 98, 94); cursor: help; z-index: 9000; display: inline !important; float: none !important; padding: 0px !important; margin: 0px !important; background: inherit !important;">Clinton Foundation</culink>’s financial dealings (http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2015/04/26/clinton-foundation-foreign-donations-disclosure-mistakes/26409299/) were soft-pedaled or ignored. Hillary’s failure to hold a real press conference at all in 2016 received sporadic attention. And the scandal over her illegal email server and the exposure of classified information to hackers didn't get the attention it deserved until, all of a sudden, Donald Trump became the email bad guy. (https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/clinton-campaign--and-some-cyber-experts--say-russia-is-behind-email-release/2016/07/24/5b5428e6-51a8-11e6-bbf5-957ad17b4385_story.html)
With Trump, meanwhile, the press treated him as a novelty candidate until he had the nomination wrapped up, and then started calling him, basically, Hitler. This didn’t get much traction because they do that with every Republican nominee. As David Mastio wrote here, “No one is listening anymore. When mild-mannered technocrat (http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2016/07/29/trump-polls-winning-clinton-democratic-convention-speech-column/87700524/)<culink class="culinks" culang="en" href="http://curiyo.com/en/topic/Mitt Romney" title="" style="border-bottom: 1px dashed rgb(100, 98, 94); cursor: help; z-index: 9000; display: inline !important; float: none !important; padding: 0px !important; margin: 0px !important; background: inherit !important;">Mitt Romney</culink> was running for president, Clinton’s obscure Obama-administration colleague <culink class="culinks" culang="en" href="http://curiyo.com/en/topic/Joe Biden" title="" style="border-bottom: 1px dashed rgb(100, 98, 94); cursor: help; z-index: 9000; display: inline !important; float: none !important; padding: 0px !important; margin: 0px !important; background: inherit !important;">Joe Biden</culink> told a black audience that Republicans ‘are going to put ya’llback in chains (http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2012/08/vp-biden-says-republicans-are-going-to-put-yall-back-in-chains/).’ If you listen to Democrats, every Republican who has run for anything in my lifetime has Klan robes in their closet and secret Confederate memorabilia collection.”
Perhaps we should require reading “The Boy Who Cried Wolf” in journalism schools.
And, of course, voters are to blame, too. One of the flaws of democracy is something called “rational ignorance.” Voters know that their individual vote isn’t likely to make a difference, so it’s rational for them not to put a lot of effort into informing themselves. Instead, politics is more like sports, with people cheering on a team or an idol regardless of real-world issues. <culink class="culinks" culang="en" href="http://curiyo.com/en/topic/Tyler Cowen" title="" style="border-bottom: 1px dashed rgb(100, 98, 94); cursor: help; z-index: 9000; display: inline !important; float: none !important; padding: 0px !important; margin: 0px !important; background: inherit !important;">Tyler Cowen</culink> writes that much of American politics is about which groups will rise in status (http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2008/07/xxxxxxx.html) over others, rather than policy per se. An electorate (http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2015/02/22/obama-bush-patriotism-politicians-america-column/23842055/) that views things this way is not likely to make political decisions that benefit the nation as a whole.The Framers of our Constitution knew this, of course. This is why they created a representative democracy, a republic, rather than a pure democracy. As <culink class="culinks" culang="en" href="http://curiyo.com/en/topic/James Madison" title="" style="border-bottom: 1px dashed rgb(100, 98, 94); cursor: help; z-index: 9000; display: inline !important; float: none !important; padding: 0px !important; margin: 0px !important; background: inherit !important;">James Madison</culink> wrote in Federalist No. 55 (http://www.constitution.org/fed/federa55.htm), “Had every Athenian citizen been a <culink class="culinks" culang="en" href="http://curiyo.com/en/topic/Socrates" title="" style="border-bottom: 1px dashed rgb(100, 98, 94); cursor: help; z-index: 9000; display: inline !important; float: none !important; padding: 0px !important; margin: 0px !important; background: inherit !important;">Socrates</culink>, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob.” The idea was that while voters might be rationally ignorant, the better sorts of people would be more informed, and more vigilant. The voters would be like a reset button, but mostly the machinery of government would be run by elites, who had a stronger incentive to know what was going on, and to deal with it effectively on behalf of the nation.
The problem is that today’s elites aren’t really the better sorts of people. As Richard Fernandez notes, today we have a (http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2016/07/29/trump-polls-winning-clinton-democratic-convention-speech-column/87700524/)principal-agent problem (https://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/2016/07/27/why-does-putin-own-everything/?singlepage=true). Those happen when the agent (a lawyer, say, or a public official, or a journalist) cuts deals for himself instead of for the benefit of the people he’s representing. Our elites seem to be doing that now — looking after themselves, rather than after the country, with traditional limits on self-dealing having vanished.
We need to fix that. And maybe we need to work on voters (http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2015/02/22/obama-bush-patriotism-politicians-america-column/23842055/), too.
Fixing these problems will be difficult. The consequences of not fixing it are likely to be unpleasant. Will we get around to it? Perhaps eventually. As <culink class="culinks" culang="en" href="http://curiyo.com/en/topic/Winston Churchill" title="" style="border-bottom: 1px dashed rgb(100, 98, 94); cursor: help; z-index: 9000; display: inline !important; float: none !important; padding: 0px !important; margin: 0px !important; background: inherit !important;">Winston Churchill</culink> said, “You can always count on Americans to do the right thing (http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/w/winstonchu135259.html) — after they've tried everything else.” We’re getting close.