Tag: 2016 presidential election

Trump Will Be the Nominee and the GOP (Unfortunately) Will Be Fine

Donald Trump will be the presidential nominee of the Republican Party. I thought this months ago, and today it’s blindingly obvious. What baffles me is that this is only now dawning on the political class. He was written off as a joke when he entered the race (and in the case of Huffington Post, officially written off as a joke), but even then I knew he’d have some solid base of support. How could I have been so prophetic, when I usually screw these things up? Because the horrible things he said, his history of conspiracy mongering, his perceived independence from the establishment, and his grotesque bravado were the prime ingredients for the perfect contemporary right-wing candidate.

The GOP has been cultivating the Trump electorate for generations now. You can draw a direct line from Nixon’s “silent majority,” through Reagan’s sunny obliviousness, through George W. Bush’s flippant swagger, through rabid anti-intellectualism of Sarah Palin, right to the substanceless jingoistic braggadocio of Donald Trump. For decades, the Republican Party has succeeded by intentionally fostering an electorate of fanatical ignoramuses, and now this their harvest.

So each time the pundit class declared that the latest offense to decency vomited up by Trump would finally – finally! – sink his candidacy, I thought, no, this will only solidify his current base of support, and probably attract more. And that’s what happened every time. It just shows how utterly out of touch the political class is when they think that the contemporary GOP electorate would be, say, horrified at someone who disparaged Mexicans, Muslims, women, or the disabled, or that they’d recoil at someone who dissed John McCain – the GOP base hates John McCain! Where have you people been?

So here we are, with Trump having racked up three huge primary victories in a row, and folks are still scrambling to figure out how Trump is ultimately beaten. Sorry, folks. This is your guy. Cruz can’t beat him, because there’s too much overlap in their supporters, and Trump’s foundation is granite-solid by now. Cruz’s best hope is that he can peel some of Trump’s people off, but he’s going to need a lot of very strong pick-axes to do that. So no dice. Rubio has very little overlap with the Trump base, so his only hope is to sop up what’s left of the drop-outs’ support, and convince voters of Kasich’s lack of viability. I don’t think he can do it in time, not by a long shot. I presume when he loses the nomination, though, he’ll declare victory anyway.

Oh, and apparently Kasich could maybe possibly beat Trump in Ohio. That’s about as meaningful as Howard Dean’s post-dropout victory in Vermont in 2004.

There’s also a lot of talk about how Trump’s ascension means the end of the GOP. The splintering among the Republican Party’s constituencies, they say, is irreparable and will lead to a total overhaul of the party.

Please.

First of all, this is what was said about the GOP after they lost so badly in 2008. “GOP in exile” and whatnot. Did they rejigger their party as they licked their wounds? No. They steeled themselves (and Steele’d themselves), and if anything became even more resolute in their increasingly extreme positions.

Second of all, while the GOP has a real problem when it comes to the presidency right now, owing as much to demographics and the Electoral College as their to their own madness, in congressional districts and statehouses they are doing just fine. More than fine. Because stupidly complacent moderates and liberals skip midterm and off-year elections, the most extreme corners of the Republican Party control state legislatures, city councils, school boards, and, oh yes, Congress. So maybe the White House is a tougher climb for the GOP right now, they are otherwise sitting very, very pretty.

So to sum up, Trump will be the nominee of the Republican Party because he is exactly what the GOP has been training its electorate to want. And while it may cost them the White House (or at least I really, really hope so), it’s only going to strengthen their determination and tighten their grip on every other aspect of government they control. And that’s where the real problem is.

February 24, 2016

2016 presidential election, donald trump, GOP, republican party, sarah palin
Jeb the Human

Like almost everyone the past few months, I’ve not felt inclined to be kind to or about John Ellis Bush. This was justified in my mind largely by the fact that life has been so incredibly kind to Jeb in the 60-some years previous, and likely will for many years more. I deeply resented the idea that someone, who despite whatever virtues they might or might not possess by their own merits, could meander from one political ruling position to another because of the family they were born into. The idea that after a horribly disastrous Bush administration, merely one presidency ago, another Bush could have the gall to presume what America really needed was another Bush in charge, well, I found that hubristic and grossly entitled. When he got pushed around by Trump, I enjoyed it. Sorry, Jeb, I thought, you don’t get this one handed to you because of who your dad and brother are. Your family has no genetic claim to the White House.

As I watched his concession speech after his final loss in South Carolina, I could see in his eyes that he was about to drop out of the race. My mirror neurons started firing as he choked up while declaring his exit. My heart ached a little for him. His speech was a classy one, dignified and generous. I began to remember that there was a human being inside the mantle of wealthy, powerful Bush pedigree.

In the time since, I have also thought about the myriad substantive reasons I have to dislike the man, fair and square. Those are of course about policy. Regardless of his relative lack of extremism as compared to Trump and Cruz, he still espouses the usual GOP orthodoxy on all the issues that matter. And that is a dangerous and inhumane orthodoxy. There’s no excuse for any rational, well-meaning would-be public servant to align themselves with it. Aside from the occasional mild heresies, Jeb Bush towed the line.

And the stone cold bullshit that was the whole “My brother kept us safe” malarkey. And that “America” gun tweet. Revolting. I hope the coming campaign tell-all books reveal that that was done by an intern with extremely poor judgment.

Yet no one is only a member of a family, or only a subscriber to an ideology, or only a member of a party. To put it in only a semi-charitable way, Jeb Bush could be a man who meant well, but was just wrong about almost everything.

I often chalked up his debate-stage pleas for civility as more or less cynical tactics to distinguish himself from, and possibly shame, Donald Trump. But it’s just as likely that he may also really believe in civility, in compromise, in treating even people we don’t like or understand with some measure of dignity. Who can really say?

Look, Jeb was a terrible candidate. I was genuinely taken aback by how poorly he performed at debates and the like. It screamed of a man who had never been truly challenged for power.

But maybe he was also, like me, an introvert. A different man altogether from his dunderheaded brother. Yes, he had a lot of things handed to him, a lot, but maybe he also wanted to just do some good work instead of engaging in pissing contests. (Read this piece by Seth Stevenson on the overlooked humanity of Jeb.)

I try to imagine what might have been different if he and not his brother had been president in 2001. Would all the disasters have happened anyway? His obvious aversion to conflict suggests he would have been bullied and bulldozed by people like Cheney and Rumsfeld, and led into the same traps. Again, who can say?

Whatever the case, 2016 was not his time. The GOP, the Republican Party his family and cohorts helped create, is now a home for aimlessly angry bigots and ignoramuses. That is not electorate that is open to introversion, thoughtfulness, or compassion.

So I feel a little for Jeb. I’m somewhat terrified of the party that spat him out, and yet to which he is still attached. I suppose he should have abandoned it years ago, before it would have a chance to abandon him.

February 22, 2016

2016 presidential election
Malleable

Former President Jimmy Carter would take Trump over Cruz, and so would I. Jimmy says:

The reason is, Trump has proven already he’s completely malleable. I don’t think he has any fixed (positions) he’d go the White House and fight for. On the other hand, Ted Cruz is not malleable. He has far right-wing policies he’d pursue if he became president.

This is exactly the point I’ve been making about Trump vs. Cruz, but President Carter put it perfectly. Trump is malleable. He pretends to have an ideological agenda, but it’s all show. He just wants to win the big popularity contest and get the job. He may be terrible at it if he gets it, but he won’t be guided by some absurd belief that the creator of the universe must be placated through government fiat. The only supreme being he cares about is himself, and he’ll do whatever he has to do to keep things running to his satisfaction.

I’m not saying he’ll reveal himself to be a closet liberal (though one never knows), but that he’ll roll with it. He won’t embark on crusades, he’ll cut deals. He’ll allow himself to be influenced, he’ll feel the political winds, and he’ll probably try to get a few things done. It’ll be pragmatism and ego, not zealotry. (And, with Cruz, also ego.)

This is why I used to half-jokingly tout Mitt Romney for president, at least for the GOP nomination. Yes he was poised to be the most likely to be able to defeat President Obama, but it was a more palatable thought than a Gingrich or a Santorum getting the nomination and then somehow winning the White House. Romney wasn’t just “moderate,” he was, like Trump, malleable. He’d want to get things done. If it meant chucking Republican dogma or snubbing Tea Party dumbasses, then so be it. If the political tides shifted in a particular direction, he’d have leaned into them in order to keep things stable.

Cruz is not malleable (except his god damn smug pompous shit-eating fucking ass-face). He’s a fanatic. Trump is a salesman, Cruz is a maniac. If I have to choose, I’ll take the salesman.

February 4, 2016

2016 presidential election, donald trump, mitt romney, republican party, ted cruz
Trump is Exactly What We Wanted

I was not a Trump skeptic when he entered the race. I didn’t know how far he’d get, but I knew he’d be a big factor, and as he plowed ahead and stayed on top, I was also not one of those who thought he’d implode. His support, I believed, was rock solid, with a floor that other candidates couldn’t match. But I don’t think I could ever really articulate why he would do, and has done, so well.

Then I read this interview with historian Doris Kearns Goodwin at Huffington Post by Howard Fineman, and it all made sense. Fineman writes:

Trump deploys fame for fame’s sake; taps into populist expressions of fear, hatred and resentment and shows a knack for picking fights and a braggart’s focus on the horse race. All of which allow him to play into — and exploit — every media weakness and bad habit in a chase for audience and numbers.

And Goodwin tells him:

Do we know, at this point, about his modus operandi in business? Do we know how he treated his staff? Do we know what kind of leader he was when he was building his business? I mean, I don’t know the answers to these things.

All I know is that, when I see him now, it’s like his past is not being used by the media to tell us who the guy really is.

This all rings more truthfully to me than the idea that Trump is some kind of political savant. I do think he’s probably smarter than his competition in a number of meaningful ways, but a better and broader explanation of his success is that his shtick happens to align perfectly with the way the news media produces content today.

The media and Trump are equally obsessed with horse race poll numbers. The current news paradigm is to churn out content with every tiny, potentially interesting development, and Trump practically gives off spores of content fodder. The news media delights in conflict, especially personal conflict, and the potential for controversy or the possibility of offenses given. Again, Trump provides and provides. And I assume that this is half because he’s playing all of us, and half because it’s just what he is. We the audience demand vapid, garbage content, and Trump gives us exactly what we want.

Here’s a subject that Fineman and Kearns don’t cover: the electorate to which Trump is appealing. It’s hard to imagine a Democrat-Trump, some leftward counterpart that has Trump’s bravado but fights for social and economic justice. No, Political Trump is a product custom made for an electorate stoked into rage and fear and happy ignorance by the very party that now fears the Trump takeover. The GOP primary electorate has been primed for a candidate like Trump, whether the party knew it or not. They’ve been fomenting paranoia about Obama, minorities, women, “religious freedom,” Iran, Muslims, and whatever else you can think of, and they’re shocked that perhaps some chest-thumping candidate might swoop in and, confidently and joyously, embody those paranoias.

Trump is a man of our times. Goodwin in the interview with Fineman says that deeply researched print journalism is what could have better exposed and explained someone like Trump, “because [of] the way sentences work.” There’s something kind of perfect for that. In an age of clumsy tweets and Facebook memes, the antithesis of whatever it is Trump is, might be “the sentence.”

January 31, 2016

2016 presidential election, donald trump, journalism
‘Twas the Night Before Iowa (Which Probably Won’t Matter)

Here’s what I think of the state of the race on the night before the Iowa caucuses.

The polls right now for Iowa are more or less meaningless. Yes, Clinton and Trump are both up a little in the final pre-Iowa poll, but it doesn’t really matter. Save for the poor bastards in single digits, the Iowa caucuses are one of the least predictable “elections” in modern politics. For candidates within a few points of each other in polling, everything can hang on innumerable (and entirely banal) factors: Will it rain? Is there snow? Are people too busy? Are babysitters available? Are there enough cars and vans to bring people to caucus sites? Do enough people give enough of a damn about who becomes the nominee to show up, or is everyone pretty content with whoever winds up winning? Did we call enough people? Did we knock on enough doors? Did we know on too many doors, and call too many people, and become annoying?

Hell, if it’s really close for the Democrats, it could all come down to which campaign has been nicest to O’Malley, as his utter lack of viability in just about every caucus site means his few voters will have to go with a second choice. The candidate O’Malley’s voters like better could decide the whole night.

I was in the Hillary Clinton war room for the 2008 caucuses, and hopes were pretty high. I think the prevailing sentiment was that we would place a strong 2nd (behind Edwards, I thought), but alas, we were trounced by Obama and edged out by Edwards to land at 3rd. Remember the Democratic race in 2004? Wasn’t Howard Dean supposed to win that with Gephardt close behind? They came in 3rd and 4th.

So forget the polls as far as the top tier candidates are concerned. For Clinton/Sanders and Trump/Cruz, this is up in the air.

So while I won’t predict any winners, I will predict this: Iowa won’t really matter. Let’s say Sanders does win, and by a meaningful margin. He could take that momentum, build on his support in New Hampshire, and win big there, too. A rocket-launch to the nomination, right?

Look, it’ll totally suck for Clinton if she loses both Iowa and New Hampshire, and Hillary Death Watch will be on full alert. But I can’t for the life of me foresee a scenario where Sanders takes these wins and turns them into victories in South Carolina, Nevada, and the big states for Super Tuesday. Does anyone really think Sanders can win in South Carolina, where the African American vote is the whole ballgame? Or in California? Or New York? It’s possible, of course, but at this point it seems absurd to think so.

I think Iowa is slightly less meaningless for the Republicans, only because a decisive win by Trump could indeed begin the end of the race, for it would certainly catapult him to an even larger victory in New Hampshire than he is already likely to enjoy. I am skeptical, though, of a Trump win in Iowa, simply because I suspect his on-the-ground operation won’t match the religious fervor of Cruz’s supporters. And if Cruz does win, it’s no big news, it’s more or less expected, so the race remains one between him and Trump, and we trudge on. Nothing in the race’s dynamics change as a result of a Cruz victory.

Iowa’s greatest impact will likely be to begin the weeding out of the also-rans. The bottom half of the Democratic candidates more or less lopped themselves off after Iowa in 2008. I can’t see any reason for folks like Fiorina, Santorum, or Huckabee to trudge on once they get shellacked in Iowa. (And I suspect Huckabee is readying to endorse Trump after Iowa, and so a Cruz victory could be heavily dampened by a key establishment-evangelical nod like that.) Alas, Iowa losses likely won’t deter Kasich, Bush, or Christie, who have their hopes pinned on New Hampshire. And Rand Paul seems to be running for something other than the GOP’s presidential nomination, so who knows.

On the Democrats’ side, O’Malley will stay in the race as long as he technically is able. Why? Bernie or Hillary could get hit by a bus or something, and he wants to be ready to fill a spot just in case.

What do I know? A year or so ago, I certainly thought Cruz would be one of the main contenders for the GOP nod, but I also thought Rand Paul would be his main competition. I could be entirely full of it.

But that’s never stopped anyone from making predictions before. And I think at this point in my career, I’ve learned at least something. I can’t wait to find out!

January 31, 2016

2016 presidential election, bernie sanders, donald trump, hillary clinton, martin o’malley, ted cruz
No, Really, They Are All Trumps

John Scalzi has a good post of observations about the Trump-demagogue situation, echoing the drum I’ve been beating for a while about the existing GOP electorate:

Trump has been leading the GOP polls almost without interruption for months. He’s not an outlier. He’s there for a reason. The reason is that the GOP has made space in their party for race-baiting xenophobic religious bigots, and has done so for years by conscious and intentional strategy. Trump did not bring his supporters into the GOP. They were already there.

And he rightly laments this state of affairs:

Right now, in the United States, the leading candidate for president of one of the two major political parties — the leader by a substantial margin — is openly talking about denying an entire class of people their fundamental Constitutional and human rights, and being cheered for it. It’s not right, it’s bigoted and hateful, and yes, it absolutely is dangerous.

But here’s the thing. The GOP has been doing this for years, generations even, and at the establishment level. It’s not always Muslims, of course. For the past 20 years or so it’s been a lot about gays. Not barring them from entering the country, but denying them constitutional rights to marry and be as they are without discrimination or harassment. An entire class of people. Right now, the GOP literally boasts of its ability to obstruct African Americans (especially poor ones) from voting at all. An entire class of people. They go to the cruelest, most cynical, most desperate lengths to make sure that women have no say whatsoever in whether their body will be used to produce another human body. An entire class of people.

Shift your perspective just slightly, and it becomes not just about one or two unfavored groups, but the superiority of one: Christians. The right kind of Christians, of course. Rather than bellowing about the rights that some group or other does not deserve, they maintain that there are special rights that only Christians deserve. The right to flout the law, to assertively deny others’ rights because they think their religion tells them to, and even the freedom to reject responsibility for the ransacking and despoiling of the planet because the Bible says it’s okay. These are bedrock principles of the Republican Party.

So I wish the political-journalistic establishment would spare us all the shock over Trump’s version of this. The Republican Party is explicitly devoted to taking the humanity away from entire classes of people, and asserting the superiority of rich, white, male Christians. They are all Trumps.

December 9, 2015

2016 presidential election, donald trump, republican party
They Are All Trumps

Today, the political world is aghast because Trump said that “for now,” Muslims should be barred from entering the country.

That’s awful, of course. But let’s remember that mere days ago, Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz, and other “mainstream” Republican candidates were saying that the U.S. should only help the Christians among the Syrian refugees. This is not only a no-Muslims policy, it’s a Christians-only policy.

How is this less awful than what Trump is saying today? If anything, it’s worse. It’s not only saying that one group is on the outs, it’s saying that there is only one group of people worthy of compassion at a time of utterly desperate need.

(And this doesn’t even begin to address the lunacy of Lindsey Graham, who Dave Weigel at the Post just referred to as a “moderate,” who is maniacally obsessed with total war with large swathes of the Islamic world.)

Jeb, Cruz, Rubio, they all like to contrast themselves with Trump to show themselves as somehow above his demagoguery. But be it on this issue, or on many, many others such as women’s rights, LGBT rights, and even acceptance of scientific facts of existential importance, when it comes to what they themselves say they believe, they are all Trumps. They just suck at it.

I always believed that Trump would be a real contender for the nomination, even when the press laughed him off. Every time he’s said something awful, about Mexicans, Muslims, women, it’s presumed that it will be the beginning of the end for him, and every time I’ve said, actually, no, this is exactly what the GOP electorate wants to hear. And every time, he’s solidified his base and built on it. The only recent exception is Ted Cruz topping a new poll in Iowa (for whatever Iowa polls are worth), and let’s be honest, Ted Cruz is Trump with an elected office and a smarmier face.

Trump is the GOP. He may not be what the plutocrats who bankroll the party want the GOP to be, he may not be what the Family Research Council wants the GOP to be, but it is what it is. These other candidates are just as cynical, just as backward, just as eager to feed off of the fear and hate of the electorate. They’re just not nearly as good at it.

Except Cruz. He’s really good at it. Watch out for that bastard.

December 7, 2015

2016 presidential election, donald trump
The DNC’s Cowardice Kills the Lessig Campaign

Lawrence Lessig ended his bid for the Democratic nomination for president today, and I don’t blame him in the least. Due to a last-minute change by the Democratic Party in the rules to qualify for the debates, Lessig was blocked. He accounced his decision to end the campaign in this video:

I’m heartbroken, and I think he is too. I had no illusions that he would be a serious contender for the nomination, but I desperately wanted him on that debate stage. Someone has to make the case for the The One Issue to Rule Them All, fundamental reform of the electoral system. Reform of the systems by which we fund elections, vote for officeholders, and design our legislative bodies really is at the very core of all the other challenges we’re unable to politically confront. But almost no one knows that, or at least they don’t think about it. Lessig, if nothing else, would have made at least a few of us think about it.

I’m heartbroken, too, by the cowardice of the Democratic National Committee. For some reason, they decided that it was in their interest to keep Lessig off of that debate stage. I can think of several reasons why, but all of them are so petty and pathetic, that I am loath to attribute them to the party that ostensibly represents my interests. But who are we kidding? One thing the Democrats have not been known for in many generations in courage. Could they really have been so afraid, or at least squeamish, about Lessig’s message? It’s a message that points out the pox on both houses, but it also offers the vaccine for that pox. I am embarrassed for, and of, the Democratic Party.

I’m disappointed at the Clinton, Sanders, and O’Malley campaigns for not advocating on Lessig’s behalf. None of them had anything meaningful to lose by Lessig’s inclusion, certainly not Clinton. Lessig was running as a Democrat because he supports Democratic principles, and was not running to “take down” any of the other candidates. He wasn’t there to “get” them, but to be serve as a kind of conscience. Bernie Sanders is supposed to fill that role, I suppose, but he doesn’t get close enough to the core of what’s wrong. They should have insisted he be included. But of course they wouldn’t.

And I’m seething over the political press, who, when tweeting the news of Lessig’s exit, offered only snark, jokes at his expense. I understand the delight one can take in the failures of ridiculous candidates, the hilariousness that ensues when their hubris far outshines their qualifications or competence. But Lessig wasn’t one of those candidates. He’s a serious, brilliant, accomplished person with a core message that is of existential importance to the republic. But ha-ha, he had to quit, couldn’t get one percent, funny glasses, ha-ha. Whatever plague is making our democracy sick, these people are the rats helping it to spread.

I don’t know if things would have been any different if Lessig had not begun his campaign with the pledge to resign once his legislative agenda had been fulfilled, a pledge he recently recanted in light of the resistance to it, and the fixation on it. I have to think it would have at least helped for the “gimmick” of his candidacy to be the sole focus it ever received from the vapid press.

It seems Lessig is leaving the door open ajar for a third-party candidacy, but I don’t think that’s what he wants. We’re all rolling our eyes at the idea of a Jim Webb independent run, and the last thing Lessig wants is to seem like more of a political joke than the press is already making him out to be.

The point, Lessig says himself, was to get into the debates. That’s where he was going to have his maximum impact. And the Democratic Party has slammed the door in his face. I don’t know what he should do next, although in his blog post following his official announcement, he wrote in a parenthetical:

…first lesson for presidential candidate wanna-be’s: be a Senator first, so your salary can be paid while you’re running for President.

How about it, Larry? You almost ran for the House once. Maybe it’s time to get in the fray at the legislative level. Kick some ass in Congress, and then we’ll see what happens next.

November 2, 2015

2016 presidential election, debates, democratic party, electoral reform, lawrence lessig
Lessig Says “You Win…I Will Remain President” – But It Might Be Too Late

Lawrence Lessig has reversed himself on the one aspect of his presidential campaign that I considered deflating, that dampened what would otherwise have been true enthusiasm: He’s no longer pledging to leave office once he achieves his legislative objectives. He means to be president and stay president. He wrote at The Atlantic:

If the Democrats won’t take seriously a candidate with a viable, credible, and professionally managed campaign just because it includes a promise to step aside once the work is done, then fine. You win. I drop that promise.

I am running for president. … After we pass that reform [the Citizen Equality Act], I will remain as president to make sure the reforms stick. I will work with Congress to assure they are implemented. I will defend them against legislative or legal attack.

But beyond that priority, I would do everything else a president must do, too. Which means I bear the burden in this campaign of convincing America I could do that well.

Excellent. I’m delighted by this.

But it’s almost certainly too late to matter.

After the first Democratic debate last week, I said that the quality performances of the first-tier candidates more or less ruled out a Joe Biden candidacy, as the debate made clear that there was no need for either an establishment alternative to Hillary Clinton, nor a left-flank alternative to her or Bernie Sanders. The two of them both did well enough for themselves to settle the race as one between the two of them, and the remaining three candidates were rendered more irrelevant than they already were, if that was even possible.

So my concerns for Lessig are that, first, his being left out of the debates has as much to do with resistance to true reform candidates from the DNC as it does with poor poll showings, or being left out of polls altogether. That resistance certainly won’t have changed now that Lessig is promising to remain president, and the DNC has little interest in someone standing on stage saying that the whole system that keeps them (and the GOP) in power is the real problem. It is the real problem, the problem from which all other problems flow, but it boots the Democrats nothing to admit it.

But second, and probably more importantly, I’m afraid that the moment has passed for grassroots excitement for Lessig to compel the networks, or whoever else has veto power, to care whether or not he’s there. To this time, I have not seen the kind of unbridled enthusiasm for Lessig’s candidacy that I would have expected, especially from the young, civil liberties-minded, Silicon Valley crowd, and I chalk this up to his poorly conceived resignation pledge. Now that he’s wisely reversed himself on this, that enthusiasm has now been channeled largely toward Bernie Sanders. In other words, Sanders is sufficiently reform-minded to sate the appetite for change that Lessig represents. And the debate last week only solidified that state of affairs.

I truly hope that new interest is sparked in Lessig’s campaign, again, not because I think he has any chance of being nominated or elected, but because his message is so vital. The agenda he champions is literally of existential importance to our democracy. A man of his wisdom, intelligence, and humanity carrying a message of achievable and necessary democratic rebirth deserves and needs to be on the next debate stage. He needs to be heard, and the other candidates, the ones who actually can be president, need to address them.

I just despair that it simply won’t happen now. The moment, I fear, has passed. Please, let me be wrong!

October 18, 2015

2016 presidential election, debates, democratic party, electoral reform, lawrence lessig
The Democrats’ First Debate: Nothing Changed, and That’s Huge

In a sense, nothing really changed about the dynamics of the race as a result of the first Democratic presidential debate, but that in itself is extremely important. Clinton performed as excellently as I expected, and probably reminded many folks why they liked her to begin with. Sanders also did himself some good by setting himself up as a substantial and passionate contrast to Clinton. With neither of them making any meaningful mistakes, they served to solidify the existing situation, which is a win for Clinton.

O’Malley may have helped himself to a percentage point or two in the polls, if for no other reason than that he was fluid and enthusiastic, and appeared to be a plausible alternative to the current top tier. But he gained nothing that truly effects Clinton’s or Sanders’ positions. I do have to wonder if O’Malley’s slickness came across as sincere or contrived to the average viewer. He was laying it on quite thick at times, and as an actor and a veteran political observer, I don’t trust my own view to know how he comes across to others.

Webb and Chafee performed abysmally. I was genuinely embarrassed for both of them, especially considering that they both seem like good, well-intentioned public servants who would otherwise probably deserve a fair shot at consideration. But Webb was all grouse and resentment (and weirdly threatening China), and Chafee was an unmitigated disaster. I can’t think of anyone in a presidential debate who has ever performed as poorly as Chafee did tonight, and I’m including Quayle. For his own sake I hope he drops out tonight.

But again, Webb and Chafee had no effect on the larger race, and tonight really only served as a chance for voters to rule them out, and perhaps — perhaps — consider O’Malley. Which merely buys O’Malley a point or two at best.

So, as I said, this debate changed very little, other than to settle the race for a while, to where it more or less has been anyway.

With one exception: Joe Biden.

I don’t know if Biden is still considering running, and I’d be shocked if he was. But after tonight, it doesn’t matter. By not participating in this debate, I believe Joe Biden ruled himself out of the race. The fashionably late don’t get to be president, and, learning the lessons of Wesley Clark, Rick Perry, and Fred Thompson, he must know that. Biden is, as of tonight, a non-factor in this primary race.

And that is a big, big win for Hillary Clinton.

October 13, 2015

2016 presidential election, bernie sanders, cnn, debate, hillary clinton, joe biden, martin o’malley
Lawrence Lessig, Knight of the Woeful Countenance

If Hillary Clinton is my Machiavellian Prince, Lawrence Lessig is my Don Quixote. I know he can’t win (and he knows he can’t win), but his platform, his cause, is closer to my heart than perhaps any candidate’s has ever been.

That cause is one that goes beyond the litany of issues that confront our country and our planet, because it is the One Issue to Rule Them All, the crux of everything, which, if not decisively solved, will mean that nothing else truly meaningful will ever be accomplished. Of course I’m talking about reform of the political system itself.

Yes, that means the money in politics, but that’s actually the least interesting part to me. Don’t get me wrong, fundamentally upending the way we fund elections is vital to fixing the system at large, both in real terms as well as in how politicians are perceived.

There’s also the question of voter equality: access to the franchise, an opt-out rather than an opt-in voter registration paradigm, and for the love of Jiminy Cricket, make Election Day a federal holiday.

But while these two are the easiest to grasp of the three prongs of Lessig’s “Citizen Equality Act” (too much money bad!!!), I think they are secondary to the biggest problem.

That’s the electoral process. Not the way we fund or run campaigns, but the systems, the mechanisms by which we vote. Here’s what Lessig’s website says about this part of the Act:

Equal citizens must have equal representation in Congress. That means, districts must be drawn, and election systems structured, so as to give each citizen as close to equal political influence as possible. FairVote has offered the most comprehensive solution to achieve this equality. At a minimum, the Citizen Equality Act would incorporate their proposed “Ranked Choice Voting Act,” which ends political gerrymandering and creates multi-member districts with ranked choice voting for Congress.

(Oh, and allow me to remind you that I used to be FairVote’s communications director in the late Aughts, so you can imagine how proud this makes me.)

The way we elect our officeholders is pure crap. It’s garbage, because for single-seat offices like governors and senators, it allows a tiny plurality to claim victory, even when opposed by the majority. (Best example ever? My own state of Maine, where twice Paul LePage was elected with a pathetic plurality of votes thanks to a three-way race, despite the fact that most of the state hates his guts.) If we have a system by which we can rank our choices, sending our votes to back-up choices if our first choices aren’t viable, we will wind up with winners that reflect the actual will of the majority far more often.

In multi-seat bodies like legislatures and city councils, it’s also crap. Galactic-level crap. But this gets kind of complicated to explain, so I’ll let FairVote do it. And of course, that complexity is why the issue is so utterly unsexy, and why the necessary reforms to fix this shitshow are so hard to sell. I know, I tried.

The point is that this is the stuff that will really achieve change. When we stop getting election results that reflect only a warped version of the will of the voters, when we stop blocking access to voting to those we don’t agree with, and when we open political influence to more people than those with loads of cash, we can then, and only then, begin to make a dent in things like climate change and economic inequality.

But now we come full circle to reality. The Imperial Destroyer that is the U.S. of A. will not be so easily retrofitted and modified into the speedy and nimble fleet that it ought to be.

And Lessig won’t be president. Shit, he won’t even be allowed into the debates so that these issues can at least be tested out on the national stage.

But you know what gives me a little hope? Lessig’s interview this past Sunday on Reliable Sources. It gave me a little hope because I saw something I didn’t expect: a fire in Larry’s belly. I’ve always said that you can never underestimate the candidate that really wants it, and you can usually tell which ones don’t. (Feeling entitled to it is not the same as really, really wanting it.) Lessig’s always been passionate about his core issues, but this is the first time I’ve seen him truly roil.

http://www.cnn.com/video/api/embed.html#/video/tv/2015/10/04/are-press-and-party-stifling-lessigs-campaign.cnn

He pokes fun at himself, his appearance, and his “funny glasses” (that I really like but could never pull off myself), but even if he has no chance at being elected, he could still take that quixotic passion and be our Knight of the Woeful Countenance.

October 5, 2015

2016 presidential election, electoral reform, fairvote, lawrence lessig
Yes, I’m Conflicted About Hillary Clinton. But I’ll Damn Well Get Over It.

I have lots of feelings about Hillary Clinton. Heck, I used to work for Hillary Clinton. She had no idea, of course, but for about three months as 2007 turned into 2008, I was a media researcher for her presidential campaign, more or less the guy standing at the castle parapets yelling “incoming!!!” whenever anything of any note whatsoever was said about her in more or less any medium. (It was so stressful and frenetic that my body almost entirely shut down, and I had to quit after being on the job for what were, admittedly, the worst three months of the campaign for her. At one point we actually thought I might have brain cancer!)

(I didn’t.)

Showing up hither and thither in my social media streams this weekend has been this excellent piece at Elle by Rebecca Traister, and it in many ways echoes my own panoply of loves and loathings in regard to Secretary Clinton. For Traister, I gather, the internal conflict is mainly about the ideological boxes Clinton has not checked (or checked too late), versus the burning need — personally for her and for society as a whole — for a brilliant, mega-qualified woman to be, not even just elected president, but even be treated fairly as a presidential candidate.

My conflicts are in a similar vein, but they are more strategic, I suppose, than ideological. Like Traister, I too desperately want us to get over this ridiculous hump and finally, for the love of sweet flappy jeebus, elect a woman president. Like Traister, I fume and nurse ulcers over the grotesque personal scrutiny to which this woman is regularly subjected, the grossly unbalanced way she’s covered as a candidate, and the need the press establishment feels to bring her down, to make her “sorry” for, well, whaddaya got?

But I’m far less ideologically conflicted. I understand that she’s never been the Perfect Liberal. I totally get that my well-meaning friends who support Bernie Sanders do so because he holds positions that satisfy most liberal orthodoxy (which I largely support as well), and that he has skillfully positioned himself as a man of the people who tells it to you straight. It’s probably mostly sincere! And that’s great. Go, Bernie! Seriously!

But that’s not the kind of person who gets shit done from the highest reaches of global power. Running any government is often compared to steering a giant ship, where one can only make minor adjustments to the course at any given time, given the speed, weight, and size of the vessel. Running the U.S. government, including its innumerable foreign-policy tendrils, must be more akin to trying to steer an Imperial Star Destroyer. In the water.

What I’m saying is that being an effective President of the United States means being able to intellectually process vast amounts of data; to have extraordinary insight and empathy into myriad sensibilities, needs, and hopes; to have the grit to make extremely difficult decisions, not just about war and peace or life and death, but about what small concessions to make or what humiliations to endure to advance a larger cause. To put it more starkly, this person needs to be able to wisely and decisively know when to compromise even foundational tenets of morality, democracy, and ethics in order to score a meaningful win for the greater good.

(The Bush administration believed it was doing so when it decided that systematized torture and a doctrine of preemptive war were an acceptable trade for national security and economic pillage. But that’s another thing.)

I’d bet there are only a few people on Earth who can even bring themselves to even make such decisions, let alone make the right ones. I don’t think Bernie Sanders is that kind of person. He’s clearly a good, intelligent man, but frankly, he’s not Machiavellian enough. Not to my tastes. I’m sour on Sanders the presidential candidate because I don’t think he’s ready to confront the ugly and the uglier, and figure out the difference.

Clinton is. This woman is better suited than probably anyone on the planet to steer the star destroyer, nudge by nudge, by crucial and perilously timed fractions of degrees. She’ll have the brains and the guts, I think, to make the tough calls, and even the horrible calls, to do the right thing. Yes, I want The Prince, and I want The Prince that’s on my side.

And guess what, this is also where my conflict sets in. Look at the 2008 campaign, and you tell me if she made all the right horrible calls in order to advance the greater good. Was doing anything suggested by Mark Penn ever a good idea? Was refusing to say outright that Barack Obama was not a Muslim a good idea? Was hiring a staff that bullied and belittled the journalists covering the campaign a good idea? (I was in the room for a lot of those calls.) No, they were not.

So she’s willing to do the dirty work, she’s willing to go for the throat when the times call for it. I’m not 100 percent sure she’s sufficiently wise enough of the time to go for the right throat at the right time. Just as there is something pathological about the press corps’ need to see her suffer, there is something strangely chronic about Clinton’s ability to set her own landmines, and pretend they’re not there. I felt queasy as journalists were tweeting banal (and even at times endearing) personal emails from Clinton’s servers, but I feel just as sick over the idea that she had such a server, and seemed to think nothing would come of it. Why does she (and/or her universe of functionaries) let these things happen?

Ideologically, I’m more or less fine with Clinton. She came to gay marriage late, fine, so did most of anyone in the party who matters. She made the wrong horrible choice on the Iraq vote, but, again, she was hardly alone. (And I’m more sympathetic to foreign adventures than most of my liberal brethren, but come on, even I knew the Iraq invasion was a contrived bullshit boondoggle right off the bat.) But on the vast array of issues before us, she’s on the right side. She “cozies up to Wall Street”? Good! I hope she cozies up to them so close that they don’t even feel it when she sticks a knife in them and bleeds them out.

And the bottom line for me is that we essentially have the choice between a flawed but fiercely powerful and qualified Hillary Clinton, or the political equivalent of an asteroid strike with the election of any of the Republican candidates to the presidency. It’s hard to calculate the damage such an impact would cause, but it would blot out the sun for ages.

To beat whichever craggy planetoid the GOP throws at us, I want the candidate who will come at them with ruthless, superior force. Because I want more, not fewer liberal justices on the Supreme Court. Because I want a stronger wall of separation between church and state. Because I want economic policy that stops simply shoveling money toward the already-rich. Because I want a president who gives two shits about equality, education, science, and fucking nuance.

And I want a goddamned woman president.

So I’ll get over my conflicting feelings. Let’s get this damned star destroyer pointed in the right direction.

October 4, 2015

2008 presidential election, 2016 presidential election, bernie sanders, hillary clinton, realpolitik
Transhumanism as a Possibility, Not a Promise
I have a soft spot for the transhumanists, and as I’ve said, if they were a little less sure of themselves and their goals, and if they were just a little less, well, religious in their faith about what technology and artificial intelligence will bring, I could see to donning the label myself.

Zoltan Istvan, the movement’s (and party’s) presidential candidate is the embodiment of this faith. A huge, strong fellow who has led a life that resembles Indiana Jones-meets-extreme sports, he has put himself at mortal risk countless times, only to undergo a kind of revelation about just how fragile and short life – even his – can be. Now he’s a kind of missionary for immortality, using his presidential campaign (such as it is) to get us talking and thinking more seriously about making life-extending technologies a prime priority for society.

After reading a fascinating “campaign trail” report by Dylan Matthews at Vox on Istvan, and watching Istvan’s 2014 TEDx presentation, I think I see something that distinguishes Istvan from what I normally think of when considering transhumanism.

To me, transhumanism is advocacy of the utilization of technology to radically improve, augment, and transform human life. Its “faith” is that machines and humans will merge in one form or another, and very soon, so that there will be no distinguishing between flesh and robotics, computer and brain, software and mind. And this is supposed to happen in the next few decades, in what’s called the Singularity. The person most associated with this line of thinking is of course futurist and inventor Ray Kurzweil, now a lead engineer at Google. He is the transhumanists’ equivalent of a prophet, and he is himself obsessed with keeping himself alive as long as possible in order to experience this Singularity himself.

If I were to paint in the broadest of strokes, I’d say that the Kurzweilian transhumanists are very much jazzed about the gee-wiz of technology, the wow-factor of look-what-we-can-do. Having a brain uploaded to a super-internet, enhanced by unfathomably powerful computers, is a kind of Rapture, a removal from existence as we know it. Maybe this isn’t a fair characterization, but it’s how it seems from my vantage point.

Zoltan Istvan is, I now think, a little different from this. If you take him at his word, he is after not advancement for advancement’s sake, but for “beauty.” As he says in his TEDx talk, “Unless you are alive, it is impossible to experience beauty.”

And it seems to all stem from this. The idea that death is a ridiculous waste, and that life offers so much beauty and enrichment, the likes of which we as mere homo sapiens have barely scratched the surface. In order to truly know what he calls “new concepts” and “new arenas” of beauty, we have to, first, not be dead (obviously), and second, invest in the kinds of technologies that will allow for this kind of life extension and experiential enhancement.

As someone who is on the record (severally) as one who fears death like nobody’s business, I am deeply sympathetic to this…what is it, aspiration? Wish? I wholeheartedly share Istvan’s view that death is something to be avoided and ultimately conquered, because as far as we silly meat-robots are concerned, there is literally nothing beyond our experience of this one short life. If we are a way for the universe to know itself, as Carl Sagan put it, I really do feel like the universe should get more of a chance to do so by not letting its intelligent, sentient creatures die.

And there was one more thing that surprised me about Istvan, and this from his profile by Dylan Matthews, who was joined on the Immortality Bus by fellow journalist Jamie Bartlett:

On many matters, Zoltan openly concedes that he just doesn’t know what to do. … To Jamie, who in addition to writing for the Telegraph is working on a book about “political revolutionaries” for Random House, this is striking. The other chapters in Jamie’s book profile movements characterized by unwavering faith in an inviolable set of principles. He’s writing about ISIS, about neo-Nazis, about radical Islamists in Canada. These are people willing to take extreme measures precisely because they know they’re right. That raises the question: Zoltan has a beautiful home, with two beautiful daughters. His wife makes a healthy living for the family, and he can get by as a futurist on the speaker circuit too. He could be in his bed with his wife, knowing that his kids are safe in the next room…

But instead, he’s sleeping on the side of the road in a decrepit 37-year-old RV without running water. Why, Jamie asks, if you’re not sure your ideas are correct, are you willing to go through all this? Zoltan shrugs. He’s not sure. Nobody’s ever sure. But he thinks his beliefs have better odds of being true than the alternatives. Otherwise, he wouldn’t believe them.

He’s not sure. And he can say so. It makes me feel a little better that what Istvan is selling is not a promise, but a possibility. This is probably why he refers to it as “the transhumanist wager” and not “the transhumanist guarantee.” He’s betting on this path to a better future, because why not? Why not invest heavily in technologies that will improve our lives, enhance our abilities, and perhaps one day eradicate death itself? Of course a comparable investment in ethics will be required for such a path, but there are positive dividends to be gained from that as well.

I suppose the “why not” could be the dangers of explosively advancing artificial superintelligence, a danger that folks from Nick Bostrom to Elon Musk are warning us against. In this line of thinking, the superintelligent machines (or machine) won’t give two figs about human lifespans or our experience of beauty, and rather pose a kind of threat in which our extinction is a small event.

So despite the enthusiasm of Istvan, or Kurzweil or any transhumanist for that matter, I can’t get too pollyanna about this. Set aside the actual feasibility of the transhumanist wager being won, I don’t feel like I can even spare the emotional investment in such a future. Can there be more of a crippling, depressing letdown than to believe that death will be conquered, only to discover that it won’t? “The human being is not a coffin,” Istvan says, but for now, it is, eventually.

Perhaps this makes me a lazy transhumanist, or a spectator transhumanist. I’m not yet willing to go there with them, but it isn’t to say that I don’t want them to keep going there. I think what I also want from them, then, is to do a little more of what I glimpse Istvan doing: admitting that they might be wrong.

——-

Related posts:
- The Mutual Enhancement Society: Superintelligence in Machines…and Humans?
- Let’s Build Our Own Gods and Hope They Like Us: Reservations about Transhumanism
September 8, 2015

2016 presidential election, death, ray kurzweil, singularity, transhumanism, zoltan istvan
Lawrence Lessig’s Noble and Dispiriting Pledge

UPDATE 9/6/2016: Lessig’s campaign successfully passed the $1,000,000 pledge threshold (I pledged a token amount), and formally announced his candidacy on ABC this morning.

I heartily support Lawrence Lessig’s campaign for president, and there’s almost no public figure I can think of that I would prefer to be president. And that’s just the problem.

Lessig’s campaign is premised on the idea that if he runs and wins, he will doggedly pursue a single, crucial legislative goal: to end the influence of money on politics and elections with a still-in-formation Citizen Equality Act. He maintains (and I largely agree) that without fundamental, structural reforms to our political process, none of the other great challenges of our time can be meaningfully confronted.

If and when a President Lessig achieves this goal, he has pledged to resign from office and hand over his job to the vice-president, whoever that happens to be. (Presumably someone who shares his political views, such as an Elizabeth Warren, Russ Feingold, or some such.) He has promised that he would be a president-in-full while in office, working for domestic tranquility and all that, but has specified that he’d have a mind toward building the foundations of his successor, the sitting vice-president.

It’s confusing, right? Lessig insists that by pledging to resign when his goal is realized, he makes clear that he is serious about fixing the rigged system, and not interested in power for power’s sake. (Is there anyone who thinks that of him? Or could think that?) And there’s a logic to that. He needs to show that he’s not just kicking around some “on my first day in office, my first act as president will be…” bullshit that you hear from every other candidate. He means what he’s saying. He intends to pass this massively important reform, and when he has, he’s out.

Let’s set aside for the moment the fact that, of course, he won’t come close to being elected or nominated, and may not even reach his fundraising threshold to even begin running.

The novelty of Lessig’s campaign is his pledge to resign, and it’s also the campaign’s greatest weakness.

People familiar with Lessig have been clamoring for him to run for public office for years. He had explored a run for Congress for 2008, but backed down when it became clear that he’d have no shot, and his chief opponent was actually not all that bad on his core issues. Offering to run for president, now, as a Democrat, when Hillary Clinton awaits coronation (which will happen, folks), is a thrilling prospect to those who know of him and his work. Yes, his supporters deeply care about the issues he’s made the cause of his life, but they also just really, really want this guy to be president. I really want this guy to be president.

And they sure as shit don’t want him to resign, especially just after he scores his greatest achievement.

We don’t rally around candidates over single issues, really. We rally around a person, or the projection of one, who embodies innumerable qualities, hopes, fears, and possibilities. Who we support for president is tied into our own identities, it’s part of how we tell the world who we are. And the presidency is the closest thing Americans have to a kind of divinely-ordained rulership. We elect presidents that we expect to stay president.

Lessig’s gambit confuses this paradigm. It’s possible that he’d be seeing much more enthusiasm for his run if he never mentioned anything about resigning, because his core backers would be driven by the idea of four to eight years of their guy in charge. Instead, they’re getting their guy for a little while until some other arrangement can be made. Inspiring, it is not. How deflating to you think it was to McCain supporters when in 2008 it was said that he seriously considered pledging to serve only one term?

Lessig’s cause is inspiring, but it’s not enough. I want him to run, I want him in the debates, and I want him to win. But if, by some miracle, he did win, I’d want him to stay. Until he pledges that, it’s hard for me to get as excited as I might otherwise be. I expect I’m not alone in this.

September 3, 2015

2016 presidential election, democratic party, electoral reform, lawrence lessig
The Trump-Loving GOP McCain Helped Create

I keep starting and then deleting tweets that convey my overall feeling about the whole Trump-v-McCain slap fight going on right now. I know that if I’m not careful, I’ll trip a wire. But this morning, via @VideoSawyer, I find an essay by Jim Wright that, while not a tweet, gets the point across very well. You really have to read the whole thing, because it cleverly builds to a kind of crescendo, but here’s a taste of what I mean:

Donald Trump is the face of the modern Republican party.

Trump has been polling at the top of the GOP field and you’re just now figuring out what a douchebag he is? Well, that’s just plain hysterical.

Trump badmouthed old Johnny Walnuts, insulted his military service, did he?

And you’re all insulted and outraged? Heh heh, sorry Mr. Veteran, Sir. I have no idea where Little Donny learned that behavior from, no idea. Bad, Donny, bad! You apologize to this faggoty liberal pinko commie traitor right now!

Gee, I wonder where Little Donny learned those words, learned his contempt, learned to Swiftboat a veteran. Gee, I wonder.

Donald Trump is the GOP personified.

Almost as important, though, is Wright’s addendum to the post, where he explains that McCain’s life as a public figure is entirely fair game, that he has “no use” for the senator from Arizona, but that whatever else, “he went when called.”

He may have been the bottom of his class and an admittedly poor pilot, but he met the standards and he did the job. If that’s not courage, I don’t know what is …

And I keep looking for a 140-character way to say all of this, and I can’t. Trump is the ideal 2015 Republican, all jingoistic bluster, and will thereby say lots and lots of awful things. One awful thing among many is this offensive nonsense diminishing the courage and years of unthinkable suffering endured by McCain when a prisoner of war. But I also want to get across a kind of gentle reminder, that as a politician — with only the rarest of exceptions when some tiny, shriveled, death-rattle of a conscience emerges from his grizzled gray matter — John McCain is and has been a cynical, pompous, petty, pandering, entitled, sniveling, backward, show pony who also happens to have the political media machine entirely in his pocket, a machine still under the absurd impression that he is some sort of straight-taking “maverick.” (This image was as as transparently false in 1999 and 2000 as it is today, but who cares.)

John McCain, through his behavior as a politician and his enabling of the Republican noise machine, has helped make the modern GOP that now swoons at the braying of an ass like Trump.

So Donald Trump is, predictably, a detestable subhuman, as Wright says, “all 31 flavors of GOP crazy,” and they deserve him. But let’s not further gild the monumental pedestal, festooned with TV monitors and news tickers, upon which McCain already sits. Enduring five years of torture while in the service of one’s country gives you the right to be called hero. Being insulted by Donald Trump does not. Let’s keep these things separate, please.

July 21, 2015

2016 presidential election, donald trump, GOP, john mccain, media, war