Two things to note: Donald Trump has now delegated key policy decisions to Mike Pence (for the moment, heading the transition means that) and signaled he may not even live in Washington on the weekends.
I read an article last night by an American correspondent for one of the major British papers arguing, in so many words, that the entire global order is about to be upended as the US, which is the progenitor of the global trade regime, abandons that regime and also ends or vastly diminishes the NATO alliance and its analogue alliances in East Asia. These outcomes are profoundly ominous, not because any of these are sacrosanct or above reform but because any upending of the global order by its long time guarantor is the kind of jagged and chaotic change which leads to instability, global depressions and wars – and not just the kinds of wars that brutalize people in places far away from the United States. Perhaps my mindset is still too guided by the first half of the 20th century and its mix of economic autarky, revisionist states, rising and falling powers and the absence of the kind of international institutions the US created after World War II, but that is simply not a world you want you and your children to live in. Not in the least.
But there’s a big ‘but’.
We’ve had a recurring question from a number of existing Prime members over the last few days. Let me try to answer it.
Theda Skocpol responds to John Judis’s article on why Trump won …
John, your piece is an elegant example of a genre of post-election autopsy that works no better, I fear, than those polling models.
You offer speculative interpretations of exit poll responses (known to be problematic data) presented as margins for various voter blocs in an aggregate national election. A lot of creative argument that HRC was a poor candidate because voters did not hear the economic message you wish she had delivered. Two problems: national polls showed that voters said she was better than Trump on plans for the economy. That is a small problem, however, because virtually no real policy discussion occurred in this election. Second, huger problem: HRC actually won the national aggregate election you are imagining in the TPM piece by a whopping 2.5 million or more votes. If America were what you measure here, she would be President-Elect.
Fascinating article from The Moscow Times. After brief euphoria, Kremlin says the Russian version of “Oh, shit!”
A few thoughts about Keith Ellison vs Howard Dean as DNC Chair.
First, I like Keith Ellison a lot. I like him and I like him for the position. Major Dem party leaders seem to be coalescing around him and for good reason. But Howard Dean is also making a bid. Dean has been fairly removed from the political tussle for a few years, at least in the high profile way he had been in the late Bush and early Obama years. (He was DNC chair from 2005 to 2009. In other words, he was DNC chair during their two big wave elections.) He’s also done a decent amount of lobbying. I don’t know the details on that front. And he certainly wouldn’t be the only out of office pol to do lobbying. But in the present climate that seems like a significant liability.
Yesterday, the White House Correspondents Association raised a flag on President-Elect Trump’s refusal to allow a so-called ‘protective pool’ for his visit to DC. A protective pool is a small group, often just one reporter, who goes with the president virtually everywhere they go outside the White House. Go to a fundraiser, go to play golf, go out for dinner, there is at least one reporter assigned by the pool system to be there with the president.
Why? Anything can happen. Some incident of great historic moment can happen, there can be a threat on the president, anything. The idea is that you want at least one journalist there to report what happened. Needless to say, in the overwhelming number of cases that person just records the exact time the President arrived and departed, a few pieces of color and that’s about it.
Yesterday Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN) announced his candidacy to be chair of the DNC. Ellison is one of the most humane and decent people in Democratic politics today. When a party is in power, and especially when it holds the presidency, the chair of the DNC largely works for the president. Not technically and not officially, but the President is the head of the party. That person is the one who is in charge. When the party is out of power the DNC chair position is much more consequential. Last night Elizabeth Warren essentially endorsed him. This morning Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) is too. Those are essentially the heads of both wings of the Democratic party at the moment, at least near to being heads of them. Hard to see where that doesn’t make Ellison’s bid for the position essentially a done deal.
Paul Ryan just announced that as part of repealing Obamacare he plans to phase out Medicare and replace it with private insurance for retirees.