Why Citizens United Does Not Matter

 "First off, it’s the biggest election upset in the history of the American republic. Eric Cantor was the House majority leader and raised $10 million. He spent, between himself and outside groups, $8 million to hold a congressional district. He ran against a professor who was an evangelical Christian and a libertarian economist. He ran against a professor who raised in total $175,000. In fact, the bills from Eric Cantor’s campaign at a elite steak house in Washington, DC, was over $200,000. So they spent more than $200,000 over the course of the campaign wining and dining fat cats at a steak house in Washington than the entire opposition had to run."

--Stephen Bannon

Hillary Clinton outspent Donald Trump. Googling the actual numbers, it is not clear by what factor. Some estimate she spent as much as 50 times what Trump spent.

For years, the Koch brothers have claimed they spend on elections and outspend candidates and they lose.


If Democrats want to win another election, we had better figure out how that happens.
Steve Bannon is a Tea Party Republican. We have told ourselves the Tea Party collapsed. It just won the Presidency.
It won the House and the Senate in 2010 and never relinquished either.
Tea Party justices will soon sit in the Supreme Court.
These are people who are intent on destroying government.
In New Hampshire, they would be called Free Staters.

Of course, they have to deal with the President they elected, who, at least on some occasions believes in preserving Social Security and Medicare and who believes in spending government money on infrastructure.
That's the Republicans' problem.
What do you think is the problem for the Democrats?

Trump's Win Wasn't An Accident: Bannon Had An Insight

"The central thing that binds that all together is a center-right populist movement of really the middle class, the working men and women in the world who are just tired of being dictated to by what we call the party of Davos. A group of kind of — we’re not conspiracy-theory guys, but there’s certainly — and I could see this when I worked at Goldman Sachs — there are people in New York that feel closer to people in London and in Berlin than they do to people in Kansas and in Colorado, and they have more of this elite mentality that they’re going to dictate to everybody how the world’s going to be run."
Steve Bannon




Michael Moore tried to tell us.  Trump and Bannon were focused on working stiffs in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin all along. They knew that "Blue Wall" was not impregnable, and in fact it was the Achilles heel of Hillary Clinton and the Democrats, who had long ago lost the paycheck to paycheck crowd.


Look at the real election maps which the brilliant folks at the New York Times put together:
This is where the Clinton voters were:

This is where the Trump voters were:

This is entirely consistent with what we saw canvassing in New Hampshire, and what David Brooks reported from Idaho and what Anon reported from North Carolina: If you looked at territory, Trump signs and Trump voters held an enormous lead. All of Clinton's strength was concentrated, geographically in the cities.


But the electoral college is all about the geography, about territory and states. Thus Clinton is swamped by geography, even as she wins the popular vote.


America was designed by people from Jefferson to Hamilton who valued property and land more than individual human beings. In fact, only 3/5 of Black people counted, where the Constitution was concerned.


This was no fluke. This was a well conceived, well planned strategy.
And nobody, of all the talking heads on CNN, or MSNBC or PBS News Hour or even Fox could see the essential truth that Stephen Bannon and Trump saw: There are simply more white voters than there are Brown or Black voters. 


As a member of the White, East Coast elite, I was guilty of listening to "experts" who told me what I wanted to hear, who reinforced each other constantly but had no new information and who were intellectually lazy.


My brother had a cartoon in his office which showed a dozen little stick figures chanting "No! No! No!" In the second frame a big sun like figure rises over the horizon and says, "Yes!" the third frame shows all the little stick figures chanting, "Yes! Yes! Yes!" 


I've been wasting my time listening to those little guys.
Unless I miss my bet, Mr. Trump is a tabula rasa. Government, government policy has never really interested him. He's interested in making money and government only interests him to the extent government could  help him make more or would prevent him from making more money.
On some level, he knows he's a lightweight and he needs help. Nixon was like this. So Nixon turned to Kissinger to be his wise man, his shaman.
Trump is now turning to Bannon to play this role for him. He'll get cogent, pithy, convincing direction from this guy, and it behooves us to read everything we can about what Bannon thinks.  Patton read Rommel's books before he ever met Rommel on the field of battle. We ought to learn from that.

Trump v Hillary: Shades of 1968

Oh, gather round children, and you shall know
What today we suffer
Is mere ebb and flow
Of history, for today's  no rougher
Than what once brought us low. 

Today we forget tricky Dick Nixon and his rants
Who demonized Helen Gahagan Douglas
As pink down to her underpants.
Trump is simply his spiritual heir
And Roy Cohn, who they both share
As unctuous and seething and slimy as Bannon
Guiding  all to  despair
As in darkness they both lay their plan in.

Old Dick ran against Lyndon Johnson's successor
And beat him by just 500,000 votes 
Painting the Democrat the transgressor
Promising a secret plan to end the war with end notes
And two years later bombed Cambodia just for show
And Kent State left four dead in Ohio.

Hate is a spider wasp
Which eats from the inside
Unseen from the surfaces
Until it emerges
Only then does the body subside.

Obama's Last Waltz

There he was, at the lectern in the West Wing, giving his last press conference, or at least the last before he headed off to Europe, graying now, but still lean and youthful looking, thoughtful, pausing to pick just le mot juste, wry, funny in a low key way, humble, careful, saying exactly what he means and nothing more, nothing less.  In short, everything the 45th President is not going to be.

Mr. Bannon looking for the ideal woman, the Lebensborn

Mr. Bannon's ancestral inspiration

And on the way home, on NPR, I hear Stephen Bannon, President-elect Trump's "Chief Strategist" in a past interview saying that "the women who we want leading us into the future are Sarah Palin, Ann Coulter, real women with kids, not some dykes from Seven Sisters schools in New England."

Ah, well. We always seem to do this in America, Bald, pale, gray, tired Eisenhower gives way to tanned, vigorous Kennedy; sweaty, twitchy Nixon gives way to sunny, toothy Carter; George W. , who had that dull boy's insecurity gives way to the easy confidence of a man who knows he's very bright. And now the cerebral Obama gives way to the boisterous, bluster of the bloviatator.  It's just the pendulum inexorably in swing. 
We'll get by it. 

And I loved Obama describing Trump, after a pause as "gregarious." That is truly the most generous description of the man anyone could possibly summon.
 It took the special brilliance of Obama to come up with that. 

There is brilliance out there, still. Witness Kate McKinnon opening "Saturday Night Live" the first show after the election. (Who knew she could play piano and sing like this?) The selection could not have been more appropriate. Leonard Cohen died the night before the election, thankfully for him. And the song, an elegy perhaps for our Republic, but then she turns to the camera and tells us what it means to her:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BG-_ZDrypec

Trump and the Republicans: Deer in the Headlights?

"Trump’s Keynesianism was mostly defense spending and tax cuts, but it included a huge infrastructure push — soon nicknamed “TrumpWorks” — that doubled as a jobs program for his core constituency, blue-collar men. The assumption that the economy had hit full employment in the later Obama years proved to be an artifact of work-force dropouts and increasing illegal . With TrumpWorks hiring, a wall rising (albeit haphazardly) on the southern border and millennials’ entry into the housing market sparking a sudden construction boom, both wages and the work-force participation rate began to sharply climb."
--Ross Douthat, on Trump in 2020, an anti apocalyptic vision Articles appearing from living rooms in the Rust Belt are quoting voters who really, actually believe Donald Trump can and will stop factories from closing and moving to Mexico and China.
If President Trump can do this, then maybe they weren't as stupid as we here in the East think. 
Factories with 3000 robots and 300 employees won't do. He's talking about making air conditioners with the same people whose  jobs are going to Mexico, no robots.

Riding the elevated subway around New York City, I see construction booming, workers everywhere, the visible signs of a thrumming economy. 

Here in the East we don't see the empty factories and the boarded up Main Street. 

Out there, in Ohio. Michigan, Wisconsin, rural Pennsylvania, it's different. 

Hillary spoke of "retraining."  I'm guessing that held no appeal to workers who really do not believe they can be retrained or if they can that will mean jobs. They want the job first and the training later.

Anyone who watched, "Making of a Murderer," saw rural Wisconsin, and likely rural Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania.  The people you saw there looked no different from people in Alabama, Tennessee or West Virginia. 

If President Trump can find jobs for these people, he'll do better than Hillary could have done with a Republican Congress and Supreme Court.  

It will be interesting to watch.

Trump's Goon Squad

Bannon

Goebbels

“That’s one of the unintended consequences of the women’s liberation movement––that, in fact, the women that would lead this country would be feminine, they would be pro-family, they would have husbands, they would love their children. They wouldn’t be a bunch of dykes that came from the 7 Sisters schools.”
--Stephen Bannon


Even Donald Trump, who seemed to run his campaign alone, cannot govern alone.
He is now gathering around him a veritable rogues' gallery of unappetizing deplorables,  and the number will only grow.
Chief among them is this shaddowy, psychopath Stephen Bannon. If you really want to generate a profound nausea in the pit of your stomach, go on line and read about him. I have to do it in small doses. But, over the next week or so, I promise I'll pick through the dog droppings which are Mr. Trump's men.
So far, we have only a few.
Mr. Trump's minister of propaganda appears, for the moment to be Mr. Bannon. Rush Limbaugh is having too much fun and is too effective where he is to move into the West Wing. So, it's Bannon.  He is Trump's Goebbels.

His foreign minister, his Goering is, of course Newt Gingrich, who managed to bring the government down, temporarily, during his last term in government.

His hatchet man, the guy who shows up when the dirty work needs doing, his Himmler, is Rudolph Giuliani, who tried to build his career on the 9/11 catastrophe and has been looking for a new catastrophe ever since. Apparently, he has now found one.

Democrats: Be of Good Cheer

The press takes him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally.
--Salena Zito, "The Atlantic"

Enough tears. Enough mourning. Let's see what good might come of this defeat.

In a phrase: Now it's the Republicans' turn to bear the weight of having to govern, and to take the blame.

1. Healthcare:

President Obama, even when he had control of both houses ,was unable to convince Congress or the people that a government run health insurance system was a good idea. This, despite the well known success of Medicare, the biggest health care system. Maybe the only way for this to happen will be for the Republicans to kill Obamacare and substitute an alternative which fails even more spectacularly.

Obamacare had to be a give away to the health insurance industry to get it passed. But the basic premise was so structurally flawed, it had to fail. The fact is, the whole premise of a company is it exists to make money for its shareholders. Insuring people who actually have illnesses is a sure road to losing money.  So insurance companies have always run away from covering anyone who actually needs medical care. This happened with Obamacare. It will always happen with any private, commercial system. When the object is to make money, the plan will fail to provide coverage. But a government system like Medicare does not exist to make money. It exists to spend money to provide care. Eventually someone has to realize that healthcare cannot be an industry like other industries. It is a public project.

Despite its problems, Obamacare managed to cover 20 million previously uncovered or under insured citizens and it reduced overall health care costs--a surprise. But the structural flaws were bound to catch up with it and when premiums soared right before the election, I think that had more effect to seal Hillary Clinton's fate than even the FBI.

What will happen when the Republicans replace Obamacare with Ryan voucher care will be a huge shock to those 20 million, and when the bad old days of a large uninsured population flooding through Emergency Rooms and people lose houses and go bankrupt from medical costs will be a huge reaction.  The Republicans will not be able to explain their way out of it. They'll claim everyone is happy but that will kill them. The only question is whether it will happen in time for the mid term elections.

The Democrats would be smart to not help the Republicans at all by passing laws to forbid exclusions for pre existing conditions. The Democrats, Elizabeth Warren included, should step aside and say, "You killed it. You replace it. Good luck." This will be painful, but it has to happen.

2. The promise of reversing globalization, bringing factory jobs back to the Rust Belt:

New factories may return to the Rust Belt, but not the jobs. These factories will employee 300 workers and 3000 robots, not the 3000 workers they had before. This may help some small towns, but the Rust Belt will still be a wasteland unless it shifts over to a new commerce. If factories making solar panels replace all those closed car plants and steel mills, Trump will get a second term, and maybe he'll deserve it.  Hillary would not have been bold enough to get this done.

But, those jobs may prove even more essential because the trade wars will mean no more cheap clothes, appliances and goodies at Walmart. Inflation will spike big time, as far as I can tell. After all, if you can't import cheap goods made by low wage workers in China, the goods you have available have got to be more expensive.

The coal miners in Kentucky and West Virginia will still be beyond help because they think all they can do is mine coal and will never be able to learn anything new. Mr. Trump may send them back to the mines to mine "clean coal," but of course there is no such thing as clean coal. We may go back to burning more coal and we'll have Beijing air in Pittsburgh, Cleveland and Detroit.  Let's see how the white male high school graduates like breathing that. The problem is, of course, it will be years before climate change actually does anything palpable and then the Trumps of the world will deny it had anything to do with what they did wrong.

4. Building the wall and making Mexico pay for it:
This is a win/ win for President Trump, and there is no bright side, in the short term for Democrats, unless Democrats become smarter about public relations. If they do, this could be part of his undoing.

As Selena Vito of "The Atlantic" observed, Donald Trump's detractors did not take him seriously, but they did take him literally. Donald Trumps supporters did take him seriously, but they did not take him literally.

There may be some cosmetic wall, but whatever it is, Trump will say it fulfills his promise and all his white voters will cheer. 
 Since the whole flood of illegal rapists was a hobgoblin to begin with, Trump will be able to claim success in vanquishing the zombies who were never there to begin with. But, eventually, it may dawn on some, even in the Rust Belt, there are still as many Brown and Black people as ever.

WHAT PRESIDENT TRUMP MIGHT DO WHICH WE CAN CHEER:

1. Extracting U.S. military from bases in Germany, Korea and around the world.
Much as I love President Obama, he did not get us out of Afghanistan completely enough, and I've never been able to understand why we have soldiers in Germany and Korea. Rumor has it Trump is planning to increase Navy warships in the Pacific to "guard our trade routes" whatever that means. But if he closes army bases, that would make sense.
If he pulls us out of NATO, I'd be surprised, once he hears from those generals who he knows more than, but if he does, I personally would not mind.  I have to agree with him we do not need to be the world's policeman. I think Bernie felt the same.
Of course, I'd love him to close one marine base in particular: Gitmo. If anyone can do it, it would be him. If he did do this, it might be a sign that it took Nixon to go to China and it might take Trump to do the right thing and be allowed to do it.

2. He might tolerate transgenders in bathrooms and gay marriage, and the Republicans would have to swallow that. Of course, they can simply wait 15 minutes and he'll forget he ever said that and reverse himself.

WHAT PRESIDENT TRUMP HAS ALREADY TAUGHT US ABOUT OUR OWN ASSUMPTIONS:

1. The role of money in elections:
 Maybe it's time to stop worrying about Citizens United.
The reason Democrats and people who care about democracy have been so upset about the Citizens United decision is the assumption that money means power, money means votes.
But as the Koch brothers have pointed out, they have spent millions of dollars in a variety of elections where their candidates lost anyway. So money does not always translate into votes.
In some cases attractive ideas, however fallacious, beat money.
Hillary Clinton outspent Trump 9 to 1 in Forida and still lost that state. She out spent him in every state she lost.
Trump, in fact, went back to a 19th century style of campaigning: Big rallies, and word of mouth rippling out from there. Bernie Sanders did the same.
The idea of money making the difference may make more sense when there really is very little difference between candidates, but in the case of two really different options, money and ads do not matter.

2. The importance of the "ground game" is over rated. "Studies" supposedly show that people who have been contacted by volunteers in their community can be persuaded to vote for the candidate and can be cajoled into going to vote on election day. Having gone door to door, I thought most people considered us canvassers an annoyance, and those who were happy to see us were already going to vote for our candidate. HRC had computers tracking our visits and there will be computers showing how many of those we visited voted. What those computers cannot tell us is whether or not they would have voted anyway or who they actually voted for. This time around, many Democrats we assumed would vote for HRC may have wound up voting for Trump. And some of those we "convinced" to vote for HRC may have changed their minds back to Trump after talking with their neighbors.
Trump said if he lost he would have wasted his time. I think we canvassers wasted our own time, although it did make us feel we were trying.

3. We need better ways of knowing what voters are thinking and doing.
Clearly, there are structural problems with polling now.  Polls are all about statistics and methodology and when you cannot get a representative group to sample, your poll is meaningless. The reason we believe polls even though we no longer answer our own phones is Nate Silver has been right in the past. We judge polls on past performance rather than on knowing how they are done and seeing the obvious flaws because they have successfully predicted outcomes in the past. Now we can scrap that method.
In one sense, what the polls showed us is the much of what we see on TV and accept because it is said authoritatively is about as reliable as the authoritative statements we saw Moody's and other institutions making in "The Big Short." They had all the trappings of science and technology and they had no idea what they were doing.

Michael More had his finger on the pulse of his friends in the Rust Belt and he knew from anecdotes and from talking to a small number of people what was going to happen and he predicted Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania specifically because he was out there talking face to face. The age of being able to sample impersonally by plugging big data into computers should come to a close. Garbage in; Garbage out.

4. Seeing new leadership in the Democratic Party:
 I came to actually admire and respect Hillary Clinton through all this, and I really feel sorry for her because she really wanted to be President, worked hard to prepare for it was denied by a buffoon.
But she was like the aging athlete, the Brett Farve, the Babe Ruth who had a brilliant career but could just no longer bring her team the championship. Her time had past, but she didn't know it.
But the truth is, she could not be the agent of change which the Rust Belt and other parts of neglected America have demanded. She would have changed things gradually. But for many, gradual is not good enough, especially if your health care premiums are skyrocketing.
She was the choice of Debbie Wasserman Schultz and all the other party old line who wanted incremental change where Bernie Sanders wanted a revolution. Bernie, like Michael Moore, knew what Trump knew and what these unseen, un named party bosses could not see, would not believe.