The Bizarre and Manipulative Crusade by Centrist NYT Columnists to Persuade Clinton to Adopt the Republican Fiscal and Regulatory Agenda – [with update]
All the experts tell us not to pay too much attention to polls for another week or two. Still, it does look as if Hillary Clinton got a big bounce from her convention, swamping her opponent’s bounce a week earlier. Better still, from the Democrats’ point of view, the swing in the polls appears to be doing what some of us thought it might: sending Donald Trump into a derp spiral, in which his ugly nonsense gets even uglier and more nonsensical as his electoral prospects sink.
As a result, we’re finally seeing some prominent Republicans not just refusing to endorse Mr. Trump, but actually declaring their support for Mrs. Clinton. So how should she respond?
The obvious answer, you might think, is that she should keep doing what she is doing — emphasizing how unfit her rival is for office, letting her allies point out her own qualifications and continuing to advocate a moderately center-left policy agenda that is largely a continuation of President Obama’s.
But at least some commentators are calling on her to do something very different — to make a right turn, moving the Democratic agenda toward the preferences of those fleeing the sinking Republican ship. The idea, I guess, is to offer to create an American version of a European-style grand coalition of the center-left and the center-right.
I don’t think there’s much prospect that Mrs. Clinton will actually do that. But if by any chance she and those around her are tempted to take this recommendation seriously: Don’t.
— No Right Turn, Paul Krugman, New York Times, Aug. 5*
Last Wednesday Thomas Friedman used his NYT weekly column to do what he … well … does: Sing the gospel of supply-side economics and deregulation. Or, more precisely, trash as Commie-light—er, “anti-entrepreneurial” and therefore “anti-growth”—the type of fiscal and regulatory policies that fueled the economy during the era when his father-in-law and uncles-in-law were building their multibillion-dollar shopping mall empire.
His in-laws bucked the tide of that economic era, see, and somehow managed to get the business loans they needed from banks in their local area of eastern Iowa despite that dastardly, Commie-inspired Glass-Steagall abomination. And there turned out to be customers—lots of them!—with enough disposable income to buy even some things they didn’t really need at the local mall, notwithstanding those jobs-killing corporate and individual tax rates that rival—gasp—those of today’s poverty-stricken northern European countries.
Those countries’ economies don’t produce jobs, Friedman says, because their fiscal and regulatory policies are anti-entrepreneurial. And it’s business startups that produce jobs, for heaven’s sake! And supply-side fiscal and deregulatory policies are entrepreneurial and produce jobs! Like they did in the G.W. Bush administration!
Why didn’t Ike, JFK and LBJ think of that?!? And aren’t the Germans supposed to be good in math?!
Friedman had implored Michael Bloomberg to run for president this year—something about there being a Third Way—but Bloomberg declined. And now that Friedman has to choose between only two ways, and has chosen Clinton, he wants her to win.
Thus his column last week in which he generously advises her that she could knock Trump out—the column is titled “How Clinton Could Knock Trump Out”—if she would just ditch that Bernie Sanders-inspired Commie party platform and adopt Paul Ryan’s. I mean, adopt a center-right, business-Republican platform.
Seriously. He says that. But he segues into it this way:
Mind you, I hope Trump remains in his total whack-job mode, because it distracted attention from the latest economic news — that was perfectly set up for Trump to take political advantage of — that the economy grew an anemic 1.2 percent in the second quarter, and growth in the first quarter was revised downward. That economic news was teed up for Trump, the self-styled job-creator, and he shanked it deep into the woods, for it never to be heard from again.
Trump has gone amazingly far without having done an ounce of homework in preparation for the presidency, relying instead on feeding tweets to an anxious G.O.P. base. His candidacy should be over by now. But it isn’t.
It scares me that people are so fed up with elites, so hate and mistrust Clinton and are so worried about the future — jobs, globalization and terrorism — that a bare majority could still fall for this self-infatuated carnival barker if he exhibited half a political brain.
And that leads to my second reason for pushing Clinton to inject some capitalism into her economic plan: The coalition she could lead. If there is one thing that is not going to revive growth right now, it is an antitrade, regulatory heavy, socialist-lite agenda the Democratic Party has drifted to under the sway of Bernie Sanders. Socialism is the greatest system ever invented for making people equally poor. Capitalism makes people unequally rich, but I would much rather grow our pie bigger and faster and better than re-divide a shrinking one.
There are a lot of center-right, business Republicans today feeling orphaned by Trump. They can’t vote for him — but a lot of them still claim they can’t bring themselves to vote for Hillary, either. Clinton should be reaching out to them with a real pro-growth, startup, deregulation, entrepreneurship agenda and give them a positive reason to vote for her.
It makes sense politically: Take Trump on at his self-proclaimed strength. And it makes sense economically: If Clinton wins, she will need to get stuff done, not just give stuff away.
I have no idea what socialism has to do with antitrade policy. With the single exception of the antitrade-agreement plank, the Sanders-pushed parts of the platform are Germany-lite, Scandinavia-lite, Holland-lite. But the antitrade policy is not. The strong pro-labor regulatory nature of Germany’s economy, and its strong social safety net, underlie that country’s significant trade surpluses and therefore its pro-trade laws. They work in tandem, not at cross-purposes, as our policies do.
In any event, the Dem platform’s fiscal and regulatory policies are independent of the antitrade plank.
That Friedman is advocating a brazenly elitist fiscal and regulatory platform as the elixir by which the Democratic nominee could ensure her defeat of the faux economic populist in an election cycle whose very essence is, by this pundit’s own acknowledgment, driven by anti-elitist sentiment—and is using as his pretext that the last quarter’s growth was only 1.2%—suggests a presumption by him that Clinton is awfully easily confused.
Or it would if he himself weren’t so confused.
I read Friedman’s column on Thursday, the day after it was published, and reflexively wanted to deconstruct it sarcastically here in a post titled “Thomas Friedman Thinks Northern Europe’s People Are Equally Poor.” Or, “Thomas Friedman Finally Finds His Long-Sought Third Way: Convince Clinton to Adopt the Center-Right, Business Republicans Orphaned by Trump. Adoption Fees Will Be Waived.”
But it seemed hardly worth the time, and I didn’t bother. Friedman is so long past his sell-by date as a pundit—what brung him to the dance was his expertise on a Middle East whose central tenets existed for decades but mostly no longer do, and he has as much expertise on domestic fiscal and regulatory policy, economic history, and national politics, as my Democratic-voting cat has; she votes the way I tell her to—that I doubted that anyone who actually read that column would do anything but laugh at it.
But I was wrong. Krugman, to his tremendous credit, did something more than laugh at it. He devoted his column last Friday to angrily and devastatingly deconstructing it. First, the economic disinformation embedded in the column, and then the audacious political jujitsu by which Friedman casually presumes that the public is clamoring for more supply-side economics and deregulation of business, including—especially, he suggests—the finance industry.
Glass-Steagall was so effective for all those decades not just in protecting against a banking collapse but also because, although not an amendment to the Sherman Antitrust Act, it indeed effectively kept the finance industry decentralized and it curtailed that industry’s economic and political power. Friedman’s in-laws could get a business loan from a local bank in Cedar Rapids in the 1950s, on decent borrowing terms, because the local bank wasn’t competing with Chase Manhattan—which in turn was leaving the roulette tables to Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley.
It is the anti-regulation zealots who are anti-growth. An awful lot of people who shopped at Friedman’s in-laws’ malls nationwide could do so courtesy of active enforcement of the National Labor Relations Act and the Sherman Antitrust Act—and the protections of Glass-Steagall. The public—or at least most of it—is not clamoring for more supply-side economics and deregulation of business, including—especially—of the finance industry. But Friedman thinks this because he thinks supply-side economics and deregulation of business, including the finance industry is synonymous with growth:
I get that [Clinton] had to lean toward Sanders and his voters to win the nomination; their concerns with fairness and inequality are honorable. But those concerns can be addressed only with economic growth; the rising anti-immigration sentiments in the country can be defused only with economic growth; the general anxiety feeding Trumpism can be eased only with economic growth.
Sanders had no plan whatsoever for growth. Trump doesn’t, either, but he can fake it. It’s time that Hillary pivoted. The country today doesn’t need the first female president. It needs the first president in a long time who can govern with a center-left, center-right coalition, and actually end the gridlock on fiscal policy in a smart way.
If Trump continues to melt down into a puddle of bile, more and more Republicans will be up for grabs. With the right pro-growth economic policies, Clinton would have an opening to not only enlist them to help her win, but to build a governing coalition for the morning after.
Yup. Think of all those Republicans whose votes will be there for the grabbing if Clinton renounces the party platform she agreed to and bragged in her nomination acceptance speech that it’s the most progressive platform ever, thus courting the exponentially greater loss of support among Sanders supporters than the supporters she’d gain among Republicans. Sounds like a plan! Making it a zero-sum game should work great for Clinton!
The public and Sanders both are aware, although Friedman is not, that virtually all income and wealth gains in the last 15 years has gone to the top percent of the economic scale. Sanders had plans to address this, and some it is in the party platform. Clinton, too, had plans to address this, and those plans are in the platform. Their plans would increase growth via the demand side, but Friedman isn’t aware of demand-side growth policy, so it doesn’t count. Neither Sanders’ nor Clinton’s contributions to the platform entail supply-side economics or deregulation, so Friedman thinks Sanders didn’t have a plan and Clinton’s should be junked in favor of the Heritage Foundation platform.
As Krugman points out, the public is more observant than Friedman is. Here’s the denouement of Krugman’s takedown of Friedman:
So now the strategy that rightists had used to sell policies that were neither popular nor successful has blown up in their faces. And the Democratic response should be to adopt some of those policies? Say what?
Also, I can’t help but notice a curious pattern in the recommendations of some self-proclaimed centrists. When Republicans were in the ascendant, centrists urged Democrats to adapt by moving right. Now that Republicans are in trouble, with some feeling that they have no choice except to vote Democratic, these same centrists are urging Democrats to … adapt by moving right. Funny how that works.
Back to the main theme: Grand coalitions do sometimes have a place in politics, as a response to crises that are neither party’s fault — external threats to national security, economic disaster. But that’s not what is happening here. Trumpism is basically a creation of the modern conservative movement, which used coded appeals to prejudice to make political gains, then found itself unable to rein in a candidate who skipped the coding. If some conservatives find this too much and bolt the party, good for them, and they should be welcomed into the coalition of the sane. But they can’t expect policy concessions in return. When Dr. Frankenstein finally realizes that he has created a monster, he doesn’t get a reward. Mrs. Clinton and her party should stay the course.
I couldn’t agree more. And, presciently, did. But I’m not a NYT columnist.
Frank Bruni is, and in his Times column today advises Clinton, as Friedman does, to simply renege on her pledge to the Sanders supporters that she is committed to joining with Sanders and other congressional progressives to try to enact the platform planks—those originating with her and those reflecting his proposals. And that she believes in them.
Bruni’s argument overlaps with Friedman’s in its forward-looking, left-right governing-coalition thing, but seems more interested in seeing actual centrism outcomes than in rightwing fiscal and regulatory policies as Friedman wants to see. But his theme is even stranger than Friedman’s.
Unlike Friedman, who thinks Clinton risks losing if she doesn’t become Paul Ryan, Bruni is mesmerized by the fact that Clinton now appears to have a comfortable enough lead in the polls to allow her to—you guessed it—renounce her commitment to Sanders-induced platform planks.
This, he proffers, would help her lower her high personal negatives—apparently on the assumption that her negatives have something to do with the Sanders-induced platform planks. Which would be a good bet if, say, Sanders’ negatives were high. But they’re not, so Clinton’s high negatives probably aren’t related to that economic-progressive platform after all. Although, who knows, right?
Bruni goes on to advise Clinton not to campaign for or with Democratic Senate candidates who are trying to unseat Republican incumbents. After all, he says, she will need to work with Republicans to pass legislation, and even if the incumbent Republicans were defeated and so won’t be around to not cooperate, as payback, Clinton’s having campaigned against their former colleagues will cause the remaining Republicans to not cooperate, as payback.
The bottom line is that progressives aren’t invited to the party. Either party. They need not apply. They’re fine as decoration, but only as decoration. The Republican legislative agenda is the only option. And always will be.
Heads, they win. Tails, we lose. Because this is what the public—which is now in an economic-populist and anti-elitist posture—wants. Or doesn’t want. It doesn’t matter. It’s all the same to the pundits and pols. To the elitists, that is.
Sounds like a conflict of interest there. But, whatever.
*Date corrected. Krugman’s column was published on Aug. 5, not Aug. 6. 8/8 at 10:09 a.m.
____
UPDATE: Guess I’m not the only one who reacted with incredulity to Friedman’s column:
Thomas Friedman’s economic illiteracy and sycophancy for Wall Street “elites” have never been in doubt, but he has (unknowingly) plumbed new depths in his columns advising Hillary Clinton to remake the Democratic Party in Bill’s image – by embracing Wall Street’s dream of deregulation. Friedman has literally learned nothing from the three great epidemics of accounting control fraud (“liar’s” loans, inflated appraisals, and fraudulent resale of these fraudulently originated mortgages) that drove the financial crisis and the Great Recession.
In other columns in this series on Friedman’s columns advising Hillary on moving the Democratic Party well to the right of the Republican Party on economic issues, I show that Friedman has literally learned nothing from the successes of stimulus, education, and infrastructure, the horrific failures of austerity and deregulation, or his repeated distortion of “capitalism” and “socialism.”. Friedman gives no indication that he realizes that (1) his economic dogmas were all falsified by our recurrent financial crises and (2) the policies implemented on the basis of those dogmas proved disastrous.
Friedman advises Hillary to embrace Wall Street elites and adopt the deregulatory, desupervisory, and de facto decriminalization (the three “de’s”) policies that Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush implemented. The three de’s have created the “criminogenic environments” that led to the epidemics of accounting control fraud that drove the savings and loan debacle, the Enron-era accounting control fraud scandals, and the most recent crisis. Friedman urges Hillary to use Bill as her model and embrace elite bankers and financial deregulation because, what could go wrong?
In his column entitled How Clinton Could Knock Trump Out, Friedman bemoans “the anti-bank sentiment of the Democratic Party.” …
— Bill Black: Thomas Friedman’s Big Idea for Hillary – Embrace Wall Street and Deregulation, Naked Capitalism, Posted on August 8, 2016 by Yves Smith
Added 8/8 at 6:43 p.m.
It ought to be clear by now I’m hardly a fan of Hillary, but I’m going to offer her some free advice anyhow.
I no longer even attempt to read Krugman because of his hatchet jobs on Sanders, and I couldn’t find out enough about Bruni to form an opinion. It seems to me Bruni puts a whole lot of words on the paper without really saying anything. But for the final guy:
*** Whatever Thomas Friedman suggests, ignore it. ***
Even better, do the opposite.
That’s my advice to Hillary. Pissing off Sanders people even more seems suicidal to me. It’s true they’re not going to vote for Trump, but they can very easily throw their vote to the Greens – or Libertarians.
The Clinton camp also has the option of holding on to enough of the Bernie bloc, and drawing in a significant number of Republicans and Independents, by doing what the Obama team did. This being the ploy of using Lincoln’s strategy of building a coalition cabinet made up of opposing members who come from each party. Thus, those who are Bernie followers can be appeased with talk about racial equality and women’s rights issues, while the republicans can be lured in by coded references to maintaining the status quo in regards to economic issues.
All of this sold as ‘pragmatic’, of course.
Thanks Ann Landers, Dear Abby, or Dear Prudence. This is little more than gossip. You are far better than this. I would have hoped you would concentrate on legal issues rather than gossip.
You are attracting those who invest in scatology.
I talked about antitrust law! I talked about antitrust law! Did I not talk about antitrust law?!
I’m obsessed with antitrust law. I talk about it whenever I have a chance; that is, whenever it’s appropos of something more general that’s relevant to political or economic stuff in the news.
So stop this. I command you to stop this. Right now.
PS: Enforcement of antitrust law–the Sherman Act and others such as, well, Glass-Steagall, which of course not longer exists, so it can’t be enforced–get wayyyy too little attention from Dem pols. Sanders did talk about it during his campaign, and of course a very big reason why he and Warren want the reinstatement of Glass-Steagall is exactly because of the antitrust impact it would have.
It’s really, really important.
Growth for whom? Yes, one of the main results of Reaganomics has been fantastic growth – for the tiniest sliver of the citizenry at the top. It turns out a rising tide does not lift boats: if you are a yacht-owner, you can now afford a second; if you are a row-boater, you have been swamped and thrown into the sea at the mercy of the tides. CEOs in this country now make 276 times what the typical worker makes. Marissa Meyers of Yahoo failed miserably, but walks away with a severance package – a golden parachute – of @$120 million; your typical worker gets fired and walks away with unemployment insurance – one of those “socialist,” “left-leaning” programs Friedman disparages and “Conservatives” (who are actually reactionaries) want to eliminate.
It turns out that the yacht-owners weren’t interested at all in growth of the regular economy but in financializing the economy, with the result that now the 12 richest Americans have more wealth than the bottom 50% — great for them, ruinous for democracy (witness the rebellions of the middle- and working-classes this year).
Glass-Steagall was intended to insulate regular folks from Wall Street speculators. It was tremendously successful – from 1934 to 2008, there were recessions but not the full-blown economic depressions that are a common occurrence in American history. Repeal Glass-Steagall and 9 years later the global financial system is on the brink of collapse. It was, among other things, the absence of regulation, which Friedman disparages as an impediment to growth, that led to the near-depression.
Friedman is a smart guy, which is why I am always stunned to see these kinds of arguments from him and others. It turns out that ideology trumps intelligence.
Yes, exactly. To everything you say–except that Friedman’s a smart guy. He was, and I think still is, a good analyst of Middle Eastern intricacies–sort of a savant on that–but is otherwise really a dolt.
But I do want to point out a couple of things about Marissa Mayer. First, she herself is very, very liberal–so kudos to her.
But also, Yahoo itself isn’t a great example of the non-trickle-down mega-compensation-and-golden-parachutes for CEOs and the other top brass, because Yahoo employees across the board–the office assistants as well as the rank-and-file coders–have been very well compensated. That is true of most of the major Silicon Valley and other purely tech firms that have been around for a while.
Mayer did work her heart out to try turn Yahoo around–to try to save it as an independent company. She’s not someone who acted like a “turnaround” venture capitalist, milking the company for all she could while deliberately destroying it.
Run,
I have to tell you that I disagree with you completely. Except for the somewhat sarcastic comments about Friedman’s background, I don’t see how you can say it was gossipy, especially when the piece quotes extensively from establishment columnists engaged in intellectual debates about the central issue of our time. Beverly’s first thought was to sarcastically deconstruct the columns; she avoided doing so and instead engaged in a serious-minded deconstruction of them.
If her article has invited scatologists to comment, it is only because scatology is foremost in their minds.
Thank you. I don’t get run’s critique. It’s ridiculous.
Discussing the writings of Friedman and Bruni is scatology.
I cannot imagine why anyone would read them, but discussing them is worse.
I rarely read Friedman-I really can’t stand him–but of course I clicked that column with THAT title. What bothered me so much about that column was that it made clear misstatements of fact. One of my pet peeves is opinion writers make false statements of fact–and their editors allowing it to pass.
I don’t mean inadvertent errors; I mean stuff like Friedman’s representation about the type of economy that northern European countries have–and his baldly false statement that these are poor countries.
That’s not a matter of opinion; it’s just overtly false fact. Yet his editors allowed it because it was in an opinion piece. They should not have.
Bruni’s piece, on the other hand, was purely opinion; it did not misrepresent fact. I like Bruni enough to read most of his columns, and think he occasionally has a really good one.
I think he had a conscious or subconscious personal (not improper, but personal) motive in writing that column the way he did. He’s close with his siblings and father, writes about that from time to time, and has mentioned that his father and one or two of his siblings are Republicans. He himself is, I guess, a Dem-leaning independent.
A few weeks ago he wrote a column mentioning the strain this election is having on his relationship with a couple of his family members–I’m guessing, one of his two brothers; he also has a sister. He wrote that every time he writes a negative column about Trump, this sibling sends him an angry, accusatory email complaining about it. He said he had avoided asking, outright, whether the sibling actually planned to vote for Trump, but then in response to the latest email did say: “Are you ACTUALLY going to VOTE for him???”
This election has really strained a lot of friendships and family relationships, and several pundits–Krugman, Dahlia Lithwick of Slate, to name two others–have written about it. And I know that it has strained a couple of my own relationships. So I sympathize with Bruni. But I don’t think he should have written what he wrote, because his premise–his advice–was ridiculous and pretty offensive to progressives in that it suggested that we’re permanently second-class citizens.
I would suggest that the NY Times is a mine field of conflicting ideologies and that it is difficult to determine at any point what the senior editorial management is seeking to accomplish with so many self contradictory inclusions. Some come under the guise of news reporting, both analytic and objective event description. Others are purely news analysis on both a macro and micro scale. The most suspect are articles coming from those writing about macro-economic process. People like T. Friedman, P. Krugman, D. Brooks (though less so recently) and Neil Irwin fall into this group. Some are more skilled than others at obscuring the fallibilities of their articles and the ideological slants they present. I include Irwin for this beauty of an obscure look at modest GDP growth over time, http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/07/upshot/were-in-a-low-growth-world-how-did-we-get-here.html?ref=business&_r=0. The article is one of several Irwin has written recently for the Times. To put it briefly he seems to reduce the argument concerning low growth to a which is it comparison, reduced demand vs. reduced supply. Huh?? Worse yet Irwin provides this as part of his explanation,
“Mr. Summers, in an interview, frames it as an inversion of “Say’s Law,” the notion that supply creates its own demand: that economywide, people doing the work to create goods and services results in their having the income to then buy those goods and services. In this case, rather, as he has often put it: “Lack of demand creates lack of supply.””
This is not to say that the NY Times does no good economic reporting. As noted above, its a mine field of good and ridiculous. Sometimes the latter seems to out pace the former. Sorkin is pretty good, but he usually sticks to a circumspect topic. So too G. Morgenson. For a real stand out piece, appearing in today’s edition, the Times has finally discovered that there is something peculiar in the way the so called “think tank” industry operates. See, http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/08/us/politics/think-tanks-research-and-corporate-lobbying.html?ref=business.
For example, “Think tank executives reject any suggestion that they are tools of corporate influence campaigns and say they are simply teaming up with donors that have similar goals, like helping cities with economic development.”
“We do not compromise our integrity,” said Martin S. Indyk, Brookings’s executive vice president. “We maintain our core values of quality, independence, as well as impact.”” No there is no quid pro quo, I think, but there is a “relationship.” Yes, a relationship that steers all that comes before it.
The NY Times is like a camouflaged journal. It works hard at keeping its overall editorial intent hidden from clear sight. That can look and sound like a balanced presentation of the news. However, the good work of some of their staff does not excuse the mediocrity and bias of the likes of Friedman. Douthat and Brooks are too light weight to include.
Beverly Mann,
I’m sure you recognize that I was using Mayer as an example of “Growth for whom?”
I didn’t include this in my comment, but as further evidence of pampered CEOs vs. brutalized everyday folks, Yahoo was faced with the choice of either firing her outright, in which case she would have cashed in her stock options for $36 million, or not firing her and giving her the golden parachute. The Yahoo Board (a delicious juxtaposition if ever there was one) instead chose the golden parachute – a possibility no member of the middle- or working-class could ever even imagine possible.
Cheers…
Sounds to my like the Yahoo board should have just let her cash in her stock options and had the company immediately buy them back. But I’m guessing that they were trying to avoid a lawsuit about golden parachute compensation contained in her hiring contract.
Yeah, sure, I got your point about the ludicrous level of CEO and other top executive compensation and golden parachutes. Major Silicon Valley tech companies, though, at least don’t do what most other companies do, though: completely screw their non-executive-suite employees on compensation and benefits, which has been a hallmark of the American economy since the, um, Reagan Revolution.
Bev, I can’t believe you think Friedman is some sort of savant on mid-eastern intricacies. He’s the guy who wholeheartedly supported the 2003 invasion of Iraq arguing that the establishment of a democratic state in the middle east would somehow change the region for the better. He kept saying the next six months would tell the tale and he said it so often that commentators began referring to a “Friedman” as a unit of time.
I know. I didn’t mean it that way, though. I just meant that he knows a lot about the Middle East–the different clans, the backgrounds of the ruling families, the religious factions in Syria, Iraq and Iran. I was just thinking about his detailed knowledge of the area, NOT his opinions. I should have made that clear.
Yes, he was a huge cheerleader for Iraqi regime change via U.S. invasion. That didn’t work out so well. And it was pretty foreseeable that it was a loopy idea. But it was clear that it was just his opinion. His actual reporting on the area was accurate, I believe.
Jack:
Where is doodahman when you need him?
:). Ah, memories.
Done
“mid eastern” not “mid western”. It would be nice if this site had an edit function.
Jack:
I am the edit function. done
His savantness is very, very narrow, as I just explained in my response to your main comment. And his sainthood is nonexistent. Sorry, spell check.
Clinton wants to win her advisers know swing right and there could be a repeat of 2010, which would equal a huge loss to numerous Democratic party members. See there are a lot of fickle voters out there.
Bev,
I have a confirmed belief that anyone in the United States of America over the age of 35(like Bruni) who is registered as an independent is among the most stupid people in the world.
They cannot read, or have not read, the Constitution.
They cannot read, or have not read, the history of the United States of America.
They are too stupid to pay attention to in the area of politics, as they lack the simple ability to add 1+1.
Bernie Sanders fit this to a tee until last year. He finally woke up. I hope he stays awake.
Meanwhile, if he had woken up in 2006, we would be talking about Sanders versus Trump.
People pay a high price for abject stupidity. I just wish I did not have to pay the same price they do.