Clintons

Nine percent

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I’ve seen this article from the New York Times going around on Facebook and Twitter. The premise, that the two major party nominees were selected by just 9% of the American population, is true. And in a year where people are shaking their heads at the deeply unpleasant candidates we’re left to choose from, it answers a common question: how did we get here?

But when you think about it, this is basically true every year. Admittedly, Trump won with a smaller percent of the Republican primary vote than previous nominees, and Clinton had a vigorous challenger as well, but even in a more settled year, that would increase the percentage of primary voters who selected the nominees only slightly. Ten, maybe eleven percent. Would that make you feel that much better?

Even if both candidates got 100% of their respective primaries’ votes, that would mean that 14% of the populace would have selected them. In practice, it would have been even fewer people, since uncontested primaries have low turnout. This year, Clinton got 16 million votes out of 30 million cast in the Democratic primaries. In 2012, President Obama had no serious primary opposition, so he got nearly 89% of the vote, but in a low-turnout election that only added up to a little over 6 million votes.

Add that to Romney’s vote total in the Republican primaries (10 million out of 19 million cast) and we get 16 million people selecting the nominees. That’s 4.9% of the American population. Even if Obama had fought a contested primary and received as many votes as Romney, that raises the total to 20 million–just over 6%. Does that make Romney’s and Obama’s nominations somehow less representative of the people’s will? Of course not.

There are many problems with the primary process, but this is not one of them. The barriers to entry are ridiculously low. In open primary states, you just have to register to vote. In closed primary states, you have to register to vote with a party. Both of these are free, and voting takes just a few minutes of one day. Caucuses take a little longer–a couple of hours, but still a minor commitment for someone who cares about the direction the country takes in the next four years.

The Times article is nicely presented and has their usual great graphics. But as an attempt to point out a legitimate problem in the electoral process, it falls short.

Unite or Perish

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Anti-Trump Republicans’ efforts to halt the party’s slide into Trumpism failed today in Cleveland as the Republican National Convention nominated Donald J. Trump for President. The defeat, the latest of many for the NeverTrump coalition, will not change the disposition of many in that group–never means never–but it does call into question what the next steps should be. NeverTrumpers must examine the situation and their own consciences and decide the course from here. Do they search among third parties and write-in candidates for the perfect person on whom to waste their protest vote, or will they unite and create a chance–even a small one–of winning enough electoral votes to throw the election into the House of Representatives. In short: do they want to make a point, or do they want to have a chance at actually winning?

There have been efforts, mostly futile, to get a conservative independent on the ballot, but in several states the deadlines for getting on the ballot have already passed. And the options are few. Mitt Romney is out. Tom Coburn is out. Even David French is out. There are rumors of a secret candidate, but as time passes they become harder to credit. If we want to have the chance of winning even one state’s electoral votes, disenfranchised conservatives must unite our efforts on some candidate who is actually on ballots nationwide.

I would say the choices are unappealing, but they’re actually better than what the major parties are putting up this year. So let’s look at the three “major” minor parties. The Libertarians are the biggest of them, and this year have nominated two credible ex-Republican former governors in Gary Johnson and Bill Weld. You may know some Libertarians who talk about privatizing roads and what not, but these guys ain’t them: they’re serious politicians with solid principles and a history of actually getting things done in state government. That’s more than can be said of Trump or Clinton.

The Green Party hasn’t nominated anyone yet, but look like to put up Jill Stein, who ran last time around. The idea of conservatives finding a home in the Green Party, a collection of people too socialistic to be Democrats, is unlikely. Nothing Stein has said convinces me otherwise.

The wild card here is the Constitution Party. Everything I knew about them can be summed up in this line from the party’s Wikipedia entry: “The party believes that the United States is a Christian state founded on the basis of the Bible…” Yeah, that’s a strange quirk in a party named after the Constitution. That said, their current nominee, Darrell Castle, doesn’t sound half-bad. In this interview, Castle says he’s more libertarian than the Libertarian nominees, calling, for example, for an end to the drug war. He’s also solidly pro-life, the only such candidate in the race (although, as I noted here, Johnson’s legal position on abortion is effectively more pro-life than Clinton’s or Trump’s.) Then again, he also wants to “[w]ithdraw from the United Nations, NATO, TPP, Nafta, Cafta, Gatt, WTO, etc.,” making him more isolationist than the Libertarians, too.

For now, I think that the Libertarians offer the best home for conservatives. But, having become unmoored from one party already this year, I’m not ready to shack up with another just yet.

The Debate Nobody Watched

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There has been a strange divide between the two major parties this year. The Republicans have seen record numbers watch their primary debates, while the Democrats have tried their best to make sure no one witnesses theirs. Even Vox, the notorious apologists for the Democrats in general and the Clintons in particular, admits that scheduling a debate in Iowa on a Saturday night when Iowa football is on is sketchy. But it’s not the result of bad planning, it’s the result of a bad candidate, Hillary Clinton, and the party machine’s desire to protect her from scrutiny. And it is lost on no one that Clinton’s own party thinks the best way to help her win is to never let anyone see her.

This debate was on CBS, and moderated by John Dickerson, to general acclaim:

The debate began with opening statements. In hers, Clinton sought once more to assure the American people that she is not a robot:

The people remain skeptical:

Once the debates started, the questions naturally turned to the ISIS murders in Paris and the wider question of war on Islamic fundamentalist terror. Clinton tried to sound tough, tougher than President Obama, just as she did when she ran against him in 2008:

Bernie Sanders turned, as all old Bolshies do, to the past, highlighting the various misdeeds of the nation he seeks to lead:

Martin O’Malley said some things:

Generally, the output was underwhelming:

The candidates next turned to their tax plans, which no one believed:

They talked about reform of the financial industry, which let to the first interesting question of the night: is Hillary Clinton owned by Wall Street? Sanders says yes:

Clinton offered an unusual counterargument: 9/11?

O’Malley joined Sanders’s criticism, then touted his his own bona fides:

Sanders and O’Malley called for the forward-thinking innovation of re-enacting laws from 1933:

This was difficult for Clinton to agree with, since her husband had worked to repeal the act in question in 1999. Plus, you know, she’s owned by Wall Street:

In closing, the candidates reminded the viewer of their strengths.

Sanders called for more “free” stuff:

Clinton emphasized her age and her proximity to important things:

O’Malley said something, but even he wasn’t paying attention:

There was not much said here, and not many people watched it. The only real take-away was in the most ridiculous item of the night:

Fortunately, Democrats will have a chance to revisit the issue in their next two debates, to be held on the Saturday before Christmas and on a Sunday in January, opposite an NFL playoff game.

Clinton and the banks

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Yesterday, Hillary Clinton appeared on the Late Show with Steven Colbert, hoping to highlight that fun-loving side of her personality we are constantly assured actually exists.

Clinton was asked about the role of government in protecting the banking industry from financial crises (discussion begins at 26:08). Focusing on the bailouts that polarized the country in 2008, the host asked: “If you’re president and the banks are failing, do we let them fail?” Without hesitation, Clinton responded emphatically: “Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.”

She didn’t stop there. Clinton promised a new tax on banks (a “risk fee”) and stricter enforcement of the Volcker Rule, which separates banks’ speculative activities from their retail banking.

These are grand promises sure to inspire her fans on the far left. But will she follow through? Unlike most candidates, we need not take Clinton at her word about bank bailouts. We have evidence: in 2008, the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act, authorizing the government bailout that became known as the Troubled Asset Relief Program, came before the Senate. It passed the Senate by a vote of 74 to 25. Did the Senator from New York side with her Wall Street backers?

The answer will not surprise you: she did. Along with then-Senator Barack Obama, Clinton voted to authorize the bailout. Speaking on behalf of the bill, Clinton was enthusiastic in her endorsement of government action:

This is a sink or swim moment for our country. We cannot merely catch our breath. We must swim for the shores and we must do so together…. There is so much work to be done in America, so many investments that make us richer and stronger and safer and smarter that will enable us to look in the eyes of our children and grandchildren and tell them we are leaving our country in as good, in fact, better shape than when we found it.

That is quite an endorsement for a bill that did the exact thing she now inveighs against. Is this more Clintonian mendacity, or has she truly had a change of heart and embraced the Occupy Wall Street mindset? Again, we need not speculate. Let’s look at the evidence in her list of campaign donors. Who’s on the list? Morgan Stanley. J.P. Morgan Chase. Bank of America.

Either these bankers decided to enable a candidate who promises to leave them high and dry, or they know that this is all just hot air. I’ll bet on the latter.

Benghazi and Madison

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I was too busy at work to watch any of Mrs. Clinton’s testimony at the Benghazi hearings yesterday, so I did the next best thing and checked out Twitter periodically to see the partisans on both sides of the media defend their standard-bearer. I obviously fall on one side of that line, but the willful blindness of the reporters in the Clinton camp was more difficult to take than usual.

Most of the press support her party in the upcoming elections, and that’s neither surprising nor likely to change, but pretending not to understand the problem here, and pretending to be shocked at the partisanship of the hearings is absurd. Some of us have memories that predate January 2009, and we recall that Congress has always, always had partisan hearings. It’s the whole nature of check and balances.

Part of the genius of our system of government is that it is designed to be carried out by self-interested people and factions. Our founding fathers did not delude themselves into thinking that only the purest of men would lead the nation; to the contrary, they knew that people craved power, and they set up a Constitution that would use that desire to help us govern.

A Congress jealous of the executive’s strength is going to use its powers, including the power of investigation, to limit that executive. They will do this not because they are paragons of virtue, but because they want that power for themselves. And it works! Congresses investigate presidential wrongdoing. Is it political? Yes! And that’s a good thing! Politics is the way a free people governs itself.

James Madison put it best in Federalist 51:

If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.

Mankind is imperfect and antagonistic, but in their mutual antagonism, the branches of government check each others abuses and preserve the people’s liberty. That’s what we saw today, and that’s what we’ll see in the next administration, and the one after that, and the one after that. Today, whether anyone will admit it or not, the system worked.

Bye bye Biden

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Yesterday, Joe Biden announced that he would not seek the Presidency, effectively ceding the field to Hillary Clinton. I had planned to write up my thoughts on each of the contenders, but we’ve already lost two Republicans and two Democrats. What’s worse is they were some of the better candidates out there. I should write up my thoughts on Chafee before it’s too late.

Webb and Biden were my two favorite Democrats, although that’s not saying much. Webb I liked because he is, in many ways, more of a Republican than a Democrat. Biden was the best of the real Dems, to me, because he seemed likable and not corrupt, even if he’s been wrong on most of the issues other than his support for Amtrak. But let’s be honest: I would almost certainly never have voted for him.

What excited me about a Biden candidacy, beyond an indecent schadenfreude in seeing her1 discomfited, was the thought that if he were to get in, it would have to mean that he knew something was coming down for her. Something bad. Something disqualifying.

I figured that Biden jumping in, against his better judgement, would have meant that he knew Clinton would be indicted for her crimes and that the Democrats would need some suave Trans Am enthusiast to save them from Sanders and his legions of Wobblies. Now that Biden’s out, the same thought process makes me fear that he knows the fix is in, which leaves him with no shot.

There’s still a chance that President Obama’s Justice Department will indict a former member of his cabinet, but that chance is a little smaller today.

  1. Yes, like Shelob to the Orcs of Mordor, there is only one her on this blog. ↩