Get Used to Donald Trump

(Wrongo will be on the road until 2/27. This is the last post until we resume with Sunday Cartoons on 2/28)

Now that Donald Trump has swept Nevada, it’s time to acknowledge that he is the likely GOP nominee, and Republicans are lining up to accept him into the fold. In fact, the GOP House Majority Leader, Kevin McCarthy said this week that he could work with the Donald, while a few Congress people have now endorsed him.

Mr. Trump is running as a fixer of America’s problems based upon his business success. But is success in business indicative of presidential performance?

Maybe not, although in 2012, Mitt Romney said the Constitution should be amended to say a president must have business experience:

I’d like to have a provision in the Constitution that in addition to the age of the president and the citizenship of the president and the birth place of the president being set by the Constitution, I’d like it also to say that the president has to spend at least three years working in business before he could become president of the United States.

A 2009 survey of historians by C-Span showed that 6 of our 10 best presidents lacked sufficient business experience to be president by Romney’s yardstick. That includes Ronald Reagan, the actor, corporate spokesman and politician, and John F. Kennedy, the naval officer, writer and politician. There is one failed businessman on the list of great presidents, the haberdasher Harry S. Truman.

And Teddy Roosevelt, Eisenhower and FDR would not have been president, since none had real business experience.

By contrast, two 20th century businessmen-presidents, George W. Bush, who got rich owning the Texas Rangers, and Herbert Hoover, who found his fortune in mining, were ranked among the worst presidents ever by the same C-Span historians. And both had Harvard MBA’s.

Trump’s business experience and its success are more relevant if you are thinking about voting for him, than say, one of the other candidates, because it is his ONLY qualification. He has no political experience, he has no clear policies, and the vague ideas that he does throw out suggest that he has not taken the time to learn much about the big issues of the day.

His message is basically: “Don’t worry about the details, you can trust me because I’m super successful and I have a huge company.”

Let’s look at how successful Trump has been in business. According to The Economist, a review of Mr. Trump’s career suggests three conclusions. First, his fortune is about $4 billion. Second, about 93% of his wealth is located in America, and 80% is in real estate. Third, Mr. Trump’s performance has been mediocre compared with growth in the value of the stock market and in the growth of New York property values. More from The Economist: (brackets by the Wrongologist)

Of his wealth, only an estimated 7% is outside America and 66% is…in New York [City]. Only about 22% of his worth is derived from assets that he actively created after 2004, when he became a reality TV star. Some 64% is from conventional property and a further 17% from resorts and golf clubs. His biggest recent deal [was] in real estate: buying the Doral hotel in 2012 out of bankruptcy.

The Economist provided this handy chart about Donald Trump’s financial performance against a few market metrics. The best long-term starting point is 1985, when Trump first appeared in the wealth rankings without his father. The most generous starting point is 1996, when Trump had just clawed his way back from the financial abyss. The final starting point is a decade ago:

Trump Trackrecord

  • Judged by his long-term record, he has done poorly. And over the past decade Donald Trump has lagged both the S&P and Manhattan commercial real estate benchmarks.
  • Judged from the low point in 1996, he has outperformed the S&P 500 index of big firms and the New York property market. That’s a win.
  • His ranking among American billionaires has fallen from a high of 26 to 121. By the standards of the country’s real estate giants, his property empire is just 14% of the size of America’s biggest real estate firm.

Trump will be 70 in June. Much of his wealth was made well over a decade ago from a few buildings in Manhattan, including Trump Tower. The Economist thinks that Trump’s success happened a long time ago, that he has limited experience with complex organizations, little foreign experience, and limited policy experience. He has spent most of his life managing what is essentially a family business, one that he inherited from his father.

Republican primary voters say: “so what?”

If you are going to vote for The Donald, and he does get elected, go visit Trump Tower in NYC, and celebrate with one of the $18 “You’re Fired” Bloody Marys.

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Sunday Cartoon Blogging – February 14, 2016

Happy Valentine’s Day. The news of Week That Was included the New Hampshire primary, another power grab by the Supreme Court, the Zika virus, and proof of the existence of gravitational waves.

Some people have an embarrassment of riches on Valentine’s Day:

COW Valentines Day

NH reminds Hillary about kids in a different way than before:

COW Comeback Kid

Sanders met with Sharpton before heading to South Carolina:

COW Sharpton Sanders

When the history of early 21st Century US is written, the villains will already be wearing black:

COW EPA Court

Zika virus is all over the news:

COW Zika

 

Proving Einstein right about gravitational waves took 100 years. Hope we do better with market panic:

COW Gravity Waves

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Is Bernie Electable?

Nobody knows. Maybe. The “a miracle can happen” argument was made by Bob Lefsetz, who all of you should bookmark and read:

…in 1964, Elvis was king. And then the Beatles wiped him off the map. We had a decade of rock and roll. It had been whittled down to a formula…And then…A band with roots who didn’t believe in convention, who’d honed their sound off the radar, delivered an honest wallop that was undeniable. And overnight the youth switched allegiance.

Could happen again. Probably will if Bernie Sanders is any indicator.

First, he has to get the nomination. Even after winning 60% of the NH vote, Bernie has barely dented Clinton’s lead, which thanks to super delegates, currently stands at 394-42. The super delegates are lining up for Clinton, and what happens if Sanders can’t beat a massively powerful political machine? It proves his fundamental point about establishment hegemony. And if Clinton can’t beat an old leftie from Vermont on his first national run? It disproves her arguments about electability, experience and competence.

But it takes 2,382 delegates to win the Democratic nomination for president. Check out Bernie’s difficult path in the upcoming primaries:

538 Primary Polling

It won’t be easy for Bernie to win the nomination. And he has built-in disadvantages: He angers the big donors. He has limited support in the Democratic Congress. There are no governors supporting him. Add that a lot of Democrats are skittish about Sanders’ embrace of “democratic socialism,” and add his Dovish positions on foreign policy, and you’re not likely to see a stampede of Democratic insiders rallying to his cause.

OTOH, Hillary had all the insider support imaginable and couldn’t win in NH. And if she can’t beat a grumpy old socialist Jew without super delegates putting their collective thumbs on the scale, how the hell is she going to beat the Republican Media Complex fighting uphill against the Benghazi and E-mail scandals?

But, Sanders has a long, long way to go to maybe get within striking distance of the nomination. Even then, he will continue to be reviled by forces on the right that will pull no punches in order to defeat him. The Conventional Wisdom will always say that Sanders isn’t viable, electable, (a “socialist” can never win), is too old, can’t raise enough money, won’t get the votes of women, African American’s, Latino’s, etc.

And if he smashes any one “barrier,” the remaining “barriers” will be elevated in importance.

And new “barrier” constructs will be created.

Returning to the Lefsetz meme, what narrative could resurrect Hillary’s appeal to the young? “Experience” reinforces her establishment brand. “Pragmatism” runs counter to every progressive aspiration of the Sanders campaign. “Fights for people like you” invites an examination of Bill Clinton’s deregulation of Wall Street, and his welfare reforms, or his legal reforms which imprisoned many minorities.

Those who say “Hillary can work within the system and get things done where Bernie can’t” have to realize that is a double edged sword. Millennials are the largest single voting bloc this time. They think unemployment and jobs are the biggest issues. They think the system has screwed them. They want the system to be rebuilt from the ground up.

And it’s not too hard to figure out why.

They are saddled with debt, their economic opportunities are far more limited than that of any recent generation. They are told they are being selfish by the Boomer generation − the generation that while achieving many great things, has left a huge economic and geopolitical mess to deal with.

When they look at Sanders, they see someone thinking outside the box. When they see Hillary, they see the establishment. And, you can’t say Hillary is not the establishment when she has the majority of the Super Delegates and all the endorsements from, well, establishment Democrats.

So, can Bernie win? Who knows?

A hard-fought primary battle served the Democratic presidential candidate well in 2008; it’s very likely that a similar primary battle will serve the winning candidate well again in 2016.

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We Are Victims of Political Misrule

Yesterday we said that 2016 may be the last election we ever need if political division keeps us from getting anything meaningful done for another four years. We also said that none of the current candidates from either party appear to have the ability to lead us towards being a better country.

Despite that, partisans on both sides say their worst candidate would be a fine president, and would certainly do a better job than the best candidate on the other side. Maybe we have a failure to define exactly what our next president needs to accomplish.

We talk as if a president were all-powerful, able to simply wave his/her magic wand, and all will be well. The past 16 years of presidential and congressional misrule has taught us to know better, but candidates still campaign as if we didn’t know better.

If a president can’t solve our problems, what can he/she do? If all they will do is to continue doing what hasn’t worked in the past, why do we bother to elect them, or have elections at all?

If all we can expect is to maintain a defective status quo, what’s the point?

We need America to grow up. We need a president who can enunciate a humane, adult, reasonable worldview, and vigorously promote it at home and abroad. Perhaps over time, that message will resonate with enough people, young Americans in particular, so the next generation can take the first political baby steps towards building a better world.

Either we fix our politics, or resign ourselves to the fact that our democracy is going to continue to give us substandard results.

To succeed at changing the country’s world view, the people would have to insist upon a politics that requires a humane, adult, reasonable, sane worldview from our elected representatives. At best, we would see some compromise, and take a few steps forward. At worst, idealism fails, and we continue the tyranny of a Congress that while elected, is not accountable for the success or failure of the nation.

Donald Trump has broken the GOP, possibly fatally. The party’s recent history seems to have assigned him that task, and he has discharged it well. Thanks to Trump, “lesser evilism” has lost its power to control our politics, making it possible for genuinely progressive politicians to put non-incrementalist policy back onto the mainstream agenda.

That has been Bernie Sanders’s goal. He too has discharged his task well. He, like Trump, has become the polestar for people who are outraged at the status quo, and who want to change it fundamentally for the better. But if the Democrats nominate Sanders, they risk making the same mistake the Republicans would make if they nominate Trump. That is, not recognizing that the very rhetoric that their side likes best will be seen as inherently disqualifying in the eyes of many.

It is the error of the echo chamber–believing that your side is so obviously right that all you have to do is state your beliefs with conviction and honesty and then surely win.

Unfortunately for Hillary, she seems to be on the wrong side of the zeitgeist for a second time. In 2008, she was no match for an aspirational black man who allowed progressives to project their values on him. This time, it’s an actual progressive who may become the road block to her coronation. In different times, HRC would have the perfect resume for the Oval office, and yes, she could yet win the nomination and the big job. Her biggest problem is poor vision. Here is the NYT’s Charles Blow: (emphasis by the Wrongologist)

But possibly the most damaging of Clinton’s attributes is, ironically, her practicality. As one person commented to me on social media: Clinton is running an I-Have-Half-A-Dream campaign. That simply doesn’t inspire young people brimming with the biggest of dreams. Clinton’s message says: Aim lower, think smaller, move slower. It says, I have more modest ambitions, but they are more realistic.

How long has it been since a President has campaigned on a specific platform and also urged the people to vote for his Party in Congress so that he could accomplish that platform. Reagan maybe?

No president has ever changed things alone, and none ever will. If Bernie wins, it’s because he inspires us to join a movement for change. Just like Reagan and Movement Conservatism, where Republicans built a conceptual base, a popular base, a business base, and an institutional infrastructure of think tanks. By the 2000s, movement conservatives controlled the Republican Party.

It took them 40 years, but they succeeded.

And it can happen again.

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The Last Election You’ll Ever Need

“The only rules that really matter are these: what a man can do, and what a man can’t do” − Captain Jack Sparrow

Some may have seen Death Wish, starring Charles Bronson. The movie came out in 1974, a time of increasing fear of random crime, creeping distrust of life in our cities, and growing frustration with what the Right called the moral relativity of liberalism. The film resonated with the US public, and had four sequels over the next 20 years.

The context for Death Wish was New York City’s decline after the fallout from years of redlining, blockbusting, and failed urban renewal. The city’s crime stats began to rise. Son of Sam would arrive in three years, a Republican president would tell a bankrupt NYC to drop dead, and Reagan’s morning in America would usher in a decade of anti-city films bookended by Escape from New York and New Jack City.

So, the question for 2016 is: Does America have a death wish? Are we about to start another period when our cities are declining, and our fears are growing? There is plenty of evidence to support both, from urban decay in Detroit and Flint, Michigan to our fears of Muslims and immigrants, to the distressingly difficult geopolitical landscape for which we have no clear strategy.

In the case of Flint’s need to replace its water pipes, no government – local, state or federal, has any idea where the money will come to fix the problem.

And in the case of geopolitics, we chose to spend $trillions on defense and homeland security, while willingly giving up some of our Constitutional rights out of fear, but are still failing to stem the tide of persistent conflict.

And no candidate from either party is offering a coherent set of policy positions that will solve these issues. Consider that Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, the two front-runners, offer a similar pitch: Trump’s “I know how to get things done” is the same as Hillary Clinton’s.

But what can get done?

Whenever we talk about a solving a big problem, what we say is: “We can’t do that.” But in politics-speak, “can’t,” doesn’t mean: “That’s impossible” or, “We don’t have the skills or money”. What we really mean is: “It’s too hard”.

Or the solution is outside our ideological comfort zone. Ian Welsh said in 2009:

While there are no problems that America has that America can’t fix, it also appears that there are no problems America has that America is willing to fix properly. And it doesn’t matter why.

The world won’t grade us on a curve. You need to jump the fence, and you can’t. You’re running away from a bear, and you don’t run fast enough, and you’re dead. You wanted to get into a good grad school, but you don’t have the grades or test scores.

As we enter the 2016 election process, this is where America is:

• We have been shipping our real economy overseas for 30 years
• Ordinary families have had wage stagnation for the same 30 years
• We’ve voted for lower taxes
• We’ve not paid for infrastructure reinvestment, or education, or much of our domestic needs

This is where America is, and we continue to struggle to find our way in both domestic and foreign policy, despite the growing criticality of our problems.

In 2001, we elected a president who had a conservative ideology, and under his watch, we had disastrous foreign wars and the Great Recession. So, in 2008, we elected a president who we thought had a vision for the future. Someone who spoke to our better angels, who would drag us out of a near-depression, who would focus on our domestic problems and get us out of war in the Middle East.

Like Jack Sparrow says, after 16 years of presidents with very different ideologies, neither could do most of the things they promised. And we are the worse for that.

Now it is time to elect a new savior, and no candidate looks ready for the job. But choose we must, and one of them will be the next president. If, after we make our next choice, our political divisions again prevent progress for another eight years, it may be the last presidential election we ever need.

Collapse of the state is not an event, it is a process. A process that we are in.

We are right on schedule.

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Will Hillary’s Campaign Strategy Win?

“Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”Mike Tyson

The primary season clown show has moved on to New Hampshire. Republicans will see more mud wrestling between Cruz and Trump, while Rubio, Kasich and Christie try to elbow their way in to be one of the top two by next Wednesday.

Iowa showed that the Democrats will have a tough time choosing between the candidates, both of whom will struggle to refine the message(s) they need to take to South Carolina and beyond in order to win the nomination. Like that great philosopher Mike Tyson says, now the top two in each party need to present a plan that connects with voters nationally.

Think for a minute about the messages that Hillary and Bernie have been running with:

Bernie is saying we should have (and can get):

• A single-payer health care system
• Universal pre-K and free college tuition at our state universities
• Guaranteed sick leave and vacation for every employee
• A minimum wage of $15/hour
• The big banks broken up, and Glass-Steagall reconstituted
• Our campaign finance system is reformed
• The super-wealthy should pay for it all

Hillary is saying we can’t get all that:

• We must focus on what can be accomplished, not what Sanders is proposing
• Single-payer is a nice idea, but is too politically toxic to be viable
• She agrees with Sanders about sick and maternity leave
• College shouldn’t be free for all, some should pay, mostly because their parents can afford it
• Breaking up the big banks isn’t the best way to address financial market risk
• $15/hour is too high a minimum wage, $12/hour is realistic
• Since Republicans will control at least one house of Congress next year, they’ll never vote for what Sanders proposes

Hillary is in a difficult position. She’s telling people that they can’t have the things they want. Every parent understands this, but Clinton is also saying: “his policies can’t win”, all the while she is thinking: “I can get some of this through Congress.”

That may not be a winning message, particularly if Sanders is still running in a dead heat with Clinton in April. His charm is that he’s not willing to settle for campaigning on a platform that is calibrated to work in our gridlocked politics.

So, will Hillary change if she can’t shake Bernie? And what would her new message be?

She needs to start by finding a way to relate to an electorate that has limited interest in politicians like her who speak for the status quo.

Today’s voters say that the status quo is unacceptable. In fact, that’s the only thing everyone in America seems to agree about right now. And since 60% of the Democratic delegates actually get selected in March, Clinton needs a message better calibrated to meet today’s political realities, or she risks losing the nomination, or winning it only after a fight that weakens her party.

It is true that if elected, either Clinton or Sanders will be in virtually the same place regarding what they can actually achieve. The big difference today is in the vision they are laying out, and whether the voters will buy it. Will they buy a president who articulates unobtainable goals and blames the .01%, or do they want a president who articulates modest, but still unobtainable goals?

Would the electorate buy that her insider status would bring about some (or all) of her goals?

Candidate Clinton is running primarily on her resume. She presents us with a CV of job titles, not accomplishments, and if there is a campaign persona that she is embracing, it is the idea of being a lifelong fighter. But will that be enough? From the 2/2 NYT:

…she still faces an authenticity problem, even among Democrats. Some 47% of likely Democratic primary voters said that they felt Mrs. Clinton said what voters wanted to hear, rather than what she believed. 62% said they believed Mr. Sanders said what he thought…

Clinton’s liabilities as a campaigner could be lessened by treating the campaign more like a struggle between opposing parties instead of one between political celebrities. Overall, she performs well enough as a candidate. She debates well, she interviews well.

Her argument should be: if you want to see the incomes of the middle class grow, if you want to retain Constitutional freedoms that are under attack by a conservative Supreme Court, if you want to keep Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and other social programs like Obamacare, if you want less foreign adventurism, then you have to vote Democratic regardless of what you think of Hillary Clinton.

It’s sort of a vision.

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Can Democrats Win the White Working Class Vote?

Last week, Robert Reich asked a question: Why did the white working class abandon the Democrats?

Before we get to his answer, let’s look at a few electoral facts:

• In 1980, Ronald Reagan won 56% of all white voters and won in a 44-state landslide.
• In 2012, Mitt Romney carried 59% of all white voters, yet lost decisively.
• In both 2008 and 2012, Republicans’ best result was with white voters without college degrees. They carried them by 14% in 2008 and 26% in 2012.

Reich offers two answers: First, that the Republicans skillfully played the race card from the 1960s through to today. Reich makes the point that in the wake of the Civil Rights Act of 1965, segregationists like Alabama Governor George C. Wallace led southern whites out of the Democratic Party. And later, Ronald Reagan charged Democrats with coddling black “welfare queens,“ while George HW Bush accused them of being soft on black crime (Willie Horton), and all Republicans say that Democrats use affirmative action to give jobs to less-qualified minorities over more-qualified whites.

Reich’s second point is that Democrats have occupied the White House for 16 of the last 24 years, and in that time they largely abandoned the white working class, doing little to prevent the wealthy and powerful from rigging the economy for the benefit of those at the top. On the other hand, at the time Bill Clinton ran for president, the Democratic Party had lost three straight presidential elections and won only two out of the previous six. That political reality certainly had an effect on policy.

During the Obama years, Democrats did produce some weak tea for the middle class and the poor – including the Affordable Care Act, an expanded Earned Income Tax Credit, and the Family and Medical Leave Act. Reich goes on to indict our most recent Democratic presidents:

Bill Clinton and Barack Obama ardently pushed for free trade agreements, for example, without providing the millions of blue-collar workers who thereby lost their jobs any means of getting new ones that paid at least as well. They also stood by as corporations hammered trade unions, the backbone of the white working class.

Reich says that partly as a result of NAFTA, union membership sunk from 22% of all workers when Bill Clinton was elected president to fewer than 12% today, and the working class lost bargaining leverage to get a share of the economy’s gains.

Finally, Dems turned their backs on campaign finance reform. After 2010’s Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. FEC, the floodgates to big money in politics were opened. Reich again indicts Democrats: (emphasis by the Wrongologist)

What happens when you combine freer trade, shrinking unions, Wall Street bailouts, growing corporate market power, and the abandonment of campaign finance reform? You shift political and economic power to the wealthy, and you shaft the working class.

Can the Democrats earn back the working class voter? Well, when the dogs won’t eat the dog food, it may be time to think about changing brands. Any competent politician knows that. When 45% of the electorate claim to be independents, something is wrong with both parties. The White Working Class is being ignored by the Democrats and is courted by the Republicans, although with less and less success, unless you happen to think that Donald Trump is a Republican.

What has the wage earning class gained from the Democrats? Social and economic betrayal. From the Republicans? War and economic betrayal. They watch jobs disappear to Asia, and see increased competition from immigrants. Many feel threatened by cultural liberalism, at least the type that sees white Middle Americans as Christian bigots and 2nd Amendment fanatics.

But they are also threatened by Republicans who would take away their Medicare, hand their Social Security earnings to fund-managers in Connecticut, and cut off their unemployment.

These are the reasons why Sanders and Trump are able to compete with the establishment elites of both parties. But nothing in politics is ever final. Democrats could still win back the white working class. They would need to:

• Have a vision that would create economic growth that was not based on trickle-down
• Build a coalition of the working class and poor, of whites, blacks, and Latinos, of everyone who has been or is currently being shafted by the shift in wealth and power to the investor class and the salaried class

Will Democrats stop obsessing over upper-income suburban voters, and end their financial dependence on big corporations, Wall Street, and the wealthy?

Probably not.

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Why 2016 Won’t Be Like Any Other Election

If we add together the polling numbers of Trump, Sanders and Cruz, it’s clear that a majority of the electorate is ready for a president from well outside the political mainstream.

Start with the Trump slogan, “Make America Great Again“. It’s the first time in Wrongo’s memory that an explicit admission that America isn’t so great has been heard in an American presidential election. In a world where American Exceptionalism is settled dogma, how and why can a Republican say “we ain’t so great”, and be so successful?

Of course, that same dynamic also drives the willingness of voters to support the Democratic Socialist, Sanders. Bernie offers a different solution to the economic woes that the two parties have inflicted on us in the 35 years since we elected Ronald Reagan. Now, a substantial and very motivated part of the electorate on both the right and left, is telling pollsters that something different has to be on the table.

The old electioneering rules won’t work. We are in a time of anger and anxiety. Republicans go for the emotional jugular every day, while establishment Democrats are still trying to make points with a mix of policy, pragmatism and feel-good idealism. Democrats will have to decide whether they see the current political landscape as an opportunity to free themselves of these old terms of debate, or take full ownership of them moving forward.

Regardless of the GOP candidate, emotion will dominate their argument for the White House. John Michael Greer had an insightful piece last week about ways to look at voter motivations in America:

The notion [is] that the only divisions in American society that matter are those that have some basis in biology. Skin color, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, disability—these are the lines of division in society that Americans like to talk about, whatever their attitudes to the people who fall on one side or another of those lines.

The axiom in politics is that voters in these “divisions” tend to vote as blocs, and campaigns are designed to bring the bloc to the candidate. That’s less true today. Greer takes a deep dive into today’s politics, suggesting the largest differentiator:

It so happens that you can determine a huge amount about the economic and social prospects of people in America today by asking one remarkably simple question: how do they [earn] most of their income?

He posits that it’s usually from one of four sources: returns from investments, a monthly salary, an hourly wage, or a government welfare check. People who get most of their income in one of those four ways have political interests in common, so much so that it’s meaningful to speak of the American people as divided into an investor class, a salaried class, a wage class, and a welfare class.

The old divisions, women, gay people, people of color, are found in all four income classes. Finally JMG has a killer thought: The political wave that Trump and Sanders are riding has roots in the answer to another simple question: Over the last half century, how have the four classes fared? The answer is that three of the four have remained roughly where they were. The wage class in particular has been destroyed. And the beneficiaries were the investor and salaried classes. They drove down wages, offshored production, and destroyed our manufacturing base. More from JMG:

I see the Trump candidacy as a major watershed in American political life, the point at which the wage class—the largest class of American voters…has begun to wake up to its potential power and begin pushing back against the ascendancy of the salary class.

That pushback could become a defining force in American politics. The problem with that viewpoint is that their desired change is anti-business and anti-middle-class. And THAT change is not acceptable to those who control our politics, most of whom are squarely in the investor and salaried classes.

And a Trump candidacy is not the worst form it could take. If Trump is sidelined by another establishment type, a future leader who takes up the cause of the wage class could very well be fond of armbands or, of roadside bombs. Like the Bundy Brigade on steroids.

Once the politics of resentment becomes a viable strategy, anything can happen.

Read Greer’s analysis. Think about how the salaried class attack on Bernie as “socialist” might actually play out for Sanders, assuming he could analyze and communicate what is really going on here.

Think about how Hillary Clinton might stumble over the problems of the wage class, given her fervid support from the investor and salaried classes.

The usual fight for independent voters using conventional wisdom will not succeed in this political cycle.

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Sunday Cartoon Blogging – January 24, 2016

For those in the Northeast who hate the snow, remember, there is no such thing as bad weather. There is only inappropriate clothing. Be careful driving, if you must drive.

The climate forecast is grim:

Clay Bennett editorial cartoon

Doesn’t matter if you call it “climate change” or “global warming”. The denialism by the right in the US isn’t held elsewhere. The scientific opinion is held by the rest of the world. Not based on a single opinion, or by snark, but from the overwhelming result of scientific research.

Palin endorses Trump, and the GOP takes notice:

COW GOP Threeway

Trump said Palin could get a cabinet job. Liberals are contemptuous of her lack of knowledge, critical thinking skills, and judgment, but none of these are crimes. A good example of Palin’s qualities occurred when she blamed Obama for her son Track beating up his (Track’s) girlfriend. Palin said that his getting drunk, beating the crap out of his girlfriend and brandishing a gun was caused by Track’s military service, that perhaps he has PTSD. She then went on to blame Obama’s policies for her son’s behavior. It takes an immense level of cynicism, opportunism, and some cruelty to exploit your child’s struggle for political gain.

The Dems have a problem:

COW What Dems Want

This is not the first year that Democrats doubt they are putting their best person forward. Hubert Humphrey in 1968, George McGovern in 1972, Jimmy Carter in 1980 and Michael Dukakis in 1988 come to mind. Oh, and they lost 3 of those 4 elections!

Bernie still has a YUUGE problem:

COW Bernie

Flint’s plan for water:

COW Flint

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Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. 2016

Dr. King is one of Wrongo’s few heroes. He set an example for activism and success in the political arena that few other activists have matched, except for the founders of our Republic. Maybe that is why he is one of only two individuals (George Washington is the other) who have their names attached to a federal holiday.

In the 1950’s and 1960’s, MLK transformed America. In the ‘50’s , America was a place where you didn’t question why we did things the way we did, you just followed your parents. By the end of the ‘60’s we were questioning everything. We changed a few things, and by the 1970s, many of us were living under a very different set of social mores than those of our parents.

MLK, along with others in our churches and a courageous few politicians created a real “moral majority” (not the phony ideal espoused by Jerry Falwell 25 years later), comprised of people of all races, educational and economic strata who came together to support the Big Idea that Separate was not Equal. MLK gave voice to that Big Idea.

His presence, power and persuasiveness drove our political process to a place and to an outcome in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. These ideas were completely unthinkable 10 years earlier in 1954, when Brown vs. Board of Education was decided by the Supreme Court.

Wrongo participated in the Civil Rights movement from 1958 to 1962. That participation changed my viewpoint on race, religion and politics. Sadly, and wrongly, Wrongo left active participation in the movement, thinking that Dr. King’s Big Idea had taken hold, and that it permanently altered our political landscape.

Yet here we are in 2016, with all of the New Deal and Great Society reforms under attack.

Here is something Wrongo guarantees you have never heard. It is a 1986 recording by Eartha Kitt detailing Dr. King’s activism, his many, many arrests, and the few attempts on his life before he was killed in Memphis on April 4, 1968. Kitt made an album called “My Way: Musical Tribute to Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.” with The Black Academy of Arts & Letters (TBAAL), the nation’s largest African-American cultural arts institution. Here is Ms. Kitt, not singing, but speaking about MLK:

Those of you who read the Wrongologist in email can view the video here.

It is clear from that recitation that MLK paid a high price for his beliefs. Ms. Kitt also paid a price for hers. In 1968, during LBJ’s administration, Kitt made anti-war statements at a White House luncheon. When Lady Bird Johnson asked her about Vietnam, Eartha replied:

You send the best of this country off to be shot and maimed. No wonder the kids rebel and take pot.

She had trouble finding work after that. Whatever you may think of her talents, it is contemptible that she was branded “a sadistic nymphomaniac” by the CIA. This was in the late 1960s, not the 1940s.

Today, the mass movement type of activism is dead. In our current political climate, holding large rallies rarely results in political change. Most people just send a tweet, and think they’ve accomplished something. The failure of demonstrations today is a symptom of a failure in our democracy. And the way the Occupy Movement was forcibly removed from American cities makes it difficult for anyone to want to engage in civil disobedience.

Consider how quick the police are to shoot unarmed black men today. How long would MLK be able to demonstrate, or drive his car, or march to Montgomery before being shot, not by an assassin, but by the police on the streets of America today?

Our founders wrote the Constitution in a way that explicitly provides for “the right of the people peaceably to assemble”. Despite that protection, legislation in cities across America has chipped away at those rights in the name of public safety. Along with this erosion of rights, comes the military-style weapons and tactics, the pepper spray and temporary suspension of civil rights that we saw in NYC, Ferguson. MO, and Oakland CA.

Today America urgently needs a political movement with a forceful, charismatic leader.

Someone who can tie together the various threads of what is wrong in our society. Someone who can show us how these things are interrelated, and who can point us in a direction that could restore our now-fading civil rights and our middle class.

MLK remains the hero of a generation of Americans for whom activism was a building block of their personal journey to adulthood.

In most ways, our nation has never recovered that sense of can-do, or that all things are possible for your Big Idea. Today there is no one like MLK who can rally us to drive Big Ideas to reality.

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