The List: A Critique of Trump's Proposed Presidential Agenda

Donald Trump took the oath of office last week as the 45^th President of the United States amid pomp and circumstance, celebration by part of America, but trepidation, foreboding, protest, and fear by other parts.  His 40% approval rating represents the lowest ever for a new President, so Trump has his work cut out for him.  We won’t say we wish him well because, frankly, such a platitude from us seems meaningless and insincere given our attitude toward some things Trump has said he wants to do, like dismantling the Affordable Care Act, banning Muslims, giving new tax breaks to billionaires, and getting into bed with Vladimir Putin and the Russians. As patriotic Americans who deeply love this nation, we’ll just say we wish the country well and leave it at that.

A number of thorny issues fill Trump’s plate for the foreseeable future.  Some he put there himself in his zeal, and that of his fellow Republicans, to undo the policies of the previous administration.  Others he campaigned on, meaning the electorate will judge him on how he does with them. Some are there because they’re there for every President. We can think of dozens of things Trump needs to deal with, but we’ll hone in on seven that will likely move front and center during the early weeks and months of his tenure. Most have a domestic tilt, a few fall within the international realm, and some overlap.  All this presupposes Trump doesn’t face an early, unexpected foreign policy crisis or a domestic trauma we can’t now predict. 

Affordable Care Act Repeal   Republicans moved at warp speed in the early days of the current session of Congress to repeal the ACA. What they’re going to replace it with remains a major mystery. People who understand this issue know one thing: keeping the “goodies” in the ACA that even Republicans like, such as coverage for pre-existing conditions and letting young people stay on their parents’ policies until they’re 26, seems exceedingly difficult without the taxes and mandates the GOP hates.

Infrastructure/Jobs   Trump’s promise to bring jobs back to the rust belt may have won him the election. Can he now deliver? During the campaign, he talked about a major infrastructure program to create jobs by rebuilding roads, bridges, airports, water systems, and other public works.  Passing a major infrastructure bill, especially one that puts significant federal dollars, and not just tax credits, into play probably requires Democratic votes in Congress since Republicans usually detest such programs.  Will Trump propose something with real meat that Democrats could vote for? Or will he take the path of least resistance and offer up a tax credit scheme Republicans will support, produces profits for Trump’s wealthy corporate friends, but yields few improvements in the nation’s crumbling infrastructure and even fewer jobs.  

Russian Hacking/Intelligence   The new President will have a hard call once Congressional committees finish their review of the intelligence community’s conclusion that Russia attempted to swing the 2016 election to him through computer hacking of his political opponents. Does he ignore a clear attack on American sovereignty and democracy? Does he reverse course and move to punish the Russians as his predecessor did? Can he repair his relationship with the intelligence agencies?  The questions bear on U.S. national security and our concept of the nation.

Supreme Court   Trump said he’d put up a nominee for the Scalia seat that’s been vacant almost a year about two weeks after he takes office. Does he propose a moderate conservative at least some Democrats could vote for or does he put up a right wing zealot, thereby inviting a bruising Senate confirmation battle? Which way he goes may signal something important about how he plans to govern.

Syria/Middle East   Trump never really said during the campaign what he thought about Syria except that it was a “disaster” and he offered vague, almost incoherent ramblings about Assad and the Russians being better for Syria than ISIS. Does Trump have a Syria policy or doesn’t he?  Maybe we’ll find out soon.

Immigration   Will Trump follow through on three promises he made (at least at times he seemed to promise them) during the campaign: (1) banning Muslims from entering the United States; (2) starting mass deportation of undocumented persons in the country illegally; and (3) building a wall between the U. S. and Mexico that would keep out illegal immigrants.  These ideas have legislative and legal components and Trump may not have the last word on them. 

Criminal Justice Reform   Trump didn’t campaign on this issue and it isn’t a high priority for his core supporters. Many of them, in fact, may oppose efforts to reduce incarceration levels and eliminate race based sentencing disparities. His business allies probably like it that private prison companies reap more and more tax dollars from warehousing inmates.  Communities of color, however, care passionately about this, and that concern presents a potential political opportunity for Trump.  He won’t ever get the lion’s share of black and Latino votes, but he could score major points with those groups, and some moderate to progressive whites, by going against type and taking on an issue outside his natural wheelhouse. It would resemble Richard Nixon, the unrepentant cold warrior, visiting China.

Trump and the country, of course, have things other than these seven issues to worry about, including the President’s business conflicts, ISIS, trade policy, voting rights, and many others.  But these seven issues represent headaches and opportunities. Minefields, and a few safe harbors, lie within this constellation.   Your ideas?

       

  

       

Missing President Barack Obama

Barack Hussein Obama gave his farewell address this week. Shortly, he leaves office as the 44^th President of the United States. We lament his departure and not just because of the dire prospects his successor offers. We’ve stated clearly how much of a mistake we think the country made in electing Donald Trump. We’ll have more to say about that in due course. For now, we celebrate and commemorate the Obama Presidency.

As the first African-American President, no matter how he did, Obama occupies a unique place in American history. That he accomplished as much as he did makes the man all the more important. Republicans, right after the 2016 election, started talking about shrinking his legacy. They will do away with many of his executive actions and some legislative accomplishments, given their Congressional majorities. They won’t diminish Obama as a president who changed the nation, impacted people’s lives, and altered American culture.

CHANGING POLITICS   

Obama campaigned as the candidate of hope and change. Even he’d admit he didn’t live up to all that hype – no one could. But, Obama changed an accepted tenant of American politics, just in getting elected. He showed that a person of color could win the Presidency. The idea of a black (or brown) President no longer represents a fantasy of novelists and screenwriters. That he won by capturing the nomination of his party and taking the general election in an electoral college landslide made his triumph even more remarkable. We’d guess most people who dreamed a black person could become President assumed it would happen through vice presidential succession – a black elevated by tragedy. Obama did it the old fashioned way. He earned it. No back bench Republican Congressman can erode that part of Obama’s legacy just by voting to repeal the Affordable Care Act.

A DIFFERENCE IN PEOPLE’S LIVES  

Americans may have forgotten how stuck in a ditch the U.S. economy was in 2009 when Obama took office – unemployment at 7.9 % and rising (vs. 4.7 % now), the stock market at 7,949, the lowest inauguration day number ever, as opposed to flirting with 20,000 now, home foreclosures skyrocketing, and, most important, confidence at all economic levels at lows unseen since the 1930s. That many give Obama minimal credit for changing things says more about them than him. He admits he never took a victory lap touting his success and that perhaps he should have. By rescuing the auto industry, pushing through Congress a stimulus package that paved the road back, and reassuring the financial markets, Obama got the nation headed in the right direction. That the recovery hasn’t been perfect – we know about the lack of wage growth – doesn’t detract from the significance of his economic accomplishments.

The Affordable Care Act, Obama’s signature legislative program, of course, remains controversial. Polls show the electorate almost evenly divided about it. Those polls also show, however, that even opponents want it replaced with something that provides widespread coverage. Very few want to return to the Wild, Wild West that characterized health coverage before the Affordable Care Act passed. That fact alone demonstrates that Obama, by finally passing a national health insurance law, changed the dynamic around the issue. Republicans, in their zeal to repeal the Affordable Care Act, must realize that they take health coverage away from Americans at their peril. Why? Barack Obama.

GRACE   

Even before January 20, 2009, the new President acquired the moniker “No Drama Obama.”  He wasn’t prone to snap judgments, he didn’t indulge conspiracy theories, and he didn’t stir up or manufacture crises. He didn’t seem scandal prone. None of that changed over Obama’s eight years in office. In fact, he presided over a deliberate White House that, with a few exceptions, avoided the controversies, blow ups, and intrigue that had become common place in American Presidential politics. Above all, no scandals marred his Presidency. Even the trumped up IRS affair proved much ado about nothing. Vultures never circled the Obama White House because he and his aides didn’t leave battered carcasses lying around. Obama, his wife, and daughters conducted themselves with grace, dignity, and decorum. While many of his adversaries didn’t meet that standard, the President and the First Lady kept their cool in the face of both real disrespect and mere tackiness.

Obama wasn’t perfect. From time to time, even we objected to things he did or didn’t do. He occasionally misread the national mood, as when he used the words “cop” and “stupid” in the same sentence when discussing the Henry Louis Gates arrest early in his tenure. He whiffed on Syria. He likely deserves some blame for the decline in his party’s fortunes at the state and local level. In fact, his most significant failure might have been his inability to find meaningful involvement in the political and leadership process for the millions of young Americans who propelled him into office in the first place. Had he done so, the Trump insurgency might never have taken hold. We’re not sure any Democrat could have done better legislatively once Republicans took over Congress, but Obama sometimes seemed aloof from the legislative process. Yes, Obama has a few things to regret but, as Frank Sinatra might say, “too few to mention.”

The first sentence of Obama’s obituary will, no doubt, reference his status as the nation’s first African-American president. What happens between now and then will determine what else goes into it. Is there another President of color in his life time?  Does another Democratic President revive signature Obama policies the Trump administration dismantles? Do subsequent economic events demonstrate just how well he handled that part of the job?  Will anyone else govern with his dignity and intelligence? Will another family so graciously inhabit the White House? No one can answer these questions now, but they will bear on how history ultimately treats Obama and his times. What we can say now, is, “Well done and we’ll miss you.”

Election 2016: From Here, Where?

The Trump Presidency stands around the corner with many Americans anxious, fearful, and angry. The President-elect lost the election by almost three million votes, but on January 20 he takes the oath of office nevertheless. Fully acknowledging that we stand with progressives, we ask: What now?

If solving a problem first requires admitting the existence of a problem, Democrats and progressives initially must take ownership of their 2016 defeat.  That compels us to suggest that former President Bill Clinton rethink his public pronouncement that Hillary Clinton overcame every obstacle standing in her way  except FBI Director James Comey’s October/November mischief and Russian computer hacking.  

Leaving aside how much either Comey’s pronouncements or the Russian interference influenced the outcome, and despite our enormous respect for the former President’s political knowledge, we think he disserves our cause by suggesting that his wife would have won but for those two dispiriting developments.  Looking at it that way allows the Clintons, and other Democrats, to evade accountability and delays the process of moving forward.

The suggestion Secretary Clinton lost only because of Comey and the Russians roughly equates to a football coach whining at the post game news conference about officiating while ignoring his team’s five turnovers.  We see at least three conceptual shortcomings in the 2016 Democratic campaign that helped lose it and, more important, have implications for the future.

Strategic    

Clinton’s failure to campaign at all in Wisconsin now symbolizes the campaign’s strategic flaws.  That, however, wasn’t the only tactical error.  The candidate’s thin schedule, when compared with Trump’s intense barnstorming, the selection of Tim Kaine as a running mate instead of a candidate who might have energized young voters (i.e. Elizabeth Warren) or voters of color (i. e. several possible Hispanic nominees), and the failure to deploy President Obama in the Midwest when he advised the campaign he should put in more time there all strike us as potentially outcome determinative decisions the campaign got wrong.

Judgment   

Hillary Clinton did not wake up in 2015 and just happen to decide she’d run for President.  That die was cast from the moment she stepped to the microphone at the 2008 Democratic convention and moved to nominate Barack Obama by acclimation. 

Given that, some decisions the Clintons made defy logic. Could not they, or those around them, imagine the problem a private e-mail server might cause in a presidential campaign?  Did none of their advisers warn them of the danger of the Secretary having ANYTHING to do with the Clinton Foundation?  With the prospect of a White House run looming, how hard was it to see that speeches to Wall Street executives might yield embarrassing quotes?  Or did someone warn them about all these things and they chose not to listen?

Message   

Secretary Clinton had the makings of a strong economic message in 2016.  She made substantive proposals on infrastructure, job retraining, health care, and tax policy that might improve the lives of the working class whites who swung the election to Trump. Clinton, however, buried her proposals in a weak slogan (Stronger Together than what?) and a conviction that if she talked enough about the evils of a Trump Presidency everything would turn out fine.  

Elections for many Americans turn on what a candidate proposes to do that will improve their lives.  Clinton never figured out how to make that case, all the while permitting the untrustworthy, unethical, unlikeable narrative to play out.

Democrats need to own up to these mistakes and not fall for the comforting eye candy implicit in the notion that ‘we wuz robbed’ by Comey and the Russians.  Why?  Avoiding such failures in coming years, that’s why.

The Future   

After the election, President Obama reminded Democrats they need to “show up,” even in hostile red territory.  He won in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan and not just with minority votes in the cities. Many working class whites in those states voted for him and, he noted, he lost some rural areas by small margins.  With the election decided by about 100,000 votes in three states, Democrats ignore his admonition at their peril.  The Clinton campaign made the decisions it made, for better or for worse, but the President’s “show up” theory offers an organizing principle Democrats should remember.

No doubt, wanna be Democratic candidates have begun plotting 2020 campaigns.  We urge them to consider the front page test: If you’re contemplating doing anything that reeks of ethical taint, ask what it will look like on the front page of the New York Times or splashed all over cable news and the internet. We may have struggled with the concept of foreseeability in law school, but it’s not hard in politics. If it might look bad in the headlines, don’t do it.

As Democrats move toward 2020, there’s already talk of who might run, who’s going to be the lead singer.  We find having a song a more important consideration for the time being. Democrats need a message for 2018 and 2020 that attracts white working class voters who deserted them in 2016, while still appealing to the Obama coalition of young voters and people of color. In fact, the party’s most difficult task may lie in keeping the messaging effort from becoming a zero sum game pitting working class whites against black and brown voters so critical to the success Democrats have had.

The irony of this circumstance lies in the fact the last two, two-term Democratic Presidents, both immensely talented politicians, pulled off exactly this trick.  Bill Clinton (he was “Bubba” at one time, you might recall) and Barack Obama won election with strong support from both groups.  It can be done. It’s mainly a matter of working at it.  Over the coming months, we’ll have plenty to say about that work.   

Your thoughts?