December 2015 – Many Things Considered

2016 Election, Arizona, Federal Budget, Film, Journalism, Trump

What I Got Wrong in 2015…

Posted on December 31, 2015by christian

“Get ready for the “Bush Rebounds” stories. You heard it hear first.”

One of my less-than-perfect predictions from 2015

———

In the spirit of the late, great Washington Post political reporter and columnist David Broder, who annually devoted a year-end column to the mistakes, blunders and wrong-headed notions he consigned to print during the previous twelve months, I offer atonement. Or, as the old year passes, here is my “I really got that wrong” list.

Who wasn't wrong about Trump? Certainly not me. — Who wasn’t wrong about Trump? Certainly not me.

Trump – There is little year-end consolation in the fact that I was not alone in misreading, not understanding and failing to take seriously the Trump…whatever it is. Thousands of self-styled pundits missed the political rise of the orange haired billionaire. Lots of smart people made the same mistakes I made, the political equivalent of the generals fighting the last war and assuming that the rules of political warfare never change.

So, while I’m in good company, fairness demands that I acknowledge that back in the early summer I went so far as to opine of Trump that, “I still think he drops out before he really has to reveal more details about the web of financial deals and debt that undoubtedly define his business empire…” Boy, was that off the mark. Not only did he not drop out, he’s been leading the polls for months.

I redeemed myself (slightly) in the next part of that sentence by observing “but in the meantime Trump stirs things up and not in a helpful way for the more sane and sober Republican candidates.”

In July I was thinking that Trump would be a short-lived distraction, not unlike a really bad reality television show, and that soon enough the rules of politics would again take over. Now – I can’t believe I’m writing this – I’ve come to believe Trump has a reasonable chance of becoming the Republican candidate for president of the United States of America. Now, that is one prediction that I dearly hope will be WRONG.

Jeb! – I plead guilty to embracing the conventional wisdom that the former Florida governor would finally find his political sea legs and make a strong run for the GOP nomination. Never say never in this crazy political year, but that prediction is looking about as worn as last week’s tattered and torn Christmas wrapping paper.

Paul Ryan's beard surprised me, too — Paul Ryan’s beard surprised me, too.

Congress – I’m second to no one in my willingness to always expect the worst from our hyper-partisan, mostly do nothing Congress and those 535 helpless souls rarely disappoint. But…I didn’t see new House Speaker Paul Ryan stepping in an engineering a year-end budget deal that forecloses government shutdowns, etc. for an entire year. Congress, or at least Ryan, surprised me. Anyone remember John Boehner?

Hollywood – I have often allowed my cynicism about the movie glitz and gore factory get the better of me, but late this year I must admit I’ve been wrong. A slew of amazing and important motion pictures have reached the big screen in the last few weeks that (temporarily) renew my hope that Hollywood can produce real entertainment that is relevant, even profound. Films like Spotlight, The Big Short, Carol, Brooklyn, Bridge of Spies and Trumbo make this Hollywood cynic want to head for the ticket line. Tinsel town ended the year with a flourish.

What else? I didn’t see the Kansas City Royals winning the World Series. I thought the Washington Nationals might win. And I never see the Chicago Cubs winning the World Series – period. I hope I’m wrong on that one.

I didn’t think the Washington Redskins would still sport that controversial name at the end of 2015. I wonder if that team name can really last?

I thought Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel was a better politician than he is turning out to be. Rahmbo’s tough guy bluster goes only so far when you have to actually try to govern and lead a city torn between the grievances of its minority community and deep-seated problems with its police culture. And what politician takes a holiday trip to Cuba while his town is in turmoil? I’m tempted to predict that Emanuel can’t last, but that may just be wishful thinking.

I didn’t see oil prices going this low. I guess it must be Obama’s fault.

I have long been dubious, cynical and concerned about the state of American journalism, particularly the continuing demise of newspapers, but I did not foresee the wonderful, even spectacular rise of high quality “long form” journalism and non-fiction writing. Some of the material being produced is phenomenal. If one only had all the time in the world to read it all.

And, finally I did not foresee the shocking level of xenophobia (thanks Trump) that seems to have overwhelmed a good segment of the population in 2015.

In a fine piece in The Atlantic Richard Yeleson reminds all of us that change in our system comes slowly – very slowly. Yeleson makes a compelling case that America in 2015, with the widespread disdain for those who seem to be “un-American,” is in many ways not unlike America in the 1920s when anti-immigrant furor spawned violations of civil liberties and hatred for the unwelcome of that era.

“Americans are still accusing each other of not being American,” Yeleson writes, “and are even debating who should have the right to call themselves Americans at all. Both the pluralist left and ethno-nationalist right have urged their adherents to ‘take back our country.’ The left wants to ‘return’ to a country that doesn’t yet exist except in the minds of its artists and activists, and in the rhetoric, but not the actions, of its venerated Founders. The right wants to ‘return’ to a country which is ever receding from its view, and will never quite again exist in the way it wishes that it might. Between that ‘doesn’t yet’ and ‘never quite again’ lies a struggle over which side will get to impose its understanding of what ‘America’ should mean upon America.”

Arizona Senator Jeff Flake lit a candle for hope.

So, while I can believe that the xenophobia is distressing and ultimately works against the nation’s true best interests, I can be surprised – and even wrong – not to see a recent action like that of Arizona Republican Senator Jeff Flake, a genuine conservative of the Mormon faith, as hopeful, compassionate, courageous and very American.

While the blowhard leading his party’s race for the White House was calling for a complete ban on Muslims entering the country and threatening to “shut down mosques,” earlier this month Senator Flake took his wife and sons to a prayer service at a mosque in the Phoenix area.

“It’s just the antithesis of all we stand for here in America, and the freedom of religion that we all embrace so much,” Flake said of Trump’s anti-Muslim proposal. “I don’t think that it reflects well on, certainly not on the Republican Party, it doesn’t reflect well on us as a country if this were to go.”

The senator talked softly and humbly about the religious persecution his faith has suffered and, at least for a moment, he renewed one cynic’s faith in the good that exists within all of us. One Muslim participant in the service said,”To have him here today was really just powerful, very powerful, especially someone from the Republican Party joining our congregation was just a phenomenal moment for us.”

I was wrong to not to look for and find the bright candle of hope and tolerance amid all the dark, harsh rhetoric. I am delighted to atone.

Happy New Year.

Catholic Church, Economy, Film, Journalism, Wall Street

Grab the Pitchforks

Posted on December 27, 2015by christian

“The CDO – collateralized debt obligation – was, in effect, a credit laundering service for the residents of Lower Middle Class America. For Wall Street it was a machine that turned lead into gold.”
― Michael Lewis, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine

—–

If you are able to sit through a screening of Adam McKay’s outstanding new film The Big Short and not feel, as New York Times critic A.O. Scott says, like “going out to the garage to look for a pitchfork” in order to slay the villains, there is a good chance you are: 1) a partner at Goldman Sachs, 2) a Republican U.S. Senator who has been voting to dismantle the weak financial reforms put in place after the Great Recession, or 3) clueless.

Christian Bale plays Michael Burry, an eccentric fund manager who bet short in The Big Short — Christian Bale plays Michael Burry, an eccentric fund manager who bets short in the movie “The Big Short”

The Big Short, a wildly inventive and superbly acted film that is both comedy and tragedy, joins Spotlight, a morality tale, also superbly acted, in exploring the corruption inherent in absolute power.

Both films show us again that Hollywood, the very essence of America’s unceasing appetite for excess, can – at least once in a while – bring about the self-reflection that is distressingly missing among those wrapped in privilege and pampered by power and money.

Recent History…Already Being Forgotten

McKay’s film, based on the bestselling book by Michael Lewis, focuses on the years immediately before the Great Economic Meltdown of 2008 when a handful of investment “outsiders” detected the inevitable bursting of the housing bubble that ultimately brought the U.S. and world economy to its knees. These outsiders, seeing the interconnecting disaster of sub-prime mortgages, mortgaged backed securities, CDO’s, credit default swaps and billions and billions of dollars, decided to beat the rigged “system” where big banks, credit rating agencies and government regulators quietly (and in some cases ignorantly) allowed massive financial fraud to occur.

These outside guys bet “short,” made billions off the fraudulent system and then watched in disbelief as the high rolling Wall Street banking crowd walked away from the wreckage almost entirely unscathed. Others, of course, were not so fortunate. As the film points out a cool $5 trillion dollars was lost when the housing market finally crashed and took with it pension funds, life savings, 401K investments, and the jobs, homes and futures of people who deserved much better.

In the dying days of the George W. Bush Administration the American taxpayer stepped in and bailed out the banks, with the notable exception of Lehman Brothers. The bankers then used vast amounts of the bailout funds to reward themselves with huge bonuses. As the Times reported in 2009, “At Goldman Sachs, for example, bonuses of more than $1 million went to 953 traders and bankers, and Morgan Stanley awarded seven-figure bonuses to 428 employees. Even at weaker banks like Citigroup and Bank of America, million-dollar awards were distributed to hundreds of workers.”

No harm, no foul, but in fact there were both. There has been virtually no prosecution of the clear fraud that occurred – only one relatively low level banker went to jail – while business quickly returned to normal in the canyons of finance in lower Manhattan. Oh, there were financial penalties for many of the guilty firms, but most were sufficiently small to qualify as “a cost of doing business,” even when the business is built on fraud.

Actor Steve Carrell in "The Big Short" — Actor Steve Carell in “The Big Short”

In one of the most chilling scenes in a movie full of startling scenes we look on as one of the “short sellers,” played perfectly by Steve Carell, is quizzing one of the big bank managers about who he really represents as he packages and repackages the mostly worthless mortgages – he knows they are worthless – that he then peddles to his unsuspecting investors.

“Who do you work for,” Carell’s character demands to know. The bank guy smiles and says, “the investors.” That is, of course, the very definition of fraud.

Given our startling short attention span it is probably not surprising that most of the political and economic elite – Bernie Sanders excepted – have moved on from these events of less than a decade ago. Wall Street is busy devising new, esoteric investment devices, many barely regulated and even more minimally understood. Meanwhile, as though it all never happened, Hillary Clinton – and every Republican who can – goes to Wall Street for campaign cash, while promising to be tough on the same people who write the checks. The recently passed federal budget deal included, thanks to lobbying by the financial industry, a provision blocking the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) “from taking action on a long-discussed rule requiring publicly owned companies to disclose their political giving.”

Surely They Have Committed a Terrible Crime

As stunning as the lack of fraud prosecutions is the easy return to the status quo for Wall Street. One voice in the wilderness has been U.S. Federal Judge Jed Rakoff who has courageously and indigently refused to sanction several settlement agreements struck by the SEC with the bankers who caused the big collapse. Rakoff has written and spoken widely on the tepid regulatory and prosecutorial response to the Great Meltdown and singlehandedly has shamed regulators into insisting that some banks pay higher fines. But, the judge remains dismayed – as viewers of The Big Short certain will – that individuals who clearly committed fraud are still spending their weekends in the Hamptons.

“You have to be careful,” Rakoff told The Nation in 2014. “It’s easy to descend to scapegoating here. But to this very day, it concerns me that too many people in positions of authority do not realize how, even now, there are so many people suffering as a result of this financial crisis. There are millions of people out there who have lost their jobs, have no prospect of getting any good job, have exhausted their resources and are living lives of destitution and hopelessness. If there are people to blame, surely they have committed a terrible crime.”

Indeed. Go see The Big Short and next time you encounter an elected official who could have done more back then and could still do more now ask them if they are ready to explain the next big crash; the economic turmoil that surely will tumble forth again from the greed and corruption that is so deeply embedded in our financial system.

Spotlight on Corruption in the Catholic Church

The other great Hollywood study in power and corruption this season is the real life journalism drama Spotlight,the story of the Boston Globe’s investigations that exposed the extent of the clergy sex abuse scandal in the Boston Archdiocese. The film is exceptional on several levels. It is the best thing Hollywood has every produced showing how journalism really works, but it resists glorifying the scruffy reporters who miss stories right in front of them, descend into numerous rabbit holes, but still doggedly pursue corruption in high places, in this case all the way to the top – Cardinal Bernard Law.

Poster for "Spotlight" — Poster for “Spotlight”

Tom McCarthy’s movie has generated much Oscar buzz despite or perhaps because, as Rolling Stone critic Peter Travers noted,”there’s not an ounce of Hollywood bullshit in it. Our eyes and ears are the Spotlight team, played by exceptional actors who could not be better or more fully committed.”

At the heart of the church’s ugly and widespread scandal is the sobering fact that so many knew for so long what was happening and still did nothing. Lawyers, priests, bishops, well-heeled Catholics who enjoyed being on a first name basis with the Cardinal simply chose to look away. Few, very few, attempted to confront the power and influence of the Catholic Church, an institution as big in Boston as the Red Sox.

Ultimately, it took a Boston outsider, a Jewish editor in a Irish-Catholic town, Marty Baron, now the executive editor of the Washington Post, to zero in on the obvious issue: where does the real corruption come from? At one point Baron’s reporters are ready to publish a story on abuses by a few priests, but he says no. The story is bigger than just the individuals involved, he thinks. They need to go work some more. Ultimately, this is a story of institutional corruption that goes all the way to the top and the Spotlight team got the story.

A Failure of Accountability

Spotlight also draws into sharp focus the genuine threat to a democratic system from the continuing disappearance of the kind of investigative and accountability reporting that made the Globe’s critical stories possible. Critic David Sims correctly says by not cheerleading the journalist’s efforts, but “by quietly celebrating the work of The Globe’s reporters, McCarthy makes a far more consequential argument for the value of smart reporting and robust local newspapers.”

Still one wonders in the era of “click bait” journalism, shrinking newsrooms and a constant re-definition of news whether in the not-too-distant future big, powerful, corrupt institutions will have little if anything to fear from their local newspaper.

Not unlike the guilty in the financial meltdown featured in The Big Short, Bernard Law mostly walked away from his fraud, the 550 victims of abuse in the Boston archdiocese and the $85 million the church paid to settle abuse claims.

The retired Cardinal was forced to step down in Boston, but now lives comfortably in a modern apartment “in a very nice building,” near the Vatican in Rome. Reporters tried to talk to Law when Spotlight was released, but he was not available to answer questions. He, unlike the victims he failed, seems to have moved on. Law will have to wait for his ultimate accountability, as he must surely know.

Both these stellar films are classic tales of corruption, greed and the corrosive effects of money and power, but perhaps what they most share is the spotlight they turn on our culture’s frequent failure to hold those responsible in such egregious cases truly accountable.

Both these films stop short of preaching and seem instead to suggest that all of us have moral choices to make about the frauds and failures in a society that too often has trouble separating the important from the trivial. If we are content to shrug off the latest outrage then can we ever hope that politicians and church leaders, regulators and bond rating agencies will do a better job exercising their responsibility?

When fraud committing bankers are allowed to walk away from the financial wreckage they created, pockets bulging with seven figure bonuses and when one of the high priests of the Catholic Church seamlessly moves on from what may be the worst failure of accountability in the modern history of the institution one is left to wonder only one thing: how bad will it be next time?

Christmas

Christmas Memories…

Posted on December 23, 2015by christian

“It’s Christmas Eve! It’s the one night of the year when we all act a little nicer, we smile a little easier, we cheer a little more. For a couple of hours out of the whole year, we are the people that we always hoped we would be.”

– Bill Murray in Scrooged.

—–

My Dad loved to tell a Christmas story that a minister friend told him years ago. A group of first graders were lining up to take their places in a Christmas pageant and the minister was asking them what part they hoped to play – shepherd, one of the
wise men, maybe an angel. One little guy piped up and announced that he hoped to be “Round John.”

“Round John,” the minister said with a surprised look on his face. “You know,” the little guy said, “like the song – Round John virgin.”

I was once in a Christmas pageant – surprisingly as an angel – and wearing my nifty little costume, a cape-like affair with a row of tinsel-like material glued or sewed to the fabric. While waiting to make my entrance, I was sitting on the floor, back against the wall when my tinsel-like material came in contact with an electric outlet. I’m often still as oblivious as I was at age six. Sparks flew. A smell of burning fabric filled the room. The angel was sparking, but spared. No one died, thankfully. The show went on. My mother was appalled.

—–

Family lore holds that our tradition of opening gifts on Christmas Eve dates to when my brother was discovered under the tree at 3:00 o’clock on Christmas morning ripping into his presents. He had simply decided he had been in bed long enough, damn it, it was time to get on with the main event. Mom and dad, probably still a bit groggy from one too many Tom and Jerry’s, heard the commotion and lit up the living room. Reprimands to brother Rick quickly gave way to smiles and a cup of coffee. Christmas came early – very early in the morning that year. Mom, needing her beauty sleep, decreed that henceforth Christmas would come even earlier – on Christmas Eve. Good call, Mom.

—–

My mother made fruit cake. Now, before you seize up and start thinking, “I know fruitcake – also known as the brick doorstop” learn about her fruitcake. By the way, there is no truth to the rumor that there are really only about 500 fruitcakes in the entire world that are perpetually re-gifted. That is an urban myth, at least I think it is.

No store bought fruit cake for us... — No store bought fruit cake for us…

I can tell you this: my mother’s fruitcake was precious, good stuff and none of that neon electric colored, store bought fruit for Mrs. Johnson. She used fruit cocktail – from a can. Her fruit cake was dense and moist, soft and substantial. I loved it. She knew I didn’t appreciate the chopped walnuts that her recipe called for, so – love you Mom – she always made me my own loaf of fruit cake sans walnuts. She would drizzle a little powdered sugar frosting on top. Oh, the memory.

I’ve had floating islands in fancy restaurants, clafoutis to die for, cherries jubilee and mousse aux chocolate, but would trade them all for one more slice of Mom’s fruit cake. It probably tastes better in my memory than it did for real, but she did go to the trouble of leaving out the walnuts. Love is a sweet taste.

—–

Merry Christmas and thanks for reading…Now…Come let us adore him… Jesus, Lord, at Thy birth …

PS: The new Bill Murray Christmas special is very sweet, a little weird and full of funny stuff. Have an eggnog and watch while we count our blessings.

2016 Election, Politics, Polling, Sanders, Trump

Trolling the Polls

Posted on December 19, 2015by christian

“Trump has received about the most disproportionate media coverage ever for a primary candidate. The risk to Trump and candidates like him is that polling built on a foundation of media coverage can be subject to a correction when the news environment changes.” – Data gura Nate Silver on the polls and Trump.

——

Never in the course of American politics have so many paid so much attention to so many polls with so little relevance to what is really going on. Polls drive media coverage. Polls determine who gets to debate in prime time. Polls have become the oxygen of American politics. If you are up in the polls you are “surging.” Drop a few points – calling Ben Carson! – and you are “slumping.”

Every day of the week brings a new poll. Left Overshoe Junior College has released a new poll! Trump leads among six white guys who responded online! Post the story!

We are obsessed with polls, or at least political editors, reporters, campaign operatives and politicians are obsessed with polls. OK, let’s admit it, we are all obsessed with polls. I have been drafting survey questions and trying to analyze results for most of my adult life. I love the “cross tabs” and the idea of insight into the population, but we need to admit the business of polling is an art and not a science. Surveying a nation as big and diverse as ours often means channeling Monet and creating an impression rather than proclaiming a survey as scientific fact. Additionally, the rapid attention to all of the polling holds the real potential to skew the democratic process itself.

Time for a Deep Breath…

It’s human nature to want to know, as Donald J. Trump might say, “just what the hell is going on.” But political polls have become a little like really good Belgian chocolate. A little taste of really quality chocolate is satisfying and may even be good for you, but indiscriminately gobble too much and you’ll get a sugar high and put on a few pounds.

As The New Yorker’s Jill Lepore noted in a widely discussed piece last month: “From the late nineteen-nineties to 2012, twelve hundred polling organizations conducted nearly thirty-seven thousand polls by making more than three billion phone calls. Most Americans refused to speak to them. This skewed results. Mitt Romney’s pollsters believed, even on the morning of the election, that Romney would win. A 2013 study—a poll—found that three out of four Americans suspect polls of bias. Presumably, there was far greater distrust among the people who refused to take the survey.”

The Pew Center, which conducts widely respected surveys, estimates that the participation rate for its surveys is now just eight percent. Twenty years ago pollsters considered an 80 percent participation rate acceptable. With lower and lower participation rates, not to mention the challenge of reaching potential voters on a cell phone, some polling outfits have turned to “online” surveys, but the online methodology and sample quality have not kept pace with the frantic nature of polling.

Rutgers University professor Cliff Zukin, a past president of the American Association of Public Opinion Research, wrote a while back in the New York Times that “Internet use correlates inversely with age and voting habits, making this a more severe problem in predicting elections. While all but 3 percent of those ages 18 to 29 use the Internet, they made up just 13 percent of the 2014 electorate, according to the exit poll conducted by Edison Research. Some 40 percent of those 65 and older do not use the Internet, but they made up 22 percent of voters.”

With polls and chocolate it is a case of all things in moderation. So, while you nibble on a little pre-Christmas chocolate consider at least two principal things that are wrong with the overriding obsession with polling in our political process.

Two Big Problems with Too Many Polls…

First, too many polls these days are the political equivalent of a sleazy used car salesman who washes and polishes the old clunker in order to peddle it to some unsuspecting rube who doesn’t take time to look under the hood. Methodology matters, as does the professionalism and integrity of the polling organization. When assessing the latest polls its essential to “look under the hood” and understand how the survey was conducted and for whom it was conducted.

The data-crunching guru Nate Silver, he’s the guy who has nailed the prediction in the last two presidential elections, has a nifty analysis of the vast assortment of polls that make their way into the national news machine. Silver has ranked the polls according to their accuracy and methodology over time. It’s become standard practice for me – a certifiable “news junkie” – to check Silver’s ranking against the latest poll that assumes to convey heaven sent wisdom.

Second, it’s an old cliché in the polling business, but its still true: a political survey is a snap shot of a moment in time, specifically the time when the survey was conducted, as well as the slice of the electorate surveyed. At a given moment in time a well-constructed, well-researched survey utilizing a well-conceived sample can provide real insight into broad themes and valuable information about how voters might make specific choices among well-articulated alternatives. What polls are not particularly good at doing, at least at the current stage of the presidential campaign – remember not a single vote has been cast yet – is to serve as a predictor.

A skilled Republican pollster told me recently that one of the hardest things to master in the survey business is the “quality of the sample” – what portion of the electorate is actually going to make the effort to get to the polls and vote. “You need to be very careful,” this pollster said, “to pull a sample that accurately reflects age, party, geography, race and gender. That takes time and again costs more money.”

For example, when many Republicans, including his own campaign strategists, thought Mitt Romney would pull out a win over President Obama in 2012, they had misread the electorate that actually bothered to vote. A good deal of the polling miscalculated, for instance, the level of voting by Hispanic Americans. In his last election George W. Bush captured 40+ percent of the Hispanic vote. In 2012 Romney got only 25 percent. That difference in the makeup of the electorate helps explain Obama’s second term. At the same time, it would be a mistake to automatically assume that any Democrat in the future will always gain that level of the vote by a specific demographic group. Every election is different. Understanding the shape of the electorate is critical to good survey work.

The data-crunching site FiveThirtyEight has teamed with the NPR program On the Media to create a new consumer’s handbook for deconstructing the polls. You might want to copy the dozen points and tape it to your television.

But What of Trump…

I’ve become convinced that the Donald J. Trump phenomenon is, at least in some significant measure, a function of Trump’s own narcissistic pre-occupation with his standing in the polls. Trump regularly touts his “YUGE!” lead in the latest poll. He Tweets his standing from early in the morning until late at night. In the circular logic that drives news coverage of political campaigns Trump is, in many ways, a creation of the polls he loves to cite.

It is probably not a surprise then that Trump comments almost exclusively on polls that show him doing well. As the website FiveThirtyEightPolitics noted recently: “Trump also likes to tweet or retweet about the same poll a lot. He tweeted 29 poll results that he approved of more than once. He also tweeted one poll (a September CNN national survey) favorably, before turning on it more than once to highlight a better poll result for him from NBC and SurveyMonkey.”

A Trump Tweet Saturday on a post-debate poll

As Trump tweets to his 5.3 million Twitter followers a poll that he likes, perhaps more than once, he is simply building the buzz about how successful his candidacy seems to be. It’s little different, from a marketing standpoint, than what Disney is doing by branding everything it can touch with a Star Wars logo. Marketing works to create impressions, drive coverage and, temporarily at least, move polls. It also help encourage people to buy Star Wars themed merchandize.

Trump may be an idiot about policy, but he understands the psychology of perception and he is constantly using polling data, some of it decidedly specious, to continually reinforce his leadership of the Republican field.

It is also no surprise that Trump dismisses as fatally flawed any poll that shows him slipping. When the very well regarded Des Moines Register poll recently showed Trump trailing Texas Senator Ted Cruz in Iowa, the place where the first voting takes place right after the first of the year, Trump dismissed the poll as the biased work of a newspaper that has been critical of his candidacy. Should I remind him that he touted his lead in the same poll earlier in the year?

The other factor that has driven Trump’s poll numbers (in addition to him constantly talking about his poll numbers) is the unprecedented media coverage his campaign has generated. He has been making wild claims about Syrian refugees, Mexican immigrants, banning Muslims, even his “bromance” with Vladimir Putin, but it has served to give him a hugely disproportionate share of media coverage.

All Trump all the time. Trump being "interviewed" by Jimmy Fallon playing Trump. — All Trump all the time. Trump being “interviewed” by Jimmy Fallon playing Trump.

Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, based only on his two million individual campaign contributors (not to mention the polls), arguably has a larger following than The Bloviator-in-Chief, but by one measure Trump has received 23 precent more coverage than Sanders.

As Nate Silver says: “Trump probably realizes, the media’s obsession with polls can become a self-perpetuating cycle: Trump’s being in the media spotlight tends to help him in the polls, which in turn keeps him in the spotlight, which in turn helps in the polls, and so forth.”

It’s worth pointing out once again that no one has voted yet and there is considerable historical evidence that voters in early state contests like Iowa and New Hampshire decide very late in the process as to who they will support. Trump’s national polling lead may yet translate into real votes in the Iowa caucus – remember that in the best poll conducted at the state level talking to people who have actually participated in previous caucus voting he is behind – but there is also an argument to be made that his lead is to a large degree a function of prospective (or possible) voters seeing and hearing him constantly. Name ID matters, particularly when voters are still weighing choices.

As Jill Lepore noted in her New Yorker piece: “Donald Trump is a creature of the polls. He is his numbers.” But there could well be a bigger and longer-term problem for our democracy than one self-obsessed, poll-centric billionaire.

Reporting incessantly on polls and allowing this week’s polling results to determine the shape of political coverage, Lepore and others argue, is more than just a sign of the times, it is a signal of the increasing disintegration of American political culture.

“Turning the press into pollsters has made American political culture Trumpian,” Lepore writes, “frantic, volatile, shortsighted, sales-driven, and anti-democratic.”

No political junkie – I’m certainly guilty – would encourage a complete disregard for political polling, but there is a very strong case to be made for backing it off a full turn. Let’s have a little real voting and then we can see who is really winning.

2016 Election, Trump

Anatomy of a Demagogue

Posted on December 11, 2015by christian

In his masterful study of the populist demagogues that plagued Franklin Roosevelt near the end of his first term in the 1930’s, Columbia University historian Alan Brinkley made an observation that seems eerily appropriate to the crazy politics of the United States in the early 21^st Century.

Brinkley argued that political characters like Louisiana Senator Huey Long and the Roman Catholic hate preacher Father Charles Coughlin, both of whom developed mass followings during the economic and social upheaval of the Great Depression, were part of a long American tradition of populist figures not wholly of the political left or right. Long and Coughlin and others of their ilk were motivated by a few deeply felt beliefs, including fear of concentrated power and resistance to being dominated by either private interests or public institutions.

Leading to the Left…and Right…

“It is an impulse that can, under different circumstances lead either to the left or the right,” Brinkley wrote in his seminal work Voices of Protest. “Or it can – as it did in the case of Huey Long and Father Coughlin – lead to both simultaneously.”

As Roosevelt contemplated a second term in the election of 1936 he also had to confront the enormously popular ideas of an elderly California physician by the name of Francis Townsend. Townsend was advocating an old age pension scheme – The Townsend Plan – that sounded to millions of elderly and often destitute Americans as simply too good to be true. It was and FDR responded by creating Social Security.

Long, a skillful political communicator with a flair for the outrageous, was described by the great reporter A.J. Liebling as “a chubby man, he had ginger hair and tight skin that was the color of a sunburn coming on. It was an uneasy combination, like an orange tie on a pink shirt.” Long authored a book that he modestly entitled My First Days in the White House. Sound like anyone you know?

Huey Long was both a serious political threat to Roosevelt and a populist demagogue. FDR’s advisors believed that Long might either split the Democratic Party in 1936 or run an independent presidential campaign that might deny Roosevelt a second term. History changed in ways we will never know when Long died in a hail of bullets in a hallway of the Louisiana State Capitol in September 1935.

A Coughlin supporter years later said that “when he spoke it was a thrill like Hitler. And the magnetism was uncanny. It was so intoxicating, there’s no use saying what he talked about…”

Roosevelt complained shortly before Long’s death that that he was “fighting Communism, Huey Longism, Coughlinism, Townsendism…to save the capitalist system” from “crackpot ideas.”

Like the poor, our demagogues have always been with us. And now comes The Age of Trump.

But…Trump Now Dominates One Major Party…

The big difference between the 1930’s and today is that one dangerous and divisive man, a demagogue in the American tradition, has largely taken over one major political party, something that a Long or a Coughlin never accomplished. Ironically, the man Donald J. Trump may have to crush to win the GOP nomination, Texas Senator Ted Cruz, has approached his campaign as a Trump-lite in cowboy boots. Cruz has an uncanny resemblance to a one-time Republican demagogue from Wisconsin and his sweeping assertions and scathing attacks channel another of the last century’s great manipulators, Joe McCarthy.

However it is Donald J. Trump, the stout billionaire with the ginger hair and skin the color of a sunburn coming on, who is the manifestation of the fact-free, racially divisive, often cynical and opportunistic party he now dominates. The 21^st Century Republican Party created the environment that allowed the Age of Trump. They own him now and increasingly Trump owns the Republican Party.

Trump has the GOP over the barrel of his own design. His appeal is to the core Republican voter – overwhelmingly white, middle aged, less educated and angry – angry at Obama, angry about the nation’s changing demographics and increasingly angry at those who once might have channeled their frustrations in a more constructive direction. If Trump does not win the party’s nomination he almost certainly will mount a third-party effort, which could doom GOP chances for not only winning the White House, but controlling Congress.

Opportunity and Circumstance…

A demagogue – some have moved on, not improperly, to label Trump a fascist – is a product of both opportunity and circumstance. You cannot separate the Age of Trump from the circumstances that have been in the political foreground now for nearly a decade: the ultra conservative disdain for a government that actually governs, the complete abandonment of bipartisanship, the abject failure to address immigration from Mexico and Central America, the visceral hatred for the nation’s first black president, the completely partisan response to a health care crisis that condemned millions of Americans to a life without the security that they can see a doctor (and pay for it), lock step opposition to addressing growing income inequality and the new Gilded Age excesses of the nation’s economic elite.

Add on a Supreme Court that by the narrowest of margins wiped out any limits on money in politics creating a system where economic oligarchs secretly lavish outrageous sums of money on favored candidates and causes, and you truly have the toxic opportunity that Trump has so successfully exploited.

Of course, every demagogue needs an unpopular enemy. Huey Long had his villains – “the Rockefellers, the Mellons, the Barachs” – while Coughlin’s target were “the Jews.” Trump began his romp toward the Iowa caucus by demonizing Mexicans as “rapists and murderers,” but like all skillful demagogues he was able to switch his target in the space of a Twitter message when the circumstances presented. Radicalized Islam provided what Trump really needed to exploit the fears of Americans in the wake of Paris and San Bernardino. Trump is far from the brilliant businessman he claims to be, but as a classic narcissist he is a master manipulator. Hot buttons are all that he pushes.

The signature Trump event - the rally — The signature Trump event – the rally

Trump’s approach is not unprecedented in our history, but he has clearly demolished all the old boundaries. Historian David Kennedy of Stanford University told the Washington Post recently that branding an entire religious class of people puts Trump “further out there than almost anyone in the annals of [U.S.] history.”

Once upon a time a candidate for President of the United States had to at least pretend to offer a coherent policy agenda, but a demagogue labors under no such uncomfortable constraints. Trump, with all his bravura on display in carefully choreographed mass rallies with security offered by his own private forces, and yes the comparison to those grainy black and white photos of fascist rallies of the 1930’s is intentional, never offers a specific and credible policy proposal.

Making America Great Again…

Trump will build “a beautiful wall” along the Mexican border and “make Mexico pay for it” without ever grappling with the details or impossibility of such a silly proposal. Trump would bar all Muslims from entering the country, even American citizens, create a register of Muslims and “look closely at the Mosques”, without even a passing nod to the U.S. Constitution. His answer to Islamic State terrorism is to “bomb the hell out of them.”

Predictably Trump has prompted a noticeable increase in white supremacist activity, while Muslim’s face threats and religious facilities are vandalized. Trump has no advisors and relies on no one but his friend in the mirror. His policy positions are as thin as his political and foreign policy experience. Any inconvenient question is an attack. His opponents are losers, unworthy of the moment Trump commands.

At the same time, Trump is both more politically attuned and more manipulative than the rest of the Republican presidential gang who cannot figure out how to deal with him. He avoids the third rail of American politics and unlike most Republicans defends Social Security and Medicare, while promising to tax the most wealthy. His “base,” of course, hates government, but loves those entitlements and hates those elites.

Trump will make “America Great Again” without ever saying what “again” means. When was American great in a way that Trump might endorse? I hesitate to play the Nazi card, but Trump begs the reference. The demagogic Austrian made the same claim and addressed the same perceived grievances in Germany in the 1920’s and 1930’s.

In 1990, Trump’s lawyer told Vanity Fair magazine that, “Donald is a believer in the big-lie theory. If you say something again and again, people will believe you.” Trump’s lie that “thousands” of Muslim’s celebrated the attacks on the World Trade Center, was completely debunked by fact checkers and those who were there, has now been repeated so often it has become accepted wisdom among his followers.

Trump, make no mistake, is both a profoundly dangerous and astoundingly devious man; the social media empowered demagogue of our time. He has recognized both the opportunity and the circumstance of America in 2015 and he rides the wave, while the nation reaps his whirlwind.

The Burden of Citizenship is Responsibility…

“There is a burden of responsibility that comes with being a citizen of a constitutional democracy,” University of Virginia historian Michael Signer told NPR in a recent interview where he was asked to analyze the new and uniquely American demagogue – Donald J. Trump. “And if you decide to go with your gut as opposed to caring about those values, then you are hurting this country.”

Demagogues, Signer says, have “been talked about for millennia as flatterers, so they flatter the people. They play to our need for gratitude. And we’re supposed to better than that. So one of the reasons that demagogues are hemmed in is because people say, I hear you, that feels good, but I’m not going to fall in love with you. This is too indulgent. And politicians, usually, are too ashamed to do what demagogues do. And then, Trump, who’s a creature, comes from the entertainment world, comes from a culture of narcissism, he doesn’t care about any of those rules. So I don’t think it’s OK to say, well, you know, I know about the principle of separation of church and state, and I know about not having violence in our politics, but I’m going to go with Trump anyway because I’m so angry at the system. That’s not OK. It’s definitively not OK in the United States of America, and it needs to be condemned.”

Put me down as condemning. What we have seen in the fact-free, demagogic, big lie tirades of a dangerous man is not the country a Lincoln or an Eisenhower, a Reagan or a Kennedy or a Carter would recognize. We all have a burden of responsibility to say enough. You do not speak for us. This is the United States and we are better than you think we are.

The proper, indeed American response to fear and paranoia is to deal in facts and reason, elements unfortunately as missing from the national dialogue and from Trump’s language as any shared sense of responsibility among citizens in a constitutional democracy.

As we swing wildly at the “un-Americans” of the moment and cheeringly embrace complete nonsense we risk doing real harm to our always fragile democracy and we risk squandering the one sure and most powerful weapon we hold over our real enemies – an open, decent, inclusive albeit often messy political system that rejects demagogues, deals with reality and embraces values that should set us apart.

The modern Republican Party created the environment that has permitted the Age of Trump. Republicans own their demagogue. Now, can they stop him?