Automation, free trade deals and job losses

I’m never quite sure whether politicians, taken as a whole, are really too dumb and/or uneducated to understand the real world, or if they just think we, the voting public, are too dumb and/or uneducated to understand complicated explanations, so they give us simple ones. Perhaps it’s a little of both.

Both parties in this election have been promising to restore lost blue collar jobs (which just isn’t going to happen). Both have blamed free trade deals and outsourcing as the culprit. Actually, studies suggest that only around 10-12% of job losses are from outsourcing and trade agreements. (see, for example, the paper Trade Deficits and Manufacturing Job Loss: Correlation and Causality ) 

The rest were lost to automation. It turns out automation is actually the big job destroyer, both in America and around the world.  (see, for example, Trump Doesn't Need ToBother Apple About Manufacturing In America--Foxconn Replaces 60,000 WithRobots) And automation isn’t going to get reversed. Indeed, automation is rapidly invading even the higher-skill middle class job markets, enriching the 1% even more and putting even more people out of work.

 Now the real brilliance of the Marshall Plan after World War II was the realization that it was in America’s interests to rebuild Europe, because American companies needed European markets to prosper, and those markets weren’t going to come back until Europe was rebuilt and European economies were healthy again.

The 1%, and the politicians they buy, need to understand a similar principle. It is all very well to reduce production costs (and increase profits) by automating manufacturing and services, but unless a way is found for all the displaced workers to earn a good living, there is no market for those goods and services.  Henry Ford was smart enough to pay his workers higher than average wages so they could buy his cars. Today's business owners need to think the same way.

Neither political party seems to have understood this yet, or if they have, they haven’t put any apparent attention to solving this problem.  Certainly neither Clinton’s nor Trump’s campaign speeches suggest any understanding of the underlying problem, nor have I seen much discussion of it among the academic think tanks that feed off of Washington’s largess.

But it seems to me this is the single largest problem facing the nation today.

Recommended: The Meaning of Mr Trump

Walter Russel Mead. who always seems to have something useful to say, has a good article in the current American Interest: The Meaning of Mr Trump.

Mead argues that the nation has moved on, but the professional establishment politicians haven't.  They are still selling the same ideas and messages that they were selling a decade or two ago, but by now it is clear that these policies aren't working.  He doesn't necessarily think that Trump has the answers, just that people are supporting Trump (and Bernie) as a message to the establishment that things aren't working.

I tend to agree.  Although by comparison America is doing better than most of the rest of the world, it is nevertheless in trouble.  The middle class is getting hollowed out, inequality is rising, the political systems is deadlocked and ineffective, government agencies right and left are getting mired in scandal (the VA system, the IRS, the Justice Department, etc, etc.), the economy is recovering at a snail's pace, we are mired in endless, wildly expensive wars in the Middle East, we seem to be helpless against the provocations of Russia and China, etc, etc, etc.

It's a good article.

A Rational Choice?

Most voters will vote based on either their ideological stance (Republican, Democrat, liberal, conservative) or on the basis of some emotional appeal from one candidate or the other that happens to be a concern of theirs, whether the appeal is realistic or not.  But if one wanted to be a “rational” voter in this dismal election, how might one think about the choices?

First of all, the president’s powers really are fairly limited. Most effective actions have to be enacted by Congress as laws.  Presidents can promise all sorts of things – Obama promised to create a million jobs in his second term (he is still about 700,000 short of meeting that promise), but in fact he really has almost no control at all over job creation in the short term. So the first filter might be to ignore candidate’s positions and promises on issues they really don’t control.

For example, gun control. Yes, it would be nice to take assault weapons off the streets and get guns out of the hands of criminals, but realistically it isn’t going to happen. First of all this nation (and the world in general) is awash in guns, and large sections of the country would rebel if anyone tried to take them away. Background checks are reasonable, but they won’t stop criminals and drug gangs from getting unregistered guns, nor will it stop the occasional nut from getting a gun one way or another if they want it.  States and local communities can manage to get some restrictions through because they can accommodate to the local values (ie - liberal urban areas can pass local gun restrictions that would never fly nationwide). But the federal system isn’t going to manage to do anything effective nationwide, so one can simply ignore any candidate’s promises or positions on this issue.

And job creation. Candidates can promise whatever they like – manufacturing jobs lost to automation or cheaper overseas labor are for the most part never coming back, whatever promises are made. And in fact the president has almost no direct control over job creation, which is a function of large scale economic pressures in the private sector. Which means really that presidents deserve neither blame nor credit for most short term economic conditions, so one can ignore most such proposals.

And climate change.  Yes, man-made climate change is real and a rational species would do something effective about this issue. But it isn’t going to happen. All the recent international agreements are nice political window dressing, but actually they don’t do anything effective. Nations will always act in their own interests, and that means the big polluters will never agree to the economic pain and dislocation that a really effective line of action would require.  The US is doing better in recent years, but not because of any agreements – it just happens that cheap fracking gas, which pollutes less, is displacing coal for strictly economic reasons. So although this issue gets a lot of press, one can largely ignore the candidate’s positions on this.

And Supreme Court appointments. Yes, the president nominates candidates for the Supreme Court, but they have to get past Congress. So really it is the ideological balance in Congress that controls the nominations, not the president. And besides, history shows that presidents and Congress are remarkably bad at predicting the stance of Supreme Court judges once they are on the bench. (Conservatives thought Chief Justice Roberts would be one of theirs, but he turned out, once appointed, to have his own agenda).

So what issues does a president have some power to control?

Foreign policy in general, and military deployments in particular, are controlled to some degree by the president, so the candidate’s positions on these issues matter.  It matters what they might do in the Middle East mess – get more involved or get less involved.  It matters if and how they might handle confrontations with countries like Russia and China.  It matters if they favor a strong military or not. It matters how they handle our allies.

The budget. Yes, Congress makes up the budget, but the president can veto it, so she/he has some leverage to control what goes into the budget and how big it is. So a president has some control over whether our national debt grows or shrinks, and over what programs get more funding. This is a situation where it matters how good the president is at negotiating with Congress. Obama wasn’t very good at it, even with his own party.

Cabinet appointments. Political appointees have limited effect on the agencies they head – the bureaucracies have their own momentum – but they can steer the agency focus to a certain extent.  Obama’s attorney generals, for example, have focused the Justice Department more on black civil rights issues than previous administrations, but have been remarkably lenient on the Wall Street abuses that led to the economic crash.

This is just a sampling, but it suggests an approach a “rational” voter might take – ignoring issues the president really doesn’t control and focusing on the candidate’s positions on issues over which the president actually does have some significant influence.

The Sanders’ strategy

The Democratic establishment is understandably unhappy that Bernie Sanders hasn’t yet dropped out of the race against Hillary Clinton.  The Clinton camp has been trying – apparently without success thus far – to figure out how to convince him to quite without angering his followers, which they need in the general election. Some have begun to hint snidely that this is really about him, not his movement.

I think Sanders is staying in the race because he knows that there is a good chance that Hillary will have serious legal problems before the election which will either cause her to drop out or cause the Democratic establishment to figure out how to replace her as the nominee. And if that happens, Bernie would be the obvious replacement, since he has the next most delegates, and in polling thus far does better than Clinton against Trump.

I have no doubt that the FBI will present enough evidence in her e-mail scandal to the Justice Department to warrant an indictment. Just the publically revealed facts provide that evidence (that she sent and received classified information – whether so marked or not - on her unsecured private server), and I assume the FBI has probably found other stuff too. But Attorney General Loretta Lynch, a Hillary supporter and Obama appointee, has the final say on whether to put the case to a grand jury, and will no doubt try to find a justification for not doing so.

And there is a separate civil trial going on now under U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan of Washington to determine if Hillary and her staff conspired (in the criminal sense) to evade the government Freedom of Information Act with her private server. And finally the State Department Inspector General has an investigation going on to determine if the massive foreign contributions to the Clinton Foundation while she was Secretary of State amounted to “pay for play” corruption.

I assume the Obama administration will do everything it can to protect Hillary from these legal challenges, just as they did with General Petraeus. If all else fails, President Obama can always give her a presidential pardon, though politically that might be as bad for Hillary and the Democratic Party as Hillary getting indicted. Still, the administration has a number of ways of putting in a “fix” to protect Hillary, and I assume they will use them if they have to.

But the evidence may be too overwhelming, and if the FBI finds it has a strong case and then the Justice Department tries to bury it or avoid indicting, the FBI will probably leak damaging stuff and perhaps there will be a few highly visible and highly embarrassing resignations. Apparently the FBI was not happy about how General Patraeus’ case was handled, and is determined not to have that happen again.

So my guess is that Bernie thinks there is a reasonable chance yet that Hillary will have to withdraw and he will be the nominee, and that is why he is not letting up.

Trump’s positions – Immigration (re-posted)

Like it or not, there is a fairly good chance Donald Trump will be our next president. Even if his persuasion techniques, so successful in the primaries, are insufficient to overcome the all-out political and media establishment attacks, Hillary may lose because she is indicted, because a large proportion of Sander’s supporter are too embittered to support her (as some recent polls suggest), or simply because her campaign will again, as in 2008, be too boring, uninspiring and inept.

Given that possibility, it is worth looking at what we know of Donald Trump’s positions on major issues. The issue here isn’t whether one agrees with those positions, but simply whether they really are as outlandish as the (largely liberal, largely Clinton biased) media has been painting them. Let’s start with immigration.

The biggest fuss the media have made is about his proposal to build a fence across the 2000 mile US-Mexican border. Yes, that is probably not really practical, and may, as Scott Adams suggests, just be an “anchoring” opening offer from which he can now negotiate down to something reasonable. But note that over the past eight years the Democratic establishment, which is so critical of his plan, have in fact themselves already built over 500 miles of wall/fence on this border – about ¼ of what Trump has proposed. So it’s dumb if Trump proposes it, but not if Obama builds it?

 Border fence under construction in Eagle Pass, Texas

Moreover, a February 2016 Rasmussen poll found 70 percent of Republican voters - and 51 percent of voters overall - support Trump's border wall plan. So apparently at least half of the American public think this isn’t such a dumb idea.

What about his proposal to deport all the illegal immigrants? Liberals want to give most of them some sort of amnesty and a path to citizenship. Trump points out that there is a backlog of hundreds of thousands or perhaps millions of people from around the world who have applied for legal immigration and have been waiting, many for years, to immigrate – is it fair to let illegal immigrants jump the queue ahead of those applying legally?  Seems to me like a perfectly valid question.

Oh and by the way, it is the Obama administration that has been deporting illegal immigrants faster than any previous administration – about 2.5 million people since 2009.  Once again, it’s terrible if Trump proposes it, but just fine if Obama is doing it?

What issues do the majority of voters really care about?

In general we get a biased view of what issues American voters care about most. That is because a few issues have aggressive proponents who manage to garner a deceptively large proportion of the media attention.

The Gallup polling group has been tracking voter priorities in an open-ended poll (that is – voters themselves mention what worries them, rather that ranking a pre-made list. See the full report here). The results are interesting.

It is no surprise that the state of the economy is the top concern. 

The top non-economic issues, in order are

2. Dissatisfaction with government (hence the current voter revolt)

3. Immigration and illegal immigrants

4. Race relations and racism

5. Terrorism & national security

Notice that climate change isn’t a big issue with most voters, even though it gets a lot of press and is a big liberal cause. Notice that gay marriage and abortion aren’t top issues, even though they are a big conservative issue.  Notice that although terrorism and national security are among the top 5 issues, they certainly aren’t the most important – the economy is the most important.

I assume candidates are paying attention to polls like this, and although they do have to pander to the issues their bases care about, I assume they will put their major efforts into positions on these top issues.

Advisors

Presidents, and presidential candidates, do not really act by themselves. They have a team of advisors and chiefs of staff who help shape the president’s or candidate’s actions, propose strategies, filter information, control access, etc, etc.  While the president or candidate themselves certainly sets the overall policies and tone, the quality of the staff controls how successful the execution is and how well and accurately informed the president or candidate is. In truth a presidential campaign is as much a test of how good a candidate’s staff is as it is how good the candidate themselves are.

It is interesting that Trump appears to have won the primaries with no staff helping him.  Of course, there may have been help under the radar, but then for the primary race all he had to do (apparently) was be the best persuader in the crowd, and he didn’t need any help doing that. Now that he is moving into the general election phase, I see that he is doing exactly what he does in his business enterprises – go out and pay top dollar to hire the very best people available to run things.  And I assume that is what he would do if elected president.

Clinton, as near as I can tell, is repeating her 2008 error – choosing her staff for personal loyalty to her rather than competence.  In 2008 party leaders urged her repeatedly to replace key members of her staff who simply weren’t getting the job done, but she refused. And she lost!  Much of that staff followed her to her Secretary of State job, and were again incompetent. No competent staff would have let her get into her current e-mail security problem with the FBI.

She appears to be repeating the error yet again. Her messages are muddled. Trump is about “Making America Great Again”.  Can you tell what Clinton’s core message is about? (Perhaps “Elect me because I am a woman”?).  Look at her website homepage – it actually mentions Trump and Love together, amidst a confusing clutter of images. A recent twitter posting from her went viral when someone (whoever composed the Twitter posting – Clinton apparently doesn’t know how) got mixed up and put a statement supporting Trump into the message.  These are really stupid errors that no competent team would have made.

And there is the rub.  I assume if she were elected president she would continue to put personal loyalty to her above competence in her advisors – and that would be disastrous.

Neither of the choices is appealing in this campaign, but on balance I think I’d rather vote for a president who values competence in their team over personal loyalty to themselves.

Trump’s positions – Nation Building

Continuing my examination of Trumps positions, since, like it or not, he may be our next president, let’s look at his views on the military and the Middle East mess.

Hillary, we know, is a Cold War hawk and an internationalist interventionist.  That is, she believes in using American power to intervene and “right the wrongs” elsewhere in the world, a noble, if expensive, aspiration.  During her time as Secretary of State she was constantly pushing president Obama to intervene more in the Middle East.  There is no reason to think that if she were president she would not continue this trend.

Trump has made it clear that he thinks we ought to cut our losses and get out of the Middle East entirely, and use the money thus saved to do useful things at home like repair our crumbling roads and bridges and fix our lagging education system.

Is this unreasonable?  The Watson Institute at Brown University says this:

The United States federal government has spent or obligated 4.4 trillion dollars on the wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq. This figure includes: direct Congressional war appropriations; war-related increases to the Pentagon base budget; veterans care and disability; increases in the homeland security budget; interest payments on direct war borrowing; foreign assistance spending; and estimated future obligations for veterans’ care.

This total omits many other expenses, such as the macroeconomic costs to the US economy; the opportunity costs of not investing war dollars in alternative sectors; future interest on war borrowing; and local government and private war costs.

The current wars have been paid for almost entirely by borrowing. This borrowing has raised the US budget deficit, increased the national debt, and had other macroeconomic effects, such as raising consumer interest rates. Unless the US immediately repays the money borrowed for war, there will also be future interest payments. We estimate that interest payments could total over $7 trillion by 2053.

A trillion dollars is a thousand billion - an awful lot of money!  According to the American Society of Civil Engineers $4.4 trillion is enough to completely rebuild the crumbling US infrastructure with a trillion left over for something else. They also estimate that a repaired infrastructure might add something like $3.1 trillion to the nation’s gross domestic product, and something like $3,100 in additional annual disposable income to the average household. 

And what has 15 years of American involvement (meddling) in the Middle East produced? The Middle East is in far worse shape than when we started, Iraq no longer acts as a counterweight to Iran’s ambitions. Our Middle Eastern allies no longer trust us. Russia has found a way to insert itself into the chaos. ISIS has come into being to fill the political and power vacuum left when we unseated the (admittedly despicable) authoritarian leaders. What evidence is there to support the argument that continued or increased American involvement would help the situation?

There is a legitimate debate about America’s role in the world – about whether we ought to just mind our own business or whether we have a moral obligation to act as the world’s policeman. There are valid arguments for both views.  One might certainly reasonably disagree with the side Trump has taken in this debate, but I don’t find his views outlandish or unreasonable.

RIP – The New York Times

There was a time (long ago now) when the staid old New York Times was the newspaper of record; a reliable source of relatively unbiased reporting about national events. Those days are apparently long past, as the current flap over the Trump story is revealing. For any who have not been following the story, the Times ran a lead article Sunday about how badly Trump had treated women over the past two decades, and then the women quoted at the beginning of the article came out and said the Times had deliberately “spun” her words to make him look bad.  Trump also noted that he had supplied the Times reporters with a long list of women he had worked with, but they interviewed none of them.

The giveaway that the Times is not unbiased is (1) the fact that they chose to report on Trump’s personal behavior, and on the very issue Hillary Clinton is trying to use against him, rather than examine his policy positions, and (2) that there appears to be no plan for the Times to examine Hillary’s personal behavior as well, especially her personal behavior toward women abused by her husband.

But then, as I said in an earlier posting, the insider political and media establishment – Republican and Democrat alike – sees Trump’s campaign as an existential threat to their cozy world, and is clearly gearing up to go all out to defeat him in any way they can. It will be a rough campaign. It is by no means clear that he is suitable to be president, but if he can withstand the combined Republican and Democratic attacks over the coming months and win, I will certainly be impressed with his abilities.

Actually there is sort of a poetic justice that Trump is so adroit at turning the media’s own biases and weaknesses to his advantage – sort of like jiu jitsu moves that use the opponent’s own momentum to throw him.

But then I have never trusted the press since Goldwater came to speak at Indiana University in 1964 when I was a graduate student. He came and gave quite a reasonable speech to a very orderly and supportive crowd.  But the national TV press coverage that night focused entirely on a small group of perhaps 6 or 8 protesters at the very edge of the crowd, and the print press, in reporting on the question and answer session afterward, actually matched answers to other, different questions, so as to make Goldwater look as bad as possible.  I have never believed in unbiased press since.

Recommended: Crippled America

The press, liberal and conservative alike, have been making a big deal about how little we know of Donald Trump’s positions, and how “dangerous” he would be since we don’t know where he stands on major issues.  Apparently they don’t read books.  Donald Trump wrote (probably ghostwritten with someone else, as most political books are) Crippled America: How to Make America Great Again, released in Nov 2015, and available to anyone – even journalists – on Amazon.com.  It makes pretty clear what he thinks the major issues are, and how he might approach them.

He also wrote several other books, including The Art of the Deal, which give a pretty good insight into his personality.  And what comes across in that book is pretty consistent with what we have seen on the campaign trail – a brash, bright, outspoken, highly successful New York entrepreneur who is a pragmatist, not ideological, neither a conservative wingnut nor a bleeding-heart liberal, a doer, a very good persuader and self-publicist, and relatively risk-averse.

The opposition - liberal and conservative alike - is certainly free to disagree with his views, but to claim that they don’t know his views simply makes them look stupid – read his book!

More on the election

Well, we are now down to two – Trump and Clinton.  And I assume the Obama administration will shield Hillary from indictment for her mishandling of sensitive emails, just as they did for General Petraeus. I have read and signed those clearance nondisclosure papers that Clinton also signed, and I know for a fact that if you or I had done a quarter of what either of them did, we would be in federal prison, but part of the current Washington corruption is the protection of insiders like Clinton and Petraeus from the laws the rest of us are bound by.

So we will probably have a choice between an unlikable unindicted felon (Hillary) and a bombastic, unusually expert persuader with unknown policies (Trump). Or looked at another way, between a member of the incestuous, corrupt Washington insider establishment (Hillary) and a rich, arrogant Washington outsider entrepreneur (Trump).

Not voting, or voting for some unelectable marginal third-party candidate just means abdicating from the choice. We will live with the consequences however we vote or don’t vote, so we might as well try to decide between these two, unappealing as the choice may be.

Hillary will clearly just be another four years of the Obama administration, except that she is more hawkish, and so somewhat more likely to commit more American lives and money to the black hole that is the Middle East mess. Since the Clinton Foundation continued to get huge donations from foreign governments even while she was Secretary of State, the corruption that pervades the Clinton Foundation activities will no doubt continue, and perhaps expand now that she is president.

Though like all the candidates she talks big on the campaign trail, she will probably only tinker with problems at the edges, and her solutions will always involve more government, and more money. She shows no signs thus far of understanding the problems that globalization and automation are producing in the nation, even though Sanders has been pressing those very issues on her.

If she wins, I predict it will be by a very narrow margin, and her win is unlikely to carry very many new Democrats into Congress, so she will face the same sort of Republican obstructionism that Obama has faced, which will severely limit what she can do.

Trump is largely an unknown. The Washington establishment, both political and media, Republican and Democrat alike, are (belatedly) mobilizing to oppose him because he is an existential threat to their cozy insider world. He will have his work cut out for him to withstand their attacks.  I see that the Washington Post has assigned a team of 20 reporters to dig into Trump’s past and write a series of articles about him.  Naturally no such review of Hillary Clinton’s past activities is planned.

And if you watch the media talking heads, or read the opinion columns, it is clear that the vast majority of the “professional pundits”, humiliated by their repeated underestimation of him, are spinning any story they can find to sell the notion that he is unelectable. There is even a note of desperation in some of them.  I see outlandish claims that a Trump victory would bring an immediate recession, or put us into (another) war. Sounds like desperation to me.

What we do know about Trump is (a) he is very, very good at persuasion, which after all is a large part of the president’s job (persuading Congress, persuading the nation, persuading foreign leaders), (b) he is pragmatic rather than ideological (which drives ideological conservatives up a wall), (c) he is less an internationalist than the establishment (who label him, unfairly, as an isolationist), and therefore less eager to spend America lives and money solving foreign problems, and (d) he is a pretty good businessman (a few bankruptcies among his many ventures are a sign he has kept his various enterprises prudently protected from one another, not a sign that he is a bad businessman).  And (thus far at least) he has probably not been bought by any major special interests.  I personally count most of those points in his favor.

Of course running a government is not the same as running a business, as many of his detractors have been pointing out.  But then running a government is not the same as being an actor and union leader, but that didn’t stop Ronald Reagan from being at least an adequate president.  And being just a community organizer didn’t seem to stop Obama from being at least an adequate president.

So there is a case to be made for voting for Trump on the grounds that it would be hard to do any worse than the current system has been doing, and he at least might shake things up a bit. The underlying unknown is whether electing Trump would make any impact on the current incestuous, corrupt, dysfunctional Washington ruling elite, or whether they would survive a Trump administration and continue as usual afterward.

What is also clear is that both political parties are in deep trouble internally. The reason Democrats are stuck in this election with a candidate as weak and unlikeable as Hillary is that they have been decimated downballot in state elections over the past eight years, so there are hardly any promising new faces coming up through the Democratic party ranks. And Republicans are engaged in a vicious civil war within the party which is crippling them, and is the reason a candidate like Trump could emerge as their nominee.  Both parties have gotten so far out of touch with the voter’s concerns and the nation’s real problems that their traditional bases are dissolving out from under them.

I still don’t know what I will do on election day, but this is part of the thought process I’m going through now.

Abortion

I think Scott Adams has about the best position on abortion I have ever seen. He thinks ALL men (including especially politicians and religious leaders) ought to butt out of the whole discussion entirely. Whatever the majority of WOMEN want is fine with him.

I have noted before that if men carried babies this wouldn't even be an issue! If you think about it, it really is ridiculous that MEN, whose involvement in the whole process lasts perhaps 5 minutes if they are lucky,  are telling WOMEN, who get stuck with the results for years, what they can and can't do in this area.  Really, there is absolutely no one less qualified to pontificate on this subject then men.

Scott Adam's anaylisis of the Trump effect

Yesterday I went back and read Scott Adam's blog all the way back into last year.  It was a real master class in the art of persuasion, not only as Trump uses it, but as other politicians and advertisers and "issue" people use it - though none do it as well as Trump.  It is most instructive to read the blog from older posts to the newer ones, as Trump's campaign evolved, so I suggest readers start here, with his August 5, 2015 posting, and then read forward using the "newer post" button at the bottom of each post.

I have learned a whole slew of useful new concepts, like "reframing, "thinking past the sale", "anchoring", "trigger phrases", etc, etc.  A few of these I knew about - vaguely - beforehand.  But to see Adam show us how Trump is using them in actual situations is a real education.

There is no question (a) that the political system in America is dysfunctional, and (b) that the two presidential choices we are going to get in this election - Trump and Clinton - (assuming Clinton isn't indicted) are miserable choices. If we elect Clinton we are clearly simply going to get 4 more years of Obama and dysfunctional, corrupt Washington, except that Clinton is more likely to increase the waste of money and American lives in the Middle East wars.  If we elect Trump we upset the whole system, dump the political chessboard on the ground, and have a chance - not a certainty, but at least a chance - of significantly changing Washington politics.

As Adams says in one of his posts, if you think America is going the right way, vote for the safe hands of Clinton and a continuation of the status quo.  If you think America is going the wrong way, Clinton isn't going to change anything significant so your only chance to change directions is to vote for Trump and hope.

An interesting choice.

Recommended: Scott Adam's blog

I just discovered that Scott Adams has a blog at http://blog.dilbert.com/ that expands on his views and is well worth following.

About politicians as “sales people”

Thinking more about the Scott Adams piece I just recommended, it occurs to me that Donald Trump really isn’t all that different from all the other politicians – he is just better at it. Lots of us voted for Obama the first time because he sold us his “hope and change” vision.  But of course we didn’t get either hope or change in the end.  Hillary is selling different things to different people (eg: “close coal mines” to East Coast greens, but “save coal mine jobs” to West Virginians).  Bernie, much as I like him personally, is selling a socialist package that (a) is economically unsustainable and (b) would never get through an American Congress.

In fact politicians in general appeal to people’s emotions, fears, and hopes. They tell people what they think people want to hear (the better funded use extensive focus groups and polling to determine just what that is).  They promise more than they know they can deliver. They always have.  In the end Trump isn’t really any different – just a lot better at it than anyone else in this year’s field of candidates.

It will be interesting to see what the 2020 election looks like in the light of this election’s unconventional course. Both parties clearly will need to completely rethink their strategies and their positions over the ensuing four years, whichever party wins the presidency. The bases of both parties have changed significantly, and the political mechanisms haven’t yet caught up to that change.  The party establishments will try to regain their power to control the nominations, but they may not succeed.

Of course the fat lady hasn’t sung yet. There are probably many more surprises and unexpected twists in the upcoming months that could substantially change the race. A Clinton indictment on her mishandling of emails, for example, could make a big different. A failure to indict her, or a presidential pardon if she were indicted could also have substantial repercussions. A sudden health problem with either candidate could make a difference. Something like a big domestic terrorist attack could make a difference. Many of those media pundits who are so certain of the outcome – whatever their predictions - will no doubt be humiliated yet again.

Recommended: Donald Trump will win in a landslide.

Scott Adams, the creator of the widely-read cartoon "Dilbert", isn't someone one would normally think of as a political prognosticator, but his piece today "Donald Trump will win in a landslide. The mind behind "Dilbert: explains why" is a brilliant piece, well worth reading and thinking about.

Adams isn't a Trump supporter, just an outside observer who thinks Trump is a master salesperson whose skill at appealing to the emotions of the voters will overwhelm Hillary Clinton's more traditional (and boring) campaigning style.  And he may well be right.  I see in today's news that the Donald is already rapidly closing the gap with Clinton in the polls, and he hasn't even yet really started his national campaign.

I have wondered all along how much of the Trump we have been seeing in the primaries is really him, and how much is a (very effective) act to dominate the news cycles and define his opponents. I am beginning to think he is not nearly as "off the cuff" as we have all been assuming, but instead that all of this is a well-planned, well-thought-out strategy. Several people who have gotten to know him pretty well have been saying that in private he is much different, much more thoughtful.

None of this guarantees that he would be a good president. On the other hand, masterful marketing and poker-playing  skills might serve us well in dealing with loose cannons like Putin or the expansionist Chinese government, or even the Middle East mess. If Scott Adams is right, we may well get a chance to test this theory.

Bathrooms!

Sometimes we Americans just look ridiculous! The sudden “bathroom wars” issue is a case in point.

We were just in France.  In one place we visited the men’s room was being cleaned. That didn’t bother the French at all – they simply all – men and women alike – went into the women’s room (which after all, has private stalls for everyone). No fuss. Just a practical solution.

In another place we visited, there was a line for the women’s room, so a few of the women simply went and used an unused men’s room. No fuss.  Just a practical, matter-of-fact solution.

Yet with all the really serious issues we face as a nation, what is consuming us at the moment – the issue of where a transgender person can pee!!  It’s absurd.    

Trump and “America first”

On April 27^th Donald Trump, now the presumptive Republican nominee for president, gave a foreign policy speech.  It was short on details, as all such speeches are at this stage in an election, but its basic message was that he would look out for America first.  That brought universal derision from the East Coast media and foreign policy experts, as well as from Hillary Clinton.

Excuse me?  What nation doesn’t look out for itself first? China certainly does. Russia certainly does. North Korea certainly does.  India and Pakistan and France and Germany and …and … and….  Every nation looks out first for its own national interests.  What else is a national government for if not to look out first for the interests of the people who elect it? If America doesn’t look after its own interests just who will?

For example, he is perfectly right that NATO isn’t pulling its weight.  NATO members, by agreement, are each supposed to spend at least 2% of their GDP annually on defense.  Of the 28 NATO members, only 5 currently meet that requirement (the US, Great Britain, Greece, Poland, and Estonia). The rest rely on America to provide what they are unwilling to fund.

I have no idea if Trump really knows how to look out effectively for our national interest, but it seems to me telling that the establishment thinks this is a crazy thing to do.  It seems to me the only people who wouldn’t care if a president looked out first for the interests of the nation that elected him would be big multinational corporations and the international billionaires who move their money around the world and don’t consider themselves citizens of any particular nation.  Is that who the current East Coast political establishment is beholden to?

This seems to me one more symptom of how the current ruling establishment is out of touch with the common American voter.