All I have tonight are some random thoughts — admittedly I haven’t had many inspiring insights to share here lately. So for now, I’m just going to blurt out a handful of things from the top of my head. I’m not going to try to justify them with cites to other sources and articles, I’m not going to dig deeper as I usually try to do. Hopefully I can get back to that soon.

So . . . . these are my unstructured thoughts on the national political situation as of today. Again, I apologize in advance, this will not be one of my better posts.

I’m going to talk about Trump vs. Clinton . . . wow, what a lousy choice!!! Has America ever been given a worse choice between Presidential candidates? If you are grinding a partisan axe, which a lot of people are, then I’m sure that you disagree. Perhaps you see Secretary Clinton’s candidacy as “historic destiny” given that she would be the first female President; perhaps you believe that Clinton will continue the march  »  continue reading …

The political reaction to the recent unexpected death of Supreme Court Justice Anthony Scalia is quite depressing. Under the Constitution, President Obama should soon (i.e., within in the next few weeks) appoint a replacement, and the US Senate should review that appointment and either approve or nix it. Of course, the Senate has a Republican majority, and a number of those Republican Senators (including Senate President Mitch McConnell) say that they will vote against ANY candidate that the President may send their way. They argue that the appointment should wait given that we will have a new President in a little less than a year. There is no historical precedent for such a rule; Ronald Reagan appointed Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy in his final year of office, and the Senate approved it.

Unfortunately, the level of partisan political warfare has greatly intensified since the 1980’s. There are a number of politically important Supreme Court cases to be heard and decided this year, involving hot-button issues such as abortion and labor union rights. The good Senators are afraid that a highly partisan appointment by President Obama will tip these cases in the direction that Democrats would favor. So, in assuming that the President will act in a partisan manner, they justify their own hyper-partisan tactics.

That’s where we are today in national politics; no one even waits to see what the other side will do, they take pre-emptive strike measures right up front. Here’s an example I can across today. There is an article on the Federalist web site by conservative pundit David Harsanyi entitled  »  continue reading …

Damon Linker recently wrote a great article about the whole Trump phenomenon, an article that is both reassuring and scary. Linker repeats the growing wisdom that Trump’s support comes mainly from the down and out working-class white population. As I noted in my previous post on Trump (Time to Take the Donald Seriously?), a growing number of writers are taking the time to think this whole Trump thing through, given that it doesn’t seem to be fading quite as quickly as was expected. As Linker points out, there is a growing consensus that non-professional / non-college whites are the intended target of Trump’s message, and that they have been buying it in bulk.

So, it turns out that Trump is indeed a “populist”, a politician who speaks directly to the problems of an unhappy population and promises direct relief for each malady. But here’s the rub — if Trump’s working class whites only wanted better economic circumstances, Bernie Sanders should be their man. Sanders is making all sorts of promises (which I doubt that he could actually keep)(not in the long run anyway) to improve the lot of those who have been excluded from the dynamic growth of the American economy over the past decade or two. Sanders is willing to address the travesty of an America growing richer and richer and yet sharing its riches with fewer and fewer each year, promising to us whatever means seem necessary. Mostly those means would be a highly interventionist, quasi-socialist government.

Personally, I don’t think that a socialist political economy would be good for us in the long run. But certainly in the short run, a Sanders administration would manage to take from the rich and give to the not-so-rich. You would think that might be attractive to non-professional whites struggling to get by on  »  continue reading …

According to the 15-day moving average of poll results for the GOP presidential nomination found on Real Clear Politics, Donald Trump has been in the lead since July 19. Many pundits at first speculated that he would be another “flavor of the week” phenomenon such as Rick Santorum, Herman Cain and Newt Gingrich were in the 2008 primary season. But OK, we’re now going on 5 months, and the first primaries in Iowa and New Hampshire are only a month and a half away. Trump’s RCP average just hit a new high at 34%, and one poll from last week (Monmouth) put him at 41%. An increasing number of political junkies have decided that we’d better take a closer look at what’s going on here and figure out whether something is changing among Republican voters (and possibly among the American population in general). I’m going to get on board with that trend and have a look myself.

Two recent articles by journalist Thomas Edsall make a good start at analyzing the Trump phenomenon from a political science point of view. In the first article, Edsall says that even though Trump’s future as a presidential candidate is uncertain (we don’t know yet if all those people who say they love him will really show up at the polling booths and party caucuses once the primaries begin), “we still need to understand the roots of his current success”. In order to get a start on that, Edsall cites a recent Pew Center research paper showing that “Trump’s backing from voters with a high school degree or less is twice as high as is it is from those with college degrees; the percentage of men lining up behind him is eight points higher than the percentage of women; voters from households making $40,000 or less are 12 points more likely to cast a Trump ballot than those from households making more than $75,000.”

According to Edsall, “Trump appeals to the anger, discontent and sense of entrapment that plague contemporary voters . . . ” As with most, if not all GOP presidential candidates, Trump’s support comes primarily from Euro-Caucasians, i.e. white people; but Trump specializes in discontented, down-on-their-luck whites. “Trump makes white working-class voters, the core of his support, feel safe . . . ” In his second article, Edsall states that “three current trends —  »  continue reading …