The Day After the Debate

I have been thinking about my years as an op-ed writer in terms of freedom of the press. I had so much freedom to write about what I wanted. But publishing in the newspaper did entail some restrictions, most of which were not important, for example, I could not use bad words.

Now that I write for online readers, I realize some newfound freedom from the press. I have no restrictions on length aside from your patience. I can use whatever words I want. Today I take another liberty with my freedom – I send this a day late. Because the Democratic debate is on Tuesday, I want to include it in this column.

The last debate in Nevada made a stronger impression on me than most of the others, because of the highly critical comments all around. The metaphor of a circular firing squad could become accurate, if these few Democrats work so hard at tearing the others down that they collectively make all of them unelectable. I had a notion about who had said what and what that mattered, but I wanted to see what really happened by reading the transcript:

I think anyone watching the debate would have been struck by the exchange between Elizabeth Warren and Michael Bloomberg in the first minutes. Warren made a statement for the ages: “I’d like to talk about who we’re running against. A billionaire who calls women fat broads and horse faced lesbians. And no, I’m not talking about Donald Trump, I’m talking about Mayor Bloomberg. Democrats are not going to win if we have a nominee who has a history of hiding his tax returns, of harassing women and of supporting racist policies like redlining and stop-and-frisk. Look, I’ll support whoever the Democratic nominee is, but understand this, Democrats take a huge risk if we just substitute one arrogant billionaire for another.”

That may be what is remembered, but I think Bloomberg said something even more important about Bernie Sanders first: “I don’t think there’s any chance of the Senator beating President Trump. You don’t start out by saying, “I’ve got 160 million people, I’m going to take away the insurance plan that they love.” That’s just not a ways that you go and start building the coalition that the Sanders’ camp thinks that they can do. I don’t think there’s any chance whatsoever, and if he goes and is the candidate, we will have Donald Trump for another four years and we can’t stand that.”

This was not tit for tat. Bloomberg dismissed Sanders’ candidacy as a failure, and gave no indication he would support it. Bernie is a loser. The people who vote for Sanders now, which so far has been the plurality in 3 primary states, are deluded or worse.

Warren was not nice, but she was a making much more reasoned and fact-based prediction about the campaign, if Bloomberg were the nominee. Nevertheless, she said she would support “whoever the Democratic nominee is.” The difference is that Bloomberg did creepy things he has to explain and Bernie is winning Democratic votes.

Pete Buttigieg was desperate, I thought, to knock off the front runner Sanders and the dangerous rival for moderate Democrats Bloomberg. So he lumped them together as dangerous: “we’ve got to wake up as a party. We could wake up two weeks from today, the day after super Tuesday, and the only candidates left standing will be Bernie Sanders and Mike Bloomberg, the two most polarizing figures on this stage. And most Americans don’t see where they fit, if they’ve got to choose between a socialist who thinks that capitalism is the root of all evil and a billionaire who thinks that money ought to be the root of all power. Let’s put forward somebody who actually lives and works in a middle-class neighborhood, in an industrial Midwestern city. Let’s put forward somebody who’s actually a Democrat. Look, we shouldn’t have to choose between one candidate who wants to burn this party down and another candidate who wants to buy this party out. We can do better.”

Again the words about Sanders are important: he will burn the party down; he’s a socialist, not a democratic socialist; he is on a par with Bloomberg. The latest polls have Sanders in the lead in New York, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, California, Massachusetts, North Carolina, and Illinois. He is tied with Biden in Texas, and comes second to Biden in South Carolina, and third behind Biden and Bloomberg in Florida.

In nearly all these states, Buttigieg is in 4^th or 5^th place. In Midwestern states, who might look favorably on “somebody who actually lives and works in an industrial Midwestern city”, Buttigieg comes in 5^th in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota.

The Nevada debate made me uncomfortable. The South Carolina debate was hard for me to watch. The danger that has accompanied the months of campaigning and debates so far, that these varied and talented Democrats would kill each other off, was apparent.

The arguments of Klobuchar and Buttigieg, that unity is most important for Democrats and the country, are now a smokescreen for assertions that Bernie Sanders is too divisive, too rigid, too far to the left, which alienates all non-Democrats and threatens 4 more years of Trump and loss of the House. They both expressed the certainty that Bernie represents a danger to Democrats because of his policies.

Within the last few days,

the Economist/YouGov national poll puts Buttigieg and Klobuchar 5^th and 6^th at 9% and 4%;

the Hill/HarrisX poll puts them in 4^th and 6^th with 12% and 3%;

the CBS News/YouGov poll has them in 5^th and 6^th at 10% and 5%.

In Minnesota, her home state where she has won victories that she constantly talks about, Klobuchar is ahead of Sanders only 29%-23%. Bernie’s “favorability rating” among Democrats is the highest, while Buttigieg and Klobuchar occupy their usual places outside of the top four.

Divisive is the public yelling that the leading Democratic vote-getter is “burning down the party”, by candidates who are rejected by most Democrats. Their most important claim is nonsense: Sanders beat Trump in the most recent poll by CBS/You Gov by a larger margin than anyone else, and other national polls show similar results. He beats Trump by the largest margin in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, those states at the center of Democratic calculations.

The debate last night displayed rudeness, lack of discipline, hostility, and misleading criticisms of fellow Democrats. Buttigieg couldn’t stop making wild predictions about chaos if Sanders is nominated: “I mean, look, if you think the last four years has been chaotic, divisive, toxic, exhausting, imagine spending the better part of 2020 with Bernie Sanders vs. Donald Trump. Think about what that will be like for this country.”

The nastiest lightly veiled implication by Buttigieg and Klobuchar was that Bernie “had shown an inexplicable, suspicious softness toward authoritarian regimes around the world”, as NY times columnist Frank Bruni says. Here is the context. All the moderate candidates position themselves as descendants of Obama. An article in the New York Intelligencer shows that Obama praised the Cuban educational system, that every President has noted actual good achievements in authoritarian nations, and that some, including Trump, have praised the worst dictators in general terms. The article concludes that examining “the senator’s actual governing record on civil liberties and political freedom” brings him again to the fore.

Perhaps I’ll discuss Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren later. Tom Steyer has no chance, but he is the most modest and least hostile of the candidates. Bloomberg makes it clear that he thinks Bernie is a sure loser to Trump, that he will be a disaster for the Democratic party. He needs to prove that he is really a Democrat, and he hates Bernie’s progressive policies. He has never made the call for unity among Democrats a signature position, except unity behind himself. So it’s not surprising that he attacks the obvious front-runner.

Buttigieg and Klobuchar are desperate. They have been campaigning hard for nearly a year and are mired at the bottom of those left in the race. They had virtually no appeal for black and Latino voters in December or in January. Polls in the many states that vote on Super Tuesday, which will probably decide the overall delegate winner, show Buttigieg and Klobuchar outside of the top 2 everywhere, outside of the top 4 in most states, except for Klobuchar’s lead in her home state.

Claims that Bernie Sanders is a bad Democrat and a sure loser disdains the Democratic voting public, which puts him in the lead everywhere. These white candidates with only white support are telling voters of color that they don’t know what they are doing. I don’t think it is possible that Klobuchar and Buttigieg would rather have 4 more years of Trump than see Bernie leading the country. But their dishonest attacks on a likely nominee may make the difference in a close race.

Steve Hochstadt

Jacksonville

February 26, 2020

Trump the Great and Powerful

Donald Trump’s legal troubles have had an unexpected result – the proclamation of a view of the Presidency, in which Trump is legally untouchable and newly all-powerful. The head of the party of limited government has proposed a theory of American democracy, the unlimited Presidency, and the rest of his party has fallen into line.

The district attorney of Manhattan is trying to obtain Trump’s financial records, including tax returns, in the case about whether the payments to Stormy Daniels by his former lawyer, Michael Cohen, then reimbursed by Trump, were legal. William Consovoy, Trump’s lawyer, told the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals that as President, Trump is immune from the entire judicial system. Consovoy said that if Trump shot someone on Fifth Avenue, he could be charged with a crime only after he is out of office.

After the hearings about the Mueller investigation, Trump said in a speech about the Constitution in July 2019, “Then, I have an Article II, where I have to the right to do whatever I want as president.”

Trump’s impeachment defense team based their case on a belief that the Presidency is much more than one of three separate and equal powers. Alan Dershowitz argued during the impeachment trial in the Senate that anything a President does to help his re-election is in the public interest, and thus not impeachable.

In a tweet about the recent legal case of Roger Stone, Trump insisted that he has a “legal right” to intervene in criminal cases.

Trump often asserts that he has the “absolute right” to do what he likes. Last April, he said he had never “ordered anyone to close our southern border,” but he could do it if he wanted. After he was criticized for revealing classified information to Russian officials in 2017, Trump said he has an “absolute right” to release such material to foreign powers.

The Associated Press has counted at least 29 times since his election that Trump has said he has an “absolute right” to wield executive authority. One example is his claim that he could end birthright citizenship by executive order, even though it is assured by the 14^th amendment to the Constitution.

In June 2018, Trump tweeted a new absolute right in his Presidential theory: “As has been stated by numerous legal scholars, I have the absolute right to PARDON myself, but why would I do that when I have done nothing wrong?” Why would he bring it up if he had done nothing wrong?

Trump’s absolute right is tolerated with silence by the same Republicans who screamed “dictator” when President Obama issued an executive order offering deportation relief to DACA children. “Why is @BarackObama constantly issuing executive orders that are major power grabs of authority?” Trump tweeted in 2012. Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey said, “He’s not a king, he’s not a dictator, he’s not allowed to do it himself.” House Speaker John Boehner said Obama was acting like a “king or emperor.” He said Republicans “will not stand idle as the president undermines the rule of law in our country and places lives at risk.” Now Republicans are nervously standing by as Trump declares himself above all law.

Trump appears to argue that he can exercise absolutely all powers that are not specifically denied to the President in the Constitution. But he goes further. Two key powers are explicitly vested in the Congress by the Constitution: power of the purse and power to declare war.

When the Congress did not appropriate funds for Trump’s beautiful wall, he ignored their decision, declared a national emergency, and then diverted funds which the Congress had appropriated for other purposes. Although majorities in House and Senate voted for a resolution to end the “emergency”, only a dozen Republican Senators out of 53 voted to reject Trump’s arrogation of new powers. One of those Republicans, Susan Collins of Maine, co-sponsored the resolution. She said, “The question before us is not whether to support or oppose the wall, or to support or oppose the President. Rather, it is: Do we want the Executive Branch — now or in the future — to hold a power that the Founders deliberately entrusted to Congress?” But she didn’t believe that idea strongly enough to vote for Trump’s impeachment.

Last week, the Senate passed the Iran war powers resolution that limits Trump’s ability to wage war against Iran. Eight Republicans voted with Democrats to pass the bill 55-45. The House passed a similar bill last month 224-194, with only 3 Republicans voting for it. Only a small minority of Republicans is willing to challenge Trump’s theory of the unlimited presidency.

The other modern example of a President asserting absolute rights in instructive. When David Frost interviewed Nixon in 1977, three years after he had resigned, he asked, “Would you say that there are certain situations - and the Huston Plan was one of them - where the president can decide that it's in the best interests of the nation, and do something illegal?” Nixon famously replied, “Well, when the president does it, that means it is not illegal.” The so-called Huston Plan was the plan hatched by Nixon and his advisors after he had been in office for 2 years and the bombing of Cambodia in 1970 had unleashed massive popular protests. Here’s the Plan: “The report recommended increasing wiretapping and microphone surveillance of radicals - relaxing restrictions on mail covers and mail intercepts; carrying out selective break-ins against domestic radicals and organizations; lifting age restrictions on FBI campus informants; and broadening NSA's intercepts of the international communications of American citizens.” FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and the National Security Agency, who would have to carry out the illegal activities, convinced Nixon to abandon the Plan. But according to Nixon years later, those illegal actions cannot be illegal if he initiates them.

That appears to be where Trump is heading. The most illegal Presidents wish to abolish the possibility that the President can commit a crime.

It is not surprising that a president so unconcerned about Constitutional norms would try to add to his powers. It is disturbing and dangerous that the Republican Party as a body supports Trump going far beyond what they harshly denounced just a few years ago. Republican Congressmen and -women are sitting by while Trump amends the Constitution by fiat.

Steve Hochstadt

Jacksonville IL

February 18, 2020

What a Mess in Iowa

It looks like we will never find out what the vote in Iowa really was. New York Times reporters found arithmetical errors in the sets of numbers set to the Iowa Democratic headquarters from over 200 precincts. But the lawyer for the Iowa Democratic Party says that the original vote tally sheets cannot be changed by law. In any case, it would be impossible now to fix the errors – the caucuses have long dispersed and there is nobody who could be sure how to correct them.

In this peculiar situation, where the results were so close between Bernie Sanders and Pete Buttigieg, the Associated Press declined to call a winner.

We could say, so what? The general results are clear: Bernie and Pete came out on top, with a significant lead over Elizabeth Warren, then further behind Joe Biden, and even further Amy Klobuchar. It is notable that many of the TV reports since then list only the top 4 candidates. Klobuchar’s Iowa race is being widely erased.

One aspect of the results is clear, even if the numbers may be inexact. Sanders won many more votes than anyone else. The caucus voting is a two-step process, because votes for candidates who do not reach 15% in a precinct get redistributed among the candidates who reached that threshold. Sanders received 24.7% of the first votes, against Buttigieg 21.3%, a difference of over 6000 votes. After the first redistribution, the difference had been narrowed: Sanders 26.5%, Buttigieg 25.1%. Most of the votes which had to be redistributed had been given to moderate candidates, like Yang and Steyer, and thus were more likely to go to Buttigieg than to Sanders or Warren.

When these votes were translated in over 1700 precincts into delegates, or as the Iowans have it, state delegate equivalents (SDE), which then get turned into delegates, Sanders and Buttigieg were essentially tied.

It’s easiest to see these shifts in a table:

                                    first vote          second vote     delegate equivalents    delegates

Sanders                       24.7                 26.5                 26.1                             12

Buttigieg                     21.3                 25.1                 26.2                             14

Warren                        18.5                 20.2                 18.0                             8

Biden                          14.9                 13.7                 15.8                             6

Klobuchar                   12.7                 12.2                 12.3                             1

Why did Sanders’ obvious lead in votes get turned into second place in delegates?

Delegates are apportioned automatically to each county, and rural counties are favored in that apportionment. Steve Kornacki of NBC pointed out that in rural Shelby County, which went to Buttigieg, every 53 voters got one state delegate equivalent, while in Poweshiek County, home to Grinnell College, where young voters lean toward Sanders , it took 126 votes to get one SDE.

That is a normal feature of Iowa’s political structure. In 2016, in the big university and college precincts, it took over 200 votes to get a delegate, while in rural Fremont County, 45 voters got an equivalent. The smallest counties got the most delegates per person. Although Hillary Clinton was recorded as the winner in Iowa, it is likely that Bernie Sanders got more votes, but nobody knows for sure, because only the SDE’s were tabulated before this year.

Sanders was not the only one who was disadvantaged by this system. Comparing the numbers for the second vote and the SDE’s, Elizabeth Warren lost a couple of percent and Biden gained. She had run a relatively close third place with a big lead over Biden, but in the SDE’s, which is all that most media reported, she is a more distant third and Biden is close to her.

Many commentators, especially those who support the more progressive candidates Sanders and Warren, have noted that Iowa and new Hampshire are among the whitest states in America, and they have an outsized influence on the Democratic primary. They are also among the most rural states, and then Iowa’s system gives even more power to rural voters, who tend to be moderate.

That is part of the American political system. The Senate is the most obvious case of rural bias, where the smallest and most rural states get equal representation with the big urban states, like New York and California. That translates into rural bias in the Electoral College, which is why both Bush and Trump won the Presidency, while losing the popular vote.

In one scary calculation, it would be possible for Trump to lose by 5 million votes to a Democrat, but by very narrowly winning states like Arizona, Florida, North Carolina and Wisconsin, he could win in the Electoral College. Add to this legal, constitutional bias the illegal bias that Republicans have introduced by gerrymandering both Congressional districts and state legislative districts.

It is not possible to create a perfect electoral system, which gives the proper weight to each subgroup of the population: rural vs. urban, black vs. white, conservative vs. moderate vs. progressive. As soon as such a perfect system were created, population movement would throw it out of whack. But America could have a much better system of translating votes into power. The most obvious change would be to get rid of the Electoral College, which has been proposed many times. In 1969, after George Wallace had received 46 electoral votes, Emanuel Celler of New York proposed abolishing the Electoral College in favor of a purely popular vote. That passed the House 339-70, and President Nixon said he supported it. The Senate Judiciary Committee passed the bill to the full Senate by a vote of 11 to 6. But the bill was filibustered by a few Democrats and Republicans, and although it had majority support, there was not a two-thirds majority needed to end the filibuster.

So any candidate whose support lies with more progressive urban voters is at a significant disadvantage. A progressive Democrat could beat Trump handily and still lose.

Steve Hochstadt

Jacksonville IL

February 11, 2020