Im-Politic: Fin de Trump? Again?

Tags

2016 election, Donald Trump Jr., establishment, healthcare, Hillary Clinton, Im-Politic, Immigration, Jared Kushner, Mitch McConnell, Paul Manafort, Paul Ryan, Republicans, Russia, Russiagate, Trade, Trump, Vladimir Putin

The latest Trump-Russia revelations make me feel like the Bill Murray character in “Groundhog Day.” I’ve already written posts to the effect that “[Candidate] Trump could really be in trouble this time.” I’ve also already written posts to the effect that “[Candidate] Trump could really be in trouble and this time it could be different.” Like practically everyone else I read and communicate with, I’ve been wrong on these scores, but I’ll be plowing the same fields again – if only because the circumstances are so extraordinary, and especially because so much is still unknown.

First, my bottom lines: I remain skeptical that the emails Donald Trump, Jr. released yesterday (after he was told they’d be published) will result in the end of his father’s presidency in any direct sense (i.e., impeachment and removal, or resignation). I remain equally skeptical of meaningful (and I know that’s an important qualifier, as I’ll discuss below) Trump-ian collusion with Russia’s government (which includes lots of operatives without official positions) to undermine his chief presidential opponent Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

I am, however, more convinced than I had been that what is different about the newest disclosures is that Washington will remain preoccupied with “Russiagate” for most of the rest of the President’s (first?) term, that they’ve just about ruled out any meaningful policy accomplishments through 2020, and that one reason is that Mr. Trump will have bigger reasons than ever to toe a standard Republican establishment policy line that’s highly unpopular even with his own base, but that’s still gospel with a Washington wing of the party whose loyalty is vital to his survival.

Second, let’s knock down the main talking points offered by Mr. Trump’s aides and other supporters (full disclosure: I support much of his agenda, and most of his establishment-bashing). As should be obvious, the failure of the Russian lawyer actually to produce any damaging information on the Clinton campaign does not absolve the president’s son – or son-in-law cum adviser Jared Kushner, or then campaign manager Paul Manafort, of the charges that they tried to cooperate with foreign agents to affect an American political campaign (the heart of the politically salient collusion charge).

The email exchange showed that this information was the principal reason that all three figures attended the meeting. Their motives are completely unaffected by the false pretenses under which they acted.

Just as obvious, and just as bogus, is Trump, Jr.’s claim that he and his colleagues viewed an offer from Russia as nothing special because the Russia-gate charges had not proliferated. Manafort, for example, formally joined the Trump campaign manager on March 29. Certainly by May 2 – a month before Trump, Jr. first heard about the supposed Russian information – Manafort’s longstanding lobbying for pro-Russia politicians in Ukraine was making news. As a result, even if the president’s son was politically inexperienced enough not to recognize the potential dangers, Manafort himself, a veteran Washington operative, surely knew the score.

Even more important, the Russia business ties of Trump, Sr. himself were being scrutinized and fretted about at least as early as March 15.

Have any laws been broken? Beats me. That’s now officially the responsibility of Robert Mueller, te Justice Department’s Special Counsel, to determine. But much of this uncertainty centers on how much is known about this meeting, and how much is known about similar activities. Further, neither impeachment nor the future of the Trump presidency will necessarily hinge on such legal questions. A president, as I’ve noted previously, can be impeached for anything the House of Representatives believes satisfies the definition of “high crimes and misdemeanors” – which itself is a political, not a legal, concept. The Senate, moreover, can remove a president from office for equally political reasons.

So public opinion will be crucial. There are no signs yet that Russia-related charges have significantly damaged President Trump’s support either with the general public or among Republicans. But the more such Russia-related material keeps coming out, the likelier such erosion becomes.

Nor will the president’s political support depend completely, or even largely, on politicians’ often less than steely backbones. The new Trump, Jr. emails – and the continuing and utter failure of anyone in the Trump circle (including the president himself) to provide straight, durable answers to perfectly reasonable questions – understandably revive questions of how extensively individuals associated in any significant way with Mr. Trump or his campaign worked with the Russian government to sway election results.

Until yesterday, as I’ve written, I’ve felt confident that no important collusion evidence would emerge because none had yet been leaked – even though the matter had been probed for months by several official and many unofficial investigations, and even though bureaucrats at the highest levels have been positively eager to reveal incriminating Trump information even if national security could be undermined.

In addition, it’s never been clear to me why Russian interference with the election ever required cooperation from the Trump campaign – or any other American source. As long as Moscow was so motivated, its formidable hacking and disinformation capabilities were amply capable of producing the desired results on their own. Moreover, the U.S. intelligence community’s January report on the Russian interference campaign itself reported that Russian leader Vladimir Putin was wary of praising candidate Trump too enthusiastically precisely for fear of generating a backlash.

At the same time, even the canniest political leaders and other figures don’t always behave logically or sensibly. It’s also now clear at least that many in the Trump circle have been less than canny or, when it comes to explaining controversial events, even minimally competent. As a result, as stated above, there’s now indisputable evidence of receptivity to collusion by three extremely influential Trump aides (including two family members).

If the June Trump, Jr. meeting represents the extent of the collusion, there’s still an excellent chance that the president ultimately will survive the Russia mess. After all, what kind of (serious) collusion effort, once started, would feature no follow up? But because no one close to Mr. Trump now enjoys (or deserves) much credibility on these matters outside hardcore Trump-supporter circles, Democrats now have the pretext they need to force the administration to keep trying to prove a negative – a challenge no one should relish. Special Counsel Mueller has a comparable justification for prolonging his own investigation considerably.

Yet even before the possible crumbling of the president’s political support, for either legal or political reasons or some combination of the two, the Trump administration’s Russia-related problems could profoundly impact the nation’s policy agenda – and not in a good way if you’ve hoped Mr. Trump would be an agent of serious change. Here’s what I mean.

Recall that last year, Mr. Trump did not simply assume the leadership of the Republican party after winning its presidential primaries. He engineered a hostile takeover, supplanting a party mainstream that strongly opposed him on his two signature issues – trade and immigration policies. The shocking Trump fall victory, however, gave the incoming president crucial leverage in this relationship, and for a very powerful, concrete reason. The Republicans’ establishment leaders in Congress gave his campaign, and especially the inroads he made with new constituencies, abundant credit for saving the party’s control of both the House and Senate.

Once the Russia-gate charges and Team Trump’s failures to address them adequately began gaining critical mass, though, the dynamics of this relationship began changing dramatically. President Trump’s future became more dependent on the establishment GOP’s support. Therefore, he needed to warm to its establishment agenda – notably their budget and healthcare proposals – despite the poor poll numbers they’ve been drawing. Additionally, his ability to reach across the aisle on promising areas of bipartisan agreement, like infrastructure, turned into a function of the overall party’s flexibility – which seems pretty limited to date.

Since such vast new – and, due to the Trump circle’s constantly changing responses, legitimate – investigative frontiers have been opened up by the new emails, the Trump wagon now looks to be hitched to the Congressional Republican star more tightly than ever. That’s not to say that House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell will never stray from their party’s orthodoxy. McConnell, at least, has hinted that bipartisan compromise may be needed on healthcare. Moreover, the party establishment is by no means united on all major issues, either. Consequently, intra-party divisions may widen the scope for bipartisanship (as has generally been the case to avoid or mitigate various budget crises).

But the main point here is that at this point, these decisions are likeliest to be driven by the establishment, not the president. And the tragedy, at least for anyone rooting for the president or any of his agenda, is how many of the resulting White House political and policy wounds will have been entirely self-inflicted.

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Im-Politic: Russiagate Aside, the Economy Keeps Failing Too Many Americans

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2016 election, Hillary Clinton, Im-Politic, Trump, weekly wages

On the off chance that the American political and chattering classes ever conclude that they might have responsibilities other than waging the Russiagate wars, some new Labor Department data might usefully remind them of the economic pressures faced by so many of their compatriots that resulted in the 2016 presidential vote producing such a stunning – and anti-establishment – upset. Because there are no signs that the situation has improved meaningfully since election day.

The figures describe trends in weekly wages in the United States county-by-county for the 344 largest American counties and how they changed between 2015 and 2016. They’re awfully revealing when viewed collectively, but they become especially illuminating when overlaid on the election results, and add to the case the fragile and/or falling living standards were major contributors to Donald Trump’s victory.

The headline wage development was that average weekly pay in the United States overall fell 1.5 percent between the fourth quarter of 2015 and the fourth quarter of 2016. As the Department put it:

“This is one of only eight declines in the history of the series, which dates back to 1978. The 1.5 percent decline in average weekly wages was the largest decline since fourth quarter, 2011, when average weekly wages decreased by 1.7 percent. The most recent decline occurred in 2016, when the U.S. average weekly wage decreased 0.6 percent over the year.”

Even worse, this drop-off isn’t adjusted for inflation. Although by conventional measures, the cost of living hasn’t been rising much lately, it’s still been rising. So in real terms, weekly wages decreased still more. And it’s hardly a stretch to suppose that this development had more than a little something to do with so many voters’ willingness to roll the dice and put a political outsider and novice in the world’s most powerful position.

The correlation between economic distress and pro-Trump votes comes through much more clearly when broken down by county. But before examining these statistics, two big context-setting points need to be made.

First, according to the Associated Press, Mr. Trump won an astonishing 2,626 out of 3,113 total U.S. counties. His Democratic Party opponent, Hillary Clinton, won only 487. So candidate Trump triumphed in more than 84 percent of counties.

Second, however, as is not the case with, say, House of Representatives districts, the size of counties varies enormously. Just one example: As of 2006, the population of Los Angeles County (won by Clinton) was larger (10.29 million) than that of 42 states. And indeed, Clinton won the popular vote precisely because she won so many of those gigantic urban counties.

Still, looking at the 20 large counties where weekly wages fell and rose by the greatest percentages from late 2015 to late 2016 shows that the former heavily went for Mr. Trump and the latter for Clinton – a pattern similar to that demonstrated by state-level growth numbers I looked at recently. (The county-by-county vote total can be found on this New York Times interactive graphic.)

The specific numbers? Seven of the ten counties where weekly wages worsened the most went for the president in 2016; only three voted for Clinton. Of the ten second worst wage performers, six were won by Mr. Trump, three opted for Clinton, and election data was unavailable for one county (Anchorage, Alaska).

But in my view, the correlation between economic performance and Trump and Clinton voting shows up most strikingly when examining the winning counties. After all, Clinton won very few counties to begin with. In fact, on a percentage basis, her results in the worst performing large counties were better than her county-by-county results overall.

This was also the case with the large counties where wages rose the fastest on a percentage basis. But what stands out to me is the difference between the share of these counties the Democratic candidate won, and the share of total counties she won.

The Democratic candidate won six of the ten large counties where wages performed best, and eleven of the 17 “next ten” performers (there were several ties). In other words, Clinton captured nearly 63 percent of these winners, versus fewer than 16 percent of total counties large and small.

These data don’t conclusively resolve the debate over whether Mr. Trump’s appeal (and Clinton’s failure) was rooted in economic distress or other issues (racism, sexism, server-gate).  We’d need data going back farther than that. But they do underscore the continuing gap between the apparent priorities of official Washington and its various satellites on the one hand, and much of the public on the other. And they raise the question of whether, in 2018 and 2020, the voters will respond by throwing the rascals in both major parties out once again.

Im-Politic: Deconstructing Obstruction of Justice

Tags

Constitution, Dianne Feinstein, FBI, high crimes and misdemeanors, Hillary Clinton, Im-Politic, impeachment, James Comey, James Lankford, James Risch, Marco Rubio, Michael J. Flynn, obstruction of justice, removal, Russiagate, Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Trump

There have been so many important economic and foreign policy stories to write about these days, and certainly RealityChek will be covering lots of them. But this of course is #ComeyDay, as they’ve said on Twitter, and I thought the most useful item I could post today would focus on one of the central questions raised by the Russiagate controversy: Has President Trump committed an impeachable offense?

Before beginning, though, it’s vital to recognize that although the Constitution provides for impeachment (and removal – they’re two separate matters) of government officials, including the president, on the grounds of “high crimes and misdemeanors,” the Framers never defined this term. Not surprisingly, legal specialists have made any number of convincing arguments for infusing these words with some specific content. But at least based on this Congressional Research Service survey, the consensus seems to be that “high crimes etc” mean anything that a majority of the House of Representatives (which impeaches) and two-thirds of the Senate (which conducts the trial, and whose guilty verdict on any specific charges, or “articles” results in removal from office) believe it means.

So legally and Constitutionally speaking, the debate on whether the president is guilty of the specific crime of obstruction of justice is beside the point. Politically speaking, though, finding this kind of actual violation of criminal law would make impeachment and removal votes much easier to justify for lawmakers when they face the electorate.

The main evidence so far in favor of an obstruction charge consists of two claims made by Comey under oath in his opening statement today to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. First, according to the former FBI Director, in a one-on-one February 14 Oval Office meeting, Mr. Trump made the following comments about the bureau’s probe of former White House national security adviser Michael J. Flynn:

“‘He is a good guy and has been through a lot.’” He repeated that Flynn hadn’t done anything wrong on his calls with the Russians, but had misled the Vice President. He then said, ‘I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go. He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go.’”

Second, in phone calls with the president on March 30 and April 11, Comey said Mr. Trump referred to a “cloud” that was undermining presidency’s agenda that he wanted Comey’s help in lifting. In the first phone call, according to Comey,

“the President called me at the FBI. He described the Russia investigation as ‘a cloud’ that was impairing his ability to act on behalf of the country. He said he had nothing to do with Russia, had not been involved with hookers in Russia, and had always assumed he was being recorded when in Russia. He asked what we could do to ‘lift the cloud.’ I responded that we were investigating the matter as quickly as we could, and that there would be great benefit, if we didn’t find anything, to our having done the work well. He agreed, but then re-emphasized the problems this was causing him.”

Comey added that President Trump “finished by stressing “the cloud” that was interfering with his ability to make deals for the country and said he hoped I could find a way to get out that he wasn’t being investigated.”

In the April 11 call, Comey stated that Mr. Trump

“asked what I had done about his request that I ‘get out’ that he is not personally under investigation. I replied that I had passed his request to the Acting Deputy Attorney General, but I had not heard back. He replied that ‘the cloud’ was getting in the way of his ability to do his job. He said that perhaps he would have his people reach out to the Acting Deputy Attorney General. I said that was the way his request should be handled. I said the White House Counsel should contact the leadership of DOJ to make the request, which was the traditional channel.”

It seems clear, therefore, that the “cloud” references concerned the president’s belief that Comey should have informed the public that he personally was not being investigated by the FBI for anything. That is, it had nothing to do with the Russiagate investigation or the separate Flynn investigation. And responding to separate questions from California Democrat Dianne Feinstein and Florida Republican Marco Rubio, Comey explicitly agreed.

The question still remains, however, of whether Mr. Trump’s Flynn comments constitute obstruction. At this point, definitive answers aren’t possible. For one, the president’s personal attorney has denied Comey’s claim that any such Flynn-related statements were made at all. For another, as all the legal community seems to agree, obstruction of justice is a complicated act consisting of numerous criteria that need to be met. But what’s certainly noteworthy for the time being is what Comey himself has said about the matter – and what he hasn’t said.

It’s important to observe that Comey at one point did indeed tell the Senate panel, that although he found the Flynn remarks “very disturbing, very concerning,” he also said

“I don’t think it’s for me to say whether the conversation I had with the president was an effort to obstruct….that’s a conclusion I’m sure the special counsel will work towards to try and understand what the intention was there, and whether that’s an offense. “

Considering Comey’s willingness to expound at great length last July on Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s innocence of the charge of criminally mishandling classified information on her personal server, that sounds coy at very best.

In addition, Comey was given repeated chances to characterize the Flynn statements as obstruction. For instance, Idaho Republican James Risch asked him whether the president “directed” or “ordered” him to “let it go.” Comey responded, respectively, “Not in his words, no” and “those words were not an order.”

Comey then added that “I took it as a direction” because “this is a president of the United States with me alone saying I hope this. I took it as, this is what he wants me to do. I didn’t obey that, but that’s the way I took it.”

Also pertinent: In response to a question from Rubio, Comey said that President Trump never asked him to “let go” the Flynn investigation after the February 14 meeting. Moreover, Comey told Republican James Lankford of Oklahoma that neither any White House nor Justice Department staffers, nor the heads of any of the intelligence agencies ever mentioned to him dropping the Flynn probe.

As Lankford concluded: “The key aspect here is if this seems to be something the president is trying to get you to drop it, it seems like a light touch to drop it, to bring it up at that point, the day after he had just fired Flynn, to come back here and say, I hope we can let this go, then it never reappears again.”

Keeping in mind that other shoes could always drop, that’s an observation I hope will remain front and center as the Russiagate probes – and press coverage – drag on.

Im-Politic: More Evidence that Trump-ers Were Mainly Voting Their Pocketbooks

Tags

Commerce Department, Great Recession, Hillary Clinton, Im-Politic, inflation-adjusted growth, manufacturing, recovery, states, Trump

One of my favorite statistical reports just came out a week ago – the Commerce Department’s survey of economic growth last year in each of the 50 states plus the District of Columbia. I like the report so much mainly because it’s accompanied by the release of figures that show how much manufacturing production changed in real terms on an annual basis – and therefore gives us another indication as to whether or not the sector really has recovered from the Great Recession completely. (Spoiler alert: It hasn’t. But more on that later.)

This year, the new state numbers provide some new insights into why last year’s presidential election turned out as it did. Specifically, it shows a strong relationship between a state’s economic performance and its award of electoral votes to President Trump or his Democratic rival, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

To begin, here’s a list of the “Top Ten” states that enjoyed the fastest inflation-adjusted growth between 2015 and 2016. (Because of ties, there are actually 21 of them). Their real percentage growth in 2016 is next to their names, then comes their rank (in parentheses) and then their presidential choice:

Washington 3.7 (1) Clinton

Oregon 3.3 (2) Clinton

Utah 3.0 (3) Trump

NH 3.0 (3) Clinton

Fla. 3.0 (3) Trump

Georgia 3.0 (3) Trump

Utah 3.0 (3) Trump

Calif. 2.9 (4) Clinton

Nevada 2.4 (5) Clinton

DC 2.4 (5) Clinton

Arizona 2.1 (6) Trump

So. Carolina 2.1 (6) Trump

Hawaii 2.1 (6) Clinton

Tenn. 2.0 (7) Trump

Colorado 2.0 (7) Clinton

Mass. 2.0 (7) Clinton

Idaho 1.8 (8) Trump

Michigan 1.8 (8) Trump

Ohio 1.7 (9) Trump

So. Dakota 1.7 (9) Trump

No. Carolina 1.6 (10) Trump

At first glance, the election seems like a toss-up in terms of the economic winner states, with Mr. Trump winning twelve and Clinton nine. But in terms of one of the main questions posed about the president’s supporters – whether they were motivated mainly by economic concerns or by other hopes or fears (ranging from racism and xenophobia to mistrust of Clinton) – this list looks like it points to the latter.

But here’s where some context needs to be considered. After all, the president won 32 (or 62.75 percent) of the states (including D.C.) up for grabs. Clinton won only 19. But the Trump share of the economic winners was somewhat lower – 12 of 21, or 57.4 percent. So maybe economic issues were fairly prominent among the Trump-ers.

More convincing evidence comes from the list of the worst performing states in 2016. Here they are in the same format used for the first list. (These states total eleven due to a tie):

No. Dakota -6.5 (1) Trump

Alaska -5.0 (2) Trump

Wyoming -3.6 (3) Trump

Oklahoma -2.3 (4) Trump

West Va. -0.9 (5) Trump

Louisiana -0.6 (6) Trump

New Mex. -0.5 (7) Clinton

Kansas 0.2 (8) Trump

Montana 0.2 (8) Trump

Texas 0.4 (9) Trump

Delaware 0.3 (10) Clinton

In fact, this evidence couldn’t be clearer. President Trump won nine of these eleven slowest-growing states.

These results don’t finally resolve the debate over Trump voters by a long shot – if only because the nation’s population is so unevenly distributed among states, and because of the winner-take-all nature of the Electoral College (except in Maine and Nebraska). Moreover, there’s not always such a bright line between economic and non-economic concerns, and many voters base their choices on several considerations.

Finally, it would be important to examine the economic growth trends over a longer period of time. That way, we could see whether various states’ expansion or contraction last year was consistent with longer-term trends or whether they were outliers. (Those distinctions presumably would have some influence over voters’ views of their own fortunes and the appeal of incumbents – or representatives of incumbent administrations – and challengers.)

But the news that nine of the 19 states won by Clinton were among the nation’s fastest growers, and only two were among the slowest, lends more support to the view that pocketbook issues created a big divide in the electorate last year.

And about that manufacturing news: The industry data released along with the new states growth shows that American domestic manufacturing’s output fell by 0.15 percent in constant dollar terms. That’s not much, but recall that it’s only a tenth as fast as even the negligible growth registered by the economy as a whole after inflation – 1.54 percent.

And thanks largely to this down year, from the last quarter of 2007 (when the Great Recession began) until the last quarter of last year (the latest quarterly data available), real manufacturing production shrank by 2.37 percent. As RealityChek readers know, there are several measures of manufacturing output used by the government – but they also know that most, like these latest data, show that the claim that America’s manufacturers have never turned out more product in this country than ever in the nation’s history are just peddling fakeonomics.

Im-Politic: Initial Thoughts on the Trump Wars

Tags

2016 election, Andrew McCabe, Director of National Intelligence, FBI, hacking, Hillary Clinton, Im-Politic, impeachment, intelligence community, James Clapper, James Comey, John McCain, Justice Department, Lindsey Graham, Loretta Lynch, Michael T. Flynn, Richard M. Nixon, Russia, Russiagate, Sally Yates, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Trump, Wategate

Since I’m not a Trump or intelligence community insider, I’ve refrained from posting any items on the last crisis that began surrounding the administration starting with the president’s firing of James Comey as FBI Director. (I have commented on some aspects briefly on Twitter.) But since I’m a strong supporter of many positions championed by Mr. Trump both during the campaign and – to a lesser extent – in the White House, I thought that RealityChek readers would be interested in some observations about aspects of the uproar that deserve more consideration.

First and most important: Both current and former officials in the federal bureaucracy and even the intelligence community clearly hope to end the Trump presidency, and have decided to leak to the equally anti-Trump Mainstream Media even the most highly classified material if it’s judged to be potentially harmful to the president. Yet no leaks have revealed any evidence supporting the central allegation against the president: the charge that he or close aides colluded in any way with Russian efforts to fix the presidential election in his favor.

Given that the president’s foes long viewed the prospect of his victory with alarm, and given that they have sought to de-legitimize this victory since it unfolded the evening of last November 8, the absence of such a smoking gun after so many months is absolutely startling. If this evidence exists, what are President Trump’s adversaries waiting for?

P.S. – this argument pertains to retired General Michael T. Flynn, who advised candidate Trump and briefly became his White House national security adviser. Flynn has certainly acted in several instances like he’s had something (or things) to hide. But he’s been tracked for months by intelligence officials who – again – have been anything but reluctant to make troubling findings public. And nothing has emerged pointing to working with Russia to undermine the campaign of Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.

One possible explanation? Many anti-Trump-ers are waiting for the 2018 mid-term elections to get closer and closer, in order to boost the chances of a Democratic landslide before the administration had a chance to rebut the charges conclusively – and before Congressional Republicans have a chance to dissociate themselves from Mr. Trump. And maybe they’re being joined by some establishment Republicans, who hope to recapture their party from the Trump-ist forces. And maybe both factions are motivated mainly by the belief that Mr. Trump is such an unprecedented danger to the republic that any means are warranted to remove him from the Oval Office.

If so, however, some big legal issues pop up.  For instance:  Are individuals privy to information about crimes – and in fact major crimes – withholding them from law enforcement authorities? 

Second: Not only has no evidence of collusion been leaked. The former head of the entire intelligence community has just made clear that, during his own prolonged probe of Russia’s efforts to interfere with the election (a related but clearly separate issue, for which strong evidence exists), he saw none.

In March, James Clapper, who resigned as Director of National Intelligence soon after the election, had tantalizingly hinted at the existence of such material by telling a reporter that the intelligence community “did not include any evidence” in its January report on the Russian campaign “that had anything, that had any reflection of collusion between members of the Trump campaign and the Russians. There was no evidence of that included in our report.”

But when pressed by “Meet the Press” anchor Chuck Todd to confirm whether such evidence existed, Clapper responded, “Not to my knowledge.” And when asked under oath in Senate testimony on three months later whether that statement was still accurate, Clapper stated, “It is.” In other words, Clapper’s probe, which reflected the work of 16 intelligence agencies including his own Director’s office uncovered no collusion evidence.

The issue was briefly muddied during that same hearing by former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates. Like Clapper, an Obama administration appointee to her latest position, Yates initially answered the question about collusion by demurring. She explained that her “answer to that question would require me to reveal classified information. And so, I — I can’t answer that.”

As noted by questioner Senator Lindsey Graham – no admirer of President Trump – the FBI that Yates helped supervise as the second-in-command at the Justice Department was part of Clapper’s Russia investigation. After Yates indicated that the FBI was conducting its own separate counter-intelligence inquiry into Russia’s activities, Graham asked Clapper if the evidence found by the Bureau at that time “was not mature enough” to justify including in the broader intelligence community report.

Responded Clapper: “[T]he evidence, if there was any, didn’t reach the evidentiary bar in terms of the level of confidence that we were striving for in that intelligence community assessment.”

So again, a protracted look into Russia’s Election 2016 hacking produced no evidence of collusion that the intelligence community as a whole believed was solid enough to justify even hinting at in its publicly stated conclusions.

Third: One highly damaging allegation that’s been made over the last week was the Washington Post‘s claim that Comey requested more resources from the Justice Department for his investigation just before he was fired. The clear implication: The president became convinced that Comey was ramping up his investigation – which began in July – and decided to fire him in order to deny him the funds needed to do the job adequately. Such an action, of course, would at least strongly resemble obstruction of justice.

This article, however, too, looks fishy. Post reporter Ashley Parker did include an on-the-record flat Justice Department denial, but needless to say, government spokespersons lie or dissemble all the time. Much more difficult to dismiss: Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe – who had been Comey’s former top deputy – stated in his own sworn testimony to Congress that he was unaware of any such request.

Yes, it’s true that Comey might have made the request without telling McCabe. But how much sense does that make? Nor can anyone accuse McCabe of being a Trump toady. His wife, Jill, had run for office in 2015 as a Democrat and had accepted $500,000 in campaign contributions from the political organization of a long-time Clinton family ally, Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe.

Finally (for now!), comes the subject, as reported in The New York Times, of Comey’s alleged memo claiming that President Trump asked him to drop his Russia investigation in a February meeting. The former FBI Director will surely have the chance to confirm, deny, or otherwise elaborate on this story and the conversation in his own testimony under oath to Congress.

As suggested by prominent Trump critic Republican Senator John McCain of Arizona, if this request was made, we’re talking about a genuinely Nixonian case of obstruction of justice. (The “smoking gun” tape that played such a decisive role in Richard Nixon’s impeachment and removal in 1974 centered precisely on a decision by the former President to order the FBI to stop its Watergate investigation.)

As Mr. Trump’s critics like to say, however, the Times article “raises questions” – indeed, big ones. First, it’s crucial to note that, as Nixon himself admitted, his actions were intended to cover up criminal activity. As noted above, there’s no evidence yet of a Russia-related crime committed by the Trump administration.

More immediately, Comey has not exactly been shy about loudly expressing, acting on, and widely sharing his concerns about obstacles to official inquests and other behavior he considered improper. In 2004, he threatened to resign as Deputy Attorney General over post-September 11 domestic surveillance programs he viewed as illegal. Last July, he famously held a press conference in which he took the extraordinary step of moving beyond his position’s investigative role to explain extensively his decision to recommend against indicting Hillary Clinton for using a personal email system as Secretary of State. And earlier this month, Comey said – again, under oath – that he took this step because he unilaterally decided that his superior, Attorney General Loretta Lynch had lost credibility as a Clinton investigator because of her meeting with the candidate’s husband, former President Bill Clinton, in June.

It’s certainly possible that Comey has decided to keep firsthand evidence of clear Trump criminality under wraps for going on three months now. But it sure looks out of character.

All of the above notwithstanding, there’s no question that the President’s undisciplined and often contradictory statements understandably have created major suspicions – which are by no means confined to his enemies’ ranks. The consequently confused efforts by his surrogates to clean up these messes have only compounded the problem. And even if the administration had its communications act together, one indisputable lesson of Washington and other scandals is that shoes keep dropping. Moreover, numerous continuing global business ties and burgeoning official responsibilities of the President’s children, his son-in-law Jared Kushner, and his family keep failing valid smell tests.

At the same time, the clearly organized Dump Trump effort by numerous persons with detailed knowledge of seemingly the full range of the federal government’s most sensitive activities suggests that “RussiaGate,” at least, could be different. Not in the sense that damaging claims won’t continue to be made, but in the sense that the anti-Trump-ers might have already leaked their worst.

The only certainty at this point appears to be that the various Trump Wars will rage on for months at a minimum – which means that the valid policy grievances of the president’s supporters and so many other Americans will continue to be neglected by their government.

Im-Politic: The Trump-ers and the Russians

Tags

2016 election, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Im-Politic, Jeff Sessions, Logan Act, Michael T. Flynn, Russia, Sergey Kislyak, Trump, U.S. intelligence, Vladimir Putin

The more I read about the firestorm that has erupted over possible contacts between officials of and advisers to President Trump’s campaign for the White House, his transition team, and members of his new administration on the one hand, and the Russian government and/or its agents on the other, the less sense any of it makes to me.

That goes double – at least – for the charge that is only rarely made explicit but that is central to this entire uproar: that Trump’s outsider nature and supposedly authoritarian, anti-democratic instincts opened the door to an alliance with Russian leader Vladimir Putin that aided his November victory. More specifically, insinuations have been made that figures either officially or unofficially associated with Mr. Trump “colluded” with the Russians in their efforts to undermine Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton’s presidential bid.

Of course, the fire keeps getting fueled by the failure of the supposed Trump-ist conspirators to provide forthright answers to questions about their recent contacts with Putin’s aides and surrogates. By their own belated admissions now, the president’s briefly serving White House national security adviser Michael T. Flynn and his Attorney General, former Senator Jeff Sessions, held either meetings or communications with Russia’s ambassador to the United States during the transition and campaign, respectively, that they did not originally acknowledge.

Nothing could have been easier, the entirely reasonable argument goes, than for them to have been up front right away. Flynn, for example, is alleged to have broken with an important American tradition that only one person serves as president at a time when he spoke with Ambassador Sergey Kislyak about America’s anti-Russia sanctions. It’s true that former President Obama’s second term ran through midday, January 20, and that he and his officials alone possessed the authority to conduct the nation’s foreign relations. In addition, Flynn might have violated a law preventing private citizens from interfering with official American diplomacy – though it’s unclear whether the Logan Act applies to transition team officials like Flynn at the time.

But wouldn’t the former general have been much better off – let alone Mr. Trump – had he simply stated that he broached the subject of sanctions (as opposed to simply introducing himself and starting to get acquainted) because Russia is an important country and he wanted to help the administration hit the ground running?

And Sessions has now stated that his original answers at his Senate confirmation regarding such meetings assumed that the questions were focused on meetings dealing with his position in the Trump campaign and that concerned campaign matters. But why engage in such Clintonian parsing if everything was on the up and up?

After all, his first such contact with Kislyak took place at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio, at a meeting co-sponsored by the Obama State Department. The second – also with Kislyak – took place in his Senate office, in September. As a senior member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, what could be more natural than a lawmaker meeting with a representative of a major power? The answer? “Nothing.” Such events have become routine – and should be, if Congress is to play the important role in foreign policymaking assigned it by the Constitution. How difficult would it have been for Sessions to make these points in the first place?

One obvious retort is that the president’s enemies are so loaded for bear that even such reasonable explanations wouldn’t have satisfied them – and were likeliest to egg them on further. But it should be equally obvious that the real political prize here is the American middle, which historically has a knack for distinguishing the truth-tellers from the fear-mongers.

Even more bizarre, however (and that’s a high bar!), is the more fundamental notion that the Russians thought a concerted effort to fix the U.S. election was a stroke of genius. That may indeed have been the case – I sure don’t have any inside info on the Kremlin. But let me count the biggest reasons why Putin should have laughed out of his office anyone who made this proposal.

First, with his KGB background, Putin of all people should know that it’s almost impossible to keep any significant secrets in the American political world, let alone one this big. One major reason, of course – this plan would have had to have been kept from any number of foreign intelligence services as well, if only because so many other national governments have big stakes in American presidential elections, too.

Second, precisely because of these excellent chances of discovery, the upside of any successful election rigging would have been severely limited. Had Clinton won, after all, at least for the medium term, Moscow would have guaranteed that Barack Obama’s successor would have taken much harder-line anti-Russian positions across the board in American foreign policy. But even had the alleged plot succeeded, every word or action taken by Mr. Trump suggesting a more conciliatory policy would – as has been clear already – have come under the harshest suspicion. Indeed, the new administration has faced continuing heavy pressure to demonstrate what might be called some anti-Russia street cred – on top of already having named some prominent Russia hawks to key posts.

Third, the cost-benefit calculus of a political interference campaign looks even worse upon recalling the conventional wisdom that Mr. Trump was heading toward an historic defeat at the polls. Why take major chances on behalf of such a likely and big loser? In this vein, it’s fascinating to note that the January American intelligence community report on the Russian influence campaign suggested that the Kremlin (as with so many others) anticipated a Clinton win as late as election night.

Fourth, if Russian intelligence was even minimally competent, it would have known that a Trump presidency would have been more favorable to Moscow even without actively cooperation with his presidential campaign. For Mr. Trump had long criticized U.S. foreign policymaking for picking needless overseas fights that too often turned into bloody and hideously expensive quagmires (like the second Iraq war). And for even longer he had insisted that America’s military actions abroad be restricted to crises where the nation’s security was directly threatened.

But as indicated above, the American intelligence community has stated that Putin – although concerned about a “backfire” effect from direct Putin praise of candidate Trump – did in fact order precisely this kind of anti-Clinton, pro-Trump “influence campaign”. Given all the claims from every quarter of American politics that the Russian leader is a diabolically dangerous mastermind, this decision simply adds to my list of “Russia-gate” developments that I find completely mystifying.

Not that my own befuddlement means that there’s no fire behind any of this smoke, or that Russian interference in U.S. elections should be accepted simply because it might have been ineptly conceived or carried out. (What if Moscow or others one day get the hang of this?) Until and unless much more serious disclosures emerge, however, it could well mean that Trump-haters and the Mainstream Media need to hold their hysteria about the Trump-Russia connection. And the president and his team stop needlessly shooting themselves in their feet.

Im-Politic: No Learning Curve for America’s Left on Immigration

Tags

American Muslims, Angela Merkel, assimilation, Attorney General, Cory Booker, Democrats, Elizabeth Warren, Germany, Hillary Clinton, Im-Politic, Immigration, Jeff Sessions, Jeremy Corbyn, Labour Party, liberals, Marketwatch.com, Muslims, national security, Obama, Open Borders, progressive, Social Democratic Party, terrorism, Trump, United Kingdom

I keep waiting for America’s self-styled progressives to start recognizing that they’re going absolutely nowhere in national politics until they abandon their devotion to Open Borders policies, and start responding to their fellow citizens’ legitimate economic and especially security concerns about mass immigration.

Sadly, nothing could be clearer from recent developments than that the wait will continue indefinitely. Even worse, the U.S. Left seems to be even more clueless on the subject than its counterparts in Europe.

Certainly President Obama remains unrepentant about his own record. In his Farewell Address, he touted his record in fighting Islamic terrorism overseas (not that he used the term), and warned against the dangers of domestic radicalization. But his boast that “no foreign terrorist organization has successfully planned and executed an attack on our homeland these past eight years” once again made painfully clear his neglect of the dangerous impact of already having admitting so many newcomers whose original religion or culture creates huge obstacles to successful assimilation into American society. Why else would he have glossed over the deadly attacks by Muslim immigrants in Boston, San Bernardino, and Orlando?

In fact, according to Mr. Obama, the only Americans who need to learn about current and emerging immigration realities are those in the native-born population – because their fear that some immigrants today could “destroy the fundamental character” of the country is not only obsolete, but bigoted.

Other progressives also seem to be doubling down on efforts to address valid immigration concerns with smears. Can anyone reasonably doubt, for example, that Alabama Republican Senator Jeff Sessions’ appointment as President-elect Trump’s Attorney General would be sailing through the Senate if had not so forthrightly championed immigration realism – and enforcing the nation’s existing laws?

Yes, many Senate Democrats have accused Sessions of harboring racist views and neglecting the rights of a wide variety of discrimination victims. At the same time, none of these alleged transgressions prevented New Jersey Democratic Senator Cory Booker – Sessions’ leading Congressional opponent – from feeling “blessed and honored” just last year “to have partnered with Sen. Sessions in being the Senate sponsors” of a Congressional Gold Medal for the voting rights activists of the 1960s. No one else in the Senate protested, either.

Maybe Booker’s Massachusetts Senate colleague, Elizabeth Warren, is moving in the opposite direction? Not if her declaration that she’s running for reelection is any indication. Warren marked the occasion by vowing to “fight back against attacks on Latinos, African-Americans, Muslims, immigrants, women, and LGBT Americans. Our diversity is what makes our country strong – and on this, there will be NO compromise.” As if all these groups can be lumped in the exact same victimization category.

In fact, the only sign of progress I can detect is that no progressives are urging Mr. Obama or Mr. Trump to quintuple the number of U.S. refugee admissions from war-wracked Middle Eastern countries – as failed Democratic presidential contender Hillary Clinton proposed.

The contrast with European progressive leaders is stunning. As reported in an insightful column on Marketwatch.com, the head of Germany’s Social Democratic Party – and the country’s vice chancellor in the current coalition government – is calling for “ncreased video surveillance…a ban on fundamentalist mosques as breeding grounds for terrorism, and…an end to freeloading on Germany’s generous child-support subsidies by other European Union citizens.”

Another German progressive leader has slammed Chancellor Angela Merkel for “uncontrolled border opening [and]a police force that has been downsized to the point of inefficiency, that neither has the personnel nor the technical resources that would enable it to cope with the current threat situation,”

Meanwhile, Jeremy Corbyn, who heads the United Kingdom’s struggling Labour Party, is unmistakably rethinking his former opposition to Britain’s decision to leave the European Union in large part because of the grouping’s lax immigration policies. Corbyn had previously opposed “Brexit,” which British voters passed in a referendum in June.

Germany, of course, has experienced Muslim terrorist attacks much bloodier than America’s. The Labour Party seems headed for its worst showing in Parliament since the 1930s. Will it take these kinds of security and political disasters to bring U.S. progressives to their senses on immigration?

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Sense and Nonsense on Russia’s Hacking

Tags

2016 election, Amy Klochubar, China, cyber-security, cyber-war, defense spending, Democrats, hacking, Hillary Clinton, intelligence, John McCain, Middle East, NATO, Obama, Office of Personnel Management, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Putin, Republicans, Russia, sanctions, terrorism, Trump

What could be more predictable? The growing uproar over charges that Russia’s government waged a cyber-focused disinformation campaign to influence the last U.S. presidential election has let loose a flood of positively inane statements and arguments on both sides that show politics at its absolute worst.

Even worse, unless both Democrats and Republicans – and the various conflicting camps within the two major parties – get their act together quickly, the odds of further attacks and all the damage they can cause to American governance will only keep shooting up.

Let’s start with those who have expressed skepticism about these allegations, including regarding the substance of yesterday’s intelligence community report concluding that “President Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election. Russia’s goals were to undermine confidence in the democratic process, denigrate [former] Secretary [of State Hillary] Clinton [the Democratic nominee], and harm her electability and potential presidency.”

Can they really be serious in contending that the intelligence agencies’ publicly expressed judgments don’t pass the credibility test because no smoking gun or any other compelling evidence has been published? Do they really want the CIA etc to reveal whatever human and technical sources and methods they rely on? Do they really believe that any effective counter-hacking strategy can be developed or continued after disclosing that information?

The insistence on definitive proof, moreover, amounts to terrible advice for making foreign and national security policy generally. It seeks to apply to the jungle realm of international affairs the standards of the American legal system. President Obama’s years in office should have taught Americans how dangerously childish it is to believe that relations among sovereign countries are governed by commonly agreed on rules and norms, that the world is on the verge of this beatific state of affairs, or even that significant progress is being made. And Americans should hold shadowy world of spying and counter-spying to a simon-pure standard?

A more defensible rationale for doubting the intelligence community’s work emphasizes its past major blunders. And from what’s been made public, they have indeed been all too common and all too troubling.  (Please keep in mind, though, that successes often cannot be made public.)

Nevertheless, if a president or president-elect has no faith in a high confidence judgment of this importance from his intelligence agencies, then it’s clearly time to clean house. If the next administration does indeed decisively reject the community’s work on this matter, it will have no legitimate choice but to replace it leaders.

Back to the genuinely ditzy positions: statements that the Russian hacking failed to influence the course of the election. I personally believe this, and shame on those partisans who keep insisting that this interference prevented former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton from winning the White House or that it delegitimizes to any extent Donald Trump’s victory.

But should the United States count on Moscow – or any other actor – continuing to fail? Should it wait to respond forcefully until a U.S. adversary succeeds? Shouldn’t Washington capitalize on its adversaries’ current evident shortcomings in this regard and focus on punishment and deterrence? Simply posing these questions should make clear how obvious the answers are.

A final major objection to hammering the Russians represents another more reasonable judgment call, but it’s still fatally flawed. It’s the argument that Washington needs to softpedal the hack attack because the United States has a vital interest in improving relations with Moscow.

As I’ve written, opportunities for better ties with Russia abound, and they should be pursued. But that’s no reason to let Moscow off lightly for its cyber-aggression. In the first place, in any mutually beneficial relationship, boundaries need to be drawn. This is especially true given how much stronger and wealthier than Russia the United States is. If an effort to subvert America’s democratic processes doesn’t qualify, count on further, even worse provocations by Moscow.

Just as important, this approach overlooks a crucial reality: Clear indications that Russia has an incentive to cooperate with the United States in fighting Islamic extremism and terrorism haven’t appeared because Moscow is in a charitable, or even helpful, mood. They’ve appeared because these are vital interests as well for Russia, which both borders the dysfunctional Middle East and rules over its own Muslim populations.

In other words, Moscow has plenty of incentive to play ball with Washington on the Middle East whether the United States retaliates sharply for the hacking or not. And if the Russians don’t understand that, then there’s little hope of any form of meaningful cooperation.

Yet the actual and potential inconsistencies and hypocrisies of those urging tough retaliatory measures are equally troubling. Some are exclusive to Democrats. For example, the sanctions imposed on Moscow by the Obama administration for the hacking seem pretty modest for actions that it claims “demonstrated a significant escalation” of Russia’s “longstanding” efforts “to undermine the US-led liberal democratic order.”

And at the same time, the outrage voiced at Moscow contrasts conspicuously with reactions to China’s successful attack on the federal Office of Personnel Management, in which the records of some 22 million U.S. government employees – including classified and confidential information – were compromised. Indeed, President Obama never publicly blamed China’s government nor announced any responses.

Most important, however, is the question of whether Russia hardliners in both major parties old and new will act on the logical implications of their views of Russian actions and intentions – including on Moscow’s efforts to expand its influence along its own European borders. If for instance the hacking, as per Arizona Republican Senator John McCain, is truly an “act of war,” then will the call go out to cut off economic and diplomatic relations with Moscow?

If Russia’s moves against Crimea or Ukraine or the Baltics mean, in the words of Minnesota liberal Democratic Senator Amy Klochubar, that “Our commitment to NATO is more important than ever,” will today’s hawks – especially the noveau liberal variety – call for more U.S. defense spending and bigger American military deployments in endangered countries? And will they demand that American treaty allies in Europe finally get serious collectively about contributing to the common defense – which is first and foremost their own defense?

The answers to these questions will speak volumes to the American people as to whether their government is truly determined to defend interests declared to be major against foreign threats. And you can be sure they’ll convey the same vital information to America’s foreign friends and foes, too.

Im-Politic: The Last Gasps of Immigration Snake Oil?

Tags

border security, Cheap Labor Lobby, crime, felons, Hillary Clinton, illegal immigrants, illegal immigration, Im-Politic, Immigration, Migration Policy Institute, Norman Matloff, Obama, Open Borders, Trump, Washington Post

What if someone told you and the rest of the country that Washington has just decided to admit into the country a large group of foreigners and that you knew for sure that 7.45 percent of them would be convicted for crimes and that more than a third of these (2.73 percent of the total) would be felony convictions. In absolute terms, this works out to 820,000 and 300,000 illegal residents, respectively.

If you have a lick of common sense, you’d be outraged. Yet this is the exactly the case with America’s illegal immigrant population in recent decades. Along with another news item I’ve just found, reveals just how completely and dangerously loony America’s immigration policy has become under the Open Borders-obsessed leaders of the last two administrations, and why at least from this standpoint, Donald Trump’s election as president was so urgently needed.

Supporters of more lenient immigration policies might respond that, compared with the U.S. population overall, illegal immigrants look even more law-abiding. A 2010 academic report, for example, claimed that a total of 8.6 percent of the adults in the United States has been convicted for a felony – more than three times the above rate for illegals. Moreover, the number of these felons is growing faster than the population as a whole, so the gap could well be even bigger today.

Yet here’s where you need to look at the numbers intelligently – and make sure you’re comparing apples versus apples. First, the Census Bureau counts illegal immigrants when it gauges the population every ten years. So illegal immigrant felons have been contributing to the overall numbers.

Second, the first illegal immigrant felon figures I provided were for the entire illegal population. The illegal immigrant felon figures are for adults illegally living in the country. According to a widely accepted source of information about the illegal population – the Pew Research Center – some 28 percent of this group is outside the nation’s workforce, meaning those Americans who either are working, or unemployed but looking for work. So we can safely assume that most of these illegals are either minors or seniors – demographic sectors where you don’t find many convicted felons.

When you do the math, it turns out that the share of illegal immigrant adults with felony convictions equals some 3.79 percent. That’s still considerably lower than the share for the total American population, but closer.

Here’s the rub, though, and it’s based on a crucial point raised recently by one of America’s best thinkers on immigration policy today, Professor Norman Matloff, a computer scientist at the University of California-Davis who specializes in both immigration and the U.S. high-tech workforce, and the Asian immigrant community in northern California.

As Matloff has noted, the purpose of American immigration policy is supposed to improve the country. As a result, why has Washington looked the over way for so long as literally millions of foreigners, including large numbers of undesirables, made their way into the country? Even worse, felons pose especially clear and present dangers to pubic safety. No wonder so many voters were outraged by the federal government’s record on this count.

In addition, all the figures I’ve provided for illegal immigrant crime rates come from the Migration Policy Institute. Its website specifies that it favors “rights-based immigration and refugee policies” – which raises an orange flag concerning its objectivity to me. And that orange flag should turn bright red for everyone after reading through its list of donors – which includes the hitherto immigration-friendly U.S. government, the Mexican government, the foundation run by Microsoft founder Bill Gates (a strong supporter of immigration policies that have undercut wages in the U.S. tech sector), and WalMart (a long-time pillar of the nation’s corporate cheap labor lobby). So it’s entirely possible that the real numbers for illegal immigrant felons are considerably higher.

Meanwhile, much stronger evidence for the abject failure of current American immigration policy comes from a new Washington Post report finding that “Central American families are flowing into the United States in growing numbers….” Not surprisingly, this Mainstream Media article tries to put the blame on Mr. Trump and his supporters:

“Trump has pledged to build a towering border wall and deport millions, proposals that have been sketched out so far only in broad terms.

“By winning the election, Trump may have inadvertently made his job even harder. His plans have become a selling point for the smugglers urging people to cross the border before a wall goes up, according to migrants and officials in the United States and Mexico.”

Even less surprisingly, the authors missed the real news here: Throughout his administration, President Obama has been making statements to the effect that “Overall, the border is less porous than it’s been any time since the 1970s.” So did Mr. Trump’s main general election opponent, Democrat Hillary Clinton. But as the Post article makes painfully obvious, both of them, as well as the Open Borders crowd generally, were blowing smoke.

Trump will no doubt face daunting obstacles towards keeping his immigration promises. But so far, it’s clear that none of them will involve the self-inflicted handicaps of cockeyed priorities and deliberately wishful thinking.

Im-Politic: The Day After, Part II

Tags

2016 election, African Americans, Bernie Sanders, consumer confidence, Democrats, Elizabeth Warren, exit polls, Hillary Clinton, Hispanics, Im-Politic, labor, NAFTA, polls, TPP, Trade, trade laws, Trans-Pacific Partnership, Trump, white working class

It’s the day after the day after in America, and I’m still stupefied by the advent of the Age of Trump. I have absolutely no inside info on what to expect in the way of policy recommendations from the transition team or the new administration, so I’ll be just as eager as anyone for the hints and trial balloons to emerge.

But continuing with the theme of yesterday’s post, I believe it is possible to identify some important questions that major actors in American politics – and the voters they’ll keep trying to reach – will need to grapple with. Let’s focus today on the Democrats and their allies and constituencies, since they face the most obvious challenges:

>At least one piece of the conventional wisdom about Hillary Clinton’s failings strikes me as being right on target – especially since the emails exposed by Wikileaks make clear that her senior advisers spotted it as well: She never developed a clear, compelling positive message.

It’s not that “Stronger together” isn’t a positive idea, and no doubt had some appeal at a time of deep national division. But this slogan begs the question “Stronger together to where?” Regularly, Clinton suggested that she meant “to the 1990s,” when her husband was president. Many Americans – particularly in the chattering classes – do indeed view the period as a time of unprecedented prosperity along with peace. To many others, however – especially in working class precincts – the decade evoked memories of job-killing trade agreements like NAFTA. And of course many others were reminded of a string of scandals, both real and alleged.

In fact, I’d take the critique of Clinton’s message one step further. Even though her campaign website and many of her speeches were filled with any number of specific proposals, they were quickly replaced on the campaign trail, and especially in her ads, by a non-stop assault on Trump’s character and qualifications for the Oval Office. Clinton’s defeat strongly indicates that you can’t beat even a deeply flawed something with nothing.

>In fairness to Clinton, however, her messaging problems might have been related to a genuine quandary she faced. Democrats have styled themselves, and often acted like, the Party of the Common Man. As I and others have written, when it comes to issues like trade, demographic changes in Democrats’ ranks seem to be clashing with this relatively populist identity, and Tuesday night’s results indisputably show that the party has the majority of the white working class.

Indeed, according to the preliminary evidence, Clinton’s performance among union voters was feeble by the standards of recent Democratic presidential candidates – despite labor leaders’ vehement opposition to Trump. And keep in mind that nearly half of this electoral bloc is comprised of government workers, who naturally tend to favor the freer spending Democrats. As a result, Clinton’s backing from members of private sector unions was probably much weaker still.

So the Democrats face a fundamental choice, and it could well have rhetorically crippled an undecided Clinton. Will they turn their backs on private sector union members, possibly also in the belief that America’s changing population profile is steadily reducing their political importance? Or despite the gulf between private sector union workers and younger, better educated Democrats on issues like trade (along perhaps with immigration and those amorphous but crucial cultural and values issues), will they try to bring them back?

>Nonetheless, major Democratic constituencies and their leaders – including the unions and the party’s progressive wing – still loudly oppose America’s current approach to trade. But as mentioned above, they’ve been almost hysterically anti-Trump, to the point of incoherence.

If they’re serious about overhauling trade policy, it’s time for these folks to wake up and turn the partisanship down. They’ll soon be getting a president who supports most of their major and longstanding trade positions, including opposing the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), sanctioning China for currency manipulation, rewriting NAFTA, and using U.S. trade law more energetically to fight predatory foreign practices.

Working with Mr. Trump, they can achieve these goals. Remaining in spiteful high dudgeon could doom reforms they’ve sought literally for decades. Statements by Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, and from organized labor, are promising signs that these progressive leaders are open to cooperation with the incoming Chief Executive. Assuming that these declarations are serious, it’s time for the rest of the movement to fall in line and recognize that for the first time in modern U.S. history, the White House looks to be on their side.

>Finally (for now), nothing could be clearer about the 2016 election returns than the serious flaws they’ve revealed in the so-called science of polling. But politically focused surveys aren’t the only soundings apparently needing major surgery. Many of the best known economic surveys arguably were way off base as well.

For example, many polls – including this week’s exit polls – show strong public support for some form of legalization for illegal immigrants. Can this finding be reconciled with Mr. Trump’s win? Other surveys have revealed a notable warming of Americans’ views of free trade and recent trade agreements. That’s also hard to square with this week’s actual results – and would have been even had Mr. Trump lost by a respectable margin.

Also deserving of greater scrutiny – surveys of consumer and other forms of economic confidence. They have strongly tended to show significant improvement since the depths of the last recession, which isn’t hard to understand. But even their general claims of a simple return to pre-recession levels or, in some cases, better, ring false in light of this week’s voting.

One possible explanation is the gap identified by some researchers between rising optimism by African-Americans and Hispanics and the more downbeat views of whites. But if so, why did Trump fare much better among the latter than widely predicted, and why did he best 2012 Republican nominee Mitt Romney with both groups even though the economy was considerably weaker four years ago?

I can’t emphasize enough, however, how tentative my observations are, and how long my (and so many other) questions will defy confident answers. My only certainty so far is that election night this week was the most important historic event I’ve ever experienced. (I was born at the end of 1953.) I just wish I knew whether for good or ill.