Im-Politic: Final Grades on the Final Debate

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battleground states, climate change, crime, crime bills, election 2020, energy, fossil fuels, fracking, green energy, Im-Politic, Joe Biden, marijuana, narcotics, natural gas, oil, presidential debates, progressives, racism, systemic racism, Trump

I got something massively wrong about the second (and final) presidential debate of 2020. I thought that my frantic live-tweeting covered every important aspect of the Thursday night event. Upon reading the transcript, I realized there was lots more to say.

Let’s start with the 30,000-foot picture. There’s no question that President Trump performed more effectively than in the first debate. Even his most uncritical admirers, like Fox News talker Sean Hannity, have conceded as much (Check out the video of his post-debate show, in which he acknowledges that long-time Republican political operative Ari Fleischer was right in faulting Mr. Trump’s first debate performance as too overheated.)

But there are plenty of questions left unanswered about the second debate’s impact on the Presidential race. For the record, I’m sticking with the assessment I offered after the first debate: Given his lead even in most battleground state polls, because the Trump campaign and other Trumpers (including Hannity) had set the bar so low for “Sleepy Joe,” all Biden needed to do was show up and not screw up massively in order to win.

Those battleground polls have tightened somewhat, Biden’s perfectly fine first debate performance raised the bar for the second debate, and I’m far from thinking that the race is over. But I’d still rather be in Biden’s shoes than in Mr. Trump’s. And time keeps running out for the President. All the same, it’s important to remember that we haven’t seen any major post-debate nationwide or battleground polls come out yet, so there’s simply no hard evidence to go on at this point.

The time-is-not-the-President’s-friend point, though, brings up my first new debate-related point: Mr. Trump’s improved performance alone (whether he “won” or not either on points or according to the public), indicates that he erred in rejecting the Commission on Presidential Debate’s offer to hold the second debate virtually, due ostensibly to CCP Virus-related reasons.

Especially if Mr. Trump had by that time begun heeding the advice of supporters urging him to dial it down (which isn’t at all clear), he lost an opportunity to square off again against Biden in real time. And although there’s no adequate on-line substitute for the atmosphere and resulting pressures of in-person encounters, the President did lose a valuable opportunity to reassure voters unnerved – rightly or wrongly – by his first debate tactics.

Getting down to specific points, on Thursday night, two issues really do demand further discussion. First, I might have been mistaken in my tweeted view that the Biden comments on natural gas fracking and energy (and related climate change) policy wouldn’t be terribly important.

I did agree that the former Vice President did nothing to help himself in key energy states like Pennsylvania, where voters might worry that his various positions – and the prominence of staunch fossil fuels opponents in Democratic ranks now – would guarantee relatively rapid closures of the coal mines and gas and oil fields that created so much employment in their regions. But I stated that, because these subjects had been aired so thoroughly already, few energy voters’ minds would be changed.

What I clearly underestimated was the impact of an extended discussion of energy and climate subjects before a nation-wide audience. If I’d been right, why would the Trump campaign have almost immediately put out an ad spotlighting Biden’s assorted statements on these topics. And why would the Biden campaign have spent so much time trying to explain the Biden position?

Looking at the transcript helped me understand why energy- and climate-related anxieties in the energy states might have been elevated by the Biden debate remarks. For on the one hand, the Democratic challenger insisted that he was “ruling out” “banning fracking” and claimed that

“What I will do with fracking over time is make sure that we can capture the emissions from the fracking, capture the emissions from gas. We can do that and we can do that by investing money in doing it, but it’s a transition to that.”

And whereas previously, Biden had responded to a primary debate question about whether fossil fuels would have any place in his prospective administration by declaring “We would make sure it’s eliminated and no more subsidies for either one of those. Any fossil fuel,” on Thursday night, the former Vice President referred to transitioning from “the old oil industry”–presumably to some (undefined) new kind of oil industry.

Nonetheless, it would be reasonable for energy states residents to question these assurances of gradualness and transformation instead of elimination given Biden’s continued contention that “global warming is an existential threat to humanity,” that “we’re going to pass the point of no return within the next eight to ten years,” and that the energy sector in toto needs “to get to ultimately a complete zero emissions by 2025.” Last time I checked, that’s only five years from now.

Moreover, given the notable split within the Democratic party on climate change and energy issues between progressives and centrists, the Biden statements suggesting that major fossil fuel industries will survive during his administration in some form could depress turnout in their ranks for a candidate who clearly needs to stoke their enthusiasm.

The second set of issues I should have tweeted more about entails crime and race relations. I think Biden deserves a great deal of credit for calling “a mistake” his support for crime bills of the 1980s and 1990s that, in the words of moderator Kristen Welker “contributed to the incarceration of tens of thousands of young Black men who had small amounts of drugs in their possession, they are sons, they are brothers, they are fathers, they are uncles, whose families are still to this day, some of them suffering the consequences.”

He was also correct in pointing out that President Trump – who quite properly pointed to some noteworthy achievements of his administration on behalf of African Americans – took a sweepingly harsh line on crime himself in previous decades.

But two positions taken by Biden should disturb even supporters. First, his argument that “It took too long [during the Obama administration] to get it right. Took too long to get it right. I’ll be President of the United States, not Vice President of the United States,” clearly throws his former boss under the bus. In fact, he also implicitly blamed Obama for the failure to resolve the problem created by children living the United States born to illegal immigrant parents.

The second such position was Biden’s argument that “No one should be going to jail because they have a drug problem. They should be going to rehabilitation, not to jail.”

I personally can support this view when it comes to hard drugs. But marijuana? For whose use so many American blacks have been jailed – and so many more than white Americans? (I’m not a big fan of the American Civil Liberties Union these days, but the data in this study are tough to refute.) Mandatory (government-funded?) therapy for potheads? That could use some rethinking.

But like I said at the outset, I expressed views on many other debate-related subjects on my Twitter feed (@AlanTonelson). So there’s no substitute for following there, as well as checking in with RealityChek, for the most up-to-date thinking on the election — as well as everything else under the sun.

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Following Up: Washington’s Still Covertly Exposing America to Asia Nuclear Threats

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2016 election, Asia, Defense Department, deterrence, Following Up, missile defense, North Korea, nuclear weapons, presidential debates, South Korea

There’s a good news-bad news way to report the latest development in the U.S. government’s ongoing efforts to cope with the surging nuclear threat posed by North Korea. Too bad the bad news weighs much heavier on the scale.

On the one hand, it’s good news that Washington is finally acknowledging with deeds as well as words a danger that RealityChek has been highlighting for years: Kim Jong Un’s regime keeps making impressive strides towards building nuclear weapons capable of neutralizing America’s commitment to defend South Korea and Japan with its own nuclear weapons. The reasons? As I’ve noted, the North’s weapons are nearing the point at which they can hit U.S. territory. And just as frighteningly, Pyongyang is learning how to boost greatly the odds that at least some of these weapons will be able to survive an American strike to knock them out before they can be used – either before a military conflict begins on the Korean peninsula, or while one’s underway.

As a result, the North can be increasingly confident that Washington won’t use its own nuclear weapons to stop any invasion it mounts of the South, and therefore increasingly confident that its superior conventional forces (with or without nuclear help) would power it to victory.

And a special bonus for the United States: Because 28,000 U.S. troops remain in South Korea even though the Cold War has been over for nearly 30 years, a North Korea invasion could well confront an American president with this agonizing choice: Use the nukes, and risk losing one or more U.S. cities, or acquiesce in major American casualties. Those North Korean nuclear forces could take out America’s 49,000 soldiers and sailors in Japan, too.

As known by RealityChek regulars, in the most immediate sense, the United States is in this predicament to begin with because neither South Korea nor Japan has fielded powerful enough conventional militaries to defeat North Korea without American help. In large measure, Japan has skimped on defense because Washington doesn’t want it to become a major military power once again – for fear the Japanese will revert back to their aggressive early 20^th century ways. But no such pressure has been exerted on Seoul. For decades, however, American leaders have decided that both a nuclear Japan and South Korea would be calamitous.

And worst of all, the entire U.S. foreign policy establishment – including the Mainstream Media – has worked overtime to hide these scary realities from the American people.

So what’s the good news? As reported in this Bloomberg piece, the United States will continue to develop a missile defense system aimed at protecting U.S. territory from the North’s nukes. Indeed, a new round of tests is “tentatively” scheduled for early next year.

But here’s the (really) bad news: Washington is nowhere near developing a missile defense system that can actually work. To be sure, Defense Department officials are expressing optimism that they’ve figured out how to fix the problems responsible for recent test failures. But even if this next test – and follow-ons – succeed, and even if their targets actually do approximate “real-world threats” (which they haven’t so far), defining success is awfully tricky given how much damage even one warhead striking the United States can do.

All of which means that, for the indefinite future, it will be American policy to keep the U.S. homeland exposed to a non-negligible threat of nuclear attack in order to protect countries more than wealthy enough to defend themselves. As I’ve acknowledged, there are some theoretically justifiable reasons for this strategy (e.g., both countries are vital trade partners, or a nuclear-armed Japan really would go berserk, or Washington is striking the right balance between deterring aggression and preserving peace in Asia and keeping Americans themselves safe). But it also remains clear that U.S. leaders refuse to acknowledge the real stakes – because they recognize that no benefits of protecting Asia can possibly exceed the harm of a nuclear warhead (or two, or three) exploding above U.S. territory, and that public opinion would explode in outrage if the truth were told.

We’ve still got some presidential debates – and a vice presidential face-off – coming up before Election Day. Is anyone confident that this issue will receive remotely as much attention as Alicia Machado?

Im-Politic: It’s Time to Shake Up the Presidential Debate Format

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2016 election, Democrats, Im-Politic, media, presidential debates, Republicans

I gotta admit it: Although I’m a politics junkie during big election years, this cycle’s presidential debates are starting to wear thin. Sure there are still unexpected fireworks displays that can justify wall-to-wall viewing, but the stretches in between of canned answers and stump speech fragments seem to drag on longer and longer.

So let me suggest two format changes to break this increasingly depressing mold: First, giving the candidates considerably more time to answer questions; and second, permitting the hopefuls to question each other for at least part of each session.

During the last Democratic debate, the Public Broadcasting Service gave Democrats Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders 90 seconds to answer each question directed at them, and 30 seconds to respond to those initial answers. And the Republican candidates at their most recent session had 60 seconds to answer questions they received directly, 30 seconds for responses to the journalists’ follow-ups, and 30 seconds to rebut attacks from other candidates.

The strict time limits might have made sense during the early debates. For example, the initial Republican prime-time event in August featured ten contenders, while five Democratic hopefuls took the stage for their party’s inaugural debate. But now the Republican field is down to six, and only two Democrats remain. Unless the debates themselves are greatly shortened, why not enable these politicians to go into some detail? And pose questions sharp enough to encourage such answers?

It’s true that the candidates on either side could use these new opportunities to mouth even more blather than usual. But better queries – perhaps coming from some recognized specialists in various fields – could boost the risks of simple bloviating. It’s also true that candidate-to-candidate exchanges could degenerate into simple shout fests. But we’ve seen some of that already. Journalist moderators could still be available as referees. And (for the most part) politicians could still be relied on not to want to loose their cool in public. Moreover, it’s not like many in the audience would greatly miss the kinds of softball or gotcha questions seemingly foremost on the media’s minds.

Although it’s still early in Campaign 2016, the public has already been treated to nine Republican presidential debates, six Democratic counterparts, and one Democratic Town Hall. The ratings seem to be holding up on both sides (see here and here for evidence), but Americans’ attention spans don’t appear to be growing longer these days, and it’s easy to envision their interest in such events fading until the fall contest is set. Both the sponsoring networks and the health of American democracy have strong stakes in keeping the nation engaged. Shaking up an ever more predictable series of presidential debates would be both good business and good civics.

Im-Politic: Why Trump’s Critics Need to Learn Trump-ish

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2016 election, African Americans, anger, assimilation, border security, borders, Chuck Todd, Donald Trump, Fox News, George Will, Hillary Clinton, illegal immigrants, Im-Politic, immigrants, Immigration, ISIS, Islamophobia, Jeb Bush, Jobs, John Kasich, Latinos, Lindsey Graham, Megyn Kelly, middle class, Muslim ban, Muslims, NBC News, Obama, Paris attacks, political class, polls, presidential debates, racism, radical Islam, refugees, San Bernardino, sexism, sovereignty, terrorism, wages, xenophobia

Since the political class that routinely slams him is hermetically shielded from the struggles of Donald Trump’s middle class and working class supporters, it’s no surprise that the nation’s elite pols and pundits don’t speak a word of Trump-ish. Assuming, in the spirit of the holiday season, that at least some of the Republican front-runners’ assailants are actually interested in understanding the political earthquakes he’s set off and responding constructively, as opposed to buttressing their superiority complexes or stamping them out (frequently in response to special interest paymasters), here’s a handy two-lesson guide.

Special bonus: This post also goes far toward both interpreting the widely noted anger marking the nation’s politic today, and explaining why Trump’s bombshells keep boosting, not cratering, his poll numbers.

Lesson One: It’s been all too easy to condemn Trump’s various comments on immigration policy as xenophobic, racist, or both. Some have clearly been sloppy and/or impractical, which is why, as in the case of his deportation policy, or the original form of the Muslim ban (which didn’t distinguish between citizens and non-citizens), I’ve been critical.  (For the former, see, e.g., this post.  For the latter, I’ve expressed my views on Twitter on November 20 and December 7.)  There’s also no doubt that much opposition to current, permissive immigration policies stems from the kinds of fears about threats to “traditional American values” that have animated explicitly discriminatory anti-immigrant movements in the past.

Yet the standard denunciations of Trump’s positions ignore too many features of his pitch and his proposals to be convincing. For example, if Trump is a simple racist, or white supremacist, why does he never mention the supposed threats from East or South Asian immigrants? And if these groups really are often conspicuously singled out as “model minorities” even by many immigration policy critics, how can they reasonably be lumped into the racist category? Further, why does Trump’s immigration plan emphasize the harm done by low-skill and low-wage legal and (especially) illegal immigrants to the incomes and prospects of so many low-skill and low-wage black Americans?

Similar observations debunk the portrayal of Trump’s Muslim ban as simple, ignorant, irrational Islamophobia. As I’ve pointed out repeatedly (e.g. this post) , for many reasons, Islam presents special problems for American national security and international interests. Even President Obama has accused the so-called moderate majority of the world’s Muslims and their leaders of failing to resist the fanaticism of ISIS and Al Qaeda strongly enough. And although Muslims have by and large integrated peacefully and successfully into American life – certainly more so than in Europe – Western, evidence of pro-terrorist activity and sympathy is too compelling for comfort.

So obviously, there’s much more to the Trump pitch and platform than mindless hating. In the case of immigration from Mexico and the rest of Latin America that’s overwhelmingly economically motivated, it’s the concern that business and other elite economic interests have so successfully and so long focused Washington on satisfying its appetite for cheap labor that the needs of native-born workers and their families, as well as the fundamental security imperative of maintaining control over national borders, have been completely neglected. Therefore, Trump’s pronouncements – including his call for a wall – are best seen as demands that American leaders prioritize their own citizens and legal residents in policymaking, and for restoration of border security arrangements essential for concepts like “nationhood” and “sovereignty” and “security” to have practical meaning.

In other words, when Trump and his supporters complain about Mexican or Latino immigrants, whether legal and particularly illegal, the candidate in particular, and arguably most often his supporters, are complaining not about newcomers with different skin colors or about foreigners as such. They’re complaining about immigrants who are serving exactly the same purpose as the picket-crossing scabs that historically have aroused heated – and sometimes violent – reactions from elements of the American labor movement: increasing the labor supply to further weaken workers’ bargaining power.

Of course, there’s another, non-economic reason for focusing on Hispanic immigrants that has nothing to do with racism or bigotry – though you don’t hear this point from Trump himself. It’s that worry about assimilation and American values referenced above. In turn, it springs from (a) both those groups’ distinctive insistence on concessions to bilingualism in daily life (when was the last time you heard about demands for Chinese language instructions on ballots, or Vietnamese announcements on subway P.A. systems?); and (b) from the eagerness many politicians show to accommodate them. The latter is in sharp contrast to official America’s handling of earlier immigration waves, when the overriding intent was to Americanize newcomers as soon and as completely as possible – and when demands for special treatment were far less common.

Similar non-bigoted messages are being sent by Trump’s Muslim ban and related opposition to admitting large numbers of refugees from Middle East war zones. Assimilation is clearly on the minds of his supporters. But security is an even bigger issue for both the candidate and his backers. Especially in the wake of the November Paris attacks and the ensuing San Bernardino shootings, many Republican and even some Democratic party leaders have understandably felt compelled to call out an Obama administration that has, in the face of all common sense, kept insisting that those fleeing areas of chaos could be adequately vetted – and that with equal stubbornness has demonized such prudence as prejudiced, callous, a propaganda windfall for ISIS, and un-American.

Lesson Two: This one, concerning Trump’s insulting comments towards fellow presidential hopefuls, journalists, and other individual critics (whether they’ve been truly critical or not) should be much easier to understand – though perhaps more difficult for the targets to take to heart. In a perfect world, or even close, office-seekers, anyone in public life, or anyone in public, shouldn’t call others “stupid,” or “losers” as Trump has, and it’s even worse to disparage people because of their looks or use sexist slurs against women.

But this is not only a world that is far from perfect. It is a world – and country – in which the wealthy, the powerful, and the influential enjoy privilege that is almost unimaginable unless you know or have seen it personally. Far too often, to a degree not known in America for decades, their position has come at the expense of fellow citizens so remote financially, culturally, and even geographically from them that the latter might as well as invisible. And even more infuriating, the occupants of America’s commanding heights seem to stay securely in place – and even more securely in place – no matter what failures and even catastrophes they inflict on the country. Increasing signs of nepotism and even dynasticism foul the picture further.

In other words, there’s no shortage of reasons for many Americans to refer to their current leaders, their wannabe leaders, and all their varied courtiers without the level of courtesy to which we’ve become accustomed. Indeed, there is every reason for a big bloc of the electorate to view them as outright crooks, incompetents, or some combination of the two. And when Trump treats them as such, a strong case can be made that, even though he’s coarsening public discourse, he’s also sending the Beltway crowd and its fans and funders across the country messages about millions of their countrymen that they urgently need to hear and understand. For example, Trump backers

>are completely unimpressed with monuments to unearned status like former Florida Governor (and presidential relative) Jeb Bush, and former Senator and Secretary of State (and First Lady) Hillary Clinton;

>view failed or failing presidential rivals like Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Ohio Governor John Kasich as shills for the corporate cheap labor lobby and its mass immigration plans, not as courageous champions of more inclusive conservatism;

>and wonder who decreed pundits like George Will and news anchors like NBC’s Chuck Todd or Fox’s Megyn Kelly to be arbiters of political, social, and cultural acceptability.

In other words, Trump’s supporters believe that spotlighting the disastrous records, wrongheaded positions, or hollow reputations of many individual American leaders and media notables is vastly more important than protecting their delicate sensibilities. In turn, the specificity of this harsh treatment reveals something important about much of the anger pervading American politics today. It’s not simply aimed at abstractions like “politics as usual” or “Washington dysfunction” or “the system” or even “corruption.” That’s because in addition to being almost uselessly vague, these terms conveniently permit practically any individual or even any particular category of individuals involved in public life to assume that the problem lies elsewhere.

Instead, today’s anger is directed at specific individuals and groups who large numbers of voters blame for the country’s assorted predicaments, and who Trump supporters read and see routinely belittle their frustrations and therefore condemn their chosen spokesmen as know-nothings, clowns, bigots, and even incipient fascists.

Trump’s blast at Kelly right after the first Republican presidential debate in Cleveland in August was especially revealing. Even I first described it as needlessly personal and petty. But looking back, it’s also clear why so many Trump acolytes and (then) undecideds seemed to ignore it and its seeming implications about Trump’s personality and judgment.

For in the actual debate, they heard Kelly pose what they surely viewed as a second-order “gotcha” question – about Trump’s previous insults of women. And they also heard an answer from the candidate that immediately pivoted to some of their top priorities. “I don’t frankly have time,” Trump responded, “for total political correctness. And to be honest with you, this country doesn’t have time either. This country is in big trouble. We don’t win anymore. We lose to China. We lose to Mexico both in trade and at the border. We lose to everybody.”

And the more political rivals and other establishmentarians harrumphed or inveighed about Trump’s crudeness, the more backers and sympathizers viewed Kelly not mainly as a bullied female, but as another out-of-touch media celebrity and even an elitist hired gun, and the more they scorned Trump’s critics as selfish plutocrats more concerned with protecting one of their own than dealing seriously with pocketbook and other core issues.

Therefore, as with his populist policy stances, Trump’s language and its appeal are confronting his establishment opponents with a fundamental choice if they want to keep these approaches out of American politics. They can try to learn Trump-ish, and respond constructively to the legitimate economic and non-economic concerns fueling it. Or they can remain self-righteously ignorant, and continue vilifying him and his backers. Since the insults directly threaten not just the elites’ prestige but their lucrative perches, I feel pretty confident that they’ll choose the latter. What’s anyone’s guess is how long, and even whether, they can keep succeeding.

Im-Politic: Why CNBC’s GOP Debate Performance Really was That Bad

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Bernie Sanders, CNBC, Donald Trump, economists, GOP, Im-Politic, Jeb Bush, Mainstream Media, Marco Rubio, Mike Huckabee, political class, presidential debates, Republicans, special interests

As both a former journalist and an analyst who has worked closely with them, I’ve long shed any illusions about the smarts, the energy, or the integrity of the vast majority of this profession’s members, and especially those that work for national, Mainstream Media outlets. Nor do I have any more doubts about the mounting danger to American democracy’s health posed by the combination of Big Journalism’s immense influence, its near perfect isolation from the lives and concerns of Main Street Americans, its fierce protectiveness of self-serving elitist groupthink, and its almost complete lack of accountability.

And for all this cynicism, I am still slackjawed over the appalling conduct of the three CNBC moderators of last night’s Republican presidential debate in Colorado. (Here’s the full transcript, if you’re a masochist.)

Make no mistake. This complaint isn’t about “tough questions” – or coddling thin-skinned politicians. This is about an unforgivably imperious effort to decree virtually an entire major political party to be devoid of presidential candidates remotely fit for office, and its rank and file to be all but subhuman in intellect. More troubling – because largely unwitting – this course reflected less deliberate partisanship than an instinctive protectiveness of the current political class and its excessive status and privileges.

If you think I’m being too harsh, consider the following questions:

For (still?) front-running businessman Donald Trump: “Is this a comic book version of a presidential campaign?”

For Florida Senator Marco Rubio: “You’ve been a young man in a hurry ever since you won your first election in your 20s….Why not slow down, get a few more things done first or least finish what you start?”

For former Florida Governor Jeb Bush: “Ben Bernanke, who was appointed Fed chairman by your brother, recently wrote a book in which he said he no longer considers himself a Republican because the Republican Party has given in to know- nothingism.”

For former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee: “As a preacher as well as a politician, you know that presidents need the moral authority to bring the entire country together. The leading Republican candidate, when you look at the average of national polls right now, is Donald Trump. When you look at him, do you see someone with the moral authority to unite the country?”

And then there was this question (to Trump) – less obviously insulting, but just as revealing of the “pull up the drawbridge” mentality: “I talked to economic advisers who have served presidents of both parties. They said that you have as chance of cutting taxes that much without increasing the deficit as you would of flying away from that podium by flapping your arms.”

Let’s leave aside how a Trump (or Ben Carson, or Democrat Bernie Sanders, for that matter) presidency would kneecap the access to power responsible for the livelihoods not only of establishment journalists but of the policy world’s politically ambitious economists. Let’s also therefore leave aside that the vast majority of the economists that national journalists would consult with are driven not only by such career considerations, but by agendas that are either hopelessly partisan or determined by the special interests that fund them.

Let’s focus instead on the operative assumption that anyone can forecast to any useful extent the impact of tax rate changes on a $16-plus trillion economy with some 142 million (nonfarm) workers, nearly 93 million working age Americans outside the workforce, 123.2 million households, and nearly 7.5 million businesses. Yes, it’s widely believed that the economics profession boasts these powers. But simply articulating this premise, as opposed to accepting it mindlessly, reveals how looney it is, even when it comes to intellectually honest analysts.

The CNBC moderators actually did ask some serious and therefore necessary questions that exposed inconsistencies, factually dubious claims, and unreasonable assumptions in some of the candidates’ proposals. But follow-up was limited – and many issues ignored completely – because it was obviously imperative to leave sufficient time for mudslinging and incitement.

Ironically, CNBC was hoping that last night’s broadcast would attract big new audiences to its daytime finance and economics coverage. If there’s any justice, most of these new viewers turned off their sets vowing, “Never again.”

Im-Politic: Why Trump’s Debate Victory over CNBC Really Matters

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2016 elections, Ben Carson, CNBC, diplomacy, Donald Trump, fast track, Im-Politic, multinational corporations, offshoring, presidential debates, Rand Paul, Republicans, Ted Cruz, Trade

No, this isn’t an endorsement, but the way Donald Trump handled the dispute over its planned presidential debate format between CNBC on the one hand, and several Republican candidates including him on the other, shows precisely why he could well transform U.S. trade policy – and possibly American foreign policy – dramatically for the better if elected.

Along with Ben Carson, Ted Cruz, and Rand Paul, Trump protested CNBC’s original plans for two hours of actual debating time, plus up to 16 minutes of commercials, with no opening or closing statements by the contenders. The four protesting candidates wanted the event’s total time capped at two hours, and insisted that opening and closing statements be included in that total.

As these disagreements indicate, the gulf between CNBC and the four Republican hopefuls wasn’t terribly wide. But what’s important about this story is how and why these candidates – and especially Trump – prevailed even though the rest of the much more numerous Republican field apparently was fine with CNBC’s intentions.

Essentially, the four dissenters recognized that they had decisive leverage. (Their absence – especially Trump’s – could cost the cable network valuable ratings.) They threw around their weight. And they won. And when it comes to trade policy (and many other international challenges and opportunities facing the United States) that’s exactly what U.S. leaders from both parties have consistently failed to do for decades, even though the United States typically holds all the main cards.

This is especially true in trade policy, because the United States has long served as the market-of-last resort for a world full of major and minor trade powers alike that desperately depend on ever higher exports for adequate growth. But Washington’s failure to wield its relative power and leverage effectively arguably has undercut important American objectives in the national security sphere, too – for example, in persuading free-riding allies to bear a greater share of the West’s common defense burden.

I single Trump out because none of his three comrades in arms in this tussle has made trade policy a centerpiece of their campaigns. In fact, Texas Senator Ted Cruz and his Kentucky counterpart Rand Paul have been strong supporters of the substance of America’s current trade strategy, though both opposed (for procedural and political reasons) the recent (successful) attempt in Congress to award fast track negotiating authority to President Obama. Moreover, unlike Trump, neither Carson nor Cruz nor Paul has touted deal-making and bargaining as among their strongest suits. 

At the same time, Trump’s victory over CNBC underscores how incomplete his attacks on American trade diplomacy have been. For Washington has signed deficit-fueling and deals and reached similarly counterproductive trade policy decisions (like long coddling China’s currency manipulation) not mainly because U.S. officials can’t size up a situation accurately – a charge consistent with Trump’s claim that they’re incompetent and lack elementary street smarts.

Instead, they repeatedly fail at trade bargaining tables to advance and defend the interests of the American economy as a whole primarily because they haven’t considered that their job. They view themselves as agents of offshoring-happy multinational corporations, whose campaign contributions have ensured that their trade priorities prevail even when success comes at the expense of America’s productive sectors.

That’s why, as I keep arguing, Trump’s trade policy rhetoric should mainly demonize these U.S. corporate special interests, not foreign governments. (And why it’s encouraging that he’s shown signs of making this pivot.) At the same time, since the United States no longer dominates the world stage as in the early post-World War II decades, accurately assessing power balances and recognizing when compromises are needed has also become an important ingredient for diplomatic, and presidential, success.

So Trump should promise that he’s independent enough to be working for Main Street (because he doesn’t need that special interest money), that he’s tough enough to press clear advantages hard, and that he’s smart enough to “know when to fold ’em.” What other candidates can credibly make this combination of claims?