US Election 2016

Will The Race For The White House Be Decided By Shy Donald Trump Voters?

Samuel Hooper2 Comments

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Shy Tories helped the Conservative Party to an unexpected outright victory in the 2015 general election in Britain, while some say that “shy Brexiteers” helped to push the UK out of the European Union. Are shy Trump supporters now about to help elect Donald Trump president of the United States?

The progressive Mother Jones magazine has just sent its readers a panicked bulletin asking them whether or not they would “secretly vote for Trump”.

Given the left-wing readership of Mother Jones, it is a safe bet that very few people will respond in the affirmative, but the mere fact that Mother Jones and their partners the Progressive Turnout Project are asking the question at all tells us something very interesting: that American leftists and Democrats are terrified that the polls may be deceiving them and that their progressive dream might be undone in November by the “shy Trumpist” factor.

From the email (their emphasis is bold):

Political experts believe that a shocking number of voters are secretly supporting Trump — but are ashamed to voice their support publicly.

This is evidenced by the fact that Trump continues to perform better in online polls than in phone polls.

Nate Silver recently ran a national presidential poll and the results were SHOCKING:

In telephone polls — where the respondent is asked to disclose their preference to a live person — Hillary Clinton is polling at 86%. But in online and robo polls, Hillary polls 15% LOWER, at 71%.

Researchers speculate that this discrepancy is due to the fact that many respondents simply are embarrassed to admit they’re voting for Trump.

[..]

The truth is, the Trump campaign agrees this is happening.

They’re counting on a large number of ‘silent’ voters to come out in droves on Election Day and carry Donald Trump to victory.

We can’t let that happen.

The New York Times reported on the same phenomenon back in May:

There is also strong evidence that most traditional public opinion surveys inadvertently hide a segment of Trump’s supporters. Many voters are reluctant to admit to a live interviewer that they back a candidate who has adopted such divisive positions.

In matchups between Trump and Hillary Clinton, Trump does much better in polls conducted online, in which respondents click their answers on a computer screen, rather than in person-to-person landline and cellphone surveys.

An aggregation by RealClearPolitics of 10 recent telephone polls gives Clinton a nine-point lead over Trump. In contrast, the combined results for the YouGov and Morning Consult polls, which rely on online surveys, place Clinton’s lead at four points.

Why is this important? Because an online survey, whatever other flaws it might have, resembles an anonymous voting booth far more than what you tell a pollster does.

[..] In a detailed analysis of phone versus online polling in Republican primaries, Kyle A. Dropp, the executive director of polling and data science at Morning Consult, writes “Trump’s advantage in online polls compared with live telephone polling is eight or nine percentage points among likely voters”.

This difference, Dropp notes, is driven largely by more educated voters — those who would be most concerned with “social desirability.”

Concluding:

The simple fact that Trump has beaten the odds so far means that it is not beyond the realm of possibility that he could beat them again. If he does take the White House, much, if not all, of his margin of victory will come from voters too ashamed to acknowledge publicly how they intend to cast their vote.

But is this really likely to happen in America? Well, the “shy Tory” factor is certainly real and has been proven in election after election in Britain, with the Guardian recently lamenting:

“Well hung” was the headline on the Sun’s front page, while the Guardian ran with “It couldn’t be closer”. The polls were predicting Labour and the Conservatives were neck-and-neck, but they couldn’t have been more wrong.

All of the polls significantly underestimated the Tories, and they were strikingly consistent in how wrong they were. Populus put Labour one point ahead, BMG, Survation, YouGov and polling by the Conservative peer Lord Ashcroft all predicted a tie. Opinium predicted a one-point lead for the Tories, as did ComRes and Ipsos Mori.

So when the exit polls just after 10pm predicted 316 seats for the Tories – up nine seats from 2010 – and Labour a devastating 239 seats, with the Lib Dems obliterated to just 10 and the SNP winning all but one seat in Scotland, many could not believe it was true.

[..] The same excuses are being floated this time as were used in 1992: changing methods of polling, “shy Tories” who did not want to admit they were voting for John Major, and a very late swing of undecideds.

While during the EU referendum campaign, this blog weighed in on the “shy eurosceptic” phenomenon:

So what are we dealing with here? It’s the same factor which makes otherwise confident, extroverted people drop their voices to a hushed and conspiratorial whisper when discussing their conservative political leanings in an elite (or creative/artistic) workplace,or makes a school teacher think twice before openly contradicting the biased, anti-Tory ranting of their colleagues.

But it is more than simply avoiding hassle. For many people, not only the elites, it is also a case of seeking to avoid very tangible real-world consequences of being known to hold unfashionable opinions – the threat of public ridicule, professional censure or even job loss, simply for committing thought-crime.

Maybe nobody will care if you fail to join in the joking with your colleagues when they laugh about Nigel Farage or mock those knuckle-dragging Little Englanders who want to pull up the drawbridge on Fortress Britain. But maybe they will notice, and maybe it might lead to an awkward question: “Wait a minute, you can’t seriously support those racists, can you? You’re having a laugh, right?” Far easier to just go along with the crowd. Why risk antagonising the boss, or the people you sit next to every day? Why risk that upcoming promotion? Better just stay silent.

[..]  There are many social settings – mostly where the social, academic or artistic elites live and work – where expressing a eurosceptic opinion or declaring one’s support for Brexit is tantamount to reading aloud from Mein Kampf in the town square. But conversely, there are no equivalent places or scenarios where one might reasonably expect to be actively persecuted for expressing pro-EU sentiments.

Goodness knows just how many secretly anti-illegal-immigration, vaguely nationalist, protectionist authoritarians there are lurking in the enclaves of America’s coastal elites. But whether they are a handful or a small army, you can bet that they will be keeping quiet about their political preferences. Why invite public ridicule, social isolation and all of the other negative consequences of a political climate which has seen Hillary Clinton describe half of Donald Trump supporters as “deplorable” racists, and in which people like them are used as daily cannon fodder on channels like MSNBC?

It is certainly the case in Britain that many people simply dare not express their perfectly mainstream and legitimately held conservative opinions because of the toxic and hateful anti-Tory, anti-Brexit hysteria whipped up by the permanently outraged Left, who insist on seeing evil rather than mere political disagreement. And this culture is certainly no more harmonious or respectful in the United States. Therefore it follows quite reasonably that there may be a mass of voters, unimpressed with President Obama’s two terms of office and with deep concerns over Hillary Clinton, who find themselves in the unexpected position of preferring Donald Trump but are unable to confess their thoughtcrime to friends, family or pollsters.

And then again, maybe not. That’s the awkward thing about these “shy voter” phenomena – they seem so obvious the day after an election, but are almost impossible to pin down before polling day thanks to their tendency to lie to pollsters.

But if I was a Hillary Clinton-supporting progressive, I would not be taking any chances. And I would start asking myself whether the pleasurable short-term catharsis of denouncing all Donald Trump supporters as selfish, evil and ignorant is worth the risk of driving even more of his supporters underground, beyond the influence of both Democratic Party outreach and out of reliable communication with opinion pollsters.

Unfortunately, most American leftists don’t seem to have gotten the message yet. Here’s Jonathan Chait, making himself look smart at the expense of making things even worse:

Following the classic definition of a gaffe as a politician telling the truth, Hillary Clinton’s comment about Donald Trump’s supporters (“just to be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the ‘basket of deplorables.’ Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic — you name it”) was the purest and most classic example. The national media has spent a year and a quarter documenting in exquisite, redundant detail the rabid, anti-intellectual nationalistic bigotry of Trump’s hard-core fanbase. But it has taken Hillary Clinton’s affirmation to transform this by-now-banal observation into a scandal.

[..] Clinton controversially described half of Trump’s supporters as “irredeemable.” Trump earlier this year framed the same idea in a more colorful and perhaps more damning way: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.” Both statements reflect the same underlying truth: Trump enjoys a hard-core support that lies beyond persuasion, utterly immune to even the starkest factual evidence. Clinton committed a gaffe because she acknowledged a reality that literally every other person in America, including Donald Trump himself, is permitted to speak aloud.

Keep on laughing, strutting and preening if you must, American liberals.

I just hope that today’s feeling of smug superiority does not warp into the numb disbelief of defeat when the half of the country that you so love to demonise ends up delivering Donald J Trump to the White House.

 

Donald Trump Rally

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The Democrats Rub Illegal Immigration In The Faces Of Struggling Americans – No Wonder Many Support Donald Trump

Samuel Hooper4 Comments

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The American Left’s determined intransigence and dishonesty on the issue of immigration pushes decent people into the arms of Donald Trump

Imagine that for some crazy reason, you just happen to believe in the strict upholding of law and order.

Suppose that this belief extends to the enforcement of federal immigration laws, and zero tolerance on those who seek to bypass, subvert or ignore the legal avenues for attaining permanent residency and citizenship of the United States.

Suppose that you’re a hard working, ordinary decent person who perhaps doesn’t have the time or inclination to ruminate on the ways in which a conspiracy of the two political parties has effectively encouraged plentiful illegal immigration for so long that the US economy is now dependent on the millions of illegal immigrants living in America.

Suppose that you occupy a relatively unskilled and low-paid position in the labour market, and have not seen your disposable income or living standards increase for years, or in some cases even decades.

Suppose that whenever you watch or read the news, both politicians and the media refuse to call the people who overstayed their visas or snuck into the country by their proper descriptor, “illegal immigrants”, preferring to term them “undocumented immigrants” as though they were regular Americans whose birth certificates, passports and other papers proving their right to residency had simply vanished in an unfortunate puff of smoke.

Suppose that every time you turn on the television you see a deliberate effort to change the language to speak of “undocumented” rather than “illegal” immigrants, while the media consistently portray people like you, those with legitimate personal and civic concerns, as being inherently “racist”.

Suppose you then see the Democratic Party not only consistently celebrate “undocumented” immigrants at their quadrennial national convention but actually invite many of them onto the stage to give speeches, and reward those speeches with thunderous standing ovations – while the Democratic presidential nominee described people like you as belonging to a “basket of deplorables”.

Suppose that while you and your family are held to account and in some cases persecuted by the criminal justice system for the smallest infraction, the hearts of politicians and the media seem brimming over with sympathy not for you but for those whose very presence on American soil violates US immigration law.

Suppose that you are a relatively low-information voter, but someone who is very aware of the persistent air of scandal surrounding Hillary Clinton and who sees in the media’s incredulity at Donald Trump something of the same hostility that you face every day simply for daring to believe that immigration should be legal and controlled.

Now: if you were this person – and there are millions of them, in every state of the Union – why the hell would you NOT vote for Donald Trump this November?

And wouldn’t all of those people in the political and media class clutching their pearls in horror at the thought of a Donald Trump presidency bear a significant share of the responsibility for pushing you toward that decision?

 

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Is Hillary Clinton Suffering From Something More Than Pneumonia? Her Campaign’s Evasiveness Makes It Impossible To Discount

Samuel Hooper7 Comments

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Even if Hillary Clinton’s collapse at the New York 9/11 memorial event was a one-off consequence of reported pneumonia, everything that the Clinton campaign has done and said in the aftermath invites scepticism and disbelief that this is the extent of the issue, raising more questions than answers

For the first time, I am nervous that Donald J Trump might just do it – that he, rather than Hillary Clinton, might be the one taking the oath of office on January 20 next year. Not because Donald Trump has in any way become more palatable or presidential – far from it – but because of the growing, gnawing feeling in the pit of the stomach that the Clinton campaign is perched atop a huge unexploded bomb of negative health revelations.

Until yesterday, such discussions about Hillary Clinton’s health were largely confined to the sensationalist or alt-right press, with online journalists such as Mike Cernovich and Paul Joseph Watson collating video “evidence” of what they claimed to be some underlying neurological condition. While Clinton’s behaviour in some of these videos certainly appears strange, none of them met a convincing standard of proof that something is definitely awry.

But then yesterday came shocking footage of Clinton swaying alarmingly as she waited for her motorcade to appear and whisk her to safety after she “overheated” at the 9/11 memorial ceremony in New York City, before her legs finally buckled and she appeared to faint and topple forward into the vehicle, being dragged the remainder of the way into the van by aides and Secret Service personnel.

Nothing that the Clinton campaign has done since the emergence of that video has assuaged the entirely reasonable concerns of journalists and American voters. Among the litany of questionable actions:

  1. Clinton’s handlers left her press pool stranded at the 9/11 memorial event, leaving without them and giving them no knowledge of what had transpired
  2. Rather than taking Hillary Clinton to a tier-1 trauma centre hospital for evaluation, which is apparently correct Secret Service procedure in the event of a protectee falling ill and potentially losing consciousness, Clinton was instead driven to her daughter Chelsea’s Manhattan apartment to recuperate
  3. Approximately 9o minutes later, Clinton emerged from the apartment building all smiles, remarking upon what a beautiful day it was in New York before getting into her waiting vehicle unaided
  4. The Clinton campaign’s story kept changing throughout the day – first she had simply decided to leave the event due to “overheating” (on a rather mild day), then it was reported that she was dehydrated, and only once she had returned to her home in Chappaqua, New York was it revealed that she was suffering from pneumonia
  5. The diagnosis of pneumonia was apparently made on Friday 9 September after weeks of speculation about Clinton’s persistent and severe cough (previously attribute to allergies), and yet the campaign never made this public and it would presumably remain a secret even now had Clinton not been filmed collapsing on Sunday
  6. No further details as to the type of pneumonia suffered by Clinton have yet emerged, even now. If it is the bacterial type Clinton may well be contagious and yet participated in numerous fundraising events, as well as hugging a young child who ran up to greet her in the street
  7. In a failed attempt at damage control, Bill Clinton told the media that Hillary has suffered from this type of dizziness on several occasions in the past, though the campaign’s official story is that the collapse was pneumonia-related
  8. In a failed attempt at damage control to the damage control, Hillary Clinton called into the Anderson Cooper AC360 show on CNN, and upon questioning was unable to recall the number of times that she has had these spells in the past five years

This is not good. The millions of Americans who saw one of their two main presidential candidates collapse between the kerb and the open door of her waiting SUV and have to be dragged inside, feet trailing behind and losing a shoe in the process, might reasonably wonder why her entourage and the Secret Service thought it fit and proper to drive her to Chelsea Clinton’s apartment rather than a properly equipped medical facility.

They might also reasonably wonder why that same candidate then breezed out of the apartment building with a beaming smile and seemingly not a care in the world a mere 90 minutes later, exclaiming that she was “fine” and making absolutely no reference to the troubling scene we had witnessed earlier, leaving it to her campaign to make the pneumonia revelation only once she was safely ensconced in her home.

Many more Americans might wonder why so much of the mainstream media, from CNN and MSNBC to more predictable web-based outlets like The Guardian, Slate and the Huffington post, are determined to run interference in defence of Clinton, downplaying the incident as a mere “stumble”, angrily exclaiming that climate change “denialism” is worse than misleading voters about one’s state of health or that past dishonesty by presidential candidates like Franklin Delano Roosevelt and John F Kennedy effectively excuses any similar dishonesty in 2016.

Worse still from Clinton’s perspective, speculation about her health is now rife within the respectable conservative media – no longer something to be hinted at or linked to on Twitter late at night, but occupying the minds of American conservative thought leaders.

Here’s Rod Dreher, no Clinton or Trump supporter and not normally given to hyperbole or conspiracy theorising, admitting:

Until this weekend, I thought Clinton health rumors were just right-wing conspiracy mongering. That confidence collapsed when Mrs. Clinton did, on the streets of New York. The story now has two narrative lines: 1) How sick is Hillary, really?, and 2) Why did she lie about it?

The Clintons lie to protect their power. Clinton partisans will tell themselves, and the rest of America, that whatever happened on Sunday, and whatever series of tales the Clinton campaign has been telling to manage the story, we have to push it all aside to keep Donald Trump from winning. Feminists did the same thing back in the 1990s with Bill Clinton’s abusive, exploitive relationships with women. But not everybody who dislikes Trump hates him so much that they are willing to overlook Clinton’s lies, especially if they are not about things that happened in the past, as with her husband’s lies in the 1990s, but about things that weigh on her ability to perform as president.

Plus, Bill Clinton had a lot of charisma with which he shielded himself. Hillary has none. People may admire her, but they do not love her. That matters.

Hillary’s lies about her health and her “deplorables” remarks do not make Trump a better person, or a better candidate. But they do make him a slightly more plausible one with some voters than he was going into the weekend. When an election is as close as this one, that kind of thing matters.

And the National Review’s David French:

Taken together, these facts say nothing good about Hillary, her campaign, or the prospects for transparency in a potential Hillary Clinton White House. One of the oldest Americans ever to run for president has had repeated, significant health events, has concealed the true extent of her health problems from the American people, and continues to engage in a pattern of deception to this day. Does anyone really believe that Hillary would have admitted either to a significant health episode or a pneumonia diagnosis had cameras not caught her appearing to pass out on a perfectly temperate September day in New York?

Compounding the problem, not only will she conceal the true extent of any health problem until the facts emerge on their own, she’ll empower her allies to mock those who raise health concerns, to cast them as nothing more than crazed conspiracy theorists.

Anyone can, of course, find crazy things on the Internet easily enough. But the notion that a 68-year-old woman with a history of blood clots, a recent serious concussion, and obvious public discomfort (including apparently passing out at a public event) might not be fit enough to withstand the rigors of the presidency is hardly a fringe thought. Age and health weren’t fringe worries when Bob Dole or John McCain ran for president. When Ronald Reagan was campaigning for reelection in 1984 (especially after he performed poorly in his first debate), age and health dominated the public conversation.

To be clear, this is a preview of how Hillary would conduct herself in office. You can be sure that if she lies and minimizes her health challenges as a candidate, she’ll do so as president. (If past practice is any guide, she’ll lie about anything that makes her look bad.) If she falls ill, the American people risk experiencing the same thing Soviet citizens experienced — being fed the official line that their leaders simply had “colds” (or, in Hillary’s case, “allergies”) until the truth could no longer be concealed.

If it were some other candidate, someone with a more open relationship with the press and minus the history of lawyerly evasiveness, one might accept the belated pneumonia explanation at face value and chalk the confused messages emanating from the Clinton campaign as understandable confusion within the team. But we are not dealing with 2000-era John McCain. Hillary Clinton’s life is not an open book – it is a lengthy tome where several sections are torn out while others are heavily redacted, the censor’s black ink sometimes still wet as one turns the page. And those asking to be made leader of the world’s most powerful and consequential country don’t get the benefit of the doubt.

It brings me no joy to write any of this. While this blog is on the record as being unimpressed bordering on despairing of both candidates, when it comes to choosing between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump there is simply no contest – Clinton represents four more years of dreary continuity with a background hum of ethics concerns whereas Trump, hardly the picture of honesty himself, threatens a truly authoritarian dystopian future with a new crisis every week. Given the binary choice, this blog would choose Hillary Clinton without apology.

But there appears now to be every possibility that the Clinton campaign is perched atop a powder keg of dynamite, and that every public appearance for the next two months will be a heart-in-mouth ordeal of wondering whether she will make it through to the end or else cause what would surely be terminal damage to her campaign by tripping, choking or passing out again on live television.

There are questions which appear to be legitimate and not from the lunatic fringe, asking whether there is something much more significant wrong with Hillary Clinton’s health. And yet the Clinton campaign continues to stonewall and use Trump’s refusal to release full medical records as cover for being equally secretive. Making campaign decisions (like not allowing a full protective press pool) simply because Donald Trump has done the same is unbecoming of a candidate like Hillary Clinton, who should aspire to a standard of transparency significantly higher than that set by the reality TV star.

This is no time for further evasions. If there is a more serious, as-yet undisclosed health issue affecting Hillary Clinton, it needs to be made public. Now. And if public reaction is particularly negative then an urgent discussion needs to take place about replacing Hillary Clinton at the top of the ticket while their is still time for the replacement Democratic Party nominee to have a fighting chance against Trump.

Pneumonia can happen to anyone. But this palace intrigue and the swirling conspiracy theories surrounding Hillary’s state of health are entirely self-inflicted, a product of the Clinton campaign’s pathological evasiveness and secrecy not only relating to health matters but other issues too. And it simply can not be allowed to continue.

Hillary Clinton is one more “medical episode” away from effectively gifting the presidency to Donald J Trump. Her campaign needs to decide whether they are happy to have that on their collective conscience.

 

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The Clinton Foundation – Noble Charity Or Grubby Political Pay-To-Play Scheme?

Samuel Hooper2 Comments

Hillary Clinton - Bill Clinton - Clinton Foundation - CGI

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Hillary and Bill Clinton continue to insist that there is nothing untoward in the way that their Clinton Foundation sought donations or interacted with the State Department when Hillary was Secretary of State. But how much smoke can there possibly be without fire?

It has been three days now since the Associated Press’s big investigative story detailing potentially concerning links between the charitable Clinton Foundation and individuals who managed to secure private meetings with Hillary Clinton during her tenure as Secretary of State.

A flavour of the story:

More than half the people outside the government who met with Hillary Clinton while she was secretary of state gave money — either personally or through companies or groups — to the Clinton Foundation. It’s an extraordinary proportion indicating her possible ethics challenges if elected president.

At least 85 of 154 people from private interests who met or had phone conversations scheduled with Clinton while she led the State Department donated to her family charity or pledged commitments to its international programs, according to a review of State Department calendars released so far to The Associated Press. Combined, the 85 donors contributed as much as $156 million. At least 40 donated more than $100,000 each, and 20 gave more than $1 million.

Donors who were granted time with Clinton included an internationally known economist who asked for her help as the Bangladesh government pressured him to resign from a nonprofit bank he ran; a Wall Street executive who sought Clinton’s help with a visa problem; and Estee Lauder executives who were listed as meeting with Clinton while her department worked with the firm’s corporate charity to counter gender-based violence in South Africa.

The meetings between the Democratic presidential nominee and foundation donors do not appear to violate legal agreements Clinton and former president Bill Clinton signed before she joined the State Department in 2009. But the frequency of the overlaps shows the intermingling of access and donations, and fuels perceptions that giving the foundation money was a price of admission for face time with Clinton.

Obviously, the Clinton campaign sees it slightly differently.

From the Washington Post:

She dismissed as “ridiculous” Trump’s accusation at a rally in Tampa on Wednesday that Clinton had run the State Department like a “Third World country,” doling out favors and access in exchange for donations to the Clinton Foundation.

“My work as secretary of state was not influenced by any outside forces. I made policy decisions based on what I thought was right,” Clinton said. “I know there’s a lot of smoke and there’s no fire.”

Last week, the Clinton Foundation announced that it would no longer accept foreign donations or donations from corporations if Clinton is elected president in November.

So something which would be unacceptable if Hillary Clinton were president (taking money from foreign donors and entities) was perfectly fine when she was “only” the nation’s top diplomat?

Lots of smoke and yet no fire, the candidate’s own (rather smug) words.

There’s nothing to see here, we are continually told. Move along. Sleep easy in your beds. Everything about the Clinton Foundation is pure, noble and virtuous. There have never been dubious financial dealings, and nothing which might even fall into a morally grey area. Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign isn’t resting on top of a powder keg of suspicion and scandal which could see Donald Trump snatch the election, or at least weaken Clinton to the extent that she effectively becomes an instant lame duck. No, nothing like that. Honest.

The American Conservative’s Patrick Buchanan – perhaps unsurprisingly – disagrees:

The stench is familiar, and all too Clintonian in character.

Recall. On his last day in office, January 20, 2001, Bill Clinton issued a presidential pardon to financier-crook and fugitive from justice Marc Rich, whose wife, Denise, had contributed $450,000 to the Clinton Library.

The Clintons appear belatedly to have recognized their political peril.

Bill has promised that, if Hillary is elected, he will end his big-dog days at the foundation and stop taking checks from foreign regimes and entities, and corporate donors. Cash contributions from wealthy Americans will still be gratefully accepted.

One wonders: will Bill be writing thank-you notes for the millions that will roll in to the family foundation—on White House stationery?

By his actions, Bill is all but conceding that there is a serious conflict of interest between his foundation raking in millions that enhance the family’s prestige and sustain its travel and lifestyle, and providing its big donors with privileged access to the secretary of state.

Yet if Hillary Clinton becomes president, the scheme is unsustainable. Even the Obama-Clinton media might not be able to stomach this.

In one sense, Hillary Clinton is right. At present there is lots of smoke – huge, billowing clouds of the stuff – but not one visible lick of flame. It may well remain like that. It may be that the remaining emails still to be released (and think on that: the world’s superpower having its democracy influenced by shadowy outside actors based on the poor decision-making of one of its presidential candidates) point to more potential tawdry sleaze, but with no smoking gun.

And let’s face it: both Hillary Clinton and her husband are highly accomplished lawyers and politicians – if they did engage in corruption, are they really likely to have left a smoking gun or to have dealt with people who could not be trusted to keep silent? Hardly.

So rather than any concrete ethical scandal which may or may not emerge, I think it again comes down to a question about bad decision-making by Hillary Clinton. The decision to go rogue and conduct State Department business from a bootleg private email server was appalling. Even if the State Department did not have clear protocols in place for how departmental emails should be managed, simply going off on one’s own and setting up a home server is an appalling idea. Under the American system of course there was nobody to stand up to Clinton when she made the decision. In countries like Britain, with a permanent civil service running the show in the background, Clinton’s homebrew server plan would have been slapped down within minutes of it being suggested.

And then there’s the Foundation. I get it: it must be difficult transitioning back to normal life after being president of the United States. One can hardly go back into business working at an ambulance-chasing law firm or a lobbying firm or corporate America. Neither is there an established tradition of ex-presidents seeing out their days as a small town mayor or state governor, charming as the thought may be. After the Oval Office, lesser offices of state understandably seem less appealing.

So what is one to do? Well, George W. Bush provides a very helpful template for us, though sadly too late for Bill Clinton to have followed. After George W. Bush left office with an abysmal 22% job approval rating, he retired to Texas and resolved to see out his days painting unconvincing watercolour pictures of dogs (and some of his less fortunate counterparts and colleagues). Sure he’ll pop up to give a speech every once in awhile, but generally George W. Bush has maintained a dignified and most welcome silence.

Or one can go the other way, and do as Jimmy Carter did, enthusiastically throwing himself into real charitable work – not the running of giant foundations with all the perks that doing so entails (first class or private jet air travel, five star hotels, swanky fundraisers with billionaires, nurturing relationships with the politically active and an occasional conscience-easing cash disbursement to a worthy cause) but rather doing God’s honest work for Habitat for Humanity.

Actually physically building homes for disadvantaged or struggling people – that’s real charitable work. The Clinton Foundation in many respects is quite praiseworthy as some 88% of funding goes on charitable mission, but on $2bn revenue up to 2016 that is still $120 million on “overhead”, which in a family foundation has potential to conceal a whole world of ethical grey areas or outright abuses.

The point, I suppose, is that a family charitable foundation is a perfectly legitimate option for an ex-president and his family who intend to quit the political game after leaving office. But when this is not the case – when Hillary was pursuing senatorial ambitions and later becoming Secretary of State – conflicts of interest are inevitably going to occur.

When one is as rich and well-connected as the Clintons, acquiring more money becomes of limited interest. Instead, the reason for getting up in the morning after having left the White House often becomes the building of power, influence and legacy – and, of course, keeping the family in the style of living to which they have become accustomed (i.e. minimal contact with ordinary people). A family foundation accomplishes all of these objectives wonderfully. But when one or more members of the family are still politically active it is highly questionable.

It would have been far better, when there are still active political careers in play, for the Clintons to have put ego aside and thrown their support behind an alternative, existing foundation – much like Warren Buffett is giving away much of his wealth to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, recognising that it makes little sense to build up his own philanthropic expertise from scratch and create all the overheads which come from a second foundation when a perfectly good one already exists.

Why did the Clintons not take the Warren Buffett approach? Three reasons – ego, power and prestige. It is great that the Clintons are philanthropically active. But nearly all of their philanthropic work is done through the Clinton Foundation ($1 million to the foundation in 2015 and just $42,000 to another charity), meaning they want to do charity on their terms. It is a few distinct shades further away from pure altruism, and more to do with continuing to exercise power after the White House.

When Bill Clinton’s presidency ended in 2001, like a shark he had to keep swimming or surely die. Sitting at home in front of the television was never an option. But neither was Bill Clinton about to show up to work for Bill and Melinda Gates, or Habitat for Humanity. He wanted the benefits of his charitable work to accrue to him and his family, not to the Gates family or anyone else. And so the Clinton Foundation was born.

And since the Clintons choose to conduct philanthropic activities on their own terms and through their own foundation, in a way which aggrandises the Clinton family name and brings them power and influence, it is perfectly reasonable to ask questions about any other “fringe benefits” which Hillary Clinton pursued while holding the immeasurably valuable bargaining chip of being a senior part of the Obama administration. And when there is smoke, it is not churlish or unreasonable for journalists to have lots of questions about these activities.

And yet…

None of this is yet sufficient grounds to choose Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton. Indeed, it is difficult to say just how large an ethical scandal would have to befall Clinton to make her less preferable as president than Donald Trump, a lying, authoritarian would-be strongman who delights in his own ignorance and capitalises on the ignorance of others.

But while the Clinton Foundation smoke machine is no reason to elect Donald Trump, it does paint an even more worrying picture about the quality of decision making and the ethical firewalls which may or may not exist in a second Clinton White House. And it makes one marvel that the Democrats could not follow Barack Obama with a presidential nominee capable of remaining scandal-free at least until Inauguration Day. Nearly every other heavyweight Democrat was intimidated away from the field because 2016 is, we were constantly told, “Her Turn”.

I can’t help but wonder if the Democrats will yet come to regret granting that extraordinary privilege so carelessly and cheaply.

 

Hillary Clinton

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Top Image: The Atlantic, Lucas Jackson/Reuters

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The American Right’s Guilty Conscience

Samuel Hooper2 Comments

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The more self-aware parts of the American conservative movement are coming to realise their part in creating the monster that is Donald Trump. Good. But with Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party complete, the genie cannot be put back in the bottle.

Slowly but surely, realisation is dawning among parts of the American Right that they might, just might, be partly responsible for feeding the national anger and distrust of elites which has given us Donald Trump, Presidential Nominee Edition.

Politico Magazine has a great extended feature on well-known Wisconsin conservative talk radio host Charlie Sykes, in which the respected political figure essentially admits that Donald Trump’s takeover of the GOP was only possible thanks to the work of the relentless Republican Party media outrage generation machine.

From the article:

Charlie Sykes’ conscience is nagging him.

Since last year, the most influential political talk show host in Wisconsin has found out just how hard it is to be a #NeverTrump conservative on right-wing radio. Ever since Sykes began denouncing Donald Trump on the air—which he does just about every time he talks about the presidential election—he’s strained his relationships with the listeners of his daily radio show.

Sykes’ many arguments with listeners over Donald Trump’s serial outrages have exposed in much of his audience a vein of thinking—racist, anti-constitutional, maybe even fascistic—that has shaken Sykes. It has left him questioning whether he and his colleagues in the conservative media played a role in paving the way for Trump’s surprising and unprecedented rise.

Hats off to Sykes for actually challenging his listeners and exhorting them not to swallow uncritically any morsel of Clinton-related scandal from the fringe web while rejecting any attempt at objectivity or fact-checking. Many a lesser talk radio host or other media personality (cough, Sean Hannity) have seen which way the Donald Trump hurricane is blowing and meekly fallen in line with his campaign, never subjecting Trump to criticism even when it is richly deserved.

The feature continues, describing a caller to Sykes’ radio show who wanted to deport Muslim American citizens, in flagrant violation of the Constitution which conservatives claim to hold so dear:

“Were these people that we actually thought were our allies?” he asks.

Sykes remains confident that Trump will lose badly in November, and he is equally fearful that Trump will drag longtime Republicans, like Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, down with him. This has Sykes thinking about the long-term future of the party and what might have precipitated its looming collapse. He wonders: Did “the faux outrage machine” of Breitbart.com and other right-wing outlets foment the noxious opinions that Trump has stoked so effectively on the trail?

“When I would deny that there was a significant racist component in some of the politics on our side, it was because the people I hung out with were certainly not,” Sykes says. “When suddenly, this rock is turned over, there is this—‘Oh shit, did I not see that?’

And then:

He wants to figure out why, in his opinion, things went so wrong for the conservative movement. One problem, he thinks, is his fellow talk-radio hosts.

“Talk radio made itself relevant by beating up on other Republicans, vilifying other Republicans,” he says. “It fed this faux outrage machine that raised expectations unrealistically”—for instance, asking why Congress didn’t repeal Obamacare, though Obama’s veto pen made it mathematically impossible. Later, he would tell Business Insider’s Oliver Darcy that talk radio’s attack on mainstream-media bias has backfired, because its listeners now dismiss legitimate media fact-checking as untrustworthy.

Sykes warns his listeners to step outside the “alternative reality bubble” of Breitbart.com and other right-wing websites. Part of his audience thinks he’s sold out, he complains, because he won’t parrot dubious claims they’ve read on such sites. “A lot of the conservative talk shows around the country embrace almost whatever comes over the transom,” he says.

Slow hand clap.

This blog has been waiting for some time now for the penny to drop, for thinking American conservatives to realise that the hysterical and unseemly way in which the Republican Party carried out its opposition to the Obama agenda might possibly have some unintended negative consequences.

Because it turns out that treating every single centre-leftish or centrist policy to emanate from the Obama White House as though it were an existential threat to the republic and relentlessly exploiting wedge social issues and persisting with the same failed policies which deliver great benefits to the wealthy, educated elites while leaving the struggling middle class high and dry works really well, right up until the moment where it suddenly stops working at all.

Here’s what that approach actually is good for:

  1. Making ordinary decent citizens with limited political engagement very afraid, often unnecessarily, and
  2. Getting them to donate vast amounts of money to assorted conservative / Tea Party political organisations which exist primarily to enrich those who are part of the Ponzi scheme, with very little of the money actually going on to reach conservative candidates or campaigns

The American right-wing outrage machine has been absolutely magnificent at making people angry and then monetising the hell out of that anger. But it has been lousy at speaking to the issues and problems which weigh on the minds of America’s squeezed middle.

Too often, conservative leaders have been happy to nod along while right wing noisemakers prophesied the abolition of the Second Amendment or the sudden imposition of “socialism”, because it worked. Because it reliably delivered scores of votes to Republican candidates on election day. Right up until the moment it stopped working because a new populist candidate emerged who promised action, not just talk, to defeat these inflated or imagined threats.

Donald Trump isn’t some bizarre and unprecedented phenomenon to afflict the Republican Party. These are the people who earnestly and with a straight face asked Americans to make Sarah Palin the Vice President back in 2008. Their flirtation with ignorance and craziness has a long and dismal history, and only now is bearing full fruit in the form of Trump.

It’s great that some of the more self-aware leaders of the American conservative movement are now quietly realising, with shame, the part which they either intentionally or unwittingly played in unleashing Donald Trump on America. For while Trump’s supporters certainly include more than their fair share of racists, xenophobes and other assorted imbeciles, the vast majority are good and decent people – primarily conservatives who have been consistently let down by a Republican Party which pretended to talk their language but which never governed in their interests.

Unfortunately Trumpism cannot be easily put back in the bottle now it has been released. First, it must be defeated in November, however unappealing the thought of giving the Washington establishment four more years in charge may be. And then the rebuilding of American conservatism must start – a difficult feat since so many of its most intelligent and respected figures have sullied themselves by bending the knee to Donald Trump (a fact which the Politico article discusses at length).

Great electoral rewards await the first party to grapple with the core question of how to reconcile the imperatives of globalisation with the need to equip citizens with the skills and services needed to prosper in a modern economy which can no longer promise a high standard of living for mass unskilled labour. Republicans have the harder job here – the conservative emphasis on self-sufficiency and a small state requires inventive solutions, whereas the Democrats can wave their hands and simply promise a new government program. It’s a difficult issue for conservatives, one which this blog is still struggling to work through.

This is the challenge now facing American conservatives. The culture wars are not insignificant, and there are battles to be fought – some of which this blog sympathises with (political correctness, free speech, religious freedom) and others less so. But no longer will it be enough for Republican politicians to stoke anger about these issues while failing to meaningfully tackle them, or to ignore the economic interests of the American working and lower middle class – doing so will only open the door to another Trump-style populist insurgency.

From this Politico Magazine article, it seems as though at least one prominent conservative talk radio host is starting to get it. Hopefully others will follow.

But the renewal of American conservatism cannot begin yet – first we must hit rock bottom.

 

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