Civility Politics

Let us now praise the ever-hopeful and idealistic Michelle Obama.

While campaigning for a Virginia state House candidate, former Attorney General Eric Holder said

They have used the power that they have gotten for all the wrong things. They want to keep themselves in power. They want to cater to the special interests. It is time for us as Democrats to be as tough as they are, to be as dedicated as they are, to be as committed as they are.

Michelle always says- Michelle Obama, I love her, you know she and my wife, like really tight, which really scares me and Barack but Michelle says "when they go low, we go high." No, no.

When they go low, we kick them. That's what, that's what this new Democratic Party is about. We're proud of hell to be Democrats. We're willing to fight for the ideals of the Democratic Party. We;re proud our our history, we're proud of our present and we're proud of the future that we can create for this country and we're not in this just to make a statement. We're in this to win, alright?

To her credit, Michelle Obama responded. To her discredit, she was wrong when she stated

Fear is not — it's not a proper motivator. Hope wins out. And if you think about how you want your kids to be raised, how you want them to think about life & their opportunities, do you want them afraid of their neighbors?”

Hope worked for Senator Obama in the fall of 2008. By the fall of 2012, the bloom was off the rose, Obama's margin over the GOP opponent declined, and only Chief Justice John Roberts' vote to uphold the the President's Affordable Care Act saved the nation from Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan. In July of 2016, 62%-70% of Americans were "dissatisfied with the way things are going in the United States at this time."

Still, President Obama- as is his style- went high and, running for a third Obama term, Hillary Clinton did, also, Unfortunately, her (ultimately winning) opponent did not:

“One of the candidates, as you recall, was predicting that the election was going to be ‘rigged’ in some way,” said Jeh Johnson, the former secretary, referring to President Trump’s unsubstantiated accusation before Election Day. “We were concerned that by making the statement we might, in and of itself, be challenging the integrity of the election process itself.”

Mr. Johnson’s testimony, before the House Intelligence Committee, provided a fresh insight into how the Obama administration tried to balance politically explosive information with the public’s need to know.

Ian Bremmer recalls

The U.S. government under Obama knew what the Russians were doing. Obama was warned repeatedly by Eastern European governments that Russia was meddling in their own elections. And while Latvian elections don’t exactly rank high on the list of an American president’s priorities, the White House could have guessed what the Russians were gearing up to do — and should have sent them a forceful message to knock it off. Obama apparently issued a direct warning to Russian President Vladimir Putin when they met in person in September 2016, but it came too late and had little effect.

So give Michelle Obama some credit. It's not all of us who can convince themselves that the tooth fairy, Santa Claus, and the Easter bunny exist, and that the American people are yearning for happy talk from politicians.  With any luck, however, she will convince few other Democrats and Eric Holder's clear notion of reality will prevail.

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No Way To Run A Government

Mitt Romney was right.

This isn't about Russia, which during the 2012 presidential campaign he maintained "is without question our number one geopolitical foe,they fight for every cause for the world's worst actors."

Romney was right in, and only in, spirit. As President Obama recognized at the time (and is still the case) the nation's number one geopolitical foe is terrorism. However, Russia may be our number one foe among state actors, and the former governor's emphasis upon the evil of the Kremlin was needed in a country still giddy over the end of the Cold War.

President Obama might (and certainly should) want to forget that he rebuked Romney with "And, the 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back, because, the Cold War's been over for 20 years."

Romney was right about one other matter on which he differed from Obama.  Though with few details, fifty-nine (59) months ago

Mitt Romney would not continue the new program that grants work permits and suspends deportation for two years for undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as minors, his campaign says, according to the Boston Globe.

Romney would not revoke work permits for people who obtain them by the time he would take office, on Jan. 20, but he would not grant any after that, the campaign says, according to the Boston Globe report.

President Todd Schulte of FWD.us, a liberal/progressive immigration reform organization, notes "the federal government has the cellphone and home address of every DACA recipient."

That's valuable information in the hands of one Donald J.Trump and Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III.  By contrast, if Mitt Romney had been elected and ended the program, the information would be in the hands of a President Romney and whatever Attorney General he would have nominated. At the time of the GOP candidate's remark in October, 2012, 29 individuals would have been affected; now, close to 790,000.

(Nevertheless, if Romney-Ryan had won, the prayers of every disadvantaged person and most of the middle class would have had to be said every night for the continued health of the President.)

Nonetheless, Schulte accurately notes of the "Dreamers"

They grew up here, they work at nearly every major company in America, serve in the military and many are working on recovery efforts in TexasIf DACA is repealed and no permanent legislation passed, they will all be fired and our government will begin the large-scale deportation of people raised in the United States, using information they volunteered to the government with the promise it would never be used against them or their families.

The President has put off a final decision for six months, during which time he hopes congressional Republicans will con Democrats into a deal in which the "Dreamers" are allowed to stay while Trump gets funding for a wall.

Assuming the dreamer at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue does not get his wish, Barack Obama may have won his bet, that whomever becomes #45 wouldn't revoke the Dreamers' privilege of remaining in this country.  In that case, the President of the United States, enacted on an anti-immigration platform, will have reneged on a major campaign promise.

That would be the right way to go because, as Mitt Romney understood in 2012, sometimes principle has to go out the window and you just have to leave well enough alone.  However, if President Trump decides otherwise, those cellphone numbers and home addresses, courtesy of President Barack Obama, will come in quite handy for Trump-Sessions.




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Republican Presidential Stakes

I wish I had found this a couple of weeks earlier instead of its final stages, but Ken Rudin, who writes the Political Junkie blog for NPR, set up an interesting scheme, based on the NCAA basketball playoffs, to allow readers to vote for the next Republican presidential nominee. Two (instead of four) brackets and thirty-two (instead of 64-65) entries were established with some realistic, and some not so realistic, GOP names. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be an indication whether Rudin wanted respondents to vote for the man or the woman they expect to win (as motivates most of the participants in the actual basketball pool) or the individual they hope will win (as, given human nature, is likely to dominate here and given the large number of votes for Ron Paul, probably did).

I find Rudin's picks more realistic than those of the readers, but I would not have gone for Ryan over Bush or Palin, nor for Paul over Barbour (or anyone) or Sanford over Thune. (I'll leave the Haley Barbour post for another time.) I assume (though we all know what "assume" makes out of you and me) that this fellow Rudin, being of sound mind, will predict Romney over Huckabee. Take what I predict from someone who thought the 2008 nominees would be Romney and Clinton or, as Glenn Beck would say, "if you take what I say as gospel, you're an idiot."