John Podhoretz on the anti-establishment New Hampshire presidential primary election:
A socialist who only became a member of the Democratic Party a year ago just slaughtered the party’s queen-in-waiting. A reality-show billionaire who has never before run for office just humbled two senators and three former and present governors in a runaway Republican victory.
The New Hampshire presidential primary has launched America into uncharted political territory. We’re flying blind here, people. Trust no analysis. Believe no prognosticator. Nobody knows anything.
Well, we know a few things.
First — assuming that Hillary Clinton survives this humiliation and becomes her party’s nominee nonetheless — we know Democrats have a huge electability problem on their hands.
This was revealed by a piece of information from Tuesday night’s exit poll. It said that for 32 percent of Democrats, honesty was a key issue. They went for Bernie Sanders — get this — 93 percent to 5. It turns out Sanders was right not to hit Hillary on her email scandal and the behavior of the Clinton Foundation, because he didn’t have to. Democrats know about it and are discomfited by it.
Project this out to November. Say 8 percent of the electorate has honesty and integrity as its main issue. That’s 12 million voters. Barack Obama won the 2012 election by 4 million votes. Now, maybe Hillary can successfully run down her Republican rival’s reputation for honesty and thereby mitigate some of that damage, but there’s almost nothing she can do to cleanse herself of this stain.
Second, it appears that Marco Rubio injured himself terribly with his debate performance on Saturday night. All reports are that he was rising into the 20s in internal tracking polls on Friday and Saturday — and after he looped his words three times, he cratered on Sunday and Monday. This is one of the worst self-inflicted political wounds in living memory.
The most important takeaway, though, is this: The politics of resentment won Tuesday night. It hasn’t had a showing like this in the United States maybe since the 1890s.
Donald Trump and Sanders have a remarkably similar and remarkably simple message, and it’s this: You’re being screwed. They agree that international trade is screwing you, that health care companies are screwing you and that Wall Street is screwing you.
Sanders says he’s going to throw bankers in jail, raise everybody’s taxes — and provide universal health care.
Trump says he’ll deport every illegal immigrant, keep Muslims out of the country until “we can find out what the hell is going on,” force Mexico to build a wall, levy a 45 percent tariff on China — and provide universal health care.
Simple, straightforward and catchy — that’s the key. And none of it is your fault. Everything bad that’s happening, everything that makes you nervous and worried and uncertain about the future, is the result of a great wrong that is being done to you.
Sanders says it’s being done by malefactors of great wealth. Trump says it’s being done by morons and idiots who run Washington and are getting their hats handed to them by canny malefactors in Beijing and Mexico City.
Will this message carry beyond New Hampshire? Of course it will, whatever happens to the candidacies of these two men.
On the Republican side, Ted Cruz has been trying to figure out a way to layer Trumpism on his own anti-establishment conservatism — and he may be Trump’s only viable rival after Tuesday night.
Last week in a debate, Hillary Clinton claimed Wall Street is simply terrified of her because she’s been so mean to it, which is hilarious nonsense, but whatever.
Don’t look for uplift. Don’t seek vision. This is probably going to be the payback election — America at its worst.
John Yoo thinks the Founding Fathers wouldn’t be happy:
Our Framers would despair about the winners of the nation’s first presidential primaries in New Hampshire. Though polar opposites with very different ideological starting points, both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders would have set the Framers’ hair – or wigs – on fire. They designed the Constitution to moderate the people at home while preparing a president to act quickly to counter emergencies, crises, and war abroad. Instead, the Republicans have a demagogue and the Democrats have an economic radical who promise swift, extreme change.
The men who met in Philadelphia in 1787 to write a new constitution designed it to prevent someone like Donald Trump from ever becoming president. One of their great fears was of a populist demagogue who would promise the people everything and respect nothing. As Alexander Hamilton, the key theorist of executive power during the Founding, warned in Federalist 67: “Talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity, may alone suffice to elevate a man to the first honours of a single state.”
Talents for low intrigue. Little arts of popularity. The founder of this newspaper may not have known Trump, but he clearly knew men like him. Insulting braggadocio and self-aggrandizement are not the 21st Century exclusives of reality show hosts and cable news guests.
To prevent mindless populism from seizing the White House, the Founders rejected nationwide election of the president. Instead, they created the Electoral College. States choose electors (equal to the number of their members of the House and Senate), who meet and send their votes to Congress. If there is no majority, then the House votes by state delegation to choose the chief executive.
While the Electoral College today seems Rube Goldberg-esque, it served the important purpose of weeding out emotional passions and popular, but poor, candidates. “The choice of several, to form an intermediate body of electors, will be much less apt to convulse the community, with any extraordinary or violent movements,” Hamilton wrote, “than the choice of one, who was himself to be the final object of the public wishes.” He also praised the separate meeting of electors and the Congress as another brake on rash populism. “This detached and divided situation will expose [electors] much less to heats and ferments, that might be communicated from them to the people,” he observed.
The Framers would also be aghast at Bernie Sanders. His calls for a political revolution, fomenting of class hatreds, and desires for a socialist economy also run directly contrary to the Framers design. The Framers believed our Constitution and our government should not view or think of people as economic classes or special interests. They were not naïve – they knew that what they called “factions” were an inevitable product of democracy. “Liberty is to faction what what air is to fire, an ailment, without which it instantly expires,” James Madison wrote in Federalist 10. “But it could not be a less folly to abolish liberty, which is essential to political life, because it nourishes faction, than it would be to wish the annihilation of air.”
Our Constitution did not address the specter of factions by creating a government so strong that, in the hands of a crusading populist, it could crush special interests. Instead, it creates a decentralized government too difficult for one party to take over. It divides the national government between president, Congress, and the Judiciary. It further keeps federal power narrow and reserves authority over most of daily life to the 50 states. America would never suffer Sanders’ political revolution or his wish to transfer the “means of production” (for those who have forgotten their Karl Marx since the fall of the Soviet Union, he is referring to private property and financial and intellectual capital) from private hands to the public. Ask the communist nations of Europe and Asia, with millions of lives lost and millions more oppressed from the 1930s-1980s, how that experiment turned out.
As many European and American intellectuals have lamented, no serious socialist or communist party has ever succeeded in the United States. There is a reason why Bernie Sanders comes from a tiny state and represents a caucus of one. Our Constitution’s separation of powers and federalism raises too many barriers for any movement to take over all of the levers of government and impose an ideology on the United States. Even if they get too carried away by the latest intellectual fad or passionate anger, the American people have the handbrake of the Constitution to stop them from making a catastrophic mistake. It is time for them to pull it on Trump and Sanders.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 
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