When you write a column, as did I two weeks ago, headlined “The worst agreement in U.S. diplomatic history,” you don’t expect to revisit the issue. We had hit bottom. Or so I thought. Then on Tuesday the final terms of theIranian nuclear deal were published. I was wrong.
Who would have imagined we would be giving up the conventional arms and ballistic missile embargoes on Iran? In nuclear negotiations?
Are conventional weapons not a separate issue? After all, conventional, by definition, means non-nuclear. Why are we giving up the embargoes?
Because Iran, joined by Russia — our “reset” partner — sprung the demand at the last minute, calculating that Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry were so desperate for a deal that they would cave. They did. And have convinced themselves that they scored a victory by delaying the lifting by five to eight years. (Ostensibly. The language is murky. The interval could be considerably shorter.)
Category: US politics
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No comments on The #headdesk of “deals”
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How do we know that the U.S. “deal” with Iran asking Iran to pretty please not develop nuclear weapons is a bad deal?
Let us count the ways, beginning with the Daily Signal:
Although the administration entered the negotiations pledging to cut off all pathways to a nuclear weapon, the agreement amounts to little more than a diplomatic speed bump that will delay, but not permanently halt, Iran’s drive for a nuclear weapons capability.
The agreement in effect legitimizes Iran as a nuclear threshold state.
Once key restrictions on uranium enrichment expire in 10 to 15 years, Iran will have the option to develop an industrial scale enrichment program that will make it easier for it to sprint cross that threshold.
Iran used red lines and deadlines to wear down the administration, which played a strong hand weakly.
The administration undermined its own bargaining position by making it clear that it wanted a nuclear agreement more than Tehran seems to have wanted one, despite the fact that Tehran needed an agreement more for economic reasons.
The administration’s downplaying of the military option and front-loading of sanctions relief early in the negotiations reduced Iranian incentives to make concessions.
This gave the Iranians bargaining leverage they have used shrewdly.
Iran dug in its heels on key red lines proclaimed by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, while the administration’s red lines gradually became blurred pink lines.
Iran’s nuclear infrastructure is left largely intact. Centrifuges will be mothballed but not dismantled.
Iran’s illicit nuclear facilities Natanz and Fordow, whose operations were supposed to be shut down under multiple U.N. Security Council resolutions, have now been legitimized, despite the fact that they were built covertly in violation of the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty.
Iran is essentially rewarded for cheating under the agreement.
It gained a better deal on uranium enrichment than Washington has offered to its own allies.
Taiwan, South Korea and the United Arab Emirates were denied enrichment arrangements that Iran now has pocketed.
Instead of dismantling Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, the agreement dismantles the sanctions that brought Tehran to the negotiating table in the first place.
This fact is not lost on our allies, friends and “frenemies” in the region.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who understandably sees Iran’s potential nuclear threat as an existential issue, denounced the deal as “a historic mistake.”
Sunni Arab states threatened by Iran are likely to hedge their bets and take out insurance by working to expand their own nuclear options.
Saudi Arabia already has let it be known that it will demand the same concessions on uranium enrichment that Iran received.
The Saudis have begun negotiations to buy French nuclear reactors and this civilian program could become the foundation for a weapons program down the line.
Other Arab states and Turkey are likely to tee up their own nuclear programs as a prudent counterweight to offset to Iran’s expanding nuclear potential, after some of the restrictions on its uranium enrichment program automatically sunset.
The end result could be accelerated nuclear proliferation and a possible nuclear arms race in the most volatile region in the world.
Another major problem is verification of Iranian compliance.
The administration’s initial insistence on “anytime/anywhere” inspections was downgraded to “sometimes/some places.”
Iran has up to 14 days to weigh the requests of International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors. If it decides to object, its objections would be relayed to an arbitration committee that would have 7 days to rule. If it rules against Iran, Tehran would have another 3 days to arrange an inspection.
This gives Iran up to 24 days to move, hide or destroy materials sought by inspectors. This is far from a foolproof system, particularly in light of Iran’s long history of cheating.
Sanctions relief is another potential headache. Tehran would benefit by the release of about $150 billion of its money frozen in overseas accounts.
Ultimately the Iranian economy would be boosted by tens of billions of dollars more through a surge of oil revenues as oil sanctions are lifted.
This could help Iran reshape the regional balance of power and establish hegemony over Iraq, Yemen, important oil resources and oil supply routes.
Much of this money will go to fund the Assad regime, Hezbollah, Yemeni Houthi rebels, Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and other terrorist groups funded by Iran.
This would rapidly lead to escalation of the wars, shadow wars and civil wars already taking place around the Middle East.
That part about Obama’s wanting a deal more than Iran is key. Recall SALT II, Jimmy Carter’s nuclear-arms surrender to the Soviet Union in the late 1970s? The only reason that didn’t take place is because even the Democrats who controlled the U.S. Senate saw it was a bad deal and rejected it. Ronald Reagan replaced Carter, tried to negotiate a nuclear arms reduction deal with the Soviets, and walked away from a bad deal. A few years later, the Soviet Union died.
David French points out what Iran is:
Yesterday, in the immediate aftermath of the Iran deal announcement, I posted a short comment noting that Iran is responsible for more than 1,000 American military deaths since 9/11. That’s just a number, but for many of us those numbers have names — the names of men we knew. I will never forget the horrible days in March and April 2008, when Iranian-made IEDs periodically closed even the main supply route into our small forward operating base. I’ll never forget the hero flights, standing at attention as brothers carried the still bodies of their fallen comrades to waiting Blackhawk helicopters. And I won’t forget about the people who are even now learning to walk, and eat, and live again — recovering from horrific wounds. Yesterday, I got an angry message from a friend from my Iraq deployment, a man whose vehicle was destroyed by an Iranian-made IED. Some of the blood on Iran’s hands is his own.
The American people need to clearly understand what their president has done. He’s granting billions of dollars in sanctions relief to a nation that put bounties on the heads of American soldiers. Iran isn’t ending its war against America. It’s still working — every day — to kill Americans, including the Americans Barack Obama leads as commander-in-chief of our armed forces. There is no honor in this agreement. Moreover, there is no honor in leaving innocent Americans behind — to rot in Iranian prisons — so that President Obama can declare peace in his time. Compared to rewarding killers and turning its back on innocent American prisoners, the Obama administration’s lies about the negotiations are a small thing indeed. After all, dishonorable people do dishonorable things.
Every member of Congress should be made to answer this question: Do you believe in rewarding regimes that place bounties on the heads of American soldiers? If so, then tell the American people. But don’t tell them that this agreement brings peace, because no reasonable definition of the term includes Iran’s deadly, 36-year-long terror campaign against America and its allies.
Fred Fleitz adds that Obama is a liar as proven by his own statements:
In 2007, when he was beginning his run for president, Senator Obama told a conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) that “the world must work to stop Iran’s uranium-enrichment program.”
On October 22, 2012, during a presidential debate with Mitt Romney, Mr. Obama said: “Our goal is to get Iran to recognize it needs to give up its nuclear program and abide by the U.N. resolutions that have been in place. … But the deal we’ll accept is — they end their nuclear program. It’s very straightforward.”
In December 2013 at a Brookings Institution forum, President Obama said: “They don’t need to have an underground, fortified facility like Fordow in order to have a peaceful nuclear program. They certainly don’t need a heavy-water reactor at Arak in order to have a peaceful nuclear program. They don’t need some of the advanced centrifuges that they currently possess.”
This is what the president said about the Iran nuclear program to get elected. This is what the president told the American people to reassure them about the Iran talks. The agreement announced today does not come close to meeting these statements and promises. …
Some of the worst U.S. concessions concern Iran’s eleventh-hour demand to lift embargoes on conventional arms and ballistic missiles. The conventional-arms embargo will stay in place for five years, and the ballistic-missile embargo will be in place for eight years but will be lifted sooner if the IAEA definitively clears Iran of any current work on nuclear weapons. The IAEA is very unlikely to find evidence of current nuclear-weapons work, as it won’t be allowed to inspect non-declared nuclear sites where this activity is taking place. This means these embargoes could be lifted much sooner.
To defend an agreement that legitimizes Iran’s nuclear program, President Obama could possibly claim that Iran can be trusted because it has begun to act like a responsible member of the international community. However, we know it hasn’t. A State Department report from last June found that Iran’s sponsorship of worldwide terrorism has continued and did not decline in 2014 during the nuclear talks. Iran also is stepping up its efforts to destabilize the Middle East and continues to back the Assad regime and an insurgency in Yemen.
Here’s another sign, reported by the Globe and Mail:
Canada will keep its sanctions in place – at least for now – despite the nuclear agreement Iran has reached with major world powers.
Foreign Affairs Minister Rob Nicholson issued a statement saying that Canada “will continue to judge Iran by its actions not its words,” and that the government in Ottawa will examine the agreement carefully before making any policy changes.
“We will examine this deal further before taking any specific Canadian action,” Mr. Nicholson said in the statement.
That means Canada is refusing to follow the course set by its major allies, including not only the Obama Administration in the U.S., but Britain, France, and the European Union. They negotiated the deal with Iran as part of the “P5+1” group that also included China and Russia, and have agreed to lift economic sanctions in return for Tehran’s nuclear concessions.
But Prime Minister Stephen Harper was caught between two allies on this deal. While Washington pushed for a deal, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has warned against it. So far, Mr. Harper is sticking with Mr. Netanyahu’s doubts – though Mr. Nicholson said that Canada appreciates the “efforts of the P5+1” to negotiate an agreement.
Iran apparently thinks it’s a great deal, as London’s Daily Mail reports:
Just eight minutes after President Barack Obama wrapped up a White House press conference he called on Wednesday to defend a day-old nuclear deal with Iran, the Islamic republic’s supreme leader used Twitter to tweak him.
In a short letter to Obama that he posted on Twitter, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei wrote that it’s partner nations like China and Russia who should be watched carefully – not Iran – to make sure they honor the terms of the landmark bargain.‘You are well aware that some of the six states participating in negotiations are not trustworthy at all,’ Khamenei wrote in a stunning rhetorical act of jiu-jitsu.
The agreement, signed by Iran, the U.S., Russia, China, France, the United Kingdom, Germany and the European Union, seeks to limit Tehran’s aggressive nuclear program in exchange for dropping a series of crippling economic sanctions. …
Khamenei and his social media pranksters may have been responding to Obama’s observation during his East Room presser that distrust of Tehran is the only legitimate basis on which his opponents might disagree with the deal’s outcome.
‘Really the only argument you can make against the verification and inspection mechanism that we’ve put forward is that Iran is so intent on obtaining a nuclear weapon that no inspection regime and no verification mechanism would be sufficient,’ the president told reporters, ‘because they’d find some way to get around it, because they’re untrustworthy.’
‘And if that’s your view, then … that means, presumably, that you can’t negotiate,’ he continued.
‘And what you’re really saying is, is that you’ve got to apply military force to guarantee that they don’t have a nuclear program.’
Still, outraged Republicans and cautious Democrats protested after the deal was announced on Tuesday, saying Iran suffers from a trust deficit – making Khamenei’s pronouncement a day later drip with irony.
Texas Republican Sen. John Cornyn said in a statement that ‘Iran has done nothing to demonstrate to the American people that we should trust them.’
He was joined by Maryland Democratic Sen. Ben Cardin, whose bottom line was that ‘there is no trust when it comes to Iran.’
About that news conference, the Gateway Pundit demonstrates that Obama’s motivations do not include his own country:
Barack Obama told reporters today that 99% of the world community agreed with him on his historic nuclear agreement with Iran.
I’m hearing a lot of talking points being repeated that this is a bad deal. That this is a historically bad deal. This will threaten Israel and threaten the world and threaten the United States. There’s been a lot of that. What I haven’t heard is what is your alternative. If 99% of the world community and the majority of nuclear experts look at this and say ‘This will prevent Iran from getting the bomb,” and you are arguing either that it does not, or even if it does it’s temporary, or because they are going to get a windfall of their accounts being unfrozen they’ll cause more problems, then you should have some alternative to present.
Here’s another highlight from the news conference, reported by BizPac Review:
With Obama all but making a victory lap in the wake of this week’s announced nuclear deal with Iran, CBS News’ Major Garrett rained on the president’s parade when he asked why four Americans being held by the Persian Gulf country were not part of the deal.
“As you well know, there are four Americans in Iran, three held on trumped-up charges according to your administration and one, whereabouts unknown,” the CBS White House correspondent said at an extended news conference on Wednesday.
“Can you tell the country, sir, why you are content with all the fanfare around this deal to leave the conscience of this nation, the strength of this nation unaccounted for in relation to these four Americans?”
The president was not pleased, scolding Garrett for how he crafted the question.
“Major, that’s nonsense, and you should know better,” Obama added, after a long, dramatic pause.
And apparently a few of Garret’s media colleagues felt the same way.
“There’s a fine line between asking a tough question and maybe crossing that line a little bit and being disrespectful, and I think that happened here,” said CNN’s Dana Bash, adding that it was an “embarrassment to journalism.”
And she was not the only one at CNN who felt that way. Don Lemon and Gloria Borger agreed that Garrett went too far with his question — Lemon said it “was a little out of school.”
Garret did find one ally at the network in White House correspondent Jim Acosta.
“Well, [Obama] can get testy at times, and clearly this question got under his skin,” Acosta said of the exchange. “And I don’t think slamming reporters will solve any problems for the president.”
Former Marine Montel Williams, a fierce defender of fellow veterans, posted this remark on Twitter:
So because Major Garrett asked a question many of us have been frustrated about for months he’s “disrespectful?” Let’s not patronize POTUS.
— Montel Williams (@Montel_Williams) July 15, 2015
Can you imagine any Republican presidential candidate not named Donald Trump acting like that at a presidential news conference? Remember when the media aggressively questioned politicians? Apparently that only takes place when the politician has an R after his or her last name.
Daniel Greenfield gets the last word about whether Obama is a coward or a traitor, as if that’s an either/or choice:
The last time a feeble leader of a fading nation came bearing “Peace in our time,” a pugnacious controversial right-winger retorted, “You were given the choice between war and dishonor. You chose dishonor, and you will have war.” That right-winger went on to lead the United Kingdom against Hitler.
The latest worthless agreement with a murderous dictatorship is being brandished by John Kerry, a man who instinctively seeks out dishonor the way a pig roots for truffles.
John Kerry betrayed his uniform and his nation so many times that it became his career. He illegally met with the representatives of the North Vietnamese enemy in Paris and then next year headed to Washington, D.C. where he blasted the American soldiers being murdered by his new friends as rapists and murderers “reminiscent of Genghis Khan.”
Even before being elected, Kerry was already spewing Communist propaganda in the Senate.
Once in the Senate, Kerry flew to support the Sandinista Marxist killers in Nicaragua. Just as Iran’s leader calling for “Death to America” didn’t slow down Kerry, neither did the Sandinista cries of “Here or There, Yankees Will Die Everywhere.”
Kerry revolted even liberals with his gushing over Syria’s Assad. Now he’s playing the useful idiot for Assad’s bosses in Tehran.
For almost fifty years, John Kerry has been selling out American interests to the enemy. Iran is his biggest success. The dirty Iran nuke deal is the culmination of his life’s many treasons.
It turns America from an opponent of Iran’s expansionism, terrorism and nuclear weapons program into a key supporter. The international coalition built to stop Iran’s nukes will instead protect its program.
And none of this would have happened without Obama.
Obama began his rise by pandering to radical leftists on removing Saddam. He urged them to take on Egypt instead, and that’s what he did once in office, orchestrating the takeover of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and across the region. The Muslim Brotherhood was overthrown by popular uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia, but Obama had preserved the Iranian regime when it was faced with the Green Revolution. Now Iran is his last best Islamist hope for stopping America in the Middle East.
Obama and Kerry had both voted against designating Iran’s IRGC terrorist ringleaders who were organizing the murder of American soldiers as a terrorist organization while in the Senate. Today they have turned our planes into the Air Force of the IRGC’s Shiite Islamist militias in Iraq.
Throughout the process they chanted, “No deal is better than a bad deal.” But their deal isn’t just bad. It’s treason.
Obama isn’t Chamberlain. He doesn’t mean well. Kerry isn’t making honest mistakes. They negotiated ineptly with Iran because they are throwing the game. They meant for America to lose all along.
When Obama negotiates with Republicans, he extracts maximum concessions for the barest minimum. Kerry did the same thing with Israel during the failed attempt at restarting peace negotiations with the PLO. That’s how they treat those they consider their enemies. This is how they treat their friends.
A bad deal wasn’t just better than no deal, it was better than a good deal.
Obama did not go into this to stop Iran from going nuclear. He did it to turn Iran into the axis of the Middle East. After his failures in the rest of the region, this is his final act of spite. With the fall of the Muslim Brotherhood and the decline of Islamists in Turkey, supporting Iran is his way of blocking the power of his successors in the White House to pursue a more pro-American foreign policy.
Obama made this deal to cripple American power in the Middle East. …
Obama and Kerry have not made this deal as representatives of the United States, but as representatives of a toxic ideology that views America as the cause of all that is wrong in the world. This is not an agreement that strengthens us and keeps us safe, but an agreement that weakens us and endangers us negotiated by men who believe that a strong Iran is better than a strong America.
Their ideology is that of the screaming anti-war protester denouncing American forces and foreign policy anywhere and everywhere, whose worldview has changed little since crying, “Ho! Ho! Ho Chi Minh. NLF is going to win” in the streets. The only difference is that he now wears an expensive suit.
Their ideology is not America. It is not American. It is the same poisonous left-wing hatred which led Kerry to the Viet Cong, to the Sandinistas and to Assad. It is the same resentment of America that Obama carried to Cairo, Havana and Tehran. We have met the enemy and he is in the White House.
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Politico‘s story about Gov. Scott Walker’s election wins for state Assembly, Milwaukee County executive and governor is called “Tales from Scott Walker’s Graveyard”:
Scott Walker’s path to the 2016 presidential race is littered with the bones of vanquished opponents.
Since 1990, the Wisconsin governor’s name has appeared on a ballot 14 times, and he’s failed just twice — a winning record that’s central to his pitch to Republican primary voters. Along the way, he’s left a trail of defeated challengers, many of them gripped by resentment toward a foe they recall as crassly opportunistic, loose with facts or blindly ambitious.
Yet for all the lingering enmity, as Walker prepares to announce his bid for the Republican presidential nomination, his rivals also grudgingly respect him as a rare and exceptionally canny politician who’s constantly underestimated and always outperforms expectations.
He’s a sneaky-smart campaigner, they say, a polished and level-headed tactician, a master at reading crowds. He learned the value of ignoring uncomfortable questions, rather than answering them. In hindsight, the many politicians he pancaked on the road to the national stage — in races for the state Assembly, county executive and governor — almost invariably see his career as an elaborate practice run for the White House.
To David Riemer, who fell to Walker in a 2004 bid for Milwaukee County executive — a nonpartisan race — Walker’s wiles can be summed up by a single moment during one of their debates. Riemer, sensing Walker’s desire to run for higher office, recalled placing a sheet of paper on Walker’s lectern that included a pledge to fulfill an entire four-year term. Sign it, Riemer demanded.
Walker sensed the trap right away.
“He just let it sit in front of him. He didn’t get it back to me. He didn’t rip it up. He didn’t turn it into a paper airplane … he ignored it,” Riemer said. “He understood very well, one of the key lessons in political life is they can’t print what you don’t say.”
Walker dispatched Riemer, mocked his rival’s pledge in a press release and less than two years later ran in the 2006 Republican primary for governor.
The 47-year-old Republican often points to the fact that he’s been on the ballot just about every two years since 1990 — including three victorious races for governor — as proof that he’s battle-tested and prepared to grind out yet another long campaign. He’ll launch his presidential candidacy as the front-runner in Iowa, which holds the first contest of the 2016 GOP primary season in February. He’s led the pack there since delivering a well-received speech at a January GOP gathering. Since then, though, he’s muddled through some tougher months, stumbling during his early forays into foreign policy and maintaining a lower profile than other top competitors, like Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio.
Walker’s two most recent and prominent opponents — Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett and businesswoman Mary Burke — declined to comment for this story. But a former senior aide to Burke, Walker’s Democratic challenger for reelection in 2014, suggested Walker’s struggles this year have been “bigger and more noticeable” than any he faced during the gubernatorial campaign. At the same time, Democrats shouldn’t be complacent. “I think there is a risk in underestimating him,” said the aide, who requested anonymity to speak candidly about Walker’s skills.
The danger of underestimating Walker is a common theme among the candidates and operatives on the losing side. Another senior Democratic adviser in one of Walker’s statewide races warned that his foes shouldn’t be lulled by Walker’s uneven start in presidential politics.“He’s got antennas,” said the adviser, who also requested anonymity. “He’s the real deal. As time goes on, you’ll get more of that vibe as you cover him. He can come across as a little arrogant, obviously. But with real people out there, he’s really, really good. He’s just in touch with what they’re looking for.”
Walker’s opponents remember him as so unflappable and message-disciplined that he rarely created a stir. He was always polite behind the scenes at debates, said Lena Taylor, who said she appeared jointly with Walker 24 times when she tried to oust him as county executive in 2008, only to lose by close to 20 percentage points. Others recalled their off-camera interactions with Walker similarly. He’d always talk about his family, chitchat about the Packers or the Brewers sports teams, never say anything antagonizing.
“He’s personable,” said Taylor, now a Democratic state senator. “He’s comfortable with the person on the farm. He’s comfortable with the person in the boardroom.”
Taylor has no love for Walker — she refers to him as “polarizing” and “an extremist” who often touts the fact that he’s the son of a Baptist preacher to wriggle out of uncomfortable spots. Her advice to Democrats if he ends up as the nominee? Don’t expect him to commit unforced errors.
“He is used to speaking and speaking publicly, so don’t expect him to be someone, who even when it’s not going well, to get off-kilter,” she said. “He stumbles, we all do. But he’s a guy who’s going to be more even-toned. Use that to your advantage, Mrs. Clinton.”
While a handful of his challengers from the past two decades have passed away, the first and only Democrat to ever get the best of Walker is still around and promises to be a vocal Walker critic: Rep. Gwen Moore.
Moore beat Walker handily in a 1990 state Assembly race, the governor’s first-ever bid for elected office. He later moved to a more conservative district to relaunch his political career. Moore’s distaste for Walker runs deep: She describes him as smooth and talented, but also considers him ruthless and slippery.
“As a matter of fact, before I met him, some of the Republicans that I had made friends as a freshman shared with me that this man stands in front of a mirror for hours and practices,” she said.
Looking ahead to November 2016 with Hillary Clinton as the Democratic nominee, Moore urged Democrats to goad Walker into making insensitive comments — even if those same tactics failed to unsettle him last year against Burke. “He’s been very successful, but he’s going to have a hard time beating a woman that’s tough,” Moore said. “She needs to be prepared for someone who doesn’t care who he maims, cripples or kills for his ambition.”
Walker’s first national test will be in a race more crowded and fractious than any he has faced before — he’s faced relatively few truly close elections, and fewer still within his own party. In the only statewide race he’s ever lost, he dropped out of a 2006 primary for governor. Aside from that, his toughest intraparty fight came in 1993 — his first political victory — in a special election to fill a vacant Wisconsin Assembly seat. Walker won a five-way Republican primary that year, a victory that reports at the time credited to his support from anti-abortion troops.
Mary Jo Baas, who finished fourth in that race with about 600 votes, told POLITICO that she and two of the other Republican competitors discussed joining forces to beat Walker, who was the clear front-runner. But they couldn’t agree on which two of them should drop out, leaving Walker atop a splintered field, winning with less than 2,600 votes.
Today, Baas — whose surname was Paque at the time of the special election — says she’s glad she didn’t block Walker’s path. “I think when he ran for Legislature and county executive and governor and now president, people have continually underestimated him,” she said. “If I had known how good he was, I wouldn’t have run. When he talked to a group of people, people felt like he was one of them. He knew what connected, what resonated.”
Now, as she watches her onetime rival vie for the nation’s highest office, Paque sees vestiges of the same energetic campaigner he was in 1993, a sign, she said, of trouble for his Republican competitors.
“I could summarize my advice for people running against him,” she said with a laugh.
“Don’t.”
People underestimate Walker like they underestimated Assembly Minority Leader Tommy Thompson when he ran for governor; his Republican rival called him “a two-bit hack from Elroy.” People misunderestimated George W. Bush as a baseball-team owner. And, of course, Ronald Reagan was just an actor. The four people in this paragraph total 10 election wins for governor and four presidential election wins.
Walker’s message discipline is remarkable, as is his unflappability in public. I’ve seen reporters try to bait him and fail. He’s participated in debates and never once, as far as I’m aware, stumbled significantly. He is going to say what he plans to say, and no more than that. He’s not known for off-the-cuff remarks, which the media prefers but which get candidates into trouble.
Aaron Goldstein predicts that you will have to replace the title “governor” with “president” because …
1. He’s Part of the Middle Class (or He Actually Shops at Kohl’s and Sears)
It was after Walker spoke at the Iowa Freedom Summit in January that his popularity began to soar outside of Wisconsin. As much as anything else, I think what resonated with the crowd and those who watched the speech on C-SPAN or online is when he spoke about shopping at Kohl’s:
But years ago as newlyweds I made a critical mistake. I went to a Kohl’s Department Store and I bought something for the price it was marked at. Right? My wife said to me, “You can never go back there again until you learn how to shop at Kohl’s.” So now if I’m going to pick up a new shirt I go to the rack that says it was $29.99 & I see it’s marked down to $19.99. And then because I’m well trained I got that insert from the Sunday newspaper and I took it up to the clerk with my Kohl’s credit card and get another 10 or 15% off. And then I watch that mailer because, man, Tonette shops there a lot so I know I’m going to get another 10 to 15% off. And if I’m really lucky I get that flyer with 30% off.
Somehow I don’t think Ann Romney ever told her husband that he had to learn to shop at Kohl’s. Not that there’s anything wrong with being wealthy. But when money is no object it can be difficult to understand that most of us are subject to the mercy of money. The fact is, the lives of most Americans are centered around the fact we don’t have enough money. Mitt Romney couldn’t grasp this in 2012 and I don’t believe most of the current Republican field gets it either by virtue of their prosperity.
In late April, the New York Daily News tried to make an issue of Walker’s credit card debt with Sears. William Jacobson of Legal Insurrection responded to the report in the Daily News in this manner:
The latest attack on Walker is that he has “up to” $50,000 in credit card debt to — wait for it — Sears.
We don’t know exactly how much because financial disclosures only are made in broad ranges, so it could be as little as $10,000.
Regardless, it’s SEARS!
As the only presidential candidate with a negative net worth, Scott Walker is in that boat with the rest of us. Nearly all presidential candidates speak of the middle class, but in Scott Walker we actually have a candidate who is a part of the middle-class.
2. He Didn’t Graduate from College
Remember when the media tried to make an issue of Walker not graduating from college? As Susan Milligan argued in U.S. News & World Report:
But should we not demand this basic credential from the person we empower to run the country, start wars and negotiate with foreign leaders? If employers demand college degrees — and for no other reason than that they can, not because the job itself requires a college education — then why not impose this minimum requirement on the leader of the nation?
Last I checked some fellow from Missouri named Harry S Truman didn’t graduate college, much less attend. Yet he did a fine job when it came to running the country, in his case ending a war and negotiating with foreign leaders, and is considered among the best to have held the office of President of the United States.
Granted, Truman left office more than six decades ago and times have changed considerably since. But what hasn’t changed is that most Americans don’t have college degrees. In fact, it’s 60% of Americans. Another 22% attend college, but don’t graduate for a variety of reasons as was the case with Walker. So when the media tried to make an issue of the fact that Walker didn’t finish college they effectively insulted the intelligence of 8 out of every 10 Americans.
This isn’t to say that higher education is without virtue. Should Walker be elected President he will need the advice of people who are learned in economics, the military, health care and other matters. But a higher education doesn’t guarantee common sense. President Obama might have once edited the Harvard Law Review, but in more than six years in office he has proved the late William F. Buckley’s adage that he would “sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University.” I am sure if WFB were still alive that he would firmly place the Wisconsin governor among the first 2,000 names in the Boston telephone directory even if his last name begins with W.
3. He Talks to People Not at Them Nor Does He Need to Shout to Make His Point
Some politicians, be they Democrats or Republicans, love to hear themselves talk. In so doing, they end up talking at people instead of to them. That isn’t Scott Walker. As demonstrated in the first point about shopping at Kohl’s, when Walker talks about public policy he does so in a manner to which nearly everyone in the audience can relate.
There are some issues that are difficult to talk about in a rational way because of the deep emotions they arouse. We have seen this over the past couple of weeks on the subject of immigration, particularly with Donald Trump’s comments about Mexico sending criminals to the United States.
For his part, Walker has spoken candidly about reducing immigration levels. But he has done so without characterizing illegal immigrants as drug dealers and rapists. It is debatable whether reducing immigration levels is our best policy approach. But if the invective can be kept out of it, then it is a discussion worth having and if anyone can keep the discussion civil it is Scott Walker. …
4. He Chooses His Battles Wisely
Although the President of the United States wields enormous power, he or she cannot use their power on every matter. At a practical level, some matters are best left to local and state governments while other matters are best left out of the hands of government altogether. Do we really want another President who while openly admitting he doesn’t have all the facts nevertheless accuses a local police department of “acting stupidly”?
A mark of a wise and effective elected leader is the ability is to govern when necessary and with the support of the majority of the people. When Scott Walker reformed collective bargaining in Wisconsin’s public sector, he did so because it was necessary and he did so with the majority of his state’s people behind him. The result is controlled costs, more money in the hands of state workers, and greater local control. When President Obama overhauled the U.S. healthcare system he did so unnecessarily, without the support of the majority of Americans and he couldn’t have cared less. The result is higher premiums, less insurance coverage and less access to medical care.
Which would you choose?
5. He Can Appeal to Conservatives and Non-Conservatives Alike
Scott Walker appeals to conservatives not only for his stand on collective bargaining reform, but for signing into law right to work legislation, concealed carry measures, and his efforts to increase vouchers for school choice.
But the conservative vote alone won’t be enough to elect a Republican President. Would Ronald Reagan have been twice elected President without the help of Reagan Democrats? Walker certainly isn’t the only Republican with conservative bona fides, but he is arguably the only Republican who can also appeal to non-conservatives. In order for a Republican to win the White House he is going to have to convince enough people who voted for Barack Obama twice to take a leap of faith.
Now I’m not talking about hardcore left-wing activists here. Rather I am talking about the majority of people who do not think about politics on a day-to-day basis but care enough to show up on Election Day. They will vote Democrat by default, but can be persuaded to vote Republican by the right candidate. Can anyone imagine Ted Cruz, Mike Huckabee, or Ben Carson carrying a blue state like Wisconsin? After all, Walker has been thrice elected Governor in a state that twice voted for Barack Obama and hasn’t gone Republican since, well, Ronald Reagan.
This isn’t to say that Walker is the new Reagan. Such a thing does not exist. There is only one Ronald Reagan. But what Walker does possess is a calm demeanor and an ability to communicate directly with people, which enables him to come across as a reasonable person who will carry out his duties in a competent manner. Scott Walker is the kind of Republican who can resonate with people who might not ordinarily vote Republican.
6. He Can Withstand the Liberal Hate Machine
Whoever wins the GOP nomination can expect the liberal hate machine, a coalition of the Democratic Party and the mainstream media, to vilify the Republican standard bearer as a racist, sexist, homophobe who cares only for the rich and wants to throw elderly grandmothers off cliffs. …
I don’t know if Walker has skin made of Teflon, but it is certainly thicker than that of the present occupant in the White House. What has toughened him is the fact that liberals from all over the country have made a concerted effort to unseat Walker and undo his reforms and he has found a way to beat them at every turn. It is no small accomplishment that Walker is the first governor in American history to survive a recall vote.
The reason liberals have failed to oust Walker from office is that liberals portray Walker as a monster, but Walker simply doesn’t come off that way to most people. If anything it is the liberals who have been far more monstrous in their behavior towards Walker and his family, effectively making him a more sympathetic figure. When the Boston band the Dropkick Murphys objected to Walker using their version of the Woody Guthrie penned song “I’m Shipping Up to Boston” at the Iowa Freedom Summit, they tweeted, “we literally hate you.” This says a great deal more about the Dropkick Murphys than it does about Scott Walker. I suspect we will see a lot more of this and, to paraphrase Nietzsche, what does not kill Walker will make him stronger. If Walker can carry himself with more decency than his opponents, then he will go far.
I haven’t decided whether I’m supporting Walker, or anyone else, in the Republican primary. (One would think the number of GOP candidates will be culled somewhat by next April.) I think it’s unlikely Walker will become president. But that may be another underestimation.
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Why, you ask, do Republicans want to cut the UW System? Why do most Republican-leaning voters support something like that?
Well, it might have something to do with what happens with those taxpayer-funded salaries at the state’s only world-class university, as reported by The College Fix:
University of Wisconsin sociology Professor Sara Goldrick-Rab claims there are “terrifying” psychological similarities between Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and Nazi leader and mass murderer Adolf Hitler.
In a July 1 tweet, Goldrick-Rab said: “My grandfather, a psychologist, just walked me through similarities between Walker and Hitler. There are so many-it’s terrifying.”
The extreme comparisons didn’t stop there.
A day later, Professor Goldrick-Rap tweeted: “No doubt about it-Walker and many Wisconsin Legislators are fascists. Period. They proved it today. #SHAME.”
Walker, a Republican, announced on Monday that he is running for president.
The College Fix reached out to Professor Goldrick-Rab on Monday to seek clarification about her strongly worded tweets. Goldrick-Rab released the following statement to The College Fix:
Thank you for your question. Please note that I have taken time out of my unpaid vacation to respond, as a courtesy to the timeliness of your request.
If you reread the tweet, you will see that I stated that an expert in the field – a psychoanalyst with decades of experience – compared the ‘psychological characteristics’ of the two individuals, and that I was struck by his analysis. There do appear to be commonalities.
I’m confident you are capable of seeing the difference between such an assessment and equating the whole of two different people.
I’m also confident you will note that the tweet was not a “reaction” to any particular event, and thus it may not fit with your narrative.
Recently Goldrick-Rab also targeted the Wisconsin budget as an attack on education and tenure, tweeting she “spent more than 20 years working for & honoring the tenure I earned. Walker just robbed me of it. He robbed Wisconsin. It’s unforgivable.”
She went on to suggest Walker would “make an example” out of her and fire her to advance his campaign.
“You should hear my kids, trying to figure out what moving means. Walker is driving them out of their home state. He took mom’s job.” Goldrick-Rab tweeted July 12.
In a statement issued to the Wisconsin State Journal, Goldrick-Rab said that her colleagues around the UW system are talking privately about leaving, and that “(legislators) had literally shattered their employees and students and they stand up and say ‘thank you.’ It’s cowardly. We’re the laughingstock of the nation.”
Professor Goldrick-Rab also joined the chorus of those lamenting the fact that Walker doesn’t have a college degree, tweeting: “My 5 year old just busted out with ‘Scott Walker needs to go to college to get some more knowledge!’ Whoa. She’s way ahead…”
Yes, readers, these are the kind of people who have succeeded in making Walker a national political star. Among other inconvenient facts, Walker is approximately 12 million short of Hitler in deaths caused by evil ideas. This, we are supposed to believe, is what academic freedom and tenure are for.
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The Washington Post’s Chris Cilizza wrote this before yesterday’s big news:
Scott Walker’s message in his soon-to-be-announced presidential bid is simple: I’m a conservative who has won and won (and won) in a blue state. I’ve talked the talk and walked the walk.
“We fought and we won,” Walker says in the video his campaign released in advance of Monday night’s formal announcement. “Without sacrificing our principles we won three elections in four years in a blue state.”
That’s a very powerful message for Republicans desperate to win the White House back. And, it’s one that Walker has Democrats to thank for.
Remember that Walker’s initial win in 2010 occasioned no great attention among national politicos. He was a little-known county executive who was known, primarily, for being the “brown bag” guy. No one expected to hear from him again, nationally speaking.
Then Walker made his move on public employee unions. Suddenly, he became enemy number one of the organized labor movement nationally and the Republican every Democrat in Wisconsin loved to hate. That emotion led to the push to recall Walker in a June 2012 election; there was a widespread belief in the anti-Walker crowd that it was a virtual guarantee that voters would get rid of the governor.
Except that didn’t happen. In fact, Walker won by a larger margin over Milwaukee mayor Tom Barrett in the 2012 recall than he did in the regularly scheduled 2010 election. In the wake of that loss — and, in truth, in the months leading up to the vote — there was considerable disagreement between labor/Wisconsin Democrats and national party strategists about whether the recall was a smart political move.
Following Walker’s win, I wrote this:
There was considerable internal discussion and disagreement between Washington and Wisconsin Democrats (and organized labor) about whether to push for a recall election this summer or wait until 2014 for a chance to unseat Walker. (Washington Democrats broadly favored the latter option, Wisconsin Democrats and labor the former).
As the recall played out, two things became clear: 1) There were almost no one undecided in the race and 2) those few souls who were undecided tended to resist the recall effort on the grounds that Walker had just been elected in 2010.
The sentiment among those undecided voters, according to several Democrats closely monitoring the data, was that while they didn’t love Walker they thought he deserved a full term before passing final judgment on how he was performing.
That Democrats nominated Barrett — the same man who Walker had defeated in the 2010 general election — added to the sense among independents and undecided voters that this was primarily a partisan push to re-do a race in which they didn’t like the final result.
Looking back, it’s clear that without the recall, there is no Scott Walker presidential announcement today. What the recall did was turn Walker into a conservative hero/martyr — the symbol of everything base GOPers hate about unions and, more broadly, the Democratic party. He went from someone no one knew to someone every conservative talk radio host (and their massive audiences) viewed as the tip of the spear in the fight against the creep of misguided Democratic priorities. He became someone who had the phone numbers of every major conservative donor at his fingertips. He became what he is today: The political David who threw a pebble and slew the mighty liberal Goliath.
It’s hard for me to imagine that if Democrats had never tried to recall Walker that he would be a) running for president in 2016 or b) solidly established as one of the three candidates regarded as most likely to be the nominee. Even if Walker had, as he did, won a second term as governor in Wisconsin in 2014, it’s much more likely he’d be grouped in with fellow governors like John Kasich and Chris Christie rather than, as he is now, with Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio.
The recall was a major — and long-tailed — strategic mistake by Democrats. It elevated Walker from a low-profile governor into a conservative superstar. If Walker winds up as the Republican nominee in 2016 — and he has a real chance to be just that — Democrats have only themselves to blame for his rise. They made Walker into the kind of politician who could beat Hillary Clinton next November.
Conventional wisdom claimed that Walker won the 2012 recall election …
… because of a significant number of non-fans of Walker who nonetheless voted for him because they believed Walker shouldn’t have been recalled over Act 10. That foreshadowed Walker’s loss in 2014 … until, of course, he won again.
Democrats and liberals (but I repeat myself) could blame the 2014 loss on the inept campaign of Mary Burke, but Democrats were all atwitter of having a female candidate who ran a successful family business, until it became obvious that Burke didn’t have as large a role as was claimed at said successful family business, and as a candidate she reminded no one of, say, former Texas Gov. Ann Richards. One wonders when Democrats will stop underestimating Walker for having a low intellect (due to his sin of a lack of college degree, the same as with a majority of Wisconsinites), because obviously he’s smarter than the Democrats and their political experts.
So what does the O in AFL-CIO stand for? That’s the number of elections (yes, using an O for a zero — the new version of Hawaii Five-0 does it) Big Labor has won against Scott Walker. That also represents the number of times Big Labor has succeeded in wresting control of either house of the Legislature away from Republicans in the regularly scheduled 2010, 2012 and 2014 elections. When AFL-CIO chief thug Richard Trumka calls Walker a “national disgrace,” Trumka should look in the mirror; that’s called “projection.”
Alternatively, I love this tweet:
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Back in 1980, U.S. Rep. John Anderson (R–Illinois) decided to run for president as an independent. The motto of his campaign was “The Anderson Difference.”
One night that year, NBC-TV ran a story on its Nightly News, “The Anderson Differences,” comparing his positions as a congressman — for instance, favoring a measure to make the U.S. officially a Christian nation — with his positions as a presidential candidate. The comparison was not favorable, not because NBC agreed or disagreed with his past or present positions, but because the difference between past and present was essentially 180 degrees.
That came to mind reading Jim Geraghty:
You may have gathered that I remain a skeptic about Donald Trump. Trump fans look at us skeptics with incredulity that we could possibly object to their man, and his ability to “change the debate” and force the media to discuss topics like sanctuary cities. Those of us not so enamored with Trump pause at how that quality suddenly outranks all other qualities in a potential Republican presidential candidate — including consistent conservatism.
Permit me to remind you about Donald Trump’s assessment of President Bush back in 2008:
Bush has been so bad, maybe the worst president in the history of this country. He has been so incompetent, so bad, so evil, that I don’t think any Republican could have won.
Evil? Evil? Of course, in the same interview, Trump endorsed … diplomatic outreach with Iran.
You know, you can be enemies with people, whether it’s Iran, Iraq, anyplace else and you can still have dialogue. These people won’t even talk to him. It’s terrible.
Wait, there’s more! Check out his assessment of Obama!
VAN SUSTEREN: The new president-elect, what are your thoughts? Pretty exciting, it’s always exciting when we have a change of power, a transition, but what are your thoughts.
TRUMP: It’s very exciting we have a new president. It would have been nice if he ended with a 500 point up instead of down. It’s certainly very exciting.
His speech was great last night. I thought it was inspiring in every way. And, hopefully he’s going to do a great job. But the way I look at it, he cannot do worse than Bush. [Emphasis added.]
VAN SUSTEREN: We know how you feel about this.
TRUMP: It’s not me, it’s everybody. It’s been a total catastrophe. That’s what happened to Republicans. They got run are [sic] out of office because we have a president that’s been so bad.
And he’s been a catastrophe, there’s no question about it. He got us into a war we didn’t need. You look at the money, we’re spending hundreds of billions of dollars on a war, and then people wonder why the economy isn’t doing well.
OPEC is ripping us off left and right, the oil countries are just ripping us off left and right.
So you have wars, you have OPEC, all of this stuff. He didn’t do anything about it. He sends Condoleezza Rice. She gets off a plane and waves to everybody and then leaves. It’s ridiculous. …
And then here’s his thoughts on health care back in 1999 …
TRUMP: I think you have to have it, and, again, I said I’m conservative, generally speaking, I’m conservative, and even very conservative. But I’m quite liberal and getting much more liberal on health care and other things. I really say: What’s the purpose of a country if you’re not going to have defensive [sic] and health care?
If you can’t take care of your sick in the country, forget it, it’s all over. I mean, it’s no good. So I’m very liberal when it comes to health care. I believe in universal health care. I believe in whatever it takes to make people well and better.
KING: So you believe, then, it’s an entitlement of birth?
TRUMP: I think it is. It’s an entitlement to this country, and too bad the world can’t be, you know, in this country. But the fact is, it’s an entitlement to this country if we’re going to have a great country.
And then, as you probably saw, Trump’s post-2012 comments on illegal immigration:
“Republicans didn’t have anything going for them with respect to Latinos and with respect to Asians,” the billionaire developer says.
“The Democrats didn’t have a policy for dealing with illegal immigrants, but what they did have going for them is they weren’t mean-spirited about it,” Trump says. “They didn’t know what the policy was, but what they were is they were kind.”
Romney’s solution of “self deportation” for illegal aliens made no sense and suggested that Republicans do not care about Hispanics in general, Trump says.
“He had a crazy policy of self deportation which was maniacal,” Trump says. “It sounded as bad as it was, and he lost all of the Latino vote,” Trump notes. “He lost the Asian vote. He lost everybody who is inspired to come into this country.”
The GOP has to develop a comprehensive policy “to take care of this incredible problem that we have with respect to immigration, with respect to people wanting to be wonderful productive citizens of this country,” Trump says.
Yet I see people comparing Trump to Reagan. Donald Trump has been a conservative for about ten minutes.
You have read (because I’m sure I quoted it previously) Ralph Waldo Emerson’s observation that “Foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” (The rest of which is: “… adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.”) California Gov. Ronald Reagan raised taxes and signed the nation’s most liberal, for the day, abortion rights legislation, both of which President Ronald Reagan opposed.
But calling a previous president of your own party “evil” seems unlikely to generate much support among your own party, even among those who didn’t like said president. Favoring universal health care, whether ObamaCare or single-payer, is not a position the Republican Party is likely to adopt at any point. At some point he’s going to have to explain the gulf between his previous positions and his current positions.
Trump blamed his first bankruptcy on Reagan’s 1987 tax reform, because it eliminated some obscure real estate tax break. Reagan’s 1987 tax cut helped propel the longest peacetime economic expansion in this nation’s history, which not even Bill Clinton’s 1993 tax increase could stall for long.
Trump cannot credibly repeat Reagan’s line that he didn’t leave the Democratic Party; the Democratic Party left him, because all of the aforementioned positions remain Democratic positions today as they were in 2008. Either Trump changed all of those positions, which means he needs to explain what changed his mind, or he doesn’t actually have any long-standing firm tenets of what’s right and wrong in politics, other than his own fortunes.
Of course, there’s an easy way to do that if you have enough money, as Trump certainly does. Like Ross Perot in 1992, Trump certainly has enough money to run for president without the support of the GOP, or his apparent former party, the Democratic Party. Run for president as an independent, and you can skip the silliness of the primary parade and go right to the general campaign. You can take whichever positions you want on whichever issues you like, and you can ignore issues you don’t care about or don’t want to touch with a 39 1/2 foot pole. (For instance: Abortion rights.)
To quote 1992 “Reform” Party candidate H. Ross Perot, see? It’s that simple.
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Kevin D. Williamson has today’s example of irony:
The curious task of the American Left is to eliminate “white privilege” by forcing people to adopt Nordic social arrangements at gunpoint. Progressives have a longstanding love affair with the nations of northern Europe, which are, or in some cases were until the day before yesterday, ethnically homogeneous, overwhelmingly white, hostile to immigration, nationalistic, and frankly racist in much of their domestic policy.
In this the so-called progressives are joined, as they traditionally have been, by brutish white supremacists and knuckle-dragging anti-Semites, who believe that they discern within the Nordic peoples the last remnant of white European purity and who frequently adopt Nordic icons and myths, incorporating them into an oddball cult of whiteness. American progressivism is a cult of whiteness, too: It imagines re-creating Danish society in Los Angeles, which is not full of Danish people, ascribing to Scandinavian social policies certain mystical tendencies that render them universal in their applicability.
Call it “Nordic Exceptionalism.”
The Left occasionally indulges in bouts of romantic exoticism — its pin-ups have included Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, Patrice Lumumba, Mao Zedong; we might even count Benito Mussolini, “that admirable Italian gentleman” who would not have been counted sufficiently white to join Franklin Roosevelt’s country club — but the welfare states that progressives dream about are the whitest ones: Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, etc. The significance of this never quite seems to occur to progressives. When it is suggested that the central-planning, welfare-statist policies that they favor are bound to produce results familiar to the unhappy residents of, e.g., Cuba, Venezuela, or Bolivia — privation, chaos, repression, political violence — American progressives reliably reply: “No, no, we don’t want that kind of socialism. We want socialism like they have it in Finland.”
Translation: “We want white socialism, not brown socialism!”
The real differences between relatively homogeneous northern European societies and the sort of society we have here in the United States is rarely if ever seriously addressed by our democratic socialist friends. The unspoken assumption — that all of us will either learn to behave like good little Scandinavians or be enemies of the state in this new metaphysically blond utopia — is, as our feminist friends like to say, problematic.
Set aside for a moment the conflation of socialism with high-tax welfare-statism — Sweden, with its entrepreneurial, trade-driven economy and very little in the way of state-owned enterprises constitutes anything but centrally planned socialism — Nordic practice is what self-described socialists such as Senator Bernie Sanders generally have in mind when they talk about socialism. (We can ignore, for the moment, the old Castroite holdouts and youthful Chavistas writing for Rolling Stone; everybody else does.) The racial aspects of Nordic welfare-statism are studiously not talked about, even when Stockholm burns while members of its unassimilated Muslim minority riot.
Sweden is the most diverse of the Nordic countries, and its immigration history has been a start-and-stop affair. The most dramatic immigration episode in Swedish history is, of course, the dramatic emigration of Swedes to North America in the early 20th century, when grinding poverty and famine sent one in four Swedes packing to the United States and Canada. It is estimated that there are today more people of Swedish ancestry living in the United States and Canada than in Sweden. Political and economic realities encouraged Sweden to recruit labor immigrants for many years, and its formal and informal relationships with other Scandinavian countries — as well as the veto power over immigration policy held by its trade-union confederation, which made familiar Buchananite noises about the peril of cheap foreign labor — ensured that the vast majority of Swedish immigrants were other Nordic people. When Jews fleeing National Socialism sought refuge in Sweden in the 1930s and 1940s, “the majority were rejected due to anti-semitism and discriminatory racial ideology prevalent in Sweden at that time,” as Charles Westin puts it.
Sweden had virtually no non-European immigrants, and few non-Nordic immigrants, until the 1970s. In popular usage, the modern Swedish word for “immigrant” does not mean “foreign-born person,” but “non-Nordic person in Sweden.” Socialism and welfare-statism, like nationalism and racism, are based on appeals to solidarity — solidarity that is enforced at gunpoint, if necessary. That appeal is more than a decent-hearted concern for the downtrodden or the broad public good. It is, rather, an exclusionary solidarity, a superstitious notion that understands “body politic” not as a mere figure of speech but as a substantive description of the state and the people as a unitary organism, the health of which is of such paramount importance that individual rights — property, freedom of movement, freedom of speech, freedom of association — must be curtailed or eliminated when they are perceived to be insalubrious. If the nation is an organism, it’s no surprise to find Donald Trump describing foreigners as an infection. Thus the by-now-familiar xenophobia prevalent in Democratic rhetoric (and the Trumpkin anti-capitalist Right’s rhetoric) about Asians and Latin Americans “stealing our jobs.” The Swedes, the Swiss, and the Germans often are in direct competition with key American industries, but there is never any talk about the Swedes “stealing our jobs.”
Funny thing, that. As is the curious fact that the socialism you might read about in The Nation is cosmopolitan and liberal, whereas the socialism presented to the voters by Barack Obama, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Donald Trump, etc., is nationalistic and xenophobic, us-and-them stuff that would have warmed the heart of Father Coughlin or Henry Ford.Solidarity, as it turns out, is not evenly distributed, nor is it color-blind. None of those denunciations of wicked “foreign oil” ever end with an accusatory finger pointed north toward Canada, our largest foreign supplier. When Barack Obama wants some solar-energy subsidies to pay off his crony-capitalist backers, he doesn’t rebuke the Canadians, but those damned dirty brown people in the Middle East. (Middle Eastern people seem destined to take the eternal brunt of American economic stupidity: It used to be the scheming Jewish bankers, now it’s the nefarious awful Arabs who want to sell us crude oil that we need at market prices.) You’d need a microscope to find a substantial philosophical difference between the economic views of Democrat Ted Strickland, the boobish former Ohio governor who likes to go around denouncing “economic traitors,” and those of, say, Marine Le Pen of France’s National Front, who fears “wild and anarchic globalization.” Even “liberal” is becoming a term of abuse for the Left, with denunciations of “neo-liberalism” becoming almost intense as those of “neo-conservatism.” The anti-trade rhetoric prevalent in the recent TPA/TPP debate assumes, without ever quite saying so, that economic interactions with foreigners — especially dusky, poor foreigners — is inherently destructive.
In reality, economic xenophobia and ordinary xenophobia always end up colliding. The nastier of Europe’s anti-immigrant and ethno-nationalist movements argue that ethnic solidarity is necessary to preserve the welfare state. Among ordinary Swedes, the topic of immigrants’ — non-Nordic people’s — relatively high rates of unemployment and welfare dependency is politically charged. The same is true in the other Nordic countries; see Jørgen Goul Andersen and Tor Bjørklund on “welfare chauvinism.” Nordic welfare chauvinists often point to Finland as enjoying the ideal social situation: 99.6 percent of the population is either ethnically Finnish (93.5 percent) or Swedish (5.9 percent), and 80 percent of them are nominal members of the same church (Lutheran). The largest single non-European immigrant community in Norway is composed of Somalis; there are 35,000 of them, approximately the population of Bettendorf, Iowa. “We’d like to make America more like Norway or Finland” is, among other things, a way of saying, “We’d like to make America more like a virtually all-white society.”
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The Washington Post profiles Tonette Walker, who certainly compares favorably to the current First Lady, as well as a previous First Lady now running for president:
Tonette Tarantino’s year of sorrow came when she was only 30. First she lost the grandmother who helped raise her, like a second mother. Weeks later her brother, her only sibling, died of bone cancer. Then her husband died of kidney failure.
Now, as Tonette Walker, the wife of Wisconsin governor and GOP presidential hopeful Scott Walker, looks back, she says those brutal 12 months in the mid-1980s prepared her for her life ahead — and most especially for the rough ride of politics.
“My mom was tough. She didn’t give you a break,” Tonette Walker said in an interview at the Camp Bar, a neighborhood hangout here. “Days after my first husband died, my mom said, ‘Get up, get moving, you are not going to wallow in this. You’re going to be great, you are going to be fine. Life is going to go on.’ ”
Tonette, who at 59 is a dozen years older than her husband and comes from a pro-union Democratic family, is part of a 2016 class of political spouses who are more visible and unusual than ever. …
With her short brunette cut and bangs, and an infectious laugh, Tonette Walker is, as Brad Yates, the general manager of the bar, describes her, “a bit of a spitfire. She has a bubble to her.”
On the campaign trail, Walker constantly mentions Tonette, whom he married in 1993, often calling her “my rock.” And although Walker is a famously combative politician who wrote a book about himself called “Unintimidated,” his wife, in many ways, adds steel to his spine.
Walker has had a tumultuous time as governor, especially over his high-stakes showdowns with public workers unions that made him a hero to conservatives and a pariah to liberals. The governor who touts smaller government is now in a fevered battle over the state budget, and his proposed cuts to public education have led friends and neighbors to complain to Tonette.
“People ask me, ‘Is your wife tough enough to handle this?’ ” said Walker, who plans to formally announce for president July 13. “She is certainly not fragile,” he said, describing all she has been through, including caring for her mother when she was dying of a brain tumor, and, more recently, her father, who died of lung disease.
“Politics is nothing compared to that,” he said. …
The Walkers live primarily in the governor’s residence in Madison, but [Wauwatosa] is where they say they feel most at home, where they have a modest white house on a busy street, and where their two sons went to high school.
But even here, the roughness of politics intrudes: During Walker’s 2012 recall election, angry protesters swarmed around their home. Death threats were sent not just to Walker but to Tonette, including one vowing to “gut her like a deer.”
“Scott signed up for this,” but his whole family is dragged through it, said Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch, who endured the recall alongside the Walkers and calls it a “scary time.” She says there is growing interest in the man or woman beside the candidate, perhaps, she said, because in this “reality TV” era “we want to know what happens behind the scenes.”
“She is not a political junkie who gets up in the morning and reads RedState, Drudge, Politico or The Washington Post,” Kleefisch said about Tonette. She gives her husband “the perspective of the smart, average voter . . . she is the ‘first listener.’ ”
“Do I agree with him all the time? No,” said Tonette. “But most of the time things work out a lot better than I think they will.”
A particularly tough day for the family came a little more than a week ago, when the Supreme Court issued its ruling in favor of same-sex marriage. Scott Walker, a favorite of Republican conservatives and the son of a Baptist preacher, issued a statement calling it a “grave mistake” and supporting a constitutional amendment to allow states to determine who can marry.
In the political world, Walker drew immediate scrutiny for being particularly strident. In their house, Tonette Walker heard immediately about her husband’s response from the couple’s two sons, Matt and Alex, who are taking time off from college to help their father’s campaign. She told them to talk directly to him.
“That was a hard one,” Tonette said, pausing and choosing her words carefully. “Our sons were disappointed. . . . I was torn. I have children who are very passionate [in favor of same-sex marriage], and Scott was on his side very passionate.”
“It’s hard for me because I have a cousin who I love dearly — she is like a sister to me — who is married to a woman, her partner of 18 years,” she said.
She said her son Alex was her cousin’s best man at their wedding last year.
The couple, Shelli Marquardt and Cathy Priem, have vacationed and hosted parties with the Walkers, according to friends.
The day after the Supreme Court ruling, Tonette flew with her husband to Colorado, where he addressed a group of 4,000 conservatives and met with donors. It was widely noted that, despite a perfectly receptive audience, Walker did not repeat his sharp criticism of the Supreme Court decision.
Instead, Walker spoke more vaguely and was quoted as saying, “We should respect the opinions of others in America. But that in return means that they not only respect our opinions, they respect what is written in the Constitution.”
Asked at the Camp Bar what effect it has when his family disagrees with him, Walker said, “It doesn’t mean I change my position,” but it may lead to “finding a different way of explaining it, so they can appreciate where I am coming from.”
He said that during the protests over his move to end collective bargaining for many public-sector unions, Tonette was a huge help. He said he knew how costly it was to taxpayers and how it could help close the gaping state deficit but he hadn’t explained that well enough, even to his wife. He made a better public case, he said, after Tonette asked him one night: “ ‘Why are you doing this? Why is this causing so much havoc?’ ” …
Tonette was married at 23 and widowed at 30, supporting her sick husband at the end. Then six years later, in April 1992, she and a friend went to karaoke night at Saz’s, a Milwaukee bar known for its barbecue.
There, as she chuckled at the amateur singers, she spotted a young man looking at her, and they kept locking eyes.
Scott Walker, then only 24, scribbled a note on a napkin and handed it to Tonette as he walked out, without saying a word.
“Forgive me for being rude. I have to go to get up early for work,” he wrote. “If you want to have dinner, please call,” he said, as the two recounted their first meeting laughing as they quibbled over how many days it took her to phone him. (She says a week; he says two days.)
Despite their differences — she was a Catholic Democrat, he was the son of a Republican Baptist preacher — they hit it off immediately. But she said her parents were concerned about the age difference.
“But he had an answer for everything — that’s Scott Walker,” she said. “I said, ‘I want kids,’ and he said, ‘Okay.’ I said, ‘I want kids now,’ and he said, ‘Okay.’”
She said she looks back now and thinks that if her son Matt at 24 brought home a 36-year-old woman, “I would say, ‘Really, Matthew?’ ”
But just months after they met, when the couple went back to Saz’s, Walker pushed another napkin-note toward her. This one was a marriage proposal, and she said yes. And on their wedding day in February 1993, they returned to Saz’s again, stopping in their wedding attire for a drink before the reception.
Their wedding day was also, coincidentally, Ronald Reagan’s birthday, so every year they have a Gipper-themed anniversary party with jelly beans and macaroni and cheese. …
Much of the charity work she does is related to her own experience, including a gala she runs for the Lung Association. Her father carted an oxygen tank to campaign events before dying of lung disease. She works with Teen Challenge, a faith-based rehabilitation program for young people with substance-abuse problems, and has talked there of her mother’s struggle with alcohol. …
As a state trooper came to tell the Walkers their car was waiting, the governor said that not much gets his wife down: “She’s tough.”
He mentions, too, that she has Type 1 diabetes and an insulin pump.
“It’s fine. It’s fine,” she says, waving off talk of that, preferring to chat about the Rolling Stones concert she attended in Milwaukee — 11th row! Then she was off with someone in the bar following her to ask if she wouldn’t mind posing for a picture.
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While Wisconsin Republicans were demonstrating, until they were forced to back down, their disagreement with the state Open Records Law because it applies to them, along comes a Democrat with her own unique interpretation of our constitutional rights.
That would be U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin, who said this, according to Media Trackers:
Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.) says the 1st Amendment’s religious liberty protections don’t apply to individuals. On MSNBC last week, Wisconsin’s junior Senator claimed that the Constitution’s protection of the free exercise of religion extends only to religious institutions, and that individual’s do not have a right to the free exercise of their own religion.
During the MSNBC appearance, which was covered by Breitbart and NewsBusters, Baldwin appeared clueless to the fact that the free exercise clause of the 1st Amendment has already been found to apply to individuals – not just churches, synagogues, mosques or other institutions of faith and worship.
The full text of the 1st Amendment reads:
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”
The relevant portion of Baldwin’s MSNBC appearance transcript reads:
“Certainly the First Amendment says that in institutions of faith that there is absolute power to, you know, to observe deeply held religious beliefs. But I don’t think it extends far beyond that. … [I]n this context, they’re talking about expanding this far beyond our churches and synagogues to businesses and individuals across this country. I think there are clear limits that have been set in other contexts and we ought to abide by those in this new context across America.”
The 1st Amendment’s free exercise clause says nothing about protecting religious institutions but not individuals. “Congress shall make no law…prohibiting the free exercise of [religion].”
University of St. Thomas Law School professor [Thomas C. Berg] writes in The Heritage Foundation’s Guide to the Constitution that Supreme Court jurisprudence has long concluded that the clause protects religiously motivated conduct as well as belief.
“Because it is now accepted that the Free Exercise of Religion Clause protects religiously motivated conduct as well as belief, the most important modern issue has been whether the protection only runs against laws that target religion itself for restriction, or, more broadly, whether the clause sometimes requires an exemption from a generally applicable law.”
[Berg] goes on to explore instances of individuals – not just institutions – receiving protection for their free exercise of religion thanks to the 1st Amendment.
Fascinatingly, Baldwin is on the record claiming that another portion of the 1st Amendment shouldn’t apply to institutions and should exclusively apply to individuals; a contradiction with her present arguments.
In the landmark case Citizens United v. FEC (2010), the U.S. Supreme Court held that corporations, unions and other organizations could spend money advocating for or against political candidates and issues. The Court said such spending was free speech protected by the 1st Amendment.
Baldwin made opposition to Citizens United a consistent theme of her campaign for U.S. Senate and her time as a senator. “I think it is so important that we overturn Citizens United,” Baldwin declared in a 2012 video for the leftwing publication The Nation. Baldwin claimed that corporations – essentially institutions – should not be entitled to the same freedoms afforded individuals.
“It is far too often the case in Washington that powerful corporate interests, the wealthy, and the well-connected get to write the rules, and now the Supreme Court has given them more power to rule the ballot box by creating an uneven playing field,” Baldwin complained after another free speech-related decision by the Supreme Court. Already she has voted in favor of a Constitutional amendment that would specifically curtail the 1st Amendment’s free speech protections by denying them to institutions and organizations.
As free speech and the free exercise of religion remain contentious topics, there is no sign Baldwin intends to reach a consistent position on whether or not the Constitution applies to individuals, institutions, or both.
So Baldwin doesn’t favor the First Amendment’s application to organizations that make political contributions, but she also doesn’t favor the First Amendment’s application to individual religious freedom. Well, at least she’s consistent.
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The New York Times’s Michael Schmidt has been doing some excellent reporting on the Hillary Clinton email scandal, but one has to wonder if his editors are holding him back. Buried on page A14 of today’s paper is a story that begins as follows:
Hillary Rodham Clinton told reporters last month that the memos about Libya she received while secretary of state from Sidney Blumenthal, a longtime adviser whom the Obama administration had barred her from hiring, had been “unsolicited.”
But email records that Mrs. Clinton, according to officials briefed on the matter, apparently failed to turn over to the State Department last fall show that she repeatedly encouraged Mr. Blumenthal to “keep ’em coming,” as she said in an August 2012 reply to a memo from him, which she called “another keeper.”
All or part of 15 Libya-related emails she sent to Mr. Blumenthal were missing from the trove of 30,000 that Mrs. Clinton provided to the State Department last year, as well as from the 847 that the department in turn provided in February to the House committee investigating the 2012 attacks in Benghazi, Libya. The emails were reviewed by a reporter.
Much more interesting than the content of the emails, though, is the confirmation that Mrs. Clinton was not telling the truth when she said the following at her March 10 press conference:
After I left office, the State Department asked former secretaries of state for our assistance in providing copies of work-related emails from our personal accounts. I responded right away and provided all my emails that could possibly be work-related, which totalled roughly 55,000 printed pages, even though I knew that the State Department already had the vast majority of them. We went through a thorough process to identify all of my work-related emails and deliver them to the State Department.
Schmidt had already broken on Friday (albeit back on page A18) the story that “15 emails … were missing from records that she has turned over.” But the even more damning detail is mentioned only in passing in both stories — in the third paragraph of today’s, and the sixth paragraph of Friday’s, to wit:
Of the 15 Blumenthal emails in question, only nine were missing in their entirety. Printouts of the other six were turned over with parts missing, which would mean they were identified as official emails and then redacted by somebody in Mrs. Clinton’s employ. That points even more clearly to an active effort at withholding evidence than do entirely missing emails, which might be put down, however unconvincingly, to mere sloppiness.
The full set of 15 emails, Schmidt reports, was “discovered after Mr. Blumenthal turned over to the House committee investigating the Benghazi attacks his own batch of Libya-related email correspondence with Mrs. Clinton.” If Mrs. Clinton told the truth when she said she had destroyed the server that held the emails—a big if, though the assertion doesn’t strain credulity as far as some of her other claims—then there is no way of knowing the extent of the coverup.
And there never will be. More missing emails may turn up as the committee subpoenas other witnesses, but only if the committee knows whom to call and if Mrs. Clinton’s other correspondents didn’t follow her lead and shred the evidence.
What does Mrs. Clinton have to say about all this? She seldom deigns to talk to reporters, and Schmidt is no exception, but his Friday piece includes an official denial:
Nick Merrill, a spokesman for Mrs. Clinton, who is running for president, said that she had given the State Department “over 55,000 pages of materials,” including “all emails in her possession from Mr. Blumenthal.”
That’s obviously false, unless by “in her possession” Merrill means now, after the obliteration of the server. Yet today’s Schmidt story seems to accept the Merrill claim:
In sifting through and producing such a large number of emails, it stands to reason that some would be missed. But the fact that some of the missing correspondence contained expressions of gratitude and encouragement to Mr. Blumenthal is being seized on by Republicans, who plan to use the apparent contradiction, and the missing emails, to raise new questions about Mrs. Clinton’s credibility.
That paragraph more than any other is what makes us suspect Schmidt is the victim of agenda-driven editing on behalf of Mrs. Clinton’s campaign. The first sentence is laughably credulous. The awkward second sentence attempts to frame Mrs. Clinton’s scandalous behavior as a mere partisan dispute — as if the new details about the coverup would not raise “questions about Mrs. Clinton’s credibility” without the mediation of Republicans.
Today’s Schmidt story contains another denial from Merrill:
A spokesman for Mrs. Clinton, Nick Merrill, said, “The idea that this runs counter to the assertion that the emails were unsolicited is a leap.”
“Mr. Blumenthal began emailing of his own accord,” Mr. Merrill said. “Polite acknowledgments are not tantamount to solicitation. And I think that any reasonable person who has ever had an email exchange would agree.”
Schmidt quotes two of the “polite acknowledgments”: “Greetings from Kabul! And thanks for keeping this stuff coming!” and “This strains credulity based on what I know. Any more info about it?”
Let us acknowledge that Merrill has a bit of a point here. “Polite” seems to understate Mrs. Clinton’s enthusiasm, but one could argue these aren’t quite “solicitations.” If Mrs. Clinton were on trial for perjury over the statement that Blumenthal’s emails were unsolicited, and we were on the jury, we’d vote to acquit if those two quotes were the extent of the evidence. There’s enough ambiguity to leave some reasonable doubt about her guilt.
Is that really the ethical standard to which the Democrats plan to hold their candidate for president? Just kidding, we know it is.
Missing from both of Schmidt’s pieces is any explanation from the Clinton camp of the six emails that were redacted before being turned over, which are very strong evidence of obstruction of justice. Didn’t it occur to Schmidt to ask Merrill about these? Maybe Merrill stonewalled, but that would itself be of interest to the reader. Or did the no-comment get lost somewhere in the editing process?
So Clinton turned over emails that had been edited before they were turned over. That is what the lawyers call “obstruction of justice.” And the Times is once again covering up for Hillary.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 