We begin with this unusual event: Today in 1978, the members of Aerosmith bailed out 30 of their fans who were arrested at their concert in Fort Wayne, Ind., for smoking marijuana:
Britain’s number one single today in 1987:
Today in 1992 on NBC-TV’s “Saturday Night Live,” Sinead O’Connor torpedoed her own career:
Today in 1953, Victor Borge’s “Comedy in Music” opened on Broadway, closing 849 performances later. (Pop.)
Today in 1960, Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs released “Stay,” which would become the shortest number one single of all time:
The number one single today in 1965:
The Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza bemoans a poll:
And now for today’s least shocking statistic: Just four in 10 Americans say they have a “great deal” or a “fair amount” of trust in the media to report the news fairly and accurately, according to new data from Gallup. That matches historic lows the media also “achieved” in 2012 and 2014.
And while Republicans trust the media less than Democrats do, the numbers across all party affiliations are in rapid decline from even a decade ago.
There’s little evidence that the whole trusting-the-media thing is going to get more popular; people under 50 years old are far more skeptical of the idea of media as fair arbiters than those over 50.
GOOD!, some of you will, undoubtedly shout — particularly if you are either a conservative Republican or liberal Democrat. You deserve what you get! Your years of lies and agenda-pushing have finally caught up to you. WE ARE ON TO YOU.
To which I say: Wrong.
I don’t say that to be a jerk. I understand that many people who feel passionately about the rightness of one party or the other (and plenty of people who don’t) are simply convinced that the media is pursuing some sort of narrative that somehow furthers our collective “goals.” (If you were in the media, you would know we aren’t even close to organized enough to orchestrate such a grand plan. But I digress.) And I will grant that, like in any industry, there are some bad apples and some high-profile mistakes that people seize on as evidence that their pet theory of the media (too liberal/ too conservative) is correct.
But, I believe really strongly that the decline in trust in the media is primarily attributable to partisans — whether in politics or in the media — who have a vested interest in casting the press as hopelessly biased. What better way for liberal or conservative talk radio to (a) lure listeners and (b) stoke outrage than to insist that the mainstream media is lying to you? What better way for politicians to raise money from partisans already skeptical about the media than to say the media isn’t telling the truth?
The rise of outside partisan groups — on the left and the right — has coincided with a bumper crop of partisan-first media outlets designed to foment rage and exasperation with the mainstream media’s alleged missteps. It’s good business for them — and just plain terrible for the American public.
The belief — pushed by these groups and outlets — that there are no referees (or even rules) in all of this makes disagreeing without being disagreeable is virtually impossible. The idea of reasonable people disagreeing has also been laid to rest or damn near it. The realities of our modern political dialogue — if you can use that word to describe it — is that people who disagree with your point of view are at best dumb and at worst purposely misunderstanding things. From those conclusions about motive, nothing positive can come.
You can think the media thinks too highly of itself. (We do.) You can ask who appointed us the refs. (Fair.) And, you can be skeptical — in fact, you should be skeptical — of something being reported that smells fishy to you. (We, as humans, can and do get stuff wrong.) But what you should not wish for is that the mainstream media disappear or be rendered irrelevant.
Whether you like or agree with an independent media all the time — breaking news: you won’t! — you should value an entity that does its best to hold those in power accountable. Without such a force, you would like society a whole lot less. And our society would be a whole lot less.
All it took was one comment to blow up Cillizza’s premise:
A brief review of the Washington Post’s headlines this morning on its website reveals the following headlines:
“Ted Cruz can’t win in the Senate”
“Inept GOP attacks on Planned Parenthood”
“Warren wins another battle in war on Wall Street”
“How Elizabeth Warren picked a fight with Brookings — and won”
“Top Republican suffers disastrous outbreak of candor about Hillary Benghazi probes”
“Why Republicans are scared of everything and everyone right now”
“The Republican race to offend”Cillizza is correct – partisans are the problem. He just hasn’t identified the right ones. The problem is the partisans within the MSM, not those who criticize them.
Although this additional comment was amusing …
“Print media decided to make a headline look like BuzzFeed clickbait. You’ll never believe what happens next.”
… as was, in a more black-humor sort of way …
I’m surprised the trust is as high as it is.
… while this comment breaks open the media closet door …
What a self-important, thin-skinned, delusional puff piece. Not for one second does Cilizza grant that maybe just maybe his critics have a point. He acknowledges the media’s self importance and lack of accountability but not how close journalists are socially to their sources; not the intense drive for profit first; not the demands on their time and fewer newsroom resources that hamstring their reporting; not the bizarre fetish with balance instead of factual truth (especially I’m science policy coverage); not group think; and not the fact that general, national, and political reporters write on topics they know nothing about.
… and this comment grasps something Cillizza apparently can’t:
Dear Mr. Cillizza – to you I say: Wrong. I would agree that partisans on the left and right have taken unjustified swipes at you, but that doesn’t lie at the heart of the problem. The heart of the problem is the decline of journalism. TV journalism went over to the entertainment side of TV and print journalism has gone ever more yellow to “compete.” Today’s “journalists” look for the quick, easy and showy story. You all tend to follow the latest “squirrel!!” sighting. You’ve lost such a simple thing as memory. One reason Jon Stewart was so popular with folks my age (can you say “Medicare”?) in spite of the often juvenile humor was that he and his researchers actually compared what someone said today with what that person said last week, and last year. With the death of Tim Russert (spelling?), the last of the true journalists was gone. You want respect. EARN IT!
Russert, of NBC-TV’s “Meet the Press,” formerly worked for Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill. O’Neill was not a Republican, and neither was Russert. And yet Russert asked tough questions of all “Meet the Press” guests, even if he agreed with them politically. Not nearly enough journalists who cover politics, at any level, do that today. (Most are too fixated on the race — who’s leading, who’s rising, who’s fading — and not nearly enough on candidates’ positions on the issues beyond campaign-supplied generalities.)
For Cillizza to complain about our culture’s inability for people to disagree without being disagreeable is rich considering the media’s contribution to our cultural debate debasement. One concludes from opinions printed on pages other than opinion pages (this means you, Chris Rickert of the Wisconsin State Journal) as well as online blogs on publication websites that there is little actual reporting going on anymore at daily newspapers. To do the boring stuff like reporting is apparently beyond many journalists anymore, including Cillizza.
When I read Cillizza’s blog there were 99 comments. They were not all from conservatives; they came from the other end of the spectrum as well. Not one comment attempted to defend Cillizza’s point of view. That seems to indicate that readers find Cillizza’s premise that people have been trained by political types to not trust the media absurd.
There are two schools of thought about media political bias. The first, which is clearly wrong, is that the media is biased toward the right because media outlets are businesses. The business side of the media proves Lenin’s observation that capitalists would sell you the rope with which to hang them.
The second, and more correct, school of thought about media political bias is that journalists go into this line of work thinking they can change the world, so they’re liberals. In a sense many journalists are like politicians who go into politics not to make money, but to gain power.
(As long as we’re talking about the faults of my line of work: The bigger problem to me with journalism is that the media is biased toward incumbents. The media deserves a lot of blame for incumbents’ ability to get reelected because the media reports what a politician does or says, too often at face value, without challenging the politician or presenting an opposite point, or points, of view. Unrelated to that is the additional flaw of too many journalists being more interested in advancing their careers than doing their jobs where they are.)
My next comment does not defend Cillizza’s point of view, but … there are media consumers who criticize media reporting that does not conform to their own worldview. That, however, has been the case as long as the media has existed. I suppose there were readers of Poor Richard’s Almanack who despised its publisher, Ben Franklin, for being wrong about the British. That is why every community of any size used to have newspapers that had such labels as “Democrat” or “Republican” in their names, so the readers would know what they were getting, instead of the more reporting-focused “Journal” or “Gazette” or “Times.” (As it is, Wisconsin newspapers include the Darlington Republican Journal, the Mineral Point Democrat–Tribune, and the Muscoda Progressive, though arguments in favor of those party labels appear only in letters to their editors. Apparently when The Capital Times started publishing in Madison the word “Communist” had not been invented yet.) Even if the labels weren’t blatant, in almost every market with multiple newspapers, the locals knew which paper touted which political cause.
To repeat what I’ve written here before: The concept of an impartial media unconnected to a political party or cause is only 100 or so years old in this country. Perhaps that’s the result of the early days of radio and TV news, two mediums that supposedly are owned by the public. Clearly a majority of media consumers doesn’t see the so-called legacy media — daily newspapers, radio and TV — as impartial and unbiased, or even fair.
As for whether that legacy media is holding those in power accountable, that is clearly not the case. (If a journalist’s default position was 100 percent cynicism about an elected official at any level, the journalist would be right more often than not.) As for whether we would like today’s society even less were it not for journalists … what’s to like now?
So — who had the Russians bombing Syria and the Palestinians voiding all deals with Israel in the pool on Tuesday night before going to bed?
“News,” a coinage of the late Middle Ages, is a shortened version of the phrase “new things.” And these two pieces of news genuinely define the word. They’re events that hadn’t happened before and immediately changed what will happen going forward.
What’s amazing is that they came as a surprise, since both have been foreshadowed for weeks in the case of Russia and a couple of years in the case of the Palestinian Authority. And yet they did.
Presidential candidate Marco Rubio literally predicted the former during the Sept. 16 GOP debate.
“Here’s what you’re going to see in the next few weeks,” Rubio said. “The Russians will begin to fly combat missions in that region, not just targeting ISIS, but in order to prop up Assad.”
As for the latter, Palestinian Authority strongman Mahmoud Abbas has been taking all sorts of unilateral actions that effectively gut the legal obligations placed on the PA by the 1993 Oslo accords. We even knew that Abbas was considering a move to void Oslo — but when he did it on Wednesday, it still had the power to shock.
We should be beyond this now. Surely, if the last few years have taught us anything, it’s that anything can happen. Think of all the events no one saw coming even though there was plenty of evidence they might happen:
The week before the 2012 election was dominated by a freak hurricane that flooded the Northeast and froze the presidential race.
The economy of Greece melted down, threatening not only its own future but that of the common European currency.
China’s economy, the engine of worldwide growth, suddenly slowed down in a manner that took practically every bank and banker and hedge funder and financial analyst aback.
Last summer, 65,000 children from South America suddenly appeared inside America’s southern border.
Also last summer, Russia invaded Ukraine, and for the first time since World War II one European nation seized control of the territory of another.Here at home, a police shooting and the death of two men in custody led to civic disruptions of a sort unseen in decades.
And, most astonishing, is this:
Imagine going back in time to tell Barack Obama that his failure to strike Syria after its use of chemical weapons crossed his “red line” in 2013 would result in the creation of ISIS and eventually be the motive force behind a massive migration crisis that is likely to alter the destiny of Europe over the next century.
Surely, if he knew now what he didn’t know then, Obama would have bombed Syria back to the Stone Age rather than find himself and the world beset by the multifarious crises he is facing now.
We continue to have conversations about the politics of the near future — the 2016 elections — as though we know what sorts of things will be discussed when people actually go to the polls. We have no idea, but the possibilities are endless:
What if a mild economic downturn causes the state of Illinois or the city of Chicago effectively to go bankrupt?
What if two Supreme Court justices either die or announce their immediate retirement?
What if a catastrophe shuts down one of the two train tunnels connecting New York and New Jersey for an extended period of time, thus creating a commuting and commerce crisis in the world’s banking center?
None of these is likely to happen. But if they don’t, three other things will, and they will be the major discussion points around which we will be choosing our next president.
Oh, and if you think this Syria news marks the high-water news mark for Vladimir Putin and Russia, you better think again.
Given how Barack Obama has already mishandled our foreign policy, you should be afraid.
And I cannot believe I am quoting Piers Morgan, but …
Vladimir Putin is a monstrous, ruthless, power-hungry political and military assassin.
Let me get that off my chest immediately.
I find much of what this former KGB agent does on behalf of the Russian people self-servingly repellent.
But when it comes to leadership, he makes Barack Obama look like a naïve, timid schoolboy.
And on the specific issue of ISIS and how to stop the terror group’s surge through Syria, he’s right and Obama’s wrong. …
I was all in favour of taking out Assad when the Syrian crisis first erupted five years ago.
Like Saddam. Mubarak and Gaddafi, he appeared to be a dinosaur despot eeking out the last vestiges of tyrannical power in a country which, as so much of the Middle East, seemed to crave freedom and democracy.
Assad’s use of chemical weapons against his own people, many of them women and children, was a disgusting abomination which comfortably crossed President Obama’s infamous ‘red line’.
But Obama cried wolf and did nothing, an act of shocking cowardice which has now come back to haunt him and America. …
In the five years that the Syrian war has raged, the situation has dramatically changed all over the region.
The overthrow of so many dictators, far from bringing peace and harmony, has simply created a chaotic, violent vacuum through which ISIS has emerged like a fast-mutating virulent virus.
The rebels who won so much sympathy and support in Syria at the start are not the ‘rebels’ we see now.
The new Syrian rebel army has become a hotbed of terrorism, much of it governed by ISIS.
The good guys are now the bad guys, and the bad guys suddenly don’t seem quite so bad by comparison.
It’s a hideously complex and difficult problem for which there is no simple solution.
But the primary job of any world leader is to defend his or her people, and to do so with a clarity of vision and policy.
Frankly, I haven’t got a clue what Obama’s plan is for Syria or ISIS.
I do. It’s called surrender.
One month ago, I did a radio doubleheader Friday, starting with Wisconsin Public Radio’s Joy Cardin Week in Review at 8 a.m. I mentioned a month ago that I always seem to make WPR appearances around holidays, in that case, the start of Socialist Workers Day — I mean Labor Day — weekend.
I am doing that again Friday, with the added feature of a third radio appearance, another football game Saturday afternoon. The holiday in this case, I suppose, is St. Francis Day, the traditional day for pet blessings at churches that recognize saints — in this case, St. Francis of Assisi, the patron saint of animals. (As opposed to St. Francis de Sales, who is, believe it or not, the patron saint of journalists and writers. And you thought the patron saint of journalists was Beelzebub.)
As always, Wisconsin Public Radio’s Ideas Network can be heard on WHA (970 AM) in Madison, WLBL (930 AM) in Auburndale, WHID (88.1 FM) in Green Bay, WHWC (88.3 FM) in Menomonie, WRFW (88.7 FM) in River Falls, WEPS (88.9 FM) in Elgin, Ill., WHAA (89.1 FM) in Adams, WHBM (90.3 FM) in Park Falls, WHLA (90.3 FM) in La Crosse, WRST (90.3 FM) in Oshkosh, WHAD (90.7 FM) in Delafield, W215AQ (90.9 FM) in Middleton, KUWS (91.3 FM) in Superior, WHHI (91.3 FM) in Highland, WSHS (91.7 FM) in Sheboygan, WHDI (91.9 FM) in Sister Bay, WLBL (91.9 FM) in Wausau, W275AF (102.9 FM) in Ashland, W300BM (107.9 FM) in Madison, and of course online at www.wpr.org.
Eleven hours later, I will be announcing high school football, followed by more high school football featuring the nation’s first two-state co-op football team 19 hours after that.
I present the number one single today in 1977 to demonstrate that popularity and quality are not always synonymous:
The number one single today in 1983:
Today in 2004, the Lord Mayor of Melbourne officially opened AC/DC Lane, named for the band, to the bagpipes from …
Birthdays begin with actor Richard Harris, who “sang” …
… then you must be referring to communist presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, according to Grant Phillips:
Senator Bernie Sanders recently published an op-ed in the Huffington Post where he makes numerous claims about the economy. In typical leftist political theater, his narratives are either grossly misrepresented or outright lies, nor does he include a single citation for his wild claims.
From “stagnant middle class” and “income inequality” to “child poverty” and “evil corporations”, his analysis employs one step thinking and over-generalization to draw incomplete conclusions. I will directly address some of his specific claims.
Income inequality is one of today’s most popular economic myths derived from the misconception that wealth and income are fixed pies. Sanders makes the usual claim of the “1%” having a disproportionate amount of both.
Economic inequality is largely overstated through aggregate statistics, nor is there a connection between inequality levels and overall economic well-being.
In a paper for Columbia University, economists Emmanuel Saez and Wojciech Kopczuk analyzed wealth shares from 1916 to 2000 using more inclusive and exact definitions of income and wealth. They found that “there has been a sharp reduction in wealth concentration throughout the 20thcentury”. Around the 1920s, the top 1% held about 40% of wealth, but that has remained about 20% in the last few decades. Saez, who worked with Thomas Piketty at one point, postulates that, in 2004, the top 1% held about 18% of total wealth, which is a historic low.
Robert Haig and Henry Simons developed the Haig-Simon metric. Their measurement includes: wages/salaries, transfer payments (such as employer insurance), gifts of inheritance, income in-kind, and net increases in the real value of assets.
In a 2013 paper, economists found that Haigs-Simon is an attractive standard for calculating wealth and income because of its inclusive definition. By employing Haigs-Simon, observed growth of income inequality within tax brackets is dramatically reduced.
Based on the inclusive metric, top income shares have not significantly increased in the last 20 years, and most income growth has been in the bottom 80% of earners. Also, by incorporating accrued capital gains and not just IRS-realized capital gains, economic inequality quickly dissipates.
Leftists such as Sanders often cite the Gini Coefficient, which is the measure of a country’s inequality. The United States ranks next to African countries, while egalitarian Norway ranks next to Afghanistan. The Gini Coefficient might measure inequality to a degree, but, if anything, it proves that income inequality is not associated with economic well-being.
Bernie Sanders must not care to read further. Instead, he bases his claim off incomplete data by adjusting the CPI for inflation, which overstates it, and then excludes fringe benefits, which havedoubled since 1970. Why would you when pandering to the base is more profitable?
“Income inequality” is expectedly followed by claims of a “shrinking middle class”. In reality, however, the middle class has “shrunk” upwards to higher incomes.
According to Census Bureau data compiled by the American Enterprise Institution, 61% of families qualified as middle-class income in 1967. They define “middle class” as $25K to $75K per family per year. In the same year, upper-income families, or over $75K, only made up about 16% of families.
Fast forward to 2009 and things have dramatically changed. We have 43% of families in middle class incomes and 38% of families in the upper class. It’s also worth mentioning that lower incomes declined from 22.8% to 17% in that same time period.
A well-respected paper published by NBER further illustrates the increasing wealth and income going to the middle class. According to their findings: “using our broadest measure of available resources – post-tax, post-transfer size-adjusted household income – median income growth of individual Americans improved to 36.7% from 1979 to 2007”.
In other words, by expanding the definition of “income” and “wealth”, much like in the Haig-Simon metric, the narrative changes dramatically. Such a narrative, however, doesn’t make for vote-inducing rhetoric.
Sanders also claims that alongside the “decline of middle class”, there has been a decline in overall economic mobility. Nothing could be further from the truth.
A recent study published by Harvard measures the long run trend of economic mobility over the last twenty years, which has been difficult to accomplish due to data constraints. Michigan State economist Gary Solon said the Harvard study is the most comprehensive and in-depth research on the subject.
According to their findings, “percentile rank-based measures of intergenerational mobility have remained extreme stable”. They even address income inequality and note that the “top 1% income shares are not strongly associated with mobility”. Measures of social mobility have remained stable in the second half of the 20th century. The rungs on the ladder have grown further apart (wealth and income have increased), but the chances of climbing the ladder have not changed.
In Sanders’s own words, “children go hungry every day”. We have another misrepresentation of reality.
According to a USDA survey, only 3% of Americans do not have enough food to eat or express concern over their next meal. Interestingly enough, 93% of people living in low-income areas reported taking a car to the grocery store, either as driver of passenger. That, however, does not coincide with the Senator’s narrative.
“Child poverty” is grossly inflated by how it is defined. In 2013, the income threshold for public school lunch programs was $43,567 for a four person family, or 185% above the poverty line. Sanders claims that “children go hungry” when they only appear to be going hungry simply because their families qualify for lunch programs. The details in a Southern Education Foundation study note that the $43,567 income level is used to measure “child poverty” in public schools, thus grossly embellishing the Senator’s rhetoric.
From Bernie Sanders’s article, he finds it “absurd” that, in 1952, corporate taxes were 32% of federal revenue and, in 2013, are only 11%. This, however, only states the share of revenue from corporations and has nothing to do with the actual corporate tax rate. During that time, federal revenue has obviously increased.
By digging further, the amount of corporate tax revenue has increased 46.5% during that time – from $186B to $273B (2013 USD; adjusted for inflation). Furthermore, by imposing such a high rate, the U.S. is really encouraging money to leave for more financially appealing countries. In fact, the worldwide corporate tax system forces corporations to pay twice – first to a foreign country and second to the IRS. If Bernie Sanders wants money to stay home, he should reduce the corporate tax rate and simplify the tax code.
Sanders makes other unsubstantiated claims. He slams student loan practices despite most of it being held by the federal government. He repeats the minimum wage narrative of “fixing poverty” with no regard for the voluminous empirical evidence to the contrary. He fears “seniors cannot afford their medication” when seniors are fourteen times wealthier than the younger generation. He claims the rich don’t pay their “fair share” when, according to the CBO, the highest quintile of income earners pay almost 70% of federal taxes.
Much like Elizabeth Warren, who I have also debunked in the past, Senator Bernie Sanders perpetuates numerous economic myths that are wholly disingenuous. Although observable on the surface, a more in-depth analysis provides substantial evidence that these supposed victimized groups have benefited from economic growth.
Apparently Sanders has an insufficiently zealous voting record against guns, though he denies he is insufficiently in favor of gun control. Perhaps Sanders deserves credit for representing his constituents instead of his ideological fellow travelers on this one issue.
There also are those who laud Sanders for being honest about his wacky lefty political worldview. Apparently either our politics or our culture has degraded so much that a politician who tells (his version of) the truth, though he is wrong on nearly every issue, deserves praise.
You have read George Santayana’s observation that those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
If it seems that Donald Trump is a creation of the late 20th century, well, maybe he isn’t, according to Michael Barone:
His father Fred Trump made millions building apartments in Brooklyn and Queens. It didn’t hurt, when it came to land assembly and public subsidies, that he was a key supporter of Brooklyn machine Democrats and a close friend and ally of Abraham Beame, city controller in 1964 and later mayor.
A decade later, Donald Trump, at 28, basically took over the family business and focused it elsewhere. New York City, plagued by violent crime and high taxes, lost 1 million people in the 1970s. Building apartments in the outer boroughs was looking like a sucker’s game. Getting a toehold in Manhattan at the market’s trough, to profit when it glittered again, looked like — and was — a winner.
It helped that Beame was elected mayor in 1973 and that Hugh Carey — his major financial backers when he was an underdog in the primary were his brother and the Trump family — was elected governor in 1974. Donald Trump wrangled a stake in the Commodore Hotel next to Grand Central Station using, as big developers do, OPM — other people’s money — with key assists from the Beame and Carey administrations.
Trump’s lavish self-praise and wild unpredictability, masking his long developed political acumen, makes him seem a unique political figure in American history. But maybe not completely unique.
Newt Gingrich compares him to Andrew Jackson, rich and smarter than generally thought, but regarded as a dangerous wild man by his predecessors Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and James Monroe. Justifiably: As president Jackson abolished the Bank of the United States, which the latter two supported and ruthlessly shipped the civilized tribes west in a way they never contemplated.
Another comparison is to Huey Long, the Louisiana governor and senator whose Every Man a King became a national bestseller. Franklin Roosevelt regarded him as a dangerous, possibly fascist rival. New Deal historians say FDR supported redistributionist taxes and Social Security to outflank him.
Long was a brilliant man who built a Mississippi River bridge, a state capitol and Louisiana State University in just months’ time. It would be tantalizing to know what voters at the time thought of him. Unfortunately, he was murdered in September 1935, a month before Dr. Gallup conducted the first random sample scientific poll.
I have another nominee as precedent, one most will consider unlikely, a man on that podium in November 1964: Nelson Rockefeller. He’s considered an establishment Republican, but he operated entirely, as the title of Richard Norton Smith’s magisterial and hugely readabale biography says, On His Own Terms.
He was sometimes lavishly liberal (his Medicaid program spent one-quarter of national funds), sometimes harshly conservative (mandatory sentences for drug offenses). He spent enormous sums building Albany’s Capitol Mall and a state university system intended to rival California’s. He raised taxes so much that someone said he spends the people’s money as if it were his own.
Rockefeller was richer than Trump, a more gifted art and architecture patron and less given to boasting. He had a much longer public career, from running FDR’s Latin American desk to being Gerald Ford’s vice president. But through all that he was regarded by insiders as an unguided missile, not subject to institutional constraint, seeking power to do whatever he wanted.
The number one song today in 1957:
Today in 1967, bowing down to popular music, the BBC began its Radio 1:
Obviously Republicans cannot bring back former U.S. Rep. Jack Kemp (R–New York) from the dead, but Morton Kondracke and Fred Barnes argue a Kemp-like candidate is needed to run for president:
Jack Kemp never became president, but the country desperately needs a leader like him now. When Kemp died in 2009, two themes dominated tributes to his career as a star quarterback, congressman, cabinet secretary and candidate for vice president and president. Conservatives called him one of the most influential politicians of the 20th century who never made it to the White House. He was “among the most important Congressmen in U.S. history,” as a Wall Street Journal editorial put it. Liberals declared that the Republican Party needed, but didn’t have, a Kemp: a leader who cared about the poor, who wanted to make the GOP attractive to minorities and working-class voters, who never went negative and regularly worked across party lines.
Both evaluations were accurate. And both are relevant as the GOP struggles to find its 2016 presidential candidate. Republican voters—Democrats and independents, too—are looking for someone who, instead of raging at the status quo, will shake up Washington, make the economy grow again and restore hope in America’s future. A candidate working from the Kemp model could do all of that.
Kemp was a pivotal political leader because, as the foremost exponent of supply-side economics, he persuaded his party and later Ronald Reagan to adopt his tax-cut plan, known as “Kemp-Roth.” The top tax rate on individual income dropped in 1981 to 50% from 70%. Then Kemp helped pioneer tax reform, and the top rate fell in 1986 to 28%. Middle-income taxpayers enjoyed similar cuts.
After an era of “stagflation” and malaise in the 1970s, Reaganomics produced more than two decades of prosperity, restored American morale, undermined the Soviet empire and converted much of the world, for a time at least, to democratic capitalism. Kemp deserves a significant amount of credit.
Kemp first got into tax policy to help his suffering Rust Belt constituents in Buffalo, N.Y. He was all about economic growth, and believed in government policy to encourage work, savings, investment and productivity. Kemp insisted growth was the key to economic strength and national unity. Robust growth would help everyone rise—rich, middle class and poor. In a stagnant or contracting economy, he said, “politics becomes the art of pitting class against class: rich against poor, white against black, capital against labor, Sunbelt against Snowbelt, old against young.”
The present era resembles the miserable 1970s. Growth is glacial. Incomes are stagnant. The country’s mood is sour. Divisions are widening. In 1979 only 12% of Americans thought the nation was headed in the right direction. Now it’s around 30%. And politicians are pitting class against class: the “1%” against the “47%”; white workers against Mexican immigrants. The public is furious with Washington, and no wonder. Polarized Republicans and Democrats do nothing for them.
Jack Kemp shook things up—but with dramatic ideas about policy, not by pitting outsiders against insiders. The Republican establishment resented the gall of a backbencher’s butting into tax policy. Democrats hated tax-cutting, even though Kemp kept reminding them that President John F. Kennedy first proposed lowering the top rate to 70% from 90%. Special interests were furious when Kemp proposed reducing their tax breaks. He once wrote Reagan’s deficit-hawk budget director, David Stockman, demanding to know why Mr. Stockman wanted to raise taxes on working people and cut food stamps, Medicaid and Head Start, but keep subsidies and tax breaks in place for Boeing, Exxon and Gulf Oil.
What Republicans need today, following the Kemp model, is big ideas, not demagoguery. They ought to be debating the best way to restore growth, prosperity and hope—what voters care about most—not insulting one another over appearances and poll standings.
Some candidates are trying. Jeb Bush, Chris Christie and Marco Rubio have put forward interesting economic plans. Even Donald Trump says he will have a tax plan shortly. Mr. Bush’s tax reform initiative, with its top rate of 28%, is especially Kemp-like. Unlike Kemp, today’s Republicans can’t ignore deficits, debt and the need for entitlement reform, all drags on growth. But if they followed Kemp, they’d cut farm subsidies, ethanol requirements, sugar quotas, carried interest and other corporate welfare at the same time as they trim Social Security and Medicare benefits.
Kemp also shook things up for the reasons liberals extolled him. He infuriated Republicans when he opposed California’s anti-immigrant Proposition 187 in 1994, and he always favored, besides border control, a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants with clean records. He was the polar opposite of Donald Trump, while sharing Mr. Trump’s high energy. Kemp never disparaged opponents, even when they deserved it—as Bill Clinton did on political ethics in 1996, when Kemp ran for vice president and refused to be Bob Dole’s attack dog.
Many Republicans thought he was too fixated on the plight of the poor. What he advocated was a war on poverty by conservative means: education choice, and lower taxes and fewer regulations to attract investment to blighted neighborhoods. He wanted welfare policies to be, as he said, “a trampoline, not a trap.” But most of all, he demonstrated that he cared about the poor. Some 2016 candidates do, too. More should.
Kemp thought that the GOP should, and could, once again be the “party of Lincoln.” Being pro-civil rights was only part of it. It was famously said that Kemp, as a football player, had showered with more African-Americans than most Republicans had ever met. But Kemp also shared Lincoln’s other big idea, that the essence of America was the “right to rise”—for everybody—through talent and effort. Neither Lincoln nor Kemp favored income redistribution, but they both thought government had a role in helping people climb the ladder. Lincoln favored public investment in infrastructure and education. Kemp wanted lower tax rates.
The Republican Party and the country do need another Jack Kemp. The GOP debates and primaries ought to be about finding one.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 