CNN’s Trump Zeitgeist

At the gym tonight CNN was on one of the TVs and I saw that Anderson Cooper hosted a panel of 6-8 people to discuss the increasing likelihood the Donald Trump was going to be the GOP nominee. I wasn’t listening, I just overheard snippets and glanced at their clearly worried faces from time to time. I did get a mood sense from the discussion though.

Donald Trump. Will he be the GOP nominee? (Several seconds of silence). Everyone talking at once.

Kasich, he still has a chance…

Maybe Rubio, he’s got a lot of support…

Trump…KKK!…high negatives…brokered convention…(Me thinking: Rip, tear, shred, say anything to destroy him. Also, they’re desperate to tie him to the KKK.)

The panelists had a ‘This can’t be happening, there must be some way out, this can’t be real.’ attitude.  My sense was that Trump as the GOP nominee leaves the media in a state somewhere between shock and panic. Is it because, try as they may, they can’t seem to influence this election one way or another, that they’re losing their influence and role as gatekeepers? Or do they simply fear that a populist Trumpalanche might defeat either Democrat in the election? Or do they fear Trump in particular because he doesn’t fear them, and gets away with it, not only unscathed, but ever more popular? Whatever the reason, it was an interesting snapshot at how worried they are.

 

A Preference Cascade is Forming.

trump

Glenn Reynolds has known about this for a long time.

“This illustrates, in a mild way, the reason why totalitarian regimes collapse so suddenly. (Click here for a more complex analysis of this and related
issues)
. Such regimes have little legitimacy, but they spend a lot of effort making sure that citizens don’t realize the extent to which their fellow-citizens dislike the regime. If the secret police and the censors are doing their job, 99% of the populace can hate the regime and be ready to revolt against it – but no revolt will occur because no one realizes that everyone else feels the same way.

Peggy Noonan has written about it several times.

But in my experience any nonpolitical person on the street, when asked who will win, not only knows but gets a look as if you’re teasing him. Trump, they say.

I had such a conversation again Tuesday with a friend who repairs shoes in a shop on Lexington Avenue. Jimmy asked me, conversationally, what was going to happen. I deflected and asked who he thinks is going to win. “Troomp!” He’s a very nice man, an elderly, old-school Italian-American, but I saw impatience flick across his face: Aren’t you supposed to know these things?

In America now only normal people are capable of seeing the obvious.

This is something I have been looking at for a while.

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Quote of the Day

Vote ONLY for someone who has failed and has LEARNED from failure. This limits the field to Trump, Cruz and Carson.

Chet Richards, in a response to this post at Belmont Club

Conditional Probabilities

Daniel Henninger in the WSJ:

Still, it takes a lot to believe that Donald Trump could win more electoral-college votes than Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders and that his Supreme Court appointments would have Justice Scalia’s respect for the lives of his voters. Mr. Trump’s nominations for anything sit as a mystery.
 
Before Justice Scalia’s death, some might have said the Trump option was a risk worth running. The risk now has become too high.

He has a point.

When Hillary Clinton Killed Feminism

“Seeing Albright, the first female secretary of state, give cover to President Clinton was a low point in women’s rights. As was the New York Times op-ed by Steinem, arguing that Lewinsky’s will was not violated, so no feminist principles were violated. What about Clinton humiliating his wife and daughter and female cabinet members? What about a president taking advantage of a gargantuan power imbalance with a 22-year-old intern? What about imperiling his party with reckless behavior that put their feminist agenda at risk?

It rang hollow after the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas hearings. When it was politically beneficial, the feminists went after Thomas for bad behavior and painted Hill as a victim. And later, when it was politically beneficial, they defended Bill’s bad behavior and stayed mute as Clinton allies mauled his dalliances as trailer trash and stalkers.

The same feminists who were outraged at the portrayal of Hill by David Brock — then a Clinton foe but now bizarrely head of one of her “super PACs” — as “a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty,” hypocritically went along when Hillary and other defenders of Bill used that same aspersion against Lewinsky.

Hillary knew that she could count on the complicity of feminist leaders and Democratic women in Congress who liked Bill’s progressive policies on women. And that’s always the ugly Faustian bargain with the Clintons, not only on the sex cover-ups but the money grabs: You can have our bright public service side as long as you accept our dark sketchy side.

Young women today, though, are playing by a different set of rules. And they don’t like the Clintons setting themselves above the rules.”

NYT: When Hillary Clinton Killed Feminism

First, let me say I’m stunned I read this call-out of the Clinton’s hypocrisy in the NYT of all places from none other than Maureen Dowd. This is tectonic and tells us the ground has just shifted on the left. That says  a few things:

  1. The NYT in general and Maureen Dowd in particular no longer fear the Clinton’s power nor feel they will be punished for disloyalty by a Hillary Clinton administration. Because…
  2. The NYT in general and Maureen Dowd in particular no longer see a  Hillary Clinton administration as a probability. They know the Hillary campaign is in flames and will only get worse.
  3. Maureen is aware that something fundamental  has changed regarding the siren song of feminism. Once upon a time, Hillary could press the button that lit the overhead sign saying, “I deserve your vote because I’m a woman and it’s time we had a woman president!” and get applause and support across the board. It’s not working anymore. Hillary keeps pressing the button, women see the sign, but it’s having no effect. Young women in particular are flocking to, of all people, Bernie Sanders, who offers free college and more free stuff where that came from. Which brings me to the next stunning thing…
  4. Maureen writes, “Bernie has a clear, concise “we” message, even if it’s pie-in-the-sky.” She knows this is a fairy tale. She’s worked and paid bills and seen the NYT teeter on the edge of bankruptcy and knows things need to paid for, and a plan for taxing ‘speculators’ is economically ignorant at best. If you’re realistically going to discuss providing free college tuition, you also need to discuss what you’re going to give up to get that, especially when you’re $19 trillion in debt already.

That young women are rejecting a pavlovian response to ‘I have a vagina, vote for me!’ is a positive development. That they aren’t asking rational economic questions about Bernie’s promises and appear to know nothing of the long failed history of socialism or even think to ask questions as basic as how much does this cost and how does it get paid for is not a positive reflection on our unionized, increasingly radicalized, government bureaucrat staffed educational system*. But it does show self serving design on their part, coincidentally enough.

(*) I haven’t got the slightest doubt that there are people in that system who genuinely want to provide a good education. However, those desires are overwhelmed by the social-political-bureaucratic tidal wave that imposes the conditions and the curriculum.

So Maureen knows things are looking grim for the Democrats. The vile Clinton syndicate is collapsing as we watch and she knows that while children and the government dependent might vote for Bernie, it’s going to be a hard sell to everyone else. Reading this op-ed in the NYT is like reading a critique of Brezhnev in Pravda. When one of the primary party organs has turned on you, change is afoot.