Politik: Spike Lee intervjuar Bernie Sanders!

VAL 2016 | Det är inte var dag Bernie Sanders blir intervjuad av en anhängare och hamnar på omslaget till en rikstäckande tidskrift.

När regissören Spike Lee träffade senatorn för The Hollywood Reporter blev det inga hårdslående frågor. Sanders gick knappast därifrån svettig.

Det bästa man kan säga är att samtalet möjligtvis gav en lite tydligare bild av den självutnämnde ”demokratiska socialisten” Sanders åsikter i en rad ganska förutsägbara frågor.

Do you think that Mrs. Hillary Clinton has an advantage with her relationship with President Obama? I mean, what is your relationship with the president?

It’s a good relationship. But let me be very straight about this: This president will go down in history as one of the smartest presidents. Brilliant guy. And especially the more people hear from the Republicans, the smarter they think he is. (Laughter.) But he is also incredibly disciplined and focused. You’re around the media every single day, and you have the opportunity to say dumb things — he does it very, very rarely. He is very focused. He came to Vermont to campaign for me way back in 2006. I worked on his elections in 2008 and 2012 and just was in the Oval Office a couple of months ago. So we have a very positive and, I think, friendly relationship. Is he closer to Hillary Clinton? I suspect. She was his secretary of state for four years.

When did it hit you — I’m going to run for the United States of America? When did this happen?

I got to tell you there’s a funny story that every day 100 people brush their teeth and they look in the mirror and every one of them says, ”There is the next president of the United States.” That’s the definition of the U.S. Senate. Honestly, honestly, I was not one of those people.

It wasn’t you, huh?

It wasn’t me. I love my state, very happy to be the senator. But this is what I concluded, Spike: With all due respect to Secretary Clinton and everybody else, it is too late for establishment politics and establishment economics. The problems facing this country now are so serious, are so deep, that the same-old, same-old ain’t going to do it. And what we need to do is create a political movement — what I call a political revolution — where millions of people come together.

A coalition, right?

Absolutely a coalition, based on the trade union movement, the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, the gay community movement and bringing people together to tell the billionaire class that they cannot have it all. People don’t appreciate how much power Wall Street has, corporate America, the corporate media. And we got to take ‘em on.

[…]

Trump. Have you seen the film A Face in the Crowd, directed by Elia Kazan? Do you see a correlation between Lonesome Rhodes [a character who rises to fame in the early days of TV], played by Andy Griffith, and Donald Trump?

He is an entertainer by and large. He did very well on television; he knows the media very, very well. Don’t underestimate him. And God knows who he is really, but we see what he personifies on TV every night. He knows how to manipulate the media very effectively, he knows how to do what he does with people. But let me just reassure you: Donald Trump is not going to become president of the United States. That I can say.

Would you agree that he is possibly the Frankenstein that the GOP has created? They got a monster on their hands and don’t know what to do with it.

There’s no question. The estab­lishment Republicans are going nuts. And this could lead to a real dissolution of the Republican Party as we know it.

Who are the people who are voting for him? When a guy says I can stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue, shoot somebody — even saying that, knowing that 99 Americans die every day — and you’re going to shoot somebody and no one’s going to not vote for you? That’s insane to me.

Well, virtually every day he says something that’s crazier than the day before, right? So what can you say? But here is what I think is going on. I think that the establishment has underestimated the contempt and the frustration that the American people have, a segment of the American people have, with politics as usual.

With Washington, D.C., right?

Yeah, yeah. So when he says, ”Look, I’m not them,” they say, ”OK, that’s good enough for me.” You know? ”That’s all that I need.” And there is a lot of anger out there and a lot of reasons for the anger. One of the reasons for these 50-year-old, 60-year-old white guys voting for Trump is in many cases they are working longer hours for lower wages, they are seeing their jobs go to China, they are seeing their jobs go to Mexico. They are scared to death about the future of their kids, and they don’t see anybody doing anything about it. And Trump comes along and says, ”I got the solution, we’re going to scapegoat Mexicans and we’re going to build a wall a mile high.” People are angry, what do you do? You don’t get to the real issues as to why people are hurting, you scapegoat. You scapegoat blacks, Latinos, gays, anybody, Jews, Muslims, any minority out there, that’s what you do. That is nothing new. That’s what demagogues have always done, and that’s what Trump is doing. What we are trying to do in our campaign is bring people together to look at the real problems facing this country, which in my view is the greed of corporate America, of Wall Street, the grotesque level of income and wealth inequality. Let’s attack those issues. Let’s not scapegoat people.

Tidskriftsomslag: The Hollywood Reporter, den 15-22 april 2016.

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Politisk kommunikation: (MP) söker en ny strategi!

POLITIK | ”Det var först när språkrören försökte rädda sig själva som proffspolitikerna ute i landet fick nog.”

Så skrev Maggie Strömberg för en tid sedan i Fokus. Och så var det kanske. Men det handlade nog också lite om politisk självbevarelsedrift.

Som så många gånger tidigare när det gäller partierna kom kritiken först efter att krisen var ett faktum.

Upproret kommer från lokalpolitiker som är mer vana vid att styra och kompromissa än många av de miljöpartister som befolkar regeringskansliet. Det handlar om brist på professionalism. Om kommunikation, strategi, krishantering. Förmåga att vinna val framöver.

Det finns en utbredd irritation över att kompetens och erfarenhet från lokalpolitiker inte har tagits tillvara i regeringsarbetet. Många tycker att både riksdagsgruppen och regeringsfolket framstår som amatörer.

– I stället för att ta in folk som har vana av att sitta i kommunpolitiska förhandlingar har man plockat in tjänstemän som fått all sin kunskap om politik från House of Cards, säger en.

– Det är bara kompisrekryteringar, säger en annan.

– Vi i kommunerna har ju fattat hur man hanterar att man inte alltid får som man vill. Man måste ändå stå för sina beslut. Det går inte att gå ut och säga ”vi har tagit det här beslutet som var jävligt dåligt”. Det är ju oseriöst, fräser den tredje.

Sanningen är att kritiken mot strategin att gå i opposition mot sig själva inte existerat tidigare i Miljöpartiet. Och det i ett parti där man har en tradition att diskutera och förankra näst intill in absurdum.

Så dessa lokalpolitikers upprördhet har lite av efterhandskonstruktion över sig. Den bästa formen av krishantering är om man lyckas lägga skulden på någon annan.

Anledningen till att det inte funnits beror nog på att sitta-stil-i-båten-strategin var just det som tre av partierna inom Alliansen gjorde under åtta år i regeringsställning. Därav att de numera kallas småpartier.

Att ”stå för sina beslut” utraderade effektivt de politiska och ideologiska skillnaderna mellan Allianspartierna. Med resultatet att endast Moderaterna har kunnat uppvisa hyfsade opinionssiffror.

Är det t.ex. någon som tror att Centerpartiet gått vidare i nyliberal riktning om partiet växt under sin tid i regeringen? Och är det någon som tror att deras tillväxt i opposition inte beror just på att man nu markerar distans mot övriga partier?

Om strategin att opponera mot sig själv hade fungerat och gett bättre opinionssiffror för Miljöpartiet hade nog kommunpolitikerna snarare applåderat sina språkrör.

Problemet var inte själva strategin utan hur man implementerade den. Istället för att smutskasta tagna beslut i regeringen borde man kanske lagt tyngdpunkten på att säja att ”så här långt nådde vi, nu bygger vi vidare på detta”.

Tidskriftsomslag: Fokus den 6-12 maj 2016.

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Image: Trumps kampanj är mer om personkult än ideologi!

VAL 2016 | De har gjorts otaliga försök att jämföra Donald Trump med Mussolini och Hitler. Mest verkar detta handla om önsketänkande från motståndare.

Poängen tycks vara att försöka få jämförelserna att fästa så att det skall bli lättare att mobilisera väljarna mot honom inför presidentvalet. Om alla ser honom som en blivande diktator kommer ingen att vilja rösta på honom.

Men Matthew Copper har tidigare i t.ex. Newsweek visat att denna oro – äkta eller låtsad – inte har mycket med verkligheten att göra. Detta även om Trump själv skulle ha tankar på att göra sig till USA:s diktator.

Det amerikanska systemet är uppbyggt just för att hindra att något parti eller politiker tillskansar sig någon diktatorisk makt.

Om Barack Obama har haft svårt att få igenom sin politik under snart åtta år finns det knappast någon anledning att tro att en president Trump skulle få det lättare.

Om något så har det politiska systemet under Obama snarare anklagats för att vara trögt och oförmöget att kunna hantera de problem som landet står inför. Kongressen har mer eller mindre effektivt lyckats hindra och obstruera för att minimera presidentens beslut.

Just p.g.a. att den dömande, lagstiftande och beslutande makten är skilda åt är risken för att beslut som utmanar konstitutionen skall gå igenom liten i USA.

Och varför skulle kongressens politiker välja att lägga sig platt på marken p.g.a. Trump? Är det någon som tror att politiker frivilligt skulle lämna över makt och inflytande till Trump bara för han säger det? I vilken demokrati brukar det ske?

Men det betyder inte att man inte kan dra vissa lärdomar av den personlighetskult som skapats kring Trump.

Hans förmåga att locka människor till massmöten är t.ex. intressant när man tittar på personer som just Hitler och Mussolini. (Men när det gäller massmöten påminner han kanske mer om Barack Obama än någon av dagens populister på högerkanten eller gårdaganes diktatorer.)

Emily Cadei har för Newsweek talat med en rad forskare och akademiker om deras syn på Trumps valkampanj:

The lesson from this race: A strong cult of personality can trump ideology. And that’s been proved by generations of demagogues. The support behind Italy’s Benito Mussolini was “more about the leader than…about the party or the ideology,” bypassing or even upending the traditional party structures, says Arfon Rees, a specialist in Soviet and Russian history at the U.K.’s University of Birmingham.

There are other parallels, says Joseph Sassoon, an associate professor at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. When Trump says he’s his own best adviser and has no speechwriters, “this is really a prototype of Saddam or Qaddafi or Nasser…the wanting to control the language of their speeches,” says Sassoon, referencing former leaders of Iraq, Libya and Egypt. “An essential component of the cult of personality is it cannot be shared with anyone.”

German philosopher Max Weber coined the term  charismatic authority to describe leaders whose power is built on their “exceptional sanctity, heroism or exemplary character,” as opposed to the rule of law or simply brute force. Many may not regard Trump the candidate in an admirable light, but to his followers, his business success and his personal wealth — which freed him from the unseemly campaign fundraising dance of his primary rivals — make him inviolable. American politicians are “all bought and paid for by somebody,” 62-year-old Trump supporter Nick Glaub said outside the suburban Cincinnati Trump rally. “The only person that isn’t is that man right there,” said Glaub, gesturing to the community center where the real estate mogul had just spoken.

Trump’s charismatic authority stems from this belief that he is above politics-as-usual, says Roger Eatwell, a politics professor at Britain’s University of Bath. And it goes beyond his reality-TV fame. “Celebrity…tends to be a fairly passing phenomenon, and it doesn’t tend to be a very emotional phenomenon,” Eatwell explains. But Trump’s campaign offers something deeper: “a sense of identification.”

[…]

Trump frequently points out that he is bringing into the political process people who rarely vote—those who have been, in one way or another, marginalized. A  Quinnipiac University poll released April 5 shows the depths of alienation of Trump supporters: While 62 percent of all U.S. voters agree that their “beliefs and values are under attack,” that number soars to 91 percent among Trump backers. And 90 percent of Trump supporters agreed that “public officials don’t care much what people like me think.”

[…]

A common way populist leaders burnish their anti-elite bona fides is through a lowbrow speaking style. Trump’s  third- or fourth-grade language level has made him a media punch line, but he’s hardly the first politician to use little words to gain mass appeal. Many of the most successful populists “talk in everyday speech to their target audience,” says Eatwell. Eschewing upper-middle-class academic sentence construction for short, declarative “common” phrasing “helps say they’re not part of the system,” he explains. This is a fundamental element of Trump’s appeal.

And it’s not just the speaking style that is simplified. Rees says a common theme of the right-wing regimes he studies is their simplification of the entire political discourse, “reducing it to basic binary opposites, of black and white,” and, of course, of us vs. them. Psychological theory holds that targeting the “other” helps a group construct its own identity: “You say…what you are not,” as Eatwell puts it. For Trump, the “other” is immigrants—Mexican and Muslim, in particular. In Nazi Germany, it was the Jews.

Rees sums up the mindset as: “We don’t really need complexity. We know what the problem is. We know what the solution is. All we need is the will to do it.”

Bild: Nam Y. Huh/AP. Trump vid ett valmöte på Wexford County Civic Center den 4 mars i Cadillac, Michigan. ”Even the experience of a Trump rally feels different from normal campaign event, something more akin to a rock concert or a mega-church prayer session than a political event.” 

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Kampanj: Boris Johnsons strategi för att bli partiledare!

VAL 2016 | Inom Torypartiet kampanjar man idag inte bara för Vote Remain eller Vote Leave utan också om vem man vill se som nästa premiärminister.

Även om kampanjen för att positionera Boris Johnson, partiets populäre tidigare Londonborgmästare, inte sker allt för öppet kan alla ändå se tecken på att striden pågår bakom kulisserna.

Johnsons strategi tycks gå ut på att bara kritisera David Cameron när det gäller hans inställning i folkomröstningen. I övriga frågor har Johnson intagit rollen som den lojale partianhängaren som inte kritiserar sin premiärminister.

Isabel Oakeshott, political editor-at-large på Daily Mail, har skrivit en artikel i Newsweek om rivaliteten mellan de två och kampanjen kring Cameron och Boris Johnson.

Johnson publicly declared he would be campaigning for Britain to leave the European Union, in direct opposition to Cameron, who called the referendum but is backing the Remain campaign.

Johnson’s announcement—on the issue that has repeatedly divided the Conservative Party over the past three decades—added personal drama to the historic decision facing the British electorate on June 23: whether to remain part of the economic and political bloc that formed in the wake of two catastrophic wars in Europe to bring peace and prosperity to the continent. The now-public contest between Johnson and Cameron will result in either the defeat and possible resignation of a sitting British prime minister or a potentially fatal blow to the ambitions of his rival, Johnson, who may be the most intellectually capable and popular politician of his generation.

”The last thing I wanted was to go against  David Cameron or the government,” Johnson told reporters gathered outside his home on February 21, the day he made his public declaration.

[…]

The prime minister had good reason to believe his entreaties to Johnson might work. Johnson is multilingual and fundamentally internationalist in outlook. Privately, his doubts about the merits of the EU were usually outweighed by his appreciation of its benefits. But he wavered. A friend of Johnson’s, who wants Britain to stay in the EU, says Johnson once told him, ”I have to warn you, one day I might say we should come out of Europe.”

After Cameron’s election victory in 2015, the prime minister promised to negotiate a new relationship between Britain and the EU, one that gave Britain more power over its own policies. Still conflicted, Johnson waited until Cameron had concluded his dealmaking before making up his mind. In the end, it was Johnson’s wife, Marina Wheeler, who helped persuade him that the prime minister’s deal did not reclaim enough British sovereignty.

If Johnson ends up on the losing side of the referendum it would be a blow—but, in an odd twist, he could end up benefiting from the defeat, because in the eyes of many Conservative MPs he will have been on the right side of the argument. The next few years might then play out like this: Cameron stays on as leader and prime minister until 2019 (the process for choosing a new leader takes several months), or he might quit earlier; a leadership contest takes place; and Johnson defeats Cameron’s key ally, George Osborne, chancellor of the exchequer, who is less popular with the Conservative legislators. (A March poll by YouGov showed 43 percent of Conservative Party members backed Johnson to be the next leader, while just 22 percent backed Osborne.)

In that scenario, Johnson would likely lead the Conservatives to an election victory in 2020, over a Labour Party that has weakened since its catastrophic defeat in 2015. That would bring Eton’s tally of prime ministers to 20.

Publicly, Johnson shrugs off the suggestion that he is fixated on getting to 10 Downing Street. In truth, his campaign for that job seems to be well underway. ”Low-key and loyal to Cameron” is how an insider describes his strategy. By ”loyal,” the insider means that Johnson is not making it his business to challenge or undermine the prime minister on subjects other than Europe. His outriders—a handful of MPs working, very unofficially, on Johnson’s behalf in an attempt to improve his prospects—are assiduously avoiding the small but significant faction of anti-EU Conservative MPs who detest the prime minister and would like him gone at any cost. At this delicate early stage, Johnson can’t come over as too grabby.

He is unlikely to find an easy path to the most powerful job in Britain. Osborne, who has played Cameron’s understudy for years, will fight him hard. And while Tory MPs like a winner—and even Johnson’s political enemies acknowledge his electoral successes—he hasn’t cultivated his colleagues. During his long years in City Hall, he spent little time in the House of Commons tea room—networking, sharing gossip, forging friendships and alliances. Colleagues who envy his career or disapprove of his foibles and indiscretions are unlikely to hold back from damaging his chances when they can.

Tidskriftsomslag: Newsweek den 20 maj 2016.

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Kampanj: Argumenten för Vote Leave!

VAL 2016 | Vill vi att det parlamentariska systemet skall urholkas? Det är den fråga som Boris Johnson vill att väljarna skall ställa sig inför folkomröstningen.

Den populära f.d. borgmästaren i London har blivit den främsta talespersonen för Brexit, kampanjen för Storbritanniens utträde ur EU.

Han är dessutom tippad att bli nästa partiledare för Torypartiet om David Cameron inte lyckas få väljarna att rösta Ja till ett fortsatt medlemskap.

En myt som Johnson slår hål på är att EU skulle vara så bra för näringslivet och konkurrensen.

En märklighet i den politiska debatten i både Sverige och Storbritannien är att partier som i vanliga fall talar om hur viktigt det är med konkurrens på marknaden inte verkar tycka det är viktigt på den europeiska marknaden.

Hade man verkligen tyckt konkurrens var viktigt skulle man inte stillatigande acceptera all den byråkrati som hämmar just konkurrensen inom EU.

James Forsyth och Fraser Nelson på The Spectator intervjuade nyligen Johnson om folkomröstningskampanjen:

He has a book on Shakespeare to finish, a Brexit campaign to win, and, if the bookmakers are to be believed, a Tory leadership campaign to assemble. He’s currently red-hot favourite for the top job.

But Boris’s emergence as one of the leaders of the Leave campaign took many by surprise. To his critics, it was a cynical conversion and an unashamed attempt to woo Eurosceptic Tory members ahead of a leadership bid. In the thousands of articles he had written about Europe before this referendum, he had never advocated leaving. ‘It is unquestionably true that I’ve changed,’ Boris admits. ‘But so has the EU. And of the two of us, it’s the EU that has changed more than me.’

[…]

The Prime Minister, Boris says, took a ‘punt’ in calling the referendum without securing a substantial deal. ‘I think that was a mistake. I think the British public are looking at all this and thinking: “Take back £20 billion? Take back control of the borders? Run the country? Democracy? You know, it might be a good idea.”’

So what kind of relationship does Boris want with the EU after Brexit? He knows what he doesn’t want: ‘the so-called single market’, which he says is a problem rather than the solution. ‘People think the single market is a great wonderful European souk or bazaar in which you will find absolutely everything humanity could possibly desire: aubergines, derivatives, trucks, ballistic missiles…’ But, unfortunately, the single market is ‘a gigantic system’ that imposes ‘extremely detailed and onerous rules on a territory of 500 million’.

[…]

‘Dear Spectator reader: do you see Britain’s future as an open, global, free trading, dynamic economy based on confidence in tried and tested British institutions? Or do you believe that in order to survive we need to remain embedded in something that fundamentally takes away our powers? Something that, over the past 15 years or so, has been a powerful depressor of jobs and growth in our historic European home?’

[…]

He is confident that his two great historical heroes would be on his side in this struggle. Churchill would not have wanted ‘parliamentary sovereignty to have been so compromised. I think he believed in that above all else. He would have felt it had gone too far.’ And he contends that Pericles, the great Athenian statesman he so often cites, would also have been an Outer. Boris argues that ‘to stick up for democracy is entirely Periclean’ and that the referendum ultimately comes down to whether you believe in ‘rule by the many, not the few’.

If the referendum goes against Boris, he thinks that the next Conservative party manifesto should admit that EU immigration into Britain cannot be controlled: ‘They should be honest.’ He goes on: ‘One of the most corrosive things is that government won’t level with us about it.’

Still, he remains hopeful that he can help Vote Leave win this referendum. ‘We are asking the British people to be brave, to be confident in themselves and to believe in Britain,’ he says with his trademark enthusiasm. ‘We have a very good chance.’

Tidskriftsomslag: The Spectator den 14 maj 2016.

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Image: En presidents begränsade handlingsutrymme!

EKONOMI | Hur stort inflytande har en amerikansk president på den ekonomiska utvecklingen i en modern ekonomi?

Arbetslösheten i USA ligger på fem procent. Underskottet minskar och BNP ökar. Trots detta känner sig många amerikaner att utvecklingen går i fel riktning.

Frågan är om president Barack Obama borde klarat av att kommunicera en mer positiv bild av vad som uppnåtts under hans tid i Vita huset – detta trots att hans politiska motståndare inte har vikt en tum i sin nattsvarta beskrivning av den ekonomiska utvecklingen.

Andrew Ross Sorkin, finansiell kolumnist, skriver i The New York Times Magazine om det ekonomiska arv som Barack Obamas sannolikt lämnar efter sig.

Often in our conversations, the president expressed a surprising degree of identification with America’s business leaders. “If I hadn’t gone into politics and public service,” Obama told me, “the challenges of creating a business and growing a business and making it work would probably be the thing that was most interesting to me.” His showy embrace of capitalism was especially notable given his fractious relationship with Wall Street and the business community for much of his first term.

In December 2009, Obama was not reluctant to chastise bankers. “I did not run for office to be helping out a bunch of fat-cat bankers on Wall Street,” he told Steve Kroft on “60 Minutes.” “The people on Wall Street still don’t get it. They don’t get it. They’re still puzzled, ‘Why is it that people are mad at the banks?’ ”

Given the national mood at the time, Obama’s words shouldn’t have come as a surprise to the business leaders. But the financial sector had buoyed Obama’s campaign, giving him $16 million in political support, nearly twice what McCain received from it, and some executives responded to his new populism in emotional terms. “It’s a war,” Stephen Schwarzman, a co-founder of Blackstone Group, the giant private-equity firm, said of Obama in 2010 and his effort to close a tax loophole that benefited the industry. “It’s like when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939.” (Schwarzman later apologized.) Others seemed more concerned with the language itself. In 2011, Leon Cooperman, a billionaire hedge-fund manager, wrote a public letter to Obama, saying: “The divisive, polarizing tone of your rhetoric is cleaving a widening gulf, at this point as much visceral as philosophical, between the downtrodden and those best positioned to help them. It is a gulf that is at once counterproductive and freighted with dangerous historical precedents.”

When I asked him about these reactions, Obama laughed. The criticism he leveled at Wall Street “was extraordinarily mild,” he said, but “it hurt their feelings. I would have some of them say to me, ‘You know, my son came home and asked me, ‘Am I a fat cat?’ ” He laughed again.

Obama’s rhetoric does seem mild, at least compared with the withering contempt of, say, Franklin Roosevelt, who, laying out the objectives for the second stage of the New Deal in 1936, said that reckless bankers and speculators are “unanimous in their hate for me — and I welcome their hatred.” Obama, to the contrary, seems to find their hatred irritating. “One of the constants that I’ve had to deal with over the last few years is folks on Wall Street complaining even as the stock market went from in the 6,000s to 16,000 or 17,000,” he said. “They’d be constantly complaining about our economic policies. That’s not rooted in anything they’re experiencing; it has to do with ideology and their aggravations about higher taxes.”

[…]

It has always been the case that voters credit or, more often, blame the president for the nation’s economic performance. But it is also the case that the president generally has considerably less sway to move the economy than even he might like to acknowledge. And as the economy continues to disperse, that sway may be diminishing further. A president has less power than ever, in either a hard- power (legal/regulatory) or soft-power (cultural) sense, over American chief executives, let alone over the chief executives of multinationals based in France or China or other places where many U.S. employers make their headquarters.

[…]

Obama considered the problem from a political perspective. “In some ways,” he said, “engaging in those hard changes that we need to make to create a more nimble, dynamic economy doesn’t yield immediate benefits and can seem like a distraction or an effort to undermine a bygone era that doesn’t exist. And that then feeds, both on the left and the right, a temptation to say, ‘If we could just go back to an era in which our borders were closed,’ or ‘If we could just go back to a time when everybody had a defined-benefit plan,’ or ‘We could just go back to a time when there wasn’t any immigrant that was taking my job, things would be O.K.’ ” He didn’t mention Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders by name, but the implications were obvious.

Tidskriftsomslag: The New York Times Magazine den 1 maj 2016.

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Strategi: (MP) tror kommunikation löser allt!

IMAGE | Miljöpartiet krishanterar. Både inom och utanför Miljöpartiet har man sökt svaret på frågan vad som hänt med partiet.

Ett svar har varit valet av politisk strategi. ”De dubbla budskapen har varit en genomtänkt del av miljöpartiets strategi”, konstaterar t.ex. Maggie Strömberg i Fokus.

Partiet har konsekvent kritiserat den politik man själva är med om att ta beslut om i regeringen. Strömberg tycker sig se att strategin fungerar bra på lokalplanet men inte inom rikspolitiken.

På riksnivå är dubbelstrategin svårare. Miljöpartiet har hela tiden vetat att regerandet skulle innebära svåra kompromisser. Små partier i koalitionsregering straffas nästan alltid av väljarna. Tanken var att miljöpartiet skulle undvika det genom att ministrarna skulle stå upp för regeringens linje medan partisekreterare, riksdagsledamöter och andra i stället skulle framföra vad partiet egentligen ville. Om man samtidigt satsade på mer politikutveckling skulle väljarna förstå vad man egentligen var. Tillsammans med legitimiteten från att ha regerat skulle det göra att partiet växte och om man var större rent procentuellt i nästa regering skulle man inte behöva kompromissa lika mycket.

Moderaterna hade en likande strategi på 70-talet, då de gått in som minsta parti i en borgerlig trepartiregering. Moderaterna lät sin partisekreterare kritisera regeringen samtidigt som partiledaren försvarade den. Partiet växte.

Skillnaden mot nu var att moderaterna vill i samma riktning som mittenpartierna, men ännu längre, till exempel i frågor om att sänka skatten. Miljöpartiet drivs i stället i motsatt ritning än dit man vill, bland annat i migrationsfrågan. Läget skulle vara mer jämförbart om regeringen tvärtom hade liberaliserat flyktingpolitiken, och miljöpartiet hade velat gå ännu längre i den riktningen.

Skillnaden har skapat ett avgrundsstort glapp mellan ideal och realpolitik.

Problemet med miljöpartiets strategi i regeringen är att man nu bara framstår som ett parti som skyller ifrån sig. Inte partiet som vill någonting mer. Ju mer partiet betonar sin egen ståndpunkt, desto mindre regeringsdugligt ser det ut.

Men inom partiet är man nöjd med vad man uppnått inom regeringen. Någon kritik mot själva strategin har inte funnits. Den kritik som framförts har mer handlat om hur man kommunicerat sin politik. Och kommunikationen är bara en del av den övergripande strategin.

Men att kritisera den egna kommunikationsförmåga är något ett parti ofta tar till när opinionssiffrorna dalar. (Hur många gånger har man inte hört Annie Lööf säga att väljarnas bristande entusiasm för Centerpartiet bara beror på att man inte nått ut med sin politik?)

Kritiken inom Miljöpartiet verkar under lång tid mest gått ut på att media blåser upp vad man själva uppfattar som småsaker. Inom partiet har man överlag varit nöjda med både språkrören och vad partiet uppnått i regeringen.

Åsa Romsons debattartikel i Dagens Nyheter inför språkrörsvalet är ett tecken på detta. ”Åtta av tio punkter i MP:s valmanifest på väg infrias”, löd rubriken. Hela artikel hade karaktären av en påminnelse. För partianhängarna var det mesta välkänt.

Inte ens partiets nedgång i opinionen i efterdyningarna av skandalerna verkar få partiet att ta itu med problemet. Även de nyvalda språkrören hoppas på att miljöfrågorna och bättre kommunikation skall vända trenden.

”Vi ska ha större fokus på att se till att miljöfrågorna kommer upp på dagordningen. Vi ska visa hur de diskussioner som förs i Sverige är kopplade till miljö- och resursutmaningen”, säger Gustav Fridolin.

”Det viktigaste är att vi för ut vår politik och det vi gör. Utan oss i regeringen hade inte Sverige spelat en viktig roll i klimatavtalet, till exempel”, säger i sin tur Isabella Lövin.

Någon självrannsakan i efterdyningarna av affärerna Mehmet Kaplan och Yasri Khan har inte skett. Det finns inget tryck inom partiet att driva på för att situationen inte skall kunna upprepas.

Anledningen måste naturligtvis bero på att man inte tycker att de gjort sig skyldiga till några större fel. Tanken tycks vara att om det inte varit för elak media och den egna bristfälliga kommunikationsförmågan hade Kaplan säkerligen suttit kvar i regeringen.

Den distansering som man tvingats till har mest haft karaktären av att ske under galgen. När det gäller Yasri Khan-affären talar t.ex. Isabella Lövin lite vagt om att partiets problem mest handlat om lite ”svajighet”.

Till och med Sverigedemokraterna har ägnat mer tid åt självrannsakan än miljöpartiet. Miljöpartisterna verkar mer se sig som offer. Och är man ett offer för omständigheterna behöver man inte syna sig själva allt för mycket i sömmarna.

Tidskriftsomslag: Fokus, 22-28 april 2016.

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Strategi: Hillary kan avväpna Trump med humor!

VAL 2016 | Hur vinner man mot en person som Donald Trump? Denna fråga har satt myror i huvudet på både republikaner och demokrater.

Neera Tanden, på den liberala tankesmedjan Center for American Progress, tror sig ha svaret.

På 90-talet arbetade Tanden för Bill Clinton i Vita huset. Här hade hon även rollen som ”senior policy adviser” till First Lady Clinton.

Senare var Tanden ”deputy campaign manager” åt Clintons senatskampanj i New York 2000 samt ”policy director” i hennes presidentvalskampanj 2008.

Henne svar på problemet Trump är hämtat från valrörelsen i New York när Clinton drev med republikanen Rudy Giuliani.

Det bästa sättet är att helt enkelt att skämta om honom. Och inte ta honom på för mycket allvar. Ett bra skämt är bättre än äkta (eller låtsad) upprördhet.

Mark Binelli intervjuade Tanden i Rolling Stone.

”I was not at all surprised by the success of Sanders,” says Tanden, who is now an outside adviser to Clinton’s campaign. ”The oddity of the race is how much Democratic voters also strongly support President Obama. They like what he’s done, but they want more. On both sides, because of the Great Recession, the Republican assault on government and the virtual standstill in Washington, people have lost faith in traditional answers. Political rollouts and solutions don’t have the power they had in previous cycles. People are interested in more disruptive change.”

Still, Tanden, who has also worked in the Obama White House on crafting the Affordable Care Act, finds it a ”great irony” that Clinton is now considered suspect by parts of the progressive left. ”As someone who worked for her in the Nineties, I can tell you that everyone on Bill Clinton’s White House staff, and everyone on the outside, thought of Hillary as the liberal champion,” Tanden says. ”Liberal activists went to her to lobby. And the president’s more centrist staff was scared of her.” Tanden pauses for a moment, then continues, ”I have to say, I think some of this is weirdly sexist. We assume she has the same views as Bill Clinton when it hurts her, and we assume she has different views when that hurts her.”

[…]

The political class, after months of writing off Trump and being proved wrong again and again, has developed an almost superstitious fear of the man, as if he must have a shriveled monkey’s paw secreted in one of his pockets that’s giving him special powers. But Tanden thinks that ”the best analogy to this race is one that Hillary has actually already run”: her 2000 Senate campaign against another brash New Yorker beloved by his supporters for going off-script, Rudy Giuliani. ”He and Trump are similar, and the way to deal with him was to make clear what he was doing. Our campaign got to a place where we were mocking him, and it really worked.”

Giuliani eventually dropped out of the race after his marriage fell apart and he received a diagnosis of prostate cancer (and Clinton went on to easily dispatch his replacement, Rick Lazio). Before that, according to The New York Times, Clinton ”had found her way to handle the gibes thrown at her by the confrontational mayor. Rather than engage him, Mrs. Clinton became the foot-tapping, arms-folded sighing mother of a forever misbehaving teenager, a strategy intended as much to infantilize Mr. Giuliani as to provoke him.

”‘I can’t be responding every time the mayor gets angry,’ Mrs. Clinton said, smiling as she campaigned in upstate New York a few days before Christmas 1999. ‘Because that’s all I would do.'”

Till detta kan läggas att man skall ta politiska motståndare på allvar om de kommer med seriösa policyförslag.

Gör man inte det riskerar man få även sina anhängare emot sig eftersom väljarna inte köper hela paket från en kandidat (eller ett parti). Även demokratiska väljare kan tilltalas av visa delar av Trumps förslag.

Att bara avfärda allt han säger kan uppfattas som nonchalant och förstärka bilden av Clinton som en av politikeretablissemanget i Washington.

Bild: Från Real Time With Bill Maher Blog.

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Kampanj: Sanders har stärkt Hillary Clinton!

VAL 2016 | Bernie Sanders har lovat jaga Hillary Clinton hela vägen till demokraternas eget partikonvent.

”We’re in it for the long haul. We’ll win some states, we’ll lose some states. We’re going to the convention.” Detta var Sanders löfte när han nästan lyckades slå Hillary i Iowa.

Hans kampvilja har tvingat Clintons lite småtråkiga kampanj at bli lite mer snabbfotad. Han har fått Team Clinton att inse att man inte kan ta något för givet i denna valrörelse.

Och man kan definitivt inte ta något för givet med Donald Trump som motståndare. Han har varit undervärderad under hela sin valrörelse.

Mark Binelli har i Rolling Stone studerat dynamiken i demokraternas valrörelse.

The morning after Super Tuesday, as many pundits were writing Sanders’ obituary, his campaign held a press briefing in Burlington. ”We had a fantastic night,” campaign manager Jeff Weaver insisted, acknowledging that ”we shot for five [states] and got 4.9.” Sanders had won Vermont, Colorado, Oklahoma and Minnesota and lost Massachusetts by the thinnest of margins. ”We did not target 11 states yesterday,” Tad Devine, a senior adviser to the campaign, explained, describing Super Tuesday as ”the single best day” for Clinton on the campaign calendar in terms of geography and demographics.

”These arguments about the delegate math, I have to say, as someone who spent a lot of time in the Eighties working on this topic, I view the analysis as being, frankly, shallow, and representing not a real understanding about how the modern nominating process works,” Devine said. ”I know there’s a lot of number crunchers who think they know how this process works and conclude the race is over. I would suggest understanding the dynamics of a modern presidential campaign requires more skills than arithmetic.”

Devine went on to sketch out a Sanders path to victory, pointing out how the geographic diversity of the senator’s Super Tuesday wins proved they could rack up a string of wins as the primary season moved out of the South and into friendlier territory. At one point, he even suggested that pledged delegates – that is, the delegates won at the voting booth – might switch to Sanders if Clinton stumbled badly, an oddly undemocratic pitch from a campaign focused on the rights of the little guy.

[…]

Added the Republican pollster Frank Luntz, who attended a half-dozen Sanders events in Iowa and New Hampshire, ”I’ve been doing this for 20 years now, and there’s something special about the Sanders voter. You can see it in their eyes: They believe they’re onto something, and that the rest of America will discover it in time. This is not Don Quixote to them. They think they can change the political process.”

Even before Super Tuesday, Luntz considered Clinton the likely nominee. But he also told me about a recent poll he’d conducted with Snapchat, in which, among 18-to-26-year-olds, Sanders was more popular than Barack Obama. ”He has really taken that generation by storm,” Luntz says. ”He is everything they have been waiting for. He’s not political, he’s more focused on policy. Whereas Clinton plays politics the way it was played 20 years ago when her husband was president.”

[…]

In the view of the Democratic pollster Peter Hart, Clinton’s biggest challenge is that ”voters think she’s competent, but they’re less convinced on compassion, and they’re downright skeptical when it comes to integrity.”

[…]

That said, the incredible stakes manifested by the spectre of a President Trump have started making even Clinton’s platitudes (”I know it sometimes seems a little odd for someone running for president, these days, in this time, to say we need more love and kindness in America. But I’m telling you, from the bottom of my heart, we do”) sound like necessary truths.

The primary fight with Sanders has also certainly transformed Clinton into a much stronger candidate: She’s more relaxed, and there’s a deeper focus and urgency in her message. According to a story in The New York Times, Team Clinton has been preparing to bloody Trump with the help of ”two prominent surrogates”: the Big Dog himself, Bill Clinton, who ”would not hold back on the stump” in order to blunt Trump’s ”ability to sway the news cycle,” and President Obama, ”who has told allies he would gleefully portray Mr. Trump as incapable of handling the duties of the Oval Office.”

Will that be enough, in these days of revolt? ”The key is, how does she handle Phase Two and Phase Three of this campaign?” Hart, the Democratic pollster, says. He isn’t as worried about the schism that’s been playing out in the primary. ”It’s different from other years, where there would be irreparable damage for a long time,” he says. ”I’m not of the belief that everyone who voted for Bernie looks at Hillary and says, ‘There’s the enemy.’ This is a situation where I think, by the time the Democrats go to the polls, the differences will be joined.”

Tidskriftsomslag: Rolling Stone, 24 mars (nr. 1257), 2016.

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Image: Donald Trump tror sig kunna allt!

VAL 2016 | Affärstidskriften Fortune har titta på hur Donald Trump har agerat som affärsman och vad detta indikerar om han skulle bli president.

En av de fem aspekter man granskade fick rubriken ”He thinks he’s great at everything”. Shawn Tully och Roger Parloff skrev så här:

Unlike most real estate titans, Trump has never stuck to real estate. He has frequently attempted to acquire and operate companies in industries outside his expertise. Several executives who worked for Trump, all of whom declined to speak on the record because they fear his wrath, say they were constantly warned by managers who knew him best that “Donald’s ego is so big, he believes he can run anything.”

[…]

His buccaneering style was especially misplaced in gambling, an industry that’s extremely cyclical. While his rival Steve Wynn stuck to gaming and retrenched when he anticipated downturns, Trump never thought Atlantic City would do anything but boom—failing to foresee the threat from the spread of gaming to neighboring states.

[…]

The same approach is evident in Trump’s latest quest in politics. He clearly thinks he’s not just the best candidate for the job but also the best at running a major presidential campaign. “I’m the strategist,” he recently bragged to New York magazine, explaining that he has been the architect of his unorthodox campaign and unexpected political success. Once again, though, Trump might not know quite as much as he thinks he does.

Läs mer: ”Donald Trump In His Own Words: Atlantic City to the White House” – hela intervjun med Trump i Fortune.

Tidskriftsomslag: Fortune (europeiska utgåvan) den 1 maj 2016.

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