Image: Donald Trumps affärer III!

VAL 2016 | Här kommer ett tredje blogginlägg med anledning av Kurt Eichenwalds löpande granskning i Newsweek av Donald Trumps affärer.

”This Way Lies Deceit”:

Over the course of decades, Donald Trump’s companies have systematically destroyed or hidden thousands of emails, digital records and paper documents demanded in official proceedings, often in defiance of court orders. These tactics—exposed by a Newsweek review of thousands of pages of court filings, judicial orders and affidavits from an array of court cases—have enraged judges, prosecutors, opposing lawyers and the many ordinary citizens entangled in litigation with Trump. In each instance, Trump and entities he controlled also erected numerous hurdles that made lawsuits drag on for years, forcing courtroom opponents to spend huge sums of money in legal fees as they struggled—sometimes in vain—to obtain records.

”Tangled Up In Orange”:

Donald Trump hasn’t been sworn in yet, but he is already making decisions and issuing statements to world leaders that radically depart from American foreign policy, all to the benefit of his family’s corporate empire. Because of this, the next president of the United States is already vulnerable to undue influence by other nations, including through bribery and even blackmail. […] President-elect Trump has a monumental choice before him: He can, as he promised during the campaign, protect the sanctity of the presidency—which he can do only by selling his company. Or he can remain corrupted by the conflicts between his country’s future and his family’s fortune.

Tidskriftsomslag: Newsweek den 11 november 2016 och den 23 december 2016.

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Image: ”Bigness” vinner alltid i Donald Trumps värld!

VAL 2016 | Tror Donald Trump på vad han själv säger? Eller är det bara ett sätt att skilja ut sig från mängden och få gratis uppmärksamhet?

Frågorna blir aldrig riktigt besvarade när Michael Wolff träffade Trump för The Hollywood Reporter.

Men rubriken på hans artikel – ”Politics’ ‘Dark Heart’ Is Having the Best Time Anyone’s Ever Had” – säger en ungefär var Wollf landar i sin bedömning av Trump.

”The biggest thing is the theme. It’s what he always wants to come back to. Bigness is unavoidable and inevitable. Bigness always wins”, skriver Wollf.

Det skulle förklara varför Trump alltid pratat om sig själv. Ju mer vi pratat om honom ju mindre utrymme blir det för Hillary Clinton.

Detta kan möjligtvis kallas en valstrategi. Men en framgångsrik sådan? Knappast. Väljarna röstar inte på politiker bara för att de är fascinerade av dem.

If there’s any pattern to his conversation, it’s that he’s vague on all subjects outside himself, his campaign and the media. Everything else is mere distraction.

[…]

I broach his problems with women and Hispanics and the common wisdom that he’ll have to do at least as well with these groups as Mitt Romney did in 2012. The ”pivot” is the word more politico pros are using to refer to his expected turn to the center. ”Unless,” I offer, ”you think you can remake the electoral math.” He says he absolutely can. So no pivot. ”It’ll be different math than they’ve ever seen.” He is, he says, bigger than anything anyone has ever seen. ”I have a much bigger base than Romney. Romney was a stiff!” And he’ll be bigger with the people he’s bigger with, but also he’ll be bigger with women and Hispanics and blacks, too. He believes, no matter what positions he holds or slurs he has made, that he is irresistible.

[…]

It is hard not to feel that Trump understands himself, and that we’re all in on this kind of spectacular joke. His shamelessness is just so … shameless. So how much, I ask — quite thinking he will get the nuance here — is the Trump brand based on exaggeration? He responds, with perfect literalness, none at all. I try again. He must understand. How could he not? ”You’ve talked about negotiation, which is about compromise and about establishing positions that you can walk back from. How much about being a successful person involves … well, bullshitting? How much of success is playing games?”

If he does understand, he’s definitely not taking this bait. I try again: ”How much are you a salesman?”

Salesman, in the Trump worldview, is hardly a bad word, and he is quite willing to accept it, although, curiously, he doesn’t want to be thought of that way when it comes to real estate. But as a politician, he’s OK as a salesman.

In this, he sees himself — and becomes almost eloquent in talking about himself — as a sort of performer and voter whisperer. He is, he takes obvious pride in saying, the only politician who doesn’t regularly use a teleprompter. With a prompter, he says, you can’t work the crowd. You can’t feel it. ”You got to look at them in the eye. Have you ever seen me speak in front of a large group of people? Have you ever watched?” He reflects on the lack of self-consciousness that’s necessary to make spontaneous utterances before a crowd. He cites a well-known actor (whose name he asks me not to use, ”I don’t want to hurt anybody”), who had wanted to run for office but, without a script, was a blithering idiot. Trump was never fed lines on The Apprentice, he says. It was all him: ”You have to have a natural ability.”

[…]

The anti-Christ Trump, the Trump of bizarre, outre, impractical and reactionary policies that most reasonable people yet believe will lead to an astounding defeat in November, is really hard to summon from Trump in person. He deflects that person, or, even, dissembles about what that person might have said (as much, he dissembles for conservatives about what the more liberal Trump might have said), and is impatient that anyone might want to focus on that version of Trump. It does then feel that the policies, such as they are, and the slurs, are not him. They are just a means to the end — to the phenomenon. To the center of attention. The biggest thing that has ever happened in politics. In America. The biggest thing is the theme. It’s what he always wants to come back to. Bigness is unavoidable and inevitable. Bigness always wins.

Läs mer: ”3 key ways Donald Trump’s Hollywood Reporter interview explains his Campaign” på Vox.com.

Tidskriftsomslag: The Hollywood Reporter den 10 juni 2016.

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Image: Vem älskar Hillary Clinton?

VAL 2016 | Trots att Hillary Clinton befunnit sig i den politiska hetluften sedan Bil Clinton var president är det fortfarande svårt att sätta fingret på vad hon tror på.

Och inte blir det bättre av att allt tenderar handla om Donald Trump i medias bevakning av valkampanjen. ”The Donald” suger upp allt syret i den politiska bevakningen av presidentvalet.

En indikation att det skulle behövas mer kritisk bevakning av Clinton och hennes politiska ställningstaganden är att opinionsundersökningar visar att hela 60 procent av amerikanerna anser att hon är opålitlig (”untrustworthy”) och ohederlig (”dishonest”).

Av de demokratiska och republikanska presidentkandidaterna är det bara Trump som lyckats uppvisa än värre förtroendesiffror.

Hillary kan tacka högre makter att hon skall möta just Trump i presidentvalet. I väljarleden verkar däremot mest sucka över att behöva välja mellan de två.

En som tittat på det politiska fenomenet Clinton är  Christopher Buckley som med stor humor skrivit om henne i The Spectator:

The difficulty with limning a template of a Hillary Clinton administration is that her existing template is unlimnable. That is, fuzzy. It’s not so much a template as a palimpsest. Mrs. Clinton’s policy positions are rarely fixed points. They have a tendency to get up and wander about, whether it’s the Iraq war vote, or the trade deal she was so in favor of until she was not, or the minimum wage of $12 or $15 an hour, or the Benghazi attack being the fault of that asshole in California streaming that totally inappropriate Islamophobic video, or the private emails with the nuclear launch codes and George Clooney’s recipe for penne arrabiata. If Mrs. Clinton had an escutcheon, its motto would be ‘Whatever’ (Quisquis?) You Brits all the know Latin, right?) The catalogue of Clinton’s policy books has more positions than the Kamasutra. As Groucho Marx said, ‘I’ve got principles. And if you do not like them, I’ve got others.’

This morphing and shapeshifting has allowed her to survive over the years. The catch is that, while getting away with stuff may sustain you in power, it won’t endear you to the general public. Mrs C has been front and center on the national stage now for nearly a quarter-century. Result: 60 per cent of Americans find her ‘untrustworthy’ and ‘dishonest’. A triumph. But she is hardly unique. Richard Nixon, aka ‘Tricky Dick’, was on the national stage for 20 years before he made it all the way. And that turned out fine.

[…]

Mrs. Clinton has her admirers, no arguments. But if that 60 per cent figure is accurate, she’s going to need more than her faithful hard core to put her over the top in November. Fortunately, many – indeed most – Republicans are resistant to the charms of the Mussolini of Fifth Avenue. Confronted with a Hobson’s Choice from Hell in November, they will hold their noses and vote for her. Or write in Ronald Reagan. And then get stinking drunk and go home and kick the dog.

Of the many difficulties facing Mrs. Clinton once she achieves her life’s ambition is a fact that even her most ardent devotees might admit to, if you promised them anonymity, voice-altering software and witness protection: she is, well, dull.  She is, to paraphrase Falstaff, not only dull herself, but the cause of dullness in others, especially the minions who warble on TV about how wonderful she is. Maybe she is wonderful, but hearing about her wonderfulness has’ve become, 24 years later, excruciating.

Mrs. Clinton is many things – intelligent, accomplished, hard-working, quisquis – but she is not herself interesting, except as a historical phenomenon – an American Evita, minus the charisma and the balcony. This is likely to make four years of her feel interminable. One year into her presidency, Stephen Hawking may have to revise his theory of time and posit that it is now slowing down. Or has stopped altogether.

[…]

Barack Obama came into office wafting on zephyrs of adoring oohs and aahs, trailing angel-dust and proclaiming the dawn of a new golden era of nonpartisan enlightenment – a new shining Washington upon a hill. In less fancy terms: he promised to change the way Washington does business. That turned out well too.

[…]

Safe bet-wise: The First Mrs. President is going to be very, very good for the Clinton Foundation. As for America, not so much. A lot has been written about how fed up people are with the arrogance and corruption of Washington. That’s why so many are voting for Donald Trump. But if you think Americans are angry now, just wait until they suffer a full term of Clinton 2.

Tidskriftsomslag: The Spectator den 21 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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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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Media: Storbritanniens statsöverhuvud!

Drottning Elizabeth II, som fyller 90 år i år, är den regent som uppnått högst ålder och regerat längst.

Drottningen har lyckats bygga en positiv image genom att helt enkelt inte bry sig alltför mycket om vare sig media eller ”imagebyggande”.

Trots medias ständiga behov av konflikter och negativa infallsvinklar koncentrerar sig Drottningen istället på att göra det hon alltid gjort, och göra det bra. Kanske finns det en lärdom här för alla politiker och beslutsfattare?

Country Life, som kallar sig för ”The voice of the countryside”, gratulerar Storbritanniens statsöverhuvud i en ledare där man också summerar hemligheten bakom hennes popularitet.

She may wield no political power, but The Queen, at 90, still has an influence the world’s leaders can only dream of.

[…]

The Duke of Cambridge summed up his grandmother’s incredible reign, saying: ‘The Queen is someone who’s been there, done it, bought the T-shirt’ and his wife added: ‘I have no idea where she gets her energy from!’ Although she has lived her entire life in the media’s glare, she has never courted its attention or tried to use it to manipulate her image. Instead, she has built a foundation on the deep roots of her family and faith and dedicated herself unswervingly and tirelessly to duty.

Often accused in the past of being too traditional, it is now her old-fashioned values and steadfastness that have made her someone to be admired and emulated the world over. Her long reign and vast accumulated wisdom have helped to stabilize relations across the world, especially within the Commonwealth.

Detta omslag passar utmärkt vår serie ”Tidskriftsomslag vi gillar”. Bilden på framsidan (20 april, 2016) är Pietro Annigonis berömda porträtt från 1955.

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Image: Ted Cruz lägger om sin kampanjstil!

VAL 2016 | Ted Cruz har inte gett upp sina drömmar om Vita huset. Men rent röstmässigt kommer han att förbli den ständiga tvåan efter Donald Trump.

Ett tecken på att han försöker ta sin kampanj ända till det republikanska konventet är att han nu är mindre aggressiv och anslår en mildare ton i sina tal.

Han vill på så sätt öka chanserna att kunna fungera som en kompromisskandidat om det blir en strid om delegaterna på kommande partikonvent.

Ett exempel på denna ändrade stil är att han nu t.o.m. börjat citera John F. Kennedy i sina tal. Det hör inte vanligheterna bland konservativa republikaner vars bas är evangeliska kristna. Men det är sådant som brukar kallas signalpolitik.

Frågan är bara om det är speciellt trovärdigt. Cruz har varit en av de ledande figurerna inom Tea Party-rörelsen och är inte speciellt älskad av vare sig partietablissemanget eller bland partikollegor han kritiserat.

Att försöka vinna över de mer moderata konservativa är nödvändigt men kan också komma att skada hans trovärdighet så här sent i valrörelsen.

Michael Scherer skriver om hans nya stil i tidskriften Time:

Good politicians know how to recast their message for the moment. The great ones seem to do it without contradiction, alienation or any actual change in position. This is the leap that Cruz is now attempting. He won the Iowa caucuses with devotion and red meat. His rallies began like prayer circles and continued into fury. He would describe the hatred for him from his own party as “the whole point of the campaign.” He promised not just to repeal Obamacare but to rescind “every word” on Day One. More than unwind the Iran nuclear deal, he vowed to rip it “to shreds.” He would not just destroy Islamic extremism, he would find out if “sand can glow in the dark.”

Those bold positions all remain, but their packaging has been muted. The clenched fists are now open arms. “From the beginning, our objective was to reunite the old Reagan coalition to bring together Republicans and independents and libertarians and Reagan Democrats,” he said. “I believe the path to winning the Republican nomination and winning the general election is standing up for hardworking men and women of America who have been left behind by Washington.” The conservative caterpillar is becoming a general-election butterfly.

This same pivot animates his campaign. After Wisconsin, Cruz planned to work hard to move beyond the white, evangelical, mostly male voters who have always been his core supporters. In his campaign speeches, he has begun to address “single moms” and “working moms” directly, with a message of economic populism to match the appeal of Trump and the Democrats. The day after Wisconsin, he traveled to a meeting with black and Latino pastors in the Bronx, spoke halting Spanish with reporters afterward and repeatedly referred to “our community” when talking about Latinos.

Then there are the gauzy new references in his public remarks. The speech he had prepared for the network cameras the night he won Wisconsin included a quote from former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill about ending the quarrel between past and present to focus instead on the future. He would even quote Democratic President John F. Kennedy, who Cruz has long argued, improbably, would be a conservative Republican if he were alive today. “We are not here to curse the darkness, but to light the candle that can guide us through that darkness to a safe and sane future,” Cruz said, repeating Kennedy’s words.

But it is another President who he said gave him hope his gambit could succeed. “Throughout the course of this campaign, as others have gotten nasty and gotten personal, have engaged in a war of insults and petty personal attacks, I haven’t responded in kind,” Cruz explained, referencing, among other things, Trump’s recent attack on the appearance of his wife Heidi. “That is very much the model of Ronald Reagan, even when Reagan primaried Gerald Ford in ’76.”

Tidskriftsomslag: Time, 18 april 2016

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Image: Kommunikatören Donald Trump!

VAL 2016 | Donald Trump är expert på att få exponering i media trots att han kontinuerligt förolämpar deras kampanjbevakning.

Och även om rapporteringen oftast är negativ kan media inte ta ögonen ifrån honom. ”He’s pulling 33 times as much coverage on the major networks as his next-closest GOP competitor, and twice as much as Hillary”, skriver Matt Taibbi i Rolling Stone.

I år är det tydligt att väljarna trötta på vad man ser som en allians mellan media och partiernas etablissemang kring beskrivningen av vad som måste göras i landet och vilka politiker som är lämpliga för jobbet.

Att väljarna på både vänster- och högerkanten har tröttnat på att deras respektive partier alltid tycks välja samma typ av politiker har skapat utrymme för både Bernie Sanders och Donald Trump.

Vare sig Sanders eller Trump är naturliga representanter för sina respektive partier. Båda har kommit in i sina partier relativt sent. Båda ses som outsiders av gräsrötterna. Och i år är detta ett plus.

Taibbi skriver om fenomenet Trump:

Trump is no intellectual. He’s not bringing Middlemarch to the toilet. If he had to jail with Stephen Hawking for a year, he wouldn’t learn a thing about physics. Hawking would come out on Day 365 talking about models and football.

But, in an insane twist of fate, this bloated billionaire scion has hobbies that have given him insight into the presidential electoral process. He likes women, which got him into beauty pageants. And he likes being famous, which got him into reality TV. He knows show business.

That put him in position to understand that the presidential election campaign is really just a badly acted, billion-dollar TV show whose production costs ludicrously include the political disenfranchisement of its audience. Trump is making a mockery of the show, and the Wolf Blitzers and Anderson Coopers of the world seem appalled. How dare he demean the presidency with his antics?

But they’ve all got it backward. The presidency is serious. The presidential electoral process, however, is a sick joke, in which everyone loses except the people behind the rope line. And every time some pundit or party spokesman tries to deny it, Trump picks up another vote.

[…]

Interestingly, a lot of Trump’s political act seems lifted from bully-wrestlers. A clear influence is ”Ravishing” Rick Rude, an Eighties champ whose shtick was to insult the audience. He would tell ticket holders they were ”fat, ugly sweat hogs,” before taking off his robe to show them ”what a real sexy man looks like.”

In Greenville, Donald ”The Front-Runner” Trump started off the debate by jumping on his favorite wrestling foil, Prince Dinkley McBirthright, a.k.a. Jeb Bush. Trump seems to genuinely despise Bush. He never missed a chance to rip him for being a ”low-energy,” ”stiff” and ”dumb as a rock” weenie who lets his Mexican wife push him around. But if you watch Trump long enough, it starts to seem gratuitous.

Trump’s basic argument is the same one every successful authoritarian movement in recent Western history has made: that the regular guy has been screwed by a conspiracy of incestuous elites.

[…]

Reporters have focused quite a lot on the crazy/race-baiting/nativist themes in Trump’s campaign, but these comprise a very small part of his usual presentation. His speeches increasingly are strikingly populist in their content. His pitch is: He’s rich, he won’t owe anyone anything upon election, and therefore he won’t do what both Democratic and Republican politicians unfailingly do upon taking office, i.e., approve rotten/regressive policies that screw ordinary people.

[…]

No one should be surprised that he’s tearing through the Republican primaries, because everything he’s saying about his GOP opponents is true. They really are all stooges on the take, unable to stand up to Trump because they’re not even people, but are, like Jeb and Rubio, just robo-babbling representatives of unseen donors.

Tidskriftsomslag: Rolling Stone, 10 mars (nr. 1256) 2016

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Image: Trump är mer Jimmy Carter än Reagan.

VAL 2016 | Mycket har skrivits om Donald Trump. En hel del har varit direkt hysteriskt och verklighetsfrämmande.

Det har gjorts få balanserade försök att ge en realistisk bild av vad Trum skulle kunna åstadkomma om han verkligen valdes till president.

Istället har vi matats med fåniga försök att jämföra Trump med Adolf Hitler. Och precis som alla republikanska politiker försöker Trumps anhängare jämföra kandidaten med Ronald Reagan. Båda har lika fel.

Det amerikanska politiska systemet ger inte presidenten fria händer att göra som han eller hon vill. Presidentens makt är inte oinskränkt. Inte ens när det gäller inom försvars- och utrikespolitiken.

Detta borde vara uppenbart för alla som exempelvis studerat Barack Obamas bataljer med kongressen under de senaste två mandatperioderna.

Alla som är intresserade av amerikansk politik borde därför läsa Matthew Coppers analys i Newsweek. Han ger en realistisk bild av Trumps möjligheter att få igenom den politik som han baserar sin kampanj på.

Om Trumps potential skall jämföras med någon historisk föregångare så är det inte, enligt Copper, någon auktoritär diktator utan snarare de tidigare presidenterna Dwight D. Eisenhower och Jimmy Carter.

Demokraten Carter anses allmänt vara en av de mer mediokra presidenterna i modern tid.

Och man får gå tillbaka till republikanen Eisenhower för att hitta någon som helt saknade politisk erfarenhet innan de blev valda.

Även Trump saknar politisk erfarenhet. Detta är en anledning till hans popularitet men det kommer också påverka hans administrations effektivitet om han blir vald. Precis som det påverkade Eisenhowers och Obama idag.

Copper skriver:

The comedian Louis C.K. wrote to his fans that “Trump is Hitler,” another “funny and refreshing dude with a weird comb-over.” On the left, The Washington Post and Slate columnists have likened Trump to a fascist. In a case of rare agreement across party lines, conservatives have used a similar description. Conservative author Matt Lewis has called Trump an avatar of white-identity politics. And the haters have a lot of fodder. The mogul began his campaign saying Mexico was sending the U.S. “rapists,” then proposed a loopy and bigoted ban on Muslim immigration “until we figure out what the hell is going on” (whatever that means). Trump continues to lambaste the media at his rallies, referring to them as “the worst.” At least two journalists say they’ve been roughed up at Trump events without provocation—one of them is a woman who writes for a conservative publication and claims it was Trump’s campaign manager who left her bruised, a charge Trump’s people vigorously deny. This isn’t the Beer Hall Putsch, but it is ugly.

[…]

Trump isn’t Hitler. He isn’t a fascist either—although he has, despite a career of deal-making, the my-way-or-the-highway proclivities of a Latin American strongman, which would be worrisome if America were Bolivia and not an enduring democracy. […] He’s also not a savior. Due to his solipsistic personality and vague, unworkable policies, he could never be what he promises to be if elected. But that doesn’t make him the sum of all fears.

The unspectacular truth is that a Trump presidency would probably be marked by the quotidian work of so many other presidents—trying to sell Congress and the public on proposals while fighting off not only a culture of protest but also the usual swarm of lobbyists who kill any interesting idea with ads and donations. […] Trump is no match for the American political system, with its three branches of government. The president, as famed political scientist Richard Neustadt once said, has to take an inherently weak position and use the powers of persuasion to get others to do what he wants.

Could Trump blow up those legendary checks and balances and make America a fascist state? Oh, please. …] Trump’s more likely to end up like Jimmy Carter—a poor craftsman of legislation and a crushing disappointment to his supporters. Since World War II, only Dwight Eisenhower, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton have left office with high approval numbers. Presidents generally end their tenure not with a bullet in a bunker but with a whimper.

[…]

But to actually accomplish even modest legislative goals, let alone become a 21st-century führer, is beyond the mogul’s ken. Philosopher Leo Strauss coined the term reductio ad Hitlerum, the common tendency to reduce all arguments to Hitler, or to always see an action leading to Nazism. In its more extreme forms, you get statements like “You-know-who was also a vegetarian.” Trump’s displays of bigotry during the primary, most notably his call for a “total and complete shutdown” on Muslims entering the U.S., are abhorrent, but they don’t put the America on a fast track toward the Third Reich—not unless you believe Congress, business, the armed forces, the judiciary and so on are all willing to start setting up internment camps. The U.S., with its unemployment rate of less than 5 percent and minuscule inflation, is a country where retirees try to get better yield, not the hyperinflation Weimar Republic that gave birth to Hitler. Fascism, with its totalitarian control of society and the economy—“Nazi” was short for National Socialists—doesn’t describe Trump’s views, even if former Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley and Michael Gerson, a former speechwriter for George W. Bush, throw around the term fascist when bad-mouthing the billionaire.

[…]

But one thing we know is that Trump is used to having his way. Eisenhower, the last president who had never held elective office before entering the White House, might be the closest thing we have to a useful comparison. Many worried that the supreme commander of Allied forces in Europe would flounder in a system where his commands were not instantly met with a salute. ”He’ll sit there all day saying, ‘Do this, do that,’ and nothing will happen,” lamented Harry Truman as he readied to turn over the presidency to the five-star general. “Poor Ike—it won’t be a bit like the military. He’ll find it very frustrating.”

It’s extremely unlikely anyone will ever utter the phrase “poor Donald.” And we should allow for the possibility that, like Eisenhower, he would be a successful president. His business has its eye-rolling qualities (mmm, Trump Steaks), but he does cut deals and, in case you hadn’t heard, even wrote a book about it. Trump has positive qualities that detractors should recognize: ideological flexibility, an ability to negotiate, great communication skills. However, they seem easily overwhelmed by his obvious flaws: bigoted policies that target religions and utterances that slander Mexicans, a brash and imperious style, a tendency to hold grudges long beyond their sell-by date. Ultimately, Eisenhower’s weak grip on Washington was a contributing factor to the rise of anti-Communist crusader Senator Joseph McCarthy.

[…]

It’s more than likely Trump would wind up being just another president on the alphabetical roll call, nestled between the memorable Truman and the utterly forgettable John Tyler, distinguished more by his hue, his bullying and his encouragement of other bullies than by any lasting damage done to a republic that has endured far worse.

Tidskriftsomslag: Newsweek, 25 mars 2016.

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