Strategi: Hur stoppar man en framtida Trump?

USA | För lång tid framöver kommer man att studera Donald Trumps valkampanj. Var den unik eller kan strategin kopieras av andra?

En bra början är att studera varför de övriga republikanska presidentkandidaterna inte lyckades stoppa honom.

James Fallows, som en gång ingick i Jimmy Carters kampanjstab och numera är på tidskriften The Atlantic, pratade med några strateger om hur man försökte hantera Trump.

After the fact, representatives of all the fallen candidates told me that none of it was inevitable, and that Trump could have been stopped if any of the others had imagined that he would go as far as he did. “If you put any of us in a time capsule and told us a year ago that he might be the nominee, then each candidate would have tried to prevent it in their own way,” Alex Conant, the communications director for Rubio’s campaign, told me after Trump had locked things up. “We all thought that the summer of Trump would not last. So our early strategy was not just to ignore him but actually to try hard not to offend his supporters, so we could be the alternative to him when he inevitably went down. He largely got a free pass until it was too late.” Tim Miller, who worked for Bush, agreed that the other non-Trump candidates were more intent on finishing one another off than attacking him when he might have been vulnerable. “By the end, Marco was scoring points against him,” Miller said. Before his humiliating loss to Trump in his own state of Florida, which forced him out of the race, Rubio was attacking Trump for his ignorance about policy and mocking him on hand size and blowhard traits. “But Marco was already sinking by then, so it was from a position of weakness rather than strength.”

“The rest of them were convinced that Donald Trump didn’t need to be defeated,” Stuart Stevens, who was Mitt Romney’s campaign strategist in 2012, told me. “That was a convenience, because they didn’t have to take him or his supporters on. With Jeb and Rubio, it became like the Bosnian civil war—more into killing each other than winning.” Meanwhile, Trump cruised ahead.

No one can say whether an earlier attack might have finished off Trump. It’s clear that the free pass he received allowed him to dominate and diminish his opponents […] “Low-Energy Jeb.” “Little Marco.” “9Lyin’ Ted.” His impulsive approach also paralyzed the other campaigns. “When we did our debate prep, we wondered how you can prepare to debate against someone who doesn’t prepare at all himself,” Alex Conant said. “I don’t think Trump had any idea what he was going to say until he said it. All you could be certain of is that if he said something funny or outlandish, that would dominate the news, and you’d be even further behind.”

Trump didn’t “win” all the debates, nor was he always effective minute by minute. When questions got into details of policy, he would set himself on pause until an opportunity for a put-down occurred. “With eight or nine others onstage, he could pick a moment to position himself as the alpha,” Tim Miller said. “And eventually the media got conditioned not to say negative things about his debate performance, since whatever he did, he rose in the polls—while for Jeb or Marco or Ted Cruz, any mistake was seen as ‘devastating.’ ”

James Parker, även han på The Atlantic, konstaterar att Trumps sätt att kommunicera gör det svårt för en motståndare eftersom han inte hade ett politiskt budskap i traditionell bemärkelse.

Trump-space is not democratic. It depends for its energy on the tyrannical emanations of the man at its center, on the wattage of his big marmalade face and that dainty mobster thing he does with the thumb and forefinger of his right hand. But it is artistic. Within its precincts, the most vicious and nihilistic utterances retain a kind of innocent levity: They sound half-funny, theatrical, or merely petulant. The scapegoating and bullying are somehow childlike. This is why, so far, no political strategy has succeeded against him. It rolls on, his power grab, his wild Trumpian trundling toward the White House, because he’s not doing politics at all. He’s doing bad art. Terrible art. He can’t go off message, because his message is “Look at me! I’m off message!”

Det blir svårt att tänka sig att någon kommer att kunna kopiera Trumps stil i kommande valkampanjer. Trump framstår som genuint unik i sin still.

I USA kommer det kanske räcka med en variant av Lloyd Bentsens put-down i vicepresidentkandidaternas valdebatt 1988. Bentsen fick Dan Quayle att krympa rejält i tv-rutan med klassikern ”You’re no Jack Kennedy!” Kanske kommer det att räcka med ett ”You’re no Donald Trump!” för att stoppa nästa Trump-wannabe.

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Politik: Barack Obamas utrikespolitiska doktrin!

USA | Barack Obamas utrikespolitik har uppfattats av många som både motsägelsefull och otydlig. Någon röd tråd har varit svår att se.

Jeffrey Goldberg, nationell korrespondent för The Atlantic, har träffat presidenten vid ett flertal sedan det första intervjutillfället 2006 när han träffade den dåvarande senatorn från Illinois.

Under Goldbergs senaste möte med presidenten i Vita huset redogjorde Obama bl.a. för hur han ser på USA:s roll i världen och vilken utrikes- och säkerhetspolitisk skola han anser sig ligga närmast.

Något förvånande är att Obama är en stor anhängare till den doktrin som i akademiska kretsar brukar kallas den realistiska skolan. Det är en inriktning som präglade president Richard Nixon och Henry Kissinger under deras tid i Vita huset.

I Obamas fall lär det dock mest vara Brent Scowcroft, nationell säkerhetsrådgivare till president George H. W. Bush, som stått för inspirationen.

I den nitton sidor långa essän i The Atlantic skrev Goldberg bl.a. följande:

Obama, unlike liberal interventionists, is an admirer of the foreign-policy realism of President George H. W. Bush and, in particular, of Bush’s national-security adviser, Brent Scowcroft (“I love that guy,” Obama once told me). Bush and Scowcroft removed Saddam Hussein’s army from Kuwait in 1991, and they deftly managed the disintegration of the Soviet Union; Scowcroft also, on Bush’s behalf, toasted the leaders of China shortly after the slaughter in Tiananmen Square. As Obama was writing his campaign manifesto, The Audacity of Hope, in 2006, Susan Rice, then an informal adviser, felt it necessary to remind him to include at least one line of praise for the foreign policy of President Bill Clinton, to partially balance the praise he showered on Bush and Scowcroft.

[…]

One day, over lunch in the Oval Office dining room, I asked the president how he thought his foreign policy might be understood by historians. He started by describing for me a four-box grid representing the main schools of American foreign-policy thought. One box he called isolationism, which he dismissed out of hand. “The world is ever-shrinking,” he said. “Withdrawal is untenable.” The other boxes he labeled realism, liberal interventionism, and internationalism. “I suppose you could call me a realist in believing we can’t, at any given moment, relieve all the world’s misery,” he said. “We have to choose where we can make a real impact.” He also noted that he was quite obviously an internationalist, devoted as he is to strengthening multilateral organizations and international norms.

I told him my impression was that the various traumas of the past seven years have, if anything, intensified his commitment to realist-driven restraint. Had nearly two full terms in the White House soured him on interventionism?

“For all of our warts, the United States has clearly been a force for good in the world,” he said. “If you compare us to previous superpowers, we act less on the basis of naked self-interest, and have been interested in establishing norms that benefit everyone. If it is possible to do good at a bearable cost, to save lives, we will do it.”

If a crisis, or a humanitarian catastrophe, does not meet his stringent standard for what constitutes a direct national-security threat, Obama said, he doesn’t believe that he should be forced into silence. He is not so much the realist, he suggested, that he won’t pass judgment on other leaders. Though he has so far ruled out the use of direct American power to depose Assad, he was not wrong, he argued, to call on Assad to go. “Oftentimes when you get critics of our Syria policy, one of the things that they’ll point out is ‘You called for Assad to go, but you didn’t force him to go. You did not invade.’ And the notion is that if you weren’t going to overthrow the regime, you shouldn’t have said anything. That’s a weird argument to me, the notion that if we use our moral authority to say ‘This is a brutal regime, and this is not how a leader should treat his people,’ once you do that, you are obliged to invade the country and install a government you prefer.”

“I am very much the internationalist,” Obama said in a later conversation. “And I am also an idealist insofar as I believe that we should be promoting values, like democracy and human rights and norms and values, because not only do they serve our interests the more people adopt values that we share—in the same way that, economically, if people adopt rule of law and property rights and so forth, that is to our advantage—but because it makes the world a better place. And I’m willing to say that in a very corny way, and in a way that probably Brent Scowcroft would not say.

“Having said that,” he continued, “I also believe that the world is a tough, complicated, messy, mean place, and full of hardship and tragedy. And in order to advance both our security interests and those ideals and values that we care about, we’ve got to be hardheaded at the same time as we’re bighearted, and pick and choose our spots, and recognize that there are going to be times where the best that we can do is to shine a spotlight on something that’s terrible, but not believe that we can automatically solve it. There are going to be times where our security interests conflict with our concerns about human rights. There are going to be times where we can do something about innocent people being killed, but there are going to be times where we can’t.”

Tidskriftsomslag: The Atlantic, april 2016.

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Kampanj: Trump går mot en storförlust!

Denna reklamfilm har fått många att göra en jämförelse mellan Donald Trumps oförmåga att ta tydligt avstånd ifrån Ku Klux Klan och klanens stöd till Barry Goldwatrer i valet 1964.

Yoni Appelbaum, senior editor på The Atlantic skrev så här:

In 2000, Trump was unambiguous about condemning the intolerance of the Reform Party, because it “now includes a Klansman, Mr. Duke, a neo-Nazi, Mr. Buchanan, and a communist, Ms. Fulani,” he said. “This is not company I wish to keep.” On Friday, Trump was asked about Duke’s support, and replied, “I disavow him, OK?” But somehow, by Sunday, he’d forgotten both who Duke was, and how repellent his ideology is.

Om man inte klarar av att ta avstånd ifrån KKK har man uppenbara problem. I ett val där den viktiga väljargruppen kommer att vara svarta amerikaner, och där dessa till övervägande delen röstar på demokraterna, har ingen kandidat råd att göra sådant misstag.

För det kan väl inte vara så att stödet från t.ex. David Duke, f.d. ”Grand Wizard” i klanen, anses vara så pass viktigt för Trump att han inte anser sig ha råd att avstå ifrån det?

I så fall är det ett säkert tecken på att Trump misstänker att han går mot en storförlust mot Hillary Clinton.

Läs mer: ”If You Can’t Understand the Trump Problem, Watch This Vintage Campaign Ad” av Jack Holmes.

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Politik: Nästa president blir en ”liberal”!

Val 2016 | USA:s väljare har vänt sig alltmer åt vänster enligt Peter Beinart som är contributing editor på tidskriften The Atlantic.

Enligt hans tes kommer nästa president – oavsett om det blir en demokrat eller republikan – att fortsätta förvalta det liberala arvet efter Barack Obama.

Om det blir t.ex. Hillary Clinton kommer hon att bygga vidare på de liberala strömningar som redan finns i landet.

Och vinner Donald Trump kommer han inte att kunna ta landet tillbaka till konservatismen under George W. Bush oavsett hans retorik idag. Obama har helt enkelt förändrat USA för mycket. De viktigaste målgrupperna har alla gått i mer liberal riktning.

Beinart skriver:

I came of age in the ’80s and ’90s, when the backlash against ’60s liberalism still struck terror into Democratic hearts. I watched as Ronald Reagan moved the country hard to the right, and as Bill Clinton made his peace with this new political reality by assuring white America that his party would fight crime mercilessly. Seeing this year’s Democratic candidates crumple before Black Lives Matter and shed Clinton’s ideological caution as they stampeded to the left, I imagined the country must be preparing for a vast conservative reaction.

But I was wrong. The more I examined the evidence, the more I realized that the current moment looks like a mirror image of the late ’60s and early ’70s. The resemblances are clear, but their political significance has been turned upside down. There is a backlash against the liberalism of the Obama era. But it is louder than it is strong. Instead of turning right, the country as a whole is still moving to the left.

[…]

That doesn’t mean the Republicans won’t retain strength in the nation’s statehouses and in Congress. It doesn’t mean a Republican won’t sooner or later claim the White House. It means that on domestic policy—foreign policy is following a different trajectory, as it often does—the terms of the national debate will continue tilting to the left. The next Democratic president will be more liberal than Barack Obama. The next Republican president will be more liberal than George W. Bush.

In the late ’60s and ’70s, amid left-wing militancy and racial strife, a liberal era ended. Today, amid left-wing militancy and racial strife, a liberal era is only just beginning.

[…]

It means the next Republican president won’t be able to return the nation to the pre-Obama era.

That’s what happened when Dwight Eisenhower followed Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Truman. Ike moderated the growth in government expansion that had begun in the 1930s, but he didn’t return American politics to the 1920s, when the GOP opposed any federal welfare state at all. He in essence ratified the New Deal. It’s also what happened when Bill Clinton followed Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush. By passing punitive anticrime laws, repealing restrictions on banks, signing NAFTA, cutting government spending to balance the budget, reforming welfare, and declaring that the “era of big government is over,” Clinton acknowledged that even a Democratic president could not revive the full-throated liberalism of the 1960s and ’70s. He ratified Reaganism.

Barack Obama sought the presidency hoping to be the Democrats’ Reagan: a president who changed America’s ideological trajectory. And he has changed it. He has pushed the political agenda as dramatically to the left as Reagan pushed it to the right, and, as under Reagan, the public has acquiesced more than it has rebelled. Reagan’s final victory came when Democrats adapted to the new political world he had made, and there is reason to believe that the next Republican president will find it necessary to make similar concessions to political reality.

This political cycle, too, will ultimately run its course. A sustained rise in crime could breed fissures between African American activists and young whites or even Latinos. Slower economic growth and a rising budget deficit could turn the public against government in a way that Obama’s policies have not—and force Democrats to again emphasize the creation of wealth more than its distribution. How this era of liberal dominance will end is anyone’s guess. But it will likely endure for some time to come.

Tidskriftsomslag: The Atlantic, januari/februari 2016.

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Kampanj: Hillary Clintons komparativa fördelar!

STRATEGI | Det finns få negativa saker inom politiken som inte kan vändas till en fördel. Det gäller bara att lyfta fram styrkorna på bekostnad av svagheterna.

Hillary Clinton har fått mycket kritik för de första stapplande stegen i sin valkampanj och sättet hon har försökt krishantera.

Peter Beinart i The Atlantic har dock en lite annorlunda vinkling på temat. Hans poäng är att Clinton har gjort precis det hon är bäst på.

Hennes styrka har aldrig varit de stora visionerna. Däremot älskar hon att tala om sakfrågor. Hon är, precis som sin man, en riktig politisk geek.

Visioner är annars standardingrediensen i amerikanska politikers arsenal. Visioner är ett bra sätt att slippa bli alltför konkret i sin politik. Samtidigt låter det visionära som om man tänkt både länge och väl kring de stora utmaningar landet står inför.

Visioner har också den fördelen att man inte behöver vara speciellt konkret. På så sätt unviker man att öppna upp sig för motståndarnas attacker.

Beinart konstaterar att Clinton gjort precis tvärt emot vad många andra politiker gör när de drar igång sin presidentvalskampanj.

Soaring rhetoric and grand themes have never been Hillary’s strengths. That’s one reason so many liberals found her so much less inspirational than Barack Obama in 2008. And it’s a problem with deep roots. In his biography, A Woman in Charge, Carl Bernstein describes Hillary, then in law school, struggling to articulate her generation’s perspective in an address to the League of Women Voters. “If she was speaking about a clearly defined subject,” Bernstein writes, “her thoughts would be well organized, finely articulated, and delivered in almost perfect outline form. But before the League audience, she again and again lapsed into sweeping abstractions.”

Team Clinton appears to understand this. And so it has done something shrewd. Instead of talking vision, Hillary is talking policy, which she does really well.

[…]

Hillary’s handlers have played to this strength. On April 29, she devoted the first major speech of her campaign not to her vision for America, but to something more specific: race and crime.

[…]

The speech was not merely substantive. It was authentic. It showcased the real Hillary Clinton: A woman who, whatever her faults, hates injustice and knows what she’s talking about when it comes to government.

[…]

She’s at her best talking about America not abstractly, but concretely. She’s most inspiring when talking not about what she believes, but about what she wants to do. And she most effectively humanizes herself by being true to who she is: knowledgeable, passionate, and vaguely obsessive about making government work. Against Rubio, or any other likely Republican challenger, that identity should provide an excellent contrast.

Bild: Seth Wenig/AP Photo. Hillary Clinton talar med reportrar vid FN:s högkvarter den 10 mars 2015.

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Citat: När det hettar till i kampanjteamet!

When the house is on fire, it’s better to have a psychotic fireman than no fireman at all. 

                                                                      – Howard Wolfson

Wolfson var Communications Director i Hillary Clintons kaotiska kampanjteam 2008. Citatet från Joshua Greens ”The Front-Runner’s Fall”, The Atlantic.                                

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PR: Varumärket ”JFK” lever vidare!

MYTER | John F. Kennedys popularitet har aldrig riktigt stått i proportion till vad han lyckades åstadkomma inom politiken.

Speciellt märkligt är att han är så omhuldad i liberala politiska kretsar.

Studerar man hans politik på det inrikespolitiska och utrikespolitiska området framstår hans politik som mer konservativ än progressiv.

När det gäller medborgarrättsrörelsen hamnade han på fel sida om historien. Han kan knappast påstås ha varit drivande när det gäller de svartas rättigheter.

Man kan snarare se honom som en bromskloss. Eller en som var rädd att frågorna skulle stjäla tid och fokus från viktigare uppgifter. Inte minst på det utrikespolitiska området.

Tittar man på hans politik när det gäller Kuba, Vietnamn och Sovjetunionen var han mer hök än duva.

Hans övertro på att CIA kunde lösa alla problem som inte diplomatin rådde bot på gör att han idag mer ser ut som en föregångare till Ronald Reagan än, låt säga, Jimmy Carter.

Redan i valrörelsen kritiserade han sin huvudmotståndare, vicepresident Richard Nixon, från höger. Han påstod att Sovjetunionen hade ett farligt övertag när det gällde kärnvapenmissiler som hotade USA:s säkerhet.

Detta är knappas ståndpunkter som idag borde göra honom populär bland liberaler, vare sig i USA eller i Europa.

Så varför denna popularitet? Det är svårt att se det som något annat än en förälskelse i själva ”varumärket” Kennedy.

Steven Stark är inne på samma tankegångar i artikelen “The Cultural Meaning of the Kennedys”.

Artikel skrevs 1994 och förklarar fenomenet som konsekvenserna av amerikansk kändiskultur. I kändisvärlden är det nämligen alltid bättre att vara en Elvis än en FDR.

Oavsett hur många skandaler som avslöjas om Kennedys privata och politiska liv – och de är bra många vid det här laget – kommer JFK alltid att framstå i positiv dager.

Om en Britney Spears eller Charlie Sheen kan överleva mediala härdsmältor så varför inte en Kennedy?

När man väl gått från att vara en vanlig dödlig till att bli ”kändis” överlever man allt. Och är det något familjen Kennedy alltid har varit skickliga på så är det just att vårda sina egna myter.

Steven Stark skriver:

Because of the current cultural obsession with inner life, biography now tends to stray into the personal more than it once did. Still, the Kennedy family isn’t written about the way that Harry Truman, or Ronald Reagan, or Martin Luther King Jr. is. The Kennedys are different from you and me and them, and not simply because they have more money.

To be sure, the Kennedys have had—and continue to have—a political impact on the nation. To many, they have embodied an ideal of public service. But politics hasn’t been this family’s calling card in the mass culture for some time. Even in the aggregate the Kennedys have never had the political impact of Martin Luther King Jr., FDR, or even Reagan. If President Kennedy is still revered today, it’s more because of his glamorous style and because he died young than for any specific accomplishments.

[…]

As a kind of entertainment family the Kennedys were a prime force in blurring the distinctions between Hollywood and Washington—that blur being a condition characteristic of the age. As the critic Richard Schickel has observed in his book Intimate Strangers, they were certainly not the first to court the film industry or to recognize the consequences of the media era.

[…]

But the Kennedys helped complete the revolution. As the biographers tell it, Father Joe ”mingled” with Gloria Swanson and other stars, and his real business interest was in movie production, because he thought that was where the aristocracy of the next generation would be created. Judging from the biographies, much of the next Kennedy generation’s childhood appears to have been one long photo op, culminating in John Kennedy’s marriage to, of all things, an aristocratic photographer. If, in the media planning devised largely by Father Joe, JFK’s 1960 race for the presidency was the first to resemble the packaging of a Hollywood blockbuster—the buildup, the bio, the promos, the publicity shots, the early buzz among influential critics, the reviews, the breakthrough performance (in debates), and, finally, the crowd reaction—that may have been no accident. ”John F. Kennedy treated southern Ohio yesterday as Don Giovanni used to treat Seville,” Murray Kempton wrote one day in a campaign dispatch striking both for its honesty and for the new political phenomenon it was describing. After all this, and an Administration that made the elevation of style over substance into both a zeitgeist and an ideology, not only the hanging out with Sinatra and Marilyn was inevitable; so was the eventual arrival of someone like Ronald Reagan.

Läs mer: Ovanstående artikel finns i förkortad version även i ovanstående tidskriftsnummer. Artiklarna är samlade här. Tidskriftsomslag: The Atlantic: Special Commemorative Issue, 2013.

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Image: Teflonpresidenten Obama!

TERRORISM | Barack Obama har kommit lindrigt undan när det gäller protester riktade mot hans politik på det utrikespolitiska området.

Speciellt tydligt är det när det gäller hans användande av drönarattacker i kampen mot terrorister i andra länder. I EU-länderna har protesterna varit näst intill obefintliga.

Ronald Reagan kallades ofta för teflonpresidenten eftersom hans image aldrig verkade ta skada av kritiken på hemmaplan. Obama verkar ha samma förmåga på det utrikespolitiska området.

Man behöver inte vara konspiratorisk för att anta att protesterna skulle varit betydligt mer omfattande om en republikansk president använt drönarplan i samma omfattning som Obama.

Var finns alla demonstrationer med krav på att Obama skall ställas inför rätta för krigsförbrytelser och kränkningar av de mänskliga rättigheterna?

Detta var vardagsmat för både premiärminister Tony Blair och presidenterna Reagan och George W. Bush. Inte ens partier på vänsterkanten som t.ex. Vänsterpartiet verkar vara intresserade av att protestera.

Mark Bowden skriver i The Atlantic om drönarattackerna:

The list is the product of a rigorous vetting process that the administration has kept secret. Campaigning for the White House in 2008, Obama made it clear (although few of his supporters were listening closely) that he would embrace drones to go after what he considered the appropriate post-9/11 military target—“core al-Qaeda.” When he took office, he inherited a drone war that was already expanding. There were 53 known strikes inside Pakistan in 2009 (according to numbers assembled from press reports by The Long War Journal), up from 35 in 2008, and just five the year before that. In 2010, the annual total more than doubled, to 117. The onslaught was effective, at least by some measures: letters seized in the 2011 raid that killed Osama bin Laden show his consternation over the rain of death by drone.

[…]

The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, a left-wing organization based in London, has made a strenuous effort, using news sources, to count bodies after CIA drone strikes. It estimates that from 2004 through the first half of 2013, 371 drone strikes in Pakistan killed between 2,564 and 3,567 people (the range covers the minimum to the maximum credible reported deaths). Of those killed, the group says, somewhere between 411 and 890—somewhere between 12 percent and 35 percent of the total—were civilians. The disparity in these figures is telling. But if we assume the worst case, and take the largest estimates of soldier and civilian fatalities, then one-quarter of those killed in drone strikes in Pakistan have been civilians.

Everyone agrees that the amount of collateral damage has dropped steeply over the past two years. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism estimates that civilian deaths from drone strikes in Pakistan fell to 12 percent of total deaths in 2011 and to less than 3 percent in 2012.

No civilian death is acceptable, of course. Each one is tragic. But any assessment of civilian deaths from drone strikes needs to be compared with the potential damage from alternative tactics. Unless we are to forgo the pursuit of al-Qaeda terrorists entirely, U.S. forces must confront them either from the air or on the ground, in some of the remotest places on Earth. As aerial attacks go, drones are far more precise than manned bombers or missiles. That narrows the choice to drone strikes or ground assaults.

Sometimes ground assaults go smoothly. […] In fact, ground combat almost always kills more civilians than drone strikes do. Avery Plaw, a political scientist at the University of Massachusetts, estimates that in Pakistani ground offensives against extremists in that country’s tribal areas, 46 percent of those killed are civilians. Plaw says that ratios of civilian deaths from conventional military conflicts over the past 20 years range from 33 percent to more than 80 percent. “A fair-minded evaluation of the best data we have available suggests that the drone program compares favorably with similar operations and contemporary armed conflict more generally,” he told The New York Times.

Tidskriftsomslag: The Atlantic, september 2013

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Politik: Barack Obama och USA:s svarta väljare!

VÄLJARE | Att det politiska landskapet har förändrats till demokraternas fördel visar omvalet av president Barack Obama.

Men Obama kan inte ta åt sig hela äran för valsegern enligt Ta-Nehisi Coates på tidskriften The Atlantic.

Åtminstone inte när det gäller svarta väljares benägenhet att gå och rösta.

Coates skriver:

A sober observer could have dismissed Obama’s election in 2008 as an anomaly rather than a sea change. As the first black presidential nominee, Obama naturally benefited from record turnout among African Americans—turnout that might not be sustainable in future elections. He also benefited from an opposition that was saddled with two wars, an unpopular incumbent, and an economy in free fall. In black communities, there was a distinct awareness of the situation: if white folks are willing to hand over the country to a black man, then we must really be in bad shape.

Entering the 2012 election, Obama was no longer a talented rookie; he was the captain of the football team, with a record vulnerable to interpretation, and to attack. The economy was still sluggish. American troops were still being shot in Afghanistan. His base seemed depressed. And the most-loyal members of that base, African Americans, were facing an array of “voter ID” laws that had—what a coincidence—bloomed following his election.

[…]

The black community refused to comply with expectations, and instead turned out in droves. In 2012, minority turnout across the country exceeded 2008 levels; unlike the turnout of other minorities, however, black turnout was not fueled by demographic growth but by a higher percentage of the black electorate going to the polls. For the first time in history, according to a study by Pew, black turnout may even have exceeded white turnout.

You could be forgiven for looking at African American history as a long catalog of failure. In the black community, it is a common ritual to deride individual shortcomings, and their effect on African American prospects. The men aren’t doing enough. The women are having too many babies. The babies are having babies. Their pants are falling off their backsides. But November’s electoral math is clear—African Americans didn’t just vote in 2012, they voted at a higher rate than the general population.

[…]

Martin Luther King Jr. did not create the civil-rights movement any more than Malcolm X created black pride. And the wave that brought Obama to power precedes him: the black-white voting gap narrowed substantially back in 1996, before he was even a state legislator. The narrowing gap is not the work of black messiahs, but of many black individuals.

Bild: Anhängare till Barack Obama vid Palm Beach County Convention Center den 9 september 2012, West Palm Beach, Florida. (Foto: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

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Politik: Mike Bloomberg om att våga leda!

INTERVJU | Michael Bloomberg, New Yorks borgmästare, är en av dessa politiker som lyckas vara både kontroversiell och populär på samma gång.

I en intervju med James Bennet, editor in chief på The Atlantic, delar han med sig om sina tankar kring bl.a. politiskt ledarskap, förtroendeundersökningar och politikers öppenhet gentemot media.

Mycket av detta handlar om att våga tänka själv och våga leda. Här finns en hel del även svanska politiker borde kunna ta till sig.

[W]hat leaders should do is make decisions as to what they think is in the public interest based on the best advice that they can get, and then try and build a constituency and bring it along.

The public, I believe — and I’ve always thought this — is much more likely to follow if the public believes that you are genuine. I’ve said this before, and yesterday in this economics speech, I gave a kiss to George W. Bush. But that’s true. George W. Bush, who I don’t agree with on a lot of things — I think he got elected and reelected because the public thought he was genuine. They think his father was genuine. Jeb — I know [him] very well; he’s on the board of my foundation — he is genuine, they believe.

And Al Gore and John Kerry tried to be on both sides of every issue. ”I voted for the war, but not to fund it.” And that’s Mitt Romney’s problem, I think. He walked away from everything he did. He actually was a pretty good governor of Massachusetts, where I come from. I think that’s a losing strategy, to not have values. I think the public wants you to have them and will respect you for them. They may carp a little bit, but in the end, that’s the kind of person they want. They want somebody who has real conviction.

[…]

I said one time that if I finish my term in office — at that time, we were talking about eight years, or four years — and have high approval ratings, then I wasted my last years in office. That high approval rating means you don’t upset anybody. High approval rating means you’re skiing down the slope and you never fall. Well, you’re skiing the baby slope, for goodness’ sakes. Go to a steeper slope. You always want to press, and you want to tackle the issues that are unpopular, that nobody else will go after.

[…]

The president — how often does he talk to the press? His press secretary talks to the press every day, okay. But I happen to think the public should demand he should. I think he should; I think that’s his job. But regardless, it is in an election year, just before the election, maybe I cut you a break. Where I don’t cut you a break is the day after the election. I believe you do the tough stuff first. Why? Number one, you have an obligation to those who voted for you, to do what you promised. Number two, if you believe they’re the right things, you need some time to let them work out, adjust them, explain them, maybe cancel and change them — or whatever — before the next election.

Bild: Tidskriftsomslaget är The Atlantic, november 2012. Intervjun fanns med i samma nummer. En längre variant finns på nätet.

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