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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Lobbyism: Tony Blairs värld av affärer och filantropi!

AFFÄRER | Tony Blair rör sig fortfarande i politiska kretsar. Numera är han en kombination av lobbyist och internationell dealmaker.

Precis som Bill Clinton ägnar sig Tony Blair både åt att tjäna pengar och idka välgörenhet. Men till skillnad från ex-presidenten är Blair betydligt populärare utomlands än på hemmaplan.

Stephanie Baker skriver i Bloomberg Markets:

In his new incarnation, Blair is taking on highly paid roles that don’t sit well with Britons still agitated by what they saw as Blair’s foreign adventurism when he was in office.

He’s a paid adviser to the Abu Dhabi Executive Affairs Authority, which is chaired by Crown Prince Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan. He’s helping to arrange deals with China Investment Corp., the country’s $482 billion sovereign wealth fund.

Blair also is advising President Nursultan Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan, whose administration has paid Blair’s team of advisers 8 million pounds a year since the spring of 2011, including fees to Portland Communications, a PR firm set up by his former deputy press secretary Tim Allan.

Human Rights Watch Inc., a New York-based nonprofit advocacy group, condemned the Kazakh government for the shooting deaths of 12 striking oil workers during a clash with police in December 2011.

In 2012, Blair signed an agreement with Geraldo Alckmin, governor of the Brazilian state of Sao Paulo, to assemble a team of advisers to help modernize the state’s public services.

[…]

“I wanted to create a different type of post-prime ministerial career altogether,” he says. “From the outset, I had a very clear view of what I wanted to do. I wanted to create my own set of institutions.”

He’s done that. The Office of Tony Blair manages his work advising governments. Tony Blair Associates runs his financial consulting business. His charities include the Africa Governance Initiative, the Tony Blair Faith Foundation and the Tony Blair Sports Foundation.

[…]

At the heart of Blair’s firms — all ultimately owned by him — are two serendipitously named London-based limited partnerships that aren’t required to publish accounts under English law, Windrush Ventures No. 3 LP and Firerush Ventures No. 3 LP.

[…]

“There’s no reason to make your life that complicated unless it’s to reduce tax or hide something,” says Adrian Huston, a former U.K. tax inspector and director of Belfast, Northern Ireland-based accounting firm Huston & Co. “The only reason you do all these intervening transactions is to create a smoke screen.”

Blair shrugs off with a laugh any suggestion that he is trying to dodge taxes.

“Anything I get, I pay full 50 percent tax on,” he says.

Unlike many rich Britons who make money overseas and devise tax avoidance strategies by spending time outside the country, Blair says he has always been resident in the U.K. for tax purposes.

The rationale for his Byzantine-looking business configuration is simple, he says.

“We wanted confidentiality,” he says. “There’s a section of the media that will go after anyone connected with me, and I can’t operate like that.”

Bild: Tidskriftsomslaget är Bloomberg Markets, maj 2013.

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Kampanj: Boris Johnson mot Ken Livingstone!

LONDON | Valkampanjen i London är i full gång. Striden står mellan nuvarande borgmästaren Boris Johnson och utmanaren Ken Livingstone.

Till skillnad från så många andra valkampanjer i Storbritannien (eller i Sverige) står striden mellan två ideologiskt tydliga alternativ. Här handlar det inte bara om att trängas i mitten.

Johnson, mannen med frisyren endast en mor kan älska, är betydligt tydligare i sin konservatism (eller snarare libertarianism) än premiärminister David Cameron. Och Ken Livingston tillhör vänstern inom Labour.

Jemima Khan intervjuade de två kandidaterna för New Statesman.  Här ett utdrag från intervjun med Johnson:

“My kind of Toryism,” he continues, ”is about allowing people to get on and do what they are capable of doing, liberating talent and allowing people to prosper and flourish. What I find maddening about the left and socialists generally is that they are all about trying to restrain people and keep them in their boxes.

“Conservative politics, properly done, is a massive liberating force. The wealth gap in this country hugely opened up under Labour and social mobility froze in the last 20 years. It was during that epoch of Blair and Livingstone and the whole boom in credit that things started to go wrong for this country, and what they forgot about was what was really happening to the bottom 20 per cent.

[…]

“I’ll tell you what makes me angry – lefty crap,” he thunders in response. Like? ”Well, like spending £20,000 on a dinner at the Dorchester for Sinn Fein!” Take that, Ken.

[…]

“I am the guy who has concentrated on spending their [the taxpayers’] money where it really counts for Londoners,” he says. ”I haven’t been so arrogant as to squander it on things that would bring no benefit to the people of this city at all, like flying off to bloody Havana and shacking up with Fidel Castro for a while. What is the point of that; how does that help Londoners? Show me the jobs that brought to London. The difference between him and me is that he used huge sums of taxpayers’ money for his own self-publicity – he spent £12m on a freesheet he used to shove through people’s letter boxes, proclaiming his achievements.”

[…]

“I think it is the big things that I am proud of: reducing the cost of London government and focusing the money where it matters. From that flows everything else – delivering the best car scheme in the world, cutting people’s council tax, giving them a 24-hour Freedom Pass.

“We’ve greatly reduced crime, and it hasn’t been easy because it has been a tough period to be mayor. We have still got crime down by 10 per cent; the murder rate is down by about 25 per cent, and you can’t fudge that – so, great credit to the Met and to law enforcement generally. Bus crime is massively down, by 30 per cent; people were getting really hassled on the Tube. We have got a 40 per cent reduction in delays in my four years compared to the previous four years. I am proud of this.”

Läs mer: ”The world is run by monsters” är Khans intervju med Livingstone. Se även ”Ken vs Boris: my verdict”, ”Boris: quick-fire questions” och “Ken: quick-fire questions”. (Tidskriftsomslaget och alla artiklar är från New Statesman den 13 februari 2012.)

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Media: Bilden på Mitt Romney vi aldrig får se!

DESIGN | Mitt Romney har tagit mycket stryk på sista tiden. Newt Gingrich har vunnit debatter och knappar in inför valet i Florida enligt opinionsundersökningar.

Men det var inte de politiska händelserna som fick Bloomberg Businessweek att avstå ifrån att låta en blodig och sönderslagen Romney ”pryda” omslaget. Enligt tidskriften ville man bara lyfta fram en annan story.

Redaktör Josh Tyrangiel: “[T]he Romney story seemed to have already hit its peak. A lot of times these decisions are about all of us putting our finger in the air and trying to figure out which way the zeitgeist is blowing. It’s what makes the job so fun and so challenging.”

Läs mer: Se texter och länkar om tidskriftsomslaget på BuzzFeed och The Atlantic Wire.

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Image: Mitt Romneys problem är hans personlighet!

MITT ROMNEY har ett problem. Han har en tendens att stöta bort väljarna ju mer de lär känna honom.

Romney är den bland de republikanska presidentkandidaterna som har störst chans att besegra president Barack Obama.

Men innan han kan ta sig an Obama måste han först besegra – inte bara övriga republikanska utmanare – utan också delar av sin egen personlighet.

Andrew Romano, Newsweek, skriver om hur olika personlighetsdrag kan påverka både valrörelser och valresultat:

What is Mitt Romney? It is very hard to tell. Put him on a debate stage, and he can outshine the klieg lights.

[…]

And yet, away from the stage, and the lights, and the shrink-wrapped soundbites, where real human beings aren’t kept at a respectful distance, and résumés and factoids matter less, Romney isn’t quite as luminous.

[…]

If Romney loses the Republican nomination, the reasons won’t be mysterious: “Romneycare,” Mormonism, and the rise of a rival, Rick Perry, who is better at connecting with voters. (Perry’s Positive Intensity Score among Republicans is a league-leading 24, according to Gallup; Romney’s has fallen as low as 11.) By the same token, if Romney becomes president, it won’t be a surprise to see him succeed; his conscientiousness has already helped him oversee a successful state, a successful business, and a successful Olympics.

The only mystery now, the only surprise left, is Romney vs. Obama. Supporters say that Romney would be “more himself” in a general-election setting, where he’d no longer have to pander to the Republican fringe. But it’s possible, too, that being himself would be the problem. In America, voters tend to replace sitting presidents with polar-opposite personalities: Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Obama. But as Aubrey Immelman [an expert on the electoral effects of personality] points out, the rational, technocratic Obama “is one of the few presidential candidates since 1996 who can be labeled conscientious,” just like Romney. Faced with a choice between the conscientious devil they know and the conscientious devil they don’t, voters may not be as motivated to switch sides—especially when the incumbent scores higher on empathy, confidence, and comfort in his own skin.

Övrigt: Tidskriftsomslaget är från den amerikanska editionen.

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Strategi: Kan ”pragmatisk konservatism” besegra Obama?

HAR NÅGON av de republikanska presidentkandidaterna någon möjlighet att vinna över Barack Obama?

The Economist anser att chansen finns för en kandidat som anammar ”pragmatic conservative realism”.

In 2008 Mr Obama represented change. This time he will have to fend off charges that he is to blame for the achingly slow recovery by arguing that it would have been worse without his actions, such as his $800 billion stimulus package and the takeover of GM and Chrysler. That may be true but it is not easy to sell a counterfactual on the stump (as the first President Bush learned). And there are other holes in Mr Obama’s record. What happened to his promises to do something about the environment or immigration or Guantánamo? Why should any businessman support a chief executive who has let his friends in the labour movement run amok and who let his health-care bill be written by Democrats in Congress? Above all, why has he never produced a credible plan to tackle the budget deficit, currently close to 10% of GDP?

Asking these questions will surely give any Republican a perch in this race. But to beat the president, the Republicans need both a credible candidate and credible policies.

[…]

In most elections promising toughness is not a successful tactic; but this time Americans know that their country has huge problems and that their nation’s finances are the biggest problem of all. In Britain the Conservatives made the incumbent Gordon Brown seem ridiculous by spelling out the austerity that he at first barely dared mention; now another tough-talking centre-right party has won in Portugal […] If ever there was a time for pragmatic conservative realism, it is now. Mr Obama might also bear that in mind.

Övrigt: Tidskriftsomslaget är från den amerikanska upplagan. Se omslaget till den engelska och europeiska.

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