Media: Med kunskap kommer man långt!

USA Nyhetsreportage från USA ger en lätt uppfattningen att redaktionerna nöjer sig med att kopiera ståndpunkter och nyheter från The Huffington Post.

Marcus Oscarsson på TV4 är en av de få som avviker från det förutsägbara. Med stor entusiasm analyserar och sprider han kunskap om amerikansk politik som ingen annan.

I slutet av förra året uttalande han sig så här i livsstilsmagasinet Café om Donald Trump, amerikansk politik och val:

– Jag tror att han skulle kunna bli en bättre president än vad många tror. Jag tror att han har lyckats dölja sina goda egenskaper väldigt väl. Det är lite typiskt Sverige, och USA också, att tycka att Trump är ”galen”. Man kan inte vinna ett primärval mot 16 motkandidater om man är galen eller dålig. Däremot måste han sluta med en del av de här clownerierna.

Han gör en kort paus.

– Vilken kandidat var det förresten folk sa så där om förut: ”Han kan inte vinna, han är en Hollywoodpajas?”

– Reagan, mumlar en prematur ingenjör.

– Exakt. USA:s nästan mest populära president genom tiderna.

– Vem tror du vinner då?

– Jag tror att det blir väldigt, väldigt spännande. Och jag tror att Trump har mycket större chanser än vad folk tror.

[…]

– När man väl kliver in i Ovala rummet och vet att man är USA:s president och har hela världen på sina axlar, då tror jag att man skärper till sig. Och så finns det ju kontrollinstanser: kongressen, högsta domstolen, Pentagon och ministrarna. Många är arga för det här med muren mot Mexiko, men de har ju ett allvarligt problem med enorm illegal invandring från Mexiko. Vi har själva gränskontroller i Skåne. Hade vi haft hela vår landsgräns mot Turkiet tror jag att det hade varit stort stöd för en mur i Sverige också. Man får ta på sig den andra personens glasögon. Dessutom har Trump en history av att typ vara demokrat. Jag tror fortfarande att han är mer för aborträtten än vad många andra republikaner är. Jag tror inte att han är så som han verkar. Jag tror att ganska få personer är ondskefulla. Men ska han som person vara en förebild för USA:s unga så har han helt klart en del att förbättra – plus att stora delar av hans politik är okänd, vilket skapar stor osäkerhet om hur han faktiskt skulle agera som president.

[…]

– Politiska kampanjer är väldigt spännande för det är nära kopplat till att förstå väljarna och förstå vanligt folk, säger Marcus. Och amerikanska politiker är bra på göra sig begripliga. De är mindre byråkratiska än svenska politiker – som ofta använder svåra ord som ”arbetsgivaravgifter”. Det är många som inte vet vad det betyder. Säg ”så att det blir billigare att anställa” i stället.

Om Trump blir en bra som president lär vi få se. Men ingen president blir lika bra som deras anhängare säger eller så urusla som deras belackare påstår.

Vad vi kan se nu är att Trump uppenbart förstod något om USA som de flesta analytiker och politiker – inklusive Hiillary Clinton – missade.

Med sin försiktighet lyckades Oscarssons framstå som mer balanserad (och mer ”rätt” i efterhand) är de flesta i Sverige.

Tidskriftsomslag: Café, november 2016

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Kampanj: Clintons lugn besegrar Trumps ilska!

VAL 2016 | Den amerikanska väljarkåren är i stort sett uppdelad på 50 procent demokrater och 50 procent republikaner.

Detta gör att det oftast är mer kostnadseffektivt att lägga kraft på att övertyga de egna kärnväljarna att gå och rösta än att försöka locka över motståndarens väljare.

Men detta förutsätter naturligtvis att man inte gör de egna väljarna så upprörda att de hellre väljer att hålla för näsan och röstar på motståndarsidans kandidat.

Och det är detta som nu håller på att hända i USA där Donald Trump har gjort så många kärnväljare på högerkanten att de redan har börjat fundera på att rösta på Hillary Clinton om Trump blir deras partis presidentkandidat.

Det ser mer och mer ut som om valkampanjen – om det blir Clinton mot Trump – kommer att handla om att inte skrämma bort potentiella väljare (Clinton) och att övertyga tveksamma (Trump).

Team Hillarys strategi kommer därför att handla om att försöka minimera antalet uttalanden som riskerar stöta bort presumtiva republikanska väljare.

Risken för väljarflykt från den demokratiska sidan framstår ett av Clintons minsta problem.

En större risk är i så fall att Clinton, för att inte stöta sig med någon, väljer att kommunicera ett politiska budskap som är så utslätat att ingen orkar bry sig om att gå och rösta.

Men med tanke på att demokraterna har möjlighet att rösta fram USA:s första kvinnliga president framstår detta inte heller som speciellt sannolikt.

Vad Team Trump måste göra är att försöka övertyga både demokratiska och republikanska väljare att han är värdig deras röst. Med ett sådant scenario står Trump inför en rejäl uppförsbacke.

The Economist är inne på samma tankar i en ledarartikel.

Om hon bara kan undvika att framstå som lika aggressiv och arg som sin motståndare kommer hon att få det lättare att övertyga republikanska väljare som inte vill rösta på Trump.

For Mrs Clinton, going down the angry route might not split the party, but would almost certainly result in defeat. Democrats tend to fare poorly when their anguish overflows and begins to sound like contempt for America. It is hard to imagine Mrs Clinton credibly playing the political insurgent. She has decades of experience when the angriest voters want a novice. Nobody can out-hate Mr Trump. So it is encouraging that Mrs Clinton celebrated her victories on Super Tuesday by calling for more “love and kindness” in politics.

The opportunity for a better outcome lies in the asymmetry of the risks. Mrs Clinton has the opportunity to put together a coalition of anti-Trump voters broader than the one that carried Barack Obama to victory in 2008 and 2012. Despair over Mr Trump has reached such an intensity among some Republicans that the usual rules about there being no swing voters may no longer apply. If Mrs Clinton were to combine a high turnout on her own side with a sizeable number of Republican abstentions and spoilt ballots and some voters who are prepared to switch from red to blue, then Democrats could not just win the presidency with a landslide, but also wrest back control of the Senate.

To form this coalition for stopping the blond Berlusconi, Mrs Clinton would have to woo moderate, business-minded Republicans, and such folk would in turn have to put the national interest ahead of their tribe’s victory in November. Republicans like to talk about the importance of character (see Lexington); Mr Trump offers a chance to show that means something. Mr Trump often insults other Republicans; they owe him no loyalty. Some prominent Republicans have already begun to attack him, including Mitt Romney, the party’s nominee in 2012. More will have to make that move.

Tidskriftsomslag: The Economist, 5-11 mars 2016.

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Politik: Wall Streets skräck!

USA | Elizabeth Warren är presidentkandidaten som demokraterna aldrig fick. Om hon kandiderat hade hon utgjort ett rejält hot mot Hillary Clinton.

Till skillnad från Barack Obama har hon lyckats samarbeta med republikaner. Detta trots att hon uppfattas ligga på sitt partis vänsterkant.

Om inte attityden hos republikanerna förändras kommer alla demokrater, inklusive Hillary Clinton, att få en svår tid i Vita huset.

Och om Bernie Sanders mot förmodan skulle vinna kommer han att få det än svårare med en republikansk majoritet i kongressen.

Warren har blivit den mest kända politikern när det gäller att kritisera banker som är så stora och inflytelserika att ingen vågar låta dem gå omkull.

Hon har till och med , enligt Katrina Brooker i Bloomberg Markets, hänvisat till Teddy Roosevelt, “her favorite trust-busting president, who took on the big corporations of his day”.

När man läser Brookers artikel om Warren i Bloomberg Markets från förra året så förstår man varför hon inte är populär på Wall Street.

Barney Frank, the former congressman from Massachusetts and co-author of the Dodd-Frank legislation, says Warren has protected the act. “She can raise hell and make clear to people they will pay a political price if they try to attack it,” says Frank. In particular, he says, Warren has helped make modifying Dodd-Frank politically untenable for Democrats, without some of whom Republicans can’t hope to roll back the law. “I think it is safe until 2016,” Frank says.

“A Republican Senate would not take up Wall Street deregulation now,” says Dennis Kelleher, president and CEO of Better Markets, a watchdog organization that monitors Wall Street’s influence in Washington. “Nobody wants to be seen as siding with the big Wall Street banks.”

[…]

For Warren, the fight is definitely not over. In April, in a speech titled “The Unfinished Business of Financial Reform,” she laid out how she hopes to move her agenda forward. Among other things, she called for the breakup of the big banks; they are still too big to fail, she said, and bailing them out of the next crisis would cost billions. And she wants jail time for managers who violate the law. “It’s time to stop recidivism in financial crimes and to end the ‘slap on the wrist’ culture that exists at the Justice Department and the SEC,” Warren said.

An important part of her legislative agenda is the 21st Century Glass-Steagall Act, which she and three co-sponsors introduced in 2013. The bill is a modern version of the 1933 law that split commercial and investment banks. (The original Glass-Steagall was effectively repealed in 1999.) So far, 21st Century Glass-Steagall hasn’t gained traction on Capitol Hill, but for Wall Street, this will be one to watch.

“There are only two things I’m looking for from the biggest financial institutions in this country,” Warren says one cool spring night in New York. She’s standing before a packed crowd on the fourth floor of a Barnes & Noble bookstore on 17th Street. She’s come here, while the Senate is in recess, to promote the paperback version of her autobiography, A Fighting Chance.

[…]

Those two things she wants from the banks: “No. 1, I don’t think they ought to be able to cheat people,” Warren says. “Second thing, I don’t think they ought to be able to risk destroying this economy. Too big to fail has got to end.” The room erupts.

[…]

Warren isn’t the only politician tapping into the public’s frustration and anger at the financial system. Other lawmakers have been vocal supporters of tighter regulation. David Vitter, a Republican senator from Louisiana, sided with Warren and other Democrats in December in their fight against Citi. “I know it surprised a lot of people,” he says, explaining that he also fears the risks posed by large institutions. “Too big to fail is alive and well.” In late April, Bloomberg reported that Vitter and Warren were working together on another piece of legislation, this one designed to curb the authority of the Fed to bail out banks in a crisis. John McCain, the senator from Arizona and former Republican presidential candidate, is a co-sponsor of the 21st Century Glass-Steagall Act, along with Democrat Maria Cantwell and independent Angus King.

Last fall, Clinton tried to mimic Warren’s populism, declaring in a speech, “Don’t let anybody tell you that it’s corporations and businesses that create jobs.” This was way off the mark Warren hit when she famously argued during her Senate campaign in 2011 that businesses owe some part of their success to citizens and to the government. (Obama echoed Warren’s rhetoric in his 2012 “you didn’t build that” speech.)

The Warren version is worth examining. It gives, in plain language, her view of American capitalism: “You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear: You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for; you hired workers the rest of us paid to educate; you were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did.”

Tidskriftsomslag: Bloomberg Markets, juni 2015.

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Strategi: Det lönar sig att vara tuff mot Kina!

VAL 2016 | Kina utgör inte ett av de mer framträdande ämnena i valrörelsen så här långt. Åtminstone inte i jämförelse med Syrien och ISIS.

Trots detta anser Peter Coy på tidskriften Bloomberg Businessweek att kandidaternas inställningen till Kina är en indikator på hur de ser på USA:s roll i världen.

China is a litmus test for how the presidential candidates would govern on a broad range of issues. Are they isolationists or interventionists? Do they see foreign policy as a job for the White House or for Congress? How would they strike a balance between concern for human rights and the economy? Which constituency do they most aim to please—business, labor, religious groups, environmentalists, defense hawks?

Men oavsett vad kandidaterna säger för tillfället kommer man inte kunna ignorera Kina.

Jeffrey Bader, en tidigare rådgivare till Hillary Clinton, ger rådet “Be tough”. “But China is an increasingly powerful country that has its own interests, and it doesn’t listen to us.”

Coy skriver vidare om kandidaterna:

So far, nuance has been missing from the campaign. Donald Trump, the leading Republican in the polls, speaks of China primarily as a cheater.

[…]

The leading Democrat, Hillary Clinton, sounds nearly as hawkish on the subject of Beijing. As Obama’s secretary of state from 2009 to 2013, she introduced the “pivot to Asia” policy, designed in part to prevent Chinese hegemony in the region. At a New Hampshire event last July, shortly after it was revealed that China was behind a massive electronic intrusion into U.S. Department of State personnel records, she accused the country of “trying to hack into everything that doesn’t move in America.”

[…]

“She tends to be harder on China than her husband was,” says Jeffrey Bader, who was chief adviser to the Obama administration on China until 2011 and has remained close to Hillary.

[…]

Human rights, interestingly enough, is an issue that cuts across party lines. Clinton has repeatedly raised concerns about China’s record, most vividly in September, when she criticized President Xi Jinping during a visit to the U.S., which included a White House state dinner in his honor. That enraged the Chinese. Republicans, including Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and Carly Fiorina, have been no less harsh. In contrast, Trump and Bernie Sanders, Clinton’s chief Democratic rival, rarely mention Chinese human-rights issues in their speeches—though Sanders has contrasted China favorably with the U.S. on paid maternity leave, a position that drew him a rebuke from the actor James Woods, who called the senator an “utter moron.”

[…]

If history is a guide, the candidate who wins in November is likely to be more moderate in office than he or she was on the campaign trail.

Tidskriftsomslag: Bloomberg Businessweek (internationella upplagan) den 28 december 2015 – 10 januari 2016.

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Image: Donald Trump som politiskt varumärke!

KAMPANJ |  Vad kommer en seger för Donald Trump innebära för USA? Och hur kommer han att styra USA om han blir president?

Eftersom han primärt är en affärsman får man kanske försöka finna lösningen på frågorna i hans sätt att styra sin affärsverksamhet.

Max Abelson, Bloomberg Businessweek, skriver: ”We’re talking business rather than politics—after all, that’s his central qualification for the job he’s seeking.”

Trump is selling himself to America as the king of builders, a flawless dealmaker, and masterful manager. But he isn’t really any of those things. Trump has built few skyscrapers this century, stumbling twice when he’s tried, and struggled with an array of other projects. Meanwhile, his corporate leadership is a kind of teenager’s fantasy of adult office power. From his Trump Tower desk in Midtown Manhattan he controls the teensiest details, rejects hierarchy, and picks top deputies by following his own recipe for promotion.

[…]

The Trump Organization is not the kind of place where employees can always tell you what colleagues are working on or what their titles are. What they agree on is Trump’s immersion in the minutest of details, from the fountain and urns to the marble of lobby floors.

“Not in a compulsive way, or sick way, but in a caring way,” says David Schutzenhofer, Bedminster’s manager. When asked about it, Trump says he pays attention to details, even though he has good managers who should be able to handle them. It’s hard to imagine how Trump’s management style would or could translate to government, where hierarchies are impenetrable, micromanagement ineffective, and expensive urns susceptible to congressional scrutiny.

[…]

Antagonizing enormous swaths of North America, mocking women, and startling anyone tuned in to a few minutes of his speechifying wouldn’t be a wise business move if those products were all he had, because he’d be alienating precious customers. But there’s more to Trump’s business, and not just because he has the real estate and golf portfolios. His brand isn’t kindness and inclusiveness; it’s aggression and extravagance and power. It’s a self-rendered notion of an elite man who controls and wins, even when he loses.

That doesn’t mean you can take the boasts about his empire literally.

[…]

Trump isn’t the biggest New York developer. He isn’t really a skyscraper developer anymore, and he hasn’t been for years. He put up huge buildings and casinos, borrowed to do it, nearly wiped out, came back as a brand name that often needed bigger partners, was smacked by the financial crisis when he tried to again take massive risks, and ended up with a profitable business anyway.

The lesson from the 150-story building he craved is the same one you get from stepping inside the company. It’s not the hugest in the whole world, and it’s not what it was supposed to be, but it’s something. And, like his politics, it can seem much, much bigger than it is.

Trump has crushed his presidential competition by presenting himself as the finest businessman ever to don a suit. Will his career’s blemishes hurt him? Could Americans who love the great, amazing, terrific, perfect version of Trump accept the flawed one? In his office, he tells me that someone said the cool thing about his race to be the leader of the free world is that if he loses he gets to go back to being Donald Trump again—only an even vaster version.

“So win, lose, or draw, I’m glad I did it,” he says. “Although it’s too early to say that yet.”

Tidskriftsomslag: Bloomberg Businessweek, 7 september 2015.

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Strategi: Clinton vill vara både ”vanlig” och ”unik”!

USA | Känslan att Hillary Clinton inte entusiasmerar väljarna har tilltagit sedan utmanaren Bernie Sanders har börjat locka stora skaror.

Lösningen, enligt hennes campaign manager Robby Mook, är att låta Clinton få den tid hon behöver ute på fältet för att väljarna skall se henne som en historisk chans att kunna välja USA:s första kvinnliga president.

Detta skall kombineras med att väljarna får se en Hillary som gärna framhäver sig själv som en riktig medelsvensson som delar den vanlige amerikanens erfarenheter och vardag.

Detta är just så motsägelsefullt som det låter. Men konstigare kampanjupplägg har varit framgångsrika i amerikanska presidentvalskampanjer.

Tillsammans med en välfylld kampanjkassan, kalla nerver och ett målinriktad kampanjupplägg skall fixa valsegern.

Mark Leibovich rapporterade från hennes kampanj för The New York Times Magazine:

Hillary Clinton is private and guarded by nature, and three decades of being inspected like an exotic species has made her even more so. But right now, in the early days of what will be a 19-month campaign for the White House, she is trying to share and expound on her experi­ences, to project some greater measure of herself, big and small.

[…]

These are things Hillary Clinton has been talking about as she has undertaken the messy practice of what political types refer to as ‘‘reintroducing’’ — or, in Clinton’s case, re-re-re-reintroducing.

Still, all those introductions and forays into hostile territories have left her with battle scars. She is wary to a point where the control-freak tendencies of her campaign, especially with regard to how she is portrayed in the press, have reinforced an established story line: that she is sealed off and inaccessible and not like the rest of us. ‘‘DO YOU HAVE A PERCEPTION PROBLEM?’’ a reporter shouted out at her during Clinton’s last visit to New Hampshire, not quite the icebreaker you’d wish for when making reintroductions. As a rule, the media is not Clinton’s preferred confidant.

[…]

From the outset of the campaign, any hope that Clinton might unveil a more freewheeling style in keeping with the more unplugged sensibilities of today’s political and media culture lasted for all of, well, never. Signs of apparent spontaneity and whimsy have been nonexistent — she has been largely steadfast in avoiding interviews, with a campaign team that can convey a heavy-handed preoccupation with control.

[…]

Clinton’s enterprise has a grind-it-out quality reminiscent of Obama’s re-election strategy of 2012: cover your base, attack often. Her team will emphasize data, targeting and field operations — all specialties Mook sharpened as a wunderkind state director for Clinton in 2008 and in subsequent statewide and congressional races. Ground troops will identify supporters and make sure they vote, without giving much thought to persuading swing voters. In nearly every campaign event, the candidate catalogs all the fights she has waged on their ‘‘everyday American’’ behalf. That’s as close as there comes to a big idea in this expedition. To fight is a skill, and it creates a spectacle, but it hardly constitutes a vision. Nor is it a particularly fresh theme for Democratic presidential candidates, who have been trumpeting their ‘‘I’ll fight for you’’ credentials for decades (the future lobbyist Richard Gephardt used to punctuate his labor-heavy rallies with an impassioned ‘‘It’s your fight too!’’).

Clinton often says at her events that her campaign is ‘‘not about me.’’ All politicians say that (even though, of course, it is about them). But she is right in that she stands for bigger things, not least among them the goal of electing a woman as president. Her sex gives the campaign a built-in point of connection, and compared with what she did in 2008, Clinton has not hesitated to emphasize the factor known euphemistically as ‘‘the historic nature of her candidacy.’’

[…]

Mook projects a confidence belying his age and the stresses of his job. As the campaign manager, he sits in the bull’s-eye within the many circles of insanity that ring Planet Clintonia. (Actually, Mook does not sit, as his office is equipped with a standing desk.) What impressed me was how he dispatched my question about reconciling the divide between the candidate’s cautious persona and the private ‘‘Hillary I know’’ that her disciples swear by. ‘‘What I worry about is us getting up in our heads too much and trying to manufacture one thing or another,’’ he told me. ‘‘My priority is letting her take her time to get out there, let the voters see who she is, rather than some Wizard of Oz.’’

Tidskriftsomslag: The New York Times Magazine, 19 juli 2015.

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Politisk kommunikation: Ben Carsons fyra kampanjtrick!

USA | Ben Carsons kampanj går bra. Åtminstone i Iowa där han ligger jämt med Donald Trump i opinionsmätningar.

Så vad är det Carson gör rätt?

Enligt Tessa Berenson i Time är det fyra saker som gör hans kampanj lite okonventionell jämfört med övriga republikanska presidentkandidater.

1. Friend Facebook

Gimmicks like Pet Week, when fans post cat pics, have earned Carson 2.7 million likes, nine times as many as Jeb Bush. If Carson posts, “‘I’ve scratched my left ear,’ we get 9,000 likes,” says aide Doug Watts.

2. Sell bus space

Dubbed the Healer Hauler after an online competition, Carson’s tour bus has children’s names written on the sides for $50 a pop, “so he would remember why he was running,” says Carson’s campaign manager.

3. Keep it small

With an average donation of $50, he raised $6 million in August alone. He raised $160,000 in two days by asking supporters to chip in $40 to pay his South Carolina ballot-filing fee.

4. Stay low-key

Carson’s team made a decision never to attack another candidate, even if Carson gets hit first. “It’s not Dr. Carson,” Watts says. “It’s not the way he works.”

Läs mer: “The Secret of Ben Carson’s Campaign Success: Facebook”

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Politisk kommunikation: Donald Trumps kampanjstil!

USA | ”Speak softly and carry a big stick” är ett uttryck som brukar tillskrivas Theodore Roosevelt.

Donald Trumps strategi verkar vara den diametralt motsatta. Han talar tufft men har en pragmatisk inställning i många frågor enligt Michael Scherer i Time.

Strategin verkar fungera. Trump leder över sina republikanska rivaler i många opinionsmätningar.

“I don’t think the people running for office are real,” säger Trump. “They have to throw a lot of consultants away and be themselves. I think it is one of the things that has helped me.”

Scherer har studerat Trumps kampanjstil.

If you want to understand what is happening in the country right now, to get at its shifting id, its calcifying frustrations, its guttural demand for change, you need only listen to that message of disgust, for the political system, its falsehoods and failures, which has taken Trump to the top of the Republican polls.

[…]

“It’s a belief that the country is fundamentally broken and nobody is fixing it,” explains Republican pollster Frank Luntz. “It’s a sense that all the elites are in it for themselves and everybody else is suffering.” It is also a reminder that performance matters. On the two dimensions of your television screen, in the 20-­second sound bite of an often bankrupt process, what H.L. Mencken termed “a carnival of buncombe,” a true showman can beat out rank even on his worst days.

[…]

When he says he will beat China, steal Iraq’s oil and stick it to Iran, he is selling an unlikely dream. But that, after all, is what campaigns are about. “I’m just as disappointed with the Republicans as I am the Democrats,” Trump says. “It’s just so false and so phony and they can’t move—it’s moribund. They become weak and ineffective, except with one thing, getting themselves re-elected. That’s the one thing they’re good at.” Preach.

“There are two things going on,” explains Roger Stone, Trump’s on-again, off-again political consultant, who left his campaign orbit most recently on Aug. 8. “One is the total revulsion of American voters with politicians and the entire political system. And secondarily, just the belief that he can’t be bought.

[…]

Less than 32% of the country has a favorable view of the Republican Party, including just 68% of people who call themselves Republicans. And the numbers are falling. “Every time somebody says I made a mistake, they do the polls and my numbers go up,” Trump says. “So I guess I haven’t made a mistake.”

[…]

Most of his rivals have been cowed by the onslaughts, unable to beat the more popular bully at his game. “At this point we just have to ride it out, wherever he takes us,” says a strategist for another GOP contender. “What else can we do?”

The bigger question is whether Trump can paste some broader credibility to his winning posture before his rivals gang up on him to push him from the field. It means a lot to have 25% of the vote when 17 candidates are running, but there are signs in the polls that many of those who don’t support him now will never vote for him. A recent CNN poll found that 58% of Republican-­primary voters thought Trump on the ticket would decrease the odds that the party wins the White House. More than half the country still finds him unqualified for the presidency.

His response has been a focus on policy, releasing a written plan for immigration that is both bold and indecipherable. He would build the wall, confiscate the earnings of undocumented immigrants if Mexico did not pay for it, seek an end to birthright citizenship and rejigger the way immigrants who enter the country legally get visas. As for the estimated 11 million now in the country without papers, including about 10% of California’s workforce, “they have to go,” though he won’t say how he plans to make them leave, and he promises to return the “good ones” quickly. Whether those lucky winners will get an eventual path to citizenship—he won’t say just yet.

[…]

Most of his rivals can’t even find a clear answer to the question of whether they agree with Trump’s threadbare immigration white paper, while Clinton has become a master of boldly committing to policies that poll well for her coalition while attempting to dodge any pressing question that might complicate her coronation. Yet it would be a mistake to think Trump is incapable of moderation or nuance. At heart he is a pragmatist, not an ideologue. He would not rip up Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran, because contracts matter, but he would “enforce that deal like they never saw.” He boldly defends Planned Parenthood for the women’s health care it provides, not the abortions. And while his rivals quietly plot deep cuts in costly senior entitlement programs, he promises to treat Social Security and Medicare as sacrosanct.

Tidskriftsomslag: Time den 31 augusti 2015

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Kampanj: Lika barn leka bäst!

USA | Vem hade kunnat tro att expresidenterna Bill Clinton och Geroge W. Bush, och deras respektive familjer, är goda vänner?

Många av demokraternas och republikanernas kärnväljare satte säkert kaffet i halsen när Time gjorde ett reportage om de två inför valet.

Men sanningen är att deras vänskap inte är någon större hemlighet. Det är mest deras tajming, när det nu börjar hetta till i valrörelsen, som överraskade.

Kommande valkampanj kan fortfarande komma att handla om Hillary Clinton och Jeb Bush. Men inom båda partiernas etablissemang har man börjat oro sig över kärnväljarnas vilja att röra om i grytan. Mest märks detta bland republikanerna.

Demokraterna har börjat oroa sig över att Hillary verkar sakna politiska övertygelser och kanske är för komprometterad efter alla år inom politiken. Detta samtidigt som Jeb, bland republikanerna, inte direkt inspirerar gräsrötterna till stordåd.

Men när Nancy Gibbs och Michale Duffy intervjuade expresidenterna kom man naturligtvis in på kommande presidentvalskampanj.

“Look, this is highly complicated,” Clinton says of the political environment. “People don’t like negative, divisive environments. But they frequently reward them in elections.”

[…]

“I can’t tell you who is going to win, but I can tell you what’s going to happen,” Bush says and Clinton nods in agreement. “There’s kind of a general pattern. And there will be flash in the pans, there will be this crisis, there will be the funding thing. There will be all these things that happen, but eventually the person who can best lead their party will be nominated.”

[…]

Earlier this year at a private fundraiser, George W. reportedly called Hillary formidable but beatable, and you get the sense that his opinion hasn’t changed. “You know, I’m pulling for Jeb as hard as I can pull for him,” Bush says. His brother is “plenty smart and plenty capable, and if he needs my help, he’ll call me,” he said. “Otherwise I’m on the sidelines, and happily so.”

[…]

The 2016 race, Clinton says, is going to be about the economy and how to make it bigger and broader. But just as he starts to get going on the topic with his old intensity, you can him hitting the brakes, as if he were saying to himself, “It’s not your turn.” Says Clinton: “I think the debate could become fresh for Americans if it’s really about…how do you create broadly shared prosperity all over the world? I think it’s going to be interesting.” But now he, he says, “I think most of my role will be giving advice if I’m asked for it. And I try not to even offer it at home unless I’m asked. But she’s been pretty good about asking every now and then.”

Tidskriftsomslag: Time den 3 augusti 2015.

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Politik: Obama och minsta möjliga motståndets väg!

USA | David Bromwich har skrivet en essay om Barack Obama som nog får anses vara en av de bästa om presidentens politik så här långt.

“One of the least controversial things you can say about Barack Obama is that he campaigned better than he has governed”, skriver professor Bromwich.

Obama har under sin tid i Vita huset, enligt Bromwich, valt att följa ”minsta möjliga motståndets väg” så fort en konflikt uppstått på både det utrikespolitiska som på det inrikespolitiska området.

Bromwich skriver i Harper’s Magazine:

Any summing-up of the Obama presidency is sure to find a major obstacle in the elusiveness of the man. He has spoken more words, perhaps, than any other president; but to an unusual extent, his words and actions float free of each other. He talks with unnerving ease on both sides of an issue: about the desirability, for example, of continuing large-scale investment in fossil fuels. Anyone who voted twice for Obama and was baffled twice by what followed — there must be millions of us — will feel that this president deserves a kind of criticism he has seldom received. Yet we are held back by an admonitory intuition. His predecessor was worse, and his successor most likely will also be worse.

[…]

In March 2015, in the seventh year of his presidency, Barack Obama was presenting himself as a politician who followed the path of least resistance. This is a disturbing confession. It is one thing to know about yourself that in the gravest matters you follow the path of least resistance. It is another thing to say so in public. Obama was affirming that for him there could not possibly be a question of following the path of courageous resistance.

[…]

During Obama’s first year in office, the string of departures from his own stated policy showed the want of connection between his promises and his preparation to lead. The weakness was built-in to the rapid rise that carried him from his late twenties through his early forties. His appreciative, dazzled, and grateful mentors always took the word for the deed. They made the allowance because he cut a brilliant figure. Obama’s ascent was achieved too easily to be answerable for the requirement of performing much. This held true in law school, where he was elected president of the Harvard Law Review without an article to his name, and again in his three terms as an Illinois state senator, where he logged an uncommonly high proportion of noncommittal “present” votes rather than “ayes” or “nays.” Careless journalists have assumed that his time of real commitment goes further back, to his three years as a community organizer in Chicago. But even in that role, Obama was averse to conflict. He was never observed at a scene of disorder, and he had no enemies among the people of importance in the city.

He came to the presidency, then, without having made a notable sacrifice for his views. Difficulty, however—the kind of difficulty Obama steered clear of—can be a sound instructor. Stake out a lonely position and it sharpens the outline of your beliefs. When the action that backs the words is revealed with all its imperfections, the sacrifice will tell the audience something definite and interesting about the actor himself. Barack Obama entered the presidency as an unformed actor in politics.

In responding to the opportunities of his first years in office, Obama displayed the political equivalent of dead nerve endings.

Mer: Lyssna på en längre intervju med David Bromwich på KERA med anledning av hans essay i Harper’s.

Tidskriftsomslag: Harper’s Magazine, juni 2015.

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