Rogue Columnist

A truly mass party: The 1976 Republican Convention shows the triumphant centrist Gerald Ford over the conservative Ronald Reagan. Liberal Nelson Rockefeller, Ford's vice president, is to his right. Next to him is Ford's daughter, Susan.

The media have constructed a narrative for their campaign horse race stories, the ones all about the positioning of candidates and little about real issues. It goes something like this: The Republican "establishment," apparently represented by the likes of Ohio Gov. John Kasich and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, is contending with an "insurgency" from Ted Cruz and especially Donald Trump.

Things are so dire that the idiot David Brooks, who traveled to the sprawl abortion of Verrado in the mid-2000s and saw "the future" rather than the dangerous housing bubble, to write a column (kinda) missing President Obama.

This, of course, is nonsense from a cowed national media.

The "moderate" Kasich is obsessed with a balanced budget achieved by cutting federal spending, attacking women's reproductive rights and charter schools. At least he said climate change is real — once. His ambition has him back denying mainstream science and he opposes EPA regulation of carbon emissions.

Kasich cut more than $84 million from Ohio's public schools. He removed a modest amount of state funding that had been slated for the Cincinnati streetcar and deep-sixed Ohio's plans for high-speed rail. Ohio boasted some of the finest public universities in the nation, including "public ivies" Miami University and Ohio University. Kasich threatened to "take an ax" to them if they didn't cut costs and raise tuition.

As a presidential candidate, he says he wants to keep Medicaid expansion, but favors "repealing and replacing" the rest of Obamacare (with what is murky). He wants to cut taxes and reduce union bargaining power. He wants "boots on the ground" to fight the Islamic State.

The trouble with Hillary Clinton was painfully captured in a New Hampshire town hall, carried on CNN and moderated by Anderson Cooper, Wednesday night. I'll let Chris Cillizza of the Washington Post take it from here:

For 59 minutes of it, she was excellent — empathetic, engaged and decidedly human. But, then there was that other minute — really just four words — that Clinton is likely to be haunted by for some time to come.

"That’s what they offered," Clinton said in response to Cooper's question about her decision to accept $675,000 in speaking fees from Goldman Sachs in the period between serving as secretary of state and her decision to formally enter the 2016 presidential race.

Clinton is both seemingly caught by surprise and annoyed by the question all at once. Neither of those is a good reaction to what Cooper is asking. Both together make for a uniquely bad response.

Here's the thing: I'm not sure there is a great answer, politically speaking, for Clinton on the question of her acceptance of huge speaking fees from all sorts of groups — from colleges and universities to investment banks. She took the money because these groups were willing to pay it. And who wouldn't do the same thing in her shoes?

The problem is that you can't say that if you are the front-running candidate for the Democratic nomination, a front-runner facing a more-serious-than-expected challenge from a populist liberal who has made your ties to Wall Street a centerpiece of his campaign.

And that's just part of the trouble with Hillary Clinton.

As every student of American politics knows, Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater led a conservative insurgency that captured the Republican Party in 1964.

The GOP was a mass political party then, with liberals, centrists, and conservatives — the latter had been defeated and marginalized since 1932. The 1952 nomination fight loss of Sen. Robert Taft, "Mr. Republican," to the centrist Dwight Eisenhower had been especially embittering to the right.

The party was controlled by the generally liberal Eastern establishment. But in the 1964 national convention, its leading candidate, New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, was smashed by the Goldwater machine at the Cow Palace in San Francisco.

The department store heir embraced the reactionary right's agenda to roll back the New Deal and confront the Soviet Union much more aggressively. Goldwater opposed federal civil rights legislation, a stance he later came to regret but it attracted Southern whites. He didn't want to run against the ghost of the recently martyred John F. Kennedy (who, when alive, had worried about a Goldwater challenge). But he felt it was his duty to the party and his conservative principles.

Of course Goldwater went down in one of the worst drubbings in the history of presidential elections. He carried only six states: Arizona (despite Eugene C. Pulliam endorsing LBJ) but more significantly for the future four states in the Deep South and South Carolina. Of equal significance was the visible support of actor Ronald Reagan, especially his famous "Time for Choosing" speech on the eve of the election. It made Reagan a political star and Goldwater's heir presumptive.

We can wonder what Barry and Dutch would think of Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, et al, and I have speculated that both would now be seen as "too liberal" to win a GOP school-board election. But the fact is that they built today's white, extreme-right Republican Party and everything it has brought to our national politics, life, and future. Much of Reagan's 1964 speech echoes eerily into our present.

Which brings us to Sen. Bernie Sanders.

Although wealthy Republican Rick Snyder, the governor of Michigan, personally apologized for the catastrophe in Flint, he emphasized this, "Government failed you — federal, state and local leaders — by breaking the trust you place in us."

Well, no.

As Juan Cole made clear, Flint's water from Lake Huron has been fine under the city's elected government. But "Snyder staged a coup in Flint and appointed a city caretaker,or Emergency Manager, one Ed Kurtz, depriving the citizens of their voting rights. And Snyder’s appointee decided that a little money could be saved by switching the city’s water source from the Detroit Water and Sewage Dept. to the local Flint River. DWSD complained bitterly about Kurtz setting the two cities against one another."

As emails from the governor's staff also make clear, the crisis was dismissed by his top aides as unmerited complaints from antagonists in the majority black, Democratic city. In an echo of the GOP anti-science mentality, a pediatrician's study of lead in the water and its hazards was blown off as "data." Data, as we know, has a left-wing bias.

Behold, government run like a business.

This is the time of year when writers are making their predictions. The Archdruid Report foresees the election of Donald Trump as president. Gail Tverberg has a thoughtful post about oil. The usually delightful, politically incorrect, and trenchant James Howard Kunstler is worth quoting at length:

Given where we are in human history — the moment of techno-industrial over-reach — this crackup will not be easy to recover from; not like, say, the rapid recoveries of Japan and Germany after the brutal fiasco of World War Two. Things have gone too far in too many ways. The coming crackup will re-set the terms of civilized life to levels largely pre-techno-industrial. How far backward remains to be seen.

Those terms might be somewhat negotiable if we could accept the reality of this re-set and prepare for it. But, alas, most of the people capable of thought these days prefer wishful techno-narcissistic woolgathering to a reality-based assessment of where things stand — passively awaiting technological rescue remedies (“they” will “come up with something”) that will enable all the current rackets to continue. Thus, electric cars will allow suburban sprawl to function as the preferred everyday environment; molecular medicine will eliminate the role of death in human affairs; as-yet-undiscovered energy modalities will keep all the familiar comforts and conveniences running; and financial legerdemain will marshal the capital to make it all happen.

Oh, by the way, here’s a second element of the story to stay alert to: that most of the activities on-going in the USA today have taken on the qualities of rackets, that is, dishonest schemes for money-grubbing. This is most vividly and nauseatingly on display lately in the fields of medicine and education — two realms of action that formerly embodied in their basic operating systems the most sacred virtues developed in the fairly short history of civilized human endeavor: duty, diligence, etc.

I don't make predictions in my Seattle Times column. "It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future" as Yogi Berra said. Instead, I have laid down markers, written about the perilous prospects ahead for workers, and the chance of a recession.