Fever Swamp: A Journey Through the Strange Neverland of the 2016 Presidential Race

by Richard North Patterson

  One hope among progressives aware of his flaws is that a President Sanders could channel his current grassroots support into a tidal wave that would overwhelm congressional opposition. But President Obama tried just that. What he learned is that campaigns are different than governance. A Senate closely divided between red states and blue states, and a House with a vast majority of members insulated from defeat by gerrymandering, are immune to a tsunami of emails.

  In these fractious times, enacting any part of the Sanders agenda calls for more than principled consistency—it requires a Ted Kennedy or, at least, someone skilled at working with Congress as they find it. Sanders’s most recent bills—promoting free college and universal health care—drew zero Democratic cosponsors. These bills are the canary in the mine shaft of reality. For, given the electoral base of Congress, there is no scenario—none—that delivers us a legislature that embraces Bernie Sanders.20

  But from the progressive point of view there is one way Congress could change for the worse: a decisive presidential defeat. As Gene McCarthy and George McGovern learned—the latter disastrously for his party—white liberals by themselves are not nearly enough to compete. While Sanders’s appeal to progressives is turbocharged by the class divide, McGovern had enraptured crowds, deep grassroots support, and the galvanizing issue of our tragedy in Vietnam. He carried Massachusetts.21

  Fervent crowds of the committed do not of themselves augur a mass revolution in voting patterns that will transform the electoral map. Perhaps, as some insist, this year it’s different—so different as to transcend the unpleasant truths of a long campaign. But it is inconceivable that Sanders will moderate his stance to propitiate the majority of voters to his right, or that the GOP won’t trumpet all that many voters will need to know: that Sanders is a self-proclaimed socialist who became a Democrat solely to run for president. So progressives must decide whether to risk this election on the willingness of Americans of varying political stripes to choose him.

  “Yes,” one can imagine some responding, “when to our eyes Hillary Clinton and the GOP dine at the same table.” But the most casual glance at issues reveal stark differences between Clinton and the Republican field on economics, education, the environment, and gun control—one area where she is markedly stronger than Sanders. Here, again, history provides us with lessons. No true progressive can look at the current Supreme Court, which has turned back affirmative action and voting rights while gutting campaign finance reform, and say that President Gore would have made no difference.22

  That election mattered. So does this one.

  Trump’s Character Is His Fate

  OCTOBER 8, 2015

  The Greek philosopher Heraclitus famously wrote, “A man’s character is his fate.” This truth neatly captures Donald Trump’s rise—and inevitable fall—as a presidential contender.23

  Already there are hints of his collapse beneath the weight of his quest. Trump’s performance in the second debate resembled the slow leak of a balloon, overinflated by an indulgent media that viewed him as ratings helium. Though he now promises that his candidacy will have a “second act,” Trump has within him but one act—his own. Thus polls suggest that he has reached his ceiling, and it is hard to imagine him drawing mass support from the adherents of his rivals.24

  For the Trump campaign—if such a happening can be called that—does not reward more serious scrutiny. His persona is not that of a seasoned political leader, but an entertainer, a combustible mix of P. T. Barnum updated by Kim Kardashian. His seeming supernova exemplifies how social media and reality TV have debased our sense of who to admire, and for what. His puerile jibes—at Bush’s energy, Fiorina’s looks, and Rubio’s sweat glands—suggest the tiresome braying of a witless frat boy. And his reflex to demean anyone who displeases him—especially women—combines the pollution of our civic dialogue with our appetite for seeing others humiliated as entertainment.

  Trump offers no real program—he offers himself. While many politicians may be narcissists, Trump alone treats narcissism as a contest he must win. To him, his dominance of the airwaves must have seemed absurdly easy, confirming his rightful place at the center of public attention. After all, as he recently remarked, were he not in the race “there’d be a major collapse of television ratings.”

  To put it mildly, this suggests an underappreciation of the seriousness of his current enterprise. The goal of becoming the most powerful man in a dangerous world has not moved him to undertake the difficult task of truly understanding that world. In Trump’s inner world, the world will come to him.25

  So in place of substance, he channels the primal scream of those so gripped by media-fueled outrage that contempt for government and those who lead it is program enough. His ignorance of governance is a klieg-lit embarrassment; his pronouncements on policy self-preening blather. His immigration plan is incoherent, unachievable, inhumane, budget-busting, and borderline racist.26 His foreign policy, when he deigns to have one, consists of chest thumping. His economic program is a muddled mélange of populism, protectionism, and tax proposals that don’t add up. As a political thinker, he is Herman Cain on steroids.27

  In this intellectual Sahara, a credulous media has greeted any sprout of sanity—his renunciation of the Iraq war, repealing tax breaks for hedge fund managers—as a sign of growth.28 And the twenty-four-hour cacophony of Trump as a political colossus by commentators with their jaws agape obscures the fact that, as a candidate, he has not been with us for four years, but merely four months, with thirteen months to go until November 2016.

  He will never get that far, for whatever months remain to him will come to feel like a merciless persecution. The flip side of his self-involvement is that he is a thin-skinned bully, and such people do not endure attacks with grace.29 Forty years of self-celebration have scattered nuggets of video that his detractors will convert to bullets. They will be fired at his heart by the Republican establishment and donor classes, their own hearts filled with a particularly ruthless loathing—not simply because they fear that Trump would lose a general election, but because his intimation of tariffs and tax hikes is, to them, an economic sacrilege that threatens their own place in the firmament.30

  As the primary field continues to narrow, one or two well-financed opponents will—as Romney did to his rivals in 2012—carpet-bomb Trump with viciously crafted negative ads from state to state, a drumbeat of humiliation that will make Megyn Kelly’s recitation of sexism look like a Caribbean cruise. Conservative media will peel back his curtain of red meat and expose that, as a conservative, Trump is a phony; his all-too-ripe personal life will begin repelling evangelicals. Slowly, inevitably, Trump will crack, flooding the maws of an avid media with a cascade of whining, petty feuds and overblown grievances, mindlessly feeding the hunger for a new story line in which Trump consumes himself.

  His audience will be watching, and not kindly—some out of sheer fascination with his self-destruction, more because most Americans are, at bottom, sensible. They want an optimistic leader who imbues them with hope, not a self-obsessed whiner whose endless psychodrama is, in the end, exhausting. Not only will they not want Donald Trump in the White House; they won’t want him in their living rooms. And one by one they will switch the channel until Trump is left alone on a soundstage, and the lens into which he stares becomes an empty mirror.31

  Debating Hillary Clinton

  OCTOBER 14, 2015

  Beneath the din, the essence of Tuesday’s debate can be distilled with relative ease. If consistent ideology is the sine qua non, one can stop at Bernie Sanders. But those concerned with the yawning political chasm between naming problems and solving them must employ a wider lens. Which brings us to Hillary Clinton, whose crisp and substantive performance served, at last, to resurrect her better self.32

  By now one can recite her problems on autopilot. For restive Democrats, she embodies the party’s tilt toward the financial classes. Critics decry her speaking fees or see her ties to Wall Street as
a mortgage on her political soul. Too often her campaign can feel like a series of tactical feints bereft of an uplifting vision—at times a thought bubble seems to appear above her head, filled with focus groups, poll numbers, and the conflicting voices of too many advisers. While smart at strategy, her recent shifts on TPP, the Keystone Pipeline, and Obamacare’s Cadillac Tax reinforce this image of a calculating politician, driven less by principle than by a rival whose principles never change. The ironic upshot is an all-too-familiar figure who seems all too elusive.

  Her portrait has been further blurred by fuzzy campaign optics. Years of fending off attacks have bred an instinctive caution that can smother spontaneity. Her long history in public life overshadows that her quest is potentially historic, while serial reintroductions of each new persona have served only to obscure the person. A kaleidoscope of shifting accounts has made the email issue feel eternal, each thread tying Clinton down like Gulliver among the Lilliputians, hostage to the trope that she is entitled and disingenuous.33 All this has threatened to gel into a dispiriting ennui.

  But such a litany disserves the effort to truly assess this complex woman. For she is neither the feminist icon of her fiercest devotees nor the stock villain of the GOP’s demented melodrama.

  One starts by dismissing the zealots for whom she has become a human Rorschach test. Whatever toxins emanate from House Republican Trey Gowdy’s oh-so-selective committee, she did not abandon the victims of Benghazi. However ill-judged her use of a private server, the emails themselves amount to little. No credible evidence suggests that she subcontracted policy decisions to the Clinton Foundation. Only those gripped by the psychic need to hate Hillary Clinton need linger in this fever swamp. The rest of us, at least, can note her hardihood in slogging through it.

  Other qualities prepare her for this race. The marathon of 2008 produced an able and durable campaigner. Her skills as a debater—potentially critical in a close election—were again evident last night, likely foreclosing a Biden candidacy. Her proposals on key issues like financial regulation, tax policy, and college debt relief are detailed and considered. She remains strong among Democrats writ large. And as a manner of electoral math, she can block the GOP from making headway where they need it most—white women.

  As for her claim to higher office, it rests on capacities that few dispute. Strong-minded adversaries like John McCain and Lindsey Graham respect her intellect and grasp of policy. Colleagues describe a woman who works hard, assimilates complex information, and tests conventional wisdom, her high expectations leavened by good humor. Whatever her limitations in large settings, in smaller groups she is engaging, cogent, and persuasive. Despite glaring misjudgments—e.g., Iraq—she has amassed deep knowledge of foreign and domestic policy. By consensus she is prepared to fill the presidency.34

  The harder question is what core beliefs would inform this President Clinton. True, many challenges facing a president require acumen instead of ideology—as ever, competence matters. But what a president cares most about day to day matters just as much. Three decades of public engagement prove Clinton to be solidly left of center, sometimes markedly so. But it is colder comfort to assume that her judgments will reflect the political interests—and interest groups—associated with any Democratic president.

  So a clear-eyed Democrat must measure Clinton and Sanders against a complex calculus. What candidate has the best chance to win, and to what end. How much does preventing a Republican president matter in itself. When does expedience on one issue promote success on another, and the refusal to compromise morph into comprehensive failure. Who has the skill and temperament to wrest results from a fractious Congress in such divisive times, pushing forward the party’s stated agenda. And who can best confront the disparate challenges thrust at an American president.

  For some the hope of seismic change will outweigh its probability, binding them to Bernie Sanders’s impassioned crusade. But others who look past November 2016 to envision the difference between victory and defeat may conclude that, in the end, Hillary Clinton’s dogged quest is the safest place to be.

  Plutocrats and Their Pets

  OCTOBER 20, 2015

  Wikipedia defines plutocracy as a society “controlled by the small minority of its wealthiest members.” In 2010, the Supreme Court set out to help us join the list.

  The case, of course, is Citizens United.35 After an unseemly series of maneuvers by Chief Justice John Roberts expanded the case far beyond the issues presented, a five-to-four majority of Republican appointees held that unlimited expenditures to elect political candidates are “speech protected” from regulation by the First Amendment. Stating bluntly in dissent that “the Court changed the case so it could change the law,” Justice Stevens warned: “A democracy cannot function effectively when [voters] believe laws are being bought and sold.”

  The post–Citizens United conduits for such barter, super PACs, funnel millions from the ultra-wealthy to support their human vessels—a counterweight, one supposes, to the parlous effects of letting ordinary people vote. The ads spawned by this money now flood our airwaves: a prominent Democratic consultant estimates that his party’s nominee must raise at least $1.5 billion to compete with the tidal wave unleashed by the Supreme Court. This spiraling financial arms race drives candidates away from voters in order to grovel before demanding would-be patrons in big-dollar “money primaries.”36 And there is much groveling to be done. The 2012 campaign produced over $1 billion in soft money. A drastic increase is coming in 2016: already a mere 156 families have put $176 million on the electoral table.

  As anyone—surely Chief Justice Roberts—could foresee, this constitutionally cosseted class is overwhelmingly white and to the right. With honorable exceptions, such people are characterized by vaulting self-esteem and tend to perceive the national interest by looking in the mirror. And while support from rich donors does not in itself ensure victory, at the least it badly skews the discussion of policy and issues within the campaign as a whole.

  It hardly matters if these donors’ desires precede, or match with, the candidates’ positions—though often the symmetry is so striking as to suggest an answer. This unwholesome symbiosis between plutocrats and their pets is epitomized by two of the most well fed, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio.

  Take Cruz. As of July, pro-Cruz super PACs had raised $38 million. Fifteen million dollars came from Dan and Farris Wilks, Texan brothers who made billions through fracking. No surprise that they oppose regulation of pretty much anything that relates to oil and gas. Far odder is their leadership of a tiny and socially conservative cult that believes every word of the Bible as originally written is literally true. In a nifty double pander to his patrons, Cruz calls fracking a “providential blessing.” And Cruz’s program for the rest of us is manna for any fundamentalist fracker: barring the EPA from regulating greenhouse gases; adamant denial of climate science; disdain for reproductive rights; and—in direct response to the Court’s approval of same-sex marriage—subjecting justices to electoral review.

  Then there is the combined $21 million from Robert Mercer, a hedge fund kingpin whose enterprise is under IRS investigation,37 and Toby Neugebauer, a Texas financier who decamped for Puerto Rico after it erased the capital gains tax. Cruz’s tax program? Abolish the IRS, enact a flat tax, and roll back the capital gains rate. Whatever his proposals might do to the country, no doubt President Cruz would strive to bring balm to this afflicted duo, liberating Mercer from the IRS while facilitating Neugebauer’s repatriation.

  Even so, for the experience and zest he brings to the role of rich man’s hireling, Marco Rubio stands out.38 Here one starts with Norman Braman, who has pledged $10 million to help bring us President Rubio. Since Rubio entered Florida’s legislature, Braman has funded his campaigns and subsidized his personal finances, employing Rubio and his wife and underwriting Rubio’s stint as a college instructor. As a legislator, Rubio steered $85 million to Braman’s favorite causes. And as a candidate for preside
nt, Rubio echoes Braman’s adamant support for Benjamin Netanyahu, no matter what the issue.

  But even more adamant is the billionaire Rubio is courting most assiduously—casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, by many multiples the biggest donor of soft money in 2012. Though Adelson has other requirements—notably a bill to ban Internet gambling now sponsored by Rubio—it is Israel that best illuminates Rubio’s political permeability.

  For Adelson is committed to investing a staggering amount in the candidate who best demonstrates absolute fealty to his hard-line views. And they are not merely extreme—they run counter to the most basic tenets of American policy with respect to Israel. An unbroken line of presidents—all staunchly committed to Israel’s security—have supported the establishment of a demilitarized Palestinian state on the West Bank, home to several million Palestinians. This is no small matter. A half century of Israeli occupation has fed a festering anger that, now as before, threatens to explode in a cascade of violence that could destabilize an already dangerous region. American and Israeli national security experts believe that indefinite occupation will end in tragedy for all concerned: the collapse of the Palestinian Authority; a third intifada; the bloody intervention of more Israeli troops; and a radicalized populace bereft of hope and dotted with extremists.

  But this is precisely what Adelson wants America to support: an Israeli annexation of the West Bank and the subjugation of its people. As for the nuclear deal with Iran, Adelson would have the next president rip it up. His alternative? A preemptive American nuclear strike on the Iranian people.