I am going to truly miss this Senator who had the good sense to serve and leave:
Sen John Kennedy (R, Louisiana)
THE NEW WILL ROGERS If only all of us could be this witty! What a character...actually a genius, with some of the American, "country boy" stuff he comes up with...LUV the guy...wish we had 99 more in the Senate, just like him...we need him, especially right now..with all the political crap all the leaders are throwing at us.
I believe Kennedy graduated Magna cum Laude from Vanderbilt, has a Law degree from University of Virginia and a degree from Oxford in England. He is no country bumpkin; he is very insightful & funny as hell.
Comment about Cuomo lecturing us. "It is like a frog calling you ugly."
"This election in Ga will be the most important in history, you have nothing to worry about unless you are a tax payer, parent, gun owner, cop, person of faith, or an unborn baby!" Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy
Senator John Kennedy from Louisiana describes Democrats as the “well intended arugula and tofu crowd.”
– Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy
"You can only be young once, but you can always be immature."
– Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy
"Americans are thinking, there are some good members of Congress but we can’t figure out what they are good for. Others are thinking, how did these morons make it through the birth canal.”
– Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy
"It’s as dead as four o’clock."
– Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy
"Always Follow your heart.....but take your brains with you."
– Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy
"The short answer is ‘No.’ The long answer is ‘Hell No.’"
– Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy
"It must suck to be that dumb."
– Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy
"When the Portland mayor's IQ gets to 75, he oughta sell."
– Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy
"I keep trying to see Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer's point of view, but I can't seem to get my head that far up my ass."
– Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy
"Go sell your crazy somewhere else...we are all stocked up here."
– Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy
"She has a Billy goat brain and a mockingbird mouth!"
– Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy
Sen. John Kennedy (R., La.) said on Wednesday that he "trusted Middle Eastern countries as much as gas station sushi, with the exception being Israel."
– Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy
"You can get a goat to climb tree, but you’d be better off hiring a squirrel."
– Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy
"This has been going on since Moby Dick was a minnow.""Don't stand between a dog and a fire hydrant."
– Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy
"Our country was founded by geniuses, but it's being run by idiots"
It appears that he might do the right thing, but only when supervised and cornered like a rat.
– Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy
"Dum enough for twins."
– Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy
"This is why aliens won't talk to us."
– Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy
"Democrats are running around like they found a hair in their biscuit."
– Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy
"Chuck Schumer just moo’s and follows Nancy Pelosi into the cow chute."
– Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy
"What planet did you parachute in from?"
– Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy
"Just because you CAN sing doesn’t mean you should."
– Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy
Senator John Kennedy on Nancy Pelosi, “She can strut sitting down!”
– Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy+++
Trumpism is not dead. In fact it remains alive and can be effective and resurrected by the right political personality. Trump touched a raw nerve when he identified issues impacting/crippling the middle and working class because the policies of progressives, liberals, Democrats had an antithetical impact from what they espoused. They hurt these segments of America because they moved jobs offshore which helped destroy families, diminished religious faith, challenged the value and worth of patriotism and our traditional symbols, did nothing for black education and encouraged racial divisions and heightened racial tensions
Trump's policies worked for the betterment of America but, as Seib aptly describes, Trump failed to benefit, in the end, because he allowed his personality to interfere, made it about himself which gave rise to his own rejection.
The Trump presidency drew on forerunners including Patrick Buchanan, H. Ross Perot and Sarah Palin and each, in their own way, may have been too early but they prepared the way. Seib's article is long but very insightful.
Where Trump Came From—
THE SATURDAY ESSAYWhere Trump Came From—and Where Trumpism Is Going
A populist movement rooted in worries about globalization and alienation from elites culminated in the storming of the Capitol. What can conservatives salvage from the debris?
At the outset of the 2016 presidential campaign, Chris Christie, then the governor of New Jersey, sensed a yearning within a changed Republican Party for a populist voice—for a political figure who knew how to speak bluntly for the burgeoning ranks of working-class voters in the GOP.
So he set out to be that guy: a no-nonsense everyman from
outside Washington who talked about the economic travails of a prototypical
45-year-old construction worker, the need to use government aggressively to end
the opioid crisis in working America, the virtues of law and order, and the
need to “stop the Washington bull.”
Mr. Christie was right,
in part. The party was ready
to move away from traditional conservative formulations and toward a populist
message—and even toward somebody who came across as a bit of a bully delivering
it. His problem was that the biggest bully with the loudest megaphone turned
out to be somebody else: Donald J. Trump. Mr. Trump won the nomination and the
White House with a populist and nationalist message and has led a
consequential, tumultuous presidency.
That presidency effectively collapsed in flames on Jan. 6, when
Mr. Trump sent a crowd of his supporters to the Capitol to stop the constitutional
transfer of power to his elected successor. That crowd turned into a mob that
ransacked the seat of American democracy and tried to hunt down its elected
leaders.
Republicans, and the nation as a whole, now are left to ponder
what went wrong—and whether such an ugly and violent ending was inevitable. Mr.
Christie, who went from Trump rival to informal Trump counselor, thinks that he
knows how things went awry. “One of the big concerns I’ve had all the way
through the Trump presidency—and I’ve spoken to him about this directly—is that
his behavior has obscured his message and his accomplishments,” he says. “And
worse than obscuring them, as time went on it was discrediting them.”
In short, the problem has been the inability—or perhaps
failure—of the GOP to separate Trumpism from Trump. In the view of John Kasich,
a former governor of Ohio who also ran in 2016, the party chose in Mr. Trump
“negative populism,” which sought scapegoats and defined itself by what it was
against, rather than a “positive populism” defined by what it was for.
Ultimately, a movement born of many Americans’ legitimate
concerns about the effects of economic globalization and feelings of alienation
from the nation’s political, cultural and financial elite was overwhelmed by
Mr. Trump’s need to find enemies and grievances—and the bond he chose to build
with those on the outer edges of society who shared that tendency. The
culmination was a march on the Capitol in which mainstream Trump supporters
were overshadowed by those swinging fire extinguishers at cops and a man
wearing a “Camp Auschwitz” sweatshirt.
The question now is whether more conventional figures—Messrs.
Christie and Kasich, for example, or Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell
—can sort through the debris and carry forward a more mainstream version of the
message.
In analyzing the arc of Trumpism, it is important to remember
that it didn’t emerge from nowhere, overnight. It was the culmination of forces
that were building within the Republican Party, and the broader body politic,
for at least two decades before they crystallized in the candidacy and election
of Mr. Trump. Indeed, one can draw a nearly straight line through a series of
leaders and movements to today. Mr. Trump himself may not have been inevitable,
but some version of him probably was.
The line begins with conservative commentator Patrick Buchanan, who ran for president twice, in 1992 and 1996, as a renegade Republican with a message eerily like the one that Mr. Trump later used to take power. Mr. Buchanan declared that free trade was taking American manufacturing jobs and hollowing out its cities in the process. Immigrants were moving in to compete for the jobs that remained and driving down wages. Elites were benefiting while others were drowning, and worse, they were contemptuous of the values and way of life of ordinary Americans. The Republican pollster Bill McInturff would later refer to Mr. Trump as “Pat Buchanan with his own airplane.”
Mr. Buchanan’s rise also coincided with two important inflection
points in American society. The first was the beginning of a steady decline in
U.S. manufacturing jobs, the traditional launchpad into the middle class. Data
from the St. Louis Federal Reserve show that manufacturing employment in the
U.S. peaked in 1979, then began a long and steady decline. It was a halting
decline through the 1980s and 1990s and then a much sharper one after the year
2000—coinciding, not coincidentally, with China’s entry into the World Trade
Organization in 2001.
At the same time, the U.S. was moving into what would become the North American Free Trade Agreement, the fulfillment of President Reagan’s vision of a unified free market across the continent. National barriers were falling in a newly globalized economy. The shift excited financial markets and internationalists of both parties and undoubtedly added to American economic growth, but it scared workers at the lower rungs.
Mr. Buchanan sounded alarms on their behalf but found that the
Republican Party, still wedded to more traditional free-trade, free-markets
conservatism, wasn’t ready for such a message. Much of the appeal of his
message was to blue-collar Americans, many of whom were still wedded to the
Democratic Party.
But the message didn’t die. H. Ross Perot carried a version of its anti-free-trade element into his independent presidential runs in 1992 and 1996. Similar antiestablishment, working-class themes resonated in the Republican Party when Sen. John McCain picked then-Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska to be his running mate in 2008. She was the classic working-class populist figure, full of folksy appeal and disdain for the elites. The big and wildly enthusiastic crowds she drew anticipated Mr. Trump’s rallies a few years later.
The power of economic grievances was underscored anew by the
rise of the Tea Party movement on the right and the Occupy Wall Street movement
on the left in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. In both, the message was
that the fruits of the new, globalized economy were going to the financial
elites and not to middle America. Though the Tea Party’s message later
developed into attacks on the Affordable Care Act, it was born in response to
anger over financial bailouts. The movement carved out a big space for itself within
a Republican Party whose leaders thought, mistakenly, that they could capture
and control it.
Two other threads were laced throughout the evolution toward
Trumpism. The first was fear of immigration. Traditional conservatives saw
immigration as a net positive for the economy and society—a kind of
ever-refreshing lifeblood for a melting-pot America. But the decline in
manufacturing created deep economic anxiety among many in middle America. They
watched with alarm as the number of undocumented immigrants more than doubled
in the 1990s, to an estimated 8.6 million, and then grew further to 12 million
by 2007.
That trend also fed what has long been an ugly element of
American populism: a tendency to blame outsiders for problems. Though trade
patterns and, above all, the rise of new technologies in the workplace were
bigger blows to traditional employment, many Americans thought they were losing
control of not only their economic future but the racial and cultural identity
of the country.
A series of GOP leaders—former President George W. Bush, the late Mr. McCain, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio —tried to steer the party through these shoals by supporting immigration reform that accepted the growing role of immigrants in the U.S. with the need for border security. All were thwarted by anger within the party at anything that smacked of “amnesty” for undocumented immigrants.
The second thread was demographic change in the Republican
Party. Blue-collar voters who felt alienated by the Democrats’ positions on
social issues—same-sex marriage, abortion, gun control—were moving into the
GOP. Data from The Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll show that in 2010, 40% of
self-identified Republicans were college-educated white Americans. By 2016,
that share had fallen to 33%. Meantime, the share of white Republicans without
a college degree rose from 50% to 59%. Many of these new Republicans felt that
its traditional economic prescriptions didn’t work for them and that the
establishment didn’t much care.
They also had a new rocket fuel to propel their anger forward:
the internet and social media. The Tea Party’s founders were, for the most
part, early users of social media, and they organized and spread their gospel
there. Eric Cantor, who lost his job as the Republican Party’s number-two
leader in the House to a virtually unfunded Tea Party upstart in a 2014 primary
election, was asked later what fed and spread the anger that did him in. He
reached into his pocket and pulled out his iPhone.
Mr. Trump was watching these developments unfold and preparing to run for president by tying them together. But he wasn’t the only one in 2016 who saw a populist path opening up. Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, in announcing his own run, pledged a radical reform of the tax system to help working Americans. In his announcement speech, Mr. Kasich talked about the need for empathy and compassion for suffering fellow citizens. Mr. Christie declared: “Americans are not angry. Americans are filled with anxiety.”
Trump
chose an approach that emphasized and stoked anger.
Mr. Trump chose a different approach—one that emphasized and
stoked anger. In his own announcement speech, he attacked Mexican immigrants as
rapists and criminals, in language that nodded to racist sentiments he would
play upon later. He bashed the leaders of the Republican Party he was proposing
to lead and declared, “People are tired of these nice people.” He showed early
on his recognition that targeting the news media would be popular with his core
antiestablishment voters. Within a week of his announcement, he had already
publicly attacked by name a handful of journalists and several big news
organizations.
The message for his growing band of supporters was clear: You
think that the system is shafting you and the elites don’t care, and you’re
right. Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton would later confirm the notion and
further energize his supporters by declaring that half of them were
“deplorables.”
Oddly for a super-wealthy
New Yorker, Mr. Trump seemed to understand his supporters’ feeling of being
outsiders looking in at a cultural and media establishment that considered them
uncouth. As Trump supporters often say in conversation: Liberals don’t understand my values or my religion and look down
their noses at me. Trump doesn’t do that. Economic worries
often add to this feeling of exclusion, as on immigration, where fear of job
losses combines with anxiety over the changing face of the America they once
knew.
Mr. Trump amped up that anger with the big crowds at his rallies and sometimes weaponized it, declaring at one event that if they beat up protesters he would pay their legal bills. He also learned that such rhetoric could win blanket coverage on cable news networks. Anger and the demonization of his foes became the staples of his upstart campaign. Mr. Trump also increasingly appeared to see those forces as the glue that held his movement together. He needed enemies as foils, and Republican voters embraced his approach.
This remained true even after he became president. In policy
terms, Mr. Trump generally was true to his campaign promises. He pledged to
throw out and renegotiate Nafta, and he did so. He promised to impose tariffs
on Chinese goods to force Beijing into trade negotiations and he did so, though
with limited results. He promised to build a border wall with Mexico and force
the Mexicans to pay for it, which didn’t happen, of course, though he kept
returning to the theme. He appointed the conservative judges whom he had
promised by name. He cut taxes and regulations, and the economy hummed.
Yet he also made his presidency almost entirely about himself
personally rather than the broader movement he was trying to lead. “This guy
was totally unaware of both the machinery that is available to him and how the
whole team should be working together,” says Edwin Feulner, longtime leader of
the conservative Heritage Foundation and head of domestic policy on the initial
Trump transition team. That personalization prevented the Trump movement from
sinking deep roots. As American Compass, an organization of young, conservative
economic thinkers, concluded in a retrospective analysis: “Trumpism cannot be
declared a ‘success’ or a ‘failure’ because it did not exist. The administration,
which neither emerged from nor erected institutional infrastructure or an
intellectual framework, lacked both overarching vision and an integrated policy
agenda.”
On an emotional level,
Mr. Trump continued to tell his supporters that the political establishment
would never accept them or him, even as he sat in the Oval Office and exerted
ever-greater control over the Republican Party. That antiestablishment reflex
led to, among other things, the discounting of advice from government health
experts once the Covid-19 pandemic broke out. Democrats fed that deeply held
belief with investigations into how Russia might have aided his 2016 campaign
and with their impeachment of Mr. Trump for seeking help from Ukraine in
investigating his main re-election rival, Joe Biden.
‘Asking where did Trumpism go wrong suggests that it wasn’t
misguided from the beginning.’
— Douglas Heye, former House Republican aide
Rather than cooling his and his supporters’ anger, Mr. Trump’s
time in the Oval Office increased it. So perhaps it was only natural that when
he lost both the popular vote and the electoral college vote in November, the
result wouldn’t be acceptance but denial, grievance, charges of election fraud
and irregularity—and, on Jan. 6, violence. “Asking where did Trumpism go wrong
suggests that it wasn’t misguided from the beginning,” says Douglas Heye, a
former top House Republican aide. “Well before he was elected, Trump made it
clear that violence was acceptable, as long as it’s on his side.”
Which doesn’t mean that the legitimate concerns that produced
Mr. Trump’s rise are going away or that his substantive achievements will
evaporate. He has helped to turn the GOP into more of a working-class party, helped
to alter views of China’s economic policies and responded to a kind of national
war-weariness. Many of his core supporters remain wedded to him, and he still
has strong support across the GOP. As the House was preparing to impeach him
for a second time this week, an Axios poll found that six in 10 Republicans
approve of his recent behavior and more than 90% of self-identified Trump
supporters think he should be the party’s 2024 presidential candidate.
But moving forward may require a different approach, especially with the wider electorate. “He touched a nerve,” says Mr. Kasich. “There is a challenge here that needs to be addressed. But you don’t do it by creating scapegoats and blaming somebody else.”
++++++++++++++++++++++++++
.
No comments:
Post a Comment