Miscellany Central

Wednesday, February 26, 2020

How to Make the Debates Less Terrible by Jonathan Bernstein

How to Make the Debates Less Terrible

by Jonathan Bernstein, bloomberg.com

February 26, 2020 06:30 AM

It’s time for the parties to take over their own debates.

Tuesday night’s debate was universally panned. Political scientist Seth Masket got it exactly right: “Sometimes I see a lot of people complaining about a #DemDebate when I actually enjoyed it. This is not one of those times.”

Before getting to that? Yes, the candidates debated. They shouted over each other a lot. Bernie Sanders and Michael Bloomberg spent a lot of time under attack; neither was as bad as Bloomberg had been in the previous debate, but my guess is that neither really helped himself, either. (Disclaimer: Michael Bloomberg is the founder and majority owner of Bloomberg LP, the parent company of Bloomberg News.)

Joe Biden probably had his strongest debate performance. Amy Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg were fine, but neither seems to have found a path to the nomination. Elizabeth Warren was pretty good, but it’s hard to see how she gets there, either, unless she’s been boosted from last week’s debate in a way that hasn’t shown up in the polls yet. And Tom Steyer was back, chewing up time that could have gone to more serious candidates.

Indeed, the first problem with this debate was that — after a Nevada showdown in which each of the six candidates on stage could argue that he or she had a plausible way to win the nomination — at this point it’s hard to see anyone but Sanders and Biden with a serious chance, given the results so far, the polls, and the resources they each have. Steyer aside, that’s less about a flawed debate invitation process than about no one dropping out after Nevada, but it’s a real failure of the system.

Back to the process. To start with the most obvious thing: Everyone in the U.S. and at least half of the rest of the world was talking about coronavirus on Tuesday — and the stock market cratering amid fears of serious damage to the economy — yet the moderators didn’t get around to that issue until well into the second hour of the debate. In fact, there were hardly any policy questions in the first hour at all, with the moderators instead inviting the candidates to pick fights with one another and pushing them on recent campaign controversies.

In other words, the debate on CBS wasn’t much different from recent ones on NBC and CNN. For better or worse, that’s how the journalists who run these things want it. They hope sparks will fly, and they want to be seen as asking tough questions.

But that doesn’t serve the interests of the party. (And while we only have the Democrats debating now, this applies to Republicans when they’re contesting their presidential nomination.) For a party, debates are helpful in large part because they allow policy questions to be thrashed out by the candidates. That helps achieve one of the key functions of nomination politics: arriving at policy positions and priorities through candidate competition and cooperation.

To be sure, that can happen regardless of how bad the questions are, since the candidates always have the option of talking about policy positions they think are important. And there’s nothing necessarily wrong with candidates attacking one another. But while TV networks might want that for their own purposes, the party’s interests are best served when the candidates themselves are free to attack or not as they see fit.

Debates can also be helpful in the other, non-policy portions of representation; the party shows and further develops who it is by who its candidates are and how they present themselves. Again, that does tend to happen regardless of how bad the questions are, but “gotcha” demands or invitations to fight don’t really help achieve it.

Debates used to be arranged by various sponsors and the candidates, and formal party organizations had nothing to do with it. In recent cycles, the parties have taken over the process of issuing invitations. Media sponsors were happy to cede that to the parties, since the decisions were nothing but headaches for the networks. They would be a lot less happy if the parties chose their own moderators, since one of the reasons the networks host these things is to showcase their on-air talent. But it’s not at all clear, in these days of streaming and all, that the media sponsors have the clout to get what they want if the parties insist otherwise.

That said, it’s not exactly clear what party-run debates would look like if the parties did insist on them. And even if it’s in the parties’ interests as a whole to run the debates themselves, it’s possible that the risks would seem larger than the rewards, since both the Democratic National Committee and the Republican National Committee are reluctant to be seen as favoring any particular candidate (or, even worse, “rigging” things against someone).

So I suspect that nothing will really change in 2024. But after Tuesday night, I’m more convinced than ever that it should.

1. Dan Drezner on what the Trump administration’s messaging on the coronavirus is about.

2. Andrea Benjamin at the Monkey Cage on Bloomberg’s endorsements.

3. Matt Grossmann on the Democratic nomination race.

4. David Broockman and Joshua Kalla on Sanders as a general election candidate.

5. Thomas Edsall on placing Trump in history.

6. Philip Klein on Sanders’s health care math.

7. And Greg Sargent and Paul Waldman on the budget conflict over fighting coronavirus. The Trump administration wants to use it as an excuse to cut programs that Republicans always want to cut. The proper response for House Democrats? Put a clean supplemental spending bill on the House floor and dare Republicans to vote against it — and then see if Mitch McConnell is really willing to take on a fight over this.

Get Early Returns every morning in your inbox. Click here to subscribe. Also subscribe to Bloomberg All Access and get much, much more. You’ll receive our unmatched global news coverage and two in-depth daily newsletters, the Bloomberg Open and the Bloomberg Close.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Bloomberg LP and its owners.

To contact the author of this story:

Jonathan Bernstein at jbernstein62@bloomberg.net

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Sanders is stirring up a sickening sense of deja vu by Dana Milbank

On the stage in Charleston, S.C., Tuesday night stood one candidate who is running to be president — and six people running against the guy who is running to be president.

One by one, the Democratic candidates took shots at the self-described socialist who is suddenly the front-runner for the party’s presidential nomination.

“If you think the last four years has been chaotic, divisive, toxic, exhausting, imagine spending the better part of 2020 with Bernie Sanders versus Donald Trump,” said former South Bend, Ind., mayor Pete Buttigieg.

“Russia is helping you get elected,” former New York mayor Mike Bloomberg told Sanders, “so you will lose to [Trump].”

Businessman Tom Steyer told Sanders, “The answer is not for the government to take over the private sector.”

Former vice president Joe Biden pointed out that Sanders voted against an assault-weapons ban and in 2012 said "we should primary Barack Obama.”

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (Mass.) declared that she “would make a better president than Bernie.”

And Sen. Amy Klobuchar (Minn.) informed Sanders that his “math does not add up" and that “we should pay attention to where the voters of this country are, Bernie.”

Sanders scoffed, smirked, grimaced and glowered. “Not true!” he interjected, and “categorically incorrect!” He shook his head and waved his hand dismissively. “I’m hearing my name mentioned a little bit tonight — I wonder why,” the front-runner said.

He chose to parry by shouting counter-assaults — against Bloomberg, against Buttigieg, against Biden. The others joined in, and soon it was an all-out food fight, with rhetorical mashed potatoes landing everywhere. Warren hit Bloomberg, who hit Sanders. Biden hit Klobuchar, while Steyer hit Sanders and Bloomberg. Biden hit Steyer, and Warren pummeled Bloomberg.

Within the first few minutes, the CBS News moderators lost control. Candidates shouted at each other, talked over the moderators and interrupted at will. “He spoke over time, and I’m going to talk!” bellowed Biden. The audience cheered and booed as if watching professional wrestling.

The melee brought a sickening sense of deja vu.

After the South Carolina primary four years ago, on Feb. 22, 2016, I wrote:

“Are Republican voters really choosing as their standard-bearer a man who preaches such hatred and spews such vitriol?

“No, they aren’t — at least not yet. But they may get Trump anyway.

“The good news is that only 32.5 percent of South Carolina Republicans voted for Trump. The bad news: Trump may not need the support of a majority of Republican voters to secure the nomination.”

We now see a mirror image of this happening in the Democratic race. Sanders has only 29 percent support in polls, but the fragmented field prevents any one candidate from emerging as the alternative — much as the crowded field of Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz and the rest split the anti-Trump vote in the Republican primaries.

If this field remains splintered, the Democrats will soon find it’s Sanders or nobody: Either Sanders wins the nomination outright or comes close enough that his angry supporters torpedo the nominee, assuring Trump’s victory. If Tuesday night’s dynamic holds, Democrats are on their way to opposing Trump with a 78-year-old socialist who recently suffered a heart attack, who has had nice things to say about nasty regimes around the word, and who has a $60 trillion spending plan without the means to pay for it.

Sanders’s opponents sounded the alarm.

“Not only is this a way to get Donald Trump reelected,” said Buttigieg. “We got a House to worry about. We got a Senate to worry about.”

Said Bloomberg: “If you keep on going, we will elect Bernie. Bernie will lose to Donald Trump. And Donald Trump and the House and the Senate and some of the statehouses will all go red.”

Yet the candidates couldn’t rise above their squabbles.

They vied to produce the best anti-Sanders barb. “Can anybody in this room imagine moderate Republicans going over and voting for him?” asked Bloomberg. Buttigieg accused Sanders of having “nostalgia for the revolution politics of the ’60s.”

But just as often the unfocused Democrats aimed their fire every which way. Warren took every opportunity to hammer away at Bloomberg, even using a question about Chinese manufacturing to denounce Bloomberg for failing to release his tax returns. She also invoked an allegation, denied by Bloomberg, that he once had told a pregnant employee to “kill it.”

The audience booed.

“If we spend the next four months tearing our party apart, we're going to watch Donald Trump spend the next four years tearing our country apart,” Klobuchar warned.

She’s right. The winner of Tuesday night’s debate was Trump.

Read more:

Tuesday, February 25, 2020

Trump Laid the Groundwork for a Coronavirus Messby Jonathan Bernstein

Trump Laid the Groundwork for a Coronavirus Mess

by Jonathan Bernstein, bloomberg.com

February 25, 2020 06:30 AM

Get Jonathan Bernstein’s newsletter every morning in your inbox. Click here to subscribe.

It’s hard to imagine a president doing more to make himself vulnerable to damage from a viral outbreak than Donald Trump has over the last three years.

Yes, to himself. Also to the nation — that’s surely more important — but good presidents take care of themselves, too. Trump, for all his bluster, is putting himself at risk.

Let’s start with the obvious: Trump has almost never, since the very beginning of his presidency, spoken to the nation as a whole. His entire presidency is based on picking us-versus-them fights against various real and imagined enemies. Most presidents pretend to wait until the last minute to begin their re-election campaigns, using the time up until that point to attempt to represent the entire nation; Trump has been running for re-election from day one. (That is, when he’s not re-fighting his original election — something normal presidents almost never do.)

This divisiveness has helped Trump keep the intensity levels of his strongest supporters high. But it means a large part of the nation has tuned him out long ago.

Trump has also failed to forge any kind of working relationship with Democrats. To be sure, Democrats aren’t eager to work with the president. But Trump doesn’t even go through the motions of trying. So when a crisis does happen, he’s unlikely to produce a bipartisan response — which, importantly for the president, would yield shared blame if things were to go wrong.

Trump also has little regard for maintaining a reputation for honesty. This too has given him some advantages; most partisans (of both parties) tend to believe whatever same-party presidents say, and Trump doesn’t limit himself to the kind of stretching-the-truth spin that normal politicians employ. The downside, of course, is that only a fool would take Donald Trump’s word for anything — and everyone except his strongest supporters knows that.

Then there are his attacks on competent civil servants and even his own political appointees whose main fault is in following the rule of law. The deprofessionalization of the White House — and increasingly of the executive branch as well — may effectively reduce the number of people within the government willing to tell the president “no.” That’s a disaster in the making: Qualified professionals actually know how to do things, and they share expertise that makes it more likely the president will support policies that work.

What’s more, Trump doesn’t seem to pay much attention to governing unless an issue personally affects him, appears on a TV show he watches, or produces good applause lines at his rallies. Most of the rest seems to wind up in the hands of those within the administration whose bureaucratic skills allow them to build little fiefdoms in which to operate relatively unfettered.

Which is just an introduction to Trump’s budgets: It appears that for the most part he only engages on a few items, leaving acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney free to submit radical budgets asking for huge cuts to popular programs. Congress — Republicans very much included — ignore most of those cuts and consider the budgets dead on arrival. But Trump’s name is on them, which means that when he regularly (for example) demands large cuts in the agencies responsible for fighting epidemics, he’s vulnerable to political attacks.

Then there’s Trump’s knee-jerk resistance to emulating his predecessors, especially Barack Obama. While being open to new ways of doing things is a virtue for leaders, rejecting procedures that have worked in the past is, not surprisingly, risky. So Trump didn’t follow Barack Obama’s example by appointing someone in the White House with clear presidential backing to coordinate the government response to the coronavirus, which has already produced some utterly predictable misfires.

And don’t forget Trump’s shoot-from-the-hip style of communication. Normal presidents vet their public statements carefully; Trump says whatever is on his mind. This produces comments which experts find counterproductive. Indeed, one of the reasons to consult with experts before issuing statements is to avoid that kind of criticism, since the criticism itself makes things worse. That’s true even in the very unlikely case that Trump actually knows more than everyone else about the topic at hand, and of course it’s even more true if he’s relying on yahoos on cable television news rather than real experts.

Some of these things will actually make it harder for government policy to be effective. All of them increase the risks to Trump — both the risk of failed policy, and the chances that he’ll take the blame for anything that goes wrong.

1. Brent Durbin at the Monkey Cage on Richard Grenell as acting director of national intelligence.

2. Sean Trende on the Nevada caucus results.

3. Kyle Kondik on Bernie Sanders and down-ballot races.

4. Jonathan Chait on Sanders.

5. Sydney Ember and Nate Cohn on the Sanders theory that he’ll bring out new voters.

6. Ed Kilgore on the choice ahead for Pete Buttigieg.

7. And Henry Farrell talks to Hugo Mercier about the exaggerated threat and the real dangers of misinformation campaigns.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Bloomberg LP and its owners.

To contact the author of this story:

Jonathan Bernstein at jbernstein62@bloomberg.net

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Thursday, February 20, 2020

Fine, Dems are in Disarray. Here's Why / Seth Masket

By Seth Masket for Mischiefs of Faction.

Original post here.

February 19, 2020

Sanders rally in Manchester, NH. (Photo by Seth Masket)

I usually push back at claims that the Democratic Party is in disarray, particularly right in the middle of a nomination contest. It's supposed to be a messy process, after all. Messiness needn't prevent the party from finding a nominee and rallying around that person. But it seems reasonable to conclude that some aspects of this cycle are weird. For one thing, we're now several weeks past Iowa, and there are different polling, endorsement, delegate count, and campaign spending leaders. Very few candidates dropped out after the initial contests, and it's not at all clear who the most likely candidate for the nomination is right now.

But why? What makes this cycle so unusual? This is a lot of what my book is about, so I wanted to explain this a bit here. I claim that the processes for deciding the two things a party needs to figure out before making a nomination -- what it wants and who is most likely to get it for them -- have been messed up. The culprit is negative partisanship generally, and Donald Trump more specifically. Allow me to explain.

As laid out in the "Theory of Parties" article a few years ago, the ideal party nominee is a combination of two main factors. First, that person should be broadly acceptable to major factions in the party and able to deliver on things that people in the party care about. Second, that person should be electable. A party doesn't want to nominate just anyone who can win an election, because they actually want some things out of that person when they're in office. But they don't want to ignore electability completely, since there's no point in picking a person who's good on the issues but can't win.

Of course, party insiders might weigh these two factors differently based on recent events. The authors of The Party Decides noted an important time trend after an election loss – the out party will sometimes nominate a relatively extreme candidate their first election out of power, but, losing that, will moderate with each passing cycle to increase their chances of victory. As a party spends more time out of power, they’ll become increasingly desperate for a win, to the point where they’re willing to give up almost everything that their party stands for. In 1952, for example, the Republicans, after five consecutive presidential losses, were so hungry for a victory that they nominated Eisenhower without even knowing to what party he belonged, no less what his issue stances were.

This pattern – increasing moderation with time out of power – certainly makes sense, but that first term, in which the out party is willing to nominate a relative extremist (think Barry Goldwater in 1964 or George McGovern in 1972) is an interesting one. Compared to how they will later act, party insiders at this point are willing to take a chance. They don’t want to lose the election, but they are willing to raise the odds that that will happen for the sake of nominating someone they truly believe in.

But think how this interacts with negative partisanship, the pattern of Americans not necessarily liking their own party any more than they used to, but increasingly despising the other party, even to the point of viewing it as a threat to the nation. The costs of losing a presidential election seem substantially higher than they did just a decade or two ago.

Negative partisanship can make the out party after just one term act more like a desperate party that has been out of power for two or three terms or more. Notably, Republicans truly did not like Barack Obama for the most part, and in 2012, after just one term out of office, they nominated Mitt Romney, a former governor of Massachusetts who had signed health care reform into law at the state level. To be sure, Romney moved rightward to become a more conventional GOP nominee, but he was actually one of the more moderate choices party insiders faced in the 2012 cycle. The Republican Party had become substantially more conservative in the previous few years, but it was willing to nominate a conventional Republican with a history of moderation because they thought it would give them a win. They were acting like a party that had been out of power for a lot longer than one term, in part because the ongoing presence of Obama in the White House was an affront to everything they believed in.

Now apply that to the Democrats facing Trump’s reelection campaign. Trump’s approval rating among Democrats (now in single digits) is about half that of Obama’s approval rating among Republicans. And needless to say, Trump’s governing style is far different from Obama’s. Trump’s whole approach is to be relentlessly in Democrats’ face whenever possible, even to the point of trolling party leaders on Twitter and mocking them with nicknames. To Democrats, Trump’s governing style, his policy aims, and his frequent norm violations (and impeachable offenses) are more than just wrong – they are infuriating and exhausting. For Democrats, the costs of losing in 2020 seem far greater than they did in previous election cycles.

Survey evidence supports this. A series of YouGov polls taken the year prior to recent presidential elections shows that Democrats this cycle far prefer an electable candidate to one who agrees with them on issue positions, and that's a significant departure from the past. Democrats after just one term of Trump are acting like Republicans after five terms of Roosevelt and Truman – willing to jettison a considerable amount of their commitments just for the sake of a win.

I certainly don't mean to suggest all Democratic activists can be described this way – some are more determined than ever to press for longstanding party priorities – but the prioritization of electability seems to be a lot stronger than usual this cycle.

But how do they determine which candidate is the most electable? That's where election narratives come in. It's very common for party leaders to "fight the last battle," determining why they lost the last election and use that to figure out whom to nominate next time. If party leaders figure they lost in 1988 because they nominated a northeastern liberal, that's easy to fix -- go with a southern moderate in 1992.

But as my book research shows, there has been little agreement among party activists about why they lost in 2016. Some say the problem was Hillary Clinton. Others say the problem was the campaign. Others blame messaging. Still others blame Bernie Sanders, or Russia, or James Comey, or sexism in the media. It was a strange enough and close enough election that almost any of these explanations is plausible. Usually, once you figure out the narrative, you can figure out the path forward and the type of nominee to pick for next time. But party activists haven't come close to a consensus on a narrative. If anything, they're more divided now about why they lost that election than they were in 2017.

All this is to say that the normal process by which party insiders pick a presidential nominee has been short-circuited. That doesn't necessarily tell us which way the party will go. But it suggests that the types of nominees Democrats have come up with in the past -- experienced politicians with stances that are broadly acceptable to groups within the party -- are at a disadvantage this time around.

Wednesday, February 19, 2020

Bloomberg Is the Crisis, Not the Cure

Democratic presidential hopeful Mike Bloomberg talks to supporters during the "Mike for Black America Launch Celebration" in Houston, Texas, on February 13, 2020. — Mike Bloomberg at the “Mike for Black America” launch in Houston, Texas.
MARK FELIX/Getty Images

The morning after President’s Day, a new poll found that Michael Bloomberg had captured enough public support to claim a place onstage in the next Democratic presidential debate. On Wednesday night, the business-information tycoon and former Republican mayor of New York City will appear alongside candidates who have spent months or years trying to win over Democratic voters—shaping their policy proposals, cultivating armies of donors and volunteers, gathering support door-to-door—having himself spent only money, a tsunami of it: more than $400 million of his own fortune on campaign expenses, including saturation ads across TV and online media.

It may look as if Bloomberg is simply joining the presidential race a little later than the others. But what he’s really there to do is shut down the presidential race entirely. Yes, everyone running wants to win. But the other people in the race are asking voters to choose them. Bloomberg is asking—or telling—the public to give up on the idea that anyone really has a choice.

Everyone in and around the Democratic field shares the understanding that Donald Trump represents a crisis of democracy. The candidates are all, to a greater or lesser extent, running on the message that they are each the singular person best positioned to resolve the crisis, by defeating Trump and what he stands for: Bernie Sanders because of his mass mobilization of supporters, Elizabeth Warren because of her policy acumen, Pete Buttigieg because of his bright-eyed affection for unity, Joe Biden because of his long-established public profile, Amy Klobuchar because of her feisty moderation.

Bloomberg’s message is that it’s too late for any of that. Michael Bloomberg is the only person who can beat Donald Trump, because he has the power to beat Donald Trump, because he has the money. The voters’ preferences don’t matter. The crisis is too urgent for that. He alone can fix it.

A broad swath of the media and political establishment is lining up behind this message of inevitability, just like it did last time. So far, this would-be consensus is struggling to overcome Bloomberg’s long and well-documented record: He is, after all, an enthusiastic authoritarian, and a sexist bully and boor. He ruthlessly wielded the power of the state against black and Latino people, and against Muslims. He’s a glib technology enthusiast who sees labor and craft as pointless and obsolete.

It is easy, but not sufficient, to point out that many of these details line up with the reasons we’re supposed to want to get rid of Donald Trump. Bloomberg has much more money than Trump, and he cuts a much more respectable figure, but the two of them come from the same cynical, domineering New York circles of power, and act like it. Not for nothing is Trump a sometime Democrat, and Bloomberg a former Republican. Not for nothing does each present himself as too rich to be bought, even while the Trump Organization chases foreign development projects and Bloomberg News killed its own coverage of high-level corruption in China to protect its access to the Chinese market for its moneymaking Bloomberg terminals.

If anything, Trump is the more honest participant in American politics. Trump’s victory went against the popular majority, and may have had foreign fingerprints all over it, but at least it respected the basic theory behind a two-party contest. He roused the enthusiasms of his party’s base and agreed, since it didn’t really matter to him, to carry out the policy agenda of its elite supporters. The culture war fans got their rallies and the Federalist Society got its judges, and—apart from the griping of a few Never Trumpers who still choose to care about administrative competence and are only comfortable with less blatant forms of financial corruption—the Republican Party is basking in the triumph of its chosen worldview.

On those terms, Bloombergism is a very different proposition than Trumpism. Bloomberg’s offer to beat Donald Trump is an offer to do only that, not to endorse or carry out the full agenda backed by Democratic voters. The greatest hope of the anti-Trump opposition till now was that democracy might yet assert itself—that the very narrowness of Trump’s rule could produce a broad counter-movement, not just to sweep him from office but to expand the range of voices and political possibilities, to make iron-fisted minority rule a thing of the past.

Bloomberg, instead, is offering rule by a minority of one. Over the weekend, the Times reported that in addition to the sudden and visible flood of direct political spending, Bloomberg also boosted his single-year charitable spending to $3.3 billion in 2019, buying goodwill and the silence of potential critics across the country and around the world. The story opened by describing how Emily’s List kept Bloomberg on its roster of speakers for a fundraiser after he’d disparaged the MeToo movement. Feminist advocates needed his money, even if it had to come at the expense of a feminist cause. So, too, gun control activists could have his bottomless support—as long as they made his top priority, background checks, their own top priority, and they used the language he wanted them to use.

Government and policy are too important to be left to the people. This is why gun control is Bloomberg’s ideal signature issue—it’s an area in which the desires of large majorities of people are unable to prevail, thanks to concerted and well-funded minoritarian efforts. Bloomberg offers himself as an alternative power center, whose money makes it possible for people to accomplish what they could never get done through mere organizing and voting.

Perhaps this is why Bloomberg feels entitled to set the terms for whatever movement he’s involved with. “Republican” and “Democrat” are just labels to help him get in position; his patchwork identification as a liberal carries no obligation for him to fill in the holes with what liberals as a group may want. He does not have to distinguish between mass preferences and his personal preferences. His ideological and social priors say that charter schools are preferable to public schools—innovation and competition are more dynamic than universal institutional coverage—and so if you sign on with Bloomberg, you sign on with charter schools. You don’t get universal health coverage, you get limited soda sizes, and it’s for your own good.

Emily’s List needed Bloomberg’s money at its fundraiser, the Times wrote, because it was happening in the middle of the fight over Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court. Part of what made the fight so desperate was that the Senate was controlled by a narrow Republican majority; part of why the Senate was in Republican hands was that Bloomberg had donated more than $10 million to Republican Pat Toomey’s victory in a close race in 2016, because, while Toomey was a right-winger who opposed reproductive rights, he favored background checks. Forget other Democratic priorities. Supporting an ally on guns was all that mattered.

Bloomberg doesn’t care about the overall alignment of power in American politics, because his own power has never depended on it. The only thing threatening to diminish Bloomberg’s power is the possibility that Sanders or Warren might get elected president and bring enough like-minded people along with them. To him, the true crisis of Trump is that by devolving one of the major American political parties from plutocratic to kleptocratic, the president has given the left wing of the other party an opportunity to expand its influence. The proper counter-move, for a responsible plutocrat, is to try to buy out the opposition, to restore the nation’s former, politely unchecked levels of wealth accumulation.

So he arrives late on the scene, in the guise of a rescuer. The open secret of the crowded Democratic field is that most of the people declaring how hard Trump will be to beat are, in fact, counting on him being very beatable. He’s a nasty and unpopular buffoon who won while being outvoted by a margin of 3 million last time, thanks to a fluky convergence of the electoral map and the news cycles. There will be no better chance, certainly not within what’s left of his lifetime, for an elderly, charmless billionaire to claim the presidency.

Even with that, Bloomberg can’t claim it through the regular, established methods. Our presidential nominating system is set up to be perverse and unfair, but until now it did, at least, seem to offer the same terms to every candidate. Sure, the Supreme Court had destroyed the controls on campaign spending so that up-front money became an overwhelming advantage, but a Bernie Sanders could counter it by rallying an army of individual donors and celebrating how righteously small their average contribution was. The Democratic Party could make the number of individual donors a standard for debate access, and a popular campaign could stay alive and funded till Iowa and New Hampshire started caucusing and voting.

Bloomberg is trying to short-circuit all that—skipping not only the donors but the voters, blowing off the first four states to try to win Super Tuesday. The regular process, under which, at least in theory, any qualified ordinary person could become president of the United States, has been preempted by a process available only to someone with unlimited personal funds.
And the Democratic Party, by removing the donor rules to qualify for debates, is obliging him (or welcoming him with open arms). Sitting senators like Cory Booker and Kirsten Gillibrand had to be winnowed from the debate stage, but who can say no to Mike Bloomberg?

Democratic self-rule has been at odds with the mass-media presentation of politics for as long as mass media have existed. But a successful Bloomberg bid, far more than Trump using his Apprentice notoriety to devour free airtime on CNN, would mark the complete rupture between the governed and the governing. Apart from a belated and inaccurate disavowal of stop-and-frisk, Bloomberg is not pretending to have considered other people’s opinions, or to have asked for their support, or to be honored that they said yes. His goal is to market his way to a monopoly.

So why, fresh off a round of post-2016 self-reflection, do leading figures in the media accept this from Bloomberg? Yes, he’s skipping the contests where people cast ballots, but he’s advertising and provoking commentary (like this) and moving up in the polls—the various realities that matter to the political-coverage industry. Does it matter if the point of his candidacy is that democracy as we’ve known it has already failed, so the only answer to a rampaging billionaire is a billionaire on a counter-rampage, or that popular goals can no longer be achieved by popular means? Does it matter if his ruthless managerial skills failed to budge the everyday troubles of New York—if the technocratic problem-solver failed to fight the state over the MTA’s deferred maintenance and general decline, failed to break the culture of dysfunction in the housing agency, or did less than nothing for the homeless? He put his name on the economic recovery, in a proprietary sans-serif typeface rather than shiny brass letters. He was so uninterested in other people’s needs or opinions, he made his own priorities seem like necessity.

It’s true, as people feel compelled to say, he’s not as bad as Trump. Single-minded profit-chasing is not as bad as a lifelong career of high-stakes fraud. Allegations of harassment are not as bad as accusations of rape. Life under a neoliberal control freak would almost certainly be more comfortable than life under a thief and bully with a taste for fascism. But to accept that argument—to take Trump as the benchmark—is to surrender any claim on affirmatively setting the nation’s political values. It’s to accept that the republic deserves nothing more than what Michael Bloomberg is willing to give it.

Just listen to the people who fall outside Bloomberg’s vision of who matters and what he’s responsible for. When he allegedly told an employee who needed a nanny for her baby, “All you need is some black who doesn’t have to speak English to rescue it from a burning building,” he was making a racist and sexist remark, but those terms might be too narrow to capture the comment’s full tone. It seemed, principally, to be a joke about Bloomberg’s broad contempt for all categories of human beings who are not wealthy white men. This was not the panicky, Trumpy bigotry of Rust Belt Republicans, who organize their lives around imagining a vision of blackness or foreignness to pit their own identities against. It wasn’t the bigotry of the grasping or the obsolete. It was the bigotry of security. Bloomberg’s story about stop-and-frisk keeps changing because, in the end, he didn’t care one way or the other about having the police jack up hundreds of thousands of innocent young men. He only got angry when someone told him he wasn’t allowed to do it.

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Last chance for the climate transition

At the World Economic Forum in Davos this year, two people stood out: Greta Thunberg, the 17-year-old Swedish climate activist, and Donald Trump, the US president. In their messages on climate change, these two could not have been more opposed: panic, confronted with indifference. But one thing they share is that they are not hypocrites: Ms Thunberg does not pretend we are doing anything relevant; Mr Trump does not pretend he cares. Most participants in the climate debate, however, pretend to care, pretend to act, or both. If anything is to be done, this must change.
Ours remains what it has been since the early 19th century: a fossil-fuel civilisation. There have been two energy revolutions in human history: the agricultural revolution, which exploited far more incident sunlight; and the industrial revolution, which exploited fossilised sunlight. Now we must return to incident sunlight — solar energy and wind — along with nuclear power, while maintaining our high standards of living.

The point of this latest energy revolution, however, is not to raise our standard of living directly, but to preserve the only home we know in the state to which life is now adapted. It is to avoid an irreversible experiment with the climate of our planet. So far, however, despite decades of talk, trends in emissions remain in the wrong direction.

What is to be done? Discussions last week at the Oslo Energy Forum clarified things for me. My principal conclusion was that a transformation from our current energy system to a different one is the only option. Some suggest we should halt growth as well. But this would not only be impossible, it would also not be nearly enough.
Over the past three decades CO2 emissions per unit of global output have been falling at a little below 2 per cent a year. If this were to continue and world output were to stagnate, global emissions would fall by 40 per cent by 2050 — far too little. Relying on actual reductions in output, in order to cut emissions by, say, 95 per cent, by 2050, would require a fall in world output of roughly 90 per cent, bringing global output per head back to 1870 levels.

The conclusions are simple. We will not stop relying on fossil fuels by choosing universal impoverishment. But we also cannot stop using them soon enough, at our present glacial rate of reduction in emissions per unit of output. So we must massively accelerate technological progress away from burning fossil fuels. We must move beyond them almost completely. If we do achieve that, the size of our economy ceases to be the issue: however big it becomes, it ceases to emit greenhouse gases. But note: to achieve this by 2050, the rate of reduction of emissions per unit of output needs to jump massively.

Is this achievable? From a technological point of view, it appears so. So, at least, argues the Energy Transitions Commission in a number of important reports. The essential ideas are simple. The core of the new energy system is electricity generated by renewable means (solar and wind) and nuclear power. This needs to be backed up by a variety of storage systems (batteries, hydroelectricity, hydrogen and natural gas, with carbon capture and storage). Reductions in costs have already been large enough and technological progress rapid enough to make this transition feasible, at manageable cost.

This would, however, be a revolution. A zero-carbon economy would require about four to five times as much electricity as our present one, all from non-carbon-emitting sources. In running such an economy, hydrogen (much of it produced by electrolysis) would play an essential role. Hydrogen consumption might jump 11-fold by 2050.
In many sectors, the costs of decarbonisation are (or soon will be) competitive. Yet in some, they will not be. There will need to be incentives and regulations to force the shift. In order to avoid merely moving production, in its most emissions-intensive forms, elsewhere, it will be essential to impose offsetting taxes on imports from jurisdictions that refuse to support the needed changes.

Suppose that a transition towards a global zero-emissions economy by 2050 is indeed technically feasible. That does not mean it is likely to happen as a result of purely economic forces. This is so for two main reasons. The first is that the cost advantages of the decarbonised alternatives are, in many areas, at best modest. These are not (at least not yet) close to being dominant technologies in all relevant areas. The second is that there is always huge inertia in making shifts to new technologies, especially in areas where familiar methods and systems are to be replaced by entirely new ones. We know very well how to run a fossil-fuel economy reliably and at vast scale. A reliable, entirely renewable energy-economy is an unfamiliar beast.

A global systems transition of this scale will not happen by itself. It will require large-scale policy interventions, via a mixture of regulation, incentives and government-supported research and development. It will require global co-operation and clear recognition of the very different positions — in terms of past behaviour, present responsibility and future needs — of the countries of the world. It will take changes in finance and accounting. It will, in short, take a historic global effort of a kind we have never seen before to avoid a danger that still seems remote to the vast bulk of human beings.

This does need to be done. But will it be? Ms Thunberg fears our inaction. Mr Trump is one of the reasons why she is right to do so. We have so much to do and so little time. If we are to succeed in halting climate change, we have to change course now.

Climate change explained: what can ordinary people do?

martin.wolf@ft.com
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Tuesday, February 18, 2020

Long Nomination Process Doesn’t Necessarily Signal Party Weakness

Many Democratic party actors seem content with a drawn-out contest — and not without reason.

Jonathan Bernstein

2/18/2020, 9:30:12 PM

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With the Nevada caucuses coming up on Saturday, this is probably going to be the week that will finally bring some clarity to the Democratic presidential contest. Probably. We’ve already had chaos-maximizing results in Iowa, and then a New Hampshire primary which may have on balance added more chaos.

For the most part, this seems to be some combination of luck and circumstance (although the botched count in Iowa didn’t help, and that was just plain incompetence from the party). Just one example: Amy Klobuchar surged up to third place in New Hampshire, keeping her struggling campaign alive, thanks to a well-regarded performance in a debate that week. Had she instead done that well in the pre-Iowa debate, it’s likely that she would have done better there and perhaps ended Pete Buttigieg’s campaign (and perhaps even Elizabeth Warren’s). Or she might have had her usual debate results in New Hampshire (she’s typically done well, but not well enough to attract much notice) and she likely would have finished fifth in that state and dropped out of the race. Instead, five candidates with a plausible shot at the nomination contested Iowa, and the same five are all contesting Nevada.

Lots of people are saying that this is a sign of party weakness: Many party actors don’t want Bernie Sanders to win, but they’re failed to coordinate on a stop-Sanders candidate and therefore he may be the most likely candidate to win the nomination at this point.

Well … sort of.

The key is to think about this from the point of view of the party, and not the candidates. For the media and the campaigns, and for most voters, the nomination process is all about which candidate wins. But for the party, what’s more important is making sure that whichever nominee is chosen would govern as a partisan president — that he or she would be bound to the party’s policy positions and priorities and otherwise support the party from the White House. From that point of view, it just doesn’t matter that much which candidate wins, as long as that candidate wouldn’t undermine the party’s overall goals.

To be sure: Sanders remains a factional candidate, and yes, his nomination would be at least something of a sign of party weakness. That said, while some party actors clearly do oppose Sanders, others seem more ambivalent. Perhaps that’s because he’s been a fairly pragmatic senator. Or maybe they just don’t see him as all that far from the party on many key policy questions.

But what we’ve seen during Donald Trump’s presidency suggests that the parties have unrecognized strengths. Trump’s nomination was by far the clearest example of an outsider winning a presidential nomination over the objections of the bulk of party actors that has ever happened in U.S. history. And yet for the most part, Trump has wound up following the Republican party line in office. On tax cuts and judges, Trump’s record has been indistinguishable from what any of the Republican contenders in 2016 would have done. The same is basically true on health care and many other issues.

Only on trade and some foreign policy questions has Trump really strayed from party orthodoxy in important ways, and for the latter it’s not entirely clear what the party is thinking after Iraq anyway.

Now, perhaps some of this is just that Trump isn’t particularly interested in governing, something that would not be the case in a Bernie Sanders presidency. On the other hand, given that most of the more aggressive aspects of the Sanders legislative agenda are likely to fail in Congress, it’s not really clear how different an actual Sanders administration would be from a Biden or Warren or Klobuchar presidency.

And perhaps that — and not party weakness or incompetence — is why many Democratic party actors seem content to let things play out as they will in the primaries and caucuses.

None of this means that the nomination isn’t important. Some candidates will be better or worse at presidenting, which can have enormous consequences. They might be better or worse general election candidates. And the party itself shifts as a consequence of what happens in the nomination fight. But, at least to the extent that the parties are reasonably functional, it’s less of the life-or-death struggle that the candidates and their campaigns feel that it is and more incremental change — a bit more if one candidate wins, a bit less if another does.

(Disclaimer: Michael Bloomberg is also seeking the Democratic presidential nomination. He is the founder and majority owner of Bloomberg LP, the parent company of Bloomberg News.)

1. Matthew Dickinson on Richard Neustadt — and Donald Trump’s presidency.

2. Dave Hopkins still doesn’t see “lanes” in the Democratic presidential nomination contest.

3. Ruy Teixeira on turnout and a Bernie Sanders general election campaign.

4. Sarah Binder at the Monkey Cage on Congress, Trump and war powers.

5. And my Bloomberg Opinion colleague Francis Wilkinson on Trump’s false stories about voter fraud.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Bloomberg LP and its owners.

To contact the author of this story:
Jonathan Bernstein at jbernstein62@bloomberg.net

Wednesday, February 26, 2020

Opinion | Sanders is stirring up a sickening sense of deja vu

Tuesday, February 25, 2020

Thursday, February 20, 2020

Wednesday, February 19, 2020

Bloomberg Is the Crisis, Not the Cure

Last chance for the climate transition

Climate change explained: what can ordinary people do?

Tuesday, February 18, 2020