VOTE 2020 - What This Election Isn't

"The Trailer: This election isn't 1968 or 1992 or 2016" by David Weigel, Washington Post 5/31/2020

In this edition: Why the fire's different this time, what the Libertarian Party has to say about the riots and the virus, and a new poll that shows why the President is an underdog.

Don't worry, it can get worse.  This is The Trailer.

If anyone was celebrating “MAGA night”  on Saturday, they did so far from the White House.  The President coined “MAGA night”  in a Saturday morning tweet, hinting that there might be some response to what he called the “professionally managed so-called 'protesters'”  who'd rallied in Lafayette Square on Friday.

There was no response, no red-capped counter-demonstration.  In Washington, as in many cities, people protesting the killing of George Floyd by police gathered, faced off with riot-gear-wearing police and then scattered.  A week that began with the President asking for a criminal probe of an unfriendly TV host ended with him promising to “designate Antifa as a terrorist organization,” though there's no legal way to do so.

That has led to speculation of how the unrest will play for President Trump, with just as many people arguing that it will seal his reelection as arguing that it'll undo him.  Who's right?  It is far too early to say, and none of the easy comparisons hold up in 2020.

It's not 1968.  Most of the quick analysis of the unrest, from politicians and from journalists, has pointed to the election of Richard Nixon to suggest events could help reelect the President.  “He won on a law-and-order platform that appealed implicitly to white anxiety,”  Edward Luce, referring to Nixon, wrote in the Financial Times.  “Richard Nixon won the presidency by promising the country he would restore ‘law and order’ on the streets,” historian Julian Zelizer wrote for CNN.

The comparison fails in two important ways.  First and most obviously, Nixon was not President in 1968.  He was returning from political limbo to challenge, at first, an incumbent Lyndon Johnson and then by fall, Johnson's vice President.  Every summer had seen riots break out in major cities, and every year, the crime rate surged.  When Nixon told the Republican National Convention that “we see cities enveloped in smoke and flame,” he had no political power or responsibility over those cities.

“America is in trouble today not because her people have failed but because her leaders have failed,” Nixon continued.  “What America needs are leaders to match the greatness of her people.”

President Trump has lashed out at mayors and governors, but arguing that all the country's “leaders”  are failing is something an incumbent can't coherently do.  That gets to the second problem: The law-and-order pitch stopped working for Nixon once he was sworn in.  As Walter Shapiro recalled Sunday, polling ahead of the 1970 midterm elections found most voters disapproving of Nixon's crime record.  In the Democrats' official pre-midterm message, Sen. Ed Muskie of Maine leaned in, accusing the President of flailing because he hadn't solved the crime problem.

“For four years, a conservative Republican has been governor of California,”  Muskie said, referring to Ronald Reagan, the era's other major (non-Southern) law-and-order figure.  “Yet there is no more law and order in California today than when he took office.  President Nixon, like President Johnson before him, has taken a firm stand.  A Democratic Congress has passed sweeping legislation.  Yet America is no more orderly or lawful — nor its streets more safe — than was the case two years ago, or four, or six.”

It's not 1992.  Violent crime rates rose throughout the 1970s and 1980s, with Republicans regaining the advantage when voters were asked to consider “law and order.”  Bill Clinton's Presidential campaign tried to turn that around, with the candidate promising not to “make race an excuse for failing to pass judgment about self-destructive behavior” and endorsing “the simple restoration of order.”

The Los Angeles riots, which followed the “not guilty”  verdict for four police officers who had beaten Rodney King, crystallized Clinton's message.  George H.W. Bush was running for President, but the crime rate kept growing.  At one point, when the White House suggested that Democratic welfare policies were at the root of unrest, Clinton mocked them.

“It's just amazing,” Clinton said.  “Republicans have had the White House for 20 of the last 24 years, and they have to go all the way back to the '60s to find somebody to blame.”

Clinton developed a playbook that other center-left politicians would use for years, combining a promise of more policing and tougher sentencing with a promise of smarter social investment.

“We cannot take our country back until we take our neighborhoods back,” Clinton said at a July 1992 rally, flanked by police officers.  “I want to be tough on crime and good for civil rights.  You can't have civil justice without order and safety.”

Once in office, Clinton acted on that, signing popular crime bills and presiding over declining crime rates — and no major social unrest.  At the start, he did so with the support of many black political leaders.  The salience of crime as a Presidential election issue faded, while incarceration rates skyrocketed.  No modern Democrat has responded to this week's unrest with rhetoric like Clinton's.

It's not 2016.  By the time Donald Trump ran for President, violent crime had been on the decline for decades, and influential Republicans had pivoted from tough-on-crime policies to criminal justice and police reform while Democrats began reversing policies like stop-and-frisk and cash bail.  The shift from the attitudes of the 1990s was epitomized by Hillary Clinton, who apologized for a 20-year-old speech in which she called some young black criminals “super-predators.”  What was smart politics for a 1990s campaign was toxic in 2016.  But at the same time, unrest after the killings of black men by police officers and fearmongering about Barack Obama's crime policies fed into a paranoia that danger was increasing and the government was covering it up.

Trump, unencumbered by a political record, pitched himself as both a one-man solution to the crime problem and an alternative to Clinton's record.  “I have a message for all of you: The crime and violence that today afflicts our nation will soon, and I mean very soon, come to an end,”  Trump said at the 2016 RNC.  “Beginning on January 20th, 2017, safety will be restored.”  While his campaign bought ads that portrayed Hillary Clinton as a threat to black voters, Trump himself promised to side with law enforcement over anyone disturbing the peace, and, once in office, he rolled back the Obama administration's reforms.

“The Obama administration and the handcuffing and oppression of police was despicable,” Bob Kroll, the president of Minneapolis's police union, said at a 2019 rally.  “The first thing President Trump did when he took office was turn that around, got rid of the [Eric] Holder-Loretta Lynch regime and decided to start letting the cops do their job, put the handcuffs on the criminals instead of us.”

In 2020, the Trump campaign balanced tough-on-crime rhetoric with the same argument it had made against Clinton: that Trump's Democratic opponent locked up black Americans unfairly.  That was before Minneapolis.

By this weekend, the Trump campaign was accusing Joe Biden's campaign of “financially support[ing] the mayhem that is hurting innocent people,” because some of its staffers had donated to a bail fund for protesters, while the President was urging police to be “tougher.”  At the very same time, Washington's mayor was mocking an “afraid” and “alone” President, pointing out that he claimed local police were not trying to protect the White House, when they very much were.  Richard Nixon won by portraying himself as a unifier against an out-of-control left; Bill Clinton won reelection by carefully navigating the politics of crime and unrest.  There is nothing very careful, yet, about what we've seen from this President.

AMERICORPS - 20th Anniverserary and More

"Bill Clinton celebrates 20 years of AmeriCorps, talks Islamic State strategy and midterm election outlook" PBS NewsHour 9/12/2014

Excerpt

JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour):  They celebrated at the White House today, 20 years after a landmark law that enshrined a domestic version of the Peace Corps.

And the man who signed that law was on hand.

With the stroke of his pen, President Bill Clinton made the AmeriCorps national service program a reality in 1993.  A year later, the first class was officially sworn in.

BILL CLINTON, Former President of the United States:  Would you all raise your right hand and repeat after me?  I will get things done for America.

JUDY WOODRUFF:  In the 20 years since, more than 900,000 participants have spent in excess of 1.2 billion hours working on projects across the U.S.  Today, that spirit of service was celebrated at the White House, as former President Clinton and hundreds of current and past AmeriCorps members joined President Obama to mark the anniversary.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA:  AmeriCorps has changed the life of our nation.  And now it’s up to us to make sure it continues, because we’re not just here to celebrate what’s already been achieved.  We’re here to rededicate ourselves to the work that lies ahead.

WOMAN:  Please raise your right hand.

JUDY WOODRUFF:  A new class of some 75,000 volunteers was sworn in today at the White House and around the country.  Members must be at least 17 years old and commit to volunteer for a year or two in exchange for a modest living allowance, as well as an education stipend.

Over the years, they have tutored and mentored children in underserved communities and helped rebuild after natural disasters.  Volunteers have also worked to combat hunger and on environmental conservation projects.

Matthew Little joined AmeriCorps shortly after its inception.  He worked with the service organization City Year at an inner-city school in Boston.

INTERVIEW - Bill Clinton 5/14/2014

"Bill Clinton reflects on fixing the wealth gap, embracing the Affordable Care Act and Hillary’s health" PBS NewsHour 5/14/2014

Excerpt

GWEN IFILL (NewsHour):  Now; a conversation with former President Bill Clinton about economic growth, inequality, health care, and foreign policy.

I sat down with him earlier today in Washington as part of a fiscal summit run by the Peterson Foundation.  And the economy was naturally the place to start.

Here is a portion of our nearly hour-long conversation.

I’m going to plunge right in, because one of the interesting conversations we have been having lately in Washington and around the world is about inequality.  It’s back again.

I went back and looked at a conversation we had on this stage three years ago, and we were talking about it then.  Why do you think now?  Why is Thomas Piketty (see post on book) suddenly such a big deal?

FMR. PRESIDENT BILL CLINTON:  Well, first of all, it is severe constraint on growth for the country.

And it is evidence of a loss of social mobility.  The median real middle income, adjusted for inflation, is still slightly lower than it was the day I left office.  And the cost of education and health care and other things has gone up.

The average walking-around person is having a pretty tough time.  And it’s also really put a crimp in the whole idea of the American dream, that, if you work hard, you can do better than your parents did.

INTERVIEW - President Bill Clinton, Clinton Global Initiative

"President Clinton on Foreign Affairs, Politics of Health Care and Gun Control" PBS Newshour 9/23/2013

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  As the Clinton Global Initiative kicks off its annual meeting, former President Bill Clinton joins Judy Woodruff to discuss the mall attack in Nairobi, prospects for a Syrian deal, politics of health care reform and gun control, plus the potential for a presidential bid by his wife, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

JUDY WOODRUFF (Newshour):  We turn now to our newsmaker interview with former President Bill Clinton, who kicked off his annual meeting today of the Clinton Global Initiative today.

I sat down with him at the site of the gathering in Midtown New York.

AMERICA - A Duty of Office, the President of the United States

"From Oval Office to Disaster Site, Presidents Offer Compassion After Catastrophe" PBS Newshour 5/27/2013

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  In recent months, President Barack Obama has comforted Newtown families, memorialized Boston bombing victims and toured Oklahoma tornado destruction.  Presidential historian Michael Beschloss and Alexis Simendinger of Real Clear Politics analyze with Gwen Ifill the role of presidents during times of national distress and tragedy.

GWEN IFILL (Newshour):  Now a look at the time-honored, but seemingly more frequent role of president as consoler in chief.

FORMER PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH:  America today is on bended knee in prayer for the people whose lives were lost here.

GWEN IFILL:  They are the increasingly familiar moments of searing loss, when presidents give voice to the nation's grief.

FORMER PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH:  I can hear you.  The rest of the world hears you.  And the people ...

And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon.

GWEN IFILL:  Three days after 9/11, President George W. Bush stood on the rubble at Ground Zero in New York.  Six years earlier, in April 1995, President Clinton comforted mourners in Oklahoma City after 186 people died in the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building.

PRESIDENT BILL CLINTON:  We pledge to do all we can to help you heal the injured, to rebuild this city, and to bring to justice those who did this evil.

GWEN IFILL:  The presidents act as stand-ins for a nation's anguish.  In Jan. 1986, hours after the destruction of space shuttle Challenger, it fell to President Reagan to remember the seven astronauts killed that day.

FORMER PRESIDENT RONALD REAGAN:  We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye, and slipped the surly bonds of Earth to such the face of God.

GWEN IFILL:  And five days after President Kennedy was assassinated in Nov. 1963, the newly elevated President Lyndon Johnson went before a shaken Congress and country.

FORMER PRESIDENT LYNDON JOHNSON:  No words are strong enough to express our determination to continue the forward thrust of America that he began.

GWEN IFILL:  Yesterday, President Obama returned to the task, traveling to Moore, Okla., where 24 people died a week ago in a massive tornado.

ELECTION 2012 - Bill Clinton's Speech

"Bill Clinton to DNC: Barack Obama's Economic Plan Passes Arithmetic, Values Test" PBS Newshour 9/5/2012

Excerpt

SUMMARY: Former president Bill Clinton nominated President Barack Obama as the the Democratic Party's 2012 presidential candidate at the close of the DNC Wednesday. In his speech, he countered the Republican Party's main criticisms of Mr. Obama, heavily emphasizing the president's economic successes and plan for the next four years.

(50:13 min)

Significant excerpts (source National Post)

He (President Obama) also tried to work with Congressional Republicans on Health Care, debt reduction, and jobs, but that didn’t work out so well. Probably because, as the Senate Republican leader, in a remarkable moment of candor, said two years before the election, their number one priority was not to put America back to work, but to put President Obama out of work.


In Tampa, the Republican argument against the President’s re-election was pretty simple: we left him a total mess, he hasn’t cleaned it up fast enough, so fire him and put us back in.

In order to look like an acceptable alternative to President Obama, they couldn’t say much about the ideas they have offered over the last two years. You see they want to go back to the same old policies that got us into trouble in the first place: to cut taxes for high income Americans even more than President Bush did; to get rid of those pesky financial regulations designed to prevent another crash and prohibit future bailouts; to increase defense spending two trillion dollars more than the Pentagon has requested without saying what they’ll spend the money on; to make enormous cuts in the rest of the budget, especially programs that help the middle class and poor kids. As another President once said – there they go again.


President Obama started with a much weaker economy than I did. No President – not me or any of my predecessors could have repaired all the damage in just four years. But conditions are improving and if you’ll renew the President’s contract you will feel it.


As their (Republican) campaign pollster said “we’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact checkers.” Now that is true.

ALSO: "Shields, Brooks Review Bill Clinton's Speech to the DNC" PBS Newshour 9/5/2012

POLITICS - President Clinton on Romney

"Clinton on Romney: 'Business Experience Does Not Guarantee Success' as President" PBS Newshour 6/5/2012

Excerpt

SUMMARY: Former President Bill Clinton on Tuesday discussed whether it was fair for President Obama's campaign to criticize Mitt Romney over his role at Bain Capital. He also spoke about the Clinton Global Initiative's efforts to spur job creation. Read the full transcript, or watch the shorter version that aired on the NewsHour.

Significant excerpt

JUDY WOODRUFF (Newshour): But if there are three or four months like this last one, where the jobs report is so -- is moving down, some people are saying the president's goose is cooked politically.

BILL CLINTON: I don't agree with that. I think, for one thing, he would be in trouble if that happened and the Congress had passed his whole jobs plan. But they didn't, and they are explicitly advocating -- and so is Gov. Romney -- an approach that looks like the approach the Europeans are trying to get out of, which is austerity first, which drives up unemployment and interestingly enough drives the government deficit up.

And he says, let's grow now and adopt a 10-year budget plan that drives the budget down. They're saying, let's have austerity now and adopt a 10-year budget plan which, according to all the independent analysis, would actually add a trillion or two dollars to the debt because of their big tax cuts. So I think he's really just got to talk to the American people and trust them with the truth here.

This is a very complicated thing. If you go back 500 years, the average financial collapse takes five to 10 years to get over, to get back to full employment -- full employment. If there's a mortgage collapse, which we've had for the last couple of hundred years periodically, it's closer to 10 years. What he's trying to do is to beat that. The American people are - they want things done the day before yesterday, so they don't like to wait 10 years to do anything. And there's too much misery out there. I would say he's on track to beat that pretty quickly by quite a lot.

And America still has the world's largest economy, still the biggest exporter and still has enormous strengths. We are younger than Europe and Japan. We're going to be younger than China in 20 years. We're the most diverse economy in the world. We're importing manufacturing jobs again. We're bringing them home. For the first time since the '90s manufacturing is growing. And it looks like it's going to continue for three to five years.

We're going to be OK. This is the agonizing fits-and-starts phase. Assuming no collapse in Europe, we're going to be OK. And the Europeans appear to be trying to put together a sensible response on the banking side and eurobonds to invest in infrastructure to grow the economy. So if that happens, I think he'll be fine. I think he'll get through it.

POLITICS - Conversation With Bill Clinton, Jobs and Obama

"Bill Clinton on Obama: 'I Think He'll Be Re-elected'"
PBS Newshour 12/2/2011

POLITICS - Gwen Ifill on Bill Clinton

"The Gospel According to Bill Clinton" by Gwen Ifill, PBS Newshour 5/27/2011

It never gets old listening to Bill Clinton. Like a thoroughbred watching the race from the sidelines, he is always champing at the bit to get back on the track.

That became clear once again this week when I was invited to interview the 42nd President during the opening session of deficit hawk Peter G. Peterson's "Solutions for America's Future" conference.

It was a purposefully bipartisan affair, with think tanks on the right and left asked to submit proposals, and Republicans and Democrats holding forth on fascinating, but deeply wonky, panel discussions.

I'd spent some time covering the Clinton presidency - ("eight years giving me hell," he reminded me backstage) - and was there for the good old days of federal surpluses.

The former president was, of course, happy to talk about what went right with his presidency and to wax on in some detail about the best way to balance budgets. But it was also instantly clear that Mr. Clinton really wanted to talk politics.

In the course of an hour, he advised Democrats on how to capitalize on the surprise win in the New York special election that turned out to be an early test of the power of the Medicare debate. He hinted that President Obama had been a tad clumsy in his handling of the issue of returning to Israel's 1967 borders. And he suggested that, in the end, President Obama had given Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu cover by allowing him to concede for the first time in public that Israel would cede some land for peace. (Watch the full video here).

Democrat Kathy Hochul's upset win in New York's 26th Congressional district had occurred only the night before we spoke. So when I asked Mr. Clinton whether Americans are willing to slay sacred cows in the name of balancing the budget, he veered almost immediately into deconstructing NY-26.

The outcome was, without a doubt he said, a rebuke of a Republican plan to revamp Medicare.

"You should conclude the proposal in the Republican budget isn't the right one," he said, as that plan's author Rep. Paul Ryan stood just a few feet away backstage. But he had a warning for his own party too.

"I'm afraid that the Democrats will draw the conclusion that because Congressman Ryan's proposal, I think, is not the best one, that we shouldn't do anything," he said. "I would completely disagree with that."

He said some version of this three times, each time taking direct aim at Ryan, who's been having a hard time selling his plan lately even to members of his own party. "I think he's wrong to say no matter what happens and no matter what the circumstances are, we won't touch taxes," Mr. Clinton said of Ryan.

Moments later, the two men encountered each other as the president exited and Ryan headed on stage to be interviewed by CNBC's Maria Bartiromo. As they chatted briefly, Mr. Clinton turned to the young Congressman and said, "Give me a call."

The man can't help it. He loves giving advice.

That's why even though I was supposed to focus during our discussion on the budget and deficits debate, I had the sneaking feeling he might not mind weighing in on the flap that had erupted in the past several days between Mr. Obama and Mr. Netanyahu.

After dismissing the conflict between the two leaders as a "tempest in a teapot" - Mr. Obama had spoken of returning to the 1967 borders with land swaps as a basis for Israeli-Palestinian negotiation - a common "reference point," said President Clinton, who has sat at his share of negotiating tables.

"Remember what Prime Minister Netanyahu said yesterday amidst all the things that are in the headlines," he added. "He also said that if he made a peace agreement with the Palestinians, he was well aware he would have to give up so much of the West Bank --that not all the settlements would be included, and he would have to close some. And I think that has been totally overlooked."

After he had continued for some minutes deconstructing the peace process, I suggested to President Clinton that, with George Mitchell's exit, the U.S. could use a new Middle East envoy.

He actually paused at that. Then he caught himself. The Secretary of State, he allowed, is doing a fine job. The audience roared, the kind of self-knowing laughter that always seems to follow Bill Clinton around.