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Recruiting Cops with the Right Stuff

9/26/2016

Part of the aftermath of the police shootings in Tulsa and Charlotte is the advice pundits have offered to reduce the use of excessive deadly force by police. Quite rightly most pundits have called for better management and community policing procedures, implicit bias reduction and de-escalation training, and rigorous enforcement and prosecution of illegal behavior.

A Change Election for Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump

9/16/2016

This is a change election, but not the kind of change election political commentators usually cite. Change elections usually refer to elections in which the primary consideration in voting for a significant percentage of voters is removing a current office holder or administration from office. This election, however, is going to be an election in which the winner is very likely going to be the candidate who is most able to change their persona.

Donald Trump has proven himself to be racist, vindictive, erratic, self-indulgent, narcissistic, and a pathological liar. He has garnered the support of a significant portion of voters who either agree with Trump or, at least, don’t mind his character flaws. Nonetheless, he has not captured enough supporters who applaud or accept his flaws to win the election. As a result, he has tried to downplay his flaws.

Hillary Clinton also suffers from some flaws: withdrawn, secretive, defensive, risk-averse, and seemingly a part of the establishment forever. The winner of this election may well be the candidate who is most able to change their persona.
On first glance, it may seem that Trump, the reality performer, is the one most capable of change. However, Trump’s personality may make it less possible for him to change than Hillary. Consider Trump's admission that President Obama was born in the U.S., made at the behest of his campaign staff. His admission seemed reluctant and unenthusiastic. He may have been better off not making it if it could not have been more heartfelt.

Hillary, on the other hand, has a very smart campaign staff and seems able to take their advice. She obviously does not like interacting with the press but has managed to incorporate meetings with the press into her daily routine. Above all, Hillary’s flaws seem to be the result of experience rather than personality.

Hillary admits that she is not good on a stage; we all agree that Trump delivers to his audience. But after January 2016, Americans may want a President, not an act. We have to hope that voters will consider the role of President. Voters may, in fact, want changes to be cautious and controlled.

Donald Trump’s Unresolvable Conflict of Interest

9/15/2016

TrumpGolfDubai.com

The Main Stream Media seem fixated on equating the Clinton Foundation to the Trump Foundation, perhaps because they share the word “foundation.” The appropriate point of comparison, however, is the potential for conflict of interest. Those concerned about the potential for President Hillary Clinton’s conflict of interest believed that contributions to the Clinton Foundation by foreign magnates or government officials could be exchanged for a favor, even though the Clintons had never received any salaries or money from the Clinton Foundation and the Foundation had typically disbursed 90 percent of its contributions.

Alternatively, those concerned about Donald Trump’s potential conflict of interest cite long-term contractual relationships between foreign entities and Trump’s businesses that result in millions of dollars of revenues. Kurt Eichenwald in his Newsweek story (9/14/2016) found that the South Korean Daewoo Group was paying the Trump Organization $8 million a year from 1999 until its bankruptcy in 2005. After Daewoo’s re-organization following the bankruptcy, the Trump Organization continued to maintain its financial relationship with Daewoo. It should be noted that the on-going relationships between Trump’s businesses and foreign entities are not exchanges of money for products, but rather on-going service contracts that would be affected by any number of Presidential actions. For example, Daewoo’s bankruptcy affected the flow of money to Trump and Trump’s call for South Korea to develop its own nuclear deterrent could lead to a financial windfall for Daewoo and presumably increase the flow of money to Trump.

Daewoo Trump World. Photo: Haeahn Architects

The long-term service contracts that Trump has with foreign magnates and government officials means that some kind of a “blind trust” would be totally ineffective in resolving Trump’s conflict of interest. Further, there is no way of shielding the Trump Organization from the largesse of foreign leaders seeking to win favor with the President or entangle the U.S. in the fate of their countries.

Hillary Clinton’s Emails and the Commander-in-Chief Forum

9/8/2016

NBC’s Commander-in-Chief Forum suffered from numerous shortcomings. Matt Lauer, whose forte is clearly asking chefs every spring how to grill salmon, was clearly out of his depth, either because he was too enthralled with Donald Trump or too ignorant of national security issues to ask incisive follow-up questions. Lauer also interrupted Hillary Clinton numerous times while allowing Donald Trump all the time he needed to voice his lies and inanities.

Why Do Some Voters Support Donald Trump? The Limits of Identity Politics: The Lies Trump’s Black Surrogates Tell

9/7/2016

photo by Reuters- Agrippa

One aspect of identity politics (that is, political activity based catering to cultural, ethnic, gender, racial, or religious interests) involves the mechanics of campaigning. It rightfully includes the candidate signaling various self-identified groups that they are recognized, their problems understood, and their votes wanted.

Trump’s recent expedition to a black church has allowed Trump and his black surrogates to engage in a more insidious form of identity politics: proposing a solution to social problems specific to an ethnic community. Trump and his surrogates, for example, have attacked Hillary Clinton and Democrats for ignoring the blacks, except when asking for their votes. Specifically, Trump has hammered Democrats for failing to provide blacks with job opportunities, a grievance also voiced by many black leaders who are Hillary supporters.

Another Pathetic Morning Joe Meme

8/19/2016

One of Morning Joe’s favorite memes is that in the years he and Mika Brezinski have known Donald Trump, he has never heard him say anything racist, misogynistic, or xenophobic or witness him act in a bombastic or bullying manner. Of course, Joe does not count Trump’s full page ads in the Daily News and the New York Times to call for the death penalty for teenagers who were accused and subsequently confessed to the rape of a white jogger in Central Park. Also, Morning Joe may have missed the racism attached to Trump’s claim the President Obama was born in Kenya and thus, not eligible to be President.

Assuming that these two examples, as well as the discrimination case that the Justice Department won against Trumps, should not be considered because they occurred in public, then Joe may be right. Joe and Mika may never have heard a racist word from Trump’s mouth. Nonetheless, Joe should realize that many people, and almost all sociopaths, have the ability to manage their interpersonal impressions they give to others and disguise the unpleasant aspects of their personalities they show others. Of course, it is unclear how close Joe and Mika are to Donald, but perhaps Donald was merely managing the impression he showed to them. In any event, by this time we certainly know what Trump is.

Hillary Clinton Needs to Take Her Emails off the Table

8/19/2016

The Clinton campaign needs to take the accusations FBI Director James Comey levelled against Hillary Clinton off the table. That is, the Clinton campaign needs to provide a narrative to counter the one that Comey, Trump, and the right wing are pushing. Namely, that Hillary Clinton does not care about U.S. security requirements and is so careless she was willing to risk the lives of American servicemen for her on convenience. (See Hillary Needs Joe Biden to Refute James Comey’s Negative Opinions about Her.) Three points have become clear since Comey’s initial statement and subsequent appearances before Congress. First, Hillary Clinton did not send any emails correctly marked as classified (i.e., contrary to classification procedures, they were only marked with a “C” in the next and no header indicating classified material to follow); two or three emails were incorrectly marked as classified. Moreover, the two or three emails that were incorrectly marked as classified with a “C” in the text, were not classified and thus, should not have been marked as classified.

Second, Clinton was following the recommendation of former Secretary of State Colin Powell to follow his practice and use private email for non-classified material. Although the State Department’s email system had improved enough by Secretary’s Clinton’s tenure so that private email was not required, Powell’s recommendation does explain, in part, why she used private email. Third, the experience State Department officials that sent Secretary Clinton emails that contained classified material did so after having chosen NOT to use the classified email system that all State Department officials, including Secretary Clinton, have access to and are supposed to use for classified material.

Unless the Clinton campaign pushes an alternative narrative, Secretary Clinton will be handicapped if she chooses to hold a press conference because of the barrage of email questions she will face. Further, if a counter narrative is not pushed before the debates, Donald Trump will trumpet her email controversy as an all-purpose way of avoiding questions and a way of shifting attention from his own inadequacies. Just as the nine Benghazi reports clear Secretary Clinton and take that issue off the table, another email narrative is needed to take to take it off the table.

The Education of Donald Trump: Why the GOP Needed Dog Whistles

8/19/2016

Donald Trump’s campaign for both the Republican nomination and has been a paean of plain talking racism and xenophobia. Although many Republican voters celebrate Trump’s crude racism, many of the other voters he needs to win the Presidency have been so thoroughly disgusted with his racist speech, they are signaling their intent to vote for Hillary Clinton. Trump’s plain talking racism and campaign style clearly demonstrates that he does not understand how the modern GOP was formed nor what it takes to win the entire GOP base.

When Lyndon Johnson’s prediction that the Democratic Party had lost the possibility of electoral victory in the South for at least a generation was fulfilled, most Americans understood it was because the Democratic Party led the fight for the inclusion of African Americans in the social and political life of the U.S. To capitalize on white disaffection with the Democratic Party, Richard Nixon and the Republican Party touted states’ rights and “law and order” to thinly veil an appeal to white racism.
As some aspects of the inclusion of African Americans became more acceptable throughout the country, even thinly veiled appeals to white racism became more taboo. Republican strategist Lee Atwater explained the derivation of the more robust “dog whistle” as a way of disguising appeals to racism.

You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger." By 1968 you can't say "nigger" — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Nigger, nigger."

Maintaining the appearance of racial neutrality was so important to Reagan that he substituted the phrase “young man” for the more racially tinged “young buck” to describe a welfare cheat. Appearing racially neutral was a requirement for obtaining the electoral support of Republicans in the northern suburbs. Any overt appeal to racial animus would be a barrier to electoral support. Dog whistling was the mechanism for appearing racially neutral and obtaining the electoral support of racial moderates while simultaneously appealing to those who harbored racial animus and obtaining their votes.

While the racists who support Trump are quite happy to hear his racist remarks and avoid the usual GOP dog whistles, Trump has been hemorrhaging Republican voters in the northern suburbs. Just as previous GOP Presidential candidates have had to send mixed messages to obtain the support of two very different factions of their party, Trump is now appealing to northern Republican voters, after having cemented the support of racist voters. Trump’s faux appeal to Afro American voters is a way of signaling to moderate Republicans that he is not as racist as his affinity for Senator Jeff Sessions, David Duke, and other members of the alt right.

Is Something Wrong Mentally with Donald Trump?

8/14/2016

The Main Stream Media (MSM) has recently focused on mental illness as an explanation for Donald Trump’s behavior that many political analysts find is bizarre for someone seeking to win a Presidential election. Part of the impetus for this focus has been driven by pundits who concluded that many of Trump’s actions in his campaign were inconsistent with winning the election and therefore, irrational. These pundits have speculated that Trump suffers from either narcissistic personality disorder or sociopathy, although the traits associated with these disorders overlap. Traits of inflated sense of self, lack of empathy, deceitfulness and manipulativeness are associated with both narcissism and sociopathy.

Trump has exhibited examples of these traits on many different occasions. For example, he has proven himself to be a perennial liar and distorter of facts—Politifact found 60 percent of his statements to be “false” or “pants on fire” lies. He has mocked and demeaned those with whom he has disagreed—he attributed remarks Meghan Kelley made to him to her menstrual cycle and mimicked the neural tremors of a handicapped reported with whom he disagreed. And, he has callously disregarded others--when introducing his Vice President, Mike Spence, Trump spoke more about himself than Spence.

Neither narcissism nor sociopathy, however, is necessarily associated with irrational or dysfunctional behavior. A few members of the media have noted that focusing on Trump obscures what is really important: the attractiveness of his white nationalist theme to 40 percent of U.S. voters. It seems highly unlikely that 40 percent of U.S. voters are mentally ill in any clinical sense. Much of the distortion of the right is not due to mental illness, but rather stems from isolation from certain experiences and groups within U. S. society. The MSM may have seized on this psychological explanation for Trump’s behavior to distance itself and us from having to deal with the implications of our social structure shaping a part of the electorate that finds someone like Donald Trump so attractive.

The Biggest Lesson from the Two Conventions

8/3/2016

The Democratic National Convention (DNC) was more flexible, effective, and efficient than the Republican (RNC) Convention. It was more flexible because it touched on more themes, like American exceptionalism, that should play well with many voters. It was effective in validating Hillary Clinton, and it was efficient presenting several key themes: Americanism, patriotism, and the superficiality of the Republican theme of America is failing.

The lesson to take from a comparison between the two conventions is that first, Hillary’s team has a good sense of where the public is and have crafted compelling messages that can appeal to it. This shows that Hillary’s campaign has the ability to structure a winning campaign. The disarray of the RNC suggested no one was in charge; from the missteps following the convention, it is clear that no one was in charge.

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