What's the big issue in the 2022 midterm elections?

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I have not posted on this blog for almost two years. I was going to resume with a long take on the midterms on Tuesday. But I realized I don't need a long take to figure out what voters care about this cycle. I just need to think about conversations with my wife, many friends, and co-workers.

But let's use my wife as the example: A major subject in our lives is how much more expensive it is to live. We'll fret over the costs of gasoline, or the cost of eggs, or the dairy-free margarine we prefer. Or how much more expensive it is to enjoy lunch at one of several middle-class restaurants. Or how more expensive airplane tickets will be for that special vacation we've been planning 10-plus years for. 

We are pretty fortunate middle-classers. Unlike many others, we don't have to tap into our savings, or worse, use credit cards to meet daily essential needs. Across America, lots and lots of people have to do that.

Inflation is the key issue today. It's easy to understand why. It affects virtually everyone. If you, or your family, are paying thousands more each year just to exist, it's your issue. And it's what you are thinking about. Crime and immigration are also concerns, but they pale in comparison to your pocketbook. 

It's not selfish to care so much about inflation that it's your major issue. One isn't coveting when inflation plagues us. One isn't greedy, or unfeeling to consider inflation a major issue. We just want to make ends meet. We want to provide for our children. And we want policies and politicians to prevent inflation, not egg it on. 

In my world, we're talking about inflation. Across the nation, we're talking about inflation.

Here's what my wife and I never talk about: a perceived threat to democracy if our preferred political party does not win. 

Republicans are tub-thumping the threat of inflation. It's their chief priority. I hope they continue to care about the issue if the GOP wins Congress. I'll be very disappointed if the next Congress emulates the previous Congress with constant investigations and impeachments.

Democrats are tub-thumping a threat to democracy if they lose elections. It's a bit ironic since Democrats spent tens of millions of dollars boosting -- in the primaries -- Republican candidates who they cynically thought would be easier to beat.

Maybe they will be easier to beat. Or maybe a lot of these "democracy threats" will win Tuesday, which would be even more ironic.

I don't predict elections. When I do I am invariably wrong. But I know that inflation is a far bigger concern than a temper tantrum that democracy will end if a candidate loses. 

We're a strong country. Politics is always cyclical. We abide, and we endure. And we dismiss political demagoguery.

Bill O'Reilly gets inside the mind of Donald Trump

Review by Doug Gibson

"The United States of Trump: How the President Really Sees America," By Bill O'Reilly, Henry Holt and Company, New York, 2019. (Amazon link here).

This is a book that has unfortunately aged too quickly in the nine months since its release. That's not O'Reilly's fault. President Trump's life is so volatile than any book that has not captured 2020, the feeble impeachment trial Democrats launched with popguns against the President, followed by Covid-19, followed by the current rallies and riots, is out of date.

Nevertheless, using his familiar narrative style, mixed with exclusive interviews he got with President Trump, and others -- particularly Donald Trump Jr. -- O'Reilly gets inside the mind of  Donald Trump to some extent.

Some insights into Trump's life:

-- Trump was both a talented athlete and "rambunctious" teen, rambunctious enough that his father placed him in a military school.

-- Trump has very few close friends. He's very reluctant to trust people. However, he's very amenable, probably more than the average pol, to work with a political rival in order to accomplish a policy. In that sense he is a pragmatic leader.

-- Trump differs from his late father, Fred, a very successful businessman also, in that the son -- besides craving success in business -- also sought fame and global recognition. Donald Trump Jr. mentions that his grandfather, Fred Trump, was content to just live quietly in Queens. Trump sought, as O'Reilly the New Yorker notes, to be bigger than Joe Namath.

-- Trump is a supportive, but not hands-on father. He's not big on compliments. He sees things pretty clearly; one is either a winner in a conflict, or a loser.

-- Donald Trump will never admit he is wrong, Donald Trump Jr. told O'Reilly. The son has learned that when his father begins to initiate small talk in a conversation with his children, it's a signal that he knows he is wrong.

-- O'Reilly writes that Trump's short-lived embrace of the discredited "birther" conspiracy against President Barack Obama was designed to lock in support of conservatives and Republicans who despised Obama.

This underscores something that has baffled many people regarding Trump. How does he embrace positions despised by elite media and political opinions, as well as the millions of "social media privates and corporals" who follow the elite, and be successful?

O'Reilly says that Trump's huge success with "The Apprentice" (I admit here I never watched an episode), provided Trump with the training he needed to run his unconventional 2016 campaign.

He understood, far more than his hapless GOP opponents, and Hillary Clinton, how alienated and frustrated many Americans were after the Wall Street corruption of 2008 crashed the economy, followed soon after by the badly botched Obamacare roll out.

In an irony perhaps only Trump is capable of pulling off, he connected with high-school educated, working- and middle-class voters, many of whom had regularly voted Democrats. He was perceptive enough to see that these voters -- so many in the Rust Belt and other swing states -- were up for grabs.

Unlike a Mitt Romney, for example, Trump understood that criticizing immigration policy was a more effective talking point with these new voters, or re-energized voters, than extolling the virtues of the Chamber of Commerce.

Clinton did not try to connect with these voters. As O'Reilly notes, she helped Trump enormously by referring to them as a "basket of deplorables."

Another important insight into Trump is that he will go with his instincts. He's done that all his life. Writes O'Reilly: "Donald Trump is not going to change. He will not modify his behavior, stop tweeting, or begin wearing jeans. He will stay the way he is until the grave." 

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We live in a vicious political environment today. Social media has perfected the cancellation of individuals, and candidacies. Look how quickly Michael Bloomberg was taken out by Elizabeth Warren, who castigated him for alleged sexism. Although Bloomberg did not realize it, his campaign was kaput after 30 or so minutes of his first debate.

So, how does Trump survive in this environment? About a month before the 2016 vote he was caught on tape boasting loudly about sexually harassing women. Yet he defeated Hillary Clinton.

O'Reilly believes that Trump survived because we are jaded with all the political "scandals." He also believes people were turned off by perceived hypocrisy from disapproving pols. Hence many decided to overlook it, and gave Trump a pass.

Trump has survived too many "scandals" to count during his first term, as well as a partisan impeachment effort. Right now just about every poll says he will lose this November, just like most polls were saying four years ago. They may be right. Who knows? In the era of Trump, consistency and certainty are more rare.

I think the secret to Trump's success, and his political survival, is that he has placed the elite media, and much of establishment politics, into a bubble that constantly talks to itself, and its millions of progressive acolytes.

The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC, etc. have moved --- in the minds of one half of the nation --- from the usual impartiality of its news departments to becoming news reporters of "The Resistance." Media have abandoned a long-time promise, sometimes broken admittedly, of disinterest. They are against Trump; all the time. Within this bubble, a guy who lives in said bubble, like Bloomberg, can be easily crushed when he upsets the bubble. There is no fallback for a Bloomberg. Trump's base has no use for him.

But Trump thrives outside the bubble.

Back to the aforementioned elite media (I'm not talking about local media, which has its own unique issues). They will never regain the trust or respect of "the other "deplorable" half." And frankly, I don't think they care. After Trump, their economic survival will depend on feeding "news reports" to progressives, with correspondents such as Jim Acosta, and finding a never-ending supply of pedigreed Washington policy insiders to criticize conservatives; as unnamed sources, of course.

This is not my favorite Bill O'Reilly book. I prefer the informative, narrative style history books he co-writes with Martin Dugard. But he does a passable job of deciphering Trump, an often amoral man who nevertheless has proven himself a far stronger advocate for traditional social conservative values than the previous three Republican presidential candidates. Another irony; Trump's full of them.

The book underscores this truth. The 2020 election is not really between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. The latter is a long-time Democratic Party man who arguably appears to be bordering on senility. Biden backed into the nomination. Donald Trump just had a rally in Tulsa as I write this. In the cautious era of Covid-19, it didn't fill the arena, but I'd wager it was watched on TV and via streaming by several million.

Joe Biden right now couldn't fill the "banquet room at the Blue-View Motel," or garner 500 streaming viewers.

This November's election is between the magnetism of Trump and the influence of the elite media and political establishment. Both are powerful. Both have a lot of sway. We'll see who wins. Another irony is that whatever the result, life will go on for all of us, pretty much the same.

'American Carnage' provides an establishment-approved vision of the Republican Party

Review by Doug Gibson

Tim Alberta's "American Carnage: On the Front Lines of the Republican Civil War and the Rise of President Trump" (Harper, 20109), is for at least half of the 680-plus tome, a pretty great, detailed read. Alberta takes the reader into the internal battles within the Republican Party political leaders toward a more conservative populism, as opposed to more moderate earlier leaders such as John McCain and Mitt Romney.

Alberta seems to think the shift that allowed Republicans to win both the Congress and House, until the House was lost in 2018, and finally electing a Republican administration in 2016, was something horrible, events that destroyed the Party of Lincoln and will hasten the party's collapse. For that reason "American Carnage" is a much-loved book among establishment liberal dailies, such as The New York Times (... Trump tapped into and exploited a bigotry that had already been seething, bubbling up to the surface during the Obama administration ...) and The Guardian. (... Trump emerges as the vehicle and voice of white, evangelicals and white Americans without a four-year degree, the operative word being “white”. ...) ... To be fair, the New York Times review notes that many conservatives, such as Karl Rove, helped create what they describe as political "bomb-throwers" by launching too many real bombs in ill-advised wars.

There's nothing more loved by wordsmiths at the above -- and similar pubs -- than criticism of Trump and the GOP from someone who might just be a conservative. Alberta is the chief political correspondent for Politico. But he used to cover the political world for National Review, and that's a conservative pub, albeit with some Never-Trumpers. The magazine made a spirited effort to sway Republicans against Trump prior to his nomination.

Former Speaker of the House John Boehner was a major source of Alberta's. A lot of the first half of the book details his efforts to keep under control more conservative, activist-minded House members motivated by the Tea Party and opposition to Obamacare, for example. Another former speaker, Paul Ryan, is a major source. He gets sort of regretfully trashed in Alberta's book as once-great pol who trashed his legacy by pushing through the Trump tax cuts. (tax cuts that actually helps our two-earners middle-class family).

Political inside baseball is also discussed, such as how the move toward populism affected movement policy groups, such as The Heritage Foundation, and how congressional caucuses were roiled, members forming more conservative groups.   

The GOP's move toward the Tea Party, Alberta accurately notes, is at its foundation partially a movement of swaths of society discomfited by cultural changes. But this is not bigotry. It's a result of millions of individuals offended that their beliefs, be it religion or civics -- effectively tagged now as bigotry by pols and political proles, the media and the entertainment industry -- are not being defended by the political class that governs them and claims to speak for them. The reviews I've mentioned focus as a theme a growing extremism of the Republican Party, since 2008. However, a more reality-based reason for a Trump presidency is the complete lack of faith from adherents to either party that national pols have their best interests at heart, or care about their values. 

To use a very old expression, voters consider the pols in power to be "four flushers," all talk no action.

The Tea Party and other fledgling groups expected pols to take strong action -- not just stances -- on cultural and political issues that same pols in power are squeamish about taking on. In reality, this is no different from the left's more vocal base, which also bemoans rhetoric without action from its Democratic pols.

In "American Carnage," Alberta writes about the wishes of Boehner, Obama and others to craft bipartisan legislation, but in most cases something seems to get in the way, usually through one faction maligning another, and hopes are not realized. The result is a government that relies mainly on stopgap funding measures with the infrequent government shutdown.

One interesting account of the 2012 election in "American Carnage" is the utter certainty of Romney and his VP nominee, former Rep. Paul Ryan, that they were going to win. This optimism was not shared by pollsters and campaign veterans.. Ryan, a major source for Alberta, was devastated by the loss.

The shift toward conservative populism within the Republican Party survived the hiccup of Mitt Romney's failed presidential bid. In fact, Mitt's loss provided momentum for a bombastic, blunt candidate such as Trump, coarse, rude, hypocritical in his personal life, but candid, damn it. And, once elected, Trump has taken conservative actions on issues that other Republicans would have likely relegated to rhetoric, such as ditching the Paris climate change deal and ending the Iran nuclear deal.

Trump, although a source, is largely portrayed as a buffoon who eats up praise from sycophants. While that no doubt pleases a lot of readers, it prevents the author from explaining why he hoodwinked all the political experts and won the presidency. One account that I take with a grain of salt is from Karl Rove, who says that Trump had to be dissuaded from trying to win far-left states California, Oregon and New York, and told to focus on the southern United States. I'm not buying that. Trump understood how to break through a long-held Democratic working-class base in the Rust Belt. He certainly knew California and New York were out of reach. In fact, while clueless Democrats were focusing on running up popular voice pluralities in 2016, the Trump campaign had a better focus on individual states, and were rewarded with more than 300 electoral votes.

There's one indictment against Trump that is legit. He is running up the national debt to frightening levels. Republicans need to call him on that eventually if he wins re-election. Increasing debt, though, is a bipartisan sin. It hasn't been addressed seriously since the Clinton administration.

The idea that Trump is an insecure, uninformed idiot is reinforced in "American Carnage." That assumption about the president actually helps him succeed. Alberta acknowledges that the 2018 congressional races strategy of going moderate helped Democrats, in a year the opposition party is supposed to score gains in the House. There's no evidence, however, that the opposition party is planning the same strategy for 2020.

After Trump wins, Alberta's book slides more into an overall condemnation of the Trump presidency, notes Democratic gains in the House, and takes the popular idea that the GOP faces bleak future electoral prospects. We'll see if that occurs. When I see two of the three major Democratic Party candidates embracing a single-payer health-care system that will cost scores of trillions of dollars, enrage the middle class, including unionists, with good health care benefits, and take away a couple of million jobs, I can see a Trump re-election looking very possible.

Alberta interviewed about 300 insiders, including President Trump. There's no shortage of conservatives trashing Trump and his allies. Besides Boehner, Ryan and Rove, others prominent are Michael Steele and Peter Wehner. As mentioned, the strength of the book is its account of a party moving away from a Bush presidents' philosophy to its new populist, nationalist bent. The rise of social media and cable news exacerbated this change, with websites and Fox News supplanting C-Span and newspaper editorial pages as tension and debate forums. 

Alberta is a supremely talented reporter and writer. I caught him on C-Span 2 tub-thumping his book and was impressed by his knowledge and sincerity. He strikes me as a self-described moderate, perhaps conservative on social and economic issues. I spent a long time overseeing editorial pages and editorial boards. Generally, it was my experience that self-described moderates I encountered tended to admire most prominent Democrats and loathe prominent self-described conservative Republicans. Take that for what you will..

I wonder, though, if Alberta is as confident today as he was several months ago that the Republicans are in future peril. Democratic Party leaders, since winning the House, have capitulated to the demands of back-benchers and their base that the president be impeached. Hence, impeachment has drowned out any policy plans for Democrats, other than the poison pill of socialized medicine pushed by Senators Warren and Sanders. Impeachment will last well into the next year, intruding on campaign-message efforts.

I recently read a Politico article where Alberta watched a debate with no-hope Democratic Party candidate Sen. Michael Bennet, in which the pair, particularly Bennet, tut-tutted about the extremism of the candidates Bennet was a denied a chance to debate with. The piece was titled, "Can Any of These People Beat Trump?"  

Perhaps, if the Republicans do not suffer the election calamity that "American Carnage ..." hints is on the horizon, Tim Alberta can do a follow-up book on the Democratic Party's gradual shift toward identity politics and socialism -- shifts that increased with enthusiasm after 2016 -- mixed with impeachment frenzy, and how it resulted in a disappointing 2020 election season.