Tag: george h.w. bush
No, Donald Trump Didn't Win This Election By A 'Landslide'

No, Donald Trump Didn't Win This Election By A 'Landslide'

As the tallying of votes approaches finality, with no happy outcome for Democrats, the triumphal narrative proclaimed by Republican cheerleaders needs correction. There was no MAGA “landslide” on Election Night – unless, like so many other aspects of American life, we have decided to diminish what that term has always meant historically.

Donald Trump appears to have won the popular vote by just over two percent, according to the latest numbers published by the Cook Political Report, which netted him 312 electoral votes. While that represented a big improvement on Trump’s weak record in presidential runs (and certainly warrants deep Democratic introspection), it was far from anything that could be defined as a landslide. In California, where Kamala Harris won the state with nearly 60 percent, there are still more than three million votes yet to be tallied..

So let's nudge the Republicans and their media cheerleaders back toward reality.

The last time that a Republican presidential candidate achieved what we have traditionally called a landslide was in 1988, when George H. W. Bush defeated Michael Dukakis by eight percent of the popular vote and won more than 400 electoral votes. Ronald Reagan notched two landslide victories: the first in 1980, when he beat incumbent Jimmy Carter by more than nine percent in the popular vote and nabbed 489 electoral votes (although Carter was hobbled by the third-party candidacy of John Anderson, who got nearly seven percent); and the second four years later, when he crushed Walter Mondale with nearly 59 percent of the popular vote and carried every state except the Democrat’s Minnesota home.

And let’s not forget Richard Nixon’s similar trouncing of George McGovern in 1972, when the Republican won 520 electoral votes and 61 percent of the popular vote. (Tricky Dick resigned in disgrace two years later when after revelations about his cheating in that election and numerous other crimes.) Democrats have won big too, notably in 1964 when Lyndon Johnson won 486 electoral votes and more than 61 percent. The last Democratic victory that approached a landslide came in 1996, when Bill Clinton won reelection with 379 electoral votes and came in nine points ahead in the popular vote against the incumbent Bush (who also had to contend with self-funding third-party gadfly Ross Perot).

So no, Trump’s roughly two percentage points do not place him in that category. It’s scarcely more than half as big as President Joe Biden’s margin in 2020, which the MAGA Republicans have repeatedly insisted was no victory at all. Democrats are far more gracious losers (and winners) than the Trump Republicans, who don’t hesitate to threaten and employ violence when they don’t get their way. (Notice how all the pre-election claims of “fraud” suddenly vanish when they win?)

Whatever the final numbers say, this election was assuredly disastrous for the Democrats, the nation, and the world. The damage has only just begun and the recovery remains distant and uncertain. Yet there many signs that the Republican narrative is too simple and simply wrong – from the Senate races that Democrats won in four of the five battleground states to the ballot initiatives where Republican ideologues were defeated on paid family leave, private school vouchers, and especially abortion rights.

The other cliché that Republicans keep repeating as they yammer about their pseudo- landslide is “mandate.” But having lied about their intentions, pretending to disown the authoritarian Project 2025 agenda that they now openly embrace, they have no mandate.

Under Biden, More Jobs Created Than Last Three GOP Presidents Combined

Under Biden, More Jobs Created Than Last Three GOP Presidents Combined

The latest jobs report shows that the unemployment rate has also reached a 50-year low.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics on Friday released its jobs report for December 2022, showing that 223,000 jobs were added to the economy, while the unemployment rate has fallen to 3.5 percent.

The new report shows that a total of 10.7 million jobs were added in the first two years of President Joe Biden’s term. By contrast, under the three Republican presidents who preceded Biden — Donald Trump, George W. Bush, and George H.W. Bush — U.S. job production was much slower.

At the conclusion of George H.W. Bush’s four-year presidency in 1993, 2.6 million jobs had been created. During George W. Bush's two terms, between 2001 and 2009, 1.3 million jobs were created; and 3 million jobs were lost during Trump’s single term.

Trump has the worst record on jobs since the Great Depression, and is the only modern president who left office with a negative jobs record. Under Trump, unemployment hit a record high of 14.7 percent in April 2020, and when Biden took office in January 2021, the unemployment rate was 6.3 percent.

Biden’s record is more in line with those of his Democratic predecessors, Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, with 12.5 million and 22.7 million jobs added during their presidential terms, respectively.

The current unemployment rate of 3.5 percent is the lowest since 1969. The bureau's report also showed an increase in employment for workers with disabilities to a level higher than before the COVID-19 pandemic. Unemployment among Black and Hispanic workers also fell.

“Today’s report is great news for our economy and more evidence that my economic plan is working,” Biden said in a statement. “We still have work to do to bring down inflation, and help American families feeling the cost-of-living squeeze. But we are moving in the right direction.”

Biden noted additional actions by his administration designed to help the economy grow, including construction projects underway that are funded under the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. Biden also cited efforts to strengthen supply chains and expand domestic manufacturing with legislation like the CHIPS and Science Act.

“We have more work to do, and we may face setbacks along the way, but it is clear that my economic strategy of growing the economy from the bottom up and middle out is working,” Biden added.

Reprinted with permission from American Independent.

Lesson For Democrats: How Alpha Tim Ryan Dominated J.D. Vance

Lesson For Democrats: How Alpha Tim Ryan Dominated J.D. Vance

At least one Democrat has started to figure out how to exploit a GOP weakness. He's Tim Ryan, who is running against J.D. Vance for Ohio's open Senate seat.

What has Ryan figured out? He's calling out Vance as a beta male.

Look, in a different world — say, the planet Vulcan — where the inhabitants, like Mr. Spock, were unburdened by primitive passions and instincts, everyone would make decisions about political candidates based entirely upon rational policy choices. But that's not how humans operate. Part of politics is about policies, of course. But beneath the surface — and these days, not very far beneath the surface — political combat partakes of the dog park. There are rituals of alpha dominance and beta submission.

Recall that in July 1988, Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis was running 17 points ahead of Vice President George H.W. Bush. Nothing crashed his numbers more surely than his response to a debate question. CNN's Bernard Shaw, noting the governor's opposition to the death penalty, asked whether, if Dukakis' wife, Kitty, were raped and murdered, he thought he might change his view. Dukakis responded: "No, I don't, Bernard, and I think you know that I've opposed the death penalty during all of my life."

Now, granted, it was a bad question, because all of us would respond with rage if someone we loved were raped and murdered, and that's not the best way to make policy. So Dukakis' answer was perfectly appropriate as a policy matter, but it was a disaster as a political matter. Voters thought he was some sort of machine bereft of human feelings and betraying his role as manly wife defender.

Candidates have long performed at two levels in debates, parrying and thrusting about issues but also asserting dominance in mammalian code. In 2000, Al Gore and George W. Bush were seated on chairs without lecterns for a townhall-style debate. At one point, as Bush was speaking, Gore strode over to his side of the stage and right into Bush's personal space. Bush looked at him and gave him a curt nod as if to say, "I see what you're doing, and it's not working."

So voters want their leaders to be assertive and commanding. That has always been the case, and in recent decades, before the Trump era, it was kept within reasonable bounds. Trump, of course, made the subtext the headline, proclaiming, "I alone can fix it," and claiming to be the smartest, toughest, wealthiest, savviest, most capable leader the world had ever seen. Like his hero, Russian President Vladimir Putin, who posed shirtless on horseback and with big game "kills," Trump took the alpha posturing to absurd lengths. Actually, if Trump had merely pretended to kill tigers, it would have been less offensive than his promises to commit war crimes (such as targeting the families of terrorists).

It remains a mystery that these absurd boasts by the most obviously insecure manchild in living memory were not met with the ridicule they deserved. But here we are. Trump's image as some sort of Rambo persists with his most perfervid followers, and even non-MAGAites continue to see him as strong.

Most Democrats have responded to the Trump alpha gorilla routine by reminding voters that he's dangerous and unhinged. It's all true. But in the process of strutting as cock of the walk, Trump has emasculated every other Republican. He may look strong, but he demands that every other Republican become weak in his service.

Men like Kevin McCarthy, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio have abased themselves to remain in Trump's good graces. Cruz performed one of the most humiliating kowtows, tamely accepting insults to his wife's appearance, to say nothing of Trump's lunatic assertion that Cruz's father had a role in the Kennedy assassination. They all hold their manhoods cheap. And because Trump is vindictive, petty and cruel, he couldn't resist reminding an Ohio audience that J.D. Vance, the candidate he had come to support but who had once been a Trump critic, was "kissing my ass."

At their first debate on Monday, Ryan took the shot. Reminding viewers that he had stood up to leaders of his own party including Nancy Pelosi and Bernie Sanders, he noted that Vance was such a Trump lackey that even Trump had described it in those terms. Pressing the point, he recalled that even after Trump had "taken his dignity away from him," Vance had returned to the stage to shake Trump's hand and smile for the camera. Hitting the everyman theme, Ryan offered, almost with pity, that "I don't know anybody I grew up with, I don't know anybody I went to high school with, that would allow somebody to take their dignity like that and then get back up on stage."

Ryan thus simultaneously elevated his own alpha status while reinforcing Vance's weakness. Every Republican who has bent the knee to Trump — male or female — is vulnerable in this way. Ryan has taught Democrats something.

Reprinted with permission from Creators.

On The High Court, Affirmative Action Isn't Only For Republicans

On The High Court, Affirmative Action Isn't Only For Republicans

Every day since President Joe Biden reiterated his pledge to nominate the first Black woman to the U.S. Supreme Court, conservatives have reacted with the most predictable jeers and complaints. We've heard all these tiresome whines so many times before. But for some strange reason, the right-wing worries about "reverse discrimination," tokenism and lack of qualifications only apply to minority nominees, and then only when those minority nominees are Democrats.

When former President George H.W. Bush chose Clarence Thomas to fill the high court seat left vacant by the retirement of Thurgood Marshall, did anyone actually believe that the former equal employment bureaucrat was the most qualified possible nominee? Bush denied that Thomas was a "token," but the president's endorsement of him as "best qualified at this time" seemed lukewarm at best. Setting aside Anita Hill's entirely plausible testimony about his alleged sexual harassment of her, Thomas carried a thin resume of judicial achievement and scholarship, receiving the lowest possible "qualified" rating by the American Bar Association.

But Thomas was an ideologically reliable conservative — an extremist, in fact, as we now know — and he was Black, which provided convenient cover for his hostility to civil rights. So, this "affirmative action" hire, achieved at the expense of every other possible nominee of any background, disturbed conservatives not at all. They defended him with absolute fervor and ferociously denounced any opposition as racist. (Thomas played the race card too when he accused his opponents of "a high-tech lynching.")

Bush wasn't the first Republican president to apply such an exclusionary — or was it inclusionary? — criterion to a Supreme Court appointment. His predecessor and partner Ronald Reagan had promised during the 1980 campaign to name the first woman to the court, for the utterly sensible reason that vital institutions should reflect the society they serve, including the female half. At the time, there wasn't even a women's lavatory near the courtroom.

This instance of affirmative action for women, by definition excluding all men from consideration, raised not a word of objection from Reagan's reactionary base — who disliked Sandra Day O'Connor only because they correctly suspected she wouldn't overturn the Roe v. Wade abortion rights precedent.

Five years later, Reagan got the chance to choose again when Warren Burger retired and was replaced as chief justice by William Rehnquist. The Gipper's short list was so short that it apparently included only one name he took seriously, Antonin Scalia. Aside from Scalia's rigid 17th century worldview, what recommended him was that, as Reagan put it, the judge was "of Italian extraction." Yes, the iconic conservative president based his choice on the candidate's ethnic background. Or as his former White House counsel Peter Wallison quoted him: "We don't have an Italian American on the court, so we ought to have one."

As Wallison described the process, that was the bottom line for Reagan, who asked about Scalia's ethnic background, and then spent no more than 15 minutes interviewing him for the job. "I think [Reagan] felt that it would be great to put an Italian American on the Supreme Court," Wallison later told an oral history interviewer.

Such sentiment doesn't bother me nearly as much as Scalia's "originalist" jurisprudence, which always struck me as both unfaithful to the Founders' intentions and intellectually ludicrous. What is notable, however, is that nobody ever complained that Reagan somehow violated the Constitution or American values by going ethnic — with a highly political calculation that shored up the Republican base in a conservative Catholic community.

Fulfilling the aspirations of a party constituency — and expanding the definition of American to include the previously excluded — is only bad when a Democrat does it. Republicans get away with playing ethnic political games, including the toxic versions favored by former President Donald Trump, but they shriek furiously when Democrats attempt to redress historical injustices that are no longer acceptable.

The Black female judges that Biden is considering to replace Justice Stephen Breyer are all exceptionally qualified and able. That they have ascended to this level in a society that consistently undervalues them should tell us just how qualified they are.

So, as Jordan Weissman slyly noted in Slate, it is perfectly sound for Biden to follow in Reagan's footsteps by bringing diversity to the Supreme Court with excellent female candidates of color. And if Senate Republicans have any decency — rather than their usual urge to foment racial paranoia — they would say so too.

To find out more about Joe Conason and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

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