Montreal Gazette
For now, Donald Trump is a symptom
By Chuck Raasch, USA Today
WASHINGTON — We just passed the 76th anniversary of Black Sunday, the April 14, 1935, dust storms that produced monstrous curtains of dirt from Texas through the Dakotas and blanketed East Coast cities in a gritty film. It was one of the most memorable days of the Great Depression, and it led to conservation policies that literally remade the Great Plains landscape.
We had a similar date of infamy on April 18, although you may not have noticed. Standard and Poor’s pessimistic assessment of the nation’s ability to pay off its $14 trillion debt sent the stock market into a temporary tailspin, and the Obama White House into damage control.
The warning came 31 months after the global financial meltdown of 2008. How it goes down in history is up to a political system that has not responded adequately enough to allay anyone’s fears of a bad outcome. Americans just witnessed an ugly legislative process that led to a tardy 2011 budget agreement that, in relation to the problem, was tantamount to drawing a few buckets of water out of a flooding river.
The April 18 warning was a vote of no confidence in the American political system. Other recent developments indicate a growing unease over American leadership in general.
President Barack Obama’s job approval has slipped below the percentage of those disapproving of his performance. Yet the same Washington Post poll also concluded that no one in the Republicans’ assembling 2012 presidential field appears capable of beating him. If held today, it would be a hold-your-nose election for many Americans.
This is why Donald Trump — as arrogant, crude and confrontational as he can be — is the potential candidate everyone is talking about. Although it’s not always for the right reasons if you are in Trump’s corner. His questions about whether Obama was born in the United States may get traction among fringe Obama haters. But talking about it counters why Trump says the country needs him, which is that he is a spare-me-the-sideshows deal-maker of unrivaled business sense at a time when a broke America needs just that.
Right now, Trump is a symptom more than a solution. His strong showing in Republican primary polls is a byproduct of a perception by many Americans that we have a leadership vacuum and a pandering political class incapable of solving America’s problems. Trump’s bluntness and deal-making braggadocio may get panned in the media, but that reaction will only add to his anti-Washington credentials among those already distrustful of anything related to the city.
"Trump appeals to the strivers," said Roger Stone, a veteran political consultant who advised him when Trump was considering a run for president in 2000, and who has talked with Trump recently. "Trump lives as they would live if they were rich. Trump’s over-the-top lifestyle of the biggest and the best appeals to these voters. The Ivy League-educated? Not so much. Old money? Forget it. Trump appeals to the Perot and Buchanan voters suspicious of both parties. The tea party is a natural launching pad for Trump."
Trump’s Atlantic City Casino might give good odds that he would wilt in the harsh light of presidential campaigns. His positions on everything from universal health care to abortion have had as many twists and turns as an episode of "Celebrity Apprentice." But he also is railing against a political system that many Americans believe is broken beyond repair, with the perceived credibility of a successful businessman (albeit one whose casino company declared bankruptcy several times).
Since the November election, the door has been uniquely open for bold action and brawny leadership on the debt and deficit. Obama might have summoned the "fierce urgency of now" he talked about in his 2008 presidential campaign.
Last November, there was an electoral mandate to get control of the deficit and a bipartisan deficit-reduction blueprint in its final draft. Obama was still relatively popular even if his party had taken an electoral licking. A commission of leading Democrats and Republicans appointed by Obama recommended a combination of cuts and tax increases, parts of which Obama put in his do-over 2012 budget proposal released earlier in April.
But for reasons that had more to do with his 2012 election campaign than solving the problem, Obama let Republicans go first, and their plan of deeper cuts and no tax increases unleashed the predictable "they’re killing granny" attacks from Obama’s left. And so Congress has retreated back to the familiar partisanship and pettiness that has brought us to this moment.
You have to give Obama credit for setting himself up as the reasonable moderate between the intransigent "no new taxes" right and the unyielding "don’t touch Medicare" left. It’s a perfect re-election triangle for him. But it is based on a premise that the intransigents will dig in, and the debt problem will again get kicked down the road.
Two years ago, 73 percent of Americans told Gallup they thought Obama was a strong and decisive leader. That fell to 60 percent last May, and to 52 percent in a survey taken in late March. That’s not a good trend — for Obama, but especially for the country.
http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/TRUMP+SYMPTOM/4667091/story.html
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