Archive for 2016

ANALYSIS: TRUE. Hillary Clinton blew the most winnable election in modern American history. And it’s her own fault.

I don’t care if the “fundamentals” favored the GOP. Trump was a fundamentals-defying opponent who should have landed flat on his face regardless of the baseline assumptions. I don’t care if Clinton racks up a nearly 3 million vote lead in the popular tally by grabbing up gobs of electorally superfluous ballots in California. She lost the election because she failed to win where she needed to win and where Democrats had a long record of winning — the upper Midwest — as well as where they win when they’re doing their jobs well (Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania, North Carolina). That’s a sign of a campaign screw-up of monumental proportions.

Most of all, I don’t want to hear about how unfairly Clinton was treated by the media. In comparison to whom? All the other candidates who’ve run for president while under criminal investigation by the FBI? (Maybe that substantial handicap should have overridden the party’s presumption that she was owed the nomination because it was “her turn.”) Or do you mean, instead, that she was treated badly in comparison to her opponent? Really? You mean the one whose 24/7 media coverage was overwhelmingly, relentlessly negative in tone and content? Either way, a halfway competent campaign should have been able to take advantage of the great good fortune of running against Donald J. Trump and left him bleeding in the ditch.

Why didn’t it happen?

Read the whole thing — but the short version is that Clinton was a terrible candidate, a lackadaisical campaigner, and she squandered her enormous ad budget.

I’VE ALREADY EXPRESSED MY DOUBTS ABOUT A BIG TRUMP INFRASTRUCTURE PLAN, but this, alas, seems right: “We’ve spent 35 years having the ‘big government versus small government’ fight. Big government won. You can be mad about it, you can disagree with it, but it is what it is.”

I’m not opposed to better roads and airports, but the truth is, there’s been a lot of money thrown at those projects, and most of it seems to get diverted into graft, consultants, and environmental impact statements. If you really want to see infrastructure boom, get rid of a lot of that federal regulation and the existing money will go far enough to get us more and better new infrastructure than even a huge slug of new cash will get us without such reform. But my approach offers fewer opportunities for graft.

AMAZON HAS A BUNCH OF KINDLE BOOKS at 80% off.