You saw it here first: affirmative action children acting out.

Stuart Taylor, Princeton '70

We told you affirmative action was responsible. Now Stuart Taylor, Jr., scholar at the liberal Brookings Institution, writes in the conservative American Spectator that affirmative action lies behind the current Cultural Revolution hitting American campuses.

As Taylor reminds us:

good black . . . students, who would be academically competitive at many selective schools, are not competitive at the more selective schools that they attend. That’s why it takes very large racial preferences to get them admitted. An inevitable result is that many black . . . students cannot keep up with better-prepared classmates and rank low in their classes no matter how hard they work.

Studies show that this academic “mismatch effect” forces them to drop science and other challenging courses; to move into soft, easily graded, courses disproportionately populated by other preferentially admitted students; and to abandon career hopes such as engineering and pre-med. Many lose intellectual self-confidence and become unhappy even if they avoid flunking out.

And many turn from their books to campus agitation against discrimination and injustice. In the process, they avoid facing head-on an injustice they first benefit from, an injustice that then turns to bite them hard: projected “white guilt.”

Or have I got this wrong?  Is the current black agitation the richly-deserved payback the white perpetrators of affirmative action deserve? 

American Cultural Revolution Rolls On

Wilson Mural at Princeton, Covered in Black

“Across the nation, students have risen up to demand an end to systemic and structural racism on campus. Here are their demands.” For the complete list of demands go to (list here).

As of yesterday, our current crop of “red guards” is active on 46 campuses. Their “demands” include Princeton activists calling for elimination of Woodrow Wilson’s name from Princeton institutions where his name appears, including the Woodrow Wilson School I attended, and Wilson College, the residential hall where my son lived. And the “red guards’” sit-in in the Princeton President’s Office (Woodrow Wilson wasn’t only our president, he was also President of Princeton) has succeeded!

It’s so ironic. Woodrow Wilson is the father (oops!) of American Progressivism, supported direct election of senators, created the Federal Reserve System, reduced tariffs, help give women the vote, created Mother’s Day, vetoed a bill demanding literacy tests for immigrants and banning Asian workers, tried to veto the National Prohibition Act, led us to victory in World War I, then earned the Nobel Peace Prize both for his efforts to end war and for founding the League of Nations, the predecessor to the U.N. Wilson is often ranked by historians as one of the nation’s greatest presidents.

Yes Wilson was a racist.  He was born in the South in 1856. But that made him too young to own slaves, as did 12 of our first 18 presidents.

Watch out, State of Washington and Washington D.C.!

The New Cultural Revolution: Affirmative Acton’s Price

Yale Students Making Revolution

So the Cultural Revolution-like protests at Missouri and Yale have now spread to Claremont-McKenna and Dartmouth.

Crane Brinton’s The Anatomy of Revolution (1938) explains why--before eventually being crushed in revolution’s "Thermidor" stage--extremists first triumph over moderates:

• they are "better organized, better staffed, better obeyed." 

• they have "relatively few responsibilities," while the legal government "has to shoulder some of the unpopularity of the government of the old regime" with "the worn-out machinery, the institutions of the old regime." 

• the moderates are hindered by their hesitancy to change direction and fight back against the radical revolutionaries, "with whom they recently stood united," in favor of conservatives, "against whom they have so recently risen." 

• they are drawn to the slogan “no enemies to the Left.” 

• the moderates are attacked on one side by "disgruntled but not yet silenced conservatives, and the confident, aggressive extremists," on the other. 

• moderate revolutionary policies can please neither side. 

Sound familiar? If so, and if the past is any guide, the current Cultural Revolution hitting American university campuses has a ways to go before its leaders are frozen.

Still, as Paul Sperry in the conservative New York Post reminds us, today’s student unrest is a pale imitation of what hit U.S. campuses 50 years ago:

The protests of the ’60s had real causes — fighting for civil rights and opposing the draft during an unpopular war. But today’s protesters are posers grasping at faux causes and ginning up pseudo-grievances about things like Halloween costumes and swastikas drawn in bathrooms.

The police dogs, truncheons and firehoses of the civil-rights movement have been reduced to slights, slurs and symbols. Today’s discrimination is “unconscious” or “implicit.” Activists know it exists, they just can’t prove it. It’s “systemic,” yet they can’t find it.

Let me be blunt. The instigators of today’s campus radicalism, especially blacks, are the children and grandchildren of affirmative action, now 50 years old. They are inspired by our angry black president, the first affirmative action child to arrive at the White House.

Conservative black author Shelby Steele, in White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era (2006), wrote forthrightly about the failure of affirmative action and its continuing damage to our nation. Steele believes that in the ‘60s, there was no quick answer to America’s

heartless betrayal of democracy where blacks were concerned, the [profound] loss of moral authority. . . In their monochrome whiteness, the institutions of this society -- universities, government agencies, corporations -- became emblems of the very evil America had just acknowledged.

Affirmative action was a false short cut, rapidly allowing white-dominated institutions to shed “white guilt” by turning to policies that favored blacks at the expense of (mostly less privileged) whites.

For blacks, however, Steele asserts affirmative action didn’t work, with no evidence the policy has narrowed the developmental gap between whites and blacks. New Haven black firemen granted promotion over their higher-scoring white counterparts certainly disadvantaged white firemen, but left undeniable the fact that not a single black scored high enough to gain promotion.

Steele writes that blacks suffer from underdevelopment, not discrimination:

Success in modernity will demand profound cultural changes -- changes in child-rearing, a restoration of marriage and family, a focus on academic rigor, a greater appreciation of entrepreneurialism and an embrace of individual development as the best road to group development.

Blacks are too proud to explore openly what Steele calls underdevelopment. That leaves us all perpetuating the language of discrimination and injustice, thereby denying blacks responsibility for taking charge of their own fate as did and do successive waves of American immigrants, whatever their color.  

Comment: Today’s campus Cultural Revolution, following Steele’s book by 9 years, is perpetuating black focus on discrimination and injustice. It does so in place of blacks overcoming the underdevelopment that must be obvious to many affirmative action beneficiaries every day in their university classrooms.

2015: American Cultural Revolution Launched?

Missouri Football Protesters Call for University President's Head

It’s amazing what just happened at the University of Missouri. Black students upset about President Timothy Wolfe’s

insufficient appreciation for the “systematic oppression” experienced by students of color at the university [and backed by c]ampus agitators alleg[ing] that racial slurs had been directed at black students

forced Wolfe to resign! They did so using a technique that may go university by university across the nation. They moved black players on Missouri’s football team to threaten that unless Wolfe resigned, they would boycott Saturday’s game with BYU, a cancellation that would cost Missouri $1 million.

Yes, Missouri is the state of Ferguson, the St. Louis suburb that hosted riots last year over the supposed white policeman murder (since disproven) of an unarmed black teenager. Yes, the University of Missouri is run by the state. Yes, Missouri is one of only 17 states still left with a Democratic governor. Yes, blacks provide over 20% of Missouri's Democratic vote. Nevertheless, every campus where football or basketball earn universities--public or private--big dollars faces the same blackmail threat that brought down Wolfe, along with his chancellor.

And if you don’t believe a nationwide cultural revolution--with parallels to the massive, student-led Red Guard revolution that destroyed China’s traditional Communist Party in 1966--may be starting in the U.S., look what’s going on at Yale. Professor Nicholas Christakis resides at and presides over Silliman, a Yale residential college. His wife Erika, a lecturer in early childhood education, shares that duty.

As described by Conor Friedersdorf over 3,500 words in the liberal Atlantic, Erika had the temerity to suggest, politely in an email, that maybe Yale administrators shouldn’t be advising which Halloween costumes were and were not appropriate for students to wear.

The reaction to Erika’s email was explosive. Please go here to view the YouTube student intimidation of husband Nicholas; a video clip that begins with one student saying, “Walk away, he doesn’t deserve to be listened to.”

You think that reaction was a bit much? Friedersdorf reports that since Halloween, “Hundreds of Yale students are attacking [the Christakis’s], some with hateful insults, shouted epithets, and a campaign of public shaming,” and “a faction of students are now trying to get the couple removed from their residential positions, which is to say, censured and ousted from their home on campus.”

Comment: We can no longer expect the crucible of meritocratic elite rule--the academy--to be a training ground for democracy based upon the principle that all persons are created equal, a belief supported by our basic freedoms, including freedom of speech. In the words of George Orwell’s Napoleon (Animal Farm, 1945), “All . . . Are Equal / But Some Are More Equal Than Others."

Third GOP Debate Shortens Field

 Cruz                        Rubio                        Trump                          Carson

"we believe there are really only four candidates with a reasonable chance of becoming the Republican nominee: Senator Marco Rubio, Dr. Ben Carson, Donald Trump, and Senator Ted Cruz."

--Marco Rubio Campaign

The Rubio campaign analysis seems correct. Following the October 28 GOP debate botched by CNBC, Ted Cruz is closing in on the Republican “outsider insider” conservative vote. At the same time, Marco Rubio has apparently broken in front of a large, qualified pack of candidates seeking to become the GOP establishment’s leading choice--in the process passing Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, Carly Fiorina, John Kasich, and departed Scott Walker and Rick Perry.

So the Republican contest might come down to Rubio v. Cruz after all. That would be news to Trump and Ben Carson. They have topped national polls since Carson passed Bush in late August (Trump’s been #1 in the RealClearPolitics average since July 19).

Trump and Carson remain well out in front. If Republicans continue to prefer an outsider, it will be Trump or Carson. Carson is Dr. anti-Trump; his support comes from Republicans who love Trump’s hostility toward the elite, but can’t stand the man. Carson provides an acceptable alternative to Trump, meaning love him or hate him, Trump dominates either way.

In line with our analysis, Carson, Trump, Rubio, and Cruz lead the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll taken over 5 days, including the day after CNBC’s GOP debate:

Carson 29%
Trump 23%
Rubio 11%
Cruz 10%

Monmouth University has a poll run entirely after the debate, but limited just to New Hampshire:

Trump 26%
Carson 16%
Rubio 13% (up from 4%)
Kasich 11%
Cruz 9%

Trump runs ahead of Carson and Kasich ahead of Cruz in secular New Hampshire; Both Cruz and Carson draw from the Christian right.

The latest Iowa poll, the Democratic PPP Poll, also took place after the last Republican debate. Iowa GOP caucus attendees are overwhelmingly evangelical-conservative. So no surprise that Christian conservatives Carson and Cruz dominate in Iowa--Carson even with Trump, and Cruz moving ahead of Rubio:

Trump 22%
Carson 21%
Cruz 14%
Rubio 10%

In all new polls, Bush trails the four new leaders.

Kim Strassel, writing in the conservative Wall Street Journal, expects Rubio and Cruz to be two of the last three standing (she also likes Chris Christie). Strassel explains why:

Republican voters want[:] a great communicator, an effective advocate for their cause. They haven’t had one since Reagan, and the Bushes and McCains and Romneys have highlighted how big a problem that is.

The two Cuban Americans, Rubio and Cruz, are both 44. They aspire to be the Republican John Kennedy as much as the next Reagan, trading on youth as did our first Catholic president.

Crusin’ Ted Cruz

Cruz                                                      Dracula

“I just don’t like the guy.”

--former President George W. Bush

It’s remarkable to have Bush 43 in his retirement attacking a fellow Republican and Texan, but Bush knows he’s hardly alone.

Ted Cruz is called the “most hated man in Washington.” Democrats hate him for his policies, but the reputation also stems from Republican animosity.  Cruz has made a name for himself by trying--and over Obamacare succeeding for a few days in October 2013--to close down the government rather than raise the debt ceiling, bust the budget, fund Obamacare, or pay for Planned Parenthood.

Republicans agree with Cruz on most issues, but pragmatists know shutting down government confirms a public image of the GOP as extremists who would defund popular government programs such as social security and medicare just to get their way.

Cruz doesn’t seem to care. He called his leader in the Senate, fellow Republican Mitch McConnell, “a liar.” His profile blossomed as a result of his many battles. Cruz was Trump before there was Trump.

So what are Cruz’s chances of winning the GOP nomination? Good, I would say. Cruz is young, 44, with superb credentials. While at Princeton, Cruz won the 1992 U.S. National Debating Championship and the 1992 North American Debating Championship, and that same year, was named U.S. National Speaker of the Year, as well as half the Team of the Year.

Cruz and his Princeton debate partner then represented Harvard Law School at the 1995 World Debating Championship, making it to the semi-finals. Famed Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz said, "Cruz was off-the-charts brilliant." After law school, Cruz clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist--the plumb of plumb clerkships. Even an Obama couldn’t match these credentials.

Cruz is Hispanic, a plus, and an evangelical Christian, a GOP plus. Cruz’s wife is a Goldman Sachs partner who took leave to help his campaign. He objectively has an impressive campaign organization geared not only to do well in the four early states (Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, South Carolina) but pointed especially at March 1st's mostly Southern “Super Tuesday." Cruz could be #1 after “Super Tuesday” primaries or caucuses in Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Colorado, Georgia, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Vermont, and Virginia.

Already, Cruz is the top Republican in one of the most important measurements of strength: “Cash on Hand.”

The ranking (in $ millions) is:
1 Hillary Clinton $33.0
2 Bernie Sanders 27.1
3 Ted Cruz 13.8
4 Ben Carson 11.3
5 Marco Rubio 11.0

Among Republicans, Cruz trails only Bush in “Money Raised,” (in $ millions including PACs as well as individually):
1 Jeb Bush $133.3
2 Hillary Clinton 97.7
3 Ted Cruz 64.9
4 Marco Rubio 47.7
5 Bernie Sanders 41.5
6 Ben Carson 31.6

Of course, Trump is self-financed, and may well obliterate all these figures with his own funds. Trump and Ben Carson are Cruz’s main rivals along with Marco Rubio. Carly Fiorina has faded, and right now, Jeb Bush seems to be self-destructing. Cruz is currently #5 in the national polls, #4 in Iowa and South Carolina (he would like to beat #3 Rubio in both), and way down in New Hampshire, but with a good organization.  


Comment: I support Rubio, who would do better against Hillary than Cruz. Rubio is a smooth, skilled talker, and better looking than Cruz, who looks like a vampire (see Halloween frights, above).

Rubio speaks better Spanish than Cruz and his wife, unlike Cruz’s, is Hispanic (Colombian). Rubio, also a Tea Party conservative, is a practicing Catholic who sends his three children to parochial schools. If Trump and Carson fade, it may very well come down to handsome, poised Marco v. brilliant, well-organized Ted Cruz.

Clinton Lies, the Sun Rises, Clinton Also Lies

So the Benghazi hearings, mama media says, showed Clinton besting her GOP interrogators? From mother, you expected otherwise?

As we stated after the October 13 Democratic debate, that party’s primary is over. The result left media no choice: fall in line behind progressives’ one-candidate, 2016 march to the White House.

Conservative Robert Tracinski, in the “Federalist,” underlines our conclusion, writing that last week’s Benghazi hearing

is being hailed by the mainstream media as a triumph for Hillary Clinton. But then again, what choice do they have? If she is the inevitable Democratic nominee, then it’s TINA time: There Is No Alternative. So they had their narrative planned in advance.

“They had their narrative planned in advance.”

The media claimed the Benghazi hearings produced no “smoking gun.” Wrong. There were three. It’s just that “TINA” media chose to ignore all three. As Tracinski added, Clinton:

knew all along that the attack on the U.S. consulate [sic] in Benghazi was a terrorist attack by an al Qaeda affiliate, not a spontaneous demonstration about a YouTube video. Three e-mails [“smoking guns”--GF] unveiled by the Benghazi investigation — one to her daughter and two [documenting] conversations with the leaders of Libya and Egypt — show that she knew and acknowledged the truth in private while at the same time she was telling a different story to the American people.

We knew from the beginning that Clinton had lied about al Qaeda-affiliated terrorists attacking our Benghazi post and killing our ambassador and three other Americans on the 9/11 anniversary date of al Qaeda’s greatest triumph. We also knew progressives couldn’t afford the truth in the midst of a 2012 election fought under the line that Democrats had al Qaeda “on the run.”

Clinton lied. We couldn’t prove it. Now three email “smoking guns” do.

Democratic “Debate” Love Fest

You can’t beat somebody with nobody. Hillary Clinton will win the Democratic nomination. That’s clear for anybody who sat through Tuesday’s first Democratic Party debate. By vanquishing all challengers on the stage, Clinton made it next to impossible for Vice President Joe Biden to enter the race.

Democrats are worried, very worried, about the consequences they will face if they lose the 2016 presidential election. Much of the media attention to Clinton’s problems with her private email server related to a desire to get her out of the race if she looked likely to lose to a Republican next November. But the media can’t take Clinton down when there is no viable alternative within the party. That leaves the media with no choice but to join Clinton’s camp, and bury scandal associated with her campaign. It’s  “every hand on deck, gotta beat the GOP” time.

Bernie Sanders is one of those Democratic deck hands. I now see, probably long after others figured it out, that Sanders really is in the race with no expectation of winning, but to use his skills to push the party toward democratic socialism. His idea-driven agenda won’t go over with the party if he is seen as wounding the likely nominee, even--maybe especially--if his effort draws the more credible Biden into the race, something that was a real possibility before the debate.

So Sanders, in the debate's key moment, told us all “The American people are sick and tired of hearing about your damn emails. . . Enough of the emails!” Result: Clinton wins the nomination, Sanders remains her principal opponent pushing the party leftward, Biden stays out.

I earlier said that Republicans should hope Clinton wins the nomination, because she is too flawed to be elected president. I didn’t count on her sewing up the nomination 13 months before the election. Unless the FBI indicts her, Clinton will now have the entire progressive structure working for her to beat the Republican nominee, much as happened in 2012 when the liberal coalition pulled President Barack Obama through under adverse economic circumstances.

Here's the consolation for Biden: if Clinton is indicted, he is the one best positioned to take her place.

Rubio Threat: NYT tells progressives, “Take heart.”

Marco Rubio isn’t yet ready to storm past Trump, Carson, Fiorina, and Bush. To progressives, Rubio's rivals for the Republican presidential nomination possess major weaknesses--Trump the male juvenile; Carson the “in over his head” right-wing Christian; Fiorina, the corporate “Fail-orina;” Bush, the name.  These four give Democrats hope that even a highly-flawed Hillary Clinton might actually beat the GOP nominee.

But Rubio, still trailing Trump, Carson, Fiorina and only slightly ahead of the better-financed Bush, is rising.  And Rubio may be the biggest threat of all.

Political bias is so obvious at the New York Times (NYT).  Like the Soviet-era Communist newspaper Pravda, the NYT writes for a chosen elite. The NYT's progressive audience is big and powerful enough the newspaper need not cater to anyone else.

NYT readers want a Democrat in the White House after 2016, and the NYT will further that goal. NYT leaks about Hillary Clinton’s email server seem odd on their face, but the leaks help nudge the party toward a substitute, should Hillary falter.

Obama faced a serious re-election challenge in 2012, when America's economy was still in bad shape.  Obama won by savaging GOP opponent Mitt Romney, with the help of the NYT and other progressive media.

That 2012 Obama winning strategy is on the front burner for 2016.  Make the GOP nominee's shortcomings the election issue. And right now, that demands focus on Rubio, whom NYT reporter Nate Cohn, in a warning to his progressive readership, writes has benefited from a change in the “political landscape surrounding his candidacy” that couldn’t be “much more in his favor over the last six months.”

But Cohn also reassures his readers that

Rubio’s problems run deeper than the factional politics of a severely divided party. Perhaps his vaunted communication skills haven’t turned into big polling gains because his personal traits — he’s a young, Catholic, Latino lawyer from Miami — don’t help him resonate among old, evangelical, white, less-educated and rural voters. His youthful appearance may not help assuage concerns about his preparedness for the presidency.

Beyond his limited experience in national politics, he has big vulnerabilities on his failed immigration reform effort and his ties to a billionaire benefactor.

The NYT tried to soften up Rubio’s run earlier this year, before the Trump phenomenon unfolded. Now that Trump is fading slightly, we see NYT attention swinging back to Rubio, the once and future threat.

On running for president at 61.

Carly  @ 61 (2015)                                    Hillary  @ 61 (2008)                             

Is Carly right to run for president at 61?

Did Hillary's best time to run for president come and go?

In politics, timing is everything.

Media already savaging Carly.

Carly Fiorina won the second Republican presidential debate. The following morning, the conservative Wall Street Journal’s Kim Strassel quoted Margaret Thatcher’s 1965 statement that “In politics, if you want anything said, ask a man. If you want anything done, ask a woman.”  Fiorina's biggest gift was cutting Donald Trump down to size, something none of the men had been able to accomplish.

Strassel then said Firoina, like Thatcher, is a politician who happens to be a woman, rather than a female politician standing on women’s votes.

Speaking presumably partly from personal experience, Strassel added:

Fiorina knows [what] she has to do: her homework. . . She knows she can’t slip up. Her Wednesday performance—from her mastery of facts, to her fluid delivery, to her zingers—was clearly the work of hours upon hours of study and debate prep.

The implicit message of Strassel’s piece: “Democrats, watch out!”

Wouldn’t you know the Democrats’ allies in the media were alert to just such a development? The same morning conservatives were cheering Fiorina as the GOP’s answer to Britain’s “Iron Lady,” Chris Cillizza, in the liberal Washington Post, was warning Republicans, “This is the ad that could kill Carly Fiorina’s campaign.” Run by Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) against Fiorina in Boxer’s victorious 2010 California Senate campaign, Cillizza reported that

The commercial notes that Fiorina laid off 30,000 workers at HP [Hewlett-Packard] while feathering her own nest (the ad's narrator says she tripled her salary) and buying a "million-dollar yacht" and "five corporate jets."

It took the New York Times’ Amy Chozick and Quentin Hardy another three days to rev up that paper’s assault on Fiorina’s record. Under the biased headline “As Profile Rises, Carly Fiorina Aims to Redefine Record as a C.E.O”--of course “redefine” means “fixing” something wrong--Chozick and Hardy on Page One wrote that Fiorina and supporters are trying to alter Fiorina’s

rocky business reputation and fend off attacks on her as an unfit and heartless executive. Such accusations helped doom her 2010 Senate campaign in California. Democrats called her “Carly Fail-orina,”

The New York Times suggests--and implicitly hopes--Fiorina

risks becoming bogged down in a defense of her record at the expense of her message as a political outsider who would bring conservative change to Washington

Attemptiong to keep her on the defensive, the article attacks Fiorina’s “knack for self-elevation,” pointing out that “Carly is not an engineer,” and rips into HP’s $24.2 billion merger with Compaq Computer, which “divided the HP board” and greatly increased the company’s size.

Quite gratuitously, Chozick and Hardy add:

The deal was so personal to Fiorina that she referred to HP as “Héloïse” and Compaq as “Abélard,” a pair whose romantic letters became treasures of medieval French literature, which she studied at Stanford. (Abélard was eventually castrated after fights with Héloïse’s family, a detail Compaq executives were unaware of at the time.)

Good grief. “All the news,” fit or unfit to print.

Chozick and Hardy won’t allow Fiorina to blame the fall of HP’s stock price on the well-known burst of the dot-com bubble that drove many tech firms out of business, as they tell us “HP shares fell by more than the stocks of competitors like Dell, IBM, Intel and Microsoft.”

This kind of reporting is called “cherry-picking.”  The two Timespersons, echoing the Boxer ad, inform us that Fiorina

ushered in a period of corporate scandal, including public clashes with members of the Hewlett family. Fired in 2005, she left with more than $42 million in severance, stock options and pension.

Board fights and golden parachutes a “scandal”? Really?

Ranging far afield in their search for dirt, Chozick and Hardy proclaim that HP is cutting up to 30,000 jobs today. That’s a full decade after Fiorina left the firm, but an action “which Fiorina’s detractors view as a repudiation of her legacy."

According to Chozick and Hardy, “some”

say the latest saga began with Fiorina’s grand acquisitions, which never yielded the profits or economies of scale she and her successors anticipated. “She had a very mixed tenure,” said George Colony, the chief executive of Forrester, a technology research firm. “The culture she tried to change spit her out, eventually. I’d put her at the top of the bottom third of C.E.O.s.”

The Colony quote is significant, since unlike those from others, including Jim Margolis, the ad maker for the Boxer campaign, and Barbara Boxer herself (!), Colony’s bias against Fiorina isn’t obvious on its face.

The piece “Fact check: Carly Fiorina didn't have a great run as CEO of Hewlett-Packard” by Fortune’s Stephen Gandel lacks the New York Times’ raw bias against Fiorina. Fortune (3.6 million circulation, 2014), however, is owned by Time Inc., which leans liberal in contrast to Fortune’s conservative rival Forbes (6.1 million circulation).

Gandel quotes Fiorina saying the tech-heavy NASDAQ stock index fell 80% while she was CEO, sending some HP competitors out of business and eliminating all their jobs. Gandel pointed out that Fiorina pegged NASDAQ’s fall from its peak in early 2000 to its early 2003 bottom. But if you look instead at Fiorina’s full 1999-2005 tenure at HP, the corporation’s stock fell 43% even as the NASDAQ dropped just 23%, and IBM’s shares went down only 29%. Gandel did concede other computer companies went out of business.

Here’s the problem with how Gandel rearranges Fiorina’s “80% NASDAQ fall” numbers. She became CEO in July 1999, just as the NASDAQ began a 91% rise over the next eight months to its all-time high. To measure Fiorina's performance from July 1999 during the NASDAQ bubble’s inflation period instead of from her first major decision as HP chief in May 2000, two months after NASDAQ topped out, makes no sense, except to obscure the fact that Fiorina actually started running HP at the peak of the dot.com bubble, giving her little chance for any positive HP stock performance record.  As she correctly points out.  The NASDAQ’s fall from its March 4, 2000 peak to Fiorina’s departure was 59%, greater than the 43% HP decline under her tenure.

Even Gandel admits:

Doing some kind of transformative deal was probably the right call for the company, even if Compaq didn’t work out immediately. Eventually, it led to big changes at HP that were for the best. HP has had some good years since Fiorina left the company. Earnings nearly doubled the year after she left, which Fiorina gets no credit for but probably deserves some.

Much of the credit for HP success goes to the corporation’s shifting emphasis to printers, a shift that occurred under Fiorina’s tenure. HP's printer and server market share did double from 1999 to 2005.

The “T” word: landscape-changing, even when unspoken.

Peggy Noonan, the former Reagan speechwriter, has a weekly Wall Street Journal column. Noonan, like others, is currently focused on Trump.

But her latest column leaves Trump unmentioned, even as she explains why people go for him. Trump talks and acts working class, thus closing the elite-masses gap the way Romney and Jeb! can’t.

Noonan doesn’t say Trump speaks common American. But Trump profits from the very problem Noonan identifies, Noonan knows it, and Noonan expects you know it too.

Here’s Noonan’s writing. Please agree Noonan is without naming Trump explaining the Trump phenom:

this crisis talk of “the elites” is pertinent. The gap between those who run governments and those who are governed has now grown huge and portends nothing good.

Rules on immigration and refugees are made by safe people. These are the people who help run countries, who have nice homes in nice neighborhoods and are protected by their status. Those who live with the effects of immigration and asylum law are those who are less safe, who see a less beautiful face in it because they are daily confronted with a less beautiful reality—normal human roughness, human tensions. Decision-makers fear things like harsh words from the writers of editorials; normal human beings fear things like street crime. Decision-makers have the luxury of seeing life in the abstract. Normal people feel the implications of their decisions in the particular.

The decision-makers feel disdain for the anxieties of normal people, and ascribe them to small-minded bigotries, often religious and racial, and ignorant antagonisms. But normal people prize order because they can’t buy their way out of disorder.

The biggest thing leaders don’t do now is listen. They no longer hear the voices of common people. . . In this age we will see political leaders, and institutions, rock, shatter and fall due to that deafness.

Don’t misunderstand me. Trump talks common, but he goes too far, such as attacking Carly Fiorina's face. He won’t age well; “T” numbers will drop.

Should conservatives want Hillary? Duh!

As a conservative, I hope Democrats nominate Hillary for president. The Republican nominee--whoever he or she is--will defeat this dishonest, corrupt and damaged candidate.

My chief worry is Democrats will realize this fact in time to replace Hillary, or that the Obama-run federal government will indict her for mishandling classified information, and thus force Democrats to nominate someone else.

During Watergate, observers knew by April 1973 it was over for Nixon. Yet it took another 15 months, discovery of taped conversations, and tremendous pressure from the media and his own party to get Nixon finally out of office. Conservatives should hope Hillary, Nixon-like, can hang on through next July’s Democratic convention.

Certainly, Democrats still remain strongly behind Hillary. While acknowledging that “It is true that Clinton made a big mistake using only private emails and took an excruciatingly long time to offer what should have been an easy apology,” liberal Brent Budowsky has just argued that:

Clinton is the most qualified person in the race for the presidency. She was the closest confidant and full partner during the most successful and fondly remembered presidency of modern times, an achievement no other candidate can match.

Yet in an early sign of what’s to come, another liberal, Harry Siegel, yesterday wrote in the New York Daily News:

it’s going to be awfully hard for [Clinton] to change opinions formed over decades, even without months of drip-drip to come from her self-inflicted private email, Clinton Foundation and whatever-else-emerges mess. . . Clinton is setting us up for . . . the circumstance that produces a Republican-dominated government significantly to the right of the American public.

Let’s hope for a government that’s exactly where the American public wants it--effective and honest.

The Trump Phenom: Wishful Thinking

Michael Barone, with the Washington Examiner, is one of the most astute conservative political observers. Digging into recent polling data on Trump’s lead, Barone notes that

over 40% favorable ratings [are] from voters 50 and over. But his favorable ratings among voters under 35 were only 25% and 28%, while 66-68% of them rated him unfavorably.

Barone explains Trump’s rejection by youth this way: millennials don’t care about Mexican illegals, and they don’t worry about international trade taking American jobs. Older people, caught in the “remember Ross Perot” past, do. Barone then reminds us that facts are on the side of youth. Net migration from Mexico since 2007 is 0, and international trade’s relevance to U.S. jobs has declined along with the world economy.

My take is that Barone is engaging in wishful thinking. The reason youth don’t like Trump is his anti-Mexican rhetoric. Youth are far more non-white than the U.S. population as a whole, and even if they’e Caucasian, their friends aren’t lily white. Youth think Trump is racist, and they don’t like him.

As for older, mostly white people, they don’t care what Barone says about international trade. The U.S. economy sucks, Trump projects extreme (to put it mildly) confidence he can create jobs, so they love him.

Trump. Deal with it.

TRUMP

Trump, the man and the phenomenon, under attack from both left and right.

Here’s liberal George Packer, writing in the New Yorker:

Populism [demands] simple answers to difficult problems. It’s suspicious of the normal bargaining and compromise that constitute democratic governance. Populism can have a conspiratorial and apocalyptic bent—the belief that the country, or at least its decent majority, is facing imminent ruin at the hands of a particular group of malefactors [i.e., politicians].

[Many] have won the Presidency by seeming to reject or rise above the unlovely business of politics and government. Trump takes it to a demagogic extreme. There’s no dirtier word in the lexicon of his stump speech than “politician.”

Please note: Packer’s “normal bargaining and compromise” takes place among an elite of Democrats and Republicans to which average people feel no connection whatsoever.

And here’s conservative Bret Stephens, sounding off in the Wall Street Journal:

a party that is supposed to believe in the incomparable awesomeness of America thinks we are losing the economic hunger games to the brilliant political leadership of . . . Mexico. [A] movement that is supposed to believe in economic freedom doesn’t believe in the essence of economic freedom: to wit, the free movement of goods, services, capital and labor.

The “party” to which Stephens refers is Stephens’ very own Republican Party. Ah despair, Trump is thy name.

Personally, I don’t believe that the masses can successfully overthrow a united elite. One has to have at least a piece of the elite on one’s side. Hitler had the Reichswehr and many industrialists. Lenin had intellectuals and part of the army. Trump, by himself alone, is rich, but not THAT rich.

So confronted by Trump’s rise, I am calmer than Packer and Stephens. I believe the Trump phenomenon stems from real issues, including the elite’s failure to take care of the economy and bring prosperity to our working class. Trump is right about our porous border and our failure to track down visa overstayers, right about the disconnect between Washington and the country, right about the meritocracy's anti-democratic nature, right to harp on how political correctness attempts to attach votes of those dependent on government to the nation’s liberal elite.

Packer wants Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, to work together. We already know what that means to progressives: “conservatives, listen to your intellectual superiors, and gracefully accept your junior status in the ruling elite.”

Stephens argues for the unfettered free movement of goods and labor, even as ordinary people believe cheap goods and cheap labor are taking jobs away from them. This is a real problem, one Marco Rubio, among others, treats seriously.

The average American isn’t responsive to the Bret Stephens/Wall Street Journal/Mitt Romney agenda bringing globalization with all its consequences to Main Street. The elite-masses disconnect helps explain why elite Republicans are linked to elite Democrats as the problem, not the solution.

And why we must deal with the Trump phenom.

Memo to Conservatives: Abandon Culture Wars

New York Governor Roosevelt (1929-32)

"Never let your opponent pick the battleground on which to fight. If he picks one, stay out of it and let him fight all by himself."

--Franklin D. Roosevelt (1930)

Roosevelt was a political master, winning the White House four times while successfully hiding his inability to walk. Roosevelt’s advice to pick always your own battlefield and never fight on your opponent’s represents the soundest two sentences I’ve seen on winning politics. It echoes the teaching of Chinese 6th century BC military strategist Sun Zi, who in The Art of War wrote, “if you know your enemies and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles.”

It’s time conservatives stopped losing the culture wars. It’s time for conservatives to leave liberals to fight “all by themselves” and move to a new battlefield.

There’s evidence conservatives are catching on.

From Ben Domenech, founder of the conservative "Federalist":

Most people speak about issues through the lens of culture, sports, and relationships, not based on elections and legislation. That's why our most popular stories are about sex, pop culture, faith, child-rearing, and more, and why we don't write gauzy profiles of congressmen. [T]he politics of Taylor Swift, Neil de Grasse Tyson, and John Oliver matter a lot more than the politics of another white guy in a Brooks Brothers suit who has a plan to save the country.

From conservative Heather Wilhelm, in “RealClearPolitics”:

Welcome to the culture wars, which have little to do with actual culture, and everything to do with harnessing raw government power. In the wake of [the marriage equality] Supreme Court decision, numerous commentators called on conservative Christians and other same-sex marriage “dissenters” to call the whole thing off. Here’s the weird thing: I suspect that many of them would if they could, at least in the political arena. Many Americans, after all, just want to mind their own business. It’s the ever-growing government, weirdly, that won’t drop the topic—and it’s the ever-growing government, ultimately, that won’t let the culture wars die. If current trends continue, we can expect more of the same.

From Kevin Williamson, writing in the conservative National Review:

there has never been a better time to be anything other than a straight white male in America. Women are thriving in higher education and the workforce. The Supreme Court just declared gay Americans can now marry anyone they please. We have elected and re-elected the nation’s first black president, and there is a good chance he might be followed by the first female president. [emphasis added]

You have to credit the Left: Its strategy is deft. If you can make enough noise that sounds approximately like a moral crisis, then you can in effect create a moral crisis. Never mind that the underlying argument — “Something bad has happened to somebody else, and so you must give us something we want!” — is entirely specious; it is effective. . . Democrats argued that decency compelled us to pass a tax increase in the wake of the [financial] crisis, though tax rates had nothing to do with it.

And again from Benjamin Domenech, along with conservative Robert Tracinski:

The 2004 effort to push state measures designed to stop gay marriage in tandem with George W. Bush’s re-election effort was a Pyrrhic victory, one which contributed to the Great Sort that eliminated the last of the Reagan Democrats. The efforts of religious leaders and traditionalists to win the argument at the ballot box won temporarily, but could not last in a country where [conservatives] no longer controlled the culture or the courts, and where these non-traditional relationships were depicted as healthy and normal on a daily basis in mass media and social media. The eventual triumph of the Counterculture was ensured.

Time to fight elsewhere.

Iran Appeasement: Method Behind Madness?

Both the non-aligned movement -- founded by Yugoslavia’s Tito, India’s Nehru, Indonesia’s Sukarno, Egypt’s Nasser, and Ghana’s Nkrumah -- and Barack Obama were born in 1961.

Barack Obama is successfully destroying traditional U.S. foreign policy. We used to lead the world’s most powerful alliance. Now, Obama has moved us toward a new home in the Third World, nations that grew together in the anti-colonial, anti-white man non-aligned movement that currently controls the U.N. General Assembly.

To over simplify, the Democratic Party is a coalition of government masters and workers, affiliated media, non-profits, crony capitalists, unmarried women, and minorities united against the capitalist white males who project the Republicans’ public image. Isn’t the GOP the party of imperialism, of corrupt, right-wing authoritarian regimes, of military spending over social welfare, of wasteful wars abroad? So why not ground Obama’s “transformative” foreign policy in the nonaligned movement’s traditional anti-colonial roots? Goodbye England, Germany, Israel. Hello Iran, Cuba, and non-aligned movement friend the Soviet Union Russia.

In April we wrote:

Obama has a consistent world view. Growing up as a minority half-black in Hawaii and Indonesia, Obama took comfort in the anti-colonial, anti-European wave of nationalism that swept through the mostly non-white world at the time. He rode that affirmative action tide through Columbia and Harvard Law to safe landing with his impressive black wife in mostly black South Side Chicago. Race remained his co-pilot as he rose through the Illinois State Senate and the U.S. Senate to the White House.

Don’t tell Obama the numbers are against him; he knows better. Israel is the past, much as Great Britain, Western Europe, and the Republican Party are the past. Time to align with a future that includes Iran, Obama’s own “Nixon goes to China” place in history.

The Iran deal makes no sense otherwise. Iran is militant, revolutionary, supporting anti-West, anti-Israel forces in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Afghanistan, Lebanon (Israel’s enemy Hezbollah), the West Bank and Gaza (Israel’s enemy Hamas).  Iran's leaders have just won a big victory! Free to advance its nuclear and missile programs, Iran will threaten all its Sunni Arab neighbors and any Western country where terrorists with nuclear weapons can destroy cities. What madness has descended upon us.

               Neville Chamberlain                               Barack Obama                         

In 1938, the world stood by as Britain and France at Munich signed away the independent nation of Czechoslovakia to Adolf Hitler. Chamberlain was a sincere man who knew, as did his French ally, how in the Western Front trenches, the Great War (1914-18) had destroyed a generation of youth to no apparent purpose. Chamberlain would not allow that to happen again. Vietnam was America’s mini-Great War, and Democrats including Obama are determined the U.S. will avoid any such future wars. Sincere, maybe. Misguided, clearly.

“Better red than dead.” Really?

RobertsCare

So the Supreme Court, by 6-3, with Chief Justice Roberts himself writing for the majority, has told us that exchanges "established by the state" really meant "established by the state or the federal government."

We didn't foresee this outcome.  Roberts has doubled down on his amazing 2012 Obamacare decision in which he proclaimed the federal penalty assessed on those who failed to register for Obamacare was a (constitutional) tax, not a(n unconstitutional) fine, even though the federal government had argued the opposite.

In 2012, Roberts also went with a different majority in the same decision to rule that the federal government could not force the states to expand Medicaid by threatening to withhold Medicaid funding unless the states followed federal orders.  Obamacare was, as we earlier wrote, supposed to employ a "carrot and stick" approach to push states into running Obamacare at the state exchange level.  Medicaid subsidies would be withheld from state programs that failed to expand health coverage.  And individual subsidies, the "carrots," would go only to state exchanges, meaning residents of states that didn't sign up would lose out entirely on the subsidies.

Roberts screwed up the 2012 plan by 1) preserving Obamacare, but 2) denying the federal government the power to force states to expand Medicaid.  Most states, no longer concerned about losing Medicaid funding, decided not to bother with Obamacare, and specifically with creating state exchanges.  So by this year, 6.3 million people -- those living in states with no exchanges partly because Roberts in 2012 had taken away the federal power to force Medicaid expansion -- faced losing their subsidies entirely.

Now Roberts has doubled down on his 2012 decision by saving Obamacare once again.  He did so, in part because 1) his saving the program in 2012 led to those 6.3 million people gaining federal subsidies, and 2) his taking away the federal power to cut off Medicaid funding to states that didn't expand Medicaid had led to states not creating their own exchanges, when the original legislation had envisioned the states would, since they would have had to expand Medicaid anyway.

U.S. moving past “hard work” and “personal responsibility”?

A century ago, the European-dominated world of empires run by constitutional monarchs self-destructed in the Great War (1914-18). That system had kept peace in the century following the Napoleonic Wars (1799-1815). Europe’s collapse led to America’s democracy and leading economy taking center stage from the 1920s on, and following its “arsenal of democracy” leadership of the Allies’ World War II victory, the United States achieved unparalleled strength with half the world’s GNP as it ruled the Free World. It was the Fifties.

In the following decade, the horror of Vietnam--our own “Great War”-like disaster--underpinned the “triple revolution” of civil rights, sexual freedom, and women’s rights that transformed American life. Besides Vietnam, the U.S. lived through black-led demonstrations and riots and “the Pill”-engendered sexual revolution, while Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique launched women’s liberation. These revolutions have been with us for fifty years now.

Andrew Hartman, a historian at Illinois State University, has in A War for the Soul of America sought to put the culture wars -- much discussed here -- into perspective. Hartman, reviewer Tod Lindberg in the conservative Wall Street Journal tells us, documents the political and intellectual clashes beginning in the 1960s that pitted left-wing intellectuals and activists seeking fundamental social change against conservative counterparts protecting “normative America,” Hartman’s phrase for

an inchoate group of assumptions and aspirations shared by millions of Americans during the postwar years. Normative America prized hard work, personal responsibility, individual merit, delayed gratification, social mobility and other values that middle-class whites recognized as their own.

Hartman wrote these values included a preference for men as breadwinners and women as homemakers, sexual discretion, and faith in God and American exceptionalism.

Hartman describes “normative America” undergoing a comprehensive challenge from alienated, excluded people devoted to “a nation more open to new peoples, new ideas, new norms.” To Hartman, the “culture wars” began because conservatives fought back in defense of “normative America.”

Lindberg, the reviewer, believes

Hartman is correct to say that the “culture wars compelled Americans, even conservatives, to acknowledge transformations to American life” and to resign themselves to these changes if not to accept them. On matters such as women’s rights, gay rights and exclusionary freedom of association, conservative polemicists of the early years of the culture wars took positions few conservatives would take today.

Lindberg acknowledges “the New Left” got what it wanted: an America more open to “new ideas” and “new norms.” But Lindberg feels the 1960s and 1970s radicals had a greater goal. They sought to discredit the values of middle-class America once and for all. In Lindberg’s eyes,

“Normative America” still prizes “hard work” and “personal responsibility” but now also prizes diversity and expanded opportunities for minorities. . . the biggest deficiency of A War for the Soul of America [is] its lack of sympathy for . . . “normative America.” As George Orwell once famously wrote, “it is possible to be a normal decent person and yet to be fully alive.” [T]he New Left’s view [is] that normal decent persons, in their collectivity, represent a repressive force.

Kyle Smith, in the New York Post, speaks for many conservatives in discussing what the “new norms” mean for our culture:

• what comes along with this mass departure of moral judgment from public life? 

• Is it morally acceptable . . . to spark up a joint every day at lunch? 

• Does being a good and tolerant citizen mean you should shrug when a person chooses to spend his life wasted? 

• Consider the amazing turnaround in people’s views of single parenthood. As of 2002, only 45% of Americans thought it was “morally acceptable” to have a child outside of wedlock. Today it’s 61%. 

• And yet, concurrent with that shift in opinion, it’s become obvious that whether or not it’s “morally” wrong to have a kid without being married, it’s undoubtedly bad for that kid. . . if you’re a child growing up in what was once called a broken home you’re six or seven times as likely to witness domestic violence as those brought up by married parents.

Fearing Marco Rubio

“A Hillary Clinton match-up with Marco Rubio is a scary thought for Democrats,”

--New York Times, May 22, 2015

We just speculated that progressives may want an alternative to Hillary in next year’s battle for the White House. Hillary’s big problem, noted earlier here, is people don’t trust her.

The Quinnipiac Poll is a blog favorite, because it rightly considers Pennsylvania, along with Florida and Ohio, one of three swing states that could well decide the 2016 election. And Quinnipiac yesterday reported that in these three swing states, those polled found Clinton not honest and trustworthy.   Florida voters say no by 51–43%, Ohio voters by 53–40% and Pennsylvania voters by 54–40%.

If Clinton, as the New York Times suggested, is particularly concerned about facing Rubio in 2016, assistant director of the Quinnipiac poll Peter Brown brought additional bad news to Clinton’s doorstep. Brown noted,

It’s a long way until Election Day, but in the critical swing states of Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania, U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida has a tiny edge over the GOP field.

According to Quinnipiac, Rubio trails Clinton by only 47-44% in Florida and 45-42% in Ohio, and beats Clinton in Pennsylvania 44-43%.

As Brown indicated, Republican rivals along with Clinton worry about Rubio. Conservative John Podhoretz, in the New York Post, writes:

Ever get the feeling the candidate who is making other candidates worry the most is Marco Rubio? Your feeling is on the money. As the debates get closer, you can be sure that if Rubio remains at or near the top of the leader board, [GOP] rivals will target him before anyone else — with particular emphasis on his immigration-liberalization flip-flop.

What makes Rubio so frightening to others is, simply, that he is a freakishly gifted politician — and a daring one. He chose to challenge the sitting governor of Florida, Charlie Crist, for the Republican nomination for Senate in 2009 when Crist was at 60% in the polls and he was at 3% — and not only knocked Crist out of the GOP race but then beat him by 20 points when Crist ran as an independent in the general election. It was an unprecedented triumph, like a rookie pitcher winning 25 games, and only another politician knows just how seriously he must take a rival like that.

Jeb Bush, I believe, is “another politician” who takes Rubio seriously; so seriously, in fact, that Bush launched his presidential campaign way last December, hoping to head Rubio off while Marco was still weighing whether in 2016 to go for the presidency or run for senatorial re-election.

Podhoretz ends by suggesting Rubio’s political skills truly set him apart:

here’s the real thing about Rubio. I’ve listened to him and watched him talk, both in private sessions and on the Senate floor in speeches you can see on YouTube. He is, without question, the most naturally gifted off-the-cuff political speaker I have ever seen.

Returning to Democrat worries, liberal concern about the Hispanic Florida senator recently drew the attention of conservative Jack Kelly. In the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Kelly discusses the New York Times’ recent, strained effort to tear down Rubio, an effort likely motivated by fear:

Marco Rubio has gotten four traffic tickets since 1997, the NY Times reported June 5. One every four to five years may be below average for Florida. So [the NY Times] beefed up their story by adding in the 13 tickets his wife got[!]

Rubio’s “luxury speedboat”

Rubio paid off his student loans and mortgages with proceeds from a book advance. But he also, frowned the NY Times, “splurged on an extravagant purchase: $80,000 for a luxury speedboat" [see picture].

Kelly doesn’t think the NY Times' deep interest in Rubio’s driving and finances has hurt Marco at all:

The smears boosted [Rubio’s] fundraising, created sympathy for him among Republicans, making it more likely they’ll nominate the person Democrats fear most. The fail has been so epic that MSNBC talk show host Chris Hayes suspects the stories were planted by Rubio’s staff. Other GOP contenders are green with envy. What can they do, they wonder, to get the NY Times. . . to smear them?