Everyone on both political sides seems to understand what a better candidate would have looked and acted like. Why neither party seems to be able to offer one of those is exactly what has turned this election year into slow torture. At least, it is concluding, and that is about the only less painful thing anyone has to look forward to.
I would contest this part.
Paul Rosenberg↱ argues, "We don't have 'two historically unpopular candidates'", and makes a pretty convincing case
There are at least three main problems with this meme. First, it's a recent snapshot view, which clearly reverses cause and effect. Running for president has severely eroded Hillary Clinton's popularity, due to the combination of intense political polarization and partisanship. On the other hand, becoming first the Republican front-runner and then the nominee has elevated Trump, bringing him in early September to his highest-ever level of national popularity.
Second, it ignores how popular Clinton was as secretary of state―much more popular than Vice President Joe Biden, her only "credible" competitor in elite circles at the time. Third, Clinton is not unpopular with nonwhite voters: African-Americans, Latinos and Asian-Americans all have favorable views of her, at least in broad strokes. The meme thus obscures the racialized nature of Trump's and Clinton's respective popularity problems ....
.... There's another way that the "unpopular candidates" meme gets things wrong and that's when it comes to race and ethnicity. As reported by Becky Hofstein Grady, a SurveyMonkey election tracking poll of more than 91,000 registered voters in August clearly showed that Clinton was not unpopular with nonwhite voters ....
.... In short, Clinton is only unpopular with whites, more unpopular than Trump by a good margin, in fact. So the meme is also a way of cloaking unacknowledged racial animus, a sentiment that Bill Clinton famously co-opted with his "Sister Souljah moment," but that Hillary apparently can't avoid.
Hillary Clinton
is historically unpopular in the context of her powerful negatives, but neither do those surveys assess whether or not any respondent gives a damn about whether or not their loathing is legitimate. Here's a fun bit of memory that not everyone shares:
When I was a kid, conservatives mocked liberals by pretending that everything would lead to anchorless relativism; these days, the idea seems to have set and concretized; conservatives today rely on an unfounded but customary presumption of legitimacy, knowing that whatever they say will automatically be given competitive legitimacy to the truth―theirs is the anchorless relativism they were telling us to guard against, and that sort of thing keeps happening in various politically conservative circles.
What happens now is a form of squeaky-wheel messaging. If I slander you for a quarter-century, exactly none of it has to be true in order for people to generally view you suspiciously.
There really isn't any ambivalence about her, as a result, and the people who just plain don't like her don't seem to care whether or not their reasons have anything to do with reality. They can even be told,
by the people trying to discredit her, that it's a hit job, and they still just tally up another negative.
And what pisses those people off even more is that after all this, her skill and stamina, enduring and overcoming all of this, means those negatives eventually start to speak to her credit.
We are using a white, male, Christian narrative, as is American custom, in order to establish Hillary Clinton's historic unpopularity; that is to say, she's historically unpopular among the only people who really matter to the people who say she's historically unpopular.
It won't be long before, "We've done this to ourselves", gives way to its historical reality: White Christians did this, and everyone else either took part, let it happen, or failed to stop it; we say we've done this to ourselves in order to preserve the proposition of an American endeavor. I can cry all I want about who taught me what when I was whenever, but in the end it seems the point is to find a way to move forward usefully.
Executive orders, for instance, depend on an executive having a legislature and judiciary that will allow whatever the executive wants. The asymmetric polarization, escalation, and resulting decay of our political discourse, culture, and credibility is problematic because enough people choose to dissent from any solution that does not meet every one of their demands and expectations. There was the great bit where the Speaker of the House saw his own caucus sink his immigration bill, told the president to use his executive authority, and then sued the president for doing so. Honestly, we could have avoided that ugly episode if, well, Republicans hadn't demanded it.
To the other, think of what doesn't get an executive order. Maybe someone is alarmed because an executive deprioritizes a particular aspect of law enforcement, like maybe it's time to stop shaking down suspected potheads and focus on methamphetamine and heroin, instead. Or maybe it's time to stop shaking down prostitutes and focus on the providers, procurers, and customers. I remember a time the police had a known violent offender in their custody and didn't bother calling immigration on his violation because he was British, and not a priority, and that's why they released him and that's why he killed his pregnant ex-girlfriend seventeen hours after he was arrested.
Yeah, Reagan's order on Cuba? It's one thing to wonder about Obama's order on immigration, but while we often argue the scale, it would seem the fundamental issue really is whether, say, what we compare to―
e.g., Reagan―was proper in the first place.
Functionally, the boundaries are each to their own: If we dive into the long history of executive orders, what do we expect to find? Here, I'll even propose one since we don't have another starting point:
Within the government versus applied in the larger sphere of jurisdiction.
Even that is too vague; an executive can try ordering quite a bit within the larger sphere of jurisdiction, including non-enforcement.
What the executive can't do, however, is invent objects of enforcement. Bobby Jindal tried; that was rather quite funny and would have been scandalous except this is the year of the Trump, so among news consumers only the armchair wonks noticed. But, yeah, after seeing what happened to Pence, the legislature in Alabama looked to Gov. Bentley and said they didn't think a RFRA bill was a good idea. When the Louisiana legislature followed suit, Gov. Jindal decided to try to enact the bill by executive order.
It's like the Rove idea of reassigning strengths and weaknesses has become the foundation for an argumentative delusion.
To wit, I don't contest the proposition that we ought to keep a concerned eye on executive orders and their functions and rationales. But I'm always at least a bit wary when the discourse comes 'round to issues like this. Republicans complaining of the scale of Obama's immigration orders had every chance to pass a bill, and when they scuttled it, instead, they then told the president to use his executive authority. That's the thing; when they talk about lawless executive orders they're also criticizing themselves. In a way, it reminds me of the time Mitch McConnell filibustered himself.
The Republican collapse suggests some manner of historical cycle is coming 'round to a closure point. There are, in considering Hillary Clinton's high negatives, any number of aggravations; setting aside the more common laments about negative attitudes toward women or a quarter-century muckraking and scandalmongering campaign, there is also the fact that people do perceive a transition in effect.
For many liberals who have engaged and endured various political compromises over the years―(What do you mean, "How'd they work out?" We knew they were bad ideas at the time, which was part of the compromise, because if the liberal platform had won enough votes the compromises would have been more favorable)―this is an important opportunity. There are also plenty of liberals who want to scrap that and forge a new, untested, undefined Democratic Party social contract. The election of Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump essentially establishes whether the old bargain remains in effect or is officially abandoned.
And if we're pushing forward with the former for one more Democratic presidency, it will be interesting to see whether the left
ish roar we heard in the primary will keep echoing, or if the movement will sit back and remind us they told us so every time they think they're not getting everything they want.
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Notes:
Rosenberg, Paul. "We don't have 'two historically unpopular candidates': What the media gets wrong about candidate popularity". Salon. 16 October 2016. Salon.com. 5 November 2016. http://bit.ly/2e19pGd
