Tag Archives: kilgore

Will the Farm Belt Eventually Abandon Donald Trump?

by DarrelWalsh Posted on November 14, 2016

Mother Jones

Ed Kilgore says that it’s not clear yet how much of Donald Trump’s appeal to rural white voters is economic:

We may soon have an answer in rural communities that still largely depend on agriculture for jobs and income. While it did not get much, if any, national attention during the presidential general election, it may soon matter a lot that Trump is largely at odds with the farm lobby when it comes to two of his signature economic policy issues: his opposition to trade agreements and to comprehensive immigration reform. The American Farm Bureau has traditionally viewed trade agreements — particularly those with fast-growing Asian countries — as creating export opportunity for farmers and agribusinesses. It strongly supported the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement that Trump (and eventually Clinton) opposed. And it has also favored comprehensive immigration reform in order to stabilize the farm-labor supply and protect undocumented migrant farm workers.

I’m not buying it. First off, take a look at the chart on the right—and pay special attention to the units on the vertical axis. It comes from the International Trade Commission’s report on the “likely impact” of TPP. In the agricultural sector, it’s minuscule. By ditching the TPP, farm employment will lose a benefit of 0.031 percent per year. That amounts to maybe a hundred workers each in the biggest Midwest agricultural states.

You wouldn’t notice this if you lost that many jobs, let alone merely failed to gain them. And that’s assuming that Trump kills TPP in the first place, rather than renegotiating a few bits and pieces and then declaring victory. Either way, it’s just not big enough for any of his supporters to notice.

As for migrant farm workers, the business community has been in favor of comprehensive immigration reform forever. Likewise, the base of the Republican Party has been against it forever. There’s nothing new here, and nothing that’s likely to split Trump’s coalition.

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Will the Farm Belt Eventually Abandon Donald Trump?

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Incompetent Terrorist Attacks Might Help Donald Trump

by JinaByles825 Posted on September 20, 2016

Mother Jones

Ahmad Khan Rahami appears to have been a pretty incompetent terrorist. One of Josh Marshall’s readers says this is no surprise:

Good intelligence work, good police work, more aware citizenry and other measures set up since 9/11 have limited — for now, and hopefully far into the future — the ability of major terrorist plots to get off the ground in the US. Major cells get disrupted, chatter on social media leads to arrests, and then great police work over this past weekend gets the bad guy in no time. There simply isn’t any scope for large-scale, mass-casualty events at the moment in the US. Our strategy is working.

If all the serious plotting gets discovered and broken up, the only plots left are small, poorly thought out ones. That’s the good news. But there’s no way to stop every single one of these penny-ante Osamas, so it’s inevitable that we’ll periodically get hit with smallish-scale attacks. That’s the bad news—especially since Ed Kilgore thinks Ross Douthat might have been right about which candidate benefits most from pint-sized terrorist attacks. Here’s Douthat:

I don’t think it’s a simple case of “the worse the blow, the better for Trump.” The Man From Mar-a-Lago is many things, but he isn’t a reassuring figure or a steady hand, and the prospect of putting him in charge in the midst of an enormous national security crisis might give many undecided voters pause.

….What Trump benefits most from, I suspect, is a more limited sense that things are out of control — a feeling of anxiety about the world that pulses through your TV set or your computer screen but hasn’t yet hit your neighborhood or family or bank account directly….He would benefit more from another spate of Islamic State beheadings than he would from a terrorist attack that required a major military response,

Maybe so. It’s an interesting, if unsettling theory, anyway.

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Incompetent Terrorist Attacks Might Help Donald Trump

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Scott Walker Is the Winner in 2016’s First Republican Campaign Cattle Call

by FTBMarylin Posted on January 26, 2015

Mother Jones

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Rep. Steve King (R–Tea Partyville) held his big annual Republican confab in Iowa this weekend, and most of the 2016 wannabe candidates for president were there. But I know you’re all busy people who don’t care about the details. Youjust want to know who won. Take it away, Ed Kilgore:

The consensus winner (first announced by National Review’s John Fund, but echoed by many others) was Scott Walker, who did exactly what he needed to do: show he could twist and shout with the best of them despite his “boring” image, and make an electability argument based on the fruits of confrontation rather than compromise. This latter dimension of his appeal should not be underestimated: at a time when MSM types and (more subtly) Jeb Bush and Chris Christie continue to suggest Republicans must become less feral to reach beyond their base, here’s Walker saying he won three elections in four years in a blue state by going medieval on unions, abortionists and Big Government. So Walker’s passed his first test in the challenge of proving he’s not Tim Pawlenty, and that’s a big deal given his excellent positioning in the field.

Kilgore’s “Tim Pawlenty” comment is a reference to Midwestern boringness, which has generally been seen as Walker’s chief shortcoming. You can judge for yourself if you watch his 20-minute speech in Iowa, but I’d say he still has some work to do on this score. He wasn’t terrible, but he never sounded to me like he really struck a connection with the crowd. He knew the words but not the tune—and even his words were a little too stilted and lifeless. Anytime you deliver an applause line and nothing happens, your words still need some work. And anytime you deliver an applause line, fail to wait for applause, then interrupt yourself to tell the crowd “you can clap for that, that’s all right”—well, your delivery needs some work too.

I’m on record saying that I think Walker is the strongest candidate in the Republican field. He’s got the right views, he’s got a winning record, he’s got the confrontational style tea partiers love, and he doesn’t come across as a kook. But yes, he needs to work on the whole charisma thing. If he gets serious about that, I still like his chances in the 2016 primaries.

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Scott Walker Is the Winner in 2016’s First Republican Campaign Cattle Call

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