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With fewer than 100 days to go until the midterm elections, several states held primaries last night as well as one very closely-watched special House election in Ohio. The final results are not all in, due to the closeness of the race in Ohio and in the Republican gubernatorial primary in Kansas, but enough results are in to draw some broad conclusions overall.
As promised, today's column is nothing but photos from my Netroots Nation trip, although most of the pictures below are actually from all the stuff we did before we got there. I mention this up front, in case you're not really interested in another travelogue column. For everyone else, let's dive in.
As I mentioned last week, we found a real gem of a place to stay atop the highest point in Arkansas, Magazine Mountain. Here is this fantastic lodge, from the front.
Here's the view from our window.
I'm back from Netroots Nation, but I'm not yet fully recovered, so today's column is not going to be a full one but rather just a teaser of sorts. I'm hoping that either later tonight or possibly tomorrow I'll have gotten my act together enough to post some photos from the trip, but at this point can't promise a hard schedule or anything (we're still unpacking...).
But I was struck by one rather minor thing at the conference, so I thought I'd toss it out to my readers for their thoughts, because I've been thinking about it ever since. In the main hall of exhibits, there was a table set up by the Public Policy Polling company (P.P.P.). They had a raffle of sorts where you dropped a business card in a fishbowl in the hopes of winning the prize. I did so, but have yet to be contacted by them, so I'm assuming I didn't win the big prize -- but I found it to be an interesting concept, because their prize was: "you get to ask five questions on our next national poll."
This is your humble narrator, checking in from the road. Today's column is nothing short of a travelogue, so if that sort of thing doesn't appeal to you, I would suggest you stop reading right now. There will be no political discussion, as I've been doing my best to ignore politics for the past few days while enjoying a drive down the middle of the country. Oh, and today's title is quite literal.
Which is as good a point as any to begin with. Our drive was not carefully planned, we just kind of wandered around. Sometimes this leads to disappointing experiences, and sometimes it leads to quite the opposite. It's a Zen sort of way to vacation, in other words. This time, it worked out wonderfully, as we stumbled across a largely-undiscovered gem.
The beginning of August, in any normal political year, is when we would usually devote at least one column to trying to predict what the upcoming "silly season" will bring. August may be the dog days for most folks, but in politics it is usually the silliest season of the year. Congress scarpers off to enjoy a month-long vacation, which leaves a vacuum of political news in Washington, which leaves political reporters and commenters desperate for an angle to write about -- any angle at all. This normally leads to focusing on some extraordinarily silly subject matter (to the exclusion of all else), for weeks on end -- hence the season's unofficial name. But these are not normal times, of course, and part of the abnormality that Donald Trump has ushered in is such a vast extension of the silly season that it can now be accurately said to have encompassed the entire calendar year. There is no more silly season anymore, in other words, because it is now silly season all the time. Just check Trump's Twitter feed on any given day, if you require proof.
Although I intend to take to task two of my favorite targets in this column (the mainstream media and the inside-the-Beltway cocktail-circuit chattering class), my real purpose in writing today is to create a memorandum to myself. Next week I will be attending the Netroots Nation conference in New Orleans, which will be as intense a gathering of lefties as is possible to imagine. This year, obviously, feelings will be running high and the rampant enthusiasm and optimistic expectations for the upcoming midterm elections should be off the charts. A little more than 100 days from now, America will vote -- and midterms are always seen as a referendum on the job the current president is doing. But like all ideological gatherings, Netroots Nation will be an echo chamber or (to be more polite) "speaking with only one voice." And it's important, when joining such a gathering, to maintain a healthy degree of skepticism. I guess what I'm trying to say was best said by that learnèd philosopher Yogi Berra, when he quipped: "It ain't over 'til it's over."
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is certainly stirring things up in a big way. After her stunning primary defeat of the fourth-ranking Democrat in the House, the 28-year-old from the Bronx has become one of the leading voices for the youthful resurgence of energy Democrats are now enjoying. But precisely because she has become so visible so quickly, she is now beginning to cause some pearl-clutching among establishment Democrats (the ones who are routinely frightened by their own shadows, it's worth mentioning). They counsel the party "not to go too far left" in their eternal quest for centrism to reign supreme in American politics.
Sure, it's easy to poke fun at such timidity, since these are the people who have not noticed that politics have changed since Bill Clinton was president. Pro-business Democratic centrism might have worked out just fine back then, but America has changed. The real question is how much it has changed, and how fast. Which sets up our main question: would a "Tea Party of the Left" be a good thing or a bad thing for the Democratic Party?
President Donald Trump is going to attempt to pivot this week to domestic policy, after his disastrous summit with Vladimir Putin didn't exactly turn out as planned. Trump has a meeting with a European leader this week where Trump's proposed European automobile tariffs will be high on the agenda, and Trump will also head out to Iowa to hit the campaign trail for Republicans. Iowa is already one of the front lines of Trump's trade war, since a lot of soybeans are grown there. So far, his farm country base seem to be supporting Trump's trade war (for the moment), but their patience isn't going to be inexhaustible. At some point blind faith in Trump's dealmaking prowess is going to hit the brick wall of reality, in the form of a seriously depressed agricultural market.
Soybean prices have already dropped a full 20 percent. Orders from China -- previously one of the major importers of American soybeans -- have all but disappeared. Uncertainty is rampant in this particular market, obviously. If you're a soybean farmer, you might accept one bad harvest season if the promise of better times lies ahead, but two bad seasons in a row is likely to be the breaking point for many.
President Donald Trump is now openly colluding with Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin, in everyone's plain sight. That's an astonishing thing to type, but there is simply no other way to put it. Trump is now Putin's ultimate "useful idiot," to resurrect an old Cold War term. The subject of whether the president of the United States has just committed treason is now being seriously discussed. That's where we, as a nation, find ourselves at the present moment.
President Donald Trump, who never met a superlative he didn't love (when it describes him in glowing terms, of course), claimed after his disastrous performance in Helsinki this week that: "No president ever has been as tough as I have been on Russia." That's a pretty tall order, especially when many others are saying exactly the opposite -- that no American president has ever been as weak as Trump was this week towards Russia. John McCain even offered up his own lyrical superlative to describe what just took place: "No prior president has ever abased himself more abjectly before a tyrant."
Trump's megalomania is, as usual, quite easy to disprove. To begin with, there was the purchase of Alaska in 1867, signed by President Andrew Johnson. Can anyone imagine how the Cold War might have played out differently if Alaska had still been Russian territory? The start to America's uneasy and adversarial relationship with Russia dates back to Woodrow Wilson, who sent American soldiers onto Russian soil in 1919 to fight against the newly-emerging Soviet state. Hundreds of Americans died fighting Bolshevik Russians, even though most Americans never learn about it in history class. Fast forward to the aftermath of World War II, and you'll find plenty of American presidents showing incredible strength against the U.S.S.R. during the entire Cold War period, the most notable of whom was probably John F. Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis. And then, of course, there was Ronald Reagan, who famously taunted: "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" in Berlin. Does any rational being think that Donald Trump's fawning press conference this week stacks up in any meaningful way with any of these previous examples?
