Monday, July 01, 2019

The Children's Hour

For supposed "seasoned" political operatives, I find a strain of Never Trumpers to be fabulously naive.  They still don't understand how Trump won the GOP nomination, much less the Presidency, (spoiler alert:  pretty much the fault of the GOP, from Gingrich to McConnell, and every Senator who put McConnell in power, over and over again) and they lay the blame at the feet of anyone else they can find.  I mean:

Does anybody even remember what issues Jeb! was running on?  At this point in 2015 we hadn't gotten to "small hands" and "No puppet!  No puppet!  You're the puppet!"  And out of 23 candidates, none of them have the baggage (or the lousy political chops) of Hillary; except, maybe, Joe Biden (!); and if he goes down early, isn't that a good thing for the Republic?  One must point out Biden is hardly leading by 48.5 points.  And Julian Castro is not exactly talking about busing or universal health care for illegal immigrants (what?  We don't owe them a standard of care while in detention?  Isn't that what that fight is all about?):

“Well, look, I’m always for speaking to our adversaries, opening up diplomatic conversations,” Castro told host Brianna Keilar on CNN. “The problem is that this president seems bent on approaching this very erratically, very haphazardly. As you know, Brianna, he did this at the last minute. And the problem with that is that, to be effective, this usually goes the other way around. There’s a lot of staff work that goes into preparing a meeting like this so that concrete terms are on the table and you can get something out of the meeting.”

What portion of that am I supposed to panic and wring my hands about?  And frankly, Kamala Harris is not wrong, but Joe Scarbrough is:

By invoking her own story, Harris highlighted a generational gap between people who lived through school desegregation as students and those, like Biden, for whom the feelings and opinions of white parents and constituents are paramount. As scholars such as Amy Stuart Wells and Rucker Johnson have shown, the generation of students who experienced school desegregation firsthand in the 1970s and 1980s benefited greatly. In public-policy debates and popular memory, though, the perspectives of students have been overshadowed by those of antibusing parents and politicians. As a result, the successes of school desegregation have been drowned out by a chorus of voices insisting busing was an inconvenient, unfair, and failed experiment.
I don't think we're actually going to have that national conversation (quick:  what were the issues in 2015, 491 days out?), but it wouldn't hurt if we did.
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