How Long, O Lord, How Long?

'Why bother?' Trump blamed for collapse of policy debates in presidential racehttps://t.co/KBOtePypBQ

— Raw Story (@RawStory) August 27, 2024

Donald Trump has hollowed out political discourse so thoroughly that few politicians from either party now bother to offer real policy solutions, according to a new analysis.

Once again: no.  The GOP was hollowed out by the time Trump came along and took an interest.  How else would have have succeeded in 2016?  We say it was against all odds, but there were nothing but odds and ends left of the GOP after the Tea Party got through with what Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh didn't destroy. Trump was just the last man standing, and his success at taking over what nobody was running was taken as proof he'd done something.  But he just stepped into the ruins and began hawking snake oil, proving P.T. Barnum right about suckers, and that not all the suckers were in MAGA.  The proof of that is in the offered analysis:

 "If you’re a Democrat, why bother crafting any careful, detailed proposals, with all their trade-offs and vulnerabilities?" Rampell wrote. "Why bother trying to understand the underlying causes of inflation when you can simply pledge to make high prices illegal?

Which proves the point, doesn't it?  Because Harris hasn't pledged to "make high prices illegal."  She's pledged to end the price gouging that goes on by national companies because individual states very on what constitutes "price gouging" under their laws, so the companies just engage in the practice where it is most favorable to their interests.  Granted, that doesn't fit on a bumper sticker, but why discuss it at all if Republicans (and the press) are going to distort it, and the only thing Republicans are offering is:

The Republican nominee often promises far-fetched solutions without a plausible course of action, such as his recent pledge to cut energy prices by half or "defeat inflation" in his first 100 days in office. 

And, as Rampell notes (and then forgets?  Or is this how the major newspapers are "even handed"?), the media (but not her?) then amplifies the nonsense.

And the media often uncritically amplifies those proposals, wrote Washington Post columnist Catherine Rampell.

Do tell.  And you stand apart from the media, do you, as the man in Kierkegaard's parable stands apart from his own being, the better to analyze the world as if he is not part of it?

"Perhaps tellingly, more than a month into her presidential bid, Vice President Kamala Harris still doesn’t have a 'policy' section on her campaign website."

"There’s always been a temptation for politicians to under-plan and overpromise, to pledge outcomes without detailing the inputs," she added. "But just as Trump has lowered the bar for politicians’ character and ethics, he’s degraded our expectations for governing, too."

I'm old enough to remember Ted Cruz's first run for the Senate, when he pledged to block UN "Agenda 51" (or whatever number its supposedly had; the whole thing was a fiction), which was going to somehow force us to outlaw golf courses and bulldoze the ones we have.  I'm sure it had something to do with black helicopters, too, which were all the rage then.  That was part of the "policy" on his website.  Somehow, I don't miss that at all.

Please note Cruz is standing for re-election for the third time, this year, which means he was in office long before Trump got interested.

Policy was always a useless canard that Washington insiders cared greatly about, and voters almost never voted on (else Adlai Stevenson would have been President for 8 years, long, long ago).  It went the way of the convention delegates picking the candidates in smoke-filled rooms, and good riddance.  The primaries are democracy run amok, but the parties don't have control of the process they did back in the day.  So it goes.  Policy was part of that process.  So were "party platforms."  The RNC didn't have one again this year; or it if did nobody reported on it.  They do have Project 2025, which Trump desperately disavows because it's as popular as toxic waste and prickly heat (I'm showing my age with that joke).

The last vestige is the insistence on the "interview."  Funny everyone demands that of Kamala, nobody demands that of Trump.  He calls FoxNews and Newsmax and talks on a bad connection to Elmo, and that's fine?  And when Kamala does approach reporters to answer questions, all the questions are about the horse race.  Name one reporter competent to interrogate the Vice President on any substantive issue of policy without resorting to: "Is your policy simply to make high prices illegal?"

I'll retire to Bedlam.  Call me when there's more coherence than this blithering nonsense in the public discussion.