My post mortem on the Trump candidacy

Donald Trump was never in the 2012 presidential campaign for the long haul.  I am not saying he had no interest in being president, I think he did.  He probably still does.  But this is my take of how this all went down.

 The 2012 campaign began almost the day after the election in 2008 but it really started up after the 2010 campaign.  Speculation about who was going to run on the GOP side seemed to be everywhere.  If there is anyone who understand the adage that “no press is bad press,” it’s Mr. Trump.  I grew up on Long Island where we seemed to get a ring side seat to the Trump Show.  I think he had been asked to do this and thought his campaign would be credible; a credible stunt.    Now, because he has a considerable ego, had been considering this, maybe his real interest was at 10 percent.  Anyone who has worked on a presidential campaign has seen the cottage industry that springs up when someone looks like they are running for president.  Would be candidates end up surrounded by a growing chorus of people telling him to run.  I used to wonder about candidates who have no chance, do they have no one in their life who can tell them this is a bad idea?  No, no there is not.

 So after a bit of this, Mr. Trump’s seriousness may have grown but I can guarantee that he did some checking into this – before he announced he was looking into it – and one of the very first things he would have learned,  was that he would have to release his financials and anyone who has ever really followed his career understands that this was never going past the summer.  Add to that his discomfort at shaking hands (a campaign must-do) and hatred of being seriously questioned (another campaign must-do) and you’ve got your three strikes.

 I think Mr. Trump started this thinking it would get decent press and raise ratings (can they ever be too high?  Not to him).  He starts out talking about the issues that he thinks makes him a credible candidate – the economy and our relationship with China.  He makes progress in the polls but the progression is more of a stable growing of support (good for politics, not so much for TV ratings) but not the meteoric rise he was looking for (bad for a campaign of a year and a half but good for TV ratings).  What’s been the hottest topic for many on the right?  President Obama’s birth certificate.  Mr. Trump takes a hard turn right and into loonie land, his polls numbers soar and the media eats this up like crazy.

 Note to the news media:  you have what, 17 months left of this campaign to cover?  Ask yourselves if you took his candidacy more seriously – or claimed to – to give you an excuse to cover something interesting.  If your answer is that he repeated (over and over and over) how serious he was – his stunt would not have worked without that.  If you really believed this, you would take Chris Christie at his word when he tries to make that same claim the other way.  Oh, and I also have a bridge in Brooklyn that you might be interested in.

 With his poll & ratings numbers soaring (not sure about his actual show but he dominated the 24 hour news cycle), the White House sees some of the crazy rhetoric is having an effect on what average people were starting to think about the President’s place of birth.  They release the long form certificate.  Mr. Trump is a allowed a small victory lap before his Icarus (thank you Chris Cillizza) candidacy crashes to earth.  We all know what happened next, Mr. Trump is eviscerated a few days later at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner and to add that last nail, his NBC show is interrupted by the announcement that President Obama caught and killed Osama bin Laden.  Done.

 I would like to draw a clear comparison between this media type candidacy and that of Mike Huckabee.  Governor Huckabee was the clear front runner, which means as much as that can in 1.5 years out.  He also wanted to be president but this is a long grueling process.  One thing I always try to remind people about campaigns is that there are two things that you always run out of.  While you can theoretically make more money (as hard as that is), you can’t get more time.  Once the race starts, you get a finite amount and that’s all you get.  I think he looked at his life and weighed the real chances – even locking in the GOP nod would not guarantee him the prize, and it probably just seemed to be too much.  I am only laying all that out to show just how genuine his reasons for ending his campaign were.  No, Cenk Uygur, he did not “get too fat and happy to run.”  That’s just petty and mean.

 PS.  Dear Mr. Trump, this might be a good time to revisit that plan you had to save the Mets.  That’s a financial/sad situation that really might need you.

Beware of wolves who look like sheep

I may look like a sheep but I am really a wolf

The Democrats are looking a bit like the boy who cried wolf.  They have seen threats to all of the social safety net programs (Social Security, Medicare & Medicaid) in every campaign and Republican proposal.  The real problem is that when someone comes along with a plan that will end these programs, they have less credibility.  The real wolf has finally arrived.

Paul Ryan, you are that wolf.

Congressman Ryan’s plan offers a strange study in contradiction.  It is bold and honest. It is equally timid and dishonest.

This plan shows some bravery in that he does talk about some of the entitlements – the so called “third rail” of politics – Social Security and Medicare – two incredibly popular programs.  These programs are so popular that even members of the Tea Party like it – remember their signs that read “Government stay away from my Medicare!” Granted, these signs miss the point but people like knowing that when they get old they will be cared for.  So yes, Mr. Ryan, kudos for talking about them.

The bravery ends there.  While this ‘Roadmap for America’s future’ goes into detail about how we should deal with all three of these, this plan will dismantle all of them and yet it fails to deal with the fundamental problems with Medicare and Medicaid (I reject his premise that Social Security is insolvent).  He refuses to take on insurance companies and change the real status quo of health care – one person at a town hall meeting with the Congressman put it well when they said “How do you expect seniors to take on the insurance companies when you will not?”

The problem is that the costs associated with our health care system are spiraling out of control.  In this area, Congressman Ryan and I agree but we soon part ways when his plan says “At the heart of this problem is the Federal tax exclusion for employer-provided health coverage.”  His solution is to give people $2,300/year for individuals and $5,700/yr for families in the form of a tax refund – this is not for people who will be enrolled in Medicare or Medicaid but speaks to the point about lowering medical costs – this plan would require people to be responsible for any costs above the tax refund amount.  I challenge anyone to find decent health insurance for that.

There is a great piece on this in the New Yorker.  Basically, our problems can be summed up this way; our current system incentivizes cost and more care does not equal better care.  Dr. Atul Gawande, in the piece above, has this to say about it: “Americans like to believe that more is better.  But research suggests that where medicine is concerned it may actually be worse.”  He describes how we incentivize costs this way:

“Providing health care is like building a house. The task requires experts, expensive equipment and materials, and a huge amount of coördination. Imagine that, instead of paying a contractor to pull a team together and keep them on track, you paid an electrician for every outlet he recommends, a plumber for every faucet, and a carpenter for every cabinet. Would you be surprised if you got a house with a thousand outlets, faucets, and cabinets, at three times the cost you expected, and the whole thing fell apart a couple of years later? Getting the country’s best electrician on the job (he trained at Harvard, somebody tells you) isn’t going to solve this problem. Nor will changing the person who writes him the check.”

The last part of that is particularly important because pointing out that the cost of care will not change if we change the party who pays for it because that is all the Ryan plan does.  It shifts the costs from the government back to the patient.   On this point I turn again to Dr. Gwande, he and Congressman Ryan express the argument for having patients pay the bulk of the expense is that when they do (and this is put the same exact way in the article and the plan itself) they will have some “ skin in the game.”  This will do nothing for the costs of treatment:

“When it comes to making care better and cheaper, changing who pays the doctor will make no more difference than changing who pays the electrician. The lesson of the high-quality, low-cost communities is that someone has to be accountable for the totality of care.”

 

Now would be a good time to point to a different resource for asking – do we get better care in the United States that other countries? – the Congressional Research Service (CRS) found that we do not.  You can read their report here.  In it they assert that we spend more on health care than any other country but do not get better care.  In fact they found “research comparing the quality of care has not found the United States to be superior overall. Nor does the U.S. population have substantially better access to health care resources, even putting aside the issue of the uninsured.”  The people at CRS concur with Dr. Gawande on the point of incentivizing costs, they cite the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD):   “there is no doubt that U.S. prices for medical care commodities and services are significantly higher than in other countries and serve as a key determinant of higher overall spending.”

The cowardice does not end there; there is one entitlement that this plan leaves alone and that is defense spending.  Nowhere in this plan does he mention the military.

The “Roadmap for America’s future” is both really honest and really not.  It claims to protect and preserve Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid while simultaneously blaming them for many problems the county faces.  Congressman Ryan blames the New Deal and Great Society programs for causing government to control people’s lives, destroying the American character, removing any incentive for innovation and killing the entrepreneurial spirit that has defined us since our founding.

This is the fundamental difference between Republicans and Democrats – and is the reason the Democrats have been crying wolf for so long.  Republicans have been trying to dismantle these programs since they were enacted.  Congressman Ryan doesn’t beat around the bush on this topic.  He comes right out and blames these programs for destroying America’s character.  This idea is repeated often throughout the introduction.  It would take pages and pages to cite every example of this intent.  In one section he states: “Americans have been lured (emphasis added) into viewing the government – more than themselves, their families, their communities their faith – as their main source of support.”  He says in another section that “More ruinous in the long run in the extent to which the “safety net” has come to enmesh more and more Americans – reaching into middle incomes and higher – so that growing numbers have come to rely on government, not themselves, for growing shares of their income and assets.  By this means, the government increasingly dictates how Americans live their lives.”  That last bit is particularly interesting when you remember that some Republicans in Congress have proposed making welfare recipients take drug tests.  There is a clear irony there.

I welcome the opportunity to have the conversation about what we want our government to do and be.  I believe government exists so that we can do the things collectively that we cannot do individually.  When Congressman Ryan blames the social safety net for destroying our innovative nature, he shows just how vast the ideological gulf is between the right and the left.  When you look at growing economies and societies – Asia, I am looking at you – you see countries investing in their people.  I see a great parallel between what makes employees stay with company (hint: it’s not money) and how countries see their people.  Companies and organizations that see their employees as their greatest asset treat them better – give them the tools and resources to do their job.  Similarly, countries that invest in their children’s education, for example, are going to be the future super powers.

I am a Democrat. I do not want Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid to be turned into voucher programs: that’s the antithesis of what they were meant to be.  However, if Congressman Ryan’s plan leads to a real, productive conversation about these programs and the role the federal government should play, I welcome this as an entrée into that.  If this is the ending point, though I think ending these programs, which are infinitely more popular than any politician right now, it would not show the world that we are recapturing our entrepreneurial spirit but that we are reneging on the promises we made to our own people.

A number of people (Churchill, Ghandi, Truman, others) that “The measure of a society is the way it treats its weakest members.”  We should remember that as we move forward.