Annie Karni, Maggie Haberman, and Sheila Kaplan  of the New York Times describe US president Donald Trump’s proposed ban on flavored e-cigarette products as “a swift and bold reaction to a growing public health crisis affecting teenagers” that Trump backed away from “under pressure from his political advisers and lobbyists to factor in the potential pushback from his supporters.”

Maybe they’re right about Trump’s motivations, but they’re wrong about pretty much everything else.

E-cigarettes are not a “public health crisis.” That supposed crisis is not “growing.” And to the extent that teenagers are negatively affected by e-cigarettes, the very “bold reactions” the three writers seem to favor are far more culpable than e-cigarettes themselves.

E-cigarettes are, according to all credible evidence, safer than burning sticks of tobacco — sorry, FDA, you don’t get to tell me I can’t say so.

A few cases of lung injury from black market “street vapes” have been reported, the cause (use of vitamin E in the “juice”) seems to have been identified, and that problem is already disappearing in the rear-view mirror.

Who buys “street vapes?” People who can’t buy the e-cigarette products they want legally, either because of content (cannabis) or age (the teenagers the Times authors imply they care about so much).

Banning flavored e-cigarette products wouldn’t stop teenagers, or anyone else, from getting flavored e-cigarette products. It would just send even more of them to the “street vape” market for those products.

If Trump reconsidered his proposed ban due to political pressure and the desire to be re-elected, so what? A good decision is a good decision.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt once told a group of lobbyists, who were pushing a policy change at him, “Okay, you’ve convinced me. Now go out and bring pressure on me.”

That’s how politics works. Politicians  appease voters and activist groups who can help or harm their careers. Sometimes that works out well for the public, sometimes it works out badly.

In this case it works out well — certainly for the public, and possibly for Trump. Much of the “I Vape and I Vote” demographic presumably falls outside his existing electoral “base,” and for at least some the issue matters enough to swing their votes.

Now Trump’s Democratic opponents need to decide which they value more: Their desire to run everyone’s lives at the expense of actual public health, or that public health and those votes.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

According to an October Rasmussen poll, 38% of likely voters say they intend to vote for “someone other than President Trump or the Democratic presidential nominee” in the 2020 US presidential election.

In a three-way presidential race, 38% constitutes a winning plurality, assuming it’s distributed among the states such that the Electoral College outcome reflects it.

As a long-time activist in America’s largest “third” political party, the Libertarian Party, I’m prone to find that number encouraging.

On the other hand, I’ve seen numbers like this before and I’ve watched them not pan out on election day. Here’s why:

Pluralities or majorities of independent, “swing,” and even Democratic and Republican voters always respond positively to polls asking them, generically, about the desirability of a “third party” in American politics.

But generically and specifically are two different animals.

America already has numerous “third parties.” In addition to the Libertarians, we have the Greens, the Constitution Party, and a wide assortment of ideological parties across the spectrum from openly socialist to openly fascist. Even the Prohibition Party, founded in 1869, still nominates a presidential slate every four years.

But most voters who perennially say they don’t want a Democrat or Republican for president next time don’t agree on a specific alternative. They either vote for the Democrat or Republican for president, or just stay home, when election day rolls around.

Even in 2016, when the “major” parties each chose widely disliked and distrusted presidential candidates, only about 5% of those who voted strayed outside the major party fold.

Why don’t third party candidates do well, especially at the presidential level? A number of factors play into the poor results.

One is that third party candidates, already far out-spent by the Democrats and Republicans, have to spend lots of the money they raise just getting on ballots. Their actual campaign budgets amount to rounding errors compared to those of their major party opponents. Even those who might prefer a mouse to a whirlwind have trouble hearing the offerings of the former over the din of the latter.

Another is a  “fear factor,” naturally occurring but  energetically encouraged and cultivated by the big players. Don’t “spoil” the election. Vote against the major party candidate you fear most, rather than for the minor party candidate you like best. Your only “real” alternative is “the lesser evil.”

A third problem is bad voting systems. Ranked choice voting would allow those fearful voters to choose the candidates they prefer while remaining confident that if their first choices failed, their second choices wouldn’t be eliminated.

Next year, voters will be told by the major parties that they must choose either four more years of the banana republicanism they chose in 2016, or a buffet of microwaved and re-heated 50- and 80-year old New Deal and Great Society programs doused with supposedly “progressive” sriracha.

That won’t be the case. Third party options will likely be on offer in all 50 states.  The 38% of voters who claim to want one should actually choose one instead of finding reasons not to.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

US president Donald Trump “elevated his political interest above the national interest and demanded foreign interference in an American election,” Peter Beinart asserts at The Atlantic. “What’s received less attention is what the scandal reveals about Joe Biden: He showed poor judgment because his staff shielded him from hard truths. If that sounds faintly familiar, it’s because that same tendency underlay Hillary Clinton’s email woes in 2016.”

Beinart admits that Joe Biden’s son Hunter’s service as a very well-paid member on the board of a Ukrainian energy company at the same time his father’s portfolio included “fighting corruption in the Ukrainian energy industry” was “a problem.”

But it’s not Joe’s fault, see? His staffers didn’t want to confront him about the conflict of interest. They “feared the vice president’s wrath,” and thought him “too fragile” after one son’s death to hear “upsetting news” about the other’s conduct.

Ditto Hillary Clinton. As Secretary of State, she was briefed on (and signed papers agreeing to abide by) State Department protocols on the handling of classified information and the use of non-government email systems.  But Beinart lets Clinton off the hook because her chief of staff and other aides failed to “forcefully convey” her obligations to her.

Here’s Beinart’s case — one also made by other Democratic partisans — boiled down to its essentials:

When Republicans act criminally and/or corruptly, it’s because they’re criminal and/or corrupt.

When Democrats act criminally and/or corruptly, it’s because they’re just poor, temperamental, out-of-their-element naifs who of course have no criminal or corrupt intent, but whose staffers — whether negligently, or out of concern for feelings or fear of offending — neglect to button their winter coats for them, take them by their little mittened hands, and carefully walk them across all those busy, dangerous legal/ethical streets.

There are two obvious problems with this double standard.

One is that for the last three years we’ve been told over and over (by, among others, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden) that Trump is a loose cannon, an eternal man-child who lacks “adults in the room” to help him navigate the intricacies of governing. So why shouldn’t Trump receive the same “Blame the Aides and Get Out of Jail Free Card” that Beinart tries to play on behalf of the other two?

The other is that in arguing that Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton aren’t responsible for their actions because they’re too stupid to discern right from wrong and too simultaneously mean and emotionally delicate to be TOLD right from wrong, Beinart is necessarily also arguing that Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton were and are, by definition, unfit to entrust with responsibilities as weighty as those that go with, say, the presidency of the United States.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY