Tag Archives: Election 2016

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Election 2016: Busted Ain’t Such a Bad Thing

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Let me alert you to three facts:

Fact #1: Donald Trump has a ceiling of support among Republican primary voters.

Fact #2:  While it’s hard to tell exactly how high that ceiling is, it’s almost certainly short of an absolute majority in any state.

Fact #3: The Republican National Committee’s 2016 rules require state and territorial Republican parties holding primaries and caucuses prior to March 15, 2016 — that’s 29 of them — to allocate delegates proportionally rather than in “winner take all” schemes.

Assuming Trump remains in the race for his party’s presidential nomination, he will almost certainly arrive at the GOP national convention without enough delegates to win on the first ballot. Which means the Republican Party faces the prospect of a busted (party poo-bahs prefer the term “brokered”) convention.

Party establishments generally view that prospect with horror, and who can blame them? In 1924, the Democratic National Convention voted 103 times before coming up with a nominee.  The parties have massaged their convention rules over the decades to turn the end phase of their nomination processes into convivial coronations. The last true major party “brokered convention” happened to the Democrats in 1952, although the GOP came close in 1976.

But while busted conventions almost certainly bode ill for parties in the short term — that is, the particular election cycles in which they take place — they’re actually a great thing for both the parties and the public in the long term.

When George Wallace, whom I’m otherwise no fan of, asserted in 1968 that “there’s not a dime’s worth of difference between the Republicans and Democrats,” he was uttering a truism that has only become more true in the 48 years since.

Over time, the Republicans and Democrats have come to take for granted their ability to stack up constituencies and, whether those constituencies consider themselves well-represented or not, get the vote out to win elections. After all, where else do those constituencies — of particular interest to me, civil libertarian Democrats and economic libertarian Republicans — have to go?

It’s about time American political parties started having real debates again instead of just stacking hostage constituencies and handing out favors to the people who can deliver those constituencies.

And hey, no time like the present. Since the Republicans seem determined to lose the 2016 presidential election anyway, why not turn that loss into an opportunity?

Thomas L. Knapp 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.

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Socialism: National Review Should Talk

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English: President George W. Bush shakes hands...
President George W. Bush shakes hands with William F. Buckley, Jr. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Sometimes partisan reactions to political event prove more informational than the events themselves. The first Democratic presidential debate was a yawner. We learned little that we didn’t already know about the five participating candidates. But we learned something important from conservative columnist Jim Geraghty of National Review: “America Now Has an Openly Socialist Party.”

Well, it’s about time ONE of the two parties came out and admitted the nature of its program, don’t you think?

Sure, the forms of socialism offered by the Democrats and Republicans differ in style. Democrats attack “the 1%.” Republicans offer to “save Social Security.” Democrats emphasize the welfare state. Republicans talk up the warfare state. But both parties are state socialist in substance, with very little daylight between them on the real issues.

Old style socialism supposedly operated on the prescription “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”

21st century American state socialism tweaks that a bit: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his lobbyist’s talent at wangling sweetheart government contracts to build weapons or hand out condoms.”

But really, I’m surprised that anyone from National Review wants to talk about socialism, given that publication’s role in shaping the modern American Republican Party into the nation’s most successful and enduring socialist institution.

National Review was founded by William F. Buckley, Jr. in 1955. Among its co-founders was James Burnham, Buckley’s mentor and the former head of America’s Trotskyites, who were firebrand advocates of worldwide communism (as opposed to the  “socialism in one country” of their bete noire, Stalin).

As early as 1952, in The Commonweal (an American Catholic magazine, not the better-known British socialist newspaper), Buckley had called upon the Republican Party to support “a totalitarian bureaucracy within our shores. …. large armies and air forces, atomic energy, central intelligence, war production boards and the attendant centralization of power in Washington …” He founded National Review to bring that vision to life.

Sixty-odd years later, behold the mutant form of Trotsky’s “war communism” imposed by Buckley’s disciples on an American politics and economy harnessed to pursuit of “global democratic revolution” (yes, they dumped the s-word to make it more warm and fuzzy).

There’s not enough facepalm in the world to encompass the silliness of National Review whining about “socialism.” The puny proposals of the debating Democrats pale in comparison to the actual accomplishments of Buckley’s commissars.

Thomas L. Knapp 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.

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Score One for Fiorina: A Clarion Call to Budgeting Sanity

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English: A graph of the US GDP compared with F...
A graph of the US GDP compared with Federal budget outlay. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In every presidential election cycle, candidates find themselves called upon to present plans for balancing the federal budget. And, for the most part, their plans call for doing so — in the sweet bye and bye. Never next year, seldom even next decade. The plan is for the current crop of politicians to kick the can down the road some  more, leaving it to future Congresses and administrations to exercise the fiscal restraint that these politicians  won’t.

Not Carly Fiorina. On MSNBC’s Morning Joe (October 7), Fiorina claimed she would submit a balanced budget to Congress in her first term.

Will she? Probably not, if for no other reason than that she wants to increase, not decrease, spending on the single largest sector of the budget, “defense,” so that she can continue the two previous administrations’ program of idiotic military adventurism around the globe.

But, be that as it may, when she explained how she proposed to attack the budget, she put her finger on one of the biggest bad habits of government spenders and promised to fix it. The problem is something called “baseline budgeting.” She proposes to replace it with “zero-based budgeting.” A quick primer:

Under baseline budgeting, the federal government assumes that each department will spend as much as it spent last year, with an automatic upward adjustment reflecting the inflation rate and US population growth. That’s on rails. The only things that have to be justified in the departments’ budget requests are changes upward or downward from that automatic amount — and how often do you think a bureaucrat requests LESS money?

Under zero-based budgeting, it’s assumed that every last dime requested has to be justified from the ground up. Just because the department spent $100 million on chips, dip and  party favors last year, it doesn’t automatically get $102 million for that this year, with the department only having to justify an extra $10 million to buy ponies for all the deputy secretaries (with THAT $10 million forming part of NEXT year’s “baseline”).

The political class, predictably, went ballistic. By the time Fiorina left the set, budget “experts” were loudly reminding us that zero-based budgeting can never work. Why? Well, because the government is just so big and complex that we can’t can’t expect its swarms of bureaucrats to spend time explaining their demands.

The only way to balance the budget, the “experts” say, is to keep automatically forking over more money every year and trust that spending will eventually magically go down on its own. Someday.

Ultimately, balancing a budget is simple: Spend less than you bring in. “Experts” who pretend that zero-based budgeting is out of bounds are the problem, not the solution.

Thomas L. Knapp 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.

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