Various Thoughts About Trump’s “Best People”

Background

This OP has been in the back of my mind ever since the 2016 election. In view of the upcoming election, this seems to be a reasonable time for this to get a mention.

In the 2016 election, the president promised to hire the best people to help him do the best governing that has ever been done in the history of humankind. So far, the president has criticized, forced out or fired a lot of his “best” people.

The president's criticisms of his best people included “way over his head” (fired John Kelly) “washed up” and a “liar” (resigned John Bolton), “Sloppy Steve”, “lost his mind” (fired Steve Bannon), “not smart”, “lowlife” and “wacky Omarosa” (Omarosa Manigault Newman), “clueless” (criticized but still in power Fed Chairman Jerome Powell) and “moron”, “dumb as a rock” and “lazy as hell” (resigned former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson).

In his own words, the president hires people who are wacky, sloppy, liars, morons, dumb as rocks and so forth. Clearly, the president is not very good when it comes to being able to pick people that he thinks are the best of the best. For him, it's a matter of trial and error.

Of course, how one sees this can depend on how one defines the best people. By now it is clear, what the president meant by the best people, was not competent or honest people. He meant people who would be loyal to him above the Constitution, the rule of law, truth and common decency. That casts the concept of best people in a very different light than how most people probably think of it.

Others have commented on the qualities of two of the people the president had in his administration, Michael Flynn and Larry Kudlow.

General Michael Flynn and the WYSIATI bias

In their 2012 book, Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction, Philip Tetlock and Dan Gardner specifically single out two people to exemplify the reasons for big mistakes or even continuing incompetence of people who sometimes rise to power. This was in 2012, not 2015 or 2016. Flynn was the president's top national security advisor for a short while in 2016. The president did not criticize Flynn. Despite his felony conviction, Flynn has stayed loyal to the president, not the Constitution, the rule of law or the American people.

They wrote this about Flynn, who is now a self-confessed felon-level liar that the president is trying to save from justice:

“Consider a 2014 interview with General Michael Flynn .... ‘I come into this office every morning .... I spend two to three hours reading intelligence reports. I will frankly tell you that what I see each day is the most uncertain, chaotic and confused international environment that I've witnessed in my entire career. .... I think we're in a period of prolonged societal conflict that is pretty unprecedented.’ Much of what Flynn said is too vague to be judged, but his final line isn’t. Societal conflict at a pretty unprecedented level] is an empirical claim that can be checked by reviewing the many reports that have quantified global violence since World War II. And what they all show, broadly, is that interstate wars have been declining since the 1950s and civil wars have been declining since the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s.”

Tetlock and Gardner point out that all Flynn had to do was Google the phrase ‘global conflict trends’ to find this out. Flynn had succumbed to the powerful unconscious WYSIATI (what you see is all there is) bias. He assumed he knew it all from reading the intelligence reports. His false belief was so deep that he simply could not see that he was awash in assumptions. He mistook an easily testable false assumption for certain knowledge. 

Flynn was too arrogant to self-question to step outside the bubble of false certainty he lived in. It was probably a combination of Flynn’s smug arrogance, his sycophancy and the fact that Obama had fired him that led the president to pick Flynn as his unfortunately incompetent security advisor and likely traitor. 

One can imagine that all of this would be lost on our clueless president and/or of no concern in view of Flynn’s probable sycophancy during the sloppy job application process the president employed. Right, best people.

Larry Kudlow and the deadly big idea bias

In their book, Tetlock and Gardner refer to people they call hedgehogs. Those folks have one big idea about something they believe is really important, even if it is false or tenuous. Their weakness tends to be that they make reality fit with their big idea, even when reality just does not fit. They cannot see this bias. It leads some to incredible heights of incompetence. Larry Kudlow is a hedgehog. The president made him the Director of the United States National Economic Council 2018. Tetlock and Gardner wrote:

“Larry Kudlow hosted a business talk show on CNBC and is a widely published pundit, but he got his start as an economist in the Reagan administration, and later worked with Art Laffer, the economist whose theories were the cornerstone of Ronald Reagan’s economic policies. Kudlow’s one big idea is supply-side economics.”

Tetlock and Gardner go on to point out that Kudlow's supply side bias led him to be one of the blindest, worst economic forecasters in the pundit business. In the recession and financial meltdown that started in 2017, Kudlow asserted in December of that year that “there is no recession. In face we're about to enter the seventh consecutive year of the ‘Bush Boom’”. That was the month the recession officially started.

For months after that, Kudlow remained unaware of what was happening because his big idea ideology blinded him to what was happening at the time. In April 2008, Kudlow wrote “President George w. Bush may turn out to be the top economic forecaster in the country.” Later in the summer of 2008 he said “We are in a mental recession, not an actual recession.” He repeated that mantra until September 15, 2008, the date that Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy and financial chaos erupted.

Unfortunately, Kudlow is one of the president's best people who are still in government and still being incompetent. That shows that at least he is still loyal to the president, which makes him among the best.

A patriotic message in these troubled times...

 

Click here.

We may disagree on politics, but can we really disagree on this message of restoring decency to a troubled nation?  What part did Obama get wrong??

Thanks for listening and recommending.

So what is it?

(Societal extremes)

This morning, someone on Twitter asked:

 “For all of you celebrating your stock portfolios today, a reminder that there are millions of Americans out of work and unable to afford the basics.”

In response, another person then asked:

“Is there a term for an economy where the markets hit an all time high but half of the country is desperately worried about paying rent and keeping groceries on the table?”

So, what do you call that? 

I call it “Capitalism Gone Awry.”  I read many others saying a version of that too.  Granted, much is in play, but are we fundamentally wrong?

Thanks for posting and recommending.

Senate Investigation into 2016 Russian Interference: It Happened!

Multiple sources are reporting that an investigation by the Republican-led Senate intelligence committee concluded that Russia did interfere. The AP writes:

"The Trump campaign’s interactions with Russian intelligence services during the 2016 presidential election posed a “grave” counterintelligence threat, a Senate panel concluded Tuesday as it detailed in a report how associates of the Republican candidate had regular contact with Russians and expected to benefit from the Kremlin’s help. 

The report, the fifth and final one from the Republican-led Senate intelligence committee on the Russia investigation, describes how Russia launched an aggressive, wide-ranging effort to interfere in the election on Donald Trump’s behalf. It says Trump associates were eager to exploit the Kremlin’s aid, particularly by maximizing the impact of the disclosure of Democratic emails that were hacked by Russian military intelligence officers. 

The conclusions mark the culmination of a bipartisan probe that spanned more than three years and produced what the committee called “the most comprehensive description to date of Russia’s activities and the threat they posed.” 

The findings echo to a large degree those of special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation, with the report’s unflinching characterization of furtive interactions between Trump associates and Russian operatives contradicting the Republican president’s claims that the FBI had no basis to investigate whether his campaign was conspiring with Russia.  

A group of Republicans on the panel submitted “additional views” to the report saying that it should state more explicitly that Trump’s campaign did not coordinate with Russia. But Democrats on the panel submitted their own views, arguing that the report clearly shows such cooperation."

What was mildly surprising to me about this is that the GOP senators apparently decided to go with the overwhelming evidence of interference. They seemingly did not fabricate evidence to make the president's false claims of no Russian interference look real. I can only assume that was because there are some democrats on the intelligence committee.

Another authoritarian shoe I have been waiting to drop is the GOP resorting to fabricating evidence to make the president's dismal record look better. They might try to do that with the bogus investigation of Biden in the Ukraine. They could also try it in Barr's bogus DoJ investigation into the origins of the FBI investigation into Russian interference. Or, maybe GOP evidence fabrication will happen in the crackpot conspiracies the president likes to blither about, e.g., Obamagate, the president's false claim that Obama illegally spied on him in the 2016 election.

Is the Will of the People Sufficient to Govern?

“Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.” -- H.L. Mencken

In a 2003 article, Is “Popular Rule” Possible? Polls, political psychology, and democracy, political scientist Larry M. Bartels considers whether the will of the people can ever suffice to run a government. Bartels is co-author of the 2016 book, Democracy For Realists: Why Elections Do not Produce Responsive Governments (book review here). Bartels thinks the answer is no. He writes:

“Leaders may ignore the dictates of public opinion, but they are assumed to do so only with good reason—and at their electoral peril.

My aim here is to suggest that this conventional view of democracy is fundamentally unrealistic. Whether it would be desirable to have a democracy based on public opinion is beside the point, because public opinion of the sort necessary to make it possible simply does not exist. The very idea of “popular rule” is starkly inconsistent with the understanding of political psychology provided by the past half-century of research by psychologists and political scientists. That research offers no reason to doubt that citizens have meaningful values and beliefs, but ample reason to doubt that those values and beliefs are sufficiently complete and coherent to serve as a satisfactory starting point for democratic theory. In other words, citizens have attitudes but not preferences—a distinction directly inspired by the work of psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky.

Kahneman and Tversky have called attention to “framing effects”—situations in which different ways of posing, or “framing,” a policy issue produce distinctly different public responses. Framing effects are hard to accommodate within a theory built on the assumption that citizens have definite preferences to be elicited; but they are easy to reconcile with the view that any given question may tap a variety of more or less relevant attitudes. The problem for democratic theory is that the fluidity and contingency of attitudes make it impossible to discern meaningful public preferences on issues of public policy, because seemingly arbitrary variations in choice format or context may produce contradictory expressions of popular will.”

An example of a framing effect making a major difference in public opinion relates to the first Gulf War in 1991-1992. When people were polled, a big majority said there were unwilling to “go to war”, but a solid majority said it was acceptable to “engage in combat.” That war was then posited to the American people as an acceptable combat engagement, not an unacceptable war.


A democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. -- John Adams and Alexander Hamilton


Bartels cite another example of how framing changes opinions. When a first group in a study was asked, “Do you think the United States should let Communist newspaper reporters from other countries come in here and send back to their papers the news as they see it?”, 36% said yes. A second group was asked the same question but only after they were first asked whether “a Communist country like Russia should let American newspaper reporters come in and send back to America the news as they see it.” In this group, 73% agreed that Russian reporters should be allowed in the US to report as they saw fit. Posing the first question to the second group led those people to apply reciprocity despite strong anti-communist attitudes.

In one large survey at times when welfare was viewed negatively by many Americans, about 20-25% percent said that too little was being spent on “welfare”, but 63-65% said that too little was being spent on “assistance to the poor.” Even for issues that seem simple and easy to be consistent about, e.g., abortion, framing effects are easy to elicit. The human mind evolved to be quite sensitive  to how information if framed. Intelligent propagandists know this very well and exploit it ruthlessly to their advantage.

That is just one of several major mental traits that make it hard to know what people want. How are political leaders to decide what the will of the people is?

Bartels is not optimistic that this fundamental aspect of democracy can be adequately addressed. He writes:

“Perhaps these apparent contradictions in public opinion would disappear if political discourse were somehow elevated—but I doubt it. Political elites have had about as much chance of providing a clarifying debate on abortion as they have on any issue before the American public .... 

More generally, the hopeful assertions of democratic theorists regarding the positive effects of deliberation are largely unsupported by systematic empirical evidence. Indeed, most observers of political deliberation have painted a much less rosy portrait than philosophers of deliberative democracy. New England town meetings apparently involve a good deal of false unanimity, with most important decisions settled in advance through informal networks reflecting preexisting inequalities in social status and political power. The atmosphere of public-spiritedness and mutual respect central to theorists’ accounts of democratic deliberation may be difficult or impossible to achieve in societies burdened by sexism, racism, and fundamental cultural schisms.  

The most obvious alternative to theoretical progress along these lines is a much-diluted version of democratic theory in which the ideal of “popular rule” is replaced by what William Riker once characterized as “an intermittent, sometimes random, even perverse, popular veto” on the machinations of political elites. If that sort of democracy is the best we can hope for, we had better reconcile ourselves to the fact. On the other hand, if we insist on believing that democracy can provide some attractive and consistent normative basis for evaluating policy outcomes, we had better figure out more clearly what we are talking about.”

Is it time for the rise of the popular veto?

“Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it whether it exists or not, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedies.” -- Ernst Benn

How voters' opinions in battleground Wisconsin could determine presidential race

 

In a state President Donald Trump won by less than a point in 2016, socially distanced French toast and eggs at Frank's Diner in downtown Kenosha, Wisconsin, come with a slate of opinions revealing how a battleground state could well determine the presidential race.

There's the college student who says she's definitely going to vote for former Vice President Joe Biden, a mask-clad man who plans to vote for President Donald Trump a second time and a young first-time voter who says, plainly, "neither" on Trump or Biden because she plans to vote for a third party instead.

And for many, the politics are inseparable from the coronavirus pandemic.

The pandemic has pushed Americans to the highest unemployment rate since the Great Depression, drawn structural racism into plain sight with Black and brown people dying at higher rates, and heightened concerns over national debt as the government tries to plug holes in the economy with multi-trillion-dollar stimulus efforts.

In 2016, Trump took Kenosha County by a mere 238 votes -- flipping a county that voted for former President Barack Obama in both 2008 and 2012.

Swing counties like Kenosha propelled Trump to take Wisconsin by a razor-thin margin of just over 22,000 votes.

For many, 2020 has become a referendum on the president's handling of the pandemic. According to recent polling by Marquette Law School, only 40% of Wisconsin registered voters approve of Trump's handling of the coronavirus, while 58% disapprove.

For Lori McCammon, a resident of Alma, Wisconsin, the pandemic response is another reason she regrets casting her ballot for Trump in 2016.

McCammon, 65, was initially drawn to him because of his hardline stance on immigration. McCammon was living in Southern California in 2016 and said her proximity to the U.S.-Mexico border made the issue feel more relevant.

"The ballot wasn't even cold in the box and I'd already regretted it," she said. On the pandemic, "he has completely failed us," McCammon said.

Asked if she had a message for the president now, McCammon said, "Just please do something about this pandemic. I'm begging you. Please do something and quit making it political."

Come November, McCammon said she's decided to vote for Biden.

"I have voted Republican for most of my adult life," she said. "I don't know if I will ever vote Republican again."

Outside of Kenosha County, in more rural areas of Wisconsin, Democrats hope to see Trump's popularity slip in places where they previously expected him to continue to gain steam. According to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Trump gained the most ground in small towns over former-Obama territory.

Wisconsin lost 10% of its dairy farms over the last year -- over 800 farms -- because of a milk surplus driving down profits. Though the issue predates the coronavirus, farmers like Lynn Hicks want to get the message to the White House that they're still struggling every day.

"I'm a small guy -- I'm just a drip in the pail," she said.

Hicks has a small family farm in Gilman, Wisconsin. She supported Trump in 2016 and still values his "tough talk" over what she's seen from Biden. But she doesn't feel like Washington is listening, she said, despite Trump's promises four years ago to "drain the swamp" and focus on Americans who'd been left behind.

MUCH MORE ON THIS STORY:

https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/newspolitics/how-voters-opinions-in-battleground-wisconsin-could-determine-presidential-race/ar-BB181Erx?li=AAggFp5&ocid=mailsignout