01-14-2017, 09:56 PM
(01-14-2017, 09:00 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote:(01-14-2017, 09:35 AM)Mikebert Wrote:Reagan appeared to get pretty chummy with Gorbachev back in the day. It didn't hurt Reagan back then. Keep in mind, we were still a Cold War society back then. We watched the Berlin Wall come down and watched later on as the Soviet Union fell apart. Your advice would be more suitable for someone like Obama. Obama came in with the maximum already sitting in place and could only loose seats. Trump still has room to grow if he plays his cards right. How many Democrats played it safe and voted for Clinton instead of taking a chance on voting for Trump? I'd say a sizable portion stuck with Hilary that is available to support Trump.(01-11-2017, 08:17 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote: The Democratic party is going down because it appears to be loaded with people and controlled by people like you. I feel bad for the regular Democrats. The only ominous resemblance that I see is the Democratic party seems to be a lot like Yugoslavia.
It is not fun to be a regular Democrat in flyover country nowadays. Although I wouldn't count them out quite yet, people were saying the same things about Republicans in 2009. Obama built the current Republican party by being alien to a lot of non-liberal white folks. Frankly Trump is just as alien to the non-conservative non-white folks in the country, and he is not all that popular with the remainder. Trump is likely to build the Democratic party as Obama did the Republicans.
Right now, Trump commands the Republican base and the GOP establishment will trend lightly. Trump is perfectly willing to throw all sort of bones to these guys: tax cuts, ending Obamacare, deregulating Wall Street, genuflecting toward Israel, unremitting hostility towards Iran. But there are a couple of things Trump ran on that they dislike. One is trade and immigration restriction. They are likely to give Trump something here because he DID run (and win) on it and they KNOW the base really wants the latter (and Trump wants the former).
But then then there is the Russia thing. Trump really seems to like Russia and wants to cut them all sorts of slack for no reason discernable to establishment Republicans. I think they will find this an irritation that will not go away.
When we eventually have a recession, Trumps popularity will fall as it always does. If it starts before the mid-terms Republicans will suffer larger losses than they expect today and so will be grumpy and unwilling to roll over for him on things like Russia. The second half of Trump's term could see the return of gridlock despite nominal Republican control of all three branches of government.
So if I were advising Trump I would tell him his power is at a maximum now, he needs to use it to get his agenda passed first, before spending political capital on theirs.
1. I'll take the moral compass of Mikhail Gorbachev to that of Vladimir Putin any day. In fact I woulr prefer that there were a Soviet Union with a Gorbachev-like leader than a post-Soviet world with someone with an admiration of the tsars for their opulence and the Brezhnev-era enforcers for their brutality.
Gorbachev tried to get good will and time in exchange for allowing the Soviet bloc to go its own way.
Most of us were glad to see the Berlin Wall go down. The demise of the Soviet Union? Only in the three tiny Baltic Republics are political realities unambiguously better than they were under Gorbachev. I had misgivings after the Baltic states seceded from the Soviet Union.
2. Gorbachev operated with the attitude, "Do something really stupid -- and die"... which explains his policy on Iraq after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. There were Soviet technicians in Iraq and Gorbachev wanted them out quickly and safely, and not used as hostages. The rest of the world concurred. After the First Gulf War he went along with the United Nations on long-range missiles, perhaps because those missiles could reach well into the Soviet Union of the time.
3. I would prefer that a somewhat-free Russia or Soviet Union be present as a safety valve now that we have the threat of a dictatorial President. I do not trust Putin with human rights.
4. Donald Trump will push a speculative boom for which Americans are unready... and it will implode faster than the corrupt boom of the Double-Zero Decade. It's hard to win re-election in a recession. Trump/GOP policies will aggravate the mass pain of an economic downturn.
The expedient of backing the banks, which learned nothing from the economic meltdown of 2007-2009, may not be so effective this time. Americans are much angrier and more polarized. Repression of dissent will backfire.
5. In other countries, pols like Donald Trump fall in military coups. "But this is America", you say? We have never had a national leader at all like Donald Trump in any living person's memory.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.