(01-15-2017, 11:15 AM)Warren Dew Wrote:(01-15-2017, 10:50 AM)David Horn Wrote:(01-14-2017, 09:00 PM)Classic-Xer 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.
Trump has a huge unfavorablity score for an entering President, and a big chunk of it is due to the people who are still saying WTF. I don't see that getting better, since he doesn't seem to get better. I don't see a wave of voters flocking to Trump who haven't done so already.
He may still win a second term, and he may get to derail the post-war social compact, but people like Warren and you will not like if it happens.
Obama already destroyed the postwar social compact. Returning to Reagan's America is not really an option any more.
To the contrary: the foreign policy of President Obama is an extension of the Nixon-Reagan-Bush I-Clinton success. He made sure that those who do evil to Americans, whether pirates or terrorists, get caught or killed. His outreach to Iran (the US and Iranian navies were cooperating on the suppression of piracy off Somalia; Iran and the USA have a common interest in destroying ISIS on behalf of the Iraqi government) and Cuba (he wants America to be in a not-so-hostile position in the post-Castro era) are more pragmatic than ideological. He sought to extend the meaning of the term "Establishment" to include successful minorities. He refused to use the power of the Presidency for patronage. Obamacare? A belated effort to catch up with the rest of the industrialized world. Deficits may not have fully gone away while he was President, but they certainly went in the right direction. He privatized about everything that came under government ownership in the wake of the unwelcome "receivership socialism" that the Bush II economic meltdown necessitated.
It is Donald Trump who promises a big break with the American political tradition, one going back at least 85 years. Maybe he dares not undo the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but I can imagine him subordinating everything to the profit motive in the name of prosperity - including human rights, civil liberties, science, gender equity, and any official protection of the poor and helpless. This is a man who stamped the letter "C" for "Colored" on applications for rentals... for rejection. Christian values? His idea of Christianity is that the common man defers to the basest drives of the economic elites in return for rewards in the Afterlife.
He is a horrible person. One cannot get around this. He is a lying, vicious egoist in the extreme. He is the worst possible sort of political figure in a democratic system -- the demagogue who promises everything and then betrays his promises because the promises contradict. Unlike most of us who have had to develop some humanizing humility just to survive in a hierarchical world, he has not. He may have a little more polish than the juvenile delinquents that most high-school kids did everything to avoid, but he thinks much the same way. Most of those juvenile delinquents have either shed their worst tendencies to hold a job or have become career criminals now dead, incarcerated, or broken. Donald Trump has gotten away with abominable behavior from youth to old age. Old age does not mellow or mollify his type; harsh reality with its brutal consequences does that to most of us, you and me included.
Donald Trump reminds me more of the late mobster John "Dapper Don" Gotti (and mobsters maintain the juvenile-delinquent lifestyle as long as they can get away with it, which can be a lifetime if they don't end up incarcerated) than of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He's a bigger philanderer than either John F. Kennedy or Bill Clinton. I would not trust him if he ran on boilerplate liberal ideology. I expect to despise him much as many Cuban-Americans despise the late Fidel Castro.
After Donald Trump, Americans will have to rebuild the institutions that he rends, restart a benign foreign policy, and restore a sane and rational culture.
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.