Whether Clinton or Trump, Baby Boomers will reclaim White House next year

[Dan '82]

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/polit.../84647186/

Quote:Ten years ago, a writer named Barack Obama recalled his fatigue with Baby Boomer politics, as epitomized by the battles in the 1990s between President Bill Clinton and House Speaker Newt Gingrich, and the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections:
"I sometimes felt,’’ he wrote in The Audacity of Hope, “as if I were watching the psychodrama of the Baby Boom generation — a tale rooted in old grudges and revenge plots hatched on a handful of college campuses long ago — played out on the national stage."
Two years later, Obama personally ended a 16-year Boomer lock on the presidency. His campaign emphasis on consensus, dialogue and pragmatism seemed to rebuke the Boomer tendencies personified by his predecessors, Clinton and George W. Bush.



http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/polit.../84647186/

[Odin]

Obama is a pre-seasonal 1T Nomad president in a 4T. His calm "most reasonable man in the room" style of politics has no place in a 4T that is growing increasingly hysterical politically. The saecular mismatch is shown very well in his last SOTU address when he bragged about how good the economy is. He was right in terms of purely objective numbers, but it terms of subjective sentiment it was, IMO, a major blunder.

[Eric the Green]

(05-24-2016, 12:41 AM)Dan Wrote: http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/polit.../84647186/

Quote:Ten years ago, a writer named Barack Obama recalled his fatigue with Baby Boomer politics, as epitomized by the battles in the 1990s between President Bill Clinton and House Speaker Newt Gingrich, and the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections:
"I sometimes felt,’’ he wrote in The Audacity of Hope, “as if I were watching the psychodrama of the Baby Boom generation — a tale rooted in old grudges and revenge plots hatched on a handful of college campuses long ago — played out on the national stage."
Two years later, Obama personally ended a 16-year Boomer lock on the presidency. His campaign emphasis on consensus, dialogue and pragmatism seemed to rebuke the Boomer tendencies personified by his predecessors, Clinton and George W. Bush.



http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/polit.../84647186/

Obama was a cusper though, and had as many boomer qualities himself as he had Xer ones.

I'm not sure in the end there was much difference. Was Bill Clinton really rooted in revenge plots and old grudges? Did he refer to these in his rhetoric while president? It seems to me he was even more of a compromiser than Obama, and that his attitude while in the White House was cheerful and pragmatic and that he sought consensus all the time. Even George W Bush, if anything, said even more to rebuke boomers (centered on his own personal "changes") than Obama did in his book, and he didn't deliberately stir up that many resentments either in his rhetoric. It was his policies that were polarizing, particularly bringing back the military-industrial complex and constant unnecessary war, the same policies that boomers protested against in the 60s. And it was those who attacked Bill Clinton (rather than Clinton himself) who exhibited the revenge and grudge politics which Obama mentioned in his book. And those who did that attack on Bill were as often members of older generations as they were boomers. Remember Bob Dole's attack on Bill that "his generation had never done anything real." Pure late-1960s anti-boomer rhetoric by a typical GI gen member.

[pbrower2a]

Barack Obama does practice revenge politics. With a foreigner who does bad things to Americans he keeps his mouth shut before calling in the drones or the Special Forces. Dubya blustered and proved a paragon of inaction. It took Barack Obama less than fifteen months to get Osama bin Laden whacked. Maybe it helps to not out CIA operatives, and to let the CIA establish how to make sure that Osama bin Laden was where the deadly force would meet him.

Her lets his political enemies implode. Just look at the US Supreme Court opening. He offered an ideologically-generic appointment to fill the vacancy that Antonia Scalia left by dying, and the Senate Majority Leader has so far chosen to wait until the Trump Presidency to fill the vacancy.

If you cause trouble, then the trouble will devour you. As Gene Roddenberry created as a Klingon proverb, "Revenge is a dish best served cold".

[Ragnarök_62]

Boomers [more or less]   A retrospective.

-  By David Stockman  born November 10, 1946

David Wrote:NOTE TO READERS
I am in the throes of finishing a book on the upheaval represented by the Trump candidacy and movement. It is an exploration of how 30 years of Bubble Finance policies at the Fed, feckless interventions abroad and mushrooming Big government and debt at home have brought America to its current ruinous condition.
It also delves into the good and bad of the Trump campaign and platform and outlines a more consistent way forward based on free markets, fiscal rectitude, sound money, constitutional liberty, non-intervention abroad, minimalist government at home and decentralized political rule.
In order to complete the manuscript on a timely basis, I will not be doing daily posts for the next week or two. Instead, I will post excerpts from the book that crystalize its key themes and which also relate to the on-going gong show in the presidential campaigns and in the financial and economic arenas.  The third of these is included below.
I am also working with my partners at Agora Financial on a new version of Contra Corner. More information on that will be coming early next month.
 
TRUMPED!  A NATION ON THE BRINK OF RUIN…..AND HOW TO BRING IT BACK
                                             By David A. Stockman
 
Hillary Clinton: Class President of A Failed Generation:
Hillary Clinton has always been at the head of her class. That includes being among the leading edge of the 80-million strong baby boom generation that first started arriving in 1946-1947.
She did everything they did: Got out for Barry Goldwater in high school; got upwardly mobile to Wellesley and social liberation during college; got “Clean for Gene” and manned the anti-war barricades in the late 1960s; got to Washington to uplift the world in the 1970s; got down to the pursuit of power and position in the 1980s; joined the ruling class in the 1990’s; and has helped make a stupendous mess of things ever since.
The baby boom generation which started with so much promise when it came of age in the 1960s has ended up a colossal failure. It has turned America into a bloody imperial hegemon aboard and a bankrupt Spy State at home where financialization and the 1% thrive, half the population lives off the state and real main street prosperity has virtually disappeared from the land.
Quite a deplorable legacy, that. And all the while Hillary has been our class president. God help the world if she becomes our nation’s President. She has betrayed all that was right about the baby boomers in the 1960s; and has embraced all the wrong they did during their subsequent years in power.
It starts during our defining moment when peace finally had a chance in the spring of 1968. We drove a sitting President from office, and, at that, one whose megalomaniacal will-to-power was terrifying.
We called bull on the cold war hysteria that had once put us under our desks at school and now claimed that peasants in far off rice paddies threatened our security. We stopped the Vietnam War cold, dented the Cold War deep and put the whole Warfare State apparatus on the run—–the Pentagon, CIA, the generals and admirals, the military-industrial complex. Within a few years the warfare state budget was down by 40% in constant dollars.
So it was an epochal chance to break the deadly cycle of war that had started a half-century earlier in the bloody trenches of northern France during the Great War; that had been rebooted for a future reprise in the vengeful folly of Versailles; that had been made inexorable by the rise of nationalism, statism, autarky and militarism during the 1930s; and that had been unnecessarily and dangerously extended by the clash of military machines that both victors refused to demobilize after they won the peace in 1945, supplanting the silence of the German and Japanese war guns with the nuclear nightmare of the Cold War.
True enough, the defeat and retreat of the American Imperium by the idealism and defiance of the baby boomers was interrupted by the Reagan defense and Cold War revival. But that historical error is what makes the Clintons all the more culpable…..
It was their job as the first baby boom co-Presidents to finish the work of 1968, and by the time they entered the White House it was a lay-up. The Soviet Union was no more and Mr. Deng had just declared that to get rich is glorious.
The Clintons’ job in 1993 was to have at least the vision of Warren G. Harding. After all, he did demobilize the US war machine completely, eschewed the imperial pretensions of Woodrow Wilson and actually launched a disarmament movement which resulted in the melting down of the world’s navies and the Kellogg-Briand treaty to outlaw war.
Yet the opportunity at the Cold War’s end was even more compelling. There was absolutely no military threat to American security anywhere in the world. The Clintons could have drastically reduced the defense budget by mothballing much of the navy and air force and demobilizing the army.
They should have cancelled all new weapons programs and dismantled the military-industrial complex. They could have declared “mission accomplished” with respect to NATO and made good on Bush’s pledge to Gorbachev to not expand it “by an inch” by actually disbanding it. And, as legatees of 1968, they were positioned to lead a global disarmament movement and to end the arms export trade once and for all.
That was their job—-the unfinished business of peace. But they blew it in the name of political opportunism and failure to recognize that the American public was ready to end the century of war, too.
And you can’t let Hillary off the hook on the grounds that she had the health care file and Bill the bombs and planes. On becoming Senator she did not miss a stride betraying the opening for peace that had first broken-through in 1968.
She embraced Bush’s “shock and awe” campaign in Iraq and was thereby complicit in destroying the artificial nation created by Sykes-Picot in 1916. So doing, Clinton helped unleash the furies of Islamic sectarian conflict that eventually led to the mayhem and brutality of the Shiite militias and the rise of the ISIS butchers on the backs of the dispossessed Sunni tribes and the demobilized officer corps of Saddam.
Tellingly, Hillary Clinton made a beeline for the Senate Armed Services Committee, the domain of the Jackson war democrats, not the Foreign Affairs Committee, where Frank Church had exposed the folly of Vietnam and the treacherous deeds of the CIA. Undoubtedly, this was to burnish her commander-in-chief credentials, but it spoke volumes.
By the time Hillary got to the seat of power, the idealism and defiance of the warfare state that had animated her and the baby boomers of 1968 had dissipated entirety. For her and most of them, it was now all and only about getting and keeping power. In that respect, Hillary’s term at the State Department was a downright betrayal.
Whether by accident or not, Obama had actually been elected as the “peace candidate” by echoing the rhetoric of 1968 that he had apparently read in a book but had been too young to actually hear. What this untutored and inexperienced idealist needed to hear from his Secretary of State was a way forward for peace and the dismantlement of a war machine that had rained havoc on the world, left behind 4 million damaged and disabled veterans who had sacrificed for no good reason and a multi-trillion dollar war tab that had bloated the national debt.
What he got was Hillary The Hawk. When Obama took Bush’s already bloated $650 billion war budget (2005$) to a level that was almost 2X the level Eisenhower thought adequate at the peak of the cold war and upon his parting speech warning of the military-industrial complex, Hillary was completely on board. When Obama was bamboozled into a “surge” of forces in the god forsaken expanse of the Hindu Kush, Hillary busied herself rounding up NATO support.
When her neocon and R2P (responsibility to protect) advisers and Administration compatriots urged making peace by starting wars in Syria, Libya and the Ukraine, Hillary lead the charge. All of them have been disasters for their citizens and a stain on America’s standing in the world.
When the Deep State began lining up the next enemy, Hillary joined the gumming brigade, warning about the China threat. My god, were the red capitalists of Beijing to actually bomb 4,000 Wal-Marts in America their system would collapse in six months and their heads would be hung from the rafters in the nearest empty Foxcon/Apple factory.
Here’s the thing. Hillary Clinton’s sell-out to the Warfare State is not just about war and peace—-even as it fosters the former and precludes the latter. It’s also about the nation’s busted fiscal accounts, its languishing main street economy and the runaway gambling den that has taken over Wall Street……
After all this time, however, Hillary doesn’t get any of this. She thinks war is peace; deficits don’t matter; the baby boom is entitled to the social insurance they didn’t earn; and that the Fed’s serial bubble machine is leading the nation back to prosperity.
Actually, its leading to the greatest financial bubble in human history. After 90 months of ZIRP and a decade of Wall Street coddling and subsidization by the Fed, the windfalls to the 1% have become unspeakable in their magnitude and illegitimacy.
Soon 10,000 people will own a preponderant share of the wealth; 10 million people will live grandly off the droppings; 150 million will live off the state; and the rest of America will be left high and dry waiting for the house of cards to collapse.
Hillary rose to fame delivering an idealistic commencement address at Wellesley at the beginning of her career. But like the generation she represents, she has betrayed those grand ideals over a lifetime of compromise, expediency, self-promotion and complacent acquisition of power, wealth and fame.
She doesn’t deserve another stint at the podium—-let alone the bully pulpit.

Donald Trump born June 14, 1946


Hillary Clinton born October 26, 1947


PS.  I'm down on Neocons.

William Kristol (born December 23, 1952)
Robert Kagan (born September 26, 1958)
Paul Dundes Wolfowitz (born December 22, 1943)
John Robert Bolton (born November 20, 1948)
Elliott Abrams (born January 24, 1948)
Richard Norman Perle (born September 16, 1941)
Lewis Paul Bremer III (born September 30, 1941)

What was old might be new again.



Duck and Cover, man.

School desks for sale here: https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_...chool+desk

[Galen]

(07-27-2016, 07:26 PM)Ragnarök_62 Wrote: Boomers [more or less]   A retrospective.

-  By David Stockman  born November 10, 1946


Donald Trump born June 14, 1946


Hillary Clinton born October 26, 1947


PS.  I'm down on Neocons.

William Kristol (born December 23, 1952)
Robert Kagan (born September 26, 1958)
Paul Dundes Wolfowitz (born December 22, 1943)
John Robert Bolton (born November 20, 1948)
Elliott Abrams (born January 24, 1948)
Richard Norman Perle (born September 16, 1941)
Lewis Paul Bremer III (born September 30, 1941)

What was old might be new again.


Duck and Cover, man.

School desks for sale here: https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_...chool+desk

I read Stockman as well because he gets a lot of things right.  It is quite clear that he understands Clinton very well.  Given the way the polls seem to be going, barring any major mistakes, Trump will probably win.  I think the following image sums up the problems with Clinton perfectly.  (Click on the image to get a larger view.)

   

One thing the Wikileaks e-mails make very clear is how in bed the mainstream media is with the DNC.