David Frum has a great short analysis of the New Hampshire results, calling them a victory for democracy over out-of-touch party establishments. A majority of Democratic voters, he says, showed themselves to be unwilling to accept the second coming of the shameless, money-grubbing Clinton machine. Those voters are not satisfied taking whatever warmed-over establishment slop the Democratic Party is serving them. More:
On the Republican side, the upset was, if possible, even more stunning. For 20 years and more, Republican presidential contests have operated as a policy cartel. Concerns that animate actual Republican voters—declining middle-class wages, immigration, retirement security—have been tacitly ruled out of bounds. Concerns that excite Republican donors—tax cuts, entitlement reforms—have been more-or-less unanimously accepted by all plausible candidates. Candidates competed on their life stories, on their networks of friends, and on their degree of religious commitment—but none who aspired to run a national campaign deviated much from the economic platform of the Wall Street Journal and the Club for Growth.
This year’s Republican contest, however, has proved a case study of Sigmund Freud’s “return of the repressed.” Republicans, it turns out, also worry about losing health care. They also want to preserve Social Security and Medicare in roughly their present form. They believe that immigration has costs, and that those costs are paid by people like them—even as its benefits flow to employers, investors, and foreigners. They know that their personal situation is deteriorating, and they interpret that to mean (as who wouldn’t?) that the country is declining, too. “Hope,” “growth,” “opportunity,” “choice”—those have long since dwindled to sinister euphemisms for “less,” “worse,” and “not for you.”
Read the whole thing. Clinton said last night in her NH concession speech, “Wall Street can never be allowed to once again threaten Main Street, and I will fight to rein in Wall Street, and you know what, I know how to do it.” Oh? Politico reports on her Goldman Sachs speech:
When Hillary Clinton spoke to Goldman Sachs executives and technology titans at a summit in Arizona in October of 2013, she spoke glowingly of the work the bank was doing raising capital and helping create jobs, according to people who saw her remarks.
Clinton, who received $225,000 for her appearance, praised the diversity of Goldman’s workforce and the prominent roles played by women at the blue-chip investment bank and the tech firms present at the event. She spent no time criticizing Goldman or Wall Street more broadly for its role in the 2008 financial crisis.
So as long as your Wall Street firm can show good results on hiring and promoting women and minorities, you can do whatever you want on the market, and Hillary Clinton won’t complain. Well, that was more or less the point of Jesse Jackson’s Wall Street Project shakedown. But I digress.
Meanwhile, Ross Douthat is sitting in his basement under a 40-watt bulb, drinking rye neat out of a jelly jar, contemplating the Republican Götterdämmerung. Excerpt:
Or should we begin to root for Donald Trump — not as a candidate actually to champion, now or in the fall, but as an agent of divine retribution for a corrupt and stumbling party, a pillaging-and-torching Babylonian invasion of which it must be said: The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.
I think that temptation still deserves to be resisted. But stay tuned.