Ben Smith’s Troubled Nut Graf: You Make the Call Ben Smith’s now made a second-round correction to his recent profile. (He wrongly believed I wrote “solely” for Twitter — meaning he hadn’t read any blog items like this one.  I’m firing my marketing department.)

I don’t think I’m going to get any more fixes out of him! That leaves intact his unsupported assertion, in the same troubled ‘nut graf,’ that I think

“Donald Trump is the ‘most credible’ candidate for the presidency.”

Where’d he get that? Here’s what I’d written Smith when he asked if I thought Trump should win [emphasis added to sentence Smith gets his quote from]:

Short Answer: I don’t know. Don’t rush me! That’s what long campaigns are for. I’m certainly glad he’s running.

Long Answer: I obviously think immigration’s very important. Nobody knows how to fix the overall economy so that it helps workers at the bottom. But we do know how to tighten the labor market by regulating supply through immigration control. For less skilled workers it seems more important than, say, tax reform.

Trump’s the most credible candidate when it comes to enforceable immigration controls — he’s not perfect (I’d rather see a clearer commitment to ‘enforcement first’ instead of to deporting all illegals). Cruz is getting better but he’s still vague on the crucial enforcement first test; Rubio’s still way to vague. Jeb isn’t even really pretending not to be on the other side.

(Here’s the crucial enforcement first test ; http://www.kausfiles.com/2015/11/13/a-simple-test-for-rubio/ )

I don’t trust any of them on this issue, but I trust Rubio least.

Trump also presents an attractive profile in other areas: He defends Social Security ( a sensible stand, I think, given that Social Security is the only secure structure in many peoples lives at the moment) and he’s relatively a restrained on foriegn policy, skeptical of neo-connish adventures.

It’s hard to say how he’d perform in office once all the forces of restraint (courts, Congress, his own staff etc) come down on him. I don’t know enough about him. Some of what I know is troubling, some of it is encouraging. The range of possibilities (great to awful) seems greater for him than for others. I could end up voting for him.

I do know he’s had a highly beneficial effect on the race so far, a) showing the extent of popular dissent from the suffocating Beltway/MSM/CEO consensus on immigration reform and b) showing that the Republican base cares less about tax cuts and more about preserving Social Security than the DC GOP elite hopes. Also c) more generally piercing the artificiality of modern campaigning.

Your call …

P.S.: Please leave aside that, after last night’s uninspiring debate, Trump now may well seem to be the most credible Republican candidate, at least. …

P.P.S.: Smith’s original angle seemed to be that I’d gone bonkers because I urged readers to call the Congressional switchboard during immigration fights. (Why not?) But readers care about Trump these days, so….

Just Between Us: Maybe it’s a bad time to say it, but the idea that we can never have a “religious test” for immigration — a righteous principle declared, to great applause, by Paul Ryan and to less applause by President Obama — is untenable, if not mildly insane. Sure, it may work for nice, bourgeois religions like Christianity, Buddhism, Judaism and, arguably, modern Islam (one reason Trump’s plan is misguided). But it’s not at all hard to think of religions so vile that it would be virtually impossible to justify not excluding people who believed them. Imagine, say, a religion that required its adherents to murder random people to demonstrate the superficiality of earthly life, to placate a bloodthirsty deity, or just to prove their faith. “The Thuggee were a religion. Jonestown was religious,” one NRO commenter has noted.  Thinking that the world’s great mainstream religions are the only possible faiths is what Marxists call “reification.”

Ryan made a point of praising “Muslims, the vast, vast, vast, vast majority of whom are peaceful, who believe in pluralism and freedom and democracy and individual rights.” OK! But what if the vast, vast majority of a particular religion were not peaceful, did not believe in pluralism and democracy and individual rights? Do we let them in too? … A million of them? … A hundred million? … Can’t have a “religious test,” after all. … It wouldn’t be hard for a beginning law professor to explode Ryan’s principle with a barrage of hypotheticals.  Ryan’s own “vast, vast, vast, vast” (yes, there were four of them) argument suggests that which believers to admit isn’t an issue of principle after all but an empirical question. Most religions — sure! Others, na-uh. It’s way too simple to just say, with Obama, that we shouldn’t discriminate against someone because of “the faith they practice.”

P.S.: Religious inquiries, in this sense, are a subset of seemingly valid ideological tests that would weed out would-be immigrants strongly opposed to “who we are,” as the current cliche describes American values. Why should a murderous anti-democratic ideology get a free pass just because it calls itself a faith or concerns itself with grand cosmological issues? If Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi declares that he’s a god, do we have to wave his believers through customs?

Once we let people in and they become citizens, we’re stuck with them, so we have to be at least a little picky! Do you have confidence that our current powers of assimilation can soon turn sincerely non-freedom-loving people [don’t fight the hypothetical!] into democracy’s defenders? What about those who might believe with firm conviction in death for offensive writing, for homosexuals, for fornicators generally, etc.?

Safer to build democracy, free speech and tolerance with immigrants who believe in democracy, free speech, and tolerance, no?

If the Republican establishment is so panicked about Donald Trump — a wild, proto-fascist egomaniac with his finger on the button, in their telling — you’d think it would do the one thing that would almost certainly stop him: Surrender. By “surrender” I mean abandon their decades long dream of winning Latino votes through a magic pill called “comprehensive immigration reform” (known to its opponents as amnesty). After Romney’s 2012 defeat, conservatives like Charles Krauthammer argued that if they just caved to the Democrats on this one issue — immigration — they wouldn’t really have to change anything else. (“It requires but a single policy change ….”) In 2013, with Marco Rubio as their smiling pitch man, they tried desperately to sell out on immigration. They failed.

Today, Trump’s massive rallies can be interpreted as an expression of the historic populist undercurrent animating America’s white working class. Or they can be interpreted, with less sophistication, as Americans saying, as loudly as they can, “WE DON’T WANT YOUR F___ING ‘COMPREHENSIVE IMMIGRATION REFORM.'”  Either way, anger over elite “more immigration” plans is the molten core of the Trump eruption. Is there any doubt that if “comprehensive immigration reform” went away for good, Trumpism would wither? So why don’t Haley Barbour and Karl Rove call a big K Street meeting where they say, “Boys, we have to throw the damn yahoos this bone. We’re giving up on amnesty”?**

The GOP establishment does have some concerns other than bringing in foreign workers, doesn’t it? It has tax reducing schemes, and regulation-reducing plans, and entitlement-controlling schemes. It wants a more assertive, ‘muscular’ foreign policy. It wants to retain control of the Senate! It wants to gain control of the Supreme Court. These are all the goodies that a Trump nomination for the Presidency would threaten (and not necessarily only if he lost). Saving those goodies by abandoning the star-crossed immigration cause seems like the obvious choice. It’s Krauthammer in reverse —  by simply not caving on this one issue on which they want to cave, professional Republicans can save the rest of their enterprise.

I’m actually a little baffled that they haven’t done this. Not even one of ’em. Maybe they still think it’s early, that a combination of SuperPAC attack ads and media-inflated embarrassments will destroy Trump in the next two months. There’s always time to cave on amnesty later. But how will the Karl Roves be in a better position after Trump has won New Hampshire and South Carolina? The time to cave is now, when ‘getting right with the base’ on immigration might promote a successful Rubio or Christie candidacy, before Trump begins to rack up delegates.

Obviously, the elite’s worried about losing Latino votes in the general election. But they can’t really be stampeded by Latino Decisions polls designed to panic GOPs into thinking that if they don’t immediately embrace the Gang of 8 they’ll never win more than 27% of Hispanics again, can they? To defuse the amnesty issue with the base, all that’s really required is moving from the Gang of 8’s “Amnesty First” position to the tough “Enforcement First” position of the Gang of 8’s most respectable foes (at NumbersUSA and the Center for Immigration Studies). That position still holds out the hope of legalization for current undocumenteds (that’s what comes ‘second’) even as it tramples on the dream of Latino activists that the border will never really be enforced (and that we’ll get an ongoing stream of future Latino undocumenteds). You’d think the prospect of getting more than Romney’s 27% of the Latino vote — if maybe less than George W. Bush’s mythical 44% — while moderating a future tide of mostly Democratic immigrants, might be accepted by Beltway strategists as a reasonable fallback position. But no!

I used to think the answer to the mystery was that it was all about Jeb — i.e., the push for amnesty was specifically designed to promote a Bush candidacy in 2016. Yet the Bush campaign is dying and the elite’s still clinging to amnesty. So that can’t be it.

It’s the money, then? So many consultants and lobbyists putting their kids through college by promoting the Chamber of Commerce/Fortune 500/Silicon Valley immigration agenda that they can’t afford to turn on their paymasters? But isn’t the political elite — at least one member of the political elite — supposed to have a strategic vision that transcends today’s personal economic concerns? Anyway, once “comprehensive” amnesty dies the K Streeters could immediately go into business selling their clients loopholes and guest-worker exemptions. Their children will not suffer.

Is the problem the mechanics of throwing amnesty overboard–e.g. how do you get Rubio to embrace Enforcement First (and he’s already close) if Christie and Kasich still push comprehensivism? But what’s the point of having a semi-shadowy Beltway elite if it can’t manipulate its pet presidential candidates?  Anyway, whichever candidate ditches amnesty will win, and Kasich will lose.

The mystery remains. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that there’s one thing Rove & Co. care about more than what they say would happen to their nation with Trump as Commander-in Chief. That is the end of their Amnesty Fantasy.

__________

** — In other words, I’m not talking about taking out some attack ads calling Trump a hypocrite on immigration (because one of his projects employs illegals). I’m talking about actually caving –switching to oppose Schumer/Rubio style “Amnesty First” amnesty (whether done all at once or “piecemeal,” whether it ends in citizenship or some other kind of legalization.). …

Something odd about Tavenner’s role here, no? ‘There are huge problems with this program that I put in place’ washex.am/1QxEVZJ

“You may leave here for Four Days in Space, but when you return it’s the same old place”:  I just learned that P.F. Sloan, the legendary L.A. songwriter/singer who mysteriously disappeared for a couple of decades, has died. His Wikipedia entry has most of the details. I sense from the minimal response to my tweets about him that he’s not a revered figure on the East Coast. So a few other things:  1) He’s way more than “Eve of Destruction,” his most famous song. He was signed to a local black record label when he was 13. When I heard him recount it, he was billed as “Little Phil Sloan, the White Boy Who Can Sing.” He was out of work at 15 (the label went broke) and started writing surf tunes. That’s him singing falsetto on “Little Old Lady from Pasadena.” 2) He co-wrote  “I Found a Girl” (for Jan and Dean) and “Let Me Be” (the Turtles) and “Secret Agent Man.” He pretty much created the “Grass Roots.” He put on his pants one leg at a time, but once his pants were on he made hit records.  3) He was in the Wrecking Crew! 4)  He embodied L.A.’s Second City problem, which in folk-rock translates into the subconscious assumption that anything coming from the gritty streets of West Hollywood can’t be authentic or profound. You get a partial pass if you lived in Laurel Canyon. 5) Specifically, people in the East seem to see Sloan as a slightly dumber, more earnest version of Bob Dylan. Which I guess he sort of was. Dylan famously dissed him during a concert in LA. (Then again, didn’t Dylan diss his own son?)  But Sloan was so talented he made it work. “Eve of Destruction” may be a little “naive,” as Sloan later said, but it’s powerful and builds to an effective crescendo. (“Hate your NEXT DOOR NEIGHBOR. But don’ forget to say Grace.”) It’s no more naive than 70% of the posts on Daily Kos ( 99% when the topic is immigration). In a way, it is a blog rant before it’s time. 6) My guess: What’s missing from Sloan, compared with Dylan, is romantic, egomaniacal rage. 7) I bet Sloan had more Top 20 hits than Dylan. 8) And did Dylan ever write a song about how other countries are ungrateful for US foreign aid (“When the Wind Changes”), I ask you? You could sing that at a Commentary fundraiser. 8) My favorite Sloan song is the faux-Dylan “Halloween Mary.” It comes from the ’60s! 9) I saw Sloan perform in a small club in Hoboken, in the 90s, after he reemerged. There were about 8 people there, six of them clutching Sloan’s (low-selling, rare) solo albums for him to sign. He was charming. 10) His best story involved him going to buy a guitar at a famous Hollywood guitar store at age 13. Elvis Presley walks in. He’s there to have a guitar gold-plated. Elvis shows him how to play “Love Me Tender.” Then he walks upstairs. Before he disappears behind a curtain, he turns and says, “You’ll do all right, kid.” 11) A couple of years ago, someone invited me to a big holiday party given by, yes, Frank Luntz. As I’m leaving I learn that P.F. Sloan had been there, but I’d missed him. Left behind on the gift table was a signed copy of the sheet music for “Eve of Destruction. ” Posterity can be cruel.

A Litmus Test for the Litmus Test: Has Marco Rubio really changed his mind and abandoned the principles behind his old “Gang of 8” immigration amnesty bill in favor of a ‘secure the border first’ approach? Or has he simply changed tactics, preferring to cut the Gang of 8 bill up into pieces and pass them separately?

There’s a fast, cheap, simple test to find out the answer! It’s to ask Rubio this question:

You say the American people have to be shown that border security measures (like a fence, and the e-Verify computerized system for checking legal status in hiring) are in place and working before we begin debating what to do about the 11 million or more who are here illegally. But do you rule out any temporary, probationary or provisional legalization or authorization before the border security measures are fully in place — having survived legal challenge — and are shown to be working?

Why is this crucial? Because the central issue in the mainstream immigration debate is whether legalization will come before enforcement measures take effect.  If legalization comes first, skeptics argue, the enforcement will never take effect as immigration activists and their lawyers move to block the border wall, etc. That is what happened, basically, with the 1986 reform legislation — legalization happened but promised enforcement measures were blocked or never materialized.  Without added enforcement, the argument goes, there’s no assurance we won’t get another, new wave of illegals drawn by the expectation that they, too, will eventually be legalized like the preceding waves.

But if legalization really can’t happen until after enforcement is in place, then the pressure for legalization from potential beneficiaries will guarantee the enforcement measures are actually implemented — and we should able to stop the next wave.

That idea — ‘enforcement first’ — seems reasonable enough but has been a total deal-breaker for Democrats and immigration activists. They argue that anti-amnesty types will never be satisfied by any level of enforcement. Anti-amnesty types suspect the real reason for the hang-up is that activists and their backers don’t want to stop future waves of illegal immigrants –– out of ethnic solidarity, or a desire for inexpensive labor, or what appears to be a majority Mexican belief that the U.S. simply has no right to enforce its Southern border against Mexican nationals who want to come North.

The Gang of 8, which included Rubio, avoided “enforcement first” with a clever trick: Illegals would indeed be legalized first –a few months after the bill passed — but only on a “provisional” basis. They wouldn’t be able to get permanent legal status until various (in practice, ephemeral) enforcement benchmarks had been reached.  The set-up was a scam at its core because even “provisional” legal status would shift the balance of power firmly in favor of those trying to undermine enforcement. After all, if the wall wasn’t built, or e-Verify wasn’t implemented, were the millions of “provisional” work permits already given going to be revoked? Answer: No. The ACLU, La Raza and Democratic pols would in practice, be free to try to stop enforcement in the courts and the bureaucracy. Soon they’d have millions more new illegal immigrants to amnesty.

The Gang of 8’s scam isn’t dead. Speaker Paul Ryan’s immigration plan — posted on his web site — repeats it, granting quick “probationary status” and leaving only the transition to permanent legal status contingent on enforcement.

Does Rubio’s plan continue the scam as well? That’s the crucial question. It’s hard to tell, from his recent pronouncements.  Rubio’s good at hiding the ball — he doesn’t address the “when, exactly, are they first legalized” issue head on. If you hear him on Hannity, it sounds like he hasn’t ruled out some sort of instant “temporary” legalization. But if you carefully parse his words on NPR, it sure seems (at 1:23) like he says illegals can come forward and apply for permits only “after” the enforcement has actually happened. [Update: The same goes for his answers to The Guardian a month ago.] Is that what he meant?

I’ve asked his office. Others should ask him too.  We shouldn’t have to parse words. The fact that he’s left the answer as vague as he has until now suggests what the answer is. I think I know what the answer is! But politicians sometimes can be nailed down to positions they don’t want to take. And the remote possibility that Rubio’s actually had some sort of conveniently timed conversion experience shouldn’t be completely dismissed — it would, after all, unlock the path to the Republican nomination for him.

I’ll let you know the answer when/if I get it.  (You can ask me then if I believe it.) If Rubio persists in trying to fudge this litmus test, we’ll be able to safely conclude he hasn’t ruled out a Gang-of-8 scam along the lines of Paul Ryan’s proposal. And he’ll only move further in that direction if he gets the nomination and starts his big Latino play.

Theranos should have had a test this simple and effective!

P.S..: The same test works for Cruz, who also says he will “secure the border first.”

Update: No answer from Rubio’s press office (as of Saturday 11/14).

“I WANT IMMIGRATION REFORM TO PASS”-I’ve noticed some new hits on this 6-mo old post on Cruz supporting legalization kausfiles.com/2015/05/21/cru…

White Mischief: In a heartening spasm of modesty, Paul Krugman seems to admit that the standard liberal menu of policy goals — “universal health care, higher minimum wages, aid to education, and so on” — are not sufficient to address the large social problem revealed by the Deaton and Case study on rising death rates among American middle-aged whites, especially those with fewer skills. (“At this point you probably expect me to offer a solution,” Krugman writes, “But … “)

P.S.  Assiduous tweeter Richard Yeselson nevertheless rises to defend the incrementalist liberal welfare state agenda, even in the context of the White Despair problem:

Let’s just get to the German level (forget Scandinavia), then we can sort out the other issues. This is the *easy* stuff.

Hmm. The deck chairs on the Titanic were the ‘easy stuff’! Krugman’s agenda items aren’t deck chairs, but they don’t look like lifeboats either.** I’d like to know what we’re going to do about the iceberg.

P.P.S.: “What is the ‘iceberg,’?” Yeselson asks. A: The iceberg is what Krugman (and Douthat) are writing about, namely workers losing what Deaton calls “the narrative of their lives”  because the American economy and culture are not providing the means and meaning they’d expected, probably due to large “tectonic forces” (like technology) that are beyond easy political control.  Simple economic growth — even growth with low unemployment rates, as now — doesn’t seem to be the answer for these people.  A Krugman-style admission that we don’t know what the answer is seems like a heartening first step. ***

__________

** —  ‘Hey, we now have the social safety net of a “mid-level OECD country.” Doesn’t that make you feel better about your life?’

*** — I especially don’t see how increased lower-skiled immigration, which inevitably depresses the wages of lower-skilled workers, will even partially cure this “White Despair” problem. I know immigration is sometimes offered up as a solution to the prospect of “secular stagnation.” I can see where it could stimulate overall growth (i.e., higher GDP).  But I don’t see how more immgrants will help the struggling, unskilled middle aged folks whose low-skill labor market they flood, and who are now showing up dead. But maybe there is some magical property of immigration I’m missing. …

Workplace Etiquette Experts Nail It! “Too many gushing emails about Mrs. Clinton’s looks could cause her to wonder … whether [her staffers] are being sincere, according to workplace etiquette experts.” —WSJ reports

Jeb! campaign update: Who’s that coming down the hall? Could it be SeppuKama!

Sometimes if you shift your mental paradigm, everything clicks into place. My previous paradigm for the House Freedom Caucus was “principled anti-Establishment Tea Party conservatives.” But now they’ve now boosted Rep. Paul Ryan’s Speaker bid in a slippery, improvised procedure that circumvented their own rules on endorsements (which require an 80% majority). They did this even though Ryan is the Establishment’s Dream Speaker and probably the GOP’s most relentless plotter for amnesty and mass immigration (as revealed in a just-released PBS Frontline documentary).

So I’m trying out a new paradigm. The new paradigm is ‘the House Freedom Caucus is idiots.’ And now everything’s all falling into place. Like these data points:

— After making serious anti-Ryan noises and boasting about how they’d bounced John Boehner and Kevin McCarthy,  they were pushovers once Ryan met with them and apparently made some not-in writing promises — actually more like “signals that he was willing to do things differently.” Signals! Well all right then!

— Ryan seems worse, from a principled Tea Party point of view, than either Boehner or McCarthy. He’s much worse on amnesty, and he’ll be harder for a caucus of 40 to push around on other issues. Brilliant work.

— They (or, rather, less than 80% of them) threw their previous Speaker candidate, the competent and respectable Daniel Webster, ignominiously aside, even though Webster had met the 80% requirement. [Bus metaphor here?-ed Over dead body]

— The point of the caucus was supposedly that they enhanced their power by acting like a bloc. (“if we didn’t stand together, I don’t think we’d be here today talking about who might be the next speaker of the House,” said Rep. Justin Amash, a member.) The 80% bar was set so high because all the caucusers were to be bound by an endorsement. By abandoning unity when it counted, they become just another group in which maybe 25 members feel one way and 15 members feel the other way. In what sense are they still the mighty conservative bloc they advertised themselves to be, as opposed to a coffee klatch that provides an open mic for Raul Labrador’s pirouetting pronouncements?

— They are obsessed with petty procedural changes in the House while they ignore the major substantive issues — Ryan’s immigration crusade, but also his troubling welfare plans — that could permanently change America for the worse.

— Many of these procedural changes –e.g. “giving individual members a chance to offer amendments and to have their ideas voted on on the House floor”— seem designed more to allow Freedom Caucus members to preen and show their constituents what fighters they are rather than to get things done.

Hmm. No discordant data points! I think I’ll stick with this new paradigm unless something happens to call it into question. …

Update: Freedom Caucusers are now getting some phone-melting blowback from constitutents. If they are as weak as they seem to be they may be forced to show some spine. …

Update 10/23: Politico reports that the Club for Growth and Koch Industries — both pro-amnesty — are the biggest donors to Freedom Caucus members. Explains a lot. …

Which GOP campaign! will SeppuKuma visit next? …

The law of supply and demand suggests that an increase in immigrant labor will lower wages. That’s what opponents of increased immigration (including opponents of Rubio-style “comprehensive” reform) say. For decades, the major bit of discordant data has been Prof. David Card’s study of the Mariel boatlift — a “natural experiment” in which 125,000 Cubans landed in Miami in 1980. Did they suppress local wages? Card found that they didn’t — a counterintuitive finding often cited in surveys of the academic debate on immigration, such as this New York Times Magazine article

Card documented that blacks, and also other workers, in Miami actually did better than in the control cities. …

Not so fast! Prof. George Borjas, whose work tends to uphold the conventional supply-demand view, has just gone back and reexamined the Mariel data, looking specificially at what happened to less-skilled workers (high school dropouts).  It turns out they took a beating!

The absolute wage of high school dropouts in Miami dropped dramatically, as did the wage of high school dropouts relative to that of either high school graduates or college graduates. The drop in the relative wage of the least educated Miamians was substantial (10 to 30 percent). … [E.A.]

Card may have missed this because he lumped high school dropouts in with high school graduates, whose wage was unaffected. (At least 60% of the Marielitos were in the lowest skilled, high-school dropout group.)

Borjas also compares Miami’s experience with cities that had similar growth patterns before the Mariel labor “supply shock” (as opposed to Card’s “control” cities, which were chosen partly because they had similar growth patterns after the shock). Borjas finds “the relative decline in the wage of low-educated workers in Miami is much larger when we compare Miami to cities that had comparable employment growth.” It makes sense that if wages in Miami went down, but you compare Miami only with cities where wages also went down, you’ might miss some of the relative Miami decline.

In both academic and political terms, this is a BFD. It looks like the law of supply and demand works. More immigrant workers translates into lower wages. The most conspicuous, unassailable finding to the contrary has apparently just been demolished. A major prop in the arguments for greater low-skilled immigration (including arguments for amnesty) –‘What about Mariel?’ — would seem to  have disappeared, though the other side has yet to be heard from. (And they will be heard from.) Borjas’ study only just went public.

I prefer the one where Q.E.2 morphs into Chelsea Clinton …

Robots and Social Equality: In Reason, Ronald Bailey concedes that “automation has taken over a lot of the routine physical and intellectual tasks that once were done by middle-income workers.” This has “resulted in a more polarized economy, where highly skilled workers in such fields as infotech and biotech are richly rewarded while a greater proportion of the workforce toil at relatively lower-paying service jobs.” [E.A.]

But don’t worry! The prosperity created by robotic achievements will lead to  “a rising demand for services, involving non-routine tasks in which workers have a comparative advantage over machines—ones requiring interpersonal interaction, flexibility, adaptability, and problem-solving. ”

Like, what services, for example? Bailey cites MIT economist David Autor:

Work, he argues, is evolving away from assembly-line rigidity and back toward a more pre-industrial paradigm populated by “new artisans.” Perhaps more chefs will prepare fine meals in the homes of clients, dramatists devise elaborate virtual environments as entertainment, tailors create one-of-kind bespoke garments. [E.A.]

Hmm. Notice anything about these “pre-industrial” jobs? Maybe that at least two of the three involve a servile relationship to someone on the right side of the “more polarized economy”?  One reason arguments like Bailey’s seem so sterile and unconvincing is that he (like many libertarians) doesn’t even consider that this might be a problem.

Maybe there’s an answer to this fear of servility, After all, some servants are upwardly mobile rather than self-effacing ( see: Affleck, Ben; nanny). And if everybody is providing artisanal services to everybody else, one man’s master one day can be his bespoke tailor the next. In theory. But it’s hard to see how a polarized economy produces that sort of universal hybrid part-time servility — especially when many people who have the skills to work effectively on an assembly line don’t have the skills for “adaptability and problem solving,” let alone sucking up to clients in their homes.

I say worry.

P.S.: And no, mass unskilled immigration won’t help.

Daily Caller vindicated in Menendez case? I have no idea how this turns out — I’m a spectator with a rooting interest in favor of the Daily Caller reporters. But a) please don’t ignore the story just because it is salacious and tabloidy (there are other similar stories waiting in the undernews!);  b) how dumb was Sen. Menendez to request a DOJ investigation? …

More on Politico‘s “room service” posts: Politico reporter Marc Caputo took intense umbrage** at a recent kf tweet and post criticizing Politico‘s habit of running pieces that effectively give sources (e.g., political aides and strategists) several screens’ worth of space to air their BS spin. I may have incompetently made my point — which is not that Caputo (and his co-author, Anna Palmer) are somehow, in any way, in the tank for Bush. Reporters who write source greasers aren’t in the tank for the source or for the source’s preferred candidate — they’re gathering chits with the source in the hope, maybe, of later using the source to uncover some really important truth, maybe a scoop that blows the source’s candidate out of the water. Politico’s innovation seems to be to make the source-greaser a recurring feature — not just something that happens at the beginning of a beat — by running stories on the order of ‘What Bush Aides Think.’ Next week it will be ‘What Cruz Aides Think’ or ‘Why Walker Isn’t Panicking.’ And it’s certainly not just Caputo and Palmer. It seems like an institutional problem, (which is the reason I didn’t use their names). ***

Does any other press outlet think this journalistic form is worthwhile? It’s an invitation to misinformation. Caputo and Palmer’s piece is headlined “5 Reasons Bush isn’t freaking out about Trump.” Jeb “is sticking to his plan,” they say. “Jebworld isn’t freaking out.” His “supporters aren’t panicking.” Do we really believe this? Do Bush’s aides and supporters really believe this? Do Caputo and Palmer really believe this? They stick in semi-red flag phrases like “sources close to the candidate insist” [Emphasis added]. Doesn’t that translate as “They may be lying to us but we’re not going to go to great lengths to uncover what they really think, at least not in this piece”? The result is long paragraphs of uninterrupted spin and brave-frontery with only an infrequent and brief dissonant note (e.g. “Trump’s demise has been long-predicted and refuted, though.”) Here, for example, is the entirety of the fourth reason Bush isn’t panicking:

Underpinning Jeb, Inc.’s belief in its candidate is that no other Republican candidate can match his record as governor: high job growth (more so than any other GOP candidate), a pioneering school-choice voucher program, fighting the teacher’s unions, eliminating a stocks-and-bonds tax, expanding gun-ownership rights, restricting abortions and cutting so much in spending that an ally dubbed him “Veto Corleone” for “whacking” so many parts of the budget.

This is “the Florida story” that Jeb, Inc. has already started to tell. The campaign and his backers say that, in the end, most Republican voters don’t know it and only identify Bush as the son and brother of former presidents. And Bush supporters are counting on Bush’s long history of working to elect Republicans — in contrast to Trump, who has supported and contributed to Democrats.

“Mr. Trump doesn’t have a proven conservative record,” Bush said in Iowa. “He was a Democrat longer in the last decade than he was a Republican.”

Look for Bush’s campaign and super PAC to continue to hammer this message over and over again in the coming weeks as both look to introduce him to the broader electorate.

I’d thought I was too crude to say this was like printing a Bush press release. But maybe not!

“[H]e’s doing all the right things,” Richard Cullen, chairman of McGuireWoods and an apparent Bush backer, says of his candidate. Does Cullen actually think this? Because if he does he’s too dumb to be quoted, even in a source-greaser.

The hoary Journalism 101 rule about calling the other side for comment may or may not be obsolete in the Internet era. But I always thought the point was to get these people off their talking points, not to demand more.

Update: Sure enough, only a few days after Caputo and Palmer said big Bush donors “aren’t spooked by Trump” and were standing by Jeb, a second Politico story by Eli Stokols reported — surprise! — “Jeb Bush’s fundraising juggernaut shows signs of slowing.” According to one Jeb backer quoted in this second piece: “The debate performance scared a few people.” Hmm. The debate was August 6. Caputo and Palmer’s piece came out August 21. Surely there were signs of donor dissatisfaction, even among big donors, by then. Did Caputo and Palmer really want to find them? Or was their story just not that kind of piece? … More: A week after Caputo’s “his supporters aren’t panicking” piece he’s back with the real story:  “Three top Jeb Bush fundraisers abruptly parted ways with his presidential campaign on Friday, amid internal personality conflicts and questions about the strength of his candidacy.” …

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** — Caputo’s response took the form of an evening of lively trolling, in which he tweeted about my “Stormfront take,” later adding a Joycean rush of phrases like “knuckledragging liar” and “Grand Kleagle.” All good fun. He acknowledged these tweets were basically BS designed to give me a “taste of [my] pandering lies.”  Almost like a form of performance art! The trouble is, he’s a reporter. He’s not supposed to write BS, even if falsely calling critics racists “builds followers” by stirring up Twitter. Where does Caputo the Troll stop and Caputo the distinguished Politico reporter begin? (I ask you!)

*** — Politico‘s run the same sort of give-one-side-its-say piece on immigration.

Politico has a habit of credulously printing sources’ spin with little or no counter-commentary. It’s a service they provide! Here’s Exhibit #27,593.  … I suppose the argument is that if Politico reporters showed skepticism — or called the other side(s) for comment — then the sources wouldn’t give them the story in the first place, and Politico‘s readers would never learn that Bush aides aren’t panicking about the Trump surge because  (Reason #4) “no other Republican candidate can match [Jeb’s] record as governor.” He was known as “Veto Corleone!” ….

Hillary Clinton’s campaign probably thought it a brilliant move when she ‘went big’ on immigration in May, pledging to out-amnesty President Obama by extending the latter’s (now-stalled) executive amnesty to the parents of so-called “Dreamers” (undocumented immigrants brought over the border as children by … well, their parents).  One of the challenges Hillary faces, after all, is preserving enough of the Obama coalition to win. She might not replicate Obama’s turnout of African-Americans — but she could maybe make up for it by increasing the Democratic “lock” on the growing Latino vote.

That’s the theory. But now Donald Trump’s campaign is demonstrating that opposition to illegal immigration is much deeper and more salient in the population at large than many analysts thought. Hillary does need some non-Latino voters! The more the better, in fact. In the past she might have appealed to them with a few Clintonian feints in their direction — saying she was “adamantly against illegal immigration,” waffling on the drivers’ license issue, saying unaccompanied minors streaming across the border “should be sent back,” or complaining about the hiring of people on street corners “waiting to get picked up to go do yard work and construction work,” all of which she’s done in the past. But now Hillary’s so far out on the pro-illegal please-Rep. Gutierrez limb she can’t make these obvious moves without seeming to flip-flop — double-crossing, or at least brutally disappointing Latino immigration activists. …

Any Weapon to Trump: Here’s National Review editor Rich Lowry on Twitter, explaining why his magazine’s otherwise excellent recent immigration editorial  is pitched as a dis of Donald Trump:

saying we need a fence is not a major contribution to debate, especially if you don’t understand or address the rest

& I have little time 4 anyone who says we need immigrants to do jobs americans won’t, even if he wants to build phenomenal wall

Trump has indeed said that, in a confusing CNN interview where he seemed to be veering in the direction of Mike Pence’s “Touchback” scam.**  It’s a silly thing to say (Americans will do a lot of jobs if you pay them more). But then again, Marco Rubio has said it too. Guess he’s through at National Review! There may in fact be nobody for Lowry to endorse, since practically every major Republican candidate has probably said it, at one point or another. Here’s Jeb!’s version, for example (“labor-intensive jobs that few Americans want”). …

Simply put, there are three big steps NR rightly says should be completed before we can even talk about amnesty (a fence, an e-Verify-style employment checking program, and a system to track visa overstays). Trump wants to finish one of them before any legalization, which is one more than his rivals have committed to finishing before legalization. If the rest of Trump’s immigration plan is vague and ill thought-out — well, Bush and Rubio have explicit, well-developed plans that are completely wrong (because they put amnesty first, meaning the enforcement can then be blocked, and they dramatically boost legal immigration). So why blast Trump? I suspect another imperative is at work — i.e. to get him out of the race …

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** As Mark Krikorian notes, it would be better for Trump to simply repeat the sensible advice of NR‘s editorial:

“[N]o new national policy resolving the status of resident illegals should even be contemplated until real border security has been achieved. Republicans should press for enforcement as a standalone proposal, not as part of a wider immigration compromise. Once that enforcement is in place, then we can open the discussion about broader subsequent reforms …”

New NBC Post-Debate Poll: Luntz Hardest Hit kf’s Post-Debate Insta-Analysis: Holding up! Except that ¿¡Jeb!? seems to have been a much bigger loser than I’d thought. (But he’s taking the gloves off! Look out.) Trump did well. Walker lost ground mainly because the pack caught up to him .Always trust content from kausfiles. …

P.S.: Why did Trump do well? Take his five-part answer to Megyn Kelly’s (completely legitimate) you-use-sexist-language question: a) “Only Rosie O’Donnell.” Best laugh of the night; b) Truthfully admits OK, it wasn’t only Rosie O’Donnell; c) “[T]he big problem this country has is being politically correct.” Another winning line with GOPs, and maybe others; d) “[W]hat I say, and oftentimes it’s fun, it’s kidding.” So he’s not that big a jerk. This was basically Arnold Schwarzenegger’s winning formula in the key debate before he was elected governor. Schwarzenegger is at least as infamous a pig as Trump. …

If Roger Stone told Trump he’d lost this debate, Stone probably should have been fired. …

Maybe it was in part this false worry (that he hadn’t done well) that caused Trump to get personal in his distracting attacks on Kelly (including part (e) of his answer), which were almost certainly not helpful to him in the short run. (Trump may think they intimidate future interlocutors, which seems unlikely.) If you’re going to make it personal, why not go to the root cause and say “I’m sorry if Mr. Murdoch, who owns your network, doesn’t like my stand on immigration and would like to see me disappear. He has dinner with Valerie Jarrett and supports Obama’s and Senator Rubio’s amnesty bill.”

P.P.S.–Die Naterdammerung!  Josh Marshall doesn’t like Trump but admirably stood fast against the left’s massed Nates (Silver and Cohn) who thought Trump did himself in. The NYT‘s Cohn predicted Trump “probably won’t receive as much media attention coming out of the debate as he did in the weeks before.” Nailed it. … Cohn is clearly a smart and knowledgeable analyst. One day he’ll be right about something, which will further burnish his reputation. ….

Why did Fox try to take out Trump? My guess: Unsophisticated viewers probably think Rupert Murdoch ordered the hit.

But viewers who are more sophisticated about the news business know it’s more complicated than that:  Murdoch and Roger Ailes, who runs Fox News, don’t always agree. Fox reporters and commentators have independent agendas — they want to protect their own reputations for integrity, and they also want to put on a good show. Many may sincerely dislike Trump, or think his candidacy would be bad for the nation. Virtually the entire Republican establishment wants Trump gone, after all.

Viewers who are really sophisticated about the news business think Murdoch ordered the hit.

Today’s Alpha debate: Seems as if almost all of the candidates who talked gained while they were talking, except maybe Paul and Kasich. The question is whether they made enough of an impression or faded into the woodwork. Trump and Jeb! helped each other by fighting it out (though Jeb!’s initial immigration answer was shaky, as was his  what-do-you-tell-the-troops Iraq answer).  … Since they can’t all gain–it’s a zero sum game–my reluctant guess is the loser is Walker. He did fine, but he now has rivals like Christe, Cruz, Rubio and Huckabee who might steal some of his votes. …

Update: Now watching Fox’s post-debate spin, which is all Oh-now-Trump-has-blown it. Theyv’e said this before! I’m skeptical. He was Trump. He did fine. We don’t have time for tone!  But I’ve been wrong before too. (I thought Rick Lazio cleaned Hillary’s clock.) …

Update: Fox also suspiciously Rubio-boosting — and Bret Baier says it as if he seems guilty about it … It also seems telling that Fox isn’t showing any of Trump’s sound bites (in which he allegedly blew it and began the end of his candidacy). If they’re so bad, why not show them? … … [OK, they’ve finally showed one answer.] …

More: They aren’t talking about Jeb! hardly at all on Fox. It’s almost as if he wasn’t there. But I’m not clear about the relationship of Fox to reality at this point  It’s like eavesdropping on an afterparty at the Comintern. …

The Larger Issue! Washington Post (finally) fingers immigration as the cause of Trump’s surge. But authors Jim Tankersley et. al. still manage to place the Trump phenomenon in a tradition of “less educated people” who think that “foreigners are to blame for [their] personal economic woes.” Perhaps these voters’ anger is self-serving, a belief that if they are falling behind they must be “being taken advantage of.” At best, they express a legitimate NIMBY-like interest that must, alas, be cast aside in the march of progress. … But there’s a difference between being a hand-loom weaver threatened by powered machines and being an uncredentialed, low-skilled worker when it looks like virtually all low-skilled work will be either shipped overseas or (if it must be done here) performed by hungrier, lower paid immigrants or guest workers. In that case, you aren’t saying immigrants are “taking our jobs” so much as that we’re heedlessly and unnecessarily creating a society where if you aren’t smart or schooled or beautiful (or lucky) or an upwardly-mobile newcomer you are a loser. [It’s odd, I agree, that Donald Trump would be the bearer of this grievance.]  If you prefer a country where anyone who works every day earns enough to live a life of dignity, does that make you “less-educated” or more American? …