Ben Sasse: Come On, There's Got to Be a Better Option Than These Two
Excerpts from a lengthy Facebook post from Ben Sasse, Republican senator from Nebraska: Our problems are huge right now, but one of the most obvious is that we've not passed along the meaning of America to the next generation. If we don't get them to re-engage -- thinking about how we defend a free society in the face of global jihadis, or how we balance our budgets after baby boomers have dishonestly over-promised for decades, or how we protect First Amendment values in the face of the safe-space movement -- then all will indeed have been lost. One of the bright spots with the rising generation, though, is that they really would like to rethink the often knee-jerk partisanship of their parents and grandparents. We should encourage this rethinking. So . . . let's have a thought experiment for a few weeks: Why shouldn't America draft an honest leader who will focus on 70% solutions for the next four years? You know . . . an adult? In case you're suspecting this is building up to a Ben Sasse, independent conservative 2016 bid, he throws cold water on the idea.) (Two notes for reporters: **Such a leader should be able to campaign 24/7 for the next six months. Therefore he/she likely can't be an engaged parent with little kids. **Although I'm one of the most conservative members of the Senate, I'm not interested in an ideological purity test, because even a genuine consensus candidate would almost certainly be more conservative than either of the two dishonest liberals now leading the two national parties.) Imagine if we had a candidate: ...who hadn't spent his/her life in politics either buying politicians or being bought …who didn't want to stitch together a coalition based on anger but wanted to take a whole nation forward …who pledged to serve for only one term, as a care-taker problem-solver for this messy moment …who knew that Washington isn't competent to micromanage the lives of free people, but instead wanted to SERVE by focusing on 3 or 4 big national problems, such as: A. A national security strategy for the age of cyber and jihad; B. Honest budgeting/entitlement reform so that we stop stealing from future generations; C. Empowering states and local governments to improve K-12 education, and letting Washington figure out how to update federal programs to adjust to now needing lifelong learners in an age where folks are obviously not going to work at a single job for a lifetime anymore; and D. Retiring career politicians by ending all the incumbency protections, special rules, and revolving door opportunities for folks who should be public "servants," not masters. What am I missing? More importantly, what are the people at the Fremont Wal-Mart missing? Because I don't think they are wrong. They deserve better. They deserve a Congress that tackles the biggest policy problems facing the nation. And they deserve a president who knows that his or her job is not to "reign," but to serve as commander-in-chief and to "faithfully execute" the laws -- not to claim imperial powers to rewrite them with his pen and phone. I love Ben Sasse right now. But I'd point out that what he sees as one of the most pressing problems facing the country -- "entitlement reform so that we stop stealing from future generations" is a non-issue to a majority of the electorate. In 2012, Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan ran on tackling entitlement reform; voters chose Obama. This time around, Trump ran against any cuts in entitlements. The largest unified chunk of the GOP primary electorate chose Trump. One of the brutal truths of the past two cycles is that real entitlement reform is impossible, at least with the electorate we have now. If you're thought you haven't heard as much about entitlement reform this cycle because the numbers had somehow improved, they have not. As Charles Lane noted: Seventy-five percent of planned federal spending between now and the end of the next two presidential terms is mandatory: Social Security, Medicare and other entitlement programs, plus interest on the national debt, according to Congressional Budget Office forecasts. That money is going out the door no matter who's president. Eugene Steuerle of the Urban Institute has come up with an "Index of Fiscal Democracy" to express this vast, automatic commitment of resources, and the preemption of actual political choice it represents. The higher the index, the more possibilities we have for actually governing ourselves. At present, the index stands at 19.7, which is the percentage of federal receipts left over after mandatory spending and interest, according to data compiled by Steuerle's collaborator Caleb Quakenbush. By 2026, however, the index will sink to 1.7, absent reforms. That's the sliver of money we'll have to pay for research, natural disasters, defense and everything else. Nobody's going to deal with this until the crisis is right at our door. And the American people chose to ignore the problem, again and again, year after year. Hillary's Opening Stumble At first glance, Hillary Clinton is the luckiest Democratic nominee in the history of the party. (Right now, Bernie Sanders supporters are screaming, "SHE'S NOT THE NOMINEE!" but that is really just a matter of time.) How often do you compete against an opponent with a disapproval rating in the 60s and avoid a serious third-party option? (Note that even if someone jumps in, any independent will not appear on the ballot in Texas.) And yet, here was her first shot at the likely Republican nominee Wednesday: "We can't take a risk on a loose cannon like Donald Trump," said Clinton, who remains on track to be the Democratic nominee. At one point, she criticized Trump for saying women should be punished for having illegal abortions. When Anderson Cooper reminded Clinton that Trump walked back those comments, she brushed that aside by saying, "Well, he's a loose cannon." And for good measure, she added, "He is a loose cannon, and loose cannons tend to misfire." 
"LOOSECANNON LOOSECANNON LOOSECANNON LOOSECANNON HA HA HA HA!" Later in the interview, she said that Trump had extreme views, mentioning his opposition to raising the minimum wage, skepticism about climate change, and abortion. All past criticism of Trump stands, it's just with an opening move like this, it's easy to start wondering whether Hillary Clinton might just be bad enough to blow an easy layup against Trump. Remember, historically, late spring and early summer is a much more decisive moment in a presidential race than may seem at first glance. In 1996, Democrats ran attack ads defining Bob Dole in the eyes of millions of Americans who didn't pay regular attention to politics. Democratic Super PACs did the same thing to Romney in 2012. They already announced plans to do the same this year, too. Few Americans don't have an opinion on Trump already, and it's unknown how many could be persuaded out of a negative opinion. And yes, it will be a long, ugly general election fight, so both candidates will have time to make more attacks. But this is each candidate's moment to define each other before the general electorate, maybe the best, before the attacks become part of the general background noise of the election. For all of Trump's flaws, his "Crooked Hillary" is a pretty good one, because it covers so much territory. Hopefully he'll expand on this in greater detail, focusing on the idea that when she was Secretary of State, the Clinton Foundation became a favor factory, trading American foreign policy decisions in exchange for donations. Sure, the "loose cannon" charge is accurate, and Hillary may get some mileage out of reusing Lyndon Johnson's attack on Barry Goldwater; she'll contend that Trump is too impulsive, too temperamental, too reckless to be trusted with the powers of the presidency, including the authority to launch nuclear weapons. (At some point, some pro-Hillary group will offer a new version of the "Daisy Ad", right?) But calling Trump a "loose cannon" also reaffirms he's unpredictable and his unpredictability, his constant ability to be saying something new, is one of the things that makes the media and his fans love him. This attack actually subtly reaffirms one of Hillary's weaknesses: everything that Hillary says feels like it was run through twelve different focus groups before being cleared by the lawyers and getting final approval from the Candidate Spontaneous Statement Approval Committee. Remember when Obama clobbered Romney 81-18 on the question of who cares about people like you? If that lone quality was enough to put Obama over the top -- Romney beat Obama on a range of other qualities -- then if you're Hillary Clinton, doesn't that seem like the most natural and important area to hit Trump? The defining identity of Trump in the eyes of his supporters is that he's the rich guy who stands up for the little guy. He thinks America's blue-collar workers are getting the shaft, and he's willing to call out other rich people for exploiting them. If you're Hillary, don't you want, as quickly as possible, to make the case that Trump doesn't care about people like you? Don't you want to define him as selfish and out for himself and treating people badly and not sharing your values at all? Even if you can't shake the faith of Trump supporters, don't you want to make sure everyone else feels like Trump would serve his own interests, not national interests? And at a moment when so many independents are wavering about Trump, does Hillary really want her case against him to focus on the minimum wage, climate change, and abortion? She really doesn't want to run as the candidate of change from the Obama years, does she? She really isn't willing to run as a candidate who thinks Washington has seen egregious mismanagement in recent years -- at the Department of Veterans' Affairs, at the lack of cyber-security at the Office of Personnel Management, the NSA handing Edward Snowden the keys to the kingdom . . . "Fast and Furious." The IRS scandal. The $2 billion spent building Healthcare.gov. Lying about Bowe Berghdahl. "Companies like Solyndra are leading the way toward a brighter, more prosperous future." You don't have to be a crazy right-winger to look at the American government and conclude it's regularly failing at basic duties. And yet somehow, Hillary Clinton is running as the candidate of the status quo and faith in the federal government. Instead her argument is that Trump is a loose cannon, ready to misfire. Indeed, Madam Secretary, Trump would be the worst kind of cannon fire since . . . oh, I don't know, Benghazi? ADDENDA: Yuval Levin realizes that soon the intelligence community will start giving "very sensitive briefings to a woman who is clearly guilty of gross failures to protect classified information and a man who seems less trustworthy and disciplined about what he allows out of his mouth than almost everyone in America." Look at the bright side, Yuval. The CIA can and should insist upon in-person briefings and not e-mailed ones for Hillary, and as for Trump blabbing, relax; he probably won't read his.  | 
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