“Pondering the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.
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Paul Krugman: Time to Borrow
The campaign still has three ugly months to go, but the odds — 83 percent odds, according to the New York Times’s model — are that it will end with the election of a sane, sensible president. So what should she do to boost America’s economy, which is doing better than most of the world but is still falling far short of where it should be?
There are, of course, many ways our economic policy could be improved. But the most important thing we need is sharply increased public investment in everything from energy to transportation to wastewater treatment.
How should we pay for this investment? We shouldn’t — not now, or any time soon. Right now there is an overwhelming case for more government borrowing.
Let me walk through this case, then address some of the usual objections.
E. J. Dionne, Jr.: We Have to Stop Demeaning or Ignoring Trump Voters—Elitism Won’t Defeat Trumpism
Anyone with confidence in the American people (and I have quite a lot of it) had to believe that Donald Trump’s unpreparedness, instability and just plain meanness would catch up with him eventually. This, as the polls show, is what happened over the last week or so. Simply by revealing who he really is, Trump sent millions of voters fleeing him in disgust.
But understanding what still attracts many voters to Trump is important, not only to those who want to prevent Trump from staging a comeback but also to anyone who wants to make our democracy thrive in the long run. Those of us who are horrified by Trump’s hideous lack of empathy need empathy ourselves. [..]
Nonetheless, to ignore the real pain experienced by Trump voters is an even bigger mistake. As a practical matter, we will not ease the divisions in our country his candidacy has underscored if we do not deal with the legitimate grievances of his supporters. As a moral matter, writing off Trump voters as unenlightened and backward-looking is to engage in the very same kind of bigoted behavior that we condemn in other spheres.
Richard Wolffe: For Donald Trump, this was more than a terrible week. It was a turning point
What have you accomplished this week? Whatever it is, you don’t come close to Donald Trump.
Trump has demolished his campaign, his brand and his party. He has squandered his vice-presidential pick and his convention, and several battleground states along with them. He picked several fights he could not win, and showed no sign of learning from his own failure.
It would be tempting to say this was just another week in the bizarre life of the Republican presidential nominee.
But it wasn’t. This week was a decisive turning point in the 2016 election, and there have been remarkably few of them in an campaign that is supposedly volatile.
In fact, the volatility and unpredictability of this election doesn’t come from polls or votes, but from the character of a single man: Donald J Trump. The real surprise of 2016 is how constant this contest has been.
Richard North Patterson: Donald Trump And The Looming GOP Apocalypse
Before the conventions, the esteemed pollster Peter Hart boiled 2016 down to this: “The Republicans have a party problem, the Democrats have a candidate problem.”
A few weeks later one can argue with this: the Democrats’ success in Philadelphia bolstered Hillary Clinton, and it is surely true that Republicans have a Trump problem.The latest embarrassments — inviting Russian espionage; encouraging Putin’s aggressions; and demeaning the immigrant Muslim parents of a dead American soldier — are mere symptoms of his appalling unfitness to lead us. But on a deeper level Hart is right about the GOP — Trump is the expression, not the cause, of a fractiousness and incoherence too deep for one election to resolve.
True, the friction between the Clinton and Sanders forces in Philadelphia was more apparent than anything we saw in Cleveland — if for no other reason than Republicans are better behaved than Democrats. But the Democrats’ shared DNA is clear enough: diversity, social justice, tolerance, environmental stewardship, opportunity for all, and government as a means of ensuring that Americans don’t fall through the cracks of a free-market economy. As a party they remain viable, and even vital.
Robert Kuttner: Donald’s Unlikely Gift To Hillary
This was going to be a tough election for Hillary Clinton. She represented continuity and establishment politics, at a political moment when unhappy voters wanted change.
She was pushing 70. Most of her prospective GOP opponents were more youthful, some of them a whole generation younger, reinforcing the image of Clinton as a candidate of the past.
She had a lot of baggage — Bill’s affairs, potential embarrassments from Clinton Foundation deals, a very long public record of public service, with inevitable gaffes and contradictions as targets. Even her strength in national security and foreign policy was blemished by misadventures such as the email mess.
And then along came Trump.
At first, it seemed as if Trump, in the role of faux populist, tribune of working class discontent, and media genius, might mean big trouble. But lately, Trump has been making Clinton look not just presidential; compared to Trump, she’s Jefferson, Lincoln and Roosevelt.
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