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: How Democrats Can Deliver on Health Care
“Democrats need to have a positive agenda, not just be against Donald Trump.” How many times did you hear pundits say something like that during the midterm campaigns? In fact, you’re still hearing it from people like Seth Moulton, who’s leading the (apparently failing) effort to block Nancy Pelosi from returning as House speaker.
What makes this lazy accusation so annoying is that it’s demonstrably, arithmetically wrong. Yes, Trump was on everyone’s mind, but he was remarkably absent from Democratic messaging. A tally by the Wesleyan Media Project found that the 2018 elections stand out not for how much Democrats talked about the tweeter in chief, but for how little: Not since 2002 has an opposition party run so few ads attacking the occupant of the White House.
So what did the campaigns that led to a blue wave talk about? Above all, health care, which featured in more than half of Democrats’ ads. Which raises the question: Now that Democrats have had their big House victory and a lot of success in state-level races, can they do anything to deliver on their key campaign issue?
Yes, they can.
Eugene Robinson: Trump is not a champion of human rights. He is a clueless clown.
In Riyadh, they must be laughing at President Trump. In Pyongyang, too, and in Tehran. In Beijing and, of course, in Moscow, they must be laughing until it hurts. They look at Washington and they don’t see a champion of freedom and human rights. They see a preening, clueless clown.
Trump’s reaction — or non-reaction — to the Saudi regime’s brutal killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi is a holiday-season gift to autocrats around the globe. It shows them that if you just shower Trump with over-the-top flattery, feed him some geopolitical mumbo jumbo and make vague promises to perhaps buy some American-made goods in the future, he will literally let you get away with murder.
Gary Younge: From Trump to Boris Johnson: how the wealthy tell us what ‘real folk’ want
I remember the first time I started to understand Donald Trump’s appeal to white, working-class Americans. It was in 2016, a few days before the Iowa caucuses, and he was being introduced by Jerry Falwell Jr, the eponymous son of the famous preacher, in Council Bluffs. Falwell told the crowd that Trump had picked him up in his private plane and offered him dinner. He had been expecting something lavish. “But you know what we had?” he asked the crowd. “Wendy’s.” The audience cheered and laughed along with him.
In that moment it occurred to me that many in that gymnasium, in a town where one in seven lived in poverty and the median household income was $47,097 (£36,813), saw something of themselves in this New York billionaire. His life might have been nothing like theirs, but his tastes appeared familiar. If they ever got rich – and a significant proportion of white working-class Americans sincerely believe that one day they might – then they could be like him, rather than a snob like Mitt Romney, whom they had rejected in a previous election.
Emily Thornberry: The famine facing Yemen is a war crime – it must be investigated
Today the UN security council will debate a UK-drafted resolution containing a rather gentle entreaty to the warring parties in Yemen. It will ask them to take “constant care to spare civilian objects, including those necessary for food production, distribution, processing and storage”.
If that sounds like the safety instructions for a new vacuum cleaner, then welcome to the world of UN resolutions. But what it actually reveals is a far darker, more shameful truth. The truth of a Saudi-led coalition, armed by Britain and the United States, which from the very start of the conflict in 2015 has sought to use starvation as a weapon of war.
Erwin Chemerinsky: Where is the progressive interpretation of the US constitution?
Over the course of American history, there have been great gains in individual freedom and enormous advances in equality for racial minorities, women, and LGBT people. But much remains to be done. Unfortunately, we are now at a profoundly challenging moment for these values. We have a president who is not committed to them, and for the foreseeable future we face the prospect of a hostile supreme court.
But all this will change. Someday there again will be a majority on the court committed to using the constitution to advance liberty and equality. In the meantime, progressives must fight to provide the foundation for their work. In particular, they must develop and defend an alternative to the conservative vision of the US constitution.
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