Tuesday Musings on what would have been my father's 95th Birthday

My father was typical of the challenges Politicians face when figuring out how to carve out a winning coalition of voters.

His instincts were New Deal, but he was prone to believing the powerful manipulated the system to their advantage.  While I do not believe he would have voted for Donald Trump if he were alive, I don't know.  His thought process definitely deteriorated as he aged and he did see the usefulness of owning guns (Through his window, he shot woodchucks messing with his garden while sitting in his wheelchair) and in his younger days enjoyed a walk through the woods looking to harvest a deer.  I have no doubt that my younger father would have seen in the idiocy in allowing people to own automatic and semi-automatic weapons of mass destruction.

And exactly why isn't what happened in Las Vegas terrorism?  Is it because the perpetrator was a white guy who was not a Muslim.  Since when did terrorism become only a Muslim thing.  Anybody who commits random acts of death causing violence is a terrorist!!!

David Brooks really highlights the problems politicians face.

"The Trump story is that good honest Americans are being screwed by aliens. Regular Americans are being oppressed by a snobbish elite that rigs the game in its favor. White Americans are being invaded by immigrants who take their wealth and divide their culture. Normal Americans are threatened by an Islamic radicalism that murders their children."

"This is a tribal story. The tribe needs a strong warrior in a hostile world. We need to build walls to keep out illegals, erect barriers to hold off foreign threats, wage endless war on the globalist elites".

"Somebody is going to have to arise to point out that this is a deeply wrong and un-American story. The whole point of America is that we are not a tribe. We are a universal nation, founded on universal principles, attracting talented people from across the globe, active across the world on behalf of all people who seek democracy and dignity."

"The core American idea is not the fortress, it’s the frontier. First, we thrived by exploring a physical frontier during the migration west, and now we explore technological, scientific, social and human frontiers. The core American attitude has been looking hopefully to the future, not looking resentfully toward some receding greatness."

But that is a complicated message in today's sound bite world.  But is one that Democrat's need to co-opt to bury the GOP in the mess of lies they are caught in.   Link to another Krugman column calling out GOP Lies

"The Republican Party is supposed to be the party that stokes dynamism by giving everybody the chance to venture out into the frontier of their own choosing — with education reform that encourages lifelong learning, with entitlement reform that spends less on the affluent elderly and more on the enterprising young families, with regulatory reform that breaks monopolies and rules that hamper start-ups, with tax reform that creates a fair playing field, with immigration reform that welcomes the skilled and the hungry."

"It may be dormant, but this striving American dream is still lurking in every heart. It’s waiting for somebody who has the guts to say no to tribe, yes to universal nation, no to fences, yes to the frontier, no to closed, and yes to the open future, no to the fear-driven homogeneity of the old continent and yes to the diverse hopefulness of the new one."

Link to today's Brooks Column