The Pros, The Cons: Clinton v. Trump

Wall Street Journal editorial board's analysis of two deeply flawed candidates. Each article is worth reading, but I took the trouble of identifying the salient points (categorized pro and con, as I see them) for each candidate. 

"The Costs of Clinton"

Pros: 

• Might be willing to work with Republicans across the aisle.
• Has shown more respect for America's role in maintaining global order than Trump has.
• Is more hawkish than Obama.

Cons: 

• Would continue President Obama's "progressive march to a French-style welfare and regulatory state" (higher taxes, entitlement spending, subsidies and price controls in ObamaCare, regulations on businesses, enforcement of "liberal cultural values on schools and churches").
• Result of this approach is more years of slow economic growth.
• Less restrained by the courts and more progressive judicial domination for years.
• Foreign policy failures include misjudging Putin ("reset"), support for the nuclear deal with Iran, withdrawal from Iraq, abandonment of Libya.
• More entitlement spending means less spending on military and defense.
• Has a "penchant for secrecy and political paranoia," evidenced most recently in her decision to use a private email server for official business and her subsequent refusal to release records.
• Scandals past and current, including pay-to-play structure via the Clinton Foundation, reflects the problem she has with "blending public office with private gains."
• If elected, she would likely be investigated by Congress for these scandals, so her administration would be hamstrung from the outset.

"The Gamble of Trump"

Pros: 

• Political disruption ("a broken Washington needs to be shaken up").
• His policy impulses are geared to liberate the U.S. economy to faster growth.
• Trump could get a faster start on governing by adopting economic reforms that the GOP-led house has already drafted.
• Trump could fill the Supreme Court seat with a conservative justice. 
• Trump is committed to rebuilding U.S. defenses.
• He is more "aggressive against the Islamic terror threat" than Obama has been.
• Checks and balances in Washington would constrain any "authoritarian" tendencies some fear in a President Trump.
• Likewise, an "awakened" media would "dog his Administration with a vengeance."

Cons: 

• Trump does not have a "coherent and firmly held word view formed by decades of reading and experience."  
• It's hard to predict how Trump would respond to "shocks and surprises" that all presidents face. 
• Trump's position on trade ("a zero-sum game" that America is losing) could cause a recession.  
• His politics are "almost entirely personal, not ideological." 
• Trump's behavior during the campaign has been characterized by "harsh rhetoric" that has alienated and offended women, minorities, and younger voters.
• There's no assurance Trump will keep his promises to change Washington. Angry or disappointed voters could end up repudiating the GOP in 2018 and return us to an "all-progressive government" in 2020. 
• The populist impulses that have emerged from Trump's candidacy can be dangerous when "rooted too much in ethnicity or class."
• Despite his assurances that he wants to build U.S. defenses, he is a "rookie" in world affairs and would be "unusually dependent on his advisers--if he listened to them."
• His "bromance" with Putin is troubling, and Trump's "instincts to retreat to a Fortress America could invite more aggression," not only from Russia, but from China and Iran, as well.

Conclusions

"The case for Mrs. Clinton over Donald Trump is that she is a familiar member of the elite and thus less of a jump into the unknown, especially on foreign policy. The case against her is everything we know about her political history.  

"The Wall Street Journal hasn't endorsed a presidential candidate since 1928, and if we didn't endorse Ronald Reagan we aren't about to revive the practice for Mrs. Clinton or Mr. Trump. Yet one of them will be the next president. The choice comes down to the very high if relatively predictable costs of four more years of brute progressive government under Hillary Clinton versus a gamble on the political unknown of Donald Trump."

It's Not Her Fault!

I'm waiting--in vain, no doubt--for the intellectually honest people of the left (or is that an oxymoron?) to speak frankly and objectively about their candidate. Those of us on the right have been quite frank about "our" candidate. I would expect no less from the left.

Instead, what I'm hearing is par for the course: it's a witch hunt, it's a Republican conspiracy, it's the Russians, and now, the latest, straight out of, you guessed it, academia: "Email-gate is a bitch hunt, but the target is not Hillary Clinton. It’s us."

Ah, yes! The gender card! Before that, the race card! It's never about their guy's malpractice, their gal's malfeasance. The left has become a cliche, and the few good people I know on the left should say so. But...dollars to donuts, they won't.

Prove me wrong, gentlemen and ladies of the left! Let's see whether you're even capable of self-scrutiny.

"Hillary Clinton's Emailgate is an Attack on Women," by Robin Lakoff

  

"The only reason the whole email flap has legs is because the candidate is female. Can you imagine this happening to a man? Clinton is guilty of SWF (Speaking While Female), and emailgate is just a reminder to us all that she has no business doing what she’s doing and must be punished, for the sake of all decent women everywhere. There is so much of that going around" (Robin Lakoff, Professor of Linguistics, U.C. Berkeley).

Texting During Class?

Yes. When it's part of the class assignment.

As an introduction to our next themed unit (Digital Literacies), I began by dividing the class in half, using alphabetized last names (A-F, G-V) and then juggling a few to make sure the class was evenly split. With about 4 absences, I had 11 students in one group and 12 in the other. Then, I asked who had a smart phone. All did.

Then I instructed each group in turn as follows:

Look amongst yourselves and find a partner that you don't know very well.

This isn't hard to do, by the way. We're only in the 6th week, and most students tend to get acquainted with the person sitting directly beside them (or none at all, if they're shy). However, I do have a few sociable students who sit together every class meeting and chat before, during, and after class, and I wanted to be sure those students selected someone else for this social experiment.

After students in each group had partnered up, I directed the partners in Group A to exchange cell phone numbers, and I directed partners in Group B to put their cell phones away (i.e., out of sight). The request to have students exchange cell phone numbers was greeted with a laugh and a few comments ("stranger danger!"). It occurred to me only then that perhaps this could have been a problem, and later I directed students to delete these numbers after our class activity if they wanted to.

Then, I directed members of Group A to remain in the classroom and "have a conversation" with their partner using text messaging only--no talking allowed. Members of Group B, meanwhile, were directed to leave the room and find a spot in the hallway (there are alcoves, seating areas, and benches) and have a conversation with their partners.

Conversation was timed (10 minutes).

When the 10 minutes were up, I invited students from Group B back in to the room, and then directed the students to open their Writing Journal and record their experience of carrying on a conversation via text or face to face with a person they don't know very well.

Then, I asked group members to find another person from within their group that they did not know very well and reverse roles. This time, Group B got to remain in the room and text while Group A was sent out of the room to talk face to face. At the end of the second session, students were again asked to record their experiences.

After a short break, we watched MIT professor Sherry Turkle's TED Talk called, "Connected but Alone?" (link below). An edited interview with Turkle is among the required readings in our Digital Literacies unit, so I thought it would be a good introduction to the concepts the students would be reading about this week. Follow up discussion focused on some of the more salient points Turkle was making, having to do with the impact technology has (or is having) on our ability to interact socially with others, the lost art of communication, the importance of solitude, the use of technology, particularly robotics, as a substitute for human connections.

I asked the students to type up their journaling and bring to the next class meeting, and will be very curious to read their reactions to the "social experiment" of having to spend an entire 10 minutes talking face to face with someone they would otherwise probably not have connected with. One student, in fact, who was in the first group sent out of the room to "talk," said as she returned, "That was a long time!" Interestingly, she's among the "chatty" group I mentioned earlier, and she's also one of my most active texters, who I'm constantly reminding to put away her phone during class discussions).

We ended class the way I always end, with a short video and brief writing response on a 4x6 notecard for attendance (I do this to ensure students will stay to the end and not slip out during break). In keeping with our theme, we watched poet Rives' brilliant presentation, "A Story of Mixed Emoticons," in which he tells a little story illustrated by emoticons (link below). The question I asked students to respond to on their attendance card was, "Has texting ruined or enhanced the art of communication?"


I'm reading their responses now. Some are very insightful.

********** 

"Connected but Alone?" (Sherry Turkle, TED 2010)

"A Story of Mixed Emoticons" (Rives, TED 2008)

A Civil Conversation About Incivility? It's Possible!

The following is an actual Facebook conversation that took place over the course of a few hours on a leisurely Saturday afternoon in August between me and someone I know indirectly (the husband of one of my Facebook friends) but had never met.

The subject had to do with the life-sized nude statues of Donald Trump, created by an anarchist art collective called INDECLINE, that started popping up in several U.S. cities during the month of August 2016. 

One of my friends shared a funny article about the statues. A friend of hers responded by saying the statues were “stupid and un-funny” and wondered whether people would be laughing if a similar statue were displayed of Hillary Clinton. 

I happened to agree with the self-described “party pooper” and ventured into the conversation: “No possible way someone does this to any other candidate, but particularly Hillary Clinton,” I wrote. Someone else concurred, asking if this was free speech "going too far."

That's when Aaron entered the fray. Here's the ensuing conversation. 

Aaron: I'm not understanding something about the reactions here. How is this statue free speech going too far? Saying that it isn't right because "how would you feel if it was Hillary?" shows implicit bias in the judgment of the work. The fights against sexism, racism, ableism are about equity, not equality. When Hillary or any other candidate makes the kind of social gaffes that have come to characterize Trump's campaign, then they are fair play for this kind of ridicule too. Is the statue un-funny, crass, and poor taste? Sure, but that would seem to be the point, reflecting your reactions back on the subject. If Trump can get away with disgusting things like calling out a judge as unfit because of his heritage, or using loaded gender stereotypes to attack female journalists all under the protections of free speech then this certainly should be protected too. Don't make the mistake of conflating your sensibilities with what is protected as speech under our constitution; something I personally find far more unfunny than this statue or the parks department's cheeky response. 

 Me: Fair enough. My only thought here has to do with how people would respond to an over-sized, butt-naked, flabby-bellied, dimply-bottomed, saggy-breasted Hillary Clinton statue with goggly-oggly spectators taking photos and posting them far and wide on social media. Not only would the feminists be outraged, there would be "hell to pay" for whoever the perpetrator was. Politics played dirty (tit for tat?) is fine until a woman is the target (unless, of course, the woman is a Republican, I guess). That's my beef. 

 Aaron: I would agree that someone erecting a statue as you've described would cause outrage. But "tit-for-tat" I think misses my point about the difference between equity and equality; fairness versus sameness. I would have a hard time finding a fair reason Hillary should be depicted as you've describe, but regardless whether I agree or not, I can see a valid argument for the statement the Trump statue makes based on the behavior of the candidate. I think it is completely valid to debate if it would be fair treatment to put up a similar statue of Hillary on the merits of the piece and the statement it makes. What I do not think is right, is doing so just because they did it to Trump. 

 Me: If I'm understanding you correctly (making a distinction between fairness versus sameness), my response would have something to do with examining the thing that makes one type of vulgarity (Trump's) different from another's (Clinton's). Those who find Trump distasteful (Republicans included) have no argument with your point that he deserves this humiliation. Yet what is distasteful about Trump on one level, many find distasteful about Clinton at a higher level. Crude, crass, boorish behavior is bad and should be called out, maybe mocked and satirized. But abuse of power, dishonesty, corruption, not to mention what many of us believe to be abhorrent views about abortion, is, at least in my view, equally distasteful, perhaps even more so. It's easy to deride Donald Trump and say he deserves it. But Hillary Clinton also deserves derision. The distinctions may not be "equal," but in my view, it's "sameness" by analogy, if not equality. Not sure if that makes sense. Hope I haven't offended.   

In either case, I fail to see how full-bodied disproportionately exaggerated over-sized anatomically incorrect nude statues of the objects of our derision helps the debate. All it's done is plunged us several meters deeper into the gutter. And fair or not, my guess is, now that the door has been shoved wide open, we can expect more of the same. Because "tit for tat" is unfortunately how the game is played.

Aaron: I agree with you here. I don't think it helps advance debate either and would rather the collective discussion focus on issues and finding common ground. I think the door has been shoved open but I think I would disagree with you about who did the shoving in this case...Perhaps I am naive, but I believe we can play the game how we choose and tit-for-tat isn't the only way to engage in political circus. What ever happened to "turn the other cheek"? 

 Me: Disappeared with all the other Biblical ideals. 

 Aaron: That may be... but that is getting into a whole other topic. I want to say thank you. I've found this discussion helpful in clarifying some of my own thoughts and I feel like I have more insight to other opposing perspectives. Even though we don't agree on these issues, being able to have a lively back and forth that doesn't devolve into insults and name calling is refreshing. 

So true, Aaron, and well said. I hope we (collectively) can do better, learning how to listen to and maybe even respect people who have different outlooks on life. 

Whose Sorrow is More Important?

A word about the Donald Trump/Khizr Khan kerfuffle.

While in no way excusing Trump's deplorable response to Mr. Khan's speech at the Democratic Convention, and in particular, what he said about Mrs. Khan, I find it extraordinarily disturbing (albeit not surprising) how the left-leaning mainstream media are responding to this situation. Here's how Gary Bauer, former Under Secretary of Education and Chief Domestic Policy Advisor to Ronald Reagan, put it in his daily End of Day report, which I subscribe to:

The same TV networks that have ignored the parents of American heroes who died in Benghazi in part because Hillary Clinton ignored their pleas for better security were quick to give the Kahns a big platform. Mr. Khan was a guest on CNN's State of the Union. Mrs. Khan has an op-ed in this morning's Washington Post.  

In contrast, Pat Smith, mother of Sean Smith, who was murdered in Benghazi, was treated like dirt because she attacked Hillary Clinton, not Donald Trump. MSNBC called her speech offensive and called Khan's memorable. Chris Matthews said, "I don't care what that woman [Pat Smith] up there, the mother, has felt. Her emotions are her own." The Washington Post actually "fact-checked" Mrs. Smith's heartfelt plea for justice for her son.

Double-standard much?