Monthly Archives: February 2018

Where is a progressive supposed to go?

By Kent R. Kroeger (Source:  NuQum.com, February 22, 2018)

We have two political parties in this country. The Republican Party and the Other Republican Party (also known as the Republicrats). Both are pro-War, pro-Big-Banks, pro-Government-Spying-On-Its-Citizens, pro-Corporate-Welfare, pro-Big-Oil, and pro-Big-Government.

This is not the rant of a frustrated progressive. I am a libertarian, mostly. But if I were a progressive, I would be frustrated at how my natural home — the Democrats — is inhospitable to progressives right now.

Barack Obama’s choice for Democratic National Committee (DNC) chair, Tom Perez, started purging progressives from the party’s leadership last fall and the DNC is already rigging the congressional primaries to favor DNC-approved, establishment candidates.

And the progressive media has noticed.

“On the eve of the Unity Commission, Tom Perez purges the party of a bunch of long-time progressives who were delegates,” complained progressive radio host Jimmy Dore on his YouTube podcast which attracts 300,000 subscribers. “Tom Perez is the enemy of progressives…and the friend of corporations who are screwing America.”

Asked what choice progressives have other than to stick with the Democratic Party, Dore responded, “They (the Democrats) didn’t have me last time and they lost, and they’re not going to have me next time.”

On his podcast, The Humanist Report, Mike Figueredo argued that Perez cloaked the purge in identity politics presumably to mute any opposition to the move: “If you are going to have a diverse coalition of people serving in the DNC then you have to appoint people that are cognizant of the corporate policies that disproportionately harm people of color and marginalize minorities like the LGBTQ community.”

Figueredo noted the irony in Perez using identity politics to shut down the voices of progressives, many of whom belonging to those same identity groups.

“Just saying we are more diverse now is not enough,” said Figueredo. “(Perez) is hiding behind identity politics to promote (his) corporate agenda covertly.”

Across the progressive media landscape, the belief that progressives no longer have a home in the Democratic Party grows in numbers.

But if progressives aren’t welcome in the Democratic Party, “Where in the name of God is a progressive supposed to go?”

We are unlikely to see a viable third-party in this country. Our first-past-the-post electoral system suppresses the potential for one, and the co-opting of the political Left, first by FDR’s New Deal and then by the Clintonian Democrats, are the final kill shots to any chance of a progressive third party in this country.

The only way progressives achieve a meaningful seat at the political table is if they take back the Democratic Party. And that won’t be easy.

When its the Democrats beating the drums for war against Russia and Syria, you know the two-party system is dead

In fairness, the current two parties are ideologically distinct if identity issues are your primary concern. A vivid dividing line separates ideological Republicans and Democrats on gender pay equity, immigration, abortion, and LGBTQ rights, as well as other issues such as climate change.

But reality (as in, the quantifiable evidence) says this country continues to make progress on many of these identity issues, despite our dysfunctional political class. Advances in medical science will rapidly replace the country’s current pro-abortion consensus with one more aligned with pro-life sentiments. The status and rights of the LGBTQ community have advanced so far in the last 10 years that, today, gay married couples, on average, earn more than straight couples. As women increasingly graduate from college at higher rates than men, in the not-so-distant future we will see the gender pay gap all but disappear.

This evidence is not a way of saying we should stop being vigilant in protecting existing rights or not push to achieve the rights and equities enumerated in our Constitution. But it is dubious that identity issues have the long-term viability to be a consistent energy source for the Democratic Party. And Donald Trump won’t be president forever…right?…. RIGHT?!

Besides, far bigger issues loom on the horizon:

  • Economic inequality,
  • resource scarcity,
  • the impact of environmental degradation on the world’s most vulnerable populations,
  • meeting the growing energy needs of a planet largely dependent on relatively low-cost energy sources,
  • sustainable economic growth,
  • rising college costs,
  • a two-tiered health care system where half the people have a great health care plan and the other half whose health care plan is buying the generic equivalent of Vicks® NyQuil™ at Walgreen’s,
  • the worldwide proliferation of advanced military technologies,
  • and our country’s seemingly perpetual war status that never seems to solve any problems.

Did I say ‘loom’? Hell, those issues are already with us, front and center.

Forgive me, but it is hard to get worked up over transgender bathroom rights or 13 Russian dudes posting satanic Hillary Clinton memes on Facebook when we are less than 10 years away from Iran developing a nuclear bomb, and that is assuming we stick with the Obama administration’s Iran agreement.

If the U.S. bails on the agreement, a nuclear Iran will happen in the next five years, which will set off a cascade of other countries being “forced” to develop or purchase their own nuclear weapons capabilities. That list will include: Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Egypt. Add to that list, Argentina and Brazil, both technologically advanced societies capable of developing nuclear weapons, who may see Middle East nuclear proliferation as their opportunity to join the elite nuclear club.

And then there is North Korea. Unless some serious high-level negotiations occur in the next few years, Pyongyang will soon have a reliable intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) platform ready to threaten not just the U.S., but the entire world.

And, yet, there is little daylight separating the two political parties on the best course of action regarding North Korea. Trump’s bombastic tweet storms directed towards North Korean leader Kim Jong Un may have startled the American public and the international community; but in practical terms, U.S. policy continues to demand pre-conditions prior to any direct talks with North Korea. That was G. W. Bush’s policy, Obama’s policy and now Trump’s.

It is only a few Democratic progressives, led by Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard, and libertarian Republicans offering a new strategy with respect to North Korea. A strategy where pre-conditions are dropped in return for face-to-face talks with the Pyongyang regime on the status of their nuclear weapons program.

More broadly, Gabbard fights a lonely battle, to the consternation of her own party, to move U.S. military and foreign policies away from the current neocon-inspired regime change strategies in Syria, Iran, Afghanistan and North Korea, towards more direct negotiations.

Gabbard, who remains persona non grata with the Democratic Party’s leadership over her endorsement of Bernie Sanders (and savage critique of Hillary Clinton) in the 2016 presidential campaign, persists in her campaign to move her party away from the disastrous neocon policies promoted by Clinton and other Democratic leaders throughout the last two decades.

“We have spent trillions of dollars, lost thousands of service members and seen hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians killed in the course of our counterproductive regime change wars, which are creating more devastation, human suffering, and refugees while strengthening terrorist groups like ISIS and al-Qaeda,” says Gabbard. “People are coming to realize the destructive and counterproductive nature of decades of broken foreign policy.”

Considering, prior to Trump, we had a Democratic president for eight years, Gabbard’s critique of U.S. foreign and military policy strikes some in her own party as a betrayal. Add to that Gabbard’s public skepticism of U.S. intelligence’s quick judgments regarding Syrian President Bashar  al-Assad’s use of chemical weapons against his own people, and the Democratic Party establishment couldn’t resist renouncing her.

Howard “Do You Remember When I Was Once Called a Progressive” Dean, who seems to be on MSNBC 10 minutes after the top of every hour, said of Gabbard’s call for more evidence before authorizing military strikes against Syria, “This is a disgrace. Gabbard should not be in Congress.” Hillary Clinton loyalist Neera Tanden, the President of the American Center for American Progress, suggested that Gabbard’s skepticism was grounds for voting her out of office.

As if we needed more evidence, today’s mainstream Democratic Party and its propaganda garrisons, CNN and MSBNC, have zero tolerance for opinion diversity and their treatment of Gabbard and other progressives reinforces this fact.

Sanders, Gabbard and other progressives refuse to be blamed for the Democratic losses in 2016, but DNC Chair Tom Perez and many big Democratic donors continue marginalize that wing of the party and give Perez a few more months to work up some dossiers and those remaining progressive resistance fighters may be gone too.

Calling Donald Trump stupid, insane, dangerous and cruel is not a plan — Lets talk about some real issues

Increasingly, it is apparent the Democrats still lack a coherent agenda for the 2018 midterm elections, beyond being the anti-Trump party. And its not like that strategy won’t work for them. The GOP is headed for a historic defeat in nine months due to chronic Trump’s incapacity to alter his own behavior for the good of his own party.

Tibetan monks pouring through Trump’s speech manuscripts 24-7 for 10 years couldn’t discern every falsehood, half-truth and lie he has coughed up in just his first year as president. And, frankly, its not worth their effort. A third of the public will support Trump no matter what he says, and another 15 percent will always be open to supporting the Republican Party as long as the Democratic Party refuses to address their core concerns (immigration, taxes, and the size of government).

It is not helping the Democrats that its own social justice warriors persist in a full-metal jacket meltdown over Donald Trump while greater threats to our country gather strength. And, no, none of those threats are pussy-chasing Hollywood and East Coast liberals.

The Rise of China and Our National Debt

Lets start with the semi-cordial but still adversarial relationship that will define the remainder of this century: The U.S. and China.

China is this country’s greatest threat since the British and the War of 1812. The Chinese, however, won’t be sending their Navy up the Potomac. The Chinese are an economic threat, not a military one. Not yet at least.

In 2014, Frank Kendall, the former undersecretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics in the Obama administration issued a warning to the defense and intelligence community that U.S. military superiority relative to China was being “challenged in ways that I have not seen for decades,” adding, “This is not a future problem. This is a here-now problem.”

Unfortunately, the U.S. cannot afford to fight five potential wars in the Middle East and Asia and also confront China’s increased power projection in the South China Sea. Our defense budget, as large as it is, isn’t built to fight more than two land wars. With a significant occupation still ongoing in Afghanistan, a growing presence in Syria, and a number of looming threats in North Korea, Iran, on the Arabian peninsula, and on the African continent, any kind of military confrontation with China is off the table. Strategic containment is the only viable option.

So, we might as well just welcome our future Chinese landlords and be happy if they provide our kids and grandkids with meaningful employment. Consider it a moral victory if they don’t lock the factory’s exit doors.

And why accept China’s ascendancy?

First, China is too large and integrated into our own economy for us to stop their rise.

Second, the Chinese do not present themselves as an existential threat to the U.S.  They are cautiously open to American culture’s intrusion into Chinese life, even as they work hard to protect and promote their own cultural dominance. Their unspoken but palpable sense of ethnic superiority aside, they have great food, great cultural arts, aren’t all religiousy like some people, and have two Disney parks. China circa 2018 bears no resemblance to Soviet Russia circa 1958, despite sharing a Communist ideological heritage. There is simply too much that binds the U.S. and China for all-out war to ever break out between the two countries.

Third, if our political and business leaders didn’t want the Chinese rising to dominance in the 21-st century, they wouldn’t have let our national debt balloon to $20 trillion, of which $6 trillion is owed to foreign countries, and over $1 trillion of that to the Chinese alone.

This country is drowning in long-term debt and our hyperpartisan-induced gridlock renders us unwilling and incapable of addressing the issue. To leaders in both Republican parties, the cries of deficit-hawks like Senators Rand Paul (R-KY) and Mike Lee (R-UT) are background noise. Their predictions of economic ruin if we don’t end the large government deficits never materialize. Instead, the economy marches forward and the deficit-hawks are simply ignored.

That will change. The economists don’t know when, but when it does, without a viable progressive party to represent those most defenseless, this country’s annual federal budgets will become nothing more than a defense budget, debt financing payments, and dramatically reduced Social Security* and Medicare programs.

[* The Social Security Trust Fund has never been “put into the general fund of the government.” But if you think Social Security will survive a serious federal government debt crisis untouched, you will be gravely disappointed.]

We face so many potentially calamitous issues that, if this country doesn’t build a genuine political alternative to the wine and brie set that own the current two-party system, we will not recognize this country 50 years from now.

I admire Bernie Sanders. I voted for Bernie Sanders. But I don’t think Bernie Sanders has workable answers to these massive structural problems. I wish he did. I trust his character and intentions, we just don’t have the money for his solutions. And some of his solutions would never work if fully implemented. For example, there is credible evidence — though not conclusive — that raising the minimum wage lowers employment levels for low-skilled workers, the very people Sanders and the progressives want to help.

But this country still needs Sanders, and people like him, fully engaged in the middlemost of the toppermost political battles that are going to determine our national trajectory going forward.

I am not a progressive, so I shouldn’t be giving advice to them I suppose, but if progressives don’t fight the establishment Democrats that hijacked the party in 1992 and haven’t let go since, we will all, liberals and conservatives alike, be forced to pick through the smoldering wreckage of what was once the world’s greatest power.

祝你好运!

{Send comments to: kkroeger@nuqum.com}

About the author:  Kent Kroeger is a writer and statistical consultant with over 30 -years experience measuring and analyzing public opinion for public and private sector clients. He also spent ten years working for the U.S. Department of Defense’s Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness and the Defense Intelligence Agency. He holds a B.S. degree in Journalism/Political Science from The University of Iowa, and an M.A. in Quantitative Methods from Columbia University (New York, NY).  He lives in Ewing, New Jersey with his wife and son.

If not for the mainstream media’s obsession with Trump, Clinton would be president right now

By Kent R. Kroeger (Source:  NuQum.com, February 21, 2018)

With special counsel Robert Mueller indicting 13 Russian nationals and three Russian entities last week for allegedly meddling in the 2016 presidential election, charging them with conspiracy to defraud the United States, the news media and their pre-approved pundits promptly delighted themselves with conjecture about how the Russians were the difference in the 2016 election.

“Friday’s indictments strongly suggest that the millions of Russian rubles spent to support and give credibility to Trump’s anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, anti-black activist themes had to have had an impact in such an extremely close presidential election,” wrote CNN legal analyst Paul Callan soon after the indictments were announced. “Given what the indictments reveal, there is a strong probability that Russia’s surreptitious and illegal support handed Trump the presidency.” (I guess James Comey is off the hook.)

The major news outlets (except Fox News) are increasingly accepting the conclusion that the Russians tipped the election in Donald Trump’s favor. Unfortunately, the facts implicate the major news outlets as the primary force behind Trump’s election. Had the mainstream news media balanced their political coverage in 2016 Hillary Clinton would be president right now.

An Alien’s View of the 2016 Election

Imagine that somewhere in our galaxy there is a colony of alien jurists who conveniently appear on isolated planetary objects whenever their inhabitants are confused about some big question and they need an unbiased judgment.

Did the Russians change the 2016 election result?

If these aliens appeared now on earth, with no prior knowledge or biases about the 2016 U.S. presidential election, and were asked to decide if the Russians changed the outcome, their answer would likely be (in translation):

The American news media made Donald Trump a star, far beyond his merit or capabilities, and effectively ensured his electoral competitiveness and, ultimately, his victory.

Before rejecting this conclusion, consider (as the alien jurists would) the content, scope and duration of the Russian effort, as described in the Mueller indictment. The Russian operation pales in comparison to what the American news media did to help Trump.

Here are the relevant facts…

The February 16th Mueller indictment details Russia’s complex web of phony social media accounts, internet memes, Facebook ads, Twitter bots, and use of intermediaries (cut-outs) to enlist the services of “unwitting” Americans, all in an effort to achieve Russia’s operational goal of “spreading distrust towards the candidates and the political system in general.”

The Russian project, named Lakhta, had “multiple components, some involving domestic audiences within the Russian Federation and others targeting foreign audiences in various countries, including the United States,” said the Mueller indictment.

As to the impact of these intertwined efforts, Mueller’s team doesn’t go there. But they do offer interesting information on the budget and timeline of the Russian information operation. Through a Russian organization, the Internet Research Agency LLC (IRA), the indictment contends that IRA “employed hundreds of individuals for its online operations, ranging from creators of fictitious personas to technical and administrative support,” with an annual budget in the millions of dollars.

The money sums cited in the indictment are modest, but not insignificant. Reads the indictment: “By in or around September 2016, the Internet Research Agency‘s monthly budget for Project Lakhta submitted to CONCORD exceeded 73 million Russian rubles (over 1,250,000 U.S. dollars), including approximately one million rubles in bonus payments.”

Whether that monetary sum represents most of the Russian election meddling is unknown. But even if we are generous and assume the Russians spent $1.5 million-a-month for two years up to election day, that would only amount to $36 million dollars in total spending. Double that amount to account for the lower labor rates in Russia, and we are still only looking at around $80 million in equivalent spending.

And what did they get for $80 million?

  • Created hundreds of fake Facebook accounts and bought advertisements which ran between June 2015 and May 2017, primarily focused on divisive social issues of which roughly 25 percent were geographically targeted;
  • Created approximately 3,000 Facebook adverts that were possibly seen by 126 million Americans;
  • Created fake Twitter accounts and, with the help of botnets, propagated and amplified fake news stories regarding the election;
  • Through intermediaries and phony business fronts, helped fund some pro-Trump signage marches prior to the election.
  • Though not specifically linked to IRA in the Mueller indictment, the Russian military intelligence service (GRU) most likely organized the hacking of the servers of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and the personal Google email account of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta and forwarded those emails to WikiLeaks, which released them in early and mid-October 2016;
  • And undoubtedly more…

In comparison, the independent media analytics firm, mediaQuant, estimated in the year prior to the 2016 election day, Trump received $4.96 billion in “free media” compared to $3.24 billion for Clinton (see chart below).

Source: mediaQuant (2016)

Unfortunately, mediaQuant’s numbers are contaminated by the Russian factor. Thankfully, mediaQuant separates out “free media” by source which allows us (or the alien jurists) to deduct Trump’s “free media” advantage on social media (“blogs & forums) and Twitter. We are subsequently left with Trump having a $1.2 billion advantage over Clinton in “free media” within the news realms of online, broadcast, and print media.

However, what was the value of the GRU-hacked DNC and Podesta emails to the Trump campaign? According to mediaQuant’s sentiment analysis of the 2016 campaign’s “free media,” Trump’s media sentiment skewed more negative (23%) than Clinton’s (11%) in the last month of the campaign when the Podesta emails were released. Would it have been worse for Trump without the Podesta emails? Perhaps, but Trump’s coverage skewed negative relative to Clinton’s long before the release of the Podesta emails, according the Harvard University’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy (see two charts below).

Source: Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy
Source: Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy

“The daily dump of stolen emails has uncovered Clinton’s lucrative Wall Street speeches, lists of 39 potential vice-presidents and 84 potential campaign slogans, fresh questions over a conflict of interest with the Clinton Foundation and alleged advance warnings of debate questions…but there have been few revelations likely to alter the course of the race for the White House,” concluded The Guardian’s David Smith towards the end of the campaign.

Clinton supporters would disagree, but the Shorenstein Center data shows Trump didn’t close the media negativity gap until the release of FBI Director James Comey’s letter in late October. Blame Comey if you must, but Clinton supporters are barking at the wrong moon if they assert the Russian-hacked Podesta emails played a significant role in Clinton’s loss.

Instead, we are left with this simple comparison: $80 million in Russian efforts to disrupt the 2016 election, largely through memes and ads on Facebook and Twitter, versus $1.2 billion advantage in “free media” given to Donald Trump by the mainstream news media.

However, even that large monetary gap probably understates the superior impact of “free media” versus social media.

On Credibility, Print and Broadcast Media Still Trump Social Media

A communication channel’s credibility helps determine information’s likely impact on voters. Even in an age where people are getting more and more of their political information from social media, the credibility of the traditional news media still outpaces social media. According to a Pew Research Center study in February 2016, 76 percent of U.S. adults have a least some confidence in information they receive from national news organizations. In contrast, only 34 percent have at least some confidence in information garnered from social media.

Source credibility matters a lot as to whether information impacts opinions or vote preferences. In their study of economic voting in Denmark (hey, it’s country. Its relevant.), James Alt, David Lassen and John Marshall concluded, “It is primarily the objective credibility of a source and the sophistication of voters, not prior partisanship, that matters most for explaining when new information will affect political behavior.” Unsophisticated voters, as they put it, are not as likely to alter their opinions for any source, regardless of how credible the source might be.

In the final analysis, the Russians spent most of their money on an information platform people still don’t trust as much as the mainstream media. They may rely on social media more than ever for their news consumption, but the credibility required to move public opinion and behavior still resides with traditional news sources. The Russians would have spent their money more effectively bribing senior executives at the news divisions of the major TV and cable networks.

The Mainstream Media, Not the Russians, Created President Donald Trump

Answer this question: If you were a presidential candidate and God gave you the choice between receiving $80 million for a sophisticated social media campaign or $1.2 billion worth of media coverage by the major broadcast networks, online news sites, and print newspapers, what would you choose?

There is only one rational choice.

Take away the “free media” advantage CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News gifted Trump during the 2016 election, and the potential Russian contribution doesn’t come close to getting Trump elected.

That doesn’t mean the Russians didn’t try. They did. And that doesn’t mean they weren’t successful. On many levels, they were.

But they didn’t get Trump elected.

The mainstream media couldn’t turn away from the Trump phenomenon, and once they saw their ratings and readership numbers rising (as they did throughout 2016), the Trump “free media” advantage was hard-coded into the media agenda.

Where is the outrage at CNN and MSNBC for their role in the Trump victory? Why aren’t the Democrats and other Never Trumpers demanding congressional hearings on why the news networks would allow such a massive advantage in airtime and print space  for one candidate over another? Why aren’t there marches in front 10 Columbus Circle in New York City demanding answers? Where are the special prosecutors? Subpoenas? Indictments?

At most, the Russians played in the margins. Sure, in an election where 70,000 votes tipped three states into the Trump column, those margins can make a difference. But professional reviews of the Russian-created Facebook ads and internet memes suggest the Russians were not very good at using Facebook and their ad copy was more often sloppy and unprofessional than compelling and persuasive.

“They’re shitty, they’re not done super well,” says Michael Bolen, VICE.com’s senior social editor, about the Russian Facebook ads. “If I wanted to influence an actual election, this isn’t what I would do.”

Another VICE.com executive, Rachel Kelly, says the Russia-made ads she’s seen put too much text on the photos, a mistake commonly made by advertising novices.

One Russian-created meme that didn’t make that mistake was also my favorite among those released by Facebook: Hillary versus Jesus.

Where the Russians seemed to do well, however, was in syncing their social media messages with the Trump campaign’s — and that wouldn’t require any formal coordination between the Russians and the Trump campaign, just a small team in St. Petersburg to track daily content on the Trump campaign’s website and social media platforms.

From what has been revealed so far by the Mueller investigation, the Russian-sourced election content is not likely to have changed votes overwhelming in one direction. If it changed any votes, it probably changed them in both directions. More likely, the Russian meddling reinforced opinions that already existed and caused an indeterminate number of Americans to become even more disengaged with the American political system.

Instead, Clinton voters should turn their gaze towards CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, and the rest of the mainstream news media for the surprise outcome on November 8, 2016.

Frankly, if the IRA’s $80 million media campaign had determined the election outcome, instead of indicting them on conspiracy charges, the two American political parties should start a bidding war to hire them for 2020.

What the Russians definitely did in 2016 was engage in some sophisticated spycraft and they caught the Obama administration flat-footed and unprepared. Even Podesta, among other Clinton operatives, has suggested the Obama administration was negligent in its early detection of the Russian meddling and too timid in its response.

And it is not just the Russians fooling around in other nations’ internal business. The U.S. has done it as well; in fact, in 85 countries since 1945. Ask the Israelis…and the Iranians…and the Venezuelans…and the Chileans…and…you get the picture.

Once the partisan-powered hyperbole and posturing subsides and Americans have some time to dispassionately reflect on the 2016 election, most will realize our democracy wasn’t irreparably damaged, our democratic institutions, manipulated by powerful interests as they were, remained intact, and our citizens didn’t lose faith in what our founding fathers created 223 years ago.

That’s the optimistic view…

We also may have just seen the Russians win the first major battle in what will become a perpetual worldwide cyber war where every social institution and individual citizen is positioned on the front line of this new battle space.

For now, I’m going with the optimistic view, but I’m preparing for the worldwide cyber war.

K.R.K.

{Send comments to: kkroeger@nuqum.com}

About the author:  Kent Kroeger is a writer and statistical consultant with over 30 -years experience measuring and analyzing public opinion for public and private sector clients. He also spent ten years working for the U.S. Department of Defense’s Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness and the Defense Intelligence Agency. He holds a B.S. degree in Journalism/Political Science from The University of Iowa, and an M.A. in Quantitative Methods from Columbia University (New York, NY).  He lives in Ewing, New Jersey with his wife and son.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Increase the U.S. House to 6,000 members

By Kent R. Kroeger (Source:  NuQum.com, February 19, 2018)

“The Number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty Thousand, but each State shall have at least one Representative.”

         U.S. Constitution: Article I, Section 2, clause 3

It says a lot about our democracy that our Founding Fathers were worried more about too much representation than too little.

For the U.S. House of Representatives, the “people’s chamber,” the Founders set a limit on representation: a ratio of one representative for over 30,000 citizens (1:30,000). They designed a representative democracy, but not too much of one.

For a comparison, in a theoretical direct democracy, where citizens vote directly on major policy questions, that ratio would be 1:1.

Today, the average House member represents 575,000 vote eligible adults living in 290,000 households. If, when Congress is out of session, members devoted 8-hours-a-day to door-knocking, it would take almost 15 years for a House member to visit every household in their district.

If we do not expect our elected representatives to possess a deep, personal connection to a wide breadth of their constituents, there is no reason to increase the size of the House. If, however, we believe our representatives are too detached from their constituents, such as by space, interests or social hierarchies, then we need to consider changing that relationship.

In his treatise, Politics, Aristotle noted that increasing the number of people in a political unit affects relationships within that unit. With greater numbers come greater levels of individual variation. Sociologist Louis Wirth, in his seminal 1938 article, “Urbanism as a Way of Life,” inferred that such increases in individual variation “give rise to the spatial segregation of individuals according to color, ethnic heritage, economic and social status, tastes and preferences.”

Over a century before Wirth’s scholarship, a similar social dynamic weighed on our Founding Fathers as they debated and created the U.S. Constitution.

James Madison, the fourth President of the United States and the “Father of the Constitution,” dedicated much of his attention in the Federalist Papers to the belief that our national government need not worry about the heterogeneity of interests and preferences in the American federal structure.

In Federalist Paper No. 55, James Madison articulated the basic argument for limiting the number of U.S. House members: “The number ought at most to be kept within a certain limit, in order to avoid the confusion and intemperance of a multitude. In all very numerous assemblies, of whatever characters composed, passion never fails to wrest the sceptre from reason. Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates; every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob.”

James Madison, the co-founder along with Thomas Jefferson of the Democratic-Republican Party, the precursor of today’s Democratic Party, believed it necessary to keep the decision-making powers of representative government in the hands of the few, not the many.

However, despite his siding with Alexander Hamilton and other federalists arguing for a smaller, constitutionally limited number of representatives, a prescient Madison identified in Federalist Paper No. 55 the potential problems associated with too few representatives:

  1. First, that so small a number of representatives will be an unsafe depository of the public interests;
  2. Second, that they will not possess a proper knowledge of the local circumstances of their numerous constituents;
  3. Third, that they will be taken from that class of citizens which will sympathize least with the feelings of the mass of the people, and be most likely to aim at a permanent elevation of the few on the depression of the many;
  4. Fourth, that defective as the number will be in the first instance, it will be more and more disproportionate, by the increase of the people, and the obstacles which will prevent a correspondent increase of the representatives.

Every one of his four points has materialized since the formation of our representative democracy in 1789. And with the Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929, which fixed the number of House members at 435 and created a procedure for automatically reapportioning House seats after every decennial census, it was ensured that as the country’s population grew, the House would not.

The result is our elected representatives are increasingly distant from the people they represent. The chart below shows the average House district’s population size since 1789 (Note: the chart uses total population, including vote ineligibles such as minors):

As district populations get bigger and often more heterogeneous, it becomes more difficult for House members to stay connected with their constituents. Modern communication technology may increase the ability of a member to communicate with his or her constituents, but such technology does not change the social distance between them.

Can elites represent the interests of the masses? Yes. That is not the problem

Being, or having been, a member of the House is to be part of an elite club. Of the 545 million Americans that have ever lived, only 10,945 have served in the House.

And it requires significant financial resources to get the job. According to OpenSecrets.org, the average 2016 House candidate in spent approximately $465,736 and to win it typically required three times that amount. While not every House member is a millionaire, without either considerable personal wealth or access to other peoples’ wealth, to run for the House is simply impossible for the vast majority of Americans.

Yet, the problem isn’t that half of our national representatives are millionaires. A good argument can be made that our elected representatives should be drawn from the most successful in our society. No, that is not our fundamental problem.

The problem is, instead, that our government’s policies increasingly represent the interests of affluent Americans at the expense of the majority. Our best and brightest aren’t going to Washington to represent their constituents. They go to Washington to represent the political donor class.

In their widely-praised 2014 study, political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page found that American policymaking is dominated by the interests of powerful business organizations and the wealthiest segment of American society.

Using 1,779 policy disputes between 1981 and 2002 in which a national survey of the general public asked a favor/oppose question about a proposed policy change, Gilens and Page assessed opinions on these policy changes by income level (e.g., poor, middle class, affluent).

The following graphs from their paper summarize their findings:

Source: Gilens, M., & Page, B. (2014). Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens. Perspectives on Politics, 12(3), 564-581.

The near horizontal, black line in the first graph indicates the policy preferences of the average American voter do not relate to actual policy outcomes. In contrast, as seen in the upward sloped black lines in the next two graphs, there is a strong relationship between policy outcomes and the policy preferences of economic elites and interest groups.

“Americans do enjoy many features central to democratic governance, such as regular elections, freedom of speech and association, and a widespread (if still contested) franchise,” conclude Gilens and Page. “But we believe that if policymaking is dominated by powerful business organizations and a small number of affluent Americans, then America’s claims to being a democratic society are seriously threatened.”

Whatever the Founding Fathers intended in setting the maximum ratio of U.S. House representatives to constituents, the result is a federal government responsive to the policy preferences of the most privileged Americans, and unresponsive to average Americans.

If we, as a country, are comfortable with such influence disparity, then changing the size of the U.S. House from the current 435 members is unnecessary. If, however, this imbalance is incompatible with our expectations and requirements for representative democracy, it is time to seriously consider increasing the number of members in the U.S. House.

Canadian novelist John Ralston Saul articulates well the practical goals of representative democracy:

“The strength of representative democracy is its ability to slow down those in power who wish to govern by blank cheque, but also those not in power who wish to yank the state about on the sole basis of their self-interest,” he writes.

Based on Gilens and Page’s research, the American state doesn’t get yanked very often by the average American. Without some structural change, the American democracy is stubbornly skewed towards the interests of the elite. And, if we agree this is a problem, we need to find the essential institutional change that most directly offers a remedy.

Per Madison’s insights in Federalist Paper No. 55, the simplest answer is to make congressional districts significantly smaller.

A Rationale for Increasing the Size of the U.S. House to 6,000 Members

Lets start with what the U.S. Constitution itself. With a current voting eligible population of 250,056,000, the Constitution limits the size of the U.S. House to 8,335 members — which is roughly two-thirds the size of the average crowd at a Big Ten men’s basketball game. At that numerical size, the House chamber would need to be the size of the MCI Center in Washington, D.C.’s Chinatown district or Michigan State University’s Breslin Center.

Breslin Center, Michigan State University (East Lansing, Michigan)

But, before deciding on the ideal size of the House, let us establish an ideal goal towards which to aim.

Here is one idea:

At the House level, an elected representative should have the ability to meet most vote eligible person in their district within a legislative term (2 years). And if the representative can meet his or her constituents, so could any other person living in the district that may want to run for Congress.

Is that asking a lot? What is representative democracy if not the principle that elected officials should represent a group of people with whom they are personally familiar?

Bringing Democracy Back to the People

Representation is a tangible intra-human interaction, not an abstraction. So, let us build a U.S. House of Representatives with that in mind. Let us create House districts small enough that a representative can meet every eligible voter within a reasonable amount time.

How small would congressional districts need to be for a House member to have a feasible chance, if they so choose, to meet most of their constituents within a two-year term? That is a hard question to answer.

Madison may be right again: “No political problem is less susceptible of a precise solution than that which relates to the number most convenient for a representative legislature.”

But he is wrong.

Generally, Madison and the Federalists feared if the House chamber was too populated, it would become unruly and incapable of rendering decisions. Madison writes in Federalist Paper No. 55, “The number ought at most to be kept within a certain limit, in order to avoid the confusion and intemperance of a multitude.”

The Federalists were obsessed with preventing mob rule.

However, it is not clear where the Founding Father’s came up with the 1:30,000 ratio in the Constitution or how that would avoid the formation of mobs. After reading Madison’s “Notes of Debate” from the Constitutional Convention in 1786, apart from their general desire to keep the House chamber small enough to avoid unruly cliques, the Founding Fathers offered no concrete rationale for the 1:30,000. It appears to be nothing more than a realization that only 55 men participated in the Constitution Convention sessions and that number represented roughly 1 in 30,000 citizens in 1787.

The number we are going to compute here will try to be more rigorous.

As we’ve argued, today’s House districts are too large (in population) for a House member to have a plausible chance of meeting a large percentage of their constituents during a two-year term, much less meaningfully represent the multitude of interests in their district. So, what is the number of House members that will make congressional districts small enough for those outcomes to be more likely?

I estimate the number is somewhere around 6,000 members, which is the point where each House district would contain around 20,000 households (or about 40,000 vote eligible constituents). To talk to all of them it will require meeting with 27 households per day for two years. Combine door-knocking with a healthy number of large audience events and it will be possible (but not easy) for congressional incumbents and candidates to talk to a sizable percentage of their constituents.

Wouldn’t Voters Prefer to be Left Alone?

The circumstantial evidence does not seem to support the electoral value of political candidates meeting voters face-to-face. In the age of mass media, the internet, and highly-targeted direct mail campaigns, a candidate doesn’t need face time with voters to get his or her message to them.

A good example is the 2016 presidential election. Republican primary candidates, Ted Cruz and John Kasich, visited New Hampshire for more days than any other Republican candidate, including Donald Trump. Yet, neither garnered more than 16 percent of the primary vote; whereas, Trump gained 35 percent of the vote.

However, there is substantial empirical research confirming the critical importance of door-to-door canvassing by candidates. Using a field experiment in a 2010 local election, George Mason University professors Jared Barton, Marco Castillo, and Ragan Petrie, found that personal contact between candidates and voters was more persuasive than literature drops where the candidate did not meet the voters.

They concluded:  “Voters are most persuaded by personal contact (the delivery method), rather than the content of the message. Given our setting, we conclude that personal contact seems to work, not through social pressure, but by providing a costly or verifiable signal of quality.”

What possibly could go wrong (or right) with a 6,000-member House of Representatives?

This essay’s argument for a larger U.S. House is predicated on these findings and assumptions:

  1. Policy outcomes from the current U.S. House misrepresent the interests of the majority of Americans and is biased towards the interests of the wealthy.
  2. This policy misrepresentation is a function of the selection bias associated with U.S. House elections, where only wealthiest can run for office, and the money required to win excludes segments of society lacking access to significant monetary resources. The result is U.S. House elections that are prohibitively expensive, non-competitive (incumbency bias) and unrepresentative.
  3. Personal, face-to-face contact between legislator and constituent is superior to indirect contact, such as through direct mail, TV/radio advertising, and mass emails. Voters, all else equal, will prefer candidates they’ve met.
  4. Smaller House districts will encourage candidates to spend more face-to-face time with constituents.
  5. Smaller House districts will make individual House races less expensive and within the realm of possibility for people of relatively modest means to win House elections.
  6. Therefore, with smaller House districts, the interests of average Americans are more likely to be considered during the policymaking process.

Is there empirical evidence supporting this last point? We could compare the world’s largest legislatures to smaller ones in the democratic world today. For example, in absolute numbers, the European Parliament is the largest with 751 legislators (one legislator per 656,527 people), followed by the German Bundestag with 709 legislators (one legislator per 104,109 people).

But the proper comparison is based on the relative size of the legislature vis-a-vis the population size. A U.S. House with 6,000 members, for example, would have one House member per 54,000 people. That would be comparable to the United Kingdom’s House of Commons (650 members) with one House of Commons member for every 45,000 people. Finland and Sweden have one lower house legislator for every 27,000 people.

On the other end of the spectrum is the U.S. House, with the lowest ratio of members to people (1 to 733,000). The U.S. is on par with countries like Pakistan (1 to 574,000), Bangladesh (1 to 554,000), and Nigeria (1 to 492,000).

Sadly, very little cross-national or intra-national research exists on the effects of legislature size on public policy or political representation. However, what research does exist is generally mixed regarding the benefits of large legislative bodies.

In 1971, the Citizens’ Conference on State Legislatures (CCSL) described the New Hampshire House, with 400 members for a population of 700,000 people, as a place “where 15 people made all the decisions, and if you were among the other 385, you just watched, part of an onlooking audience rather than a full- fledged member.”

Writing for Governing magazine years later, Alan Ehrenhalt noted that in 2000, among the 400 New Hampshire citizens voted into the state house, one was a convicted forger and another advocated violence against police.

While that result may argue against enlarging legislature, it actually reinforces its central benefit: larger legislatures bring in a wider of range of citizenry backgrounds. What, you don’t want forgers in your U.S. House of Representatives? You are convinced our current House members are significantly above such behavior? Please feel free to check out this sobering website that ranks the most corrupt U.S. Congress members in history: Ranker.com. (Spoiler alert:) It is a long list.

But other problems have also been found with larger legislative bodies.

In their 1999 study of state spending, University of Southern California professors, Thomas Gilligan and John Matsusaka, found that the larger Senate (upper house) chambers, spend more money and raise more revenues: “The more seats in the upper House of the legislature, the more the government spends and the more revenue it collects,” they concluded. “A one-seat increase in the upper house is associated with a 0.38 percent increase in total spending.”

Other potential problems with enlarging the size of the U.S. House from the current 435 to 6,000 members would be:

  • Where is the office space to accommodate 6,000 House members and their staffs?
  • Where will they meet when the full House is in session? The current House chamber only seats a fraction of that number.
  • The cost of governing (member and congressional staff salaries, office space, etc.) could be as much as 15 times higher
  • Even if smaller districts translates into lower campaign expenditures per House race, the overall cost of House elections would skyrocket.
  • It will put more power in the hands of the House leadership.
  • House members represent more than just the best interests of their district, they also represent the country — a larger House size might make members more parochial and lessen their attention to broader national interests.
  • For all the effort of increasing the House to 6,000 members, policy outcomes might remain biased towards wealthy interests.

There is no question, there are advantages to small legislatures and some of those benefits should be not be given up lightly. Summarizing years of their organization’s research, the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL) lists some of the benefits of small state legislatures:

  • Fewer legislators does not mean less responsive legislators. Using modern communication mechanisms, a legislator can easily reach, and be reached by, many more constituents.
  • Legislative elections will be more competitive and encourage greater voter participation.
  • In a smaller body, the role of a legislator will be more prestigious and more satisfying. A smaller legislature increases the responsibility of each member. Individual legislators have more opportunity to influence decisions. Each legislator should be more visible and therefore more responsive to the voting public.
  • With a smaller legislature, there will be better discussion and clearer debate. There is more opportunity for each member to make his or her views known, to have his or her voice heard.
  • Larger legislatures tend to have more committees. Too many committees result in overlapping and fragmentation of work–making it more difficult for a legislature to formulate coherent, comprehensive policies on broad public questions.
  • Large legislative bodies cost more.

But the NCSL also offers some potential benefits from large state legislatures:

  • The more the members, the fewer the constituents. With fewer constituents, a legislator is more likely to have face-to face dealings with them.
  • One political party can more easily dominate a smaller-sized legislature. A smaller-sized legislature also may increase regional rivalries, particular between rural and urban areas.
  • Relatively few political positions are well known by the general population. Reducing the number of legislators probably will not change this fact.
  • The legislative process was not intended to be neat and efficient. The legislature is designed to provide a cross-section of all points of view. Legislators are to study, debate and argue, and finally reach a compromise position that is acceptable to a majority of members.
  • A large number of members allows for a more effective division of labor and specialization. The oversight of administrative agencies is greater among larger legislatures.
  • There is a greater correlation between a state’s population and legislative costs than between legislative size and cost.
Preliminary Cross-national Evidence on Size of Legislatures

While little cross-national research exists on the effects of legislature size on representation, political participation and policy outcomes, there is some.

The World Bank has been consistently tracking income inequality (as measured by the GINI Index) for over two decades. One hypothesis on the effect of large legislatures is that they will better incorporate the economic interests of middle- and lower-income citizens, which should result in economic policies that reduce income inequality. In fact, in a simple cross-sectional, cross-national analysis, we do see evidence that countries with relatively larger legislatures (i.e., fewer people represented per legislator) have lower levels of income inequality (see chart below):

Of course, the causation could be in the opposite direction. That is, countries with low income inequality created larger legislatures because a broader cross-section of society was consulted during the democratic founding process. Nonetheless, there is correlational evidence that the size of a country’s legislature does relate to levels of economic inequality.

There is also evidence that relatively larger legislatures encourage stronger voter participation and turnout. Using voter turnout data provided by political scientist Mark Franklin, we see a strong negative correlation between the number of people each legislator represents and voter turnout for lower house elections (see chart below):

The arguments in support of small and large legislatures elicit a wide range of research questions that would need to be answered before we muck around with the size of the U.S. House.

For example, would a 6,000-member House lead to a geographically-dispersed, hierarchical structure where only “senior” House members (e.g., the current 435 members) would maintain offices on Capitol Hill, while the remaining “backbenchers” would remain in their home districts and participate in committee meetings, floor deliberations and votes through teleconferencing or other remote services?

Is there a benefit in not having all House members residing in the nation’s capital? Could the geographic dispersal of House members constrain the influence of lobbyists and special interests?

Without a doubt, a significantly larger U.S. House of Representatives will require brand new thinking on the design and function of legislatures.

A small U.S. House is not working — Let us consider making it bigger

We know the policy implications of small U.S. House, and it is set of policies that reflect the interests of the few over the many. Therefore, this country should seriously consider a major structural overhaul of its national lower house.

This essay is not attempting to outline in detail the mechanics required to increase the size of the House. Instead, it is offering a theoretical rationale for not just increasing the size of the U.S House, but to do so on a transformational scale.

Allowing the House to increase incrementally over time (as it did before 1929) will probably not address the policy bias problem. To do that, individual House members must be spatially closer and more accountable to all of their constituents. A larger U.S. House needs to be large enough (i.e., much smaller districts) so that people of modest means can at least contemplate the idea of running for Congress.

Advertising, social media and direct mail campaigns won’t go away just because House districts are smaller. But with small House districts, expensive broadcast television and radio ad buys become less attractive.

For example, in my home state of Iowa, the 1st U.S. Congressional District covers two local TV markets (Cedar Rapids/Waterloo, and Dubuque). Their coverage areas correspond fairly closely to the 1st District’s boundaries. Today, it makes sense for a congressional candidate to spend a lot of money on broadcast TV ads. And only well-funded candidacies can do that. On the other hand, if Iowa had 60 U.S. House districts, district boundaries would be roughly the size of an Iowa county. At that size, expensive broadcast TV/radio buys make much less sense.

Instead, small district will increase the potential for an underfunded but hardworking doorknocker to beat an entrenched incumbent. In a 6,000-member House, hard work will be a legitimate substitute to campaign money and that will scare the hell out of current House incumbents. If incumbents aren’t able to connect with their constituents on a personal level, the days of 90 percent re-election rates will be over.

And any idea that scares the hell out of incumbents, can’t be all bad.

K.R.K.

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Addendum:

I did’t address the U.S. Senate in this essay, which likely contributes to the elite bias in national policymaking. Therefore, any effect of changing the size of the U.S. House will be muted by the current structure of the U.S. Senate. Nonetheless, changing the size of the U.S. House should still bring an increased level of accountability and responsiveness of that chamber to the opinions of average Americans.

====================================================

{Send comments to: kkroeger@nuqum.com}

About the author:  Kent Kroeger is a writer and statistical consultant with over 30 -years experience measuring and analyzing public opinion for public and private sector clients. He also spent ten years working for the U.S. Department of Defense’s Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness and the Defense Intelligence Agency. He holds a B.S. degree in Journalism/Political Science from The University of Iowa, and an M.A. in Quantitative Methods from Columbia University (New York, NY).  He lives in Ewing, New Jersey with his wife and son.

 

 

Advice to Republicans: Nominate women

By Kent R. Kroeger (Source:  NuQum.com, February 12, 2018)

“Where are all the Republican women?” Politico’s David Bernstein asked in a 2016 article.

The solution to Bernstein’s question is simple: the Republicans need to nominate more women for the 2018 congressional races. If the GOP wants to keep control of the House, it is imperative.

While recent opinion trends have brought some tentative optimism to Republicans, few analysts believe the Republicans will keep control of the U.S. House after the midterm elections.

PredictIt, a prediction market, gives the Democrats a 63 percent chance of taking control of the House in 2018.

If disposable personal income growth accelerates as expected and Donald Trump’s job approval remains around 42 percent, NuQum.com’s Midterm Election Prediction Tool predicts the Republicans will still lose 34 House seats and 4 Senate seats. In other words, under current conditions, they will lose control of both congressional chambers.

We’ve already seen 22 Republican House members announce their retirements, many because of their dimming re-election chances. In contrast, only 9 House Democrats are retiring (as of February 8, 2018).

While Democrats’ Trump-dementia may wear thin by November, leading voters to recoil back into the arms of Republicans, the GOP can’t rest their chances on that hope. Instead, the Republicans need to acknowledge the seriousness of the public’s mood right now and, in particular, the anger many women feel towards the current president.

If the GOP adopts Laura Ingraham’s argument that “women have never had it this good,” keeping control of the House and Senate is a lost cause. As Ingraham certainly knows, when it comes to voting, facts often aren’t as important as feelings.

Many women are angry right now at a president they see as an unrepentant serial abuser of women.

“The average difference in Trump’s approval rating between men and women was 12 percentage points in 2017, roughly double the differences for the three presidents who served immediately before him,” according to Megan Brenan from the Gallup Organization. “Trump’s annual average approval rating for his first year in office was 45 percent among men and 33 percent among women. These sub-50% ratings for a president’s first year in office are unprecedented, as is the 12-point gender difference.”

The Atlantic and the Gallup Poll recently completed extensive polling in 13 battleground states and found Trump’s job approval among college-educated white women exceeded 34 percent in only four of those states.

College-educated white women are the vanguard of the anti-Trump movement, but even among white women without college degrees, one of Trump’s core voting blocs in 2016, his approval ratings have dropped precipitously.

In the 2016 election, Trump carried 61 percent of white women without a college degree. But in a yearlong 2017 study, SurveyMonkey found this group evenly split, with 49 percent approving and 49 percent disapproving of Trump’s performance as president.

Why this drop in Trump’s approval among white women without college degrees? Beyond the overwhelmingly negative news coverage given to the Trump presidency, in general, there is also circumstantial evidence pointing to the rise of the #MeToo movement and society’s heightened sensitivities to sexual harassment and abuse issues.

In a January 2018 Washington Post-ABC News Poll, 79 percent of white women without college degrees believe sexual harassment is a nationwide problem, and this was before Trump’s tone deaf defense of former top aide Rob Porter, who is accused of abusing his two ex-wives and an ex-girlfriend.

As NPR’s political reporter Danielle Kurtzleben observantly points out, the gender gap for congressional Republicans paints a slightly better picture. The current Republican gender gap is not unusually large compared to recent congressional election polls (see chart below), but it does portend large Democratic gains in the 2018 midterms, similar to 2006.

Accordingly, congressional Republicans are keeping a close eye on the mood in their districts. According to The Cook Political Report (as of February 8th), six open House seats, previously held by the Republicans, are ‘leaning’ Democratic and 18 incumbent Republicans are in toss-up races.

Furthermore, despite Kurtzleben’s accurate observation, congressional Republicans should be looking for ways to reduce the gender gap.

“The future is female,” writes Alan Jude Ryland of SecondNexus.com.

Supporting Ryland’s broad assertion, NuQum.com’s research on the 2016 Iowa state legislative elections found that among candidates challenging incumbents, on average, women outperformed men, even after controlling for other factors such as party affiliation and campaign expenditures. The candidate gender effect was no more than 3 percentage points; but in a close election, that is the difference between winning and losing.

Perceptions of candidate ‘honesty’ and ‘trust’ were a major factor in undecided voters’ selection decisions at the presidential level in 2016; but, as we know, that didn’t help the woman at the top of the Democratic ticket. Nonetheless, research consistently shows that women are viewed as more trustworthy than men (recent examples of this research can be found here and here).

It is not conjecture anymore that women may have a distinct advantage as political candidates with American voters.

If our Iowa finding applies to the nation, and we are confident it does, Republicans need to nominate as many women as possible for the 17 open House races considered ‘leaning’ or ‘toss-ups,’ if that strategy tips the balance in just half of those races, it will prevent the Republicans from losing control of the House.

It is mere speculation at this point, but given the raw size of the women’s marches and the #MeToo movement, it is not far-fetched to suggest women in the future are going to be more inclined to vote for other women.

Undeniable is how the Trump presidency has energized millions of women in this country, not just to march and organize voter registration drives, but to also run for elective office.

As of now, 2018 is shaping up to be another 1992, billed then as “The Year of the Woman.” In that election, the number of women in Congress doubled when 27 new women were elected to Congress. Women have not seen gains like that since, and while 2018 probably won’t double the number of women in Congress, we will see a significant percentage increase from the current 19.4 percent.

Are the Republicans prepared for this? What do you think? They just ran creepy virgin chaser Roy Moore for the Senate seat in Alabama. If the Republicans want to cede Alabama to the Democrats, run more Roy Moores.

If the GOP wants to consistently win elections in the Deep South again, find more Nikki Haleys and Joni Ernsts. Unfortunately for the GOP, however, Haley and Ernst can’t run in all 435 House and 33 Senate races.

Its not that the Republicans aren’t represented by other strong women. Despite fewer GOP women in the House, the past 10 years has seen the influx of younger female Republicans that bode well for the party’s future:

Martha McSally (Arizona – 2nd District),  Mimi Walters (California – 45th District), Jackie Walorski (Indiana – 2nd District),  Susan Brooks (Indiana – 5th District),  Lynn Jenkins (Kansas – 2nd District),  Vicky Hartzler (Missouri – 4th District), Elise Stefanik (New York – 21st District), Claudia Tenney (New York, 22nd District)*, Kristi Noem (South Dakota – At Large),  Mia Love (Utah – 4th District), Barbara Comstock (Virginia – 10th District)*, Jaime Herrera Beutler (Washington – 3rd District), Cathy McMorris Rodgers (Washington – 5th District)

[* denotes incumbents in toss-up races, according to The Cook Political Report]

But the Republicans need more candidates like these women. Clone them if they know how. Women need to start filling the GOP’s new candidate training pipelines. The Democrats are recruiting women candidates at hyper-drive speeds right now and will reap the benefits in 2018 if left unchallenged.

As with many other social equity trends, the U.S. trails Europe in the advancement of women in the political arena. You won’t read any new Bild or Der Spiegel articles on whether the Germans are ready for a female Chancellor. Women politicians are so established in the United Kingdom that when Prime Minister Theresa May is routinely criticized for being “weak, indecisive, and vacillating” nobody screams  “misogyny” or “sexism” in her defense.

At least 30 percent of lower house members are women in most European countries, the exceptions being Ireland (22 percent), Poland (28 percent), and Luxembourg (28 percent). At current trends, however, these percentages will approach 50 percent in the next 20 years.

That trend is slower but equally definitive in the U.S.

In the not-so-distant future, when 50 percent of all U.S. House and Senate members are women, that will mean the electorates in 134 House and 28 Senate districts, now represented by men, will have elected a woman.

Republican Party, are you prepared for that? Seriously, do you have enough quality women candidates to account for at least half of those new women in Congress?

GOP, that is your challenge.

K.R.K.

{Send comments to: kkroeger@nuqum.com}

About the author:  Kent Kroeger is a writer and statistical consultant with over 30 -years experience measuring and analyzing public opinion for public and private sector clients. He also spent ten years working for the U.S. Department of Defense’s Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness and the Defense Intelligence Agency. He holds a B.S. degree in Journalism/Political Science from The University of Iowa, and an M.A. in Quantitative Methods from Columbia University (New York, NY).  He lives in Ewing, New Jersey with his wife and son.

Are we going to destroy our democracy to save it?

By Kent R. Kroeger (Source:  NuQum.com, February 7, 2018)

It was on this day in 1968 that Peter Arnett, reporting for the Associated Press on the Vietnam War, sent out his now famous dispatch concerning an American counter-insurgency operation in the provincial capital of Bến Tre:

“‘It became necessary to destroy the town to save it,’ a United States major said today. He was talking about the decision by allied commanders to bomb and shell the town regardless of civilian casualties, to rout the Vietcong.”

While the source and accuracy of the quote has since been disputed, the near complete destruction of Bến Tre during the operation cannot.

Is the American political establishment doing the same thing to, in their view, save our democracy from Donald Trump?

That possibility is palpable when you read the latest rumor being pumped by the online #TheResistance concerning the Trump-Russia probe.

Social media-based and self-proclaimed Trump-Russia collusion maven,  @briankrassenstein, is promoting the newest theory regarding former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page:

I confess, I was intrigued when I read Krassenstein’s opening tease. Plus, it gives me another reason to keep Carter Page in my life, for a little longer at least.

Wow! Even being forced to pretend I know how to pronounce Buryakov, Vnesheconombank, Podobnyy, and Sporyshev, I could not stop reading Krassenstein’s theory on Page. It sounds like Page is…well, just read on:

After reading this I wouldn’t blame you if your inner Jed Clampett belt out a loud “Well doggie!” There you have it. Carter Page is on our side. He’s not a Russian stooge. He’s an FBI stooge. But, wait, there is more…

Yes, Brian, you should feel a bit guilty. You just wasted five minutes of my Twitter feed reading time on the goddamn stupidest theory ever shared on Twitter. And, believe me, the competition is fierce for that distinction.

In fairness, the Krassenstein theory on Carter Page isn’t total bullcrap. Like any good theory, the ‘Carter-Page-as-FBI-informant-against-Trump’ is built on some actual facts.

The FBI’s interest in Carter Page as far back as 2012 was reported by The New York Times in April 2017. The article also reported that Page helped the FBI in getting Evgeny Buryakov plead guilty to covertly working as a Russian agent in the United States.

So, yes, Carter Page is probably not a simple buffoon (in the vein of a drunken, Aussie-diplomat-speaking-to George Papadopoulos). His central role is indisputable in the Devin Nunes memo. And will be as well in the ‘Intel-Committee-Democrats-Deserve-A-Memo-Too’ memo.

But even Krassenstein acknowledges a flaw in his theory:

Yes, Brian, I do wonder why the FBI would waste a FISA court’s time as part of a counter-intelligence deception effort.

You can scratch off the first explanation.

If the FBI is using the FISA court process as a decoy for ‘an incredibly successful’ foreign surveillance program on fear the Russians might be privy to those hearings, then this country is in big, BIG trouble.

Was the judge a possible Russian agent? Or maybe one of the agents representing the FBI in the FISA court? Perhaps the stenographer? Perhaps the Russians had a listening device in the judge’s gavel?

Besides, there are far easier ways to get deceptive information into Russian intelligence’s blood stream than waste a FISA court’s time.

The second explanation as to why the FBI might make four applications to the FISA court to surveil Page is equally problematic. If the FBI didn’t trust Page while he was acting as an FBI informant on the Trump/Kushner organizations, they already had the authority to surveil him. They didn’t need a FISA warrant. If Page stopped being an FBI informant and subsequently joined the Trump campaign (in March 2016), then the FBI would need FISA court authorization, but how is that really different from what we already know?

And while Krassenstein’s Page-as-FBI-Informant-Against-Trump theory has other holes, it is not inconceivable that Carter Page was (and is) on the FBI side of the ledger in the Trump-Russia collusion probe.

That is plausible.

However, the biggest problem with Krassenstein’s theory is not its plausibility, its the possibility that its true!

[As an aside, if the FBI and U.S. intelligence community had enough concern that Trump was compromised by the Russians to plant an informant in his campaign and, while doing so, watched as the Russians hacked DNC and Hillary Clinton campaign emails, blinded social media users with millions of impressions of fake news, all that as Trump tallied up 306 electoral votes and now sits behind the Resolute desk — Jesus Christ! How incompetent is our intelligence community if that happened! We would have been better off letting Moe, Larry and Curly run our intelligence services.]

Back to reality..

If the FBI hired an informant to surveil the Trump campaign (and Jared Kushner’s real estate deals), this country will have a full-blown constitutional crisis on its hands.

Unbeknownst to most Americans, the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment does not put many restrictions on the government planting informants into our communities. If the government plants listening devices or taps our phones, they need reasonable cause and court-issued search warrants. If they want to hire your Uncle Joe to spy on you, not much is in their way to stop them.

“Americans may be surprised to learn that the Supreme Court has interpreted the Constitution to impose few, if any, restraints on the government’s authority to plant or send covert informants and spies into our lives,” wrote legal scholar Tracey Maclin for the Washington University Law Review. “The Court reads the Fourth Amendment’s guarantee against unreasonable governmental searches and seizures to place no limitations on the government’s power to send informants to infiltrate our homes, businesses, religious organizations, or social groups.”

If you didn’t know that already, let it sink in. You might want to pat down Aunt Mimmie at the next Thanksgiving dinner.

That is what Krassenstein is talking about when he suggests Carter Page was an FBI informant being used to gather incriminating information on Donald Trump and associates.

If that actually happened (and it most likely didn’t). Game over. People will go to jail, but probably not anybody connected to the Trump campaign. That use of federal offices for a partisan intrusion into a presidential election will put members of FBI and Department of Justice senior management in jail. Indictments and convictions would go straight into the White House.

[To the Krassenstein theory’s credit, it would answer this question:  Why would the Dept. of Justice and FBI show so little interest in indicting Hillary Clinton on her misuse of classified information and destruction of subpoenaed emails? If Clinton had gone down on felony charges too, Bernie Sanders would be president right now…or Jill Stein?!]

Do not fear, Democrats. It is highly unlikely Obama’s Department of Justice thought it was OK to hire an informant to collect incriminating information on the Trump campaign (and ancillary associates). But that some Democrats are getting giddy over the idea is almost as disturbing.

Is Trump-hatred-syndrome frying Democrats’ brains? Have they no concern for the laws and norms governing our government’s intrusions into our lives? Are they so blinded by Trump-hate that they will consent to an administration discrediting the presidential candidacy of an opposition candidate through the use of federal informants?

That is what dictatorships do.

Krassenstein’s theory proposes that the Obama administration was so concerned that Donald Trump was compromised by the Russians that its agents were willing to shred our founding principles to prove it.

Even if Trump is compromised by the Russians (and there is no concrete evidence yet that he is!), using FBI informants to surveil his campaign is the WRONG way to go about gathering evidence.

If true, it would permanently destroy public confidence in our federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies. It would destroy our confidence in government in general.

Such an act would be a case of the cure being worse than the disease. It would be analogous to a destroying a town just to save it.

K.R.K.

{Send comments to: kkroeger@nuqum.com}

About the author:  Kent Kroeger is a writer and statistical consultant with over 30 -years experience measuring and analyzing public opinion for public and private sector clients. He also spent ten years working for the U.S. Department of Defense’s Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness and the Defense Intelligence Agency. He holds a B.S. degree in Journalism/Political Science from The University of Iowa, and an M.A. in Quantitative Methods from Columbia University (New York, NY).  He lives in Ewing, New Jersey with his wife and son.

 

 

Why does the ‘Comey Letter’ still keep me up at night?

By Kent R. Kroeger (Source:  NuQum.com, February 6, 2018)

In his new book, “The Unmaking of the President 2016,” former Bill Clinton lawyer and adviser Lanny J. Davis makes a strong argument that FBI Director James Comey’s October 28, 2016 announcement of a new investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails was the primary cause of her electoral defeat to Donald Trump.

“The visible tip of the iceberg was James Comey’s Oct. 28, 2016, letter to Congress,” writes Davis in The Hill. “All data proves that, but for that letter 11 days from Election Day, Hillary Clinton wins the presidency.”

Davis is not the first person to blame Comey for Clinton’s defeat, starting with the candidate herself. Fivethirtyeight.com founder Nate Silver was one of the first analysts to use data to make the same argument. So, OK, I’m convinced. It’s Comey’s fault.

But, anyone familiar with W. Edward Deming’s process engineering principles knows that, until you identify a problem’s root cause, you haven’t solved the problem.

Comey was not the root cause of Clinton’s email problems in 2016. Hillary Clinton was the root cause of her own defeat.

Why? There wouldn’t have been a Comey Letter were it not for Clinton’s career long penchant for secrecy. Anthony Weiner doesn’t have Clinton’s emails on his laptop were it not for Clinton’s reckless use of a personal server while communicating — sometimes with the inclusion of classified information– with one of her top aides, Huma Abedin.

For understandable (but unethical) reasons, Clinton wanted to protect her work-related electronic communications from the subpoena powers of Congress and law enforcement. Some people are paranoid and some people really have enemies. Clinton had enemies.

Based on her long experience with aggressive special prosecutors and Republican-controlled congressional committees, Clinton felt justified in protecting her privacy. And I have no doubt she would do it all over again if she had the chance. And she would lose the election again.

It didn’t help Clinton that, for a month before the Comey Letter, Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe sat on the knowledge that Clinton emails resided on Weiner’s laptop. Why not blame him too?

I resist wasting more energy on answering ‘what really happened?’ in the 2016 election. There is no ground left to gain. Everyone is deep in defensive trenches and little will compel them to leave.

Yet, the Davis book reminds me of my own puzzlement over the Comey Letter. It never made sense why Comey would defy bureau precedent by issuing that letter to Congress, only to turn around a few days later and declare the second Clinton email investigation was completed and no indictments were necessary.

Davis’ final conclusion is that there was “a deep state campaign, comprising certain active or former FBI agents, mostly from the powerful New York City office, former NYC Mayor and pathological Hillary hater Rudy Giuliani, and the vast right-wing media complex (amplified by the Russian government and bots).”

Blaming “deep state” FBI agents out to get Clinton is laughable. After all, nobody, not even Davis, has accused these agents of planting her emails on Weiner’s laptop. They simply were doing their job and passed the information along to their superiors.

So, short of proving that FBI agents in the New York City office were involved in a conspiracy against Clinton, there is nothing gained by blaming them or anybody else for Clinton’s political defeat.

Instead, I believe a more interesting and profound story may exist underlying the Comey Letter drama. If only we had a free and independent press in America to find out.

One of the most troubling aspects of the past two decades of American journalism has been the news media’s over-reliance on anonymous sourcing and limited access to the underlying evidence that would corroborate those sources.

Journalists have become glorified stenographers.

This tender Twitter exchange between The Intercept‘s Glenn Greenwald and NBC’s National Security correspondent Ken Dilanian enunciates the issue:

Greenwald and Dilanian’s pissing match aside, American journalists largely rely on government bureaucrats, public relations offices and political partisans to provide and interpret the news for them. And sometimes they cut out the middle man and just talk among themselves to generate news stories.

That, of course, is a bad thing.

And that is why I have never accepted the news media’s final conclusions on the Comey Letter — which was the proximate cause of Clinton’s election loss and therefore deserves a complete and thorough investigation by the Fourth Estate.

The story has never made sense.

Why did former FBI Director James Comey issue his letter to Congress in late October re-opening the Hillary Clinton email investigation? And then just a few days later, declare it completed?

Rogue FBI agents loyal to Rudolph Giuliani is not an adequate explanation.

So, what really happened?

As she loves to remind anyone willing to listen, Hillary Clinton blames the Comey letter, which announced the re-launch of the FBI’s investigation into her use of a private server for work-related email communications, as the definitive factor in her defeat.

Proponents of Clinton’s theory (such as Silver and Davis) ignore that her poll numbers had been dropping in the days prior to the Comey Letter, likely due to news that, for many Americans, their health insurance premiums were increasing dramatically under Obamacare.

Nate Silver’s own graph on the issue lends support to the Obamacare thesis. Clinton was shedding support as early as October 18th. She was halfway through a sustained three-week decline in support when the Comey Letter was released:

Remember, this is the same issue that helped cause Democrats to lose 63 House seats in 2010. Apparently, it is an issue voters care about. But that is not the post-election narrative anyone wants to hear.

Nonetheless, there is no doubt that the Comey letter hit her campaign at the worst possible moment. But these same Clinton supporters use the Comey letter to defend Comey’s handling of the first email investigation because, based on what he did with the October 28th letter, he was not a Clinton supporter.

Their conclusion would be defensible if not for the unusually delicate treatment Clinton and her State Department aides received from FBI investigators during the first email investigation.

Numerous and generous immunity agreements, allowing Clinton to bring counsel to her FBI interview, and then not recording the Clinton interview, all point to the conclusion that the FBI was too passive in building a case for indicting Clinton and her associates.

All that hard work by rank-and-file FBI investigators and all they get to show for it is a James Comey press conference.

And then I think about the Comey letter being issued just 11 days before Election Day. Pundits in the mainstream media suggest its existence proves that the first Clinton email investigation was not a sham. What point is a sham investigation if you turnaround and club Clinton with a new investigation 11 days before the election?

What would be the point?

In testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee in May 2017, Comey responded to a question as posed by Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) regarding his rationale for issuing the letter to Congress:

“I met with (my investigative team) that morning (October 27), in my conference room and they laid out for me what they could see from the metadata on this fella (former congressman) Anthony Weiner’s laptop that had been seized in an unrelated case,” testified Comey. “I sat there that morning and I could not see a door labeled ‘no action’ here. I could see two doors and they were both actions. One was labeled ‘speak’ and the other was labeled ‘conceal.'”

In short, Comey believed the integrity of not just the FBI, but of the presidential election itself, could be challenged if, after the fact, it was revealed that the FBI concealed its second Clinton email investigation.

The logic is sound, but it neglects one important factor. Clinton was viewed as all but certain to win the election. Comey’s rationale must have incorporated that piece of knowledge — even if he doesn’t admit it. Otherwise, given the Comey letter‘s awkward timing, why take the risk to his or the FBI’s reputation?

The Comey letter rationale, as told by Comey himself and repeated by Trump’s critics ever since, is also unconvincing for another reason. No doubt he cared about the election’s integrity, but the choice was never ‘speak’ or ‘conceal.’ This is the federal government we are talking about here. I.F. Stone famously said “All governments lie.

The more accurate statement is, “government’s don’t volunteer the truth, unless forced to.” It is why we have a FOIA law.

And that was one of Comey’s options, faced with the decision to notify Congress about the new Clinton investigation. He could have, without controversy, kept the information about the new email investigation away from the public for a long, long time.

Sure, those rogue FBI agents in New York could have leaked details about Weiner’s laptop to the press, but Comey has never been shy to respond to those kinds of leaks with the perfunctory reply, “I can neither confirm nor deny.”

He just needed to stonewall for 11 days. That’s all.

But, instead, Comey offered a false choice when responding to Senator Feinstein’s question. And why did he do that? Well, that’s the question.

Something made him fearful of not issuing the letter.

Who was on the investigative team that met with Comey on that October 27th morning? Was Peter Strzok part of that team? Or did just the duty of writing the letter fall into his lap?

What pressure could the FBI’s New York Office put on Comey to issue the letter? Threaten leaks? Comey wouldn’t have lasted as long as he did as FBI Director had he not been able to handle information leaks.

The recent revelation that the initial draft of the Comey letter was written by Strzok, who was found to have shared anti-Trump sentiments with another FBI agent while he was working on the Clinton email investigation, confirmed to some in the media that Strzok’s was an objectivity player in this drama.

However, the one-page Comey letter itself (which you can access 102816_FBI-Letter) was so terse and void of substance that it is unclear how it exonerates Strzok’s expressed political bias against Trump. The Comey letter simply states that additional evidence in the Clinton email investigation had been uncovered and required his office’s due diligence.

A more troubling theory is that Comey was under pressure from his team’s rank-and-file investigators who felt the original FBI investigation into Clinton’s emails was not conducted in good faith?

We have evidence of that dynamic from a May 10, 2016 Washington Post story that received very little coverage from the mainstream press at the time:

Source The Washington Post

It is improbable that an FBI agent would make that “mistake” on accident. It had to be a conscious decision by the agent to lodge, in effect, a small protest against the whole process. Think about it: The area where Clinton aide Cheryl Mills was most vulnerable legally — the decision rule and process by which Clinton’s personal emails were identified and deleted — is where she had cut a deal with the Department of Justice.

Isn’t that convenient?

Did the FBI’s New York City office assist (as opposed to lead) this symbolic mutiny of FBI investigators working on the Clinton email investigation?

Pure conjecture at this point. But we don’t know. There is been nary a murmur from Washington journalists on exactly how the Comey letter went down. We are forced to accept Comey’s congressional testimony on its face value and not question its implications, as determined by partisan interests.

If senior FBI management pre-ordained the Clinton investigation’s outcome, was the Comey letter a way for rank-and-file FBI investigators to give Clinton the middle finger and were Comey and Strzok just unwilling participants in this minor rebellion?

She was going to win anyway.

As members of Comey’s investigative team start retiring from the bureau, hopefully journalists will start putting the real story together on what happened during the Comey letter fiasco of October 2016.

K.R.K.

{Send comments to: kkroeger@nuqum.com}

About the author:  Kent Kroeger is a writer and statistical consultant with over 30 -years experience measuring and analyzing public opinion for public and private sector clients. He also spent ten years working for the U.S. Department of Defense’s Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness and the Defense Intelligence Agency. He holds a B.S. degree in Journalism/Political Science from The University of Iowa, and an M.A. in Quantitative Methods from Columbia University (New York, NY).  He lives in Ewing, New Jersey with his wife and son.

A non-partisan reaction to the release of the Nunes memo

By Kent R. Kroeger (Source:  NuQum.com, February 2, 2018)

There is one clear conclusion from the House Intel Committee Chairman Devin Nunes’ memo which implicates the FBI in abusing FISA-based surveillance powers: Everyone involved in this hot mess looks bad and no institution will be spared.

The Nunes memo (which you can acccess here: FISA-Memo) is narrowly targeted at the FISA application to conduct surveillance on Carter Page. Nothing more, nothing less.

Yet, the national news media’s over reaction to the memo says more than the memo itself.

Former FBI director posted this puzzling message right before the release of the Devin Nunes memo:

Nice words, but drenched in irony. If there is any analogy to Joe McCarthy, it is the willingness of the mainstream media to provide a national platform to people suggesting anyone who defends the Trump administration may be a Russian operative, including Nunes and House Leader Paul Ryan. Here is an example of MSNBC doing just that: Video. Enough said.

That is textbook McCarthyism.

Thankfully, House Leader Ryan refuses to fall into the partisan trap surrounding the Nunes memo. “This memo is not an indictment of the FBI or Department of Justice,” says Ryan.

Ryan is correct.

In fact, now that the Nunes memo has been released, it begs the questions, what were the Democrats so afraid of and what were the Republicans so excited about?

Before going through the memo’s basic conclusions, it is important to emphasize that the memo is simply hearsay testimony about the FISA application to surveil Page. It is not even clear if Nunes himself saw the original FISA application.

Without the actual FISA application, it is impossible to verify if Nunes’ memo accurately describes what the FBI said to the FISA court. When the Democrats release their memo, the same problem will exist.

The bottom line is that the American people need to see the actual 50-page FISA application (with the appropriate redactions to protect sources and methods). Short of that, all we have is partisan posturing and noise.

Lastly, the FISA application at the center of the Nunes memo was for Carter Page –which makes it less interesting than a FISA application for someone else connected to the Trump presidential campaign.

The FBI already knew in 2013 that the Russians were trying to recruit Page as an agent. Getting a FISA court to authorize (or re-authorize) surveillance of Page did not require the Christopher Steele/Fusion GPS dossier. All the FBI needed to show the FISA court was (1) the original evidence of Russia’s attempted recruitment of Page and that (2) Page was connected at some level to a presidential campaign and still in contact with Russians (Note: The Steele dossier may have been cited in the FISA application for that reason). End of application. Period.

So, given these realities surrounding the Nunes memo, it is dangerous to ascribe too much relevance to its contents. Instead of proving the FBI had politicized a FISA application process, the Nunes memo begs more questions.

Nonetheless, we cannot dismiss the Nunes memo out-of-hand as many are trying to do. Underlying Nunes’ motive to write it  is a serious question: Did the FBI use political opposition research to justify surveillance of Trump campaign operatives and did they, by commission or omission, misrepresent the nature of this political opposition research to the FISA judge?

Why does this matter? Because in our democracy we cannot allow political parties or candidates to leverage the enormous resources of our federal government, in this case the U.S. intelligence and law enforcement community, for an electoral advantage. It is the same logic that makes it illegal for U.S. campaigns to receive services of financial value from foreign actors.

The credibility of U.S. elections is at stake.

Imagine a world where a billion-dollar presidential campaign can use its enormous resources to fund vast and sophisticated opposition research on its opponents and then magnify the impact of this research by using it to gain the services of the FBI (or any other federal agency) to further discredit a political opponent. That is what goes on in dictatorships.

This is why the Nunes memo is so important and why the Democrats are so eager to suggest Nunes has “cherry-picked” the facts.

He may have ‘cherry-picked’ facts (…what summary report doesn’t?…). However, not helping the Democrats’ argument are these two facts: (1) Trump campaign operatives were surveilled (at significant expense to the U.S. government) and/or unmasked by the Obama administration and, (2) as yet, there is no direct evidence that any Trump campaign operatives were engaged in a conspiracy with the Russians to “hack” the U.S. presidential election or pursued a quid-pro-quo arrangement with the Russians once Trump entered office.

Up to now, the public evidence of a possible conspiracy — Papadopoulos bragging to an Aussie foreign affairs official that the Russians have “Hillary’s emails,” Roger Stone predicting the release of the Podesta emails before they had been made public by Wikileaks, Donald Trump Jr. meeting a Russian lawyer in Trump Tower to discuss ‘dirt on Hillary,’ General Flynn and other Trump operatives meeting with Russia’s U.S. ambassador at various points during and after the election to discuss sanctions — is circumstantial. In other words, these facts are likely explained by more benign and legal intentions.

Robert Mueller’s team may have direct evidence, but the press hasn’t reported it and the American public hasn’t seen it.

With these major caveats in mind, here is what the Nunes memo claims:

  • According to a Republican summary of congressional testimony from Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe, the Christopher Steele dossier, which McCabe admitted was only minimally corroborated, was central to the FBI’s FISA application to a federal FISA judge to conduct surveillance on Trump campaign aide Carter Page.
  • To the FISA court, the Steele dossier was partially verified through a Yahoo News article sourced anonymously by Steele and the wife of FBI deputy attorney general Bruce Ohr; who , in turn, worked for Fusion GPS, the source of the Steele dossier itself. In other words, the source of the Steele dossier was used by the press to lend credibility to the Steele dossier. [You don’t have to be a journalist to know that is very bad journalism. We are seeing a lot of that these days]
  • The FBI did not explicitly reveal in their surveillance application to the FISA judge the funding source of the Steele dossier (the Hillary Clinton campaign). It is possible (even likely) the FISA judge asked about the dossier’s funding, but we don’t know that.
  • Steele’s numerous encounters with the media and his known detestation of Donald Trump violated the cardinal rule of source handling.
  • There is no indication of a conspiracy between Trump foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos and Carter Page.
  • Despite his dossier being unverified and some aspects discredited, Steele maintained a relationship with associate deputy attorney general Bruce Ohr, whose wife worked for Fusion GPS, the firm that generated much of the anti-Trump intelligence used to justify the FISA surveillance application.
  • The “unmasking” of U.S. persons as part of authorized U.S. intelligence collection activities was liberally (if not illegally) used by the Barack Obama administration, possibly for political reasons.
  • Nothing in the Nunes memo endangers U.S. national security.

The strengths and weaknesses of the Nunes memo aside, here are the institutions coming out of this kerfuffle looking bad. We must start with…

The News Media

Nobody looks worse in the Nunes memo controversy than the mainstream news media who uncritically parroted the FBI, Department of Justice and U.S. Intelligence Community’s warnings that national security is compromised by the release of the Nunes memo. In retrospect, their security concerns were bullshit.

So what are the congressional Democrats really concerned about?

From the start of the Trump administration, the mainstream media has had no compunction against publishing leaked classified information suggesting collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. Yet, with the release of the Nunes memo, suddenly the mainstream media is outraged at the release of classified information.

That is textbook hypocrisy.

The mainstream media can no longer can be viewed as independent arbiters of information coming from the U.S. government. They are nothing less than the extension of the U.S. government’s public relations operations.

As a news-consuming public, we need to stop calling stories “news” when their core information derives entirely from anonymous government sources. Contrary to the popular myth, Woodward and Bernstein didn’t report Watergate that way…see for yourself here.

For once, President Trump’s words got it exactly right: “A lot of people should be ashamed of themselves,” said President Trump at the release of the Nunes memo.

No group should be more ashamed than the journalists connected to The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, MSBNC, and other news organizations.

For all of the propaganda directed against the Fox News Network, no news organization has covered all sides of the Nunes memo more than Fox News.

Why did Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein extend the surveillance of Carter Page under the FISA court approval? According to Fox News, the Nunes memo offers no explanation, but that is a question an objective news media should be pursuing.

But you won’t hear that question from CNN or MSNBC.

Instead, we get tired tropes about the Trump administration’s collusion with the Putin regime, despite no concrete evidence of such. Only speculation, innuendo and hearsay are offered by CNN and MSNBC as proof of this collusion.

Sure, Russian spymasters met recently with our nation’s spymasters. Typically, that has been done in the past in places like Vienna, Austria, not McLean, Virginia. However, in my brief time in the American intelligence community, I saw Russian intelligence officials on more than one occasion navigating the hallways of the Defense Intelligence Agency. Apparently, this type of interaction with foreign intelligence officials is only acceptable under New York Times-approved administrations.

In the real world, the Russians are a critical ally with the United States in the war on terrorism. Granted, the Russians are not easy to work with and, at some level, can never be uncritically trusted. But it was U.S. coordination with Russian interests in Syria that enabled the success of U.S. military-led actions against ISIS. We can convince ourselves that our success against ISIS in Syria and Iraq was independent of Russian interests, but we would be deceiving ourselves.

American journalists, however, have conveniently ignored our country’s substantial military achievements in the Levant since the Trump administration.

American journalism, for lack of a better term, has become hopelessly partisan.

Nothing personifies the death of American journalism better than The Washington Post‘s Eugene Robinson’s essay, “Trump and His Minions Can’t Out-Leak the FBI.”

Even after regurgitating the many historical examples of how the FBI has abused its powers to conduct surveillance on American citizens, Robinson justifies the FBI’s extra-legal methods in pursuing evidence of the Trump administration colluding with the Russians.

Why does Robinson come to this conclusion? The only explanation can be that he is a partisan who will never accept that Donald Trump is his president. Unfortunately, the FBI bureaucracy he defends today is the same FBI bureaucracy that could someday turn its attention to leftist commentators like Eugene Robinson, who has over his career traveled overseas and met with more than a few critics of the American government. Sadly, Robinson does not address that possibility in his essay.

From what we know today, the Trump-Russia collusion story is nothing more than partisan politics. It is no more complicated than that.

Which brings us to the next group who does not come out of this Nunes memo controversy looking very good…

The Democrats

The Democrats, with their limitless enmity towards President Trump and a luxuriant belief in their own virtue, are now in the position of defending a federal law enforcement agency that has a long and well-documented history of occasionally abusing the privacy rights of Americans, sometimes for short-sighted, petty political reasons.

Suggestions by Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), Department of Justice, and U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) officials of “grave consequences” to the security of this country upon the public release of the Nunes memo says more about their belief in the primacy of government secrecy over transparency than their understanding of sources and methods.

The Nunes memo does not compromise national security, even slightly.

The United States has weathered many leaks of classified information, far more detailed and egregious than the contents of the Nunes memo. Truth be told, intelligence leaks often reveal the government’s abuse of power and are sometimes precursors to positive changes in public policy, such as the Church Committee (which coincidentally led the passing of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978), the Privacy Act of 1974, the end of the Vietnam War, and more recently, the ending of ‘enhanced interrogation‘ methods (torture) employed by U.S. agents in response to the 9-11 attacks and the Iraq war.

Leaking classified information is a serious crime and can do grave damage to this country’s security. Two top-of-mind examples are the leaking of U.S. spy satellite system to the Soviets (as was done by Christopher Boyce and Andrew Daulton Lee) and the identification of CIA assets in the Soviet Union (as was done by the FBI’s Robert Hanssen).

The Nunes Memo, in contrast, contains classified information, but of a more benign variety. Most of its classified content is indirect through referencing the higher-level intelligence used to support the memo’s conclusions. It is still classified content, but not the kind that can do “grave” damage to this country’s security.

The Democrats, frankly, are hyperventilating over the Nunes memo for purely political reasons and are using the Justice Department and the IC’s concerns about the memo for strictly partisan purposes. Plain and simple.

The Republicans

Republicans, in turn, are forced to defend a former presidential campaign and now an administration that recklessly populates its ranks with too many people that are poorly-vetted and ill-equipped for government service.

What else can explain George George Papadopoulos and Carter Page?

As part of its insurgency against the “swamp,” the Trump administration offers an ersatz notion of competence based not on knowledge and real-world experience but on loyalty and an often creepy degree of obsequiousness towards the boss. Administration press conferences now are more likely to give off a shock-jock vibe than a sense of earnest intent and edification.

When you look at former and current operatives within Trump’s orbit, many are inexperienced and have little background (or interest) in the laws governing public servants. That they would cross some ethical and legal lines in propriety should surprise no one.

Case in point, there is no reason George Papadopoulos should ever be near, let alone in, a senior foreign policy meeting for a major presidential campaign. His most substantive foreign policy experience prior to working on the Trump campaign was attending a Model United Nations conference for college students.

Had the Trump campaign just done a Google-level background check on Paul Manafort, they would have found a man with too many business connections to some very sketchy people. And I don’t want to hear “What about the Clintons?” from Trump apologists. If the Clintons are your benchmark for judging the integrity of public servants, that’s just sad.

And Carter Page? The shifty sleezeball meter goes off the scale with this guy. He does have a genuine business background with Russian energy interests, but he also drew the attention of the FBI’s counter-terrorism unit when a known Russian spy tried to recruit Page in 2013. This is not a guy any competent or experienced presidential campaign lets near the inner circle of campaign operatives.

But Donald Trump did.

The Federal Government

Finally, we have the federal government itself and specifically the FBI.

Since the election of Donald Trump under the pretense of ‘draining the swamp,’ many of the federal government’s senior bureaucrats have aligned themselves against the incoming administration. This is not hyperbole. This is demonstrated through the mass resignations and retirements going on throughout the federal bureaucracy today.

As an example, almost all of the State Department’s senior leadership have retired or left office since the start of the Trump presidency. Many in the FBI’s leadership from the Obama administration have either left government service or appear on the verge of doing so.

Clumsily, and inaccurately, the Trump administration and ideologically aligned media have referred to these entrenched bureaucrats as part of the ‘deep state.’

That is a gross over-simplification and mischaracterization of reality.

To avoid repeating arguments made better elsewhere, I refer readers to an excellent essay by the National Review‘s Victor Davis Hanson on the underlying motivations behind many of these federal bureaucrats that actively attempted to prevent the election of Donald Trump.

In his article, “Hillary’s ‘Sure’ Victory Explains Most Everything,” Hanson offers a simple but compelling answer to why the permanent Washington, D.C. bureaucracy might have attempted to ensure Hillary Clinton’s victory in November 2016, even to the point of overkill.

Federal bureaucrats saw the inevitable Clinton victory as an opportunity to advance their careers and felt comfortable impeding the insurgent Trump campaign on the assumption that their extra-legal actions would never be exposed under a Clinton administration.

“The current players probably broke laws and committed ethical violations not just because they were assured there would be no consequences but also because they thought they’d be rewarded for their laxity,” writes Hanson. “Needlessly weaponizing the Obama FBI and the DOJ was akin to Hillary Clinton’s insanely campaigning in the last days of the 2016 campaign in red-state Arizona, the supposed ‘cherry atop a pleasing electoral map.'”

In my 20 years of working with and in the federal bureaucracy, what I saw on a day-to-day level was the subtle but profound art of professional advancement and self-preservation. Senior bureaucrats, in particular, were openly sensitive to the preferences of an incoming administration.

It doesn’t take a conspiratorial cabal within the permanent government to pursue nakedly self-serving outcomes, as often characterized in the deep state. It only requires career-minded bureaucrats that want to maximize their FERS retirement accounts.

Such is the real finding and relevance of the Nunes memo.

K.R.K.

{Send comments to: kkroeger@nuqum.com}

About the author:  Kent Kroeger is a writer and statistical consultant with over 30 -years experience measuring and analyzing public opinion for public and private sector clients. He also spent ten years working for the U.S. Department of Defense’s Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness and the Defense Intelligence Agency. He holds a B.S. degree in Journalism/Political Science from The University of Iowa, and an M.A. in Quantitative Methods from Columbia University (New York, NY).  He lives in Ewing, New Jersey with his wife and son.