Sunday’s Forum

FILED UNDER: Open Forum
Steven L. Taylor
About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a Professor of Political Science and a College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog). Follow Steven on Twitter

Comments

  1. steve says:

    Drum has been doing good work. It turns out that the Reagan team really did make an effort to make sure that Iran did not release the hostages until after the election. Also, I dont recall it being mentioned here, maternal mortality had another big spike up. Overall for the US the rate is now 32.9/100,000 which makes us one of the worst in the world. For black women risks are about 2.5 times higher. The cause of this recent spike is not clear but it has been increasing the last few years.

    Steve

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  2. MarkedMan says:

    @steve: My first election was Reagan vs. Carter vs. Anderson and god help me I voted for Anderson because I didn’t think Carter deserved to win in a landslide. My naive 18 year old self just couldn’t believe that anyone could be fooled by Reagan’s act. It was all there. Running for head of the Screen Actors Guild and using those interactions with fellow actors to probe them, and rat them out to the House un-American Activities Committee to be blacklisted. His enthusiasm for shooting college students while governor of California. Openly embracing the Southern strategy, to the point where he kicked off his campaign in Philadelphia, MS where Civil Rights workers had been dragged from their car and tortured to death. To my eyes he was so obviously a phony, a scheming, not very bright thug who did a B-level acting job playing a “decent man”, that I just couldn’t imagine the American public could be so badly taken in. So color me completely unsurprised that he arranged for American citizens to be detained and mistreated for extra months just for his own personal gain.

    What does surprise me is that there is any Republican official left with enough of a conscience to want the truth to come out. But of course, he’s eighty-five and long out of day to day politics.

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  3. Kylopod says:

    @MarkedMan:

    What does surprise me is that there is any Republican official left with enough of a conscience to want the truth to come out.

    The whistleblower is Ben Barnes, a Democrat.

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  4. gVOR08 says:

    @steve: I objected in comments to Drum’s first post on Reagan/Iran. He said that this was of a piece with candidate Nixon trying to sabotage Johnson’s peace talks on Vietnam. I replied that as far as I was aware he didn’t try, he succeeded. And Henry goddam Kissinger leaked the secret talks to Nixon. Traitors both of them. This morning you lead me to Drum’s late night reply to Tom Nichols downplaying this story. Like many Never Trump GOPs, every now and again Tom Nichols really pisses me off. He helped build it. Like the apocryphal Hindu said about turtles, yes Tom it was always assholes all the way down.

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  5. gVOR08 says:

    @MarkedMan: I was speaking above @gVOR08: about Never Trumpers. John B. Anderson was a Never Trumper before Trump. I lived in Rockford IL, his district. For some reason Rockford was a hotbed of John Birchers. My HS Civics teacher, a major influence on my political views, had a well attended public debate with a Birch spokesman. John B. had a long career in congress supported by the Birchers and other RWNJs. He ran for prez in 1980, losing the GOP primary but continuing as an independent, accused of being a “No Labels” sort of spoiler against Carter. He had become quite liberal for a GOP and said he was tired of sucking up to the RW fools he’d made his career sucking up to. Bit late, no?

  6. daryl and his brother darryl says:

    Lots of people on the Sunday Talkies saying it’s outrageous that a FPOTUS is about to be indicted from making hush-money payments to a porn star…while also failing to mention that Trump’s co-conspirator in the scheme has already been found guilty and done time…prosecuted by Trump’s own DOJ, FFS. The same DOJ that then violated Cohen’s First Amendment Rights by jailing him for writing about it.
    Talk about Weaponization of the Government…

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  7. Kylopod says:

    @gVOR08:

    He ran for prez in 1980, losing the GOP primary but continuing as an independent, accused of being a “No Labels” sort of spoiler against Carter.

    While his presence wasn’t the singular cause of Reagan’s defeat (Reagan’s victory was substantial enough that even if you handed every single Anderson vote to Carter–which was never realistic, as exit polls suggest he attracted both Democrats and Republicans, albeit more Democrats–Reagan would still have won handily), he may have cost Carter some states. (Massachusetts is a prime example–Reagan edged out Carter by a 0.15% plurality, with Anderson taking 15% of the vote.) Reagan’s EC win likely would not have been quite as lopsided in a two-person race.

    My parents have told me they voted for Anderson, and that he’s the only non-Democrat they’ve ever supported in a presidential race. (This was in Maryland, which was one of the six states to back Carter in 1980, though it was close and networks initially misreported it as a Reagan win. Carter carried the state by just under 3 points, with Anderson taking nearly 8% of the vote.)

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  8. CSK says:

    Alan Dershowitz is assuring us that Donald Trump can serve as president from prison.

  9. Kylopod says:

    @CSK:

    Alan Dershowitz is assuring us that Donald Trump can serve as president from prison.

    In a legal and constitutional sense, this statement may be technically accurate: to my knowledge there are no laws preventing a president from serving while in prison, or forcing the president under such circumstances to resign. Whether a president can serve effectively while incarcerated is a separate question.

  10. Mr. Prosser says:

    @Kylopod: It strikes me a president imprisoned as a martyr would be the ideal situation for their party. They run the government and the prez is allowed to bleat occasionally but has no press access.

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  11. Mikey says:

    @Kylopod:

    Whether a president can serve effectively while incarcerated is a separate question.

    I’m sure Trump could serve every bit as effectively from prison as he did from the White House.

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  12. CSK says:

    @Kylopod:

    There will be a lot of resemblances–too many to list–between the careers of James Michael Curley (Boston mayor, Mass. governor) and Donald Trump if Trump gets tried and thrown in the hoosegow, one of them being the protests that took place when Curley was incarcerated.

    @Mr. Prosser:
    Yep.

  13. Just nutha ignint says:

    @MarkedMan: I voted for Anderson because I sensed that Carter couldn’t win and wasn’t willing to support conservatism of the sort that Reagan represented (already, I was more liberal than I realized). Anderson was the first in a unbroken chain of not voting for either “option.” Finally, I realized that neither the left nor the right actually valued the parts of their agendas that I did and acted on the realization that I was truly disenfranchised despite my ability to vote.

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  14. Just nutha ignint cracker says:

    @Kylopod: [cue up the Emily Littella clip from SNL] 😉

  15. Just nutha ignint cracker says:

    @Kylopod: Asking whether Trump can serve effectively at all is the same sort of question, tho. But all y’all probably shouldn’t have mentioned the possibility. If I was sure that Trump would be both the GQP candidate AND that he would be convicted of a crime, the irony of voting him in as an act of spite might be too strong a motivation to stay out of this fight.

  16. Just nutha ignint says:

    @Mikey: Be careful about what you goad people into doing. 🙁

  17. Jax says:

    @Just nutha ignint: Soooo….you would vote for Trump just for the insanity of him presidenting from prison? Just to clarify.