President-to-be Clinton

Hillary Clinton is going to become the next president of the United States. Some commentators right now are trying to suggest that Trump is going to be a challenging opponent to her. This is wrong. There is a good reason why Clinton and those close to her have said that they look forward to competing against Trump. This is not mid-campaign braggadocio; they know full well that he is a vulnerable opponent in a general election campaign, especially compared to those that Trump competed against in the Republican primary. Yet, some end-of-May, beginning-of-June polls show the two candidates running neck-and-neck. This makes some Democrat-supporters nervous. They shouldn’t be, for a lot of reasons. William Saletan sums up many of them quite well here. At the heart of the piece is the key: “Solve your enthusiasm problem, get Democrats to the polls, and you win.” Also, see here.

Whatever anyone thinks of the likelihood that this happens, it highlights something important: this is the Democrats’ election to win or lose. More than any presidential election in recent memory, this one is very much in the hands of one party. The Republicans have committed themselves to a candidate whose down-sides are so enormous, that they seem to have passed into some kind of ethereal, pre-political public subconscious. Everyone knows they are there, but only subliminally. Hence they are not mobilized quite the way they should be in discussions of politics that emphasize prediction. The Democrats have every reason to win this election. They can only lose it by screwing up, not by some hidden bullet that the Republicans can fire at Clinton. All the bullets have already been fired at her, as her supporters are so fond of pointing out, over the course of a quarter of a century.

A Clinton-Trump contest is polarizing almost by definition. If, against all odds, Sanders had somehow wound up being the nominee, the same thing would have been true. Some on-line commentators, including Saletin, have mentioned that Sanders’ history on the far left of the political spectrum, dating back to the 1960s, includes positive statements about communism and communists that Republicans would be only too happy to mobilize in a general election campaign. Of course they would, and with Donald Trump as the Republican nominee, I doubt that it would matter. Trump has induced many young people, especially Latinos, to get involved in politics who would probably not have cared much about this race otherwise. The point, again, is that, whatever ideas and proposals are mobilized after the Democrats’ convention in Philadelphia, personalities are going to loom larger than usual. However polarizing Clinton has been, the Republicans have selected a candidate who will be a liability for them in the 2016 elections.

That I find Trump to be a cruel, hateful bigot means a lot less than that millions of Americans feel that way. Clinton could definitely screw up somehow, but I bet that she won’t, at least not to the extent or to such a magnitude that it would cancel out the fact that the Republican Party has chosen a nominee so grotesque, so beyond the pale that, for the first time in my adult life, the fascist label actually has some resonance that transcends standard liberal fear-mongering.

Back in Greece

For my first morning in Thessaloniki, I woke up to the news that a new bailout agreement with Greece has been reached. Just over a week after Greece’s parliament approved massive new austerity measures, the Eurogroup has agreed to release €10.3 billion to Greece. According to the Athens-Macedonian News Agency, this money will meet Greece’s financing needs until the end of October. Debt relief of the sort that the IMF has been pushing for some time now is not part of the agreement. All actors will formally reassess the situation in 2018. Beyond that, details are (even more) vague.  The agreement specified a target of keeping no more than 15% of Greek national income devoted to debt financing until 2030. But the specific measures required to achieve this end—extending debt maturities, most likely—will not be fleshed out until 2018. Looming over the talks was the specter of upcoming German elections, which will happen no later than the autumn of 2017. Any major changes to the bailout program would have to have been ratified by the German parliament. 

Given recent statements and  the international organization’s internal analyses, agreeing to participate in a bailout of Greece without an explicit Eurozone commitment to debt relief constitutes a major (albeit predictable) concession by the IMF. Germany, on the other hand, got what it wanted: avoidance of debt relief and a postponement of any serious discussion about it until after the 2017 elections. In other words, very little has changed, as far as the basic structural factors that characterize Greece’s place in the politics of Eurozone austerity.

The episode demonstrates again the twisted logic by which market discipline functions. According to reporting in The Guardian, yields on Greek 2-year bonds improved to a six month low and yields on 10-year bonds dropped to around 7%. Yet only a few days ago, the Greek government passed austerity measures that include a set of (further) tax increases and spending cuts. The Greek economy is predicted to contract once again in 2017, but investors are still encouraged. Stability without default, not economic growth, remains the order of the day. Short-term thinking remains the norm and, assuming that the German and French elections do not bring radicals to power, I do not see any reason why Greece won’t be back at the precipice at least once in the next couple of years.

Strikes to come. In France, strikes are already on.

trying to blog more regularly

I am listening to the Jon Stewart interview found here as I type this. I was not as big a fan of Stewart as many of my peers while he was on the air. The simple fact is that I laughed much more at Colbert than at Stewart during the 2000s. I still miss Better Know a District. Stewart's show was sometimes funny, usually when his correspondents had things to do. All that said, he is in good form here.

Lately, I've returned to the idea of blogging regularly about politics. It will require some time to acquire a blogging voice. I committed myself to not posting about the primaries during 2015 and 2016, and I think that may have been a mistake. The utter foolishness I heard and read drove me crazy, and bottling up my incredulity may have taken a few years off of my life.

I will leave for Greece again on May 23rd and I hope to write more about what I see while I am there. Between now and then, I will be e-mailing folks in Greece in hopes of lining up some interviews.