From beyond the fringe comes Donald Trump

From the files of Jeff Jacoby at The Boston Globe

It speaks well of Republicans that most of them have no use for Donald Trump. The real-estate mogul and reality-TV personality proclaimed himself a presidential candidate on Tuesday, with a bizarre and rambling announcement in the lobby of the Trump Tower in Manhattan that drove the needle on the crazy-meter way into the red zone.

I used to think that Trump was about as plausible a GOP candidate as Rufus T. Firefly. I realize now that I owe Firefly an apology.

Heading into last week's event, Trump had already established himself as the GOP's most unpopular candidate — the first candidate in modern presidential primary history, as political analyst Harry Enten remarked, to begin a White House run with a majority of his own party against him.

Averaging together the three most recent national polls, Enten calculates that a staggering 57 percent of Republicans have an unfavorable view of Trump. In a Fox News survey this month, 59 percent of likely Republican voters said Trump was a candidate they would "never vote for."

Who can blame them? Virtually nothing Trump says is worth hearing. The opinions he expresses on public issues are the byproduct of his egotistical self-promotion — the clownish rantings of a publicity-seeker, not the governing philosophy of a potential commander-in-chief. Trump isn't a legitimate candidate, he is, to borrow George Will's phrase, a "bloviating ignoramus."

Granted, he has a knack for making money and drawing attention. So does Kim Kardashian. Voters aren't going to elect her president, either.

News organizations are under no obligation to provide a platform to every narcissistic buffoon who declares himself a candidate for the White House. It's probably futile to expect the networks hosting the Republican primary debates to exclude a ratings magnet like Trump, but they should.

His presence on the stage will be degrading to everyone in the room. Even if the other contenders run rings around Trump on substance, his insults and idiocies will stain them all by association.

Do the GOP's serious candidates really want to share the spotlight with a loudmouth who spent much of the last presidential election cycle trafficking in "birther" theories? Trump repeatedly questioned whether Barack Obama was born in the United States, and offered to pay $5 million if the president would disclose his college-application records.

When Obama's birth certificate from Hawaii was released, not only did Trump betray no twinge of self-reproach, he sang his own praises even more loudly.

"A lot of people love me for it," he crowed to reporters last year. "I got him to produce his so-called birth certificate, or whatever it was."

Trump isn't just a conspiracy-mongering blowhard. He is also a crude nativist.

"The US has become a dumping ground for everybody else's problems," he said on Tuesday. "When Mexico sends its people, they're ... sending people that have lots of problems.... They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists." And Trump's proposed solution to this invasion of drug-addled Mexican rapists? "I would build a great wall, and nobody builds walls better than me," he spouted. "I'll build them very inexpensively. I will build a great, great wall on our southern border. And I will have Mexico pay for that wall."

There may be an audience for that sort of incoherent demagoguery in the more fetid xenophobic fever-swamps. But there is none whatsoever among Republicans seeking to enlarge their party with an Reaganesque message of optimism, freedom, and growth.

Indeed, Trump is so far from being a mainstream Reagan-style conservative that the real question is why he is bringing his circus to the GOP tent in the first place.

Almost anyone would make a better presidential
candidate than Donald Trump.

He has touted a single-payer health care system on the Canadian model. He has advocated a wealth tax on individuals and trusts with a net worth of at least $10 million. He has called for a 25 percent tariff on all Chinese exports.

He has praised the Supreme Court's notorious Kelo decision, which upheld the power of the state to condemn private homes through eminent domain, so it can turn the land over to influential developers — like Trump. With such a government-enlarging, tax-raising, trade-restricting outlook, one might have expected Trump to be more comfortable as a champion of the Democratic Party.

Sure enough, he has been a major backer of Democratic candidates, pouring hundreds of thousands of dollars into Democratic campaigns over the years. In the 2006 election cycle, for example, Trump donated heavily to Democratic committees focused on regaining control of Congress — an effort that culminated with Harry Reid becoming Senate majority leader and Nancy Pelosi rising to speaker of the House.

Trump isn't a conservative, he isn't a Republican, and he isn't a presidential candidate. He is a political punch line looking for a joke. All things considered, I prefer Rufus T. Firefly.

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What American politics tell us today

From the Warning Signs of Alan Caruba at Facts-not-Fantasy

There is something very disquieting occurring in American politics today. Most dramatically, the Democratic Party is offering a candidate who is a moral cesspool filled with lies and a history of behavior that would render anyone unthinkable for the highest office in the land.

Something is very wrong when Hillary Clinton is, at this point, the only candidate for President the Democrats will be able to vote for and, worse, an estimated 47% of them will vote for her.

What we are witnessing is a Democratic Party that has been debauched by decades of socialism, an economic and political system that has failed everywhere it was implemented.

By contrast, what is being largely overlooked is the wealth of political talent—Rubio, Walker, Paul, et al---that the Republican Party has to offer as an alternative. Instead of obsessing over the different aspects of its candidates, we should be celebrating the fact that voters will be able to choose someone of real merit for whom to vote.

While the brain-dead media talks about the Republican candidates, seizing on every small element of the policies they are individually offering for consideration, the contrast with Hillary Clinton widens into a gap as large as the Grand Canyon. Her campaign thus far has been an exhibition of media manipulation.

She talks of “income inequality” as if it has not existed from the dawn of time and is based on the socialist utopia of everyone being equally poverty-stricken. Who wants to live in a nation where you cannot become wealthy if you’re willing to take the risks and work hard to achieve it?

It is this gap between those concerned with the very real threats to our nation’s security and welfare that lies at the heart of the months ahead in the long political campaigns. We can, at the very least, give thanks that President Obama cannot run again. We must, however anticipate that he will do everything in his power to initiate or expand policies that do not bode well for the nation.

Why anyone would vote for a party that foisted ObamaCare on us, driving up the costs of healthcare though numerous taxes and impacting the healthcare industry in ways that have already caused many physicians to seek retirement or be forced to process their patients as rapidly as possible to pay their bills? The fact that the Republican candidate Sen. Ted Cruz is calling for the repeal of ObamaCare is reason enough to give him serious consideration.

Similarly, conservatives resist amnesty programs that would load the voting rolls with those who entered illegally and now, because they’ve been here for several years, we are supposed to consider them comparable to those who did so legally. Republican candidates who resist this understand that a nation with no real citizenship standards and borders that do not close off easy access rapidly ceases to be a nation.

At the same time, these illegals are competing for jobs with those who are legal by birth and naturalization. It’s a wonder to me that this nation is $18 trillion in debt, has over ninety million unemployed, and the nation continues to “redistribute” money from those who are working to those who are not. These programs are a huge magnet for the illegals, but it is the states that must struggle to fund their educational systems and Medicaid. Meanwhile our infrastructure goes old and in need of repair.

Beyond our shores, thanks to the foreign policies of the President, the United States is no longer the leader of the free world. As the Middle East slips into anarchy Obama wants nothing more than to give Iran the right to have its own nuclear weapons with which to pursue its hegemony of the region. Lift sanctions?

Why would we want Iran to have more money to fund the terrorism that it uses to expand its influence? Closer to home, White House efforts to accept Cuba ignores its dictatorship, its record of providing weapons to our enemies, and years of hostility.

This represents a deliberate effort to undermine and weaken the moral principles on which our nation has been founded and risen to leadership in the past. Who is more widely criticized in our society than the evangelicals who have high moral standards and the Tea Party movement that is seeking to slow the obscene growth of the federal government?

We need to worry about a nation where marijuana is legalized and thus able to affects the mental capabilities of those who have used it since its heyday in the 1960s? Where is the need to reexamine the moral issues involved in the murder of babies in the womb? From 1973 through 2011, there were nearly 53 million legal abortions nationwide. In 2011, approximately 1.06 million abortions took place.

In March I noted that “More than a quarter of births to women of childbearing age—defined here as 15 to 44 years old—in the past five years were cohabiting couples, the highest on record and nearly double the rate from a decade earlier, according to new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for 2011 to 2013.”

“And here’s a statistic that really caught my attention: “Cohabiting parents now account for a clear majority—59%--of all births outside marriage, according to estimates by Sally Curtin, a CDC demographer. In all, 40% of the 3.93 million births in 2013 were to unmarried women.” Moreover, “It is mostly white and Hispanic couples who are driving the trend, not black couples, experts say.”

This speaks to the breakdown of the institution that is most essential for a healthy, successful society, the dissolution or downgrading of marriage and the births that occur outside of it.

American politics—always a national debate on where we are and where we’re going, is critical to the future. Right now America is at risk of becoming a place where our founding morals, values, and traditions are being cast aside.

Your vote was never more important.

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GOP vs GOP on immigration

On immigration, it's GOP v. GOP from the files of Jeff Jacoby at the Boston Globe

The morning after President Obama's State of the Union address, Politico had a story on how Republicans had responded to one contentious issue. The headline: "Priebus struggles to explain GOP immigration messages."

That would be Reince Priebus, the Republican Party chairman. His "struggle" was to clarify why Iowa's new senator, Joni Ernst, said nothing at all about immigration in her 10-minute reply to the president, whereas Florida Representative Carlos Curbelo, in a Spanish-language version of the GOP response, urged Obama to work with Republicans "to create permanent solutions for our immigration system, to secure our borders, [and] modernize legal immigration."

Good thing Priebus wasn't asked about the formal Tea Party response to the president's speech, delivered by another Florida Republican, Rep. Curt Clawson, or he'd have had still more reason to squirm. Speaking in English and Spanish, Clawson called pointedly for "embracing … legal immigrants, and the millions waiting in line legally to begin their own American Dream."

Then there was Iowa Representative Steve King's rude Twitter slam against Obama for inviting "a deportable" to sit in the House gallery as a guest of the First Lady. That was a reference to 20-year-old Ana Zamora, a Texas student who was brought illegally to the United States as an infant, and who benefited from Obama's 2012 executive order indefinitely extending legal status to thousands of similarly situated immigrants.

Though King's tweet wasn't an official GOP statement, it created some instant awkwardness for the Republican presidential hopefuls heading to Iowa for a Saturday "freedom summit" hosted by … King. When one of those hopefuls, Senator Marco Rubio, was asked about King's nasty tone, his answer was careful: "We have to always remind ourselves that we're talking about human beings with hopes and dreams and families."

Plainly, the clearest element of the GOP message on immigration is that the GOP has no clear message on immigration. The subject was barely mentioned in the president's address, but that didn't stop the loyal opposition from once again getting into an intramural tangle over it.

But is that a bad thing?

For any large political party, a boisterous battle over policy and principle is a sign of fitness, not feebleness. While "diversity" is a sacred cow on the left, it is on the right where real diversity — diversity of ideas and viewpoints — has most often been showcased. In the 1970s, Ronald Reagan famously debated William F. Buckley Jr. on whether the United States should relinquish the Panama Canal.

In the 1980s, Bob Dole and Newt Gingrich fiercely clashed over supply-side tax cuts. More recently, Republicans have gone at each other over war in Iraq, education reform, and "enhanced interrogation."

However disconcerting in the short run, the right's current rumble over immigration policy is heartening, especially when the argument focuses on ideals and values, and reflects a thoughtful interest in crafting wise, not merely popular, public policy. In a new monograph from Encounter Books — "Open Immigration: Yea and Nay" — Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies and Alex Nowrasteh of the Cato Institute provide a brief yet splendid example of how uplifting the debate over immigration can be.

Each lays out his case in prose that is clear, quick, factual, and respectful.

Krikorian, a well-known immigration restrictionist, argues that while mass immigration may have suited the United States in the 19th-century, it is harmful in the 21st-century. It poses security and economic threats, undermines assimilation, and retards productivity gains by flooding the market with cheap labor.

"A modern society doesn't actually need any immigration," he writes; his proposal would slash the annual influx from 1 million to about 400,000 — "still higher than any other nation in the world."

Nowrasteh, by contrast, wants more legal immigration. America isn't being swamped with newcomers — far from it. As a fraction of our population, immigrant inflows are small compared to most developed countries. Every policy generates stresses and strains, he notes, but there is no question that immigration enlarges the US economic pie.

"A freer immigration system would not only be economically beneficial to the United States," Nowrasteh argues. "It would also be consistent with our principles of limited government, free markets, and individual liberty."

These dueling essays are a pleasure to read. Each advocate strengthens his case, paradoxically, by granting that the other side raises serious challenges and attempting to meet them. To be sure, Krikorian and Nowrasteh aren't politicians, ravenous for votes and approval ratings. But their debate exemplifies what is possible even on such an incendiary issue.

It's true: Republicans and others on the right, battling it out over immigration, seem awfully fractious and confused these days. For those who take their ideas seriously, that's often how the democratic process works.

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Buy your health insurance out of state

Buy your health insurance out of state from the files of Jeff Jacoby at the Boston Globe

Read the Jacoby Files at the Boston Globe

The second open enrollment period for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act is underway, and the law is more unpopular than ever. According to Gallup, a record-high 56 percent of Americans now disapprove of the 2010 law.

Reasons to dislike ObamaCare have abounded from the outset, and on Friday the administration unveiled a new one: In large swaths of the country, the price of insurance sold on the federal health exchange is going up.

That will force many of those who bought coverage last year to scramble to find a new policy or fork over as much as 20 percent in higher premiums. How's that "affordable" health care working out for you?

Republicans in Congress — less inclined than some deep thinkers to sneer at "the stupidity of the American people" — unanimously opposed the Affordable Care Act when it was enacted, and were rewarded in the 2010 midterms for their steadfastness.

In the ensuing four years, Republicans repeatedly called for replacing ObamaCare with alternatives expanding choice, competition, and market reforms — and the voters just rewarded them again.

Of course, even with their new majorities in Congress Republicans will have to contend with President Obama's veto pen. So a bill "repealing every last vestige of ObamaCare," as Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky exuberantly proposed on Election Night, isn't in the cards anytime soon.

But that doesn't mean there is nothing to be done, particularly since the Supreme Court has agreed to hear a new challenge to the law, one that could potentially cause ObamaCare to topple under its own weight.

One way or another, changes in the law are coming. Not all of them have to be bitterly controversial, or provoke cries of Republican overreaching. Here's a suggestion: Allow individuals to buy health insurance from out of state.

In an age when consumers can purchase almost anything from vendors almost anywhere, government policies protecting insurance companies from interstate competition are indefensible. Lawmakers would be laughed out of office, rightly, if they insisted that the only CDs, cellphones, or ceramics their constituents could buy were those manufactured in the state where they lived.

All sorts of financial products are routinely acquired without to state borders proving an impenetrable barrier: life insurance, service warranties, stocks and bonds, bank accounts, credit cards. Why should a medical plan be any different?

How America Views the Patient Protection Affordable Care Act

There is no good reason to deny freedom of choice to Americans when it comes to buying health insurance. Yet licensing rules in virtually every state effectively prevent individual residents from shopping for health plans in any other state.

Consequently, there is no national market for health insurance. There are only autonomous state markets, many dominated by near-monopolies that can get away with offering lower quality insurance at ever-higher premiums.

As Michael Cannon of the Cato Institute points out, it isn't only insurance companies that are sheltered from the rigors of competition. Insurance regulators are insulated too. State governments, inveigled by special interests, can burden health insurance policies with more and more mandatory benefits, driving up premiums to cover services that many consumers would never willingly choose.

In Massachusetts, for instance, health insurance policies must cover at least 49 specified treatments and types of providers, among them midwives, infertility treatments, hair prostheses, and chiropractors.

But what if all you want is a plain-vanilla health plan akin to those sold by insurers in New Hampshire (only 38 state-required health-care mandates) or, better yet, in Michigan (24) or Idaho (13)? Tough luck. That's what it means when interstate commerce in health insurance is blocked.

Polls show broad public support for the idea — as high as 77 percent in a recent Rasmussen poll. Legislation to overhaul the Affordable Care Act, currently being drafted by Florida Senator Marco Rubio and Wisconsin Representative Paul Ryan, will reportedly include interstate choice.

"We want … every American to be able to buy the kind of health insurance they want at a price that they are willing to buy and from any company in America that will sell it to you," Rubio said in a recent radio interview.

Which isn't to say change can only come from above. One can envision a moderate, pro-reform governor championing such market choice at the state level — a just-elected Republican, say, with a deep knowledge of the health insurance industry.

How about it, Charlie Baker? Why not use that new bully pulpit to advocate for legislation freeing Massachusetts residents to buy a health policy from any properly licensed insurance company in America willing to sell it to them?

It's a fix long overdue. With the distortions imposed first by RomneyCare and then ObamaCare, Massachusetts could use it more than ever. The rest of the country could too.

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