Armageddon (14 page)

With their incomes depressed, their factories closed, and opportunities seeming to vanish, non-college-educated whites are truly the jump ball in our politics.

At the start of the modern era, these non-college-educated voters were attracted to the Democratic Party as FDR pushed his New Deal, urging workers to join labor unions and reinforcing their determination to oppose the “economic royalists” who Roosevelt condemned during his 1936 reelection campaign. FDR had governed in close coordination with the capitalist class in his first term. But as he ran for his second term, he pivoted sharply to the left and attacked those whom he had supported in the past. Democrats picked up the FDR theme. They pounded into the heads of blue-collar whites that they needed to vote Democrat to protect their families, jobs, and paychecks.

As a result of the FDR/Truman/Johnson rhetoric, blue-collar whites came to believe that they needed to vote Democrat to protect their economic interests against rapacious and greedy employers. Class warfare became the Democratic Party's motif. Decades later, Richard Nixon, and later Ronald Reagan, turned everything on its head and stole the blue-collar white vote from the Democratic Party, luring millions of them to the GOP. Nixon used social populism while Reagan used taxes to this end.

Nixon played off student antiwar demonstrations to craft the “silent majority” who, he said, shared traditional American values. Condemning hippies and yippies and flag burners, he rallied blue-collar whites to the Republican Party. Archie Bunker, the blue-collar hero of the hit TV show
All in the Family
, became emblematic of the backlash against the radical students.

Social populism had an ugly side too as Nixon rallied Southern whites against court-ordered integration. As racial animosities and intrusive court decisions found their way north, white resentment followed it. First, Alabama Governor George Wallace, an avowed racist, and then Nixon, whose act was cleaner, tapped into the backlash and piled up white blue-collar voters.

But the conversion of these former Democrats to the Republican Party really only reached its zenith under Reagan who rallied them against high taxes that sapped the paychecks of the working class whites. While Reagan attacked the welfare state, his appeal was more economic than racial, and on this surer footing, he triggered the desertion of an entire class of voters from the Democratic Party of their fathers. They came to be known as “Reagan Democrats,” a kind of political boat people who drifted to various parties and candidates in search of a political home.

Then Obama made the brilliant move of reshaping antitax rhetoric to aim at holding down taxes, but only on the middle class and the poor—those making under $250,000 a year. Obama's line in the economic sand exploited the wedge between the rich and the not-rich as he focused resentment over taxes on the rich “not paying their fair share.” In stoking this resentment, he turned the antitax rhetoric of the Republicans on its head. When the GOP lined up against all hikes in taxes, he was able to accuse them of protecting the rich at the expense of the middle class. The antitax impulse that lay at the core of the program that had attracted the Reagan Democrats to the GOP in the first place now worked against the Republican Party as it manifested itself in anger against tax loopholes that let the rich escape heavy taxation.

Even though the top 1% paid 47% of all federal income taxes,
6
Obama could point out that they earned about 20% of all income.
7
(Estimates of their income vary, ranging from 17% to 25%, and are quite volatile from year to year.) As the income disparity between the top and the rest of America widened, so did the resentment of the blue-collar voters. By 2008, the gap between the rich and the poor had become not only noticeable but unavoidable. And Obama drove a truck through it—all the way to the White House.

It was Obama's genius to use FDR's class-based rhetoric to undermine Reagan's antitax pitch and to distract voters from Nixon's social and racial arguments. When Obama ran in 2008, he often spoke of the Warren Buffet rule, quoting the billionaire investor as saying, “No household making more than $1 million each year should pay a smaller share of their income in taxes than a middle-class family pays.”
8
Poverty became Obama's friend. The more the middle class stagnated and slipped back, the more they came to resent the rich and lined up behind Obama. And income inequality got worse and worse.

• • Under Bill Clinton, 45% of all gains in personal income went to the top 1% of the country.
  9
  
• • Under George W. Bush, 65% of the gain in income went to the top 1%.
  10
  
• • And according to Emmanuel Saez, a top liberal economist from Berkley, under Barack Obama, 91% of the increase in earnings went to the top 1%.
  11
  

So the national ups and downs of the economy, to say nothing of the stock market, are but a distant echo to the 71% of American whites who have no four-year college degree.
12
When the Dow rose, it created a prosperity they could see all around them but could not share. The resulting envy metastasized into a class consciousness that dominated their voting habits.

They simply could not feel empathy coming from a Mitt Romney, a super wealthy example of the process of wealth creation that
left them out. There could be no better symbol of their exclusion than this wealthy son of a tycoon who spent his life amassing a vast fortune. Even worse, they saw Romney as typical of the ruthless deal maker who encourages mergers, acquisitions, and outsourcing to save money by laying people off in the millions. The fact that Republicans didn't see how Romney would be anathema to the swing voters they needed attests to their nearsightedness. But even as we began to realize Romney's vulnerability, he hurtled toward the nomination, using his vast wealth and his even more wealthy connections to pay for negative ads that eviscerated his opponents one after the other. Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, Herman Cain, and Newt Gingrich all fell under his sword, leaving us with no choice but Romney.

But Romney was a disaster. He alienated the very voters we needed to attract to the polls. When Obama attacked Romney for his work at Bain Capital, the Republican, inexplicably, failed to answer the charges and let them sit out there, undermining his support and convincing his white blue-collar would-be supporters to stay home. Obama exploited the boiling resentment of white blue-collar voters who worked hard at one or two or three jobs each but still couldn't get ahead while they watched the Wall Street rich pile up treasure.

In 2008, Obama had run for office on a positive theme of hope, change, and inclusion. But in 2012, he got reelected on a campaign of vicious class hatred, stoking the fault lines that divide us, capitalizing on the very income inequality that his policies and those of his Federal Reserve Board had created.

To defeat Hillary, we must bring back the white blue collar vote. In Donald Trump, we have the perfect candidate to do so. He articulates their resentment in a way no other modern political figure has been able to do. He speaks right to them. He uses the issues of terrorism, Obamacare, trade and immigration to rally their support.

We need to get the blue collar white vote back by throwing the right jab, hitting Hillary over these Republican issues.

A
s we did in
2004, we can hit Hillary and the left over their failure to rein in terrorism and to fight it with passion and vigor. With President Obama seemingly asleep at the switch and his former secretary of state impotent as well, our way forward is clear.

What is the key issue of 2016? . . .

The ISIS attacks of 2015 and 2016 have set the stage for a massive Republican victory. Terrorism clearly, and cruelly, transcends all the careful class, race, and gender divisions into which Obama has carved America. When an ISIS bomb goes off in a shopping mall, the shrapnel hits all in its path. An ISIS terrorist with a suicide vest or an assault rifle or a handgun will not play favorites in choosing his victims.

After the 9/11 attacks, we all looked up into the sky to see if any airplanes were overhead ready to crash into nearby buildings. But in
the aftermath of the random terror of the ISIS attacks, we need to look all around us—360 degrees. As we go shopping, walk up to an airline counter, step on a subway, see a movie, cheer at a sports event, or even just stay at home, we could become victims. It is not just a few of us in the nation's largest buildings or cities who are at risk.

This pervasive feeling of danger—that's why it is called “terrorism”—has created a sense of unease in all of us. It may matter to Obama if his voters are black or Latino or young or single women or gay. But it matters not at all to ISIS. Keeping America safe will inevitably be the single biggest issue of the 2016 election. It is an issue that will just not go away. Even as economic concerns such as wage stagnation climb to the top of the national charts, they get knocked down into second place when every few weeks or months a new outrageous attack rears up and dominates the national news cycle.

Paris . . . San Bernardino . . . Brussels. Each attack provides a graphic demonstration of the abject failure of President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to keep us safe. Every time a bomb goes off, it brings us all back to the essential point: our country is in a war and Obama and Hillary are losing it.

As Obama ran for president in 2008, he was bedeviled by tapes of his pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, ranting and raving about how evil America was. Commenting on the 9/11 attacks, Wright said that we had brought them on ourselves by our lawless international conduct. He famously said, “The chickens have come home to roost.”
1
Now they have truly come home as Obama's and Hillary's weakness, appeasement, and failure to protect our country is resulting in massive new terrorism unseen since the 9/11 attacks.

When Obama took office as president and Hillary Clinton became his secretary of state, Iraq was quiescent after the successful surge in US forces. ISIS did not exist. There had been relatively few terror attacks in the United States, and those that had occurred were dwarfed by the hundreds that were thwarted. The shoe bomber's footwear failed to explode. The taxi bomb in Times Square was
discovered and defused before it could detonate. The underwear bomber failed to bring down the airplane on which he was a passenger as his fellow travelers disarmed him. But now the world is a very different place.

Paris's heart has been ripped open by a series of ever-more-deadly terror attacks. Dozens were killed in Brussels, many within sight of the headquarters of the European Union. Shooting rampages by Muslim jihadists have become a weekly occurrence in the United States. ISIS controls territory equal in size to the state of New Jersey. But Obama continues to put everything else first—ahead of protecting us from terrorism.

• • He won't use our technology to pick up conversations involving terrorists. That violates their civil liberties.
  
• • He won't keep refugees out of the country, despite the likelihood that their ranks are salted with terrorists. That would violate our principle of diversity and it's not “who we are.”
  
• • He won't stand up and condemn radical Islam. In fact, he won't even say the words. That would violate pluralism and imply intolerance.
  
• • He won't even go after the most likely terrorists. That would be profiling.
  
• • Instead, he wants to disarm honest, innocent Americans who are trying to protect themselves by purchasing guns.
  

Everything comes before fighting terror with Obama.

And with no condemnation from Hillary or Obama, New York City's Mayor Bill de Blasio disbanded the municipal agency within the Police Department tasked with keeping tabs on the locations (including mosques) where Muslim extremists congregate. And so, just as 9/11 dominated the presidential elections of 2004, so ISIS's attacks will loom large in the 2016 contest.

Back in 2004, voters told pollsters that they tended to prefer Democrat John Kerry's ideas on education, Social Security,
the environment, and poverty. But they voted for Bush because of one issue: His fight against terror. So it will be in 2016. In a
RasmussenReports.com
survey in December 2015, general election voters reported that they trusted Republicans more than Democrats when it came to national security and the war on terror by a margin of 46% to 35%.

This finding by Rasmussen is no surprise, nor is it likely to change. Ever since the days of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, Republicans have had the edge on national security as an issue. And when President George W. Bush proved so aggressive and effective in pursuing the terrorists and President Obama so inept, the Republican lead on the issue widened.

So now only the core Democratic base of about one-third of the electorate gives their party the edge on the terrorism issue. Not only Republicans, but also the majority of Independents, say that they trust the GOP more on the issue. As the 2016 campaign unfolds, Democrats all face a key dilemma: the more they discuss and debate terrorism, the more the issue will come to dominate the campaign, inuring to the Republican advantage. But if they don't spend a lot of time talking about terrorism, the perception of their weakness on the issue will only grow sharper.

Of course, they may not have any choice. ISIS will do what it can to keep terrorism at the top of the national agenda by attacking Americans wherever they can. Their hideous videos of beheadings and the images of their terror attacks on our televisions will serve to keep the focus of national attention on the issue. But since the Democrats are running a former secretary of state who did little to stem—and much to inadvertently encourage—terrorism, the issue will cut even more strongly for the Republican candidate in the election.

And Donald Trump is just the right person to hammer away at the issue. By blaming political correctness for the Administration's failure to protect us, he has hit the issue head on. Trump's proposal to end all Muslim immigration while the current tide of terrorist infiltration is high, will work well to bring back our base voters.

Nothing could more squarely link Hillary Clinton to the dismal record of Obama in fighting terrorism than her inept record at the State Department. As former secretary of state, she bears more responsibility than anyone else in the administration except for the president for the spread of ISIS and the growing number of terrorists salivating for a chance to attack us. New York City's former mayor Rudy Giuliani even went so far as to say that Hillary created such an encouraging environment for ISIS to sprout that he said Hillary “helped create ISIS.” He argued that she “could be considered a founding member of ISIS.”
2
The former mayor, who won national recognition for his leadership of New York after the 9/11 attacks, said that she helped ISIS to grow “by being part of an administration [that] withdrew from Iraq. By being part of an administration that let (Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki) run Iraq into the ground, so you forced the Shiites to make a choice. By not intervening in Syria at the proper time. By being part of an administration that drew twelve lines in the sand and made a joke out of it.”
3

Indeed, terrorism has grown like a weed in the gardens Hillary was supposed to tend as secretary of state. While she gallivanted around the world, racking up frequent flyer mileage, the terrorists were gaining ground.

Foreign policy is the area of American politics in which the executive branch can make no excuses. Because of the president's and the secretary of state's exclusive control over policy and its execution, success works to their benefit while failures are also charged to their account. (Look at how much mileage Obama got in the 2012 election from killing bin Laden). Now the battle against terror has turned sour and the blame lies clearly with Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Every aspect of the Obama/Hillary foreign policy has encouraged the rise of terrorism.

For example, had America kept ground troops in Iraq after our 2011 pullout, there would have been no space for ISIS to develop. A small garrison of 10,000 or so would have been sufficient to keep things under control. But we repeated in Iraq the mistake we made 20 years earlier in Afghanistan by pulling out and letting the forces of chaos reign. Obama, who originally surfaced in our politics as an early opponent of the war in Iraq was determined to honor his commitment to pull all of our troops out before the 2012 elections. During the 2008 elections, he and Hillary (his primary opponent) excoriated Senator John McCain, the Republican candidate, when he proposed a continuing presence in Iraq to prevent the rise of groups like ISIS. McCain said “It's not a matter of how long we're in Iraq, it's if we succeed or not.” Asked by a heckler at a campaign rally about whether we should keep troops in Iraq for 50 years, “Maybe 100,” was McCain's reply. “As long as Americans are not being injured or harmed or wounded or killed, it's fine with me and I hope it would be fine with you if we maintain a presence in a very volatile part of the world where al Qaeda is training, recruiting, equipping and motivating people every single day.”
4

Hillary pounced, saying, “He [McCain] said recently he could see having troops in Iraq for 100 years. Well, I want them home within 60 days of my becoming president of the United States.”
5
Obama echoed her criticism, saying, “Senator McCain said the other day that we might be mired for 100 years in Iraq—which is reason enough not to give him four years in the White House.”
6

Hillary had always played politics on Iraq and on the War on Terror. When New York was attacked on 9/11, Hillary had just taken office as its US senator, despite never having lived in the state. She felt she needed to show toughness on terror and voted for the Patriot Act and the war in Iraq in 2003. But by 2008, the war was unpopular, so she opposed additional troops, dubbed “the surge.”

Having both vowed during the election to remove all our troops from Iraq, neither Obama nor Hillary was willing to back
a continuing presence there, however much sense it might make. Both agreed that our ongoing troop commitment in Korea and Germany had played a large role in deterring aggression, but neither one would apply that logic to Iraq.

ISIS grew out of Obama's and Hillary's obstinate refusal to listen to the advice of people like McCain. Determined to produce a full pullout in time for the 2012 elections, Obama left in our wake a sectarian war between Sunni and Shia Muslims that metastasized into the formation of ISIS, the most deadly terror gang yet.

As we left Iraq, we lost our leverage to force the Shia governments of Nouri al-Maliki and then Haider al-Abadi to moderate their course as they appointed anti-Sunni men to their new governments, alienating the 20% of Iraq's population that is Sunni. Hillary and Obama vainly warned the Iraqi leaders to include Sunnis in their government, but lacking a troop presence there, they could do nothing to make their concerns stick.

Instead, the Sunnis—who dominated the former government of Saddam Hussein—found themselves cut out. Their solution was to wage continued war against the government just as they had during the years when the United States had troops on the ground. Now reorganized and energized by the increasing anti-Sunni bias of the Baghdad government, they set up a new organization to fight for them: ISIS. Sunni-ism on steroids: ISIS.

Obama's CIA director John Brennan summarizes what happened. The Islamic State, he said, was virtually destroyed under President George W. Bush after his surge in US troop levels. Brennan said that ISIS was “pretty much decimated when US forces were there in Iraq. It had maybe 700-or-so adherents left. And then it grew quite a bit in the last several years, when it split then from al-Qaida [
sic
] in Syria, and set up its own organization.” But, Brennan notes, “[ISIS] can [now] muster between 20,000 and 31,500 fighters across Iraq and Syria . . . This new total reflects an increase in members because of stronger recruitment since June [2015] following battlefield successes and the declaration of a caliphate, greater battlefield activity, and additional intelligence.”
7

As ISIS (called ISIL by Obama) was growing and recruiting, Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes was minimizing the threat it posed to the United States. He said the major danger was al-Qaeda, not ISIS: “While both are terrorist forces, they have different ambitions. Al-Qaida's principal ambition is to launch attacks against the west and US homeland. . . . Right now, ISIL's primary focus is consolidating territory in the Middle East region to establish their own Islamic State. So they're different organizations with different objectives.”
8

The Obama administration has consistently underestimated the goals of ISIS. In an August 8, 2015, interview with CNN, Deputy National Security Adviser Tony Blinken echoed Rhodes's dismissal of the danger ISIS posed. He declared that “unlike core al Qaeda, right now, their focus is not on attacking the US homeland or attacking our interests here in the United States or abroad. It's focused intently on trying to create a caliphate now in Iraq.”
9