... haven't stopped reading the New York Times obituaries. I just didn't have much to say about Mario Cuomo's death (above, delivering his famous keynote speech at the 1984 Democratic National Convention), or
Edward Herrmann's (seen very young here, at 1:18 and 1:39, in the trailer from the 1973 movie, The Paper Chase), or
even John Goodlad's, except that his could have doubled as my Name of the Day.
But then I saw that Donna Douglas, who played Elly May in the 1960s sitcom, “The Beverly Hillbillies,” died at age 82. She was the daughter, you may recall, of Jed Clampett, played by Buddy Ebsen.* I was a little shocked by her death because I had always assumed she was in her twenties when the show was first broadcast in 1962. (Didn't you?) But according to my math, Ms. Douglas would have been 30 years old when "The Hillbillies" debuted and 39 when it went off the air in 1971.
* Ebsen, by the way, was originally cast as
the Scarecrow in the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz.
Ebsen then swapped roles with actor Ray Bolger,
who was originally cast as the Tin Man. Ebsen recorded all his songs as
Tin Man, went through all the rehearsals, and started filming. However,
he soon began experiencing cramps and shortness of breath, eventually
leading to hospitalization. Doctors determined that Ebsen was suffering
an allergic reaction to the aluminum dust used in the Tin Man makeup; he was forced to leave the production for health reasons.
In an interview,
Ebsen recalled that the studio heads did not believe he was sick until
someone tried to order him back to the set and was intercepted by an
angry nurse. Ebsen was replaced by Jack Haley,
with the makeup quickly changed to a safer aluminum paste. Until his dying day, Ebsen
complained of lung issues from involvement in "that damned movie." Ironically, Ebsen outlived all of the major cast members of "The Wizard of Oz" by at least 16 years.
...left until the New Hampshire primary, Gail Collins reminds us in her column today in the Times. Also (my emphasis):
When Hillary Clinton thinks about running for president, do you think
she contemplates the fact that no Democrat has been elected to succeed
another Democrat since James Buchanan in 1856?
Consider that succession information for a minute. We have had
Democratic vice presidents step into office when the Democratic
president died. But the voters haven’t gone to the polls and elected one
Democrat to follow another since before the Civil War.
Now there was a time not too long ago when I would have thought, Whoa! We're screwed.
But not now. I've gotten a little more sophisticated -- a little more -- and realize that since there have only been 56 or so elections in American history, that that number is not statistically significant. (I don't know what would be, several hundred? A thousand? But 56 is definitely not.)
I bring this up because Ms. Collins also reminds us that with only seven months until the Iowa straw poll, "Buchanan was also the last former secretary of state elected president."
And my point is that you are going to hear a ton -- a ton! -- of facts and figures like that in the next two years that will support someone's observation about the 2016 primaries and general election.
(How about this one: No woman has ever been elected president of the United States -- ever! Meaningless, right?)
Much of what you hear in the next couple of years will be wrong. Several "firsts" will be established in this cycle, much to the astonishment (!) of TV and print commentators (including this one) because we are still in the process of establishing a statistically significant sample. In fact, I'll probably certainly die before we have one.
So come back in a thousand years or so and maybe you'll be able to make some reliable forecasts about the elections based on past data.
Until then, enjoy the show, because we have no idea what's going to happen. (And that's one of the reasons I love politics so much.)
I didn't; never have, never will. Not because I'm like Calvin, but because I figure if something is worth doing it's worth doing today. For example, I resolve pretty much every day of the year to eat better. Is it working? Sometimes.
But if you need a New Year's resolution, a good one can be found in an opinion piece in the Times today by Razib Khan, a graduate student at the University of California, Davis. Mr. Khan (at least I think it's Mister) writes (my emphasis):
The critic Pauline Kael’s 1972 assertion
that she personally knew only one person who voted for President
Richard M. Nixon has become a favorite illustration of the cultural
isolation of liberal elites. But this may simply be the reality, that
Americans are ideologically polarized and inhabit different and mutually exclusive social worlds.
Stereotypes flourish in ignorance. Liberal and conservative perceptions
of one another can be ignorant and patronizing because they have so
little personal experience of one another. Intriguingly, research by the social psychologists Jesse Graham, Brian A. Nozek and Jonathan Haidt has shown that liberals exhibit the least accurate perception of those with opposing political views.
Our liking for black-and-white versions of reality is belied by their more shaded truths.
We live in a world with a surfeit of information at our service. It is
our choice whether we seek out data that reinforce our biases or choose
to look at the world in a critical, rational manner, and allow reality
to bend our preconceptions. In the long run, the truth will work better
for us than our cherished fictions.
So I resolve, as of today, to try harder to "allow reality to bend my preconceptions." Hopefully, it will work out better than that whole eating healthy thing.
...of hearing about the Republican Party's "deep bench" for 2016?
Joseph Curl, writing in the Washington Times yesterday, says:
...the Republicans are sitting on the deepest bench
they've had in decades. Bill Kristol, the editor of the Weekly Standard,
counts some 26 potential candidates: "John Bolton, Jeb Bush, Ben
Carson, Chris Christie, Ted Cruz, Carly Fiorina, Lindsey Graham, Mike
Huckabee, Bobby Jindal, John Kasich, Pete King, Mike Pence, Rick Perry,
Mitt Romney, Marco Rubio, Paul Ryan, Rick Santorum, Joe Scarborough,
Scott Walker, and Allen West ... Dick Cheney, Tom Cotton, Mitch Daniels,
Joni Ernst, Newt Gingrich, and Rudy Giuliani."
John Bolton, Ben
Carson, Carly Fiorina, Pete King, Rick Perry, Rick Santorum, Joe Scarborough, Allen West, Newt Gingrich and Rudy Giuliani? Seriously?
Dick Cheney? Really?
Let's consult Paddy Power for the GOP's five leading candidates at this point.
1. Jeb Bush. The Republican frontrunner shares a last name with the most unsuccessful president in recent years. And the former governor of Florida has been out of office since 2007. Is this really the quality of the field?
2. Marco Rubio. The one-time darling of the tea party has seen his star diminished since he took the lead on immigration reform and then voted against his own bill. How can Rubio hope to make a run for the White House if his mentor, Jeb, is vacuuming up all the same money and talent from Florida? Never mind the Oval Office; speculation is that Rubio might have trouble getting reelected to his Senate seat in 2016.
3. Rand Paul. The freshman senator from Kentucky has taken great pains to distance himself from his gadfly father. But all it takes is one picture like the one above to sink his nascent campaign. (That's Ron Paul posing with Don Black, a former American Nazi Party member
turned KKK Grand Wizard and owner of the white supremacist
Stormfront.org.) The GOP would be better off with Steve Scalise at the top of the ticket.
4. Chris Christie. I never thought the New Jersey governor's "Tony Soprano" schtick would play well outside the east coast, but now it doesn't seem to matter. Forget bridgegate; Christie's bigger problems are the sluggish economy and his falling poll numbers at home. And the establishment must agree or we wouldn't be hearing so much about Jeb Bush and Mitt Romney.
Which brings me to:
5. Mitt Romney. Are we really talking about this retread? Would Mitt want to be a modern-day Adlai Stevenson? Who? Exactly.
Who else is on that "deep bench" of Curl's? Paul Ryan? He'd rather be House Ways and Means Chairman. Ted Cruz? Too extreme. Lindsey Graham? Too many rumors. Mike Huckabee? Another retread from 2008. Bobby Jindal? Hasn't recovered from that disastrous State of the Union rebuttal speech back in 2009. Scott Walker? Can you imagine the "stupid party" (Jindal's words, not mine) nominating a guy without a college degree? Me neither.
So is this what Curl and others mean by the GOP's "deep bench"? Please.
...nephew said someone told him at his new job. And when it comes to the financial markets that's not bad advice, because it always seems that the expected just doesn't come to pass.
Take this piece from the Times yesterday, "Five Surprising Economic Trends in 2014, and What They Mean for 2015." In it Neil Irwin cites five "major moves that defied expert consensus this time a year ago — not only
what was predicted, but what was even thought plausible":
1. There was an epic collapse in oil prices.
Crude oil declined about 50 percent in the second half of 2014. Wow.
2. Long-term interest rates kept falling.
The yield on the 10-year Treasury note fell to 2.17 percent on
Wednesday from 3.03 percent at the end of 2013, and yields on the 30-year fell below 3 percent from about 4 percent. Almost no one expected this.
3. The U.S. stock market kept cruising.
The Standard
& Poor’s 500-stock index closed on Wednesday with a gain of 11.39
percent for 2014 — 13.68 percent when reinvested dividends are included.
It was the third consecutive year that the market benchmark has risen
by more than 10 percent.
The run-up has now lasted nearly 70 months, making it the fourth-longest
bull market since World War II, according to data from S.&P. (And rich people still hate President Obama? Can you imagine if a President Mitt Romney had this record?)
And after 14 years, the S.&P. 500 finally, in late 2014, rose to a new
high on an inflation-adjusted basis, according to data compiled by
Professor Robert J. Shiller of Yale.
4. The dollar soared.
5. The outlook for inflation fell.
According to Peter Praet of the European Central Bank, eurozone inflation could be even lower next year than the 0.7
percent forecast by its economists:
Mr.
Praet said there was a danger that businesses and consumers were
becoming resigned to low growth and low inflation, and as a result were
not investing and spending. If so, that would be one of the symptoms of
deflation — a broad-based decline in prices that causes people to delay
purchases, company profits to sink and unemployment to rise.
Let's take each one of those, one at a time.
I'm going to assume that the economy continues to recover in 2015; not five percent GDP growth like last quarter, maybe, but growth nonetheless. So what happens to these five assumptions?
First of all, oil should rebound in 2015. Come on, did you really think we were going to have oil in the fifties for very long? Even if crude rallies back into the sixties or seventies, that's higher than today. And I'm assuming continued growth, remember?
Second, as a huge bond bear (as I've been reminded by Paul Krugman on an almost weekly basis) I've been wrong, wrong, wrong for about five years now. But interest rates can't stay low forever, especially if the economy continues to grow. If long-term rates climb up to four percent or so, that's still pretty low in my experience.
Three, as someone who has been almost fully invested forever, stocks could stall out this year, especially if oil and interest rates rise in response to a recovering economy. I'm still bullish long term, but "trees don't grow to the sky."
Fourth, I don't really have an opinion on the dollar, but what if Europe and Japan start to grow? Wouldn't that put upward pressure on their currencies? Since they're starting from such low levels, maybe interest rates will rise faster overseas than here.
Finally, since everyone (expect Paul Krugman) has been calling for inflation for the last five years, and everyone keeps getting it wrong, maybe this will be the year prices tick a little higher just as everyone starts worrying about deflation in Europe.
So, are these my predictions for 2015? Not really, but I just like to "expect the unexpected." (Besides, I have nothing else to say this morning.) I'm still wildly bullish on the future; I think Warren Buffett was right when he said at the depths of the Great Recession that you'll be better off at almost any time in the future than you are today.
...that to take back the White House in 2016, a winning Republican candidate "has to be much more uplifting,
much more positive, much more willing to be practical," than recent GOP presidential nominees. The candidate should also be
willing "[To] lose the primary to win the general, without violating
your principles," Bush said.
So how's that working out so far?
Well, just two weeks later, after President Obama announced he would normalize relations with Cuba, the former governor of Florida said, "Cuba is a dictatorship with a disastrous human rights record, and now
President Obama has rewarded those dictators." And, “I don’t think we should be negotiating with a repressive regime to make changes in our relationship.”
And I thought, He's not off to a very good start, is he?
In other words, in his first opportunity to be "much more willing to be practical," Jeb flubbed it. In typical Republican fashion, Bush said in effect, "Is President Obama for it? Then I'm against it!"
But then this morning I saw this tiny blurb in the New York Times, "Jeb Bush Won’t Attend Immigration Critic’s Event in Iowa" (my emphasis):
Separating himself from much of the emerging Republican presidential field, former Gov. Jeb Bush
of Florida has declined an invitation to speak at a Jan. 24 political
event organized by one of the most strident immigration critics in
Congress. More than a half-dozen potential contenders, including Gov.
Chris Christie of New Jersey, have said they will attend the event, the
Iowa Freedom Summit, organized by the critic, Representative Steve King,
a Republican from Iowa. An aide said Wednesday that Mr. Bush, an
advocate for immigration changes, had a scheduling conflict. Mr. King
has become a conservative power broker, and Iowa is the home of the
first presidential caucuses.
(Click here for the cast of characters expected to attend.)*
And so now I think, Hey, maybe there's some hope for this guy.
But let's see how the rest of the party reacts to Jeb's willingness "to be much more uplifting,
much more positive."
My guess is that the GOP isn't ready to move to the center, particularly after its recent showing in the midterms. I expect the party to stay far, far to the right, until they get absolutely crushed in a presidential election, a la Barry Goldwater in 1964.
And while part of me (the good part) is rooting for Jeb to pull the Republican Party out of the wilderness, the other part (the not-so-good part) is waiting for that Goldwater debacle.
Right now, I'm not terribly optimistic. * King is famous for saying:
"For every [immigrant] who's a valedictorian, there's another 100 out there who
weigh 130 pounds — and they've got calves the size of cantaloupes
because they're hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert."
“He brought joy to tens.”
