21 August 2023

Finding the Strongest
Presidential Nominee

by Dr. Thomas O’Brien
Research Director
New Statecraft Institute

    No decision that an American political party makes is remotely as important as selecting its presidential nominee.  In any democratic nation, it is very unhealthy for a major party to coronate for renomination an unpopular president unopposed by any credible challengers.  But in our two-party duopoly, it is an even more glaring failure of our national dialogue. The Democratic Party must do better than giving its voters the illusory “choice” of one candidate. The Party should add at least one other consensus candidate to the ballot.  If President Biden suffers a heart attack, stroke, cancer or notable cognitive decline during the primary process with no strong back-up candidate, Trump would be even more likely to become our president again.

     Mr. Biden has been persistently unpopular.  Many Americans believe he is not qualified to serve owing to his advanced age, and fully 70% of Americans did not want him to even stand for re-election.  Polls consistently show that a presumptive Trump vs. Biden race is neck-and-neck.  And these polls do not reveal the significant silent wedge of Trump sympathizers who refuse to participate in polls or to acknowledge considering a choice of Trump over Biden.  Remember that Trump doesn’t need to win 50% of total votes anyway; he only needs to win the Electoral College.  Hillary Clinton beat Trump by 48.2% to 46.1% in the popular vote and still lost. Cornel West is also certain to drain millions more votes exclusively from Mr. Biden.

     Health concerns are the biggest reason to find an alternative candidate. But these are not the only problems for Mr. Biden. His projected budgets will add huge new debt on future generations, despite rosy scenarios of no recessions and assuming that Congress will burden U.S. businesses with trillions in new taxes.   His budgets also assume that Congress will enact another $3.5 trillion tax increase in 2025 when the Trump tax cuts expire.  These budgets still underfund Social Security by 25%, with projected deficits of over $100 trillion in Social Security and Medicare over the next 30 years.  And even with these unrealistic assumptions, his budgets will dump another $19 trillion of new debt over the next 10 years on future generations.

     If Mr. Biden is re-nominated, the discussion will center around risks of health or mental problems, open borders, projected debt explosion, inflation and rising crime.  Persuadable voters will hear this incessantly over the next 14 months. But every one of those vulnerabilities would disappear immediately if a consensus alternative candidate emerges.  Fortunately, there are many admired leaders who could not only beat Mr. Biden in a primary but would also be dramatically stronger candidates in the general election.

      Here are 27 such leaders, in alphabetical order: Jason Altmire, Evan Bayh, Michael Bloomberg, Steve Bullock, Maria Cantwell, Lincoln Chafee, Kent Conrad, Tom Daschle, John Delaney, Harold Ford, Heidi Heitkamp, John Hickenlooper, Angus King, Amy Klobuchar, Conor Lamb, Mary Landrieu, Mitch Landrieu, Blanche Lincoln, Claire McCaskill, Jack Reed, Susan Rice, Ken Salazar, Brian Schweitzer, Kathleen Sebelius, Jon Tester, Tom Vilsack, and Mark Warner. They are widely recognized pragmatic problem-solvers.  Any one of these esteemed leaders could serve as a unifying figure who runs a positive campaign that does not divide the Party.  These individuals are likely to never criticize President Biden at all.  But any such criticism would surely pale in comparison to the savagery of the general election.

      If someone with the name recognition and gravitas of Evan Bayh, Michael Bloomberg, Tom Daschle, Heidi Heitkamp, Susan Rice, Jon Tester or Mark Warner, for example, walks up to a microphone in South Carolina and announces his or her candidacy, each would likely become an immediate front runner in polls to win the nomination.  The same is true for many of these leaders.  A candidacy by one of them would also cut the wild-card risk of a No Labels ticket that could inadvertently hand Trump the presidency again.  Time is not a problem. The earliest filing deadline to qualify for the presidential ballot is October 16 (Nevada).  In the present underwhelming field of one credible candidate, gathering enough voter signatures to qualify for the ballot is not a difficult hurdle to clear.   

     In this time of epic dissatisfaction with federal leadership, a bold president can use every tool of the office to repulse the culture of failure.  An unprecedentedly vigorous veto agenda can target the worst endemic gridlocks, such as failures to balance the budget, rescue Social Security, finally address immigration and simplify the tax code. The president can use the veto power to compel the pertinent committees to remain in negotiations non-stop at least five days a week until deadlocks are resolved.  The president can allow all programmatic expenditures to be reauthorized on a full-year basis and allow only a continuing resolution on week-to-week expenses, unless the committees maintain unceasing negotiations at least five days a week. A bold president can veto any continuing resolution unless the committees stay in session until Friday at 5 PM and reconvene Monday at 9 AM; e.g., “I’ll allow a continuing resolution only until Friday at 5 PM. If you remain at work Friday afternoon, I’ll allow a CR only until Monday at 10 AM.”

    The president can demand that budget committees remain in negotiations until the budget is balanced within two years providing that economic growth remains strong.  Let Congress enact any spending cuts or tax increases it chooses.  Let Congress work its will, but balance America’s books. The president can demand that the immigration committees work essentially non-stop until they have finally addressed our immigration system. Everyone agrees that the U.S. tax code is insanely complex.  The president can demand that finance committees remain in session until Congress enacts at least a 20% reduction in the number of pages of our tax code.  He or she can repeat that again in Year Two to phase out an additional 20% in the number of pages in the tax code. The president should not tell Congress how to fix immigration or Social Security or balance the federal budget or which loopholes to cut from the tax code – but a visionary president must make it happen.

     In international affairs, the president can spearhead the formation of a World Democratic Congress that supplements or supplants the U.N., and establishment of a Civilized Trading Society of rule-of-law nations to supplant the paralyzed WTO, which allows endless legal appeals and barely functions with its unanimity requirement and which has failed to enact strong secondary sanctions to deter China’s criminality.   

     The list of legislative failures and conflicts of interest in U.S. law is too long to list here.  Voter dissatisfaction is off the charts.  A new president can lead the charge for a variety of reforms that enjoy widespread support, by demanding yes-or-no votes on isolated questions. There are innumerable changes that would enjoy overwhelming popular and expert support but Congress refuses to put them to an isolated, yes-or-no vote. Members often say: “I support this change,” but it never gets an isolated vote. Congress leaders always say: ‘We wanted to do this but there wasn’t enough time.” The president should demand that Congress vote, for example, on mandatory retirement for Members at age 90 or 95; on term limits of at most 30 years continuing service in a single chamber; on reforms of stock options and stock buybacks to eliminate the flagrant conflicts of interest plaguing them today.

     A president can champion concrete proposals that enjoy overwhelming public support to mobilize the public to demand action to fix specific failures.  The president should demand yes-or-no votes on instant runoffs for all Congressional elections, term limits of 18 years or rotating seats on the Supreme Court, and on some of the flagrant conflicts of interest in U.S. law.  Let Congress vote no on all of these overwhelmingly popular reforms and let members face their constituencies. But DEMAND isolated votes on them.

      Americans are looking for a bold departure from business as usual.

This text was first published as an advertorial in the Washington Post on 21 August 2023.

18 January 2024

by Dr. Thomas O’Brien

To the Editor:

    Kamala Harris should indeed reconsider seeking a second term as vice-president. Voters lack confidence in her, a big danger to Mr Biden’s electability. Selecting someone like Evan Bayh, Tom Daschle or Susan Rice for vice-president would completely change the campaign narrative, providing a universally respected commander-in-chief in waiting. Ms Harris could become secretary of state or UN ambassador.

22 December 2023

Want real facts?
Stop reading garbage.

by Dr. Thomas O’Brien

To the Editor:

    The Dec. 18 [2023] front-page article “Flood of falsehoods: AI fake news surges online” cited the bum advice that to avoid disinformation “people should watch for clues in articles, ‘red flags’ such as ‘really odd grammar’ or errors in sentence construction.” The real solution is to stop reading garbage. Most publications with real, paid writers and editors to double-check the facts have paywalls, which help pay to produce real news.

     False information on the internet is everywhere. But the news sections of even ideologically divergent sites such as the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times agree on most of the facts. Patronize real news sites that pay journalists to fact-check every assertion.

16 January 2021

I felt a funeral, in my brain

by Dr. Thomas O’Brien

To the Editor:

    The Jan. 3 news article “Glimmers of hope work their way through the darkness of 2020” helpfully pointed to hopeful developments. But the call for complacency on biodiversity — “there were both negative and positive developments on the biodiversity front in 2020…” — was a grave disservice to Post readers.

     We are already in a sixth great wave of extinction, “tens to hundreds of times higher” than in prior history, according to the New York Times. Twenty-four percent of native bees “are threatened with extinction,” The Post has reported. We have “insect Armageddon” and “insect apocalypse,” says the Times. The Associated Press reported “the Midwest lost four percent of its bugs in a year,” a pace for near-extinction in 25 years. We are engineering an insect desert.

     Many iconic species — sage grouse, grizzly bears, and great cats and wolves — are already extinct in more than 90 percent of their historic ranges. If anyone is optimistic about biodiversity, they’re either ignorant or delusional. Yes, we need hope, but we also need to confront very hard facts.

20 March 2020

The economics of mass transit

by Dr. Thomas O’Brien

    The March 14 editorial “A step too far” criticizing free mass transit got the economics dead wrong.  The editorial said, "It’s expensive.” Running the same number of trains and buses per day costs exactly the same down to the penny. In fact, administrative expenses can be reduced by making service free in off-peak periods. The only question is who pays the bill. Reducing the costs of maintaining fare machines and transaction delays on buses would also be improvements.

     Preserving fares only during peak periods causes potential riders to shift travel times to benefit from free riders. An hour one way or the other allows for birding strolls in Rock Creek Park or Malcolm X Park and patronizing local businesses.

     The editorial said subsidized mass transit “might even take a few cares off the road.” The first law of economics is that when you make something less expensive, more of it is consumed and vice versa. Adding a few pennies per gallon of gasoline would take loads of cars off the roads. A free ride is mighty attractive, and making car commuting more expensive makes free transit look more attractive still.

     Many bus riders are far below median income, so free rides would decrease their cost of living and reward the virtuous bus riders. Getting drivers off the road reduces the misery of gridlock, and saves the biosphere for future centuries.

10 July 2018

Let’s get centrists singing along

by Dr. Thomas O’Brien

   E.J. Dionne Jr. was wrong in discouraging centrists in his July 5 op-ed, “The centrist chorus is off-key.” His own numbers indicated that 12 percent of Americans fall into the “pure independent” category. In a 50-50 nation, 12 percent looks like the margin of victory. And 41 percent of Democrats “put themselves at the center of the ideological spectrum,” as do 22 percent of Republicans. Centrist voters choose the lesser of two evils because they are presented with a choice between two extremes.

     Instead of cursing the darkness, let’s light candles. Open primaries allow centrist voters a voice in the electoral process. Instant runoffs allow voters to to pick a unifying healer over the ideological bomb-thrower. Nonpartisan redistricting encourages more unifying candidates. Establishing a single national primary day also encourages awareness and participation rather than leaving primary voting to the tiny extremist blocs of hardcore party activists. Mail-in voting, increased early voting, automatic and same-day voter registration, and weekend elections would alsoincrease participation in the electoral process.