Conservative take: The 2020 opportunity
With a new poll showing Hillary Clinton as unpopular with voters as Donald Trump, it’s becoming clear that if she wins in November, “she is in for a miserable four years,” writes Ian Tuttle at National Review. That’s because “none of the sources of her unpopularity are going away.” And this, he says, would offer conservatives an opportunity — provided they can “come up with a comprehensive, positive agenda that presents a coherent and compelling alternative to the failed liberal agenda that, in 2020, will have held the day for a dozen years.” By then, he predicts, Americans will be “looking for an alternative,” and “conservatives should have one to offer.”
Statistician: Why There Won’t Be a Hillary Landslide
Andrew Gelman, who teaches statistics at Columbia University, writes in Slate that the conventional wisdom among some pundits that the race will be one-sided for Clinton is wrong, even though Trump “is the Republican candidate whom many Republicans want to avoid.” Unlike landslide losers Barry Goldwater and George McGovern, writes Gelman, Trump is an insurgent, “but not ideologically distinct” from most other Republicans. The most important factor, though, is “the state of the economy.” Goldwater and McGovern ran in economic boom years; this time, “the economy is slowly recovering, no longer in recession, but it is certainly not booming.” The economy “is just sitting there, not making news every day but setting the baseline for the election.”
Neo-Con: No, Clinton’s Not One of Us
“Paranoid liberal imagination” is driving the “panic-driven idea that Hillary Clinton is a secret centrist or, God forbid, a closet neo-conservative,” writes Noah Rothman at Commentary. She’s “drawing a distinction between her approach to international conflicts and diplomacy and Barack Obama’s . . . confused foreign policy and that is what is driving the left nuts.” The “hysterical left” is also beside itself that Clinton hasn’t rejected the endorsement of former Bush administration officials, confusing “this temporary and convenient truce for an alliance.” But it’s her tacit admission “that the next president must begin the work of repairing the damage done” by Obama that really “has them in a tizzy.” Yet “that’s not neo-conservatism,” Rothman argues. “It’s simply reality.”
Culture critic: Who Don’t SJWs Target Hip-Hop?
So-called Social Justice Warriors have declared war on video games, using labels like “misogynerd” about those that show women with large breasts. But hip-hop fan William Hicks at Heat Street says his own favorite genre is a much “more obvious target for an anti-sexism crusade . . . given the content of the lyrics and music videos.” After all, he recalls, back in the ’90s “culture warriors campaigned against video games and hip hop simultaneously. They were peas in the same raunchy pod.” What’s different now? “Gamers and geek culture in general are seen as easy targets,” especially “compared to the hyper-masculine hip hop culture.” And then there’s race: “Hip hop is inextricably black, born out of a resistance to authority, namely the police.”
Economist: Target Tax Cheats To Close the Deficit
Taxpayers have a “net compliance rate” of just 83.7 percent, according to the latest available figures. So Catherine Rampell at The Washington Post estimates that “we’re leaving about $600 billion on the table in uncollected tax revenue.” And the 2016 budget deficit stands at $590 billion. Which means “the estimated amount of dollars lost to tax cheating is almost exactly equal to the size of the annual deficit.” No, she writes, we’ll never get to 100 percent compliance. But “simplifying the tax code and increasing funding for enforcement and customer service at the IRS” would certainly improve it.
— compiled by Eric Fettmann