The Roy Moore effect

Let’s hope the politics of 2017 result in better candidates and better policies

The victory of Doug Jones over Judge Roy Moore in the Alabama Senate race Dec. 12 may have been the most important political event of 2017 in America, rivaling in importance the (heavily attended!) inauguration of Donald J. Trump as president.

For Alabama voters, it meant that they were not prepared to see their state’s image tarnished, beyond poverty and related characteristics, by electing a senator with a reputation like Mr. Moore’s. It would be funny if it weren’t so awful, but they preferred to vote for a Democrat as opposed to an alleged child-molester. They did themselves and America well by choosing Mr. Jones and rejecting Mr. Moore.

A positive spinoff of the Alabama vote, one hopes, is that the Republican Party was taught decisively that, even in an intensely red state like Alabama, it cannot nominate just anyone and win. In fact, the Alabama election should up the odds that both Republicans and Democrats will put up better-quality candidates in 2018. Ideally, it would mean no child molesters, no thieves, no one wearing black hats and riding horses to the polls. (I know, it will be difficult.)

The Alabama vote also was a clear sign that whatever it was that caused Americans to vote for Mr. Trump last year has worn off to some degree. The president endorsed Mr. Moore and told Alabamans to vote for him no matter what he’d said or done. Mr. Trump’s popularity ratings are down in the 30s. It is unclear what combination of acts, or inaction, on his part is responsible for that.

One element in Mr. Trump’s sagging popularity is that he has yet to do anything he said he would do for America’s “forgotten people,” the residents of the Midwestern towns, like my hometown, who are bereft of employment, driving old cars and living in rundown houses or waiting to be foreclosed on by ever-more-privileged bankers.

Passage by the Republican tax bill by both houses of Congress would simply drive the silver stake more deeply into our hearts. Apart from the cut in the corporate tax rate, which I favor in order to increase American companies’ competitiveness overseas, the rest of it consists of doggy bones for the rich, including Mr. Trump and his family, and to the devil with everyone else.

Of course, there also are Mr. Trump’s loathsome tweets and his addiction to picking fights with perfectly reasonable people. And, by the way, I have spent a lot of time with New Yorkers, and I can assure you this behavior has nothing to do with Mr. Trump being one. It has to do with his being a boor, and maybe showing signs of dementia.

My real beef with Mr. Trump is that he expects the people who voted for him simply to forget about his promise to pass a major infrastructure bill that America needs and wants. President Barack Obama punted on that one, giving trillions of dollars in recession-recovery money mostly to bankers and Wall Street instead of investing it in jobcreating project that could produce something like President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s interstate highway system.

I was glad that Mr. Moore lost in Alabama, but now I worry that Mr. Trump will sack either Attorney General Jeff Sessions or Special Counsel Robert Mueller and give one of their jobs to Mr. Moore. It was, of course, bad luck for Mr. Moore that his campaign coincided with the “Me-too” anti-sexual-harassment movement. Let’s hope the chances of the movement bringing about lasting change that outlives our traditionally short attention spans will be improved by the way that women and black voters, in particular, slam-dunked Mr. Moore.

The Alabama results made it clear that if blacks, particularly in the South, and women were to vote proportionately to their percentages of the population, they could get rid of some of the worst of our alleged representatives. Americans very much need to demand major reform of our electoral system. Just consider the number of Pennsylvania ex-legislators in jail. Then there’s the gross gerrymandering that reigns in a lot of states, including Pennsylvania, which is being challenged in the courts.

Given my foreign-affairs orientation, what worries memost about Mr. Trump is that he will start a war to make himself a “war president” who therefore would be harder to ditch in 2020. I watched George W. Bush use the Iraq war to get reelected, a war we entered into based on two lies. One was that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, which he did not. The second was that Saddam had ties to al-Qaida, which had attacked us on 9/ 11, which he did not.

Mr. Trump’s candidates for an election-based war are Iran and North Korea. (Russian President Vladimir V. Putin is too smart to get drawn into a conflict on the Korean peninsula.)

Both Iran and North Korea would be formidable opponents, and a U.S. war with them would create havoc in Asia and the Middle East. I am fairly certain that their leaders are too agile to be suckered into a war with the United States, even the zany Kim Jong Un. But that doesn’t rule out foolish, provocative, unilateral action by Mr. Trump and the military clique around him. And, if he is in fact losing it, Americans are right to be really concerned.