Decision desk
Still undecided about the midterms?
An abundance of polarizing issues — immigration, health care and the economy, for starters — and stark differences between the two major parties have most folks buzzing in their respective hives.
But for those looking for help — not so much with the basics but the incidentals that could round out your voting game on Tuesday — we’ve got your back. Trump-supporting National
Review throws a bit of a curve at the president, acknowledging in its “The Week” section the nation’s 3.7 percent unemployment rate, which is near a half-century low, saying, “One should resist the temptation to assume that presidents, or even governments more generally, have a great degree of control over the business cycle.”
Did the conservative mag purposely marginalize the tax cuts passed by its own party? Or is this merely a ploy to keep that old chestnut — “It’s the economy, stupid” — in the Democrats’ dustbin?
Elsewhere, a review of Michiko Kakutani’s “The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump” takes down the author, saying, “There can be no task harder than coming up with a criticism of [Trump] that, by virtue of being original, is genuinely damaging,” William Voegeli writes in “Red and Blue States of Mind.” “[She just strings] “together stale denunciations that read like clickbait from Salon.”
The Nation put its political correctness into overdrive — and strangely provides fodder for its right-leaning foes — bashing one of the leading lights of the old left: Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren.
Columnist Katha Pollitt writes a rant with credible quotes from socalled friends who are “writing off ” Warren over the video about her DNA test, the one proving her Native American ancestry.
If that wasn’t damaging enough to liberal Democrats, she follows with a fall-from-grace summary too vivid to overlook.
“Two years ago, Warren was a left-liberal political goddess: smart, energetic with a great economic agenda and a background in the ‘ragged edges of the middle class,’ ” Pollitt says in punishing the fallen angel. “But now Warren is a bungling racist with a screechy voice who’s pushing way too hard for the Andrea Dworkin vote.”
Pollitt eventually warms up to her subject — “I’d think twice before cheering Warren’s troubles,” she concludes — but it’s not enough to change the piece’s overriding sentiment that “with friends like these …”
Leave it to an outsider to give us something for last-minute deciders to chew in its analysis of Trump’s attempt to balance the anti-immigration fears of his base with the anti-entitlement stance of the Republican party. According to London-based
The Economist, the president doesn’t even try.
“Though people with high scores on white identity are hostile to immigration, they are also strong supporters of Social Security and Medicare, the government health-insurance program for the elderly,” the weekly writes.
These entitlements, depicted as “extremely important to white Americans after a life of hard work,” would seem to put any president committed to reconciling his people and his party in a difficult spot.
But “Mr. Trump broke with Republican orthodoxy when he promised no cuts in the pro- grams, while also driving a hard line against immigration of all kinds,” the weekly notes. If ObamaCare is your issue,
Time might be your pick. “On Election Day, conservative voters in Utah, Idaho, Nebraska and Montana are expected to join other moderate states, like Maine and Virginia, in approving ballot measures that extend Medicaid eligibility — contravening Republicans’ longtime effort to limit the program,” writes reporter Haley Sweetland Edwards.
Behind the shift toward policies like the “Medicare for All” proposal championed by Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders are two trends that transcend politics: a less healthy populace — 40 percent of Americans have health histories that could hurt their ability to get insurance — and soaring premiums for those who do qualify for health care, according to Time. New Yorker’s “A Hole in the Center” makes a case study out of Ryan Costello, the GOP Pennsylvnia congressman who was once esteemed as a bipartisan but has since been marginalized as a stuck-in-the-middle centrist. “I think the far left and the far right look at people like me, and they say we’re the problem,” Costello tells writer George Packer. “And I actually think, No, we’re the answer.”
The 10-page probe presents Trump-era politics as so polarized that 42-year-old Costello has decided to retire from Congress, after just two terms, rather than risk defeat at the hands of a more extreme candidate — whether from the right or the left.