The good ol’ Iowa try
The Weekly Brief - February 7, 2020
Coronavirus cover up?
Reeling from the unfolding crisis of coronavirus, the Chinese Communist Party went on the PR offensive this week, accusing the US and other countries of spreading fear by closing borders and quarantining people thought to be exposed to the virus.
Then, the doctor who initially blew the whistle on the CCP’s initial cover up of the virus got sick and died, and Tencent, China’s largest news site, apparently released conflicting sets of numbers that indicated the problem is much worse than officially stated in China.
Regardless of how high the numbers are, the seriousness of the problem (CV is now more deadly than SARS) is made worse by the Chinese government’s highly centralized response to it, according to Chatham House. The Council for Foreign Relations carries the argument farther, stating that weak, undemocratic political systems create and/or exacerbate public health dangers.
The good ol’ Iowa try
Last week, I realized that American politics was about to have a VERY busy week: Iowa caucus on Monday, State of the Union on Tuesday, and the end of the impeachment trial on Wednesday. Well, I was wrong. It wasn’t a very busy week. It was a helluva busy week!
Monday: “You really ought to give Iowa a try.”
Satire news site, The Babylon Bee, had a funny article last week: “Iowa Prepares to Matter,” that amusingly picked up on the collective shrug people in general, and Democrats specifically, seemed to give to the Hawkeye State’s idiosyncratic. Monday came. Iowans caucused. Bedlam ensued. Even with lower turnout (smaller numbers are easier to manage, right?)The Democrats had no clear winner, and citing irregularities and the need to to quality checks, delayed posting results. FiveThirtyEight is highly critical of the Iowa Democrats use of an untried app to report results that seems to be at the center of the foul up, and Politico suggests that voters were split on who could best take on Trump. It’s probably a combination of things, but on Monday, Iowa did matter, in all the worst ways.
Tuesday: SOTU
With a winner undeclared in Iowa, Tuesday’s coverage shifted to the President’s State of the Union speech. FiveThirtyEight cautions that the SOTU rarely has a large political impact, but their model might not have accounted for the Trump-Pelosi dynamic. Trump first refused a handshake with the Speaker, who returned the favor by ripping up his speech (an act which completely overshadowed the official Democrat response to the SOTU).
Conservative National Review stated the President’s speech to be a triumph, something that even progreggsive Vox seemed to acknowledge even as they also sought a silver lining in Trump’s apparent concern about Bernie Sanders.
Wednesday: “If it doesn’t fit….”
Trump went from strength to strength in the space of a news cycle as the Senate acquitted him of first one charge, then the second charge the House brought against him. The vote was largely along party lines, except on the charge of abuse of power. Utah Senator Mitt Romney broke ranks with the GOP to vote Trump guilty as charged. It was a quixotic move, but one that registered the continuing presence of an anti-Trump wing, however small, in the GOP.
No sooner did the Senate acquit the President that Repbulican Senators announced their own investigation into Hunter Biden’s alleged conflict of interest in Ukraine.
News of the acquittal immediately drew dire predictions of the death of democracy from the left, but The Bulwark, no friend of the President, offers a more nuanced take not only on the acquittal, but the concept of impeachment as whole, arguing that the process actually worked.
Thursday: “We’re so by god stubborn…”
By Thursday, Iowa had still not declared a winner, so Bernie Sanders decided he'd say it. Typical Sanders, still out of step with a party that definitely doesn’t want him as the front runner (another point of Democrat disagreement with Trump). As of now, the official tally is showing Pete Buttigieg and Sanders in a virtual tie with Joe Biden, the heir apparent, a very distant fourth. The Iowa DNC chair suggested redoing the whole vote, and other states getting jittery to the point of delaying their forthcoming votes.
Friday: How does it all fit?
The clear political winner this week is Donald Trump, and Bernie Sanders may not be far behind. You don’t even need to spin the optics of a disastrous Iowa vote degrading to an intra party war, coupled with a classy (by Trump standards) SOTU and acquittal to draw that conclusion.
Trump wasted no time in dancing in the end zone signaling a return to “business as usual” for the President, but FiveThirtyEight lays out a few potential outcomes from this week that suggest we may be in a new political phase of this election cycle.
Two possibly significant outcomes for the presidential election can be found in the form of new gallup poll showing the public desiring a stronger Congress, and the possibility of an insignificant independent voter bloc. The latter point is more theory than substance, but it speaks to increasingly bitter partisan divide that could influence first the Democratic nomination process, and then the general election.
The Peace Plan revisited
Last week, when I discussed President Trump’s proposed peace plan for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, I largely focused on the response - those who favored it and those who didn’t. Given the craziness of the week in American politics that has transpired since then, there’s been very little discussion on the plan in the press, but the conversation is still going on. Al-Monitor reports that the plan plus outreach to Sudan has reinvigorated Prime Minister Netanyahu’s brand of diplomacy, even as he faces down a bribery indictment. Providence Magazine makes the case that this is the best deal the Palestinians can get given the circumstances, even as it acknowledges the plan’s shortcomings.
Food trends
One of the benefits of looking at multiple news sources is you get to see narrative trends develop over time. One of those trends is an interesting intersection of climate concern and food. In the last few weeks I saw several stories in different sources about plant-based meats. I wondered where that all came from. It seems its a combination of climate change concern (cows are big methane emitters), the “eat local” impulse/movement (which Our World in Data suggests isn’t the biggest environmental boon), and a series of Gallup polls that discovered Americans are cutting back on meat consumption, and giving plant based meat a try…. Just a try as of this writing. Word is bacon will be tough to dethrone.
Other stories I was tracking this week
I was preparing for a weekly news cycle dominated by American politics, but I was still taken aback by the sheer volume of it all. It pushed a lot of important (arguably more important, in some cases) stories to the background, so I’m not able to offer much at this time, but here’s what else I was tracking this week:
Brookings offers a really helpful explainer on why we seem to be living in an age of protests. The article does a great job making data and theoretical lenses accessible to a general audience. A relevant example, France is about to be hit by a new wave of protests, which match up pretty well with the framework Brookings develops.
Big Tech is now big money. The five largest tech companies now make up 18% of the S&P 500, arguably making them the next “too big to fail” industry.
In a potential harbinger of staying power for the current expanding economy, AEI reports that productivity may be headed upward, and Brookings reports that household income growth was up last year as well.
The New Humanitarian reports on ongoing civil strife in Cameroon. This conflict has been simmering for the last couple of years, but as West Africa becomes a new front in the war on terror, such civil conflicts are going to pose new foreign policy challenges to the world powers.
On the god news front, Morocco is finding some success with a deradicalization program for former terrorists, peace talks are getting underway in Geneva to end the Libyan civil war, and Brazil may be turning a corner towards a more sustainable Amazon policy.