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By Daniel Jos Camacho By Daniel Jos Camacho July 14 at 1:06 PM

Daniel Jos Camacho is a Contributing Opinion Writer at The Guardian U.S. and writes about politics and religion.

U.S. President Trump and French President Emmanuel Macron discussed Russia, China, the Paris climate agreement and terrorism at a joint news conference on July 13. (Reuters)

As President Trump heads back from his meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron, a number of Americans are sighing wistfully for the president we dont have. Macrons American admirerssee in himeverything that welack in Trump: The new president is young, attractive, concerned about the climate and possesses commanding power in parliament. In short, Macron represents what Democrats here have lost. The French dodged their bullet; we didnt. Macron stemmed the nationalist tide sweeping across Europe and restored order to the free world reeling after Brexit and Trump. Or so the story goes.

With Marine Le Pens National Front as the only alternative in the French runoff earlier this year, Macron was the right and necessary choice. Yet Americans should beware of developing too much of a love affair with Frances latest president: After all, Macron does not provide a truly progressive blueprint that we should or even could emulate here.

American liberals have been quick to embrace Macron. During Frances election, former president Barack Obama called and formally endorsed him. Painting this simply as an effort to stop Le Pen would be a half-truth: Obama reached out before the first round, where a more progressive candidate by the name of Jean-Luc Mlenchon would go on to win the youngest segment of the voting population. Obama was not opting for a lesser evil but an unabashed embrace of centrist politics. As political commentator Joy Ann Reid put it, Macron found a way to thread the needle between far right and far left populism/socialism. Hes culturally liberal but economically pragmatic. Neera Tanden, president of the Center for American Progress, was another visible leader in the Democratic establishment who argued that Macron provides a model for progressives here. Enthusiasm for him extended to the popular level. When Macron attended the G-7 Summit in late May, he ignited social media fan fiction over his impossibly romantic first date with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

[Frances Emmanuel Macron is about to expand his power in a most remarkable way]

At first, Macrons liberal boosters seemed to be getting what they bargained for. Macron stood up against Trump, publicly airing his disagreement with him for pulling the United States out of the Paris climate accord while saying, Make our planet great again. There was his pre-emptive white-knuckled handshake with Trump which demonstrated firmness.

But look closer, and a much more complicated picture of Macrons politics emerges. To start, he won the presidency with a weak mandate in an election in which over a third of French voters abstained or cast white ballots. His party En Marche! won an overwhelming majority in parliament only amid record-low turnout. This weak mandate, coupled with his effort to push through controversial labor reforms without debate in parliament, does not sound deeply democratic.

Macron, who took Trump to Napoleon Bonapartes tomb, has himself earned comparisons to the French emperor, something he doesnt entirely seem to mind: He has previously said that France needs a king and Jupiter-like president. Macron has also given other offensive and sometimes utterly bizarre commentary. When he was recently asked if Africa would implement a Marshall Plan for Africa, he described Africas economic problems as civilizational. After the president skipped the traditional Bastille Day news conference, an administration source explained that Macrons complex thought process didnt lend itself to interviews with journalists.

[Macron is set to be one of the loudest anti-Trump voices in Europe]

Macron has emphasized tax cuts for businesses and limits on public spending. When the new French Prime Minister douard Philippe spoke to FT and was told that these were right-wing measures, Phillippe allegedly burst into laughter and responded, Yes, what did you expect? Macron has made a concerted effort to lure capital to France, particularly bankers leery of Brexit. When Macron speaks of revolutionizing and transforming France, in sounds more like a Silicon Valley-style neoliberalization than pro-worker reform that might benefit the poor and working class. Americans, at the very least, should know that this has not been to solution to the plight of workers.

Depending on who you ask, Macrons politicsare either masterful compromise or the art of standing for everything and nothing at the same time. He spoke out against Frances colonial complicity in Algeria only to apologize after his comments caused an uproar. Regarding the Muslim burkini, Macron thinks the dress is not religious but ideological and opposed to gender equality. Still, he thinks it is wrong for police to forcibly remove burkinis. Yet again, he supports a partial ban. This is against a backdrop in which Macron has low regard for civil liberties mosques can be closed if Macrons Interior Ministry does not like what is said in them and in which he plans to make Frances state of emergency permanent.

It is unclear whether Macrons policies will bury the nationalist xenophobic current feeding on economic discontent or further it. Nevertheless, Democrats here should not look to him as the progressive model to emulate here. The Democratic establishments attraction to Macron is fueled by nostalgia for a bygone era. Lacking a successor to Obama, it is as if some now look to Macron to imagine an uninterrupted order in which the center is stable, and nothing has changed. But that world is gone now, and dreaming of France wont bring it back.

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Democrats, get a grip: Emmanuel Macron is not your progressive savior - Washington Post

WASHINGTON Rep. Peter Roskam, R-Ill., targeted by Democrats for defeat in 2018, has stockpiled $1.1 million in his campaign warchest, raising $833,243 in the past three months, his campaign said on Friday.

Its the largest fundraising quarter ever for Roskam, according to Roskam campaign consultant Cam Savage, a co-founder of Limestone Strategies, sending a message to a litany of Democrats who are looking to unseat him.

Roskam, a Wheaton resident, is a member of the House Ways and Means Committee, which helped Roskam build a substantial base for fundraising.

Roskam is a top 2018 Democratic target because, in 2016, Hillary Clinton won his west suburban 6th district over Donald Trump, 50 percent to 43 percent. But even though Clinton won the district in 2016, Roskam handily defeated Democrat Amanda Howland, a Lake Zurich attorney, getting 59 percent of the vote.

Still, Clintons win has given rise to a large Democratic group of contenders, though noone familiar with the district expects them all to end up on the March 20, 2018, Illinois Democratic primary ballot.

No major-name Democrat has surfaced yet.

Carole Cheney, a former district chief of staff for Rep. Bill Foster, D-Ill., joined the crowded Democratic primary field this week.

Cheney worked for Foster from 2013 until earlier this year. She is a former attorney at Kirkland & Ellis.

Also running are Barrington Hills Planning Commission member Kelly Mazeski and Suzyn Price, a Naperville district 203 School Board member.

Mazeski raised $118,648 from 536 donorsin six weeks and loaned her campaign $90,000, to put her haul at $208,648, according to her campaign consultant, Peter Giangreco.

Roskam stepped up from the Illinois Senate to Congress after he beat Tammy Duckworth in 2006 in his closest vote to date, 51.4 percent to 48.6 percent.

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Peter Roskam's million dollar warchest a reality check for Democrats - Chicago Sun-Times

Editors Note: The following piece originally appeared in City Journal. It is reprinted here with permission.

Since early June, when voters in Georgias sixth congressional district rubbed yet more salt in their 2016 election wounds, Democratic pols and sages have been pondering why, as Ohio congressman Tim Ryan put it, our brand is worse than Trump. Thats a low bar, given the presidents nearly subterranean approval ratings, but so far the blue party has mostly been turning to an inside-the-box set of policy and political memes: jobs programs, talk of a mutiny against House minority leader Nancy Pelosi, and better marketing or, in Ryans words, branding of the Democratic message.

Whats missing from this list is the most important and most challenging item of all: solving the liberal deplorable problem. The white working class that hoisted Donald Trump to an unexpected victory may not always admire the man, but they know that he doesnt hate people like me, in the pollsters common formulation. And they have good reason to think that Democrats, particularly coastal and media types, do hate them: Consider Frank Richs snide and oft-cited article, No Sympathy for the Hillbilly. Its possible that white working-class voters would back a party filled with people who see them as racists and misogynists, with bad values and worse taste, because they all want to raise taxes on Goldman Sachs executives, but it seems a risky bet.

So its worth noting that a few prominent liberal writers have been venturing out of the partisan bunker and calling attention to the deplorable issue over the past few months. In late May, for instance, progressive stalwart Michael Tomasky, former editor of Guardian America and now of Democracy, published an article frankly titled Elitism is Liberalisms Biggest Problem in the New Republic. The West Virginia native called the chasm between elite liberals and middle America...liberalisms biggest problem. The issue has nothing to do with policy, Tomasky writes. Its about different sensibilities; bridging the gulf is on us, not them. To most conservatives, Tomaskys depiction of Middle Americans will seem cringingly obvious. The group tends to be churchgoers (Not temple. Church), they dont think and talk politics from morning till night, and, yes, theyre flag-waving patriots. Mother Jones columnist Kevin Drum, an influential though occasionally heterodox liberal, seconded the argument.

A more complex analysis of liberal elitism comes from Joan Williams, a feminist law professor whose best-known previous book is Unbending Gender. In White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America, Williams takes her fellow liberal professionals to the woodshed for their indifference to the hard-knock realities of working-class life and for their blindness to the shortcomings of their own cosmopolitan preferences. Married to the Harvard-educated son of a working-class family, Williams is astute about the wide disparities between liberal and white-working-class notions of the meaning of work, family, community, and country. One of her proposals for solving class cluelessness is a conservative favorite: reviving civics education.

A final recent example of deplorable-dtente comes from Atlantic columnist Peter Beinarts How the Democrats Lost Their Way on Immigration. Noting that the unofficial open-borders philosophy of the Democratic party is far more radical than the restrictionist immigration policy it espoused just a few decades ago, the former New Republic editor acknowledges that there is more than nativist bigotry behind white-working-class immigration concerns. He concedes that mass immigration may have worked to the disadvantage of blue-collar America by lowering wages for low-skilled workers and undermining social cohesion. Beinart concludes by dusting off a concept that liberals currently hate: assimilation. Liberals should be celebrating Americas diversity less, and its unity more, he writes.

These writers are engaging in healthy critical self-reflection, but in the course of describing the Democrats class dilemma, the liberal truth-tellers unwittingly show why a solution lies out of reach. They understate Democrats entanglement with the identity-politics Left, a group devoted to a narrative of American iniquity. Identity politics appeals to its core constituents through grievance and resentment, particularly toward white men. Consider some reactions to centrist Democrat John Ossoffs defeat in Georgias sixth district. Maybe instead of trying to convince hateful white people, Dems should convince our base ppl of color, women to turn out, feminist writer and Cosmopolitan political columnist Jill Filipovic tweeted afterward. At some point we have to be willing to say that yes, lots of conservative voters are hateful and willing to embrace bigots. Insightful as she is, even Williams assumes that all criticisms of the immigration status quo can be chalked up to fear of brown people.

No Democrat on the scene today possesses the Lincolnesque political skills to persuade liberal voters to give up their assumptions of white deplorability, endorse assimilation, or back traditional civics education. In the current environment, a Democratic civics curriculum would teach that American institutions are vehicles for the transmission of white supremacy and sexism, hardly a route to social cohesion. As for assimilation, Hispanic and bilingual-education advocacy organizations would threaten a revolt and theyd only be the first to sound the alarm.

Appeasing deplorables may yet prove unnecessary, though. Democrats strategy of awaiting inevitable demographic change in the electorate, combined with the hope that Trump and the Republican Congress will commit major unforced errors, may allow the party to regain control of the country without making any concessions to the large portion of the U.S. population whom they appear to despise.

READ MORE: A Democratic Blind Spot on Culture The Democrats Resistance Temptation Nancy Pelosi, the Face of the Shrinking Democratis Brand

Kay S. Hymowitzis aCity Journalcontributing editor, the William E. Simon Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and the author ofThe New Brooklyn: What It Takes to Bring a City Back.

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Can Democrats Make Nice with the 'Deplorables'? - National Review

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi discusses Democratic efforts to force Republicans to vote to defend President Trump at a July 14, 2017, news conference with, from left, Democratic Reps. Bonnie Watson Coleman, Hank Johnson and Bill Pascrell.(Photo: Herb Jackson, USA TODAY Network)

House Democrats said Friday they are planning to use a series of parliamentary maneuvers this summer to force Republicans to vote to defend President Trump on an array of controversies.

With some openly talking of impeaching the president, Democrats on key committees joined Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., to announce they would sponsor"resolutions of inquiry" seekinginformation about any business orcampaign connections to Russia, data about any enrichment his family or business receivefrom the government, and Trump's personal tax returns.

The resolutions would enable a member to force a vote in committee or potentially on the House floor. But it would take a major shift in Republican stances for the effort to produce anything other than a political fodder that could be used by Democrats in next year's midterm elections.

That's because Republicans overwhelmingly haveresponded to revelations about Trump's administration or campaign by voicing confidence in ongoing investigations by the House and Senate intelligence committees and Robert Mueller, the former FBI director serving as a special counsel atthe Justice Department.

At a news conference, Pelosi called Republicans complicit in covering up scandals in the six-month-oldadministrationand indicated she did not expect the resolutions to succeed in uncovering the information said they were seeking.

"We will expose House Republicans' inaction, with their willful, shameful enabling," Pelosi said. "They have become enablers of the violation of our Constitution, that attack on the integrity of our elections, the security of our country. The integrity of our democracy is at stake. House Republicans will have to answer for their actions."

Rep. Bill Pascrell of New Jersey used a resolution of inquiry in Marchwhen he tried to force the Ways and Means Committee to invoke its power under a 1924 law to require the IRS to turn over Trump's tax returns. It was defeated in a party-line vote.

Pascrell said Friday said he would introduce another resolution seeking the same disclosure, and he noted that the Watergate investigation during President Richard Nixon's administration took 26 months.

In an interview, he rejected a suggestion the effort was a political stunt.

"I resent that anybody wouldeven consider it to be a stunt," Pascrell said. He said his original letter on Feb. 1to Ways and Means Chairman Kevin Brady, R-Texas, suggested there be a bipartisan request for Trump's taxes, in part to ensure that the president did not have a personal stake in changes to the tax code that are under consideration.

"I went out of my way for a very specific reasons which I've outlined to get the support of the chairman, that we do this together," Pascrell said. "I said to him, and I'll say it again, it's going to come out sooner or later, for better or worse. So why aren't we cooperating to do this?"

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House Democrats scheme to force Republicans to vote to defend Trump - USA TODAY

A Democratic lawmaker wants to force the White House to put their spokespeople, such as Sarah Huckabee Sanders, in front of news cameras twice a week.

Maybe this is what J.P. Morgan & Chase CEO Jamie Dimon had in mind when he trashed Washington for doing stupid shit: A Democratic lawmaker has proposed a bill that would force the White House to hold at least two media briefings a week open to live cameras.

Rep Jim Himes, a Democrat from Connecticut, said his Free Press Act is needed to thwart the Trump administrations overtly hostile attitude toward the press since the early days of the presidential campaign.

The White House had held fewer news briefings lately, in some cases disallowing cameras. President Trump has engaged in a running skirmish with mainstream media outlets, repeatedly calling them fake news.

Himes bill, of course, stands a snowballs chance in hell of becoming law. The Republican-controlled Congress is certain to ignore the bill. Nor would the White House sign it into law.

The only way the bill would stand a remote chance is if Democrats seized large majorities in both branches of Congress large enough to override a presidential veto. Thats virtually impossible.

In the Senate, for example, Democrats would have to win 67 seats, a number they havent achieved since 1962. Right now they hold just 48 seats and face high odds of winning back the chamber in 2018.

Even in the all-but-impossible scenario that Democrats seized commanding congressional majorities, theres a little thing called the separation of powers. The White House would be all but certain to ignore Congress, saying the legislative branch cannot tell the executive branch what to do.

Good luck getting the Supreme Court to side with Congress in a hypothetical showdown with the president. Even now the Supreme Court doesnt allow cameras to cover its own daily business.

On Friday, Dimon, the powerful Wall Street banker, lambasted Washington for holding back the economy.

Since the Great Recession, which is now 8 years old, weve been growing at 1.5% to 2% in spite of stupidity and political gridlock because the American business sector is powerful and strong, he said. What Im saying is it would be much stronger growth had we made intelligent decisions and were there not gridlock.

Read: J.P. Morgans Dimon says bad policies are hurting the average American

The Himes bill probably wouldnt qualify as smart policy in Dimons view of things.

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Democrat wants to force White House to broadcast press briefings - MarketWatch