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A few days ago, I was at a conservative gathering talking to a friend about my dismay at the latest turns in the ongoing Russia controversy. A collusion narrative that once seemed far-fetched was back front-and-center in the investigation. Indeed, the argument for attempted collusion seemed airtight. Donald Trump Jr. was asked to meet with purported Russian officials as part of a purported Russian plan to help his father. His response? I love it.

An older gentleman, a donor to the event, was eavesdropping and obviously irritated. He jumped into the conversation with the mic-dropping comment thats always and everywhere the last refuge of the Trump apologist. What? Are you saying that you wish Hillary had won?

My response? Its too soon to tell. Before he could voice the fury that covered his face, I followed up with a question. With the benefit of hindsight, how many Democrats are glad that Jimmy Carter beat Gerald Ford in 1976?

In January, two conservative thinkers, National Reviews Reihan Salam and the New York Times Ross Douthat, both raised the thought that President Trump risked becoming a Carter a disjunctive president who tried and failed to keep together competing Democratic coalitions. Reihan and Ross focused on the difficulty of Carters political task and the tensions inherent in his fragile coalition. The concern was that, to use Reihans words, Trump (like Carter) would try and fail to paper over the deep divisions plaguing Republicans.

No doubt Republicans are divided. The struggle over Obamacare reveals a party that lacks a common national vision. Its one thing for small-government conservatives, traditional Reagan Republicans, and Buchananite politicians to unite against Hillary Clinton or to join in common revulsion against leftist cultural overreach. Its another thing entirely to unite these same people under a series of common national political goals. But this challenge is heightened immeasurably by something else that Trump so far shares with Carter a staggering amount of incompetence.

Carter would have struggled to hold his coalition together under the best of circumstances (people forget how narrowly he won the 1976 presidential election even post-Watergate), but his challenge was compounded by his own unforced errors. For Millennials, Jimmy Carter is a kindly man who builds houses and works for international peace. But to Baby Boomers and older members of Generation X (like me), Carter is the man who presided over some of the lowest points in recent American history. Carters tenure was buffeted by oil shocks, stagflation, a humiliating hostage crisis, and a stunning act of Soviet aggression, its invasion of Afghanistan. Carters presidency was so disastrous that it took the end of the Cold War for American voters to again entrust Democrats with our foreign policy.

After Carters narrow victory, Republicans won three consecutive landslides. Democrats, stung by defeat after defeat, kept tacking right in national politics culminating in a Clinton presidency that in many respects was to the right of both national parties today. Can anyone imagine a crime bill such as the Clinton-era crime bill passing today? Is anyone even trying to balance the budget, much less create a surplus? With the collapse of Obamacare repeal, is there any reform on the horizon comparable to Clintons welfare reform? Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, and implemented the now-hated dont ask, dont tell policy for gays in the military. As for immigration, is there a national Democrat alive whod make comments like this, from Clintons 1995 State of the Union address?

In true-believing leftist circles, Clintons presidency (aside from judicial appointments) was still part of the long, dark night of national political conservativism, and his moderate Democratic coalition, embodied by the Democratic Leadership Council, is anathema to the modern Left. Even today, you can find think-pieces spitting venom at the DLCs efforts to move the Democratic party to the right. Part of the leftist ecstasy at Barack Obamas victory in 2008 (and his reelection in 2012) was the realization that the Democratic party had elected its first genuine progressive of the modern era.

In other words, after Jimmy Carters failure, there were twelve straight years of Republican rule (featuring no less than 568 federal judicial appointments, including five justices of the Supreme Court), and arguably 28 years of moderate to center-right rule before the Left reclaimed the political throne.

Whats the lesson here? Yes, nations change and political coalitions can shift and fracture, but also that failed presidencies have serious consequences. Thats why better than Hillary simply isnt an argument. Trump has to be good. Trump has to be effective. Hillary wont be on the ballot in 2020, and shes not the alternative today. She is no longer the measuring stick, and any callback to her failures signals that the person making the argument is bereft of a meaningful Trump defense.

I am certain that a Democrat in November 1980 could look back on Jimmy Carters failed, disastrous four years and point to individual policies or appointments that they preferred over a hypothetical Ford administration, but wereDemocratstruly glad to be facing the future with the Carter legacy hanging around their necks? As they spent three full election cycles trying to convince Cold Warera voters that the party could handle the Soviet threat, were they thrilled with that narrow win in 1976?

When it comes to presidencies, the stench of overall failure can easily overwhelm the fragrance of an individual judicial appointment or a laudable regulatory rollback. Donald Trump has done good things in his first six months the Neil Gorsuch and James Mattis appointments most notable among them but he cant stop shooting himself in the foot, he hasnt yet shown that he can lead his party in Congress, and even a GOP conditioned to disbelieve all negative polls has to be concerned that only about 25 percent of Americans strongly approve of the president. His honeymoon was over before it had a chance to begin.

In the face of this reality, every cry of better than Hillary actually hurts Trump. It hurts the GOP. Rather than demanding the best of Trump, it enables and excuses his worst. Soon enough, the president will stand on his own record, against a different opponent. Its still early, and Donald Trump has a chance to learn to lead, but if the present trajectory doesnt change, Republicans will learn what Democrats learned after 1980 that you dont want to be the political party begging the nation for a second chance.

READ MORE: Whataboutism: What of It? Our Current Presidential Era May Not Be Normal, But It Is Predictable No One Emerges from Trumps Feud with the Media Looking Good

David French is a senior writer for National Review, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, and an attorney.

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Stop Talking about Hillary Clinton and Start Thinking about Jimmy Carter - National Review

Tucker: The Left on Campus Is a 'Snake Eating Its Own Tail'

'Maddow's Dots May Never Connect': Left-Wing Author Blasts Trump-Russia Narrative

Greg Gutfeld said the media's fixation on allegations of Trump-Russia collusion represents a double standard.

"As the media fans the flames of collusion, I ask: what about them?" Gutfeld said.

He pointed to several Democratic scandals which went largely unnoticed by the mainstream press.

Pence Hits Back at Dem Who Accused Him of Health Care 'Evil'

"Hillary's dirty tricks, John Podesta's scams... Benghazi, the IRS," Gutfeld said, listing several incidents.

He said the left colluded with the USSR for decades, and added that the Kremlin was a "far worse" evil in those days.

"The chase is driven by politics and not morality," Gutfeld said of their present-day claims.

"Today's duplicity by hysterics who embraced the Reds decades ago negates their outrage," he said.

Watch more above.

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Link:
Gutfeld on the Media's Double Standards for Hillary Clinton - Fox News Insider

Scott Olson, Getty Images

In recent years, there has been an interesting trend in international relations research: a renewed focus on the role that individual leaders play in foreign policy outcomes. This runs counter to traditional international relations scholarship, which argues that the system imposes powerful structural constraints on individual leader behavior. Over the past decade, however, an increasing number of scholars have focused on the first image, suggesting multiple ways in which individual foreign policy leaders affect their countrys approach to international relations.

Donald Trumps electoral college victory in November has accelerated this research even further. At a minimum, he has sounded different from, say, a garden-variety Republican on a number of fronts. But if Hillary Clinton had won 100,000 more votes in the salient states, would things be all that different? This kind of counterfactual analysis is also a crucial part of political science and foreign policy analysis.

Over the weekend, the New York Posts John Podhoretz argued that neither American politics nor public policy would be all that different if Clinton had won:

The astonishing answer, if you really think it through, is: not all that different when it comes to policy.

Lets face it: With the exception of the Supreme Court appointment and confirmation of Neil M. Gorsuch, Trump has astoundingly little in the accomplishments column especially for a president whose party controls both houses of Congress. . . .

What would the Republicans have done in the Hillary era so far? They would have sought to stymie her, or challenge her. . . .

We would have been awash in a scandal narrative that would not be quite as breathless or bonkers as the Trump White House helps to generate but would have been disturbing and unpleasant.

Moreover, the questions raised about the unprecedented nature of the Trump presidency would have been raised by the dynastic Clinton White House, featuring a candidate who got elected despite her e-mail scandals and the spouse who was only the second president in history to have been impeached.

Read the whole thing. Podhoretz is not Clintons biggest fan, and yet almost everything in his column rings true. The thing is, whats not in the column matters as well.

He is largely correct about what President Hillary Clinton could have accomplished with a Republican Congress. Surely, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., would have made his No. 1 goal similar to what it was in 2010: defeating Clinton in 2020. Indeed, in this scenario, there are ways in which the current moment would be more fraught with tension, as Clinton would have had to work hard to get Congress to pass a clean debt-ceiling increase and fund the government. We might still get that with Trump, but the probability would have been higher with Clinton.

And surely Podhoretz is also correct that Congress would have tried to hamstring Clinton with investigation after investigation. Remember this story from October 2016, in which Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, bragged about having two years of investigations prepped for Clinton?

Its a target-rich environment, the Republican said in an interview in Salt Lake Citys suburbs. Even before we get to Day One, weve got two years worth of material already lined up. She has four years of history at the State Department, and it aint good.

Even in this calendar year, Chaffetz seemed primed to go after Clinton.

So yes, there are a lot of ways in which 2017 wouldnt look all that different with Clinton in the White House. Podhoretz, however, omitted the most obvious areas where Clinton and Trump would differ: the areas of politics and policy where a president exerts the most unconstrained influence.

Focus on the rhetoric first. I seriously doubt that Clinton would publicly characterize the mainstream media as the enemy of the American people or tweet insults directed at critical commentators or request public effusions of praise from her cabinet or just generally act ridiculous in the public eye. To be fair, Podhoretz acknowledges this, noting that Hillary is many things, and many not good things, but she is not a sower of chaos or the subject of infighting so constant that no one can even catch a breath before one weird story is displaced by another. Shes far too boring for that. Still, this is not an insignificant difference.

The more important differences are in the policies where the executive ranch wields the greatest authority. I am pretty sure that a Justice Department under Clinton would not have taken a sledgehammer to Obamas legacy on incarceration, voting rights, and private prisons. A Clinton administration would not engage in the kind of deregulation that, say, Environmental Protection Agency head Scott Pruitt would. A Clinton administration would not issue a dumb, self-defeating travel ban on seven Muslim-majority countries. A Clinton administration would not solicit bids to build a wall along U.S.-Mexico.

More generally, however, Clinton would be conducting foreign policy rather differently. She would not have withdrawn from either the Paris climate accord or the Trans-Pacific Partnership (I know she opposed the latter during the campaign, but the far more likely option is that she would have sought to negotiate additional side deals akin to how her husband dealt with NAFTA). There would be no underhanded GCC effort to embargo Qatar, because Clinton would never have been so stupid as to have given the Saudis and Emiratis a blank check to do so.

The nation under Clinton would not be contemplating the start of the dumbest trade war in this century. European allies would not be talking about the need to go it alone. Asian allies would not talk about the need to cut the tag with the United States. The likelihood of a competent secretary of state doing his or her job seems much higher than odds of the current one doing anything constructive. There would be no ongoing beclowning of the executive branch. And no one would be worried about the sudden collapse of American soft power, because it wouldnt be collapsing.

If Clinton were president right now, American foreign policy would not have deviated too much from the prior status quo. She would have made America Boring Again. And given how this year has actually gone, I would take that outcome every day of the week and twice on Sundays.

Daniel W. Drezner is a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University.

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Would 2017 look the same under President Hillary Clinton? - The Denver Post

Former Vice President Al GoreAl GoreGore: US going through a challenging time Gore: I suspect Hillary Clinton will 'be fine' Gore: Rest of the world knows US is going through a tough stretch MORE said on Monday that he thinks 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary ClintonHillary Rodham ClintonLawyer say Trump Jr. was 'fully prepared' to speak about Russia meeting GOP faces growing demographic nightmare in West Turner marches on in the Sanders revolution MORE will "be fine."

During an interview on NBC's "Today" show, Gore was asked whether he had talked with Clinton since the election, as he understand what it's like to win the popular vote and lose the presidential election.

"Have you spoken to Secretary Clinton since the election, commiseratedat all about that?" he was asked.

Gore said he has spoken to Clinton since the election.

"I suspect she'll be fine," he added.

"But our country, as I said earlier, is going to face some challenging months ahead."

In an interview earlier this month, Gore said the global community knows the U.S. is going through a "tough stretch" under Trump.

The rest of the world, like many of us here in the U.S., are kind of looking at President Trump and I know some people are really still all for him and everything but the majority are trying to make sense of how this presidency is unfolding, Gore told CBS Newss Lee Cowan on CBS Sunday Morning.

Excerpt from:
Gore: I suspect Hillary Clinton will 'be fine' - The Hill

An artist tookHillary Clintons unused election night confetti and turned it into a political statement.

Bunny Burson, a St. Louis-based artist, tracked down and bought the 200 pounds of confetti she thought wouldrain down on the countrys first female president and her supporters,CNN reported.

Burson then built a glass installation box for those shiny pieces of paper to twirl around inside for 24 hours a day. Painted across the front of the box are the words And Still I Rise, which is the title of a famous Maya Angelou poem.

I want women and little girls to just don't feel defeated by this, Burson told CNN. Keep going. Keep fighting.

The above installation is outside the Bruno David Gallery in St. Louis, but Burson wants to create smaller globes and sell them at Planned Parenthood centers, according to CNN.

Continued here:
LOOK: Hillary Clinton's unused election night confetti turned into art - Palm Beach Post