As Hillary flails, there’s talk of Biden

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve seen a number of articles recently about it, such as this:

A prominent Democratic donor worried about the party’s chances of winning the presidency emailed dozens of fans of Vice President Joe Biden on Friday, urging them to remain prepared to donate if Biden jumps into the race.

The donor, Bill Bartmann, cited new polling showing Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont nearly tied with the Hillary Clinton, eroding the 30-point lead the former secretary of state held at the end of last year. Bartmann and other party insiders are concerned that Sanders, a self-proclaimed Democratic socialist, is too far to the left to win against a Republican in the Nov. 8 presidential election.

“We cannot afford to lose the White House,” Bartmann wrote in the email, seen by Reuters.

The problem isn’t really the emails, although it’s often framed that way. The problem is that apparently Obama was being too kind when he said to Hillary in 2008, “You’re likable enough.”

At the moment, Hillary isn’t likable enough. I think she would be forgiven the emails by most Democrats if she was.

Study that video from 2008. It seems to have been taken not long before the New Hampshire primaries, so that’s eight years ago. Hillary was a mere slip of a girl at the time at 60, and now she’s 68. The difference—particularly for a woman—is generally quite large between those two ages. That’s not an indictment, it’s just a reality of life. You can see a certain hardness in Hillary when she listens to what is in fact a rather rude question, but that hardness passes and she makes what actually is a pretty good (and almost charming) comeback under the circumstances. Notice, also, the smooth nastiness of Obama, whom I have never found the least bit likable and have long been amazed that anyone does.

These days not only does Hillary look considerably older, but that hardness has taken over the image she projects, and any humor seems a lot more false. She seems brittle and ill-at-ease, quite angry at something or many things, and not angry in a good way. I think she’s frightened, and well she might be. It’s not going well for her.

The Democrats’ problem—and it’s why she seemed to be coasting to an anointment in the first place—is that they have few alternatives. Biden could be nominated, and he even could win (depending on who the Republican is, I suppose). But he’s a weak candidate, too, and he’s now 73.

The Democrats realize they have a dilemma, and that’s why they continue to cling to Hillary (bitterly). I’ve never understand why Elizabeth Warren didn’t run, because although she’s no spring chicken either (in fact, at 66 she’s almost Hillary’s age) she looks pretty good for her age, and doesn’t have the same sort of baggage as Hillary. Of course, she has different baggage, but in the scheme of things it’s rather light.

I’ve read many analyses of why the Democrat bench is so shallow, and most of it boils down to the fact that Democrats control fewer state governments and governorships and that therefore they don’t have the same volume of choices.

But I don’t think that is enough to explain it. After all, there are governors who are Democrats, and there certainly are members of Congress, plenty of them. I think it’s that the Democratic governors don’t have such great records for the most part, and/or are in very liberal states and probably have the same drawbacks as Warren and Sanders do, which is that they are pretty far to the left. The entire party has moved to the left. Obama was able to hide his leftism from a lot of people (although I think it was pretty obvious) because he had less of a record, I suppose, and because he’s gifted at hiding things. But other people probably can’t do it so effectively.

The Democratic Party has for the most part rejected the previously-winning strategy of Bill Clinton, which was to pull to the middle or to seem to pull to the middle. In recent years Obama has been so far left, and the party has also been so far left, that unless the population follows suit, the Democrats are in some difficulty. The voters certainly have become more leftist in recent years—for example, 52% of Hillary supporters now view “socialism” positively (even more of Sanders’ supporters do), and 32% of all Americans view it positively.

But it’s still not a majority. Not yet, although they’re working on it.

In the snows of New Hampshire

The New Neo Posted on by

Candidates have snowball fights with the press:

kasich

And yes, that’s Kasich. He’s still a candidate, having spent a lot of his money and effort so far in New Hampshire, and he’s doing pretty well there. That New Hampshire snowball he’s got in his hand is in the nature of a Hail Mary pass.

Donald Trump’s jet didn’t make it back to the state Friday night and he had to cancel that rally (he jets home every night to sleep, and he keeps a much lighter appearance schedule than all the others without meet-and-greets or answering of citizen questions). I’m assuming he’s in New Hampshire by now. But I thought you might like to see the following. After viewing it, it occurred to me that Air Force One would be a step (or several steps) down for Mr. Trump:

That photo of Kasich made me think of this, from my art history classes so long ago:

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Your Trump tidbit for today

The New Neo Posted on by

Look, I almost did it. Almost stayed away from Trump posts today.

But those cookies…they were in the jar…and I just couldn’t help myself…I reached out…and…and..I found my hand going in…and then…

Thus, this post. But it will be mercifully short. Just a link.

There. Done now.

Fiorina should be in the debate on Saturday

The New Neo Posted on by

Of course she should. I don’t even think those who don’t like her think there’s any real reason to exclude her if Kasich, Bush, and Christie are there.

Take a look at the Iowa results. At this point, as the only actual voting that’s occurred, these figures should matter far more than any poll.

It would be different if there were still an undercard debate, and she could appear there. But right now Fiorina is the only candidate excluded from the big stage, and there will be no undercard debate. Either have another undercard debate (personally, I’d like to see the number of main debate participants be limited to three at this point) or include everyone in the main debate, unless one person is so obviously way way way below all the others that it’s clear he or she doesn’t belong (for example, Gilmore, who is also excluded, and whose exclusion no one seems to be protesting because even he knows he’s not a serious candidate). That’s not true of Fiorina, so her exclusion is both absurd and an unconscionable interference with the public’s right to see the candidates spar with each other.

Legal Insurrection’s Kemberlee Kaye suggests that the other candidates should escort Carly onto the stage on Saturday. Not a bad idea, although I doubt they’ll do it. But such disparate people as Romney, Gingrich, and Ben Carson have tweeted their support for her appearance.

Forecasting the New Hampshire primary

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve read some pundits who say that New Hampshire voters like to reject what Iowa voters do (for example, from Pat Caddell, but he’s not alone in saying it):

[Cadell] doesn’t think New Hampshire really loved Clinton [when she won there in 2008 after losing in Iowa]. Rather, given that Obama had won Iowa, New Hampshire voters were confronted with a dilemma: If we vote for Obama, essentially Obama is the winner of the entire primary. Back to back wins will make him nigh-unstoppable.

Caddell’s idea is that it wasn’t that New Hampshire was really backing Clinton, so much as it was saying “Let’s make sure this Obama is really acceptable, let’s have a longer nomination process.”

I beg to differ. I don’t think New Hampshire voters have any thought of whether they agree or disagree with Iowans, or whether they’re anointing a winner. In fact, why wouldn’t they want to anoint a winner? No, I think it’s just that Iowa and New Hampshire could hardly be more different in the composition of their Republican voting population.

For example, evangelicals make up a huge percentage of the Iowa GOP voters—well over half. Although there are some evangelicals in New Hampshire, it’s a lot smaller group than in Iowa:

Four years ago, just 22% of the state’s primary voters described themselves as evangelicals, well below the 57% in Iowa and the lowest rate among swing states. A 2013 Gallup poll ranked New Hampshire as the second least religious state in the country, behind Vermont, based on churchgoing and the importance of religion in daily life.

“Candidates definitely tone things down regarding social issues when they come to the state,” said Stephen Scaer, a 52-year-old special-education teacher who helps run a prayer vigil outside a Planned Parenthood clinic in Manchester, N.H., and favors Republican Carly Fiorina. But, he said, “that’s simply pragmatic. If candidates want to win, they have to.”

The common wisdom on New Hampshire is that it’s fiscally conservative and socially liberal, and there are a lot of libertarians there, too (“Live Free or Die” is still alive in New Hampshire).

So when New Hampshirites vote, they’re not consciously thinking of being different from Iowans—they just are different from Iowans.

I also keep reading how New Hampshire is natural Trump country or Trump territory. I disagree there, as well. New Hampshire is not natural Trump territory anymore than Iowa is, but for different reasons. Historically, New Hampshire has tended to favor local New Englanders when they’re running (Romney and Henry Cabot Lodge for the GOP—and Romney came close to McCain there even in 2008; Tsongas, Dukakis, Muskie, and Kerry for the Democrats) and to favor moderate Republicans more often than conservatives (although Pat Buchanan edged out Dole there in 1996). Since there’s no New Englander this year, that would make it natural Christie country or Kasich country or Jeb country (or Rubio country, because at this point he’s considered a moderate, compared to Cruz). And indeed, those candidates have all had surges in New Hampshire polling, and some (Bush and Kasich, for example) are still doing a lot better in New Hampshire than they’re doing in most other states.

That’s not to say that Trump can’t or won’t win there; he most definitely could. But if so, it’s because of the unusually high number of other candidates splitting the remainder so many ways rather than some huge amount of New Hampshire love for Trump.

Which brings us to the post-Iowa polls in New Hampshire. New Hampshire’s primary is February 9, which is next Tuesday, but the situation in the state is still so fluid that polls seem nearly worthless—except as confirmation that indeed, the situation is very fluid.

Why do I say that? Let’s take the recent CNN/WMUR poll, a rolling poll in which 2/3 of its likely-GOP-primary-voter respondents were polled before Iowa and 1/3 after, 362 and 209 respectively. The questions were asked by landline and cellphone, and note the margin of error: plus or minus 5 for the first group, and plus or minus 6.8 for the second. That’s an enormous margin of error, and that’s not all that’s problematic in the results of the poll. We also learn that only 41% of respondents have definitely decided on a candidate, with an additional 25% only leaning and a full 34% totally undecided.

Makes me almost want to give up even looking at the poll. But hey, I’ll soldier on.

Trump gets 29%, Rubio 18% (that’s a marked improvement over pre-Iowa polls), Cruz 13%, Kasich 12%, Bush 10%, Christie 4%, Fiorina 4%, and Carson 2%. Trump’s “would NOT vote for under any circumstances” numbers are far higher than anyone else’s, 37% for Trump to Cruz’s 13%, Jeb’s 7%, Rubio’s 5%, Carson’s 3%, and Christie’s 3%.

Another recent New Hampshire poll was taken by UMassLowell/WMUR, which also contains both pre-Iowa and post-Iowa results. In that poll, 2/3 were interviewed after Iowa, and there were only 487 likely GOP primary voters, with a margin of error set at plus minus 4.87, not as high as the previous poll but still fairly high.

This poll also shows a post-Iowa uptick for Rubio, but not as strongly as the other one. For respondents polled on 2/4 (the final day of the poll) it shows Trump leading by 34 to Rubio’s 15 to Cruz’s 13. But once again, there are a lot of undecideds, with 41% of all respondents saying they could change their minds. The highest “could change mind” responses were for Rubio, Bush, Christie, and Carson, but even Trump (whose voters generally seem to be most dug in) had 28% who could change their minds.

So it seems to me that the most valid things these polls reveal are (1) Trump is leading right now, in a race where the vote is split many ways; and (2) so many people are still undecided that it’s anybody’s race.

And if you think that’s a ridiculous amount of number-crunching just to get to those conclusions, you might be right.

[ADDENDUM: I just noticed this Politico article that’s all about New Hampshire’s late deciders and how often the polls in the state are just plain wrong:

“These people really are volatile,” added Monmouth University pollster Patrick Murray. “They really are undecided. Even if they pick a candidate today or tomorrow, they can change their mind.”

New Hampshire’s closeness in time to Iowa presents problems, too, because a bounce right after Iowa doesn’t necessarily last till the voting in New Hampshire. What’s more, in NH Independents can vote in either primary, and there are a lot of Independents. In addition, voters are so heavily surveyed that they get tired of answering polls and that can skew the population of respondents.]

To be a candidate, you must have energy

The New Neo Posted on by

A lot of energy.

As an example, I just want you to take a look at the pace most of these candidates maintain in the final push in New Hampshire. And they’ve been doing this since last summer, including a lot of back-and-forth between Iowa and New Hampshire.

Those who stay in the race will keep doing it till Election Day. And that doesn’t even count the preparation before their initial declarations of candidacy. It’s a marathon, but a marathon composed of sprint after sprint after sprint, all day and pretty much every day, for well over a year. Among other things, you pretty much have to love it to stay in the game.

What fuels them (besides doughnuts and coffee)? It’s easy to be cynical and say “narcissism,” and that’s not a bad answer, because obviously there’s some of that (and sometimes a great deal of that). But I think there’s more. The best politicians feed not only on adulation but on crowds and also on interacting with people one on one, something most candidates must do a lot in these two states with very small populations (Iowa has about 3 million people and New Hampshire less than half that).

Obama was apparently an anomaly in that way; he didn’t like it, but did it as a means to an end. For the current GOP crop, I would imagine the ones most naturally interested in doing that sort of thing and having fun with it would be Trump, Christie, and Rubio.

[CLARIFICATION: I didn’t mean Obama didn’t like campaigning in general, particularly the adulation of the crowds. When I wrote that he didn’t like “it,” I meant the “it” to refer to the “interacting with people one on one” part.

Same for “that sort of thing” in that last sentence—it’s meant to refer to “interacting with people one on one.”]

The long reach of time

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: This is a repeat of a previous post that first appeared in March of 2013, repeated now for no particular reason except that I like it.]

My mother’s very first memory was of being frightened by booming noises—guns? cannon? fireworks?—while being held aloft above a crowd to view a New York harbor filled with ships. She wept and her parents comforted her. The year was 1918, and she was four years old, and they told her there was no reason to cry because it was a happy occasion: the end of the Great War.

They didn’t yet realize that someday it would be known as the First.

That was a long time ago. But it really wasn’t all that long ago, since my very own mother remembered it. She grew up in an extended family shaped like an inverted pyramid, the only child of an only child. Her father had become chronically ill around the time she was born, and so her parents had to move in with her mother’s parents. They never moved out again until both grandparents had died and the house was sold, around the time of my birth.

So that’s how it happened that my mother was raised by four people, two of whom had been born during the early 1850s. All four of them had held and reassured my mother when those booming noises had announced the end of the Great War in that scene that constituted her first memory. So, although my mother became a modern woman who smoked cigarettes, drove a car, went to college, and voted as soon as she turned twenty-one (in that order, I believe), two of the people closest to her in her youth remembered the Civil War vividly.

This story illustrates how easy it is to reach back in time, at least in a “six degrees of separation” sort of way. All it takes is a family with a series of long-lived people who have children relatively late in life.

For example, with the proper connections, my mother could easily have known someone who knew someone who lived in the 1700s—and in the early 1700s, at that. That’s how we get the phenomenon of those Civil War widows who died as late as the early years of the twenty-first century. The recipe for that requires a very elderly woman who had gotten married very young to a veteran husband who was very old.

I’ve already described my mother’s family. But my father’s family also had an exceptionally long reach back in time. My paternal grandfather was born around 1860 and died in the 1920s. But he was the youngest of twelve children, the eldest of whom was a sister of his born in the year 1838.

Please let that sink in for a moment: my own grandfather’s sister was born in 1838. Not only that, but she lived to be over 100 years old and dance at my parents’ wedding. She appears in photos of the occasion, a small figure wearing a black headscarf, almost impossibly old and wrinkled but smiling.

I never met her; she died some years before I was born. But what tales she might have told! One of the difficulties of reaching back in time by talking to the elderly is that the young rarely have the inclination to do it before it’s too late. Old people—who cares what they have to say?

The answer might be: people who collect oral histories, that’s who. And while it’s true that there’s a growing industry of recording the memories of the elderly while they are still around to tell them, I wonder how many people will be listening in the future. It’s in the nature of the young these days to dismiss what used to known as the wisdom of the ages, or the thought that the experience of the past has any relevance to the present or the future. It’s one of the reasons why we fail to learn all that much from history.

2016 identity politics, Republican-style

The New Neo Posted on by

Rush Limbaugh says:

Sixty percent of the Republican vote in Iowa last night went for two Hispanics and an African-American, and 100% of the Democrat vote went for a couple of tired, old, decrepit white people.

That’s pretty funny. I don’t think they’re so very tired and decrepit, though, since although I’m younger than they are, I’m not younger enough to feel immune to the charge. Rush better watch out, too. He’s 65.

It’s the Republicans who are the party of youth these days, and of diversity. But they will never get credit for it, because Republican hispanics and blacks and women aren’t real hispanics and blacks and women.

And here’s another fact for you: I’ve noticed that people just assume that Ted Cruz is a lot older than Marco Rubio. Well, he is older—about 5 months older. It’s just that Rubio’s got that baby face.

And it occurs to me that the Republican Party owes Fidel Castro a small debt of gratitude, because two of the candidates probably wouldn’t be here without him.

I don’t know where to put this next bit, so I may as well put it here. I noticed that the campaign of 2016 is the Year of the Gorgeous Republican Wives.

I’m not kidding. People call Cruz a nerd, but this woman apparently doesn’t think so. Or maybe she likes nerds:

heidiCruz

Rubio’s wife was a Miami Dolphins cheerleader. She’s had four children, and still looks like this:

rubiowife2

You’d expect Donald Trump’s wife to look good—as a former model—and of course she does. It isn’t easy to find a photo of her smiling, however. For some reason, she seems to adopt a sullen look, perhaps a relic from her modeling days? I found a smiley one, though, and then a more typical frowning (maybe “sultry” is a better word?) one:

trumpwife

melania

Melania would also be the first US First Lady who has modeled in the nude (and no guys; that’s not a link to her nude photos). But in these progressive times, she wouldn’t be the first First Lady worldwide who has modeled in the nude. I believe that honor (?) belongs to the wife of Nicholas Sarkozy of France, Carla Bruni.

[ADDENDUM: By the way, Trump’s wife is a naturalized citizen, born in an area that was then part of Yugoslavia.

Rubio’s wife was born in Florida to parents who had emigrated from Colombia:

[Jeanette] Rubio was featured in the Miami Dolphins Cheerleaders’ first swimsuit calendar before she retired in 1997. It was during her time as a cheerleader that the Rubios, who were only slightly acquainted in high school, met again and began to date.

The fact that Mrs. Rubio’s Colombian background might make her the first Latina First Lady has aroused interest in Latin America.

They didn’t meet through her cheerleading, however, although I imagine it didn’t dampen Rubio’s interest in her; they were at the same college when they began to date.

Heidi Cruz was born in California, decided at a very early age to attend Harvard Business School, developed a political interest at 8, and met her husband while both were working for the Bush 2000 campaign.]

Trump can’t be bought—and so what?

The New Neo Posted on by

A lot of Trump supporters argue that they trust him because Trump can’t be bought.

But he can buy, and he’s been doing that his whole life. And, since he’s got more money than anyone running for political office [*see NOTE below] except Michael Bloomberg, his ability to buy is almost unlimited.

Plus, he can threaten, lie about, and try to ruin—which has been Trump’s m.o. for the vast majority of his adult life towards people who cross or thwart him. He’s shown no scruples or hesitation about it, and it doesn’t matter who his target is—for example, it can be a small landowner in Scotland, if that landowner doesn’t want to sell to Trump and Trump believes his run-down farm is spoiling the view from Trump’s luxury golf course. Then he becomes fair game to Trump: the “village idiot” who “lives like a pig.”

Hey, let’s give this guy the most powerful office in the world. His slogan can be: “In the world of politics, I’m a john, not a whore.” Or, “I’ll crush anyone who gets in my way.”

But perhaps if you support him you acknowledge all of this. You say that politics is a dog-eat-dog world, and influence is bought and sold, and you’d rather vote for the buyer than the seller. And you’d rather have the power-wielding thug wielding power on behalf of you.

Many Trump supporters must think this is a convincing argument, because I see it a lot. They seem to have arrived at a very advanced stage of cynicism, and they believe Trump would be their weapon in that world. Let’s put aside for the moment the question of whether such an extreme degree of cynicism and resignation is justified, just for the sake of argument (and this post). We still can ask why trust Donald Trump, of all people? Why think that his ends are your ends, and that it would make things better? Just because he says it?

Trump has no track record in office. His track record in life is to have done whatever it took to make money for Donald Trump, mostly through real estate development of large projects, and through marketing himself as a celebrity. Paid whoever needed to be paid. Said he liked whoever needed to be liked, and then when they didn’t do what he liked, badmouthed them. Lied when he felt he needed to. Been charming when it suited his purposes. Cheated on wives, seems to have been good to his children (who are, after all, an extension of Trump). Changed his political statements and stances with a rapidity that would make your head spin if you bothered to follow it. Paid people to help him write his books.

All of it in the service of the brand known as Donald Trump and the man known as Donald Trump. His goal has been to achieve personal power through money and fame. He’s made no secret of it, nor has he used his power for good in the world (or his money, for the most part; he’s been extraordinarily stingy with it in the philanthropic sense).

I imagine that those who want to give this particular man the highest and most powerful office in the world—particularly after Obama has shown the way towards making it more powerful by ignoring (and to a certain degree rendering impotent) the other supposedly co-equal branches of government—must in some way trust him. But I’d trust such a megalomaniac less with the reins of power than other people, not more. There is nothing—absolutely nothing—about Donald Trump that would make me trust him with that kind of power, and his braggadocio notwithstanding, he is one of those dangerous people who doesn’t even know what he doesn’t know. I’d rather trust a person who had shown some understanding of and respect for the Constitution, who had actually worked in government for conservative principles, and who we can assume might be beholden to a some special interests but who has acted on some principle in life other than pure self-aggrandizement. Trump’s only special interest is himself.

[*NOTE: On the topic of very rich people who have run for office, if you look at the Forbes400 you’ll see that Bloomberg clocks in at #8 with $38.6 billion, which makes Trump’s #121 and $4.5 billion seem like chump change. Another rich politician—in his case, ex-politican—is Ross Perot, who is #138 at $4 billion, very similar to Trump (I was very surprised to learn he’s still alive, and not even that old at 85). Except for Bloomberg, the really high political rollers on the list—but in the sense of being financial contributors rather than officeholders—are, as you might expect, the Kochs (tied at #5 with ) and George Soros (at #16 with $24.5 billion).

Most of these rich people you’ve probably never heard of. Few are celebrities like Trump, although there are some who are fairly well-known, or known for something else (like George Lucas). I was surprised to see someone on the list whom I’d known when he was a little boy of about 7 and had not seen since. Although I’d known he became rich, I never realized it was that rich.]

Germany prepares to feed at the Iran deal trough

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s not just Germany, of course. This is the sort of thing that made Europe salivate at the prospect of the Iran deal:

According to the head of Iran’s state-run oil company NPC, two leading German companies are set to invest a total of €12 billion in Tehran’s petroleum and gas sector. The latest agreement could make Germany the first big foreign investor in Iranian oil sector, after the nuclear deal was signed seven months ago.

Once the deal is finalized, these German firms will start setting up petrochemical plants in Assaluyeh in southern Iran. Mullahs in Tehran plan to get 6 unfinished petrochemical projects off the ground, which could double Iran’s annual oil revenue.

Germany has been the biggest European beneficiary of the Iranian Nuclear Deal. As German companies hoping to get up to €6 billion in back payments from Tehran, once country’s banking assets are unfrozen as part of the Obama-backed deal.

Germany isn’t the only one who should be salivating:

This week, Iran’s Government spokesman claimed that the Islamic Republic has gained access to $100 billion in overseas assets. This is a good news for terrorist organization like Hamas and Hezbollah as well as Assad’s genocidal regime in Syria. As the Shia-Sunni civil war within Islam heats up, Iranian Mullahs would be free to write fat cheques to their terrorist allies and proxies across the Islamic world and beyond.

New book on political changers by Daniel Oppenheimer

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “Cornflour” has alerted me to a new book on political changers (left-to-right), a subject very dear to my heart. It’s by Daniel Oppenheimer, and it’s called Exit Right: The People Who Left the Left and Reshaped the American Century:

In Exit Right, Daniel Oppenheimer tells the stories of six major political figures whose journeys away from the left reshaped the contours of American politics in the twentieth century. By going deep into the minds of six apostates””Whittaker Chambers, James Burnham, Ronald Reagan, Norman Podhoretz, David Horowitz, and Christopher Hitchens.

As you can see from the description, Oppenheimer’s focus is somewhat different than mine, although there’s some overlap. He seems to be intereted mostly in the movers and shakers who underwent political change, whereas although I’m interested in them (and have already written about some of them) I’m also extremely interested in the ordinary people (like me!) who did something similar. In particular I’m interested in studying the process of political change itself. How does it happen, and why? What are the commonalities? What are the differences?

I have not read the book, and definitely plan to do so. But my impression from the interview is that Oppenheimer seems to have more of a biographical interest in these people rather than an analytical one in the phenomenon as a whole. He seems to come to it more as storyteller and chronicler rather than as scientist or semi-scientist. This is a fine approach, as far as it goes. I like stories and biography, and I would imagine these are fascinating, but I’m actually more interested in what we can extrapolate from the stories.

I also listened to this interview with Oppenheimer about his book. He himself is a leftist, raised a leftist, but with intermittent doubts and questions, but so far he has resisted a personal political change. Here’s the author’s webpage.