Opinion
Lawrence Journal-World l LJWorld.com l Sunday, July 24, 2016
9A
Trump rebrands Republican Party
EDITORIALS
Lost asset It’s sad to witness the demise of the Kansas Bioscience Authority.
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he Kansas Bioscience Authority has been slowly strangled by deep cuts in state funding for several years, but its transfer last week into the Kansas Department of Commerce almost certainly is the last chapter in this once-promising economic development venture. The whole reason for putting KBA inside Commerce is to facilitate the sale of KBA’s assets and investment portfolio. That move was authorized earlier this year by Kansas lawmakers, at least in part, to help balance this year’s state budget. The state expects the sale of KBA assets to raise $25 million to fill the state budget hole. If it raises more than that, up to $13 million of the excess money will be used to fund the school finance equity bill. Some state legislators have called the strategy to raise one-time funds “a fire sale.” House Majority Leader Jene Vickrey disputed that depiction, saying “The way this was constructed didn’t work as well as we needed it to, and we need a new structure.” Let’s be clear: KBA is not being restructured. It and its mission are being abandoned. It is a sad end for an agency that provided many benefits for the state despite being plagued by political maneuvers and some questionable leadership. In the last 12 years, state taxpayers contributed more than $200 million to KBA, which operated as a quasi-public venture capital group. That’s a lot of money, but it paid off in many ways for the state. KBA support was critical to the state’s success in landing the National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility for Manhattan and gaining designation of the Kansas University Medical Center as a National Cancer Center. The KBA also invested in companies that helped boost the Research Triangle in Fairway. It can be argued that KBA was an essential part of raising the state’s stature and reputation in the highly competitive bioscience field. How or whether that reputation now can be retained — let alone, advanced — is a major question mark. KBA got off to a promising start, but politics and problems with a former president made it vulnerable to critics in recent years. State allocations were reduced and, in the last two years, eliminated. The demise of KBA is a clear step backward for Kansas. By selling off KBA’s assets, the state will raise some short-term cash but it will lose a venture that had the potential to be a longterm benefit to the state economy.
Washington — Crucial political decisions often concern which bridges to cross and which to burn. Donald Trump’s dilemma is that he burns some bridges by the way he crosses others. His campaign depends on a low-probability event, and on his ability to cause this event without provoking a more-than-equal and opposite reaction. Extrapolating from recent elections, the turnout of noncollege educated whites this November would be expected to be 3 percent smaller as a portion of the total turnout than in 2012, and college educated whites a 1 percent larger portion. The core of Trump’s support consists of non-college educated whites, a cohort whose 2012 turnout was 60.4 percent. There is a low probability that Trump can motivate recent non-voters in this cohort to increase the turnout to 67 percent. There is, however, a high probability that the way he stimulates such people — still more insult oratory and fact-free “policy” expostulations — will cause other groups to recoil. For the first time since at least 1952 — the first election for which ample data is available — Democrats probably will win a majority of voters with college degrees — a large and growing group (In 1952, 6.4 percent of Americans had completed college; today, about 33 percent have.) Consider, particularly, women with post-bachelor degrees. This fast-growing group — the percentages of women in law, medical and
George Will
georgewill@washpost.com
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Can Trump ignite a spike in the non-college white vote without causing a morethan-commensurate increase in the Democratic propensity of the collegeeducated?” business schools’ enrollments are 48.7, 46.9 and 36.2, respectively — is already approximately 65 percent Democratic. Can Trump ignite a spike in the non-college white vote without causing a more-thancommensurate increase in the Democratic propensity of the college-educated? Speaking of low-probability events, Trump’s literary interests were hidden until his vice presidential search took him to Charles Dickens’ “David Copperfield,” where he found Mike Pence, whose sometimes unctuous affect resembles Uriah Heep’s: So very ‘umble. The adjective “oleaginous” might have been invented to describe Pence’s performance with Trump on “60 Minutes”: Being chosen by Trump is “very, very humbling.” Trump is “one of the best ne-
gotiators in the world” and will provide “broad-shouldered American strength.” Trump — “this good man” (what would a bad man look like to Pence?) — “is awed with the American people.” Pence, a broad-spectrum social conservative saddened by our fallen world, can minister to the boastful adulterer and aspiring torturer who Pence thinks belongs in the bully pulpit. Actually, the sole benefit of Trump’s election would be in making the presidency’s sacerdotal role — the nation’s moral tutor — terminally ludicrous. In May, Pence endorsed Ted Cruz but larded his endorsement with lavish praise of Trump, who excuses Pence for buckling “under tremendous pressure from establishment people.” In a year of novelties, now this one: A presidential candidate calls his running mate weak. It will be interesting to see whether Pence will defend his defensible opposition, as a congressman, to Medicare Part D, the prescription drug entitlement. When George W. Bush proposed this bit of “compassionate conservatism,” House Democrats voted 195-9 against it, deeming it insufficiently compassionate to seniors and excessively compassionate to pharmaceutical companies. Nineteen House Republicans, including Pence, voted against it, largely because this was the first major entitlement enacted without provision for funding. To give the Bush administration time to twist
arms and dangle enticements, Republicans held open the floor vote for 2 hours and 51 minutes, twice as long as the previous longest House vote. It passed 216-215. If pharmacology had been as potent in 1965 as it has become, prescription drugs might then have been included in Medicare. Today, will a pliable Pence amend his convictions and repent his resistance to this now immensely popular entitlement? Trump, Pence’s new lodestar, sees nothing amiss with the existing entitlement system and disparages those (remember the man who used to be Chris Christie?) who think trillions of dollars of unfunded liabilities are problematic. Pence also has strongly favored free trade, including the North American Free Trade Agreement that Trump calls “the worst economic deal in the history of our country.” Never mind. In 1980, George H.W. Bush denounced Ronald Reagan’s “voodoo economics” until Reagan selected Bush as his running mate, whereupon Bush decided that it was very good voodoo economics. The malleable shall inherit the earth. As Trump’s campaign manager, Paul Manafort, says, Trump “has changed the face of the Republican Party” just as Ronald Reagan did. Indeed. A snarl has replaced the sunny Southern California smile. Trump, himself a brand, has completed the rebranding of the Republican Party. — George Will is a columnist for Washington Post Writers Group.
OLD HOME TOWN
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From the Lawrence Daily Journal-World for July 24, 1916: years “Regular interago urban service to IN 1916 the south side of the river will start Wednesday morning, according to the announcement of the interurban officials this morning. The depot in the 600 block is being fixed up today and the office will be moved from the station in North Lawrence to the south office tomorrow. ... The schedule of the regular service will be only slightly changed by the extension of the line across the river.” — Compiled by Sarah St. John
Read more Old Home Town at LJWorld.com/news/lawrence/ history/old_home_town.
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Republicans set low bar on vision Well, that was sure ugly. Last week’s Republican conclave in Cleveland came across less as a nominating convention than as a four-day nervous breakdown, a moment of fracture and bipolarity from a party that no longer has any clear idea what it stands for or what it is. Everywhere you turned there was something that made you embarrassed for them, something so disconnected from fact, logic or decency as to suggest those things no longer have much meaning for the party faithful. Did the convention really earn rave reviews from white supremacists, with one tweeting approvingly that the GOP “is becoming the de facto white party?” Did Florida Gov. Rick Scott really say he could remember “when terrorism was something that happened in foreign countries” — as if four little girls were never blown to pieces in a Birmingham church, and an NAACP lawyer and his wife were never killed by a bomb in Scott’s own state? Did Silicon Valley entrepreneur Peter Thiel really say, “It’s time to end the era of stupid wars,” as if it were Democrats who dragged Republicans into Iraq with promises of flowers strewn
Leonard Pitts Jr. lpitts@miamiherald.com
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Donald Trump’s ‘acceptance speech’ was a 75-minute scream as incoherent as everything that preceded it.” beneath American tanks? Did Ben Carson really link Hillary Clinton to Satan? Did the crowd really chant, repeatedly and vociferously, for her to be jailed? Did at least two Republicans actually call for her execution? No, you weren’t dreaming. The answer is yes on all counts. Then there was the party’s nominee. Donald Trump’s “acceptance speech” was a 75-minute scream as incoherent as everything that preceded it. He vowed to protect the LGBTQ community from “a hateful foreign ideology,” as if his party’s platform did
not commit it to support socalled “conversion therapy,” an offensive bit of quackery that purports to “cure” homosexuality. He accused President Obama of dividing the nation, as if he were not the one recycling Richard Nixon’s racist Southern strategy with unsubtle cries of “law and order,” and George H.W. Bush’s infamous Willie Horton ad with tales of “illegals” out to kill us. Trump painted a bleak picture of a nation in decline and under siege, and he offered a range of responses: fear or fright, fury or rage. But glory be, he promised to fix everything that ails us, down to and including long lines at the airport. Trump gave few specifics, mind you, beyond a guarantee that he can do all this “quickly.” Any resemblance to a guy hawking magical elixir from the back of a wagon was surely unintentional. This gathering made one thing clear, if it had not been already. The battle between left and right is no longer a contest of ideas, no longer about low taxes versus higher ones, small government versus big government, intervention versus isolation. No, the defining clash of our time is reason versus unrea-
son, reason versus an inchoate fear and fury growing like weeds on the cultural, class, religious and racial resentments of people who cling to an idealized 1954 and wonder why the country is passing them by. The Republicans, as presently constituted, have no ideas beyond fear and fury. And Lord help us, the only thing standing between us and that is a grandmother in pantsuits. The Democrats have their gathering this week in Philadelphia. Ordinarily, you’d call on them to present a competing vision, but the GOP has set the bar so low you’d be happy to see the Democrats just present a vision, period, just appeal to something beyond our basest selves, just remind us that we can be better and our politics higher than what we saw last week. This has to happen. Because, you see, the Republicans were right on at least one point: The nation does face a clear and present danger, a menace to our values, our hopes and our future. If the GOP wants to see this threat, there’s no need to look outward. Any good mirror will do. — Leonard Pitts Jr. is a columnist for the Miami Herald.