I have a certain fascination with Kenneth Dahlberg. He raised money for Richard Nixon’s re-election campaign and was a critical player in the Watergate scandal. After the break-in was discovered, investigators found that a $25,000 check from Dahlberg had been deposited in the bank account of one of the burglars. As is documented (apparently quite accurately) in probably the most exciting scene in the film All the President’s Men, Dahlberg simply gave the check (a bundle of smaller donations) to Maurice Stans, the head of finance for Nixon’s Committee for the Re-Election of the President (CRP, which everyone who didn’t like Nixon called “creep”).

Maurice Stans was an interesting character. He was Secretary of Commerce from the beginning of 1969 to the beginning of 1972, when he stepped down to help out on Nixon’s campaign. He was basically an accountant. He had worked in the Eisenhower administration. Now he claimed throughout his very long and pampered life that he didn’t know where the money was going. But I find this hard to believe. CRP had a huge slush fund. Nixon had a million dollars in the White House safe. Now if I had been chair of finance for CRP, I think you could rightly believe that I had no idea because I’m clueless. But Stans was an accountant. As it is, it seems that everyone at the Washington CRP office knew something was going on, even if they didn’t know what.

Regardless, Stans was indicted for perjury and obstruction of justice, but never convicted. He pleaded guilty to reporting violations of the Federal Election Campaign Act and had to pay a small (for him) fine. And that was the end of that.

So here is Dahlberg, who is a Republican at a time when it didn’t mean you were a horrible or just deeply ignorant person, who is helping to get his party’s president re-elected. It’s a patriotic act. He believes in the Republican agenda. He isn’t doing it for his direct personal benefit. He’s being a good citizen. And he finds himself in the middle of a criminal conspiracy. It’s just amazing.

Of course, Dahlberg was never indicted or anything. I think that everyone knew all along that he didn’t know what was going on. But it’s kind of interesting that CRP would not deposit the donation into its slush fund and rather just sign over a campaign check to a criminal. This could have been done because they thought Dahlberg was a patsy. But I suspect they did it out of a combination of hubris and incompetence. As Deep Throat says in the film, “Forget the myths the media has created about the White House. The truth is, these are not very bright guys.” (Remember during the George W Bush administration how everyone talked about how brilliant Karl Rove was, but he turned out to be a mediocrity, just like them all.)

What I found interesting was that Kenneth Dahlberg was a World War II hero. He was a fighter pilot in Europe and was credited with 15 aerial victories. In the course of all of that, he was shot down three times himself. He got a ridiculous number of metals, including the Distinguished Service Cross, the second-highest award the army gives out. He had a very eventful war. He was also a very successful businessman — one who actually made things (in particular, hearing aids).

I think it all fits a certain kind of profile of a man who, though very much not like me, was a decent man — trying to do what was right.

Afterword: Theoretical Kenneth Dahlberg

Beliefs are cultural. I think Kenneth Dahlberg was a good and noble man in terms of his business dealings and his politics. He was 55 in 1972, so I think he was, if anything, naive. But if he had been born 40 years later, he would be the same kind of outsourcing, “greed is good,” “demagogue everything for the sake of my tax cuts” jerk that is the Republican Party today. But as the man he was in his own time, he was good — even a hero.

Tomorrow, I will publish an article on how not to attack Bernie Sanders, Who Cares About Bernie Sanders’ Healthcare Plan? Today, I’m going to discuss the right way to attack Bernie Sanders.

Brian Buetler wrote a really good article this morning, Bernie Sanders Will Be Unelectable If He Keeps This Up. And it gets at a really important point about the Sanders campaign. One thing I’ve liked about the Democratic campaign thus far has been the mutual respect that the two main candidates have shown, and how it has been all a question about the best way to achieve our shared liberal goals.

Let’s not forget that the most important liberal policies are widely shared. When it comes to economic matters, people are for a far more fair system than we now have. And when it comes to reproductive rights, people come down firmly on the pro-choice side. (This is often obscured because the anti-choice movement is good pushing the discussion to the edges of the issue: intact dilation and extraction and fetal tissue.) These are not just things that Democrats agree on; they are things that Republicans largely agree on — especially on the economic side.

So the greatest mistake we can make is to turn this into a primary about purity. Screw purity! A huge issue for me is the minimum wage. Sanders is pushing for a $15 minimum wage. Clinton is pushing for a $12 minimum wage. These are not ideological positions. I’m with Bernie: $15 is what we should be going for. It represents a living wage. But $12 is a worthy goal too. And for people working minimum wage in California (where it is, high by American standards at $10 per hour), $12 would be a very big deal. My concern is that asking for $12 does not get you to $12. But regardless, the issue is not ideological.

And this is especially true when there is a large and growing movement in the Republican Party that we should have no minimum wage at all. Based upon their very primitive libertarian thinking with their Frédéric Bastiat thought experiments, all our unemployment problems would go away if only people could take jobs for a buck fifty a day. So it’s really important that we not lose perspective here.

I don’t like to see tweets like this from the Sanders campaign yesterday:

You can be a moderate. You can be a progressive. But you cannot be a moderate and a progressive.

— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) February 3, 2016

It was followed up with a series of even worse tweets of the form, “Most progressives I know don’t…” This was responded to cogently by Alex Katz, “Most progressives I know supported the Brady Bill and common sense gun control. Not #BernieSanders.” Now it just so happens that I care far more about economics because I believe economic inequality kills far more people than guns or cars or anything else you can mention. But this is madness to claim that the progressive issues I care most about are what make me pure while I apologize away my heresies.

Brian Beutler’s article is not really meant to attack Bernie Sanders. For one thing, I think he’s highly sympathetic towards Sanders. But he’s providing some excellent reminder to the Sanders campaign that this is not how you win primaries — not to mention general elections.

Recap: How to Attack Bernie Sanders

We know how not to attack Bernie Sanders. Jonathan Chait and Paul Krugman have shown us the way to their eternal shame. But Beutler summarized David Roberts’ criticisms:

I would add to this that I do think it is a problem for the Democratic Party to not nominate a woman. The last time we nominated a woman, it was Geraldine Ferraro, 32 years ago — for vice-president. This too concerns me.

None of this means that I now support Hillary Clinton for president. I wear my Bernie Sanders shirt proudly. I will almost certainly proudly cast my vote for Sanders on 7 June (after the primary is effectively over). But I don’t want to see this turn into a purity contest. I’ve written before, Yes, Hillary Clinton Is a Real Liberal. Now let’s get back to the real substantive campaign that we have thus far had.

I can’t believe I’m writing this again. But The Paul Krugman Bernie Sanders Giving Game continues and it is again time to donate to Sanders!

About as soon as he possibly could, Paul Krugman wrote, Post-Iowa Notes. And in it, he made the point that really doesn’t need to be made — that Ted Cruz, Donald Trump, and Marco Rubio are all horrifying. But that wasn’t really what the article was about. It was another swipe at the “Bernie bros” and to say, “To be blunt, I think Sanders is selling an illusion, but it’s an illusion many people want to believe in, and there’s no easy way to counter that.”

Donate to Sanders!

Attention Paul Krugman: you aren’t being anymore blunt than you have been for the last two weeks. We get it! Bernie is an idealist who is selling a lie and Clinton is a realist who will produce. Thus far, he has not provided a shred of evidence that Clinton actually would be more successful on a practical level than Sanders would be. This is just an unstated assumption — something Krugman “knows” just as sure as Ted Cruz “knows” that Jesus walks with him and tax cuts pay for themselves.

Look: I don’t care. I think Krugman means to say something else. I think he means to say that Sanders won’t win in the general election. He could make the quite reasonable claim that a Republican president would be so disastrous at this point that we can’t take the chance. He could write a reasonable article like Erik Loomis’s Bernie Skepticism. But he doesn’t. Krugman is just embarrassing himself at this point.

Donate to Sanders!

You may not know this but there is this thing called The Two Rules of Paul Krugman: “Rule number one: Paul Krugman is right; rule number two: if you think Paul Krugman is wrong, refer to rule number one.” And there is a reason for that. Krugman has always been a very careful thinker. He is not inclined toward saying outrageous things. Just the same, he doesn’t back away from saying things that are clearly true but “just aren’t said.” But I’m beginning to think that rule number two needs to be changed to: “If you think Paul Krugman is wrong, and it doesn’t involve Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, refer to rule number one.”

This isn’t just a matter of politics. Check out what Krugman has to say about financial reform, “Substantively, her financial reform ideas are as tough as his, just different in focus.” Oh, is that right?! Well, to start with, they’ve gotten tougher because Sanders is in this race. (Thanks Bernie!) But there just so happens to be an economist I find far more credible on economic matters than Krugman: Dean Baker. Baker has not only been right about just about every important economic issue over the last 15 years, he’s also a very creative thinker.

About a week ago, Baker wrote, Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton, and Wall Street. He points out how much wiggle room there is in all the proposed regulations. He ended by asking the serious question of which of the candidates would actually be willing to break up the too-big-to-fail banks. I think we know the answer to that.

But more important, there is one thing that we absolutely should do: enact a financial transaction tax. Sanders has been very strong on this. Clinton has only proposed such a tax on high frequency trading. Why?! I think if you look at the last question, you can see that there is one candidate that is more beholden to Wall Street.

Does any of this matter if Republicans still have control of the House in 2017? No, I don’t think it does. I’ve said many times before: I don’t think there would be much a difference between a Clinton administration and a Sanders administration. But to glibly claim that Clinton’s financial reforms “are as tough as his, just different in focus,” is just wrong.

Krugman wants to have it both ways. He wants to claim that Clinton is the practical choice. And then, he wants to claim that Clinton is just as ideologically keen as Sanders is. Which is it Krugman? Because The Paul Krugman Bernie Sanders Giving Game is getting really expensive.

Donate to Sanders!

If you would like to donate to Sanders: This is YOUR movement.

Paul Krugman wrote a very upbeat column on Monday, Wind, Sun, and Fire. And he’s right to be rosy. The truth is that the cost of clean energy has been plummeting for years. He quotes one standard estimate that solar power generation has decreased 82% since Obama took office (with almost as steep a decline in wind energy). I want to add a few random thoughts.

I’m so tired of hearing conservatives say that doing anything about global warming will hurt our economy. To start with, this is a typical trick of only looking at one side of the ledger. I see this all the time with the deficit. They claim to care about the deficit, yet apparently, it is only possible to balance a budget by reducing costs; there’s just no way you could increase revenue. (Well, except by cutting taxes, which they wrongly claim will increase revenue.)

And with global warming, the costs of mitigating are allegedly included, but never the costs of not mitigating. This position is always proffered by the “reasonable” conservative who will at least admit that global warming is a real thing. But if you admit that it is a real thing but refuse to look at the damage that it is doing, you don’t really believe in it. You just don’t like the moniker “global warming denier.” But you are one nonetheless.

But ever since 2008, I’ve heard people — even liberals — claim that we should not invest in infrastructure and clean energy in a depressed economy. This is exactly wrong. The more the economy improves, the most costly it gets to fix our power plants. We’ve gone through periods of the last seven years when investors were paying the federal government to hold onto their money. And what were we doing? Fighting over the deficit! That was the time to spend, spend, spend! And if we had, we’d have a better cleaner infrastructure, and a better economy today.

I keep think back to Scott Turow’s first novel, Presumed Innocent. In it, the DA wants the prosecuting attorney to also be able to testify, because the defendant, Rusty, allegedly admitted to his guilt. (In fact, he said it sarcastically.) The judge says that if the DA wants to use that prosecutor as a witness, he must have a different prosecutor try the case. The DA doesn’t want to do that, so the situation is dropped. Until…

The case completely falls apart. Then the DA rushes to the judge, pleading to let them put the prosecuting attorney on the stand. The judge doesn’t buy it, but then, the judge is a very liberal man and doesn’t think the prosecution should get special dispensation, just because its case fell apart — especially given that it by then looks like a setup.

This is what I imagine happening in a few years. When solar and wind energy and battery technology make coal and gas very uncompetitive, I imagine the fossil fuel industry running to Congress pleading for special subsidies. (They already get plenty.) They’ll have all kinds of reasons that they deserve this — reasons I’m sure they already have well worked out. They will shed crocodile tears for all the people that will be put out of work. Remember: these are the same people who have been dead set against subsidies for emerging clean technologies. And these are the same people who have been firing workers with glee for decades.

But if things stay the same in Congress — if we have the same kind of people in Congress — they will get those subsidies. Every argument that conservatives make today will be turned on its head to protect their rich benefactors.

Afterword: Clean Energy Reversal

Note that it doesn’t work the same way for liberals. It makes sense to invest in new technologies that are better. It makes no sense to invest in old technologies that are worse. So it is perfectly reasonable to be for subsidizing clean energy today and against subsidizing dirty energy tomorrow. It is perverse to be against subsidizing clean energy today and for subsidizing dirty energy tomorrow.

Last night, I found myself quite interested in the Iowa Caucus. This came as a surprise to me.

I am deeply divided on the idea of a caucus. On the one hand, I like how interactive it is. On the other, people have busy lives. A lot of working people are tired at night and don’t have the energy to go and mess with the whole process. But then you add on top of that the fact that it is done in the dead of winter in a state that is quite cold. And you finish it off with the fact that Iowa is a ridiculously homogeneous state, with a population of about 3% African American and no Latinos to speak of.

So put it all together and you have a prescription for a “democratic” process that leads to oligarchy. Thus, I’ve never thought that much of the Iowa Caucus.

Republican Iowa Caucus

Ted Cruz won the Iowa Caucus, but really, it was a three way tie with Donald Trump and Marco Rubio. Obviously, this makes the Republican establishment very happy. And maybe Rubio will get a big bump out of this. But the fact remains that the Iowa Caucus format helped him. In New Hampshire and South Carolina, Rubio is barely out of the single digits. We will see. (For the record: Ted Cruz is doing almost exactly as well as Rubio in these next two states.)

There is something else, though. Even though I think presidential elections are primarily about economics, I do know that candidates matter. And despite what the common wisdom is on Rubio, I think he’s a terrible candidate. I know some people say that Hillary Clinton seems fake, but that is nothing compared to Rubio. This is a guy who will turn on a dime based upon the political winds. And the entire focus of his campaign is that he’s young. Well, he does come off as young — as in not prepared, not serious, not anything. And as I’ve discussed, his ideas are old.

Rubio being the great hope of the Republican establishment is based on their boneheaded notion of identity politics. By their theory, it doesn’t matter what a politician thinks, so long as they are the right demographic. After years and years of running African American candidates who do not appeal to African Americans, you would think the Republicans would learn. But no.

We’ll see what the next week brings. The only real concern I ever had of the Republican field was that it might nominate Kasich. If Cruz, Trump, and Rubio are what the Republicans have to offer, then Clinton or Sanders will be running against the economy and only the economy.

Democratic Iowa Caucus

This one surprised me. Or it did until I read this headline in The Washington Post, Early Democratic Entrance Polls Show Big Liberal Turnout in Iowa Caucus. I wrote in my Recycled Genius post (which is turning into a kind of announcement space) that my two greatest fears were that Hillary Clinton would win and that Hillary Clinton would lose. And I more or less got my wish, because this election was amazingly close: 701 SDEs (State Delegate Equivalents) for Hillary and 697 SDEs for Bernie. (Martin O’Malley got 8.) That gave Sanders 21 delegates and Clinton 22 delegates, but I guess Clinton gets one more for winning the state.

You need to remember, however, that this is all much more complicated than it looks. If Clinton and Sanders were evenly divided by the DNC, Clinton would win. Right now, Sanders has 13 super delegates and Clinton has 347. Of course, right now in New Hampshire, Sanders is dominating with a lead of upwards of 20 percentage points in the polls. Meanwhile, in South Carolina, Clinton is crushing it with a polling lead of over 30 percentage points.

This is crazy. But exciting. And as a Democrat, I hope this goes on. Martin O’Malley has suspended this campaign. That leaves just Clinton and Sanders, who I think have been very good and very respectful. It’s not like in Life of Brian, “The only people we hate more than the Romans are the f@#king Judean People’s Front!” I’m not so sure that’s true on the Republican side.

Summing Up

I think it is important to remember that just as we are right about the Republicans, they are right about us: there isn’t much difference between the candidates. The three Republican at the top in Iowa all think that we need to lower taxes on the rich, cut spending on the poor, get rid of regulation, and “drill, baby, drill!” On the Democratic side, both our candidates want to tax the rich more to provide a more equal distribution of wealth and to invest in the future of this country. They both want to do something about global warming. Neither are planning to take us to war with Iran.

There is a clear decision between the parties — not so much inside the parties. What continues to boggle my mind is that roughly half the nation will vote for the Republicans. I don’t say that as a partisan. I can well see a conservative party that is worthy of people voting for. But not this one.