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OPINION 4A THE DAILY ASTORIAN • MONDAY, JUNE 20, 2016 Trump is running as Trump. Surprise! Founded in 1873 STEPHEN A. FORRESTER, Editor & Publisher LAURA SELLERS, Managing Editor BETTY SMITH, Advertising Manager CARL EARL, Systems Manager JOHN D. BRUIJN, Production Manager DEBRA BLOOM, Business Manager HEATHER RAMSDELL, Circulation Manager Mayor Kujala lirts with self-dealing T he public’s business should be done in public. And our elected leaders should be open and transparent about poten- tial or actual conlicts of interest. That is the best guidance But during the June 14 exec- for public bodies, such as city utive session, whose topic was councils and school boards, the Eighth Street Dam, Kujala and our elected oficials. contributed to the discussion. Oregon statute recognizes The powerful Nygaard fam- an elected body’s occasional ily and the Kujala family have need to have private conversa- aligned their interests against tions. It is called executive ses- removal of the Eighth Street sion. Statute lays out the topics Dam. that qualify for executive ses- The Columbia River sion. Those include real estate Estuary Study Taskforce and transactions, personnel matters the Skipanon Water Control and others. The media may District favor the dam’s attend such sessions, but not removal. Reported Derrick report what was said. DePledge: “The water district, State law also instructs which owns the dam, consid- elected leaders to publicly dis- ers the aging structure a haz- close potential or actual conlicts ard and of no use for lood of interest before participating in control. CREST has sought to debates or taking action. use federal Bonneville Power Mayor Mark Kujala skirted Administration money to help that instruction by participat- the water district remove the ing in an executive session at dam and improve ish pas- a City Commission meeting sage and water quality on the last Tuesday night. The topic Skipanon River.” was the Eighth Street Dam, In his self-dealing, Mayor in which Kujala and his fam- Kujala is ignoring the larger ily have a conlict of interest. good. By doing that, Kujala Kujala has acknowledged this deines himself not as the conlict, and he has recused town’s leader, but as yet himself from debate and votes another lobbyist for his and the on the topic. Nygaards’ private interests. By CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER Washington Post Writers Group ASHINGTON — When in his 1964 GOP accep- tance speech Barry Goldwater declared that “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice,” a reporter sitting near journal- ist/historian Theodore White famously exclaimed: “My God, he’s going to run as Barry Goldwater!” W Six weeks into Donald Trump’s general election campaign, Republicans are discovering that he indeed intends to run as Donald Trump. He has boasted that he could turn “presidential” — respectful, respectable, reticent, reserved bor- dering on boring — at will. Appar- ently, he can’t. GOP leaders who fell in line behind Trump after he clinched the nomination expected, or at least hoped, that he would prove mal- leable, willing to adjust his more extreme positions and tactics to suit a broader electorate. Two problems. First, impulse control: Trump says what he actu- ally feels, whatever comes into his head at any moment. Second, a cer- tain logic: Trump won the primaries Sinatra-style, his way — against the odds, the experts and the con- ventional rules. So why change now? “You win the pennant,” Trump explained, “and now you’re in the World Series — you gonna change?” Hence his response to the Orlando terror attack. Events like these generally beneit the chal- lenger politically because any mis- fortune that befalls the nation gets attributed, fairly or not, directly or indirectly, to the incumbent party (e.g., the 2008 inancial collapse). And Hillary Clinton is running as the quasi-incumbent. The textbook response for the challenger, therefore, is to offer sympathy, give a general state- ment or two about the failure of the incumbent’s national security pol- icy, then step back to let the result- ing national fear and loathing, ampliied by the media, take effect. Instead, Trump made himself the (political) story. First, he offered himself unseemly congratulations for his prescience about terrorism. (He’d predicted more would be coming. What a visionary.) Then he went beyond blaming the president for lack of will or wisdom in ight- ing terrorism, and darkly implied AP Photo/Eric Gay A demonstrator holds a sign during a rally to protest Republican pres- idential candidate Donald Trump as he attends a private fundraising event Friday in San Antonio. presidential sympathy he carries the inestimable for the enemy. “There’s advantage of the gravitas something going on,” he automatically conferred charged. He then reiter- by 7 1/2 years of incum- ated his ban on Muslim bency. Moreover, he now immigration. enjoys an unusually high Why? Because that’s approval rating of around what Trump does. And 53 percent. Trump’s latest because it worked before. favorability is 29 percent It was after last Decem- (Washington Post-ABC ber’s San Bernardino News). Charles massacre that Trump irst It’s no accident that Krauthammer called for a Muslim ban. Trump’s poll numbers It earned him lots of are sliding. A month Trump opprobrium from GOP ago, when crowned as leaders and lots of sup- presumptive nominee, made port from GOP voters. he jumped into a virtual He shot up in the polls, with Clinton. The himself tie never to descend until polls now have him los- he clinched. So why not ing by an average of six the do it again? points, with some show- Because the general (political) ing a nine- and 12-point election is a different deicit (Reuters/Ipsos story. game. Trump assumes and Bloomberg). that the Republican This may turn out to electorate is representative of the be temporary, but it is a clear relec- national electorate. It’s not. Take tion of Trump’s disastrous gen- the Muslim ban. Sixty-eight percent eral election kickoff. His two-week of GOP voters support it. Only 38 expedition into racism in attack- percent of Democrats do. And there ing the Indiana-born “Mexican” are approximately 7 million more judge. His dabbling in conspiracy, Democrats in the country. (Indepen- from Ted Cruz’s father’s supposed dents are split 51-40 in favor.) involvement in the Kennedy assas- The other major example of sination to Vince Foster’s (“very doing what’s always worked is ishy”) suicide. All of which sug- the ad hominem attack on big-dog gests, and cements, the image of a opponents. It worked in the prima- man who shoots from the hip and ries. Trump went after one leading is prone to both wild theories and challenger after another, knocking extreme policies. them out sequentially. Reagan biographer Lou Can- Hillary Clinton is a lousy cam- non thinks that the Goldwater anec- paigner but her machine is ininitely dote is apocryphal. How could any- larger and more skilled than any of one (even a journalist) have thought Trump’s 16 GOP competitors. More that Goldwater, who later admitted riskily, Trump is now going toe-to- he always knew he would lose, was toe with a sitting president. going to run as anything but his vin- Barack Obama is no Jeb Bush. tage, hard-core self? He’s not low energy. He’s a skilled Same for Trump. Give him campaigner who clearly despises points for authenticity. Take away Trump and relishes the ight. And for electability. Carbon choices are World’s fear, loathing and Brexit climate choices T W By PAUL KRUGMAN New York Times News Service hile many economists and energy regulators remain convinced that the best approach to controlling greenhouse gases is to tax car- bon emissions, it nevertheless is good to see that Oregon is continuing to closely examine an alternative approach: an economy-wide carbon cap- and-trade system in partner- ship with other governments around North America. Under cap-and-trade, agen- cies assign individual carbon emitters a “cap” based on emis- sions history and future targets. Emitters can then use, buy and sell their rights to produce car- bon dioxide pollution. By pro- viding a monetary incentive to emit less — either to preserve emission rights to use or sell for a proit or to avoid having to buy those rights from some- one else — advocates believe CO2 will cease to be so eas- ily discharged into the atmo- sphere, where it becomes everyone’s problem. Detractors of cap-and-trade believe it is needlessly compli- cated, essentially creating a new proit center for corporations that will require an unwieldy private/public bureaucracy to maintain. In contrast, a direct tax could be crafted to specif- ically discourage emissions, with the revenues going to off- set impacts on needy residents, to conduct research and for other purposes. These are, however, early days in what will surely be a long process of iguring out how best to wean industrial society off its addiction to fos- sil fuels, a dependency that per- mits carbon dioxide to warp our climate. Just this year, CO2 lev- els are stuck above 400 parts per million in the atmosphere, after starting out at 280 ppm before the industrial era. Levels will continue going up, possi- bly for decades. We probably will need to explore an array of regulatory and technological solutions before we arrive at a satisfactory set of answers. Climatewire, a publica- tion of Environment & Energy Publishing (www.eenews.net), recently reported a helpful summary of Oregon’s cap-and- trade steps. Read it at www. tinyurl.com/OR-cap-and-trade. Decisions on these matters will have a pervasive impact on citizens and society. It is worthwhile for all of us to try to understand our options and par- ticipate in deciding what to do. here are still 4 1/2 months to go before the presidential election. But there’s a vote next week that could matter as much for the world’s future as what happens here: Britain’s referen- dum on whether to stay in the European Union. Unfortunately, this vote is a choice between bad and worse — and the question is which is which. Not to be coy: I would vote Remain. I’d do it in full awareness that the EU is deeply dysfunctional and shows few signs of reforming. But British exit — Brexit — would probably make things worse, not just for Britain, but for Europe as a whole. The straight economics is clear: Brexit would make Britain poorer. It wouldn’t necessarily lead to a trade war, but it would deinitely hurt British trade with the rest of Europe, reducing productivity and incomes. My rough calculations, which are in line with other estimates, suggest that Britain would end up about 2 percent poorer than it would otherwise be, essentially forever. That’s a big hit. There’s also a harder to quantify risk that Brexit would undermine the City of London — Britain’s counter- part of Wall Street — which is a big source of exports and income. So the costs could be substantially bigger. What about warnings that a Leave vote would provoke a inancial cri- sis? That’s a fear too far. Britain isn’t Greece: It has its own currency and borrows in that currency, so it’s not at risk of a run that creates monetary chaos. In recent weeks the odds of a Leave vote have clearly risen, but Brit- ish interest rates have gone down, not up, tracking the global decline in yields. Still, as an economic matter Brexit looks like a bad idea. True, some Brexit advocates claim tion greatly outweigh these that leaving the EU would free Britain to do wonderful costs. But that’s a hard argu- things — to deregulate and ment to make to a public unleash the magic of mar- frustrated by cuts in public kets, leading to explosive services — especially when growth. Sorry, but that’s just the credibility of pro-EU voodoo wrapped in a Union experts is so low. Jack; it’s the same free-mar- For that is the most ket fantasy that has always frustrating thing about the and everywhere proved EU: Nobody ever seems delusional. to acknowledge or learn Paul No, the economic case is from mistakes. If there’s Krugman as solid as such cases any soul-searching ever get. Why, then, in Brussels or Berlin This vote my downbeat tone about Europe’s terri- about Remain? economic perfor- is a choice ble Part of the answer mance since 2008, it’s is that the impacts very hard to ind. And between of Brexit would be I feel some sympathy bad and uneven: London and with Britons who just southeast England don’t want to be tied worse — would be hit hard, but to a system that offers Brexit would prob- so little accountability, and the ably mean a weaker even if leaving is eco- pound, which might nomically costly. question actually help some of The question, how- is which is ever, is whether a Brit- the old manufacturing regions of the north. ish vote to leave would which. More important, make anything better. however, is the sad It could serve as a sal- reality of the EU that Britain might utary shock that inally jolts European leave. elites out of their complacency and The so-called European project leads to reform. But I fear that it would began more than 60 years ago, and for actually make things worse. The EU’s many years it was a tremendous force failures have produced a frightening for good. It didn’t only promote trade rise in reactionary, racist nationalism and help economic growth; it was also — but Brexit would, all too probably, a bulwark of peace and democracy in a empower those forces even more, both continent with a terrible history. in Britain and all across the Continent. But today’s EU is the land of the Obviously I could be wrong about euro, a major mistake compounded by these political consequences. But it’s Germany’s insistence on turning the also possible that my despair over crisis the single currency wrought into European reform is exaggerated. a morality play of sins (by other peo- And here’s the thing: As Oxford’s ple, of course) that must be paid for Simon Wren-Lewis points out, Brit- with crippling budget cuts. Britain had ain will still have the option to leave the good sense to keep its pound, but the EU someday if it votes Remain it’s not insulated from other problems now, but Leave will be effectively of European overreach, notably the irreversible. You have to be really, establishment of free migration with- really sure that Europe is unixable out a shared government. to support Brexit. You can argue that the problems So I’d vote Remain. There would caused by, say, Romanians using the be no joy in that vote. But a choice National Health Service are exagger- must be made, and that’s where I’d ated, and that the beneits of immigra- come down.
