Sunday, August 25, 2019

8.25.19: Standing with Hong Kong, and If Not Joe Biden, Who?

When the discussion turned to foreign policy, presidential candidate Mayor Pete Buttigieg immediately brought up the issue of Hong Kong and the protests going on there, not to make it another Tiananmen Square, clarify that America maintains a firm pro-democracy stance inline with the people of Hong Kong and that it is factor in all discussions.

It's a significant first place to start this week and kudos to Mr. Buttigieg for being immediate because this is a clarifying statement on administration's view of human rights and a founding American principle to China and everyone else in the world. The repercussions of any type of action (e.g. military) Mr. Buttigieg said would be China's 'isolation from the democratic world,' which will take a tremendous amount of diplomatic repair work first.

If the president insists of a trade strategy that consists of continually poking China in its eye, as the Mr. Buttigieg described, then the president could poke President Xi in the eye with this as well. The Administration's foreign policy consists of Mr. Trump's interactions and personal relationships with foreign leaders, mostly through Twitter. The shelf life for such diplomacy is quickly moving toward its expiration date.

This column, like Eugene Robinson, still think it's early in the race and hence why we a bit loathe to comment on it right now, especially given everything else that is going on, namely the G7 Summit in France, or the G6+1 as it has been deemed, with the six doing gentle push, as Mr. Robinson described it and also pointed out the important that Mr. Trump has not actually struck any deals, nothing signed. We've come to the point where we just want the summit to pass without major international incident.

Where last week's program dropped the ball, this week proved redemptive for "Meet The Press," with a high-bar panel consisting all of journalists and op-ed columnists, i.e. meet the press, all of whom provided quick key insights on the 'temperature in the room," so to speak.

The panel discussed the state of the presidential race in terms that we're insightful replacing the annoyingly mundane as sometimes occurs. The New York Times conservative columnist Brett Stephens described a Joe Biden campaign ad as potential poisonous for using polling data graphics, polls which are certain to change.

They continued to the larger question of if not Joe, who? The Daily Beast's Betsy Woodruff described Democratic strategists divided into two camps of thought, consisting of playing it safe with Joe Biden and others thinking an 'edible arrangement' could win. Both are poor strategies as neither answer that critical question for Democrats. Who?

This column, like Eugene Robinson, still think it's early in the race and hence why we a bit loathe to comment on it right now, especially given everything else that is going on, namely the G7 Summit in France, or the G6+1 as it has been deemed, with the six doing gentle push, as Mr. Robinson described it.


Kristen Soltis Anderson, Washington Examiner; Betsy Woodruff, "The Daily Beast;" Eugene Robinson, The Washington Post; Brett Stephens, The New York Times

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