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THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.
Thursday, August 18, 2016 | A11
**
OPINION
Law and Order: Trump Unit
Richard Nixon,
law and order’s most famous practitioner, used
the reality of
domestic unWONDER
rest to defeat
LAND
Hubert HumBy Daniel
phrey in the
Henninger
annus horribilis, 1968. President George W. Bush persuaded voters in 2004 that
John Kerry would provide
uncertain leadership in the
post-9/11 war on terror.
Donald Trump, always willing to test the limits of any
thought, is campaigning for
law and order on a global
scale. He’s accusing Hillary
Clinton of being soft on crime
at home and soft on terror
everywhere in the world. It’s
“Law and Order: Global Victims Unit,” Donald J. Trump
producer.
Tuesday in Milwaukee,
which last weekend looked a
lot like Baltimore’s 2015 street
riots, Mr. Trump said: “The
Hillary Clinton agenda hurts
poor people the most. There is
no compassion in allowing
drug dealers, gang members
and felons to prey on innocent
people. It is the first duty of
government to keep the innocent safe.”
In Monday’s foreign policy
speech he pledged to do a
reverse-Obama by keeping
Gitmo open and trying accused terrorists in military
tribunals. Likening his strategy to “the effort to take down
the mafia,” he said “this will
be the understood mission of
every federal investigator and
prosecutor in the country.”
With most of the battleground states looking more
like Republican burial grounds,
it may be pressing the membrane of believability to say
the Trump law-and-order
strategy just might work. That
said, Mr. Trump’s naming this
week of the adept Republican
political strategist Kellyanne
Conway as his campaign manager means he may yet give his
supporters a competitive presidential campaign.
Democrats deserve to have
a Trumpian version of “law
and order” unloaded on them.
I don’t think the Democrats
For global and
domestic disorder,
Trump’s answer looks
better than hers.
are soft on crime and terrorism. They’re just ambivalent.
Ambivalence can get you
killed, especially around people with guns and bombs.
Asked after every primary
to rank four issues, Democrats
nearly always put terrorism
fourth. It hardly came up in
the Clinton-Sanders debates.
And whether the domestic
shooters are San Bernardino’s
terrorists, Orlando’s nut or
Chicago’s gangs, the Democrats’ offer the same silver
bullet: gun control.
The problem with how
they’ve teed up the cops has
been the nonexistence of any
Democratic alternative beyond
patrolling the toughest streets
with a blue version of Casper
the Friendly Ghost.
On national security, an
example of progressive foreign
policy’s half-in, half-out attitude was former Attorney
General Eric Holder’s remark
in May that the traitorous
Edward Snowden “actually
performed a public service by
raising the debate that we
engaged in and by the changes
that we made.” No, it was not
worth anything.
In a Journal article last
month, an administration official summarized the Obama
anti-terror policy. It reads like
aggression with footnotes:
“Not just in Afghanistan,
but in Iraq and Syria, it’s very
evident what his approach is,
which is to make sure we’re
doing everything necessary to
disrupt and ultimately defeat
terrorist networks while significantly reducing the role of
the U.S. military in terms of
the ground presence and also
reducing the resources associated with that presence.”
There is a specific, wellknown reason for a Democratic policy of “reducing the
resources associated with that
presence,” one that 50 former
Bush officials should have
thought about before unfurling
their Hamlet-like statement
last week on the election and
national security.
The reason is guns versus
butter, military spending versus
always unsated domestic needs.
The liberals’ battle for butter
began in the 1960s, when they
vilified Lyndon Johnson for
spending on Vietnam and the
Cold War rather than the Great
Society.
Right now, foreign-policy
liberals and some conservatives are pushing sotto voce
assurances that Hillary will
“get it right” on national security. They had better go lineby-line through the economicpolicy speech she gave last
week in Michigan. After the
greatest outlay on infrastructure spending “since World
War II,” tuition-free college for
the middle class and “debt-free
for everyone,” plus uncountable tax credits, anything Mrs.
Clinton gets right will be on
the cheap. Like her “intelligence surge.”
This isn’t Bill Clinton’s center-left Democratic Party. It’s
the left-only party of Bernie
Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and
Barack Obama. What they
want is butter, lakes of it. Antiterrorism gets to tread water,
alongside the cops.
Defeating Islamic terror is a
rare unifying issue for conservatives and indeed for the
world. Unlike any conceivable
Democratic president, Donald
Trump is at least willing to
lead this battle, reflecting the
truth that it won’t happen
without active, unrelenting
U.S. leadership.
No doubt this is yet another
issue with which voters have
to struggle, wanting an alternative to the Obama-Clinton
Democrats but burdened with
misgivings that are of Mr.
Trump’s own creation.
But Donald Trump didn’t
create the law-and-order issue.
Cities and nations under assault
did that. Just now, his answer
for both looks better than her
answer.
Write [email protected].
Shuffling Deck Chairs on the USS Trump
By Karl Rove
I
n the movie “City Slickers,”
Jack Palance tells Billy
Crystal that the secret of
life is “One thing, just one
thing. You stick to that, and
everything else don’t mean
s—.” When Mr. Crystal asks
what that “one thing” is, the
old cowboy replies, “That’s
what you gotta figure out.”
As Donald Trump shakes up
his campaign’s management
team for the second time in
two months, maybe the new
crowd—and, more importantly, Mr. Trump—will finally
figure out that the “one thing”
of a presidential campaign is
message discipline. Without it,
Mr. Trump has caused controversy after controversy, generating loads of dreadful media
coverage.
Since the Republican convention in July, Mr. Trump has
delivered two major policy
addresses. But by themselves,
speeches are not nearly
enough. They must be part of a
comprehensive narrative that
explains his views in depth,
contrasts them with Hillary
Clinton’s, and leads swing and
undecided voters to his side.
The same story must be delivered by the candidate’s appearances, advocates, advertising
and other campaign activity.
That’s not happening.
Take last week’s economic
address in Detroit. Delivered
from a teleprompter, it was
generally well received. Mr.
Trump outlined his agenda in
broad terms, covering tax
reform, trade agreements, a
moratorium on new regulations and increased domestic
energy production.
He should have spent subsequent days fleshing it out. For
example, he could have devoted
Tuesday to explaining how tax
reform would create jobs and
Wednesday to visiting families
hurt by ObamaCare. On Thursday, after Mrs. Clinton’s own
economic speech called for new
“infrastructure” spending, Mr.
Trump could have mocked her
ideas as a return of President
Obama’s failed 2009 stimulus
package. Then on Friday he
could have appeared with
workers angry about unfair
trade practices. This kind of
schedule would have presented
Mr. Trump with a mix of different backgrounds and surrogates in support of his theme.
That’s how a successful campaign does things.
Instead, Mr. Trump lost
control of the narrative with
his erratic utterances. On
Tuesday he told a rally that
“Second Amendment people”
might prevent a future President Hillary Clinton from filling Supreme Court vacancies.
On Wednesday he advanced a
blame-the-press story line,
calling the coverage of him
“disgusting” and “incredibly
dishonest.” The same day, he
claimed Barack Obama and
Mrs. Clinton were the
“founder” and “co-founder” of
Islamic State. By Friday he was
insisting that his remarks were
“sarcastic.” (They were not.) A
week that was supposed to be
devoted to economics turned
into a disaster.
This week has so far proceeded along the same lines.
Mr. Trump started Monday
with a teleprompter speech on
Islamic terrorism that generated good coverage. By Tuesday
he had dropped terrorism and
changed the subject. Hillary
Clinton, he told a Wisconsin
rally, “is against the police,
believe me.” But voters are not
in a believing mood. They want
proof.
A new campaign team
can help Donald only
if he decides to stay
out of petty feuds.
Instead of unsettling sound
bites, Mr. Trump should offer a
sustained attack on the policies
and failings of Mrs. Clinton—
backed with evidence. He
should explain how he will put
the country on the right track.
Even if he does everything
right from here on, given his
terrible mistakes so far, he may
well lose in November. But if he
doesn’t change tactics now, he
is likely to be wiped out.
The new Team Trump
should decide what message it
wants Americans to hear each
day. Then it must craft language and events to present
that message, and convince
the candidate to stick to it.
The focus ought to be on the
20% of voters who are undecided or have moved reluctantly toward Mrs. Clinton,
not the nearly 40% already
committed to Mr. Trump.
He should also stop punching back at everyone who
strikes at him. Mr. Trump’s
opponents know that they can
get him off balance by needling him on inconsequential
items. He might try to prove
them wrong occasionally. For
example, 70 prominent Republicans sent an Aug. 12 letter to
the party’s chairman, Reince
Priebus, urging the GOP to
stop funding Donald Trump’s
campaign and focus on saving
its House and Senate majorities. Rather than ignoring or
playing down the letter, Mr.
Trump grabbed headlines by
telling Fox News that if the
party cut off funding, he would
follow suit: “All I have to do is
stop funding the Republican
Party.”
Did those comments help
move a single swing voter into
his corner? Convince anyone
that Mr. Trump was on their
side? No. And he’s not funding
the GOP anyway.
The main problem with the
Trump campaign has been Mr.
Trump. He is an unguided missile, prone to veer of course and
hit friendly forces. If his newly
installed team was recruited to
“Let Trump Be Trump” because
they believe his attacks and
populism have been too muted,
then an epic loss could be the
result.
D
onald Trump’s fondness
for Vladimir Putin
emerged during the
GOP primary, when he refused
to condemn the Russian dictator for murdering dissident
journalists. Since then the
New Yorker hasn’t backed
away from positions on NATO,
Ukraine and Syria that have
no doubt gone down well in
Moscow.
Then again, so have President Obama’s policies over the
past eight years.
The Trump campaign’s Putinist rhetoric has the liberal
press corps alarmed, and
rightly so. “Vladimir Putin has
a plan for destroying the
West—and that plan looks a
lot like Donald Trump,” Franklin Foer wrote in Slate. The
Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg
called Mr. Trump a “de facto
agent” of Moscow. Vox’s Zack
Beauchamp said Trump “made
World War III—the deaths of
hundreds of millions of people
in nuclear holocaust—plausible.”
Moscow’s hegemonic ambitions in Eastern Europe and
the Middle East and Mr.
Putin’s efforts to promote illiberal, far-right politics in the
West are among America’s top
security challenges. So it’s
good to see the journalistic left
waking up. Too bad the same
crowd was often asleep over
the past eight years as Mr.
Obama allowed that threat to
metastasize to its current
scale.
It wasn’t Mr. Trump, after
all, who in 2014 announced
deep cuts to the U.S. strategic
arsenal, disabling 56 submarine-based
nuclear-launch
tubes, converting 30 B-52
bombers to conventional use,
and removing 50 missiles from
underground silos—all well
ahead of the 2018 deadline set
by the New Start Treaty with
Moscow and without any reassurance that Mr. Putin would
reciprocate. That was Mr.
Obama.
Nor was it the New York
developer who refused to supply the democratic government
in Kiev with defensive weapons
after Russian regulars and
Kremlin-backed thugs illegally
annexed Crimea and carved up
territory in eastern Ukraine.
The White House still refuses to
sell Kiev the weapons it needs
to defend itself, even as Mr. Putin threatens more aggression.
The betrayal of Ukraine wasn’t
Mr. Trump’s doing.
Nor, finally, was it Mr.
Trump whose inaction in Syria
created an opportunity for
Moscow to outmaneuver
Washington and downgrade
U.S. prestige in the Middle
East. The Syrian civil war has
proved a humanitarian catastrophe, resulting in some half
a million dead and millions
displaced. It has flooded
Europe with refugees, destabilized Turkey and added the
phrase “barrel bomb” to the
The New
Deal Meal
A Square Meal
By Jane Ziegelman and Andrew Coe
(Harper, 314 pages, $26.99)
N
ot a day goes by without Americans being bombarded
with conflicting advice about how to eat. Nutritionists deliver the latest information about fats and
sweeteners while many food writers campaign for a return
to the food that our great-grandmothers put on the table.
This tension between scientific advice and traditional preferences can be traced back to the Great Depression, suggest
Jane Ziegelman and Andrew Coe in “A Square Meal,” an absorbing account of how the Depression changed eating habits that is by turns amusing and sobering.
In the 18th and 19th centuries, immigrants and visitors
alike expressed amazement at the abundance of American
fare. In World War I, American troops received more food
than any other combatants, as much as 4 pounds
or 5,000 calories daily. But
though America seemed
the exception to the historical rule that intermittent
hunger or even starvation
was the norm, problems
lurked. In growing cities,
workers crowded into small
apartments with kitchens so
inadequate that inhabitants
depended on street food, sandwiches or meals at soda-fountain counters. Worse, some children arrived in city schools too
hungry to concentrate, men
stood in bread lines all night,
Southern sharecroppers grew sickly on a
diet dominated by cornbread, and military recruiters turned away conscripts too malnourished to serve.
A loose coalition of Progressives believed that modern scientific research on nutrition offered the key to improving a
misguided and wasteful American diet. In an impressive series of experiments at Wesleyan in the late 19th century, Wilbur Atwater had established baseline calorie needs and measured the calorific value of common foods. More recently,
Elmer McCollum and others had figured out which vitamins
and trace elements were important and argued that milk was
the most perfect food. Armed with this information, nutritionists, home economists and politicians yearned to replace
traditional foodways with a “scientifically designed eating
program.” The Depression gave these reformers the opportunity not simply to try to avert hunger, Ms. Ziegelman and Mr.
Coe write, but to interrupt the natural evolution of food habits and “in one colossal push” change the way America eats.
In the lead were home economists, who entered all
spheres of public life. Flora Rose, who along with her companion Martha Van Rensselaer dominated the home-economics department at Cornell, tried her hand at inventing
new foodstuffs. Inspired by research at Columbia that
showed feeding rats a mixture of dried skim milk and
ground wheat increased their life span by 10%, she persuaded Ralston Purina to produce the fortified breakfast cereals Milkorno, Milkwheato and Milkoato. Rose and Van
Rensselaer, with the support of their friend Eleanor Roosevelt, advocated adding them to everything from muffins to
meatloaf, or even using them as a basis for chop suey.
During the Depression, a loose coalition of
Progressives set out to remake the American
diet. Milk was regarded as the perfect food.
lexicon of human depravity.
But the war has also been a
strategic boon to Moscow and
its chief regional client, Iran.
Mr. Putin and the mullahs have
deepened their military ties, as
most recently evidenced by
Russia’s use of an Iranian air
base to target Syrian-rebel
positions on Tuesday. Mr. Putin’s goal is to edge out Washington as the principal outside
power in the Middle East and
he is succeeding. America’s
long-term retreat from the
region wasn’t conceived in
Trump Tower.
If polls prove right, Donald
Trump is headed for defeat in
November—in part because of
his apparent affinity for the
Russian dictator. But that
doesn’t excuse the historical
amnesia and bad faith in the
press over U.S.-Russian relations in the age of Barack
Obama.
Louise Stanley, with a doctorate in chemistry from Yale,
headed the largest staff of female scientists in the country
at the federal Bureau of Home Economics. They poured out
advice to mothers nervous about what to feed their children
and to relief workers struggling to design adequate menus.
On the Agriculture Department’s farm-radio service, “Aunt
Sammy” reassured women that they were indeed likely to
be preparing an adequate diet and that frugal standbys like
cracked wheat made sense. The home economist Hazel Stiebeling prepared a series of guides to diets for different income levels, including a “Restricted Diet,” heavy on bread
and milk, to be used only in desperate circumstances.
Relief agencies, housewives and cooks translated this advice into rations and menus. A sharecropper family of five received a monthly allotment of 36 pounds of flour, 24 of split
beans, 12 of cracked rice and 24 of cornmeal, along with lard,
bacon, baking powder and half a gallon of molasses. A New
York schoolchild could be sure that there was some milk in
the lunch that might consist of cocoa, tomato purée, succotash, a cheese sandwich, and fresh or stewed fruit. Vagrants
settled down to large, plain meals of lima beans and bacon,
cold tomatoes, pickled onions, bread and butter, and tea.
The middle class, too, was urged to eat a similar, though
more elaborate diet. They could turn to the Good Housekeeping Institute, run by the home economist Katherine Fisher,
for advice about new appliances such as refrigerators and all
kinds of canned foods, whose reputation as a resort for “lazy
housewives” the institute’s magazine “worked hard to reverse.” They could also thumb the pages of the magazine for
recipes such as jellied lime and grapefruit salad.
Ms. Ziegelman and Mr. Coe’s message is that long-term
problems were in the making. They criticize Eleanor Roosevelt’s decision to express solidarity with a hungry nation by
serving plain food at the White House. “Built on self-denial,
scientific cookery not only dismissed pleasure as nonessential but also treated it as an impediment to healthy eating.”
Given the backgrounds of the home economists, they view
this outlook as inevitable. “The food authorities who led
America through the Depression were overwhelmingly white,
Anglo-Saxon women. . . . Who but a WASP could think up a
diet based around milky chowders and creamed casseroles?”
By contrast, the authors praise two “gastronomic salvage
missions.” In “The National Cookbook” (1932), Sheila Hibben
argued for fresh, seasonal and regional American fare such as
South Carolina hoppin’ John, Pennsylvania pandowdy and
New England clam chowder. Then, although it did not make it
into print, there was the WPA’s “America Eats!” project, which
documented America’s rich tradition of communal dining at
threshing dinners, church suppers, barbecues, fish fries and
the like. “The National Cookbook” and “America Eats!,” conclude Ms. Ziegelman and Mr. Coe, were a defense against “science, efficiency, technology, consumerism . . . the onslaught of
modernity.” Whether all readers will agree with their confidence in tradition over modernity remains to be seen.
Mr. Ahmari is a Journal editorial writer based in London.
Ms. Laudan is the author of “Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History.”
Mr. Rove helped organize
the political-action committee
American Crossroads and is
the author of “The Triumph of
William McKinley” (Simon &
Schuster, 2015).
Don’t Forget Putin’s Pal in the White House
By Sohrab Ahmari
BOOKSHELF | By Rachel Laudan