Krugman has an item in his blog yesterday to the effect that the Carrier deal was just a publicity stunt. We had 800 jobs kinda sorta maybe saved, in an economy in which 75,000 jobs per day are lost, and it dominates the news cycle for several days.
Of course this was a PR stunt. But sound bites and photo ops and 90-second debate responses are what we've let our politics become, and public policy serves politics. You have to get elected and stay elected if you want to control public policy.
A public policy proposal that would change job loss and growth systemically is not something a winner does, not a political winner under the rules of political practice we have let harden in place. No human interest headlines or sound bites, because the concrete effects would be complicated and mixed, and would only even appear some indefinite time in the future. And, of course, systemic change would require new legislation, so would be blocked. All of our politicians (except, apparently, Trump) are so convinced that they dare risk nothing beyond messaging, because actual systemic change always has winners and losers, that we can't make even obviously needed changes. The US penny still lives!
So of course the electorate, or enough of it, anyway, turned to the man on the golden escalator, the one politician who at least issues sound bites and does PR stunts that promise that he is not paralyzed by messaging. And of course the electorate got someone who will not just campaign, but will govern by messaging. We got someone who doesn’t understand anything but messaging, that there is anything in the world but messaging.
Sure, we have had administrations already that do continue messaging and photo ops past the last election. They're fighting the next election. But what we are going to get now, at least what we deserve to get now, is an administration that does not also, at the same time, actually do real governing, formulate and push public policy change, at least somewhere in some back room.
No doubt the administration has plenty of hangers-on who actually do have public policy agendas, and will seek to push them in every backroom they can connive to dominate. That is bound to be the real story of this administration, the real news it will create, the struggle within the administration among factions of these people who actually care about public policy to control an administration whose head does not care about such things. The court of the Borgias, or of the Byzantine emperors, will have to take back seat to the palace intrigue we are likely to witness. If I were Trump, I’ld get a food taster, pronto.