The system is blinking red at Trump

There is as yet no cascade of elected Republican officials disowning Trump -- that is, stating that they won't vote for him or support his campaign to be president. Still, denunciations of him by conservative and (allegedly) nonpartisan partisan establishmentarians are growing ever less inhibited. Below, some remarkable indictments.

First, knee-jerk neocon Charles Krauthammer, who never met a proposed military action he didn't like, but can recognize a personality who will up-end the U.S.-dominated world order:

Of course we all try to protect our own dignity and command respect. But Trump’s hypersensitivity and unedited, untempered Pavlovian responses are, shall we say, unusual in both ferocity and predictability.

This is beyond narcissism. I used to think Trump was an 11-year-old, an undeveloped schoolyard bully. I was off by about 10 years. His needs are more primitive, an infantile hunger for approval and praise, a craving that can never be satisfied. He lives in a cocoon of solipsism where the world outside himself has value — indeed exists — only insofar as it sustains and inflates him.

Next, David Brooks, self-appointed moral arbiter, finding a true north with his often erratic moral compass:

Obama can't quite keep it simple

[11/15: several updates at bottom]

In response to the first 'fiscal cliff' question in his press conference today, Obama seemed to shut the door on any alternative to letting the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest 2% expire -- that is, to raising the top marginal income tax rate. But there was a little sliver of light along the doorjamb, and when Chuck Todd pushed on it, Obama swung the door open.

First, this seemed all but definitive:

QUESTION: You’ve said that the wealthiest must pay more. Would closing loopholes instead of raising rates for them satisfy you?

OBAMA: I think that there are loopholes that can be closed, and we should look at how we can make the process of deductions, the filing process easier, simpler. But when it comes to the top 2 percent, what I’m not going to do is to extend further a tax cut for folks who don’t need it, which would cost close to a trillion dollars.

Obambi chorus rising again...

This lament by Michael Hirsch is well-informed, but it also reminds me a bit ofDemocratic hand-wringing in the dark days following the Republican Convention:

Obama's desire to begin a "post-partisan" era may have backfired. In his eagerness to accommodate Republicans and listen to their ideas over the past week, he has allowed the GOP to turn the haggling over the stimulus package into a decidedly stale, Republican-style debate over pork, waste and overspending. This makes very little economic sense when you are in a major recession that only gets worse day by day. Yes, there are still some very legitimate issues with a bill that's supposed to be "temporary" and "targeted"—among them, large increases in permanent entitlement spending, and a paucity of tax cuts that will prompt immediate spending. Even so, Obama has allowed Congress to grow embroiled in nitpicking over efficiency when the central debate should be about whether the package is big enough.

Impression seconded by Nate Silver:

with the important caveat that there are many more chapters to be written in this saga -- the final bill is likely to come out looking closer to what the Greg Mankiw's of the world might have advocated for and less the Paul Krugman's.

Perhaps it was inevitable that this would happen once the details of the bill became known and the Republicans began to pick over them like vultures. Perhaps the bill could have been better written. Still, in essentially passing off both narrative and literal control of the contents of the package to the Congressional Democrats, the Obama administration may have played it too cute by half. Obama is popular; Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid aren't. The trajectory of the bill might have been different if Obama had devoted a prime time speech toward selling it, with graphs and pie charts and the like. But there hasn't been a Big Obama Moment like that -- a show of force -- something that really resonated outside the Beltway. The closest Obama came, oddly enough, was during his inaugural address, but the references to the stimulus there were abstract, oblique.

I'm a rather nervous and pessimistic sort myself, but I also feel that we've learned by experience that Obama is a master of timing, and strategy, and rhetoric. My hope is that he's gamed out when to weigh in heavily on this debate, and that the stimulus will look far less Mankiwist that Nate Silver fears.

On the other hand: Obama has never been President before, and I don't want to do this overwhelming-faith-in-one-man routine. But I've been watching for two years, and my trust has only grown.