Editorials from around New England

Excerpts of recent editorials of statewide and national interest from New England newspapers:

The Providence Journal (R.I.), June 8, 2016

Hillary Clinton’s strong showing Tuesday night - including a surprisingly decisive victory in delegate-rich California - made it clear that she will be the Democratic nominee for president, and the odds-on favorite to capture the White House this November.

This is a historic moment. She will be the first woman ever to secure the presidential nomination for a major party in the United States. It appears another barrier to the advancement of women has been smashed.

Bernie Sanders, who appealed to idealistic millennial voters and won numerous states, including Rhode Island, pledged yesterday that he will remain in the race. “We understand our mission is more than just beating Donald Trump, it is transforming our country,” he said. “We are going to fight hard to win the primary in Washington, D.C., and then we take our fight for social, economic, racial and environmental justice to Philadelphia.”

But this is bluster. The air is out of Sanders’ balloon. And though he has pushed Ms. Clinton to the left during the Democratic primary battle, Tuesday’s results suggest he will not be as influential as he had hoped to be.

She can draw the party together without him, and he is too old and too extreme to be considered a reasonable choice for running mate. Ms. Clinton will no doubt go with someone younger who will carry a swing state or energize an important ethnic group - without endangering Democrats’ chances of capturing the Senate.

Ms. Clinton can now shift confidently to her battle against prospective GOP nominee Donald Trump, a real-estate mogul and reality TV star who clearly lacks the judgment, temperament and knowledge to be a successful president. Many establishment Republicans have been extremely reluctant to lend him their endorsement, while a number of leading conservatives seem to be in open rebellion against him, plotting his downfall.

Nevertheless, it has not been smooth sailing for Ms. Clinton, despite her enormous advantages in party support, fundraising and prominence, as a former secretary of state, senator and first lady. That a 74-year-old socialist improbably nipped at her heels through Tuesday was a measure, in general, of the public’s anger at establishment politicians this year, and Ms. Clinton’s difficulties, in particular, in connecting with voters. Her negative ratings have climbed as the campaign has dragged on.

While voters see her as competent, she fails to come across as warm and inspiring. And she has been dogged by questions surrounding the Clinton Foundation, her inappropriate use of a private server for her official emails and questions about her past. Scores of Federal Bureau of Investigation officials are reportedly investigating her, though the consensus of opinion is that the odds are low she will be criminally indicted.

In spite of these issues, she stands head and shoulders above Mr. Trump in experience and understanding of America’s role in the world. She also benefits from what appears to be the Democrats’ strong advantage in the Electoral College. In all of the last six presidential elections, Democrats have won 18 states totaling 242 electoral votes - a huge head start toward the necessary 270. (It is true, of course, that Mr. Trump is not a traditional Republican, something that could alter the map.)

All this leaves us with hope that America is on its way toward electing its first woman president.

___

Online:

https://bit.ly/25TH8DM

Concord Monitor (N.H.), June 10, 2016

Republican U.S. Sen. Kelly Ayotte’s re-election strategy has been to distance herself from the presumptive GOP nominee for president, Donald Trump. His latest appalling behavior, a grossly biased attack on a respected federal judge, has GOP loyalists running around “with their hair on fire,” as the pundits say.

In hardly a bold move, since as attorney general she was the state’s top law enforcement officer, Ayotte safely joined the GOP crowd and said Trump should retract his comments about Judge Gonzalo Curiel, which she said were “offensive and wrong.” She and others demanded Trump apologize, which of course he didn’t.

In the meantime, in the distorted business of Republican candidates trying to survive The Donald, Ayotte still supports Trump, because he’s the voters’ choice. But she’s not endorsing him, because she’s running for re-election. It is the same convoluted spin that Republicans have cooked up so they can be party loyalists, keep their hands clean of Trump, avoid offending his primary election supporters and, above all, hold on to their seats in Congress.

Enough already. New Hampshire voters, Republican and Democrat, know a dodge when they see one. Ayotte, running neck and neck in the latest poll with her Democratic challenger Gov. Maggie Hassan, and facing a primary challenger in former state senator Jim Rubens, shouldn’t get away with the support/not endorse avoidance tactic anymore. Just using that tangled lingo suggests she’s got some issues with Trump. Why doesn’t she just say so?

Ayotte and other Republicans are walking the line in a bizarre election season of their party’s own making. But that doesn’t justify evasion of the elephant in the room by any Republican candidates in dangerous re-election races.

We believe this is especially true for Ayotte. As a freshman senator, she was launched into national prominence by the GOP Senate leadership and schooled in critical, high-visibility issues, including military readiness and national security - her website calls her a “leading voice” on that issue. She is a member of the prestigious Armed Services Committee, as well as the Homeland Security and Budget committees. She was ever present for photo ops with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Sens. John McCain and Lindsey Graham. With that background, Ayotte owes it to all New Hampshire voters to address the statements - many of them downright frightening - made by the real estate billionaire whom her own party says should be the next leader of the free world.

Ayotte wants to talk about issues important to New Hampshire voters - translation, not having to do with Trump, who will be back here on Monday.

This week, she addressed a plan to crack down on fentanyl users - obviously a crisis of concern to all of us. But not to the exclusion of equally important topics. It should have been unacceptable to New Hampshire voters, for example, for Ayotte to say in April that she can’t comment on Trump’s foreign policy speech because she didn’t listen to it and didn’t read it because she was busy doing her job. This is her job.

Establishment strategists have said that Ayotte has taken the smart route in not being a friend or foe of Trump, making her own case and positioning herself as independent of the Republican Party.

In the new world of “disruptor” politics, that neutral, say-nothing approach is wrong, and considering what’s at stake, dangerous.

If Ayotte is re-elected, and there is a President Trump, she will have to deal with him through her own powerful position. New Hampshire voters have a right to know how she plans to do that.

We urge Ayotte to take some old sage advice from her colleague and New Hampshire favorite John McCain. Let’s have some straight talk. Right now.

___

Online:

https://bit.ly/24FlqAZ

The Republican of Springfield (Mass.), June 10, 2016

When Bernie Sanders met with President Barack Obama at the White House on Thursday, the Vermont senator would have been wise to have spent a moment soaking in the atmosphere. Because his quixotic effort to get himself elected to serve at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue was over.

Tell his supporters, tell his detractors, tell anyone who might wonder whether the socialist gadfly has a future: The revolution won’t be televised. The revolution won’t be happening. At all. The revolution was in the mind of Sanders - and his army of rambunctious supporters.

Within hours of Sanders’ visit with the president, Obama endorsed former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to be his successor.

By-bye, Bernie.

Perhaps Sanders is a reasonably good guy. He’s most assuredly a more decent fellow than, say, angry billionaire reality TV star Donald Trump, the presumptive GOP nominee.

But really. Sanders’ ideas, if one can call them that, were never grounded in the real world. He was a pie-in-the-sky candidate, with promises aplenty. But little else. His backers liked to say that “Bernie is the real deal.” Whatever that meant. What he had to offer was free this, free that, free everything else.

He said he wanted to break up the big banks, but provided no plan as to how he’d accomplish that. He railed against the outsized influence of big money in politics, even as the successes of his own campaign poked holes in his own argument.

But mostly he talked about how unfair the system is, offering some sort of utopian egalitarianism that seems always popular with ill-informed youngsters (and youthful-minded older folk) who perhaps didn’t spend enough time in college studying economics.

From the first, we argued in this space that former Secretary of State Clinton was the inevitable Democratic presidential nominee. To be sure, Sanders hung around longer than most had expected, but his bid was always more of a vanity project than a genuine effort at winning the nomination.

He’s got one job left now: Get his backers to climb on board the Clinton train. Big time. What he’s got to make them see is that the dream they dreamed together has two possible endings, and one of them - a Trump presidency - would be an absolute nightmare.

___

Online:

https://bit.ly/1VScdoE

The Rutland Herald (Vt.), June 10, 2016

Change is happening more rapidly than we fully grasp, which is why the surprising course of this year’s election has been so vexing and perplexing.

It wasn’t long ago that the alliance between evangelical Christians and the Republican Party seemed to have a lock on the nation’s politics, shaping the positions of both parties on many cultural issues.

Twenty years ago President Bill Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act, inviting states to discriminate against gay people. Twelve years ago, a Massachusetts court case legalizing gay marriage sparked a backlash that contributed to John Kerry’s loss in the presidential race.

Now, in 2016, evangelical Christians are feeling marginalized, disrespected and defeated. The U.S. Supreme Court has legalized gay marriage everywhere, and Hillary Clinton has had to disavow the law signed by her husband back in the 1990s. An Associated Press story from Kentucky reports that on a host of issues - public prayer and gay marriage, among them - evangelicals feel the tide of society is running against them.

Vermont has witnessed this dynamic firsthand. The tumult surrounding passage of civil unions in 2000 presaged battles to come all across the country. Opposition included many conservative Protestants as well as officialdom of the Catholic Church. Approval of civil unions appalled opponents who mounted a fierce campaign animated by the slogan “Take Back Vermont.” It is no coincidence that disaffected conservatives across the country today hope to “Take Back America.”

It is a mistake to believe that battles are ever won. Wounds linger for many years, and those on the losing side often nurse resentments that grow over time. The new documentary called “The State of Marriage,” which chronicles Vermont’s battles over gay marriage (it is available online), visits years later with some civil union opponents, who express their sadness and alienation about what has become of their country. One says ruefully that she now understood how Hitler came to power.

Evangelical Christians have reason to be disappointed this year. They tend to favor Republicans, but the candidates this year who seemed most closely aligned with them fell woefully short. Ben Carson, Scott Walker and Mike Huckabee proved to be less than compelling choices. The candidate who made the most ardent appeal to Christian voters, Ted Cruz, was repellent on a personal level and widely hated by fellow Republicans.

That has left them with Donald Trump, whose immodest love of money, nasty personality and questionable moral history seem antithetical to Christian values. And yet the populace of disaffected white voters to whom Trump appeals seems to overlap with the disaffected white evangelicals who are bereft of any other champion.

Recent demographic information suggests that working-class white Americans are suffering economic and social distress that is new. Their life expectancy, in contrast to that of other groups, is actually going down. It is a shocking reversal. Drug addiction, alcoholism and suicide are on the rise. Opportunities seem to be diminishing.

Republicans have long argued that government helps people best when it actually refuses to help them, and at least in conservative regions, white working-class voters have bought into that argument. Thus, we have the case of Kansas where major tax cuts have pushed the state to the brink of closing the public schools - an impoverishment of the public sector that hurts poor people the most.

Trump has no answer to these trends other than to channel anger and resentment toward Mexicans or Muslims. It is the hollowest of promises, leading nowhere but to exclusion and violence.

Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign raised the possibility that working people would see that public policy can be made to serve them - not by giving them handouts but by halting handouts to the wealthy and initiating a new era of fairness. Hillary Clinton is now in line to pick up that banner, and after a day of concord in Washington among Sanders, Clinton and President Barack Obama it appeared that she was ready to do so. Taking back America might gain new meaning.

___

Online:

https://bit.ly/1ZGwcFM

The Portland Press Herald (Maine), June 8, 2016

Electronic cigarettes have boomed since their introduction to the U.S. market in 2007, fueling the growth of an industry that went largely unregulated until last month. That’s when the Food and Drug Administration finally announced federal restrictions on the devices, including a ban on sales to minors and required safety reviews for products sold to adults.

But while the new rules strike a reasonable middle ground between leniency and prohibition, they don’t go far enough to reduce the appeal of e-cigarettes to young people. Nicotine products that taste like candy or fruit are a particular draw for curious teenagers, and it’s troubling, to say the least, that the FDA overlooked its own data and decided against putting limits on e-cigarette flavorings.

E-cigarettes, also known as vaporizers, or vapes, are small, battery-operated devices that convert a liquid containing nicotine, glycerin and a flavoring into a vapor that users inhale. And while flavors other than menthol are banned in traditional cigarettes in the U.S., e-cigarette users can choose from a vast menu of more than 7,000 flavorings, including bubble gum, cotton candy, Gummy Bear and a combination of milk chocolate and peanut butter.

These sweet flavorings are especially enticing to young people, whose use of e-cigarettes tripled between 2013 and 2014 and continues to soar, even as the percentage of those who smoke conventional cigarettes has dwindled. The rate of U.S. high school students who vape rose from 1.5 percent in 2011 to 16 percent in 2015, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Over the same period, vaping rates among middle schoolers went from 0.6 percent to 5 percent.

Eighty-one percent of first-time e-cigarette users ages 12 to 17 opted for a flavored product, while 85 percent of those who continued to vape regularly chose flavorings, scientists at the FDA, the National Institute on Drug Abuse and other institutions concluded in a study published last year.

The popularity of e-cigarettes means that “teen tobacco use hasn’t declined at all since 2011,” the online magazine The Verge declared in April. And because young e-cigarette users are exposed to nicotine - an addictive drug - at a time when their brains are still developing, they may be more likely to start smoking conventional cigarettes than their peers who’ve never smoked or vaped, according to the CDC.

Vape flavorings clearly are appealing to young people, and by failing to ban or severely limit their sale, the FDA has passed up an obvious opportunity to keep adolescents from developing a deadly addiction. If the agency takes seriously its responsibility to regulate risks to public health, it should recognize and close this loophole.

___

Online:

https://bit.ly/25QpJzb

The Hartford Courant (Conn.), June 10, 2016

Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor is the most important in the nation. But the stretch between Washington, D.C., and Boston has decayed. Fortunately, the U.S. Senate has passed legislation that, if it becomes law, will begin to get the track back into shape.

A key provision of the bill requires Amtrak to spend profits from its Northeast routes exclusively along the Northeast Corridor. That’s up to $400 million a year. The requirement is long overdue.

More than 2,000 trains carrying 700,000 riders on Amtrak, Metro-North and other commuter lines use the tracks every day, making it the busiest in North America. The lack of reinvestment in this crucial stretch has been bad policy.

One of the most crucial needs along the corridor is full implementation of a safety system known as positive train control, which allows dispatchers to stop trains if they exceed speed limits. The absence of it is said to have contributed to the derailment in Philadelphia last year that killed eight and injured nearly 200.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal has been critical of extended deadlines for implementing the technology all along the Northeast Corridor. This new funding could speed up that work.

But there is no shortage of other critical issues along the line. From outdated switches and signals to the Baltimore and Potomac Tunnel, which itself could cost $1.5 billion to replace, the corridor’s needs are overwhelming. Two years ago, Amtrak estimated that it would need nearly $800 million a year for 15 years to get the system in shape.

Any discussion about improving transportation infrastructure in Connecticut or anywhere in the Northeast has to begin with how to address those long-neglected needs.

___

Online:

https://cour.at/1OihfZO