Do Trump and Clinton Actually Know Angela Merkel’s Record?

While the major party backers had fun at Gary Johnson’s expense for his inability to remember Vicente Fox’s name (and, to be fair, my endorsee should remember the name his favorite foreign leader), Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton responded an infinitely worse choice (Politico).

“Oh, let me think. Look, I like a lot of the world leaders,” Clinton said, bursting into laughter initially when asked about her favorite world leader during a gaggle with reporters aboard her campaign plane in Chicago. “One of my favorites is Angela Merkel because I think she’s been an extraordinary, strong leader during difficult times in Europe, which has obvious implications for the rest of the world and, most particularly, our country.”

Clinton praised the German chancellor’s “leadership and steadiness on the Euro crisis” while adding that “her bravery in the face of the refugee crisis is something that I am impressed by.”

…

Trump, however, also named Merkel one of his favorite leaders Thursday, despite his rhetoric on the campaign trail that would suggest otherwise.

“Well, I think Merkel is a really great world leader, but I was very disappointed that — when she — this move with the whole thing on immigration,” he told New England Cable News. “I think it’s a big problem and really, you know, to look at what she’s done in the last year and a half. I was always a Merkel person. I thought really fantastic. But I think she made a very tragic mistake a year and a half ago.”

It’s no surprise that the two would disagree on Merkel’s policy regarding Syrian refugees, but the notion that Ms. Merkel is to be admired at all gives me newfound respect for Johnson insisting on waiting for Fox’s name rather than choosing the German Chancellor (as, sadly, his running mate did).

Angela Merkel has been Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany for over 10 years, and one could argue that she has been the worst in its history (I used the full national title to rule out the lackies who did Stalin’s bidding in East Germany and any German leader prior to 1949). Konrad Adenauer led the rebuilding of West Germany, and his two CDU successors had little time to mess it up. Willie Brandt made FRG a major player on the global stage; his successor Helmut Kohl reunified Germany and cemented it as an economic powerhouse. Even Gerhardt Schroder, who beat Kohl in 1998 and lost to Merkel in 2005, enacted the Hartz IV reforms that gave Germany a new economic boost in the aughts.

It was this boom on which Merkel skated for most of her time in power, while she insisted on the Irish and Mediterranean economies being sacrificed for the good of the euro (Coffee House).

It has spent the last five years blaming the euro-zone crisis on feckless Greeks, Italians and Spaniards, and contrasting it with their own fiscal responsibility. They allowed the Greek banks to go down, and the ATMs to be shut, they let the Irish banks collapse, and all this year they have watched the Italian banking system slide into insolvency while piously insisting that ordinary depositors had to bear the brunt of the losses.

Left unsaid was the fact that the “fiscal responsibility” that makes Germany so proud was nowhere to be found during the Hartz reforms – but Brussels gave Germany a pass. Merkel was opposition leader then, but she should have at least remembered that the Eurocracy in no way treated her as she and Jean-Claude Juncker demanded the peripheral eurozone nations be treated.

Yet what has “responsibility” actually meant in Germany? The economy has never kept pace with the United Kingdom, and is now petering out (Reuters via Daily Mail). Meanwhile, as noted by Matthew Lynn (Coffee House story), Germany’s largest and most prestigious bank could be approaching collapse, and the “admired” Merkel’s government gave talk of a bailout three different responses: never, maybe, and maybe not – all in the space of a week.

I would humbly submit that whe history looks back on Merkel’s dozen years in office (yes, I expect her tenure will come to an end either before next year’s elections or due to the result of them), it will note that she marked time while the economy coasted (then sputtered), and made her country the most hated in Europe with her positions on the euro crisis.

All in all, I much prefer Johnson’s choice. In fact, I’d much prefer his “Aleppo moment.”