Saturday Open Thread [4.23.16]
INDIANA—WTHR/Howey Politics–Trump 37, Cruz 31, Kasich 22
INDIANA—WTHR/Howey Politics–Clinton 48, Sanders 45
INDIANA—FOX News–Trump 41, Cruz 33, Kasich 16
INDIANA—FOX News–Clinton 46, Sanders 42
CALIFORNIA—FOX News–Trump 49, Cruz 22, Kasich 20
CALIFORNIA—FOX News–Clinton 48, Sanders 46
When jobless claims reach a four-decade low, it's hard not to feel encouraged about the state of the US job market pic.twitter.com/AxM7YLkmJr
— Steve Benen (@stevebenen) April 21, 2016
New rules for Wall Street from the President:
Wall Street executives would have to wait at least four years to collect most of their bonus pay and could be forced to return money if their companies lose big under rules being proposed to install one of the last major planks of the Dodd-Frank Act.
The ban on bonus practices that reward excessive risk-taking would strike hardest at senior executives and key employees at financial companies with more than $250 billion in assets, according to the long-delayed incentive compensation measures released by the National Credit Union Administration. NCUA, one of the six agencies that must adopt the rule, voted Thursday to put out the proposal for public comment. The other regulators, including the Federal Reserve and Securities and Exchange Commission, are expected to follow.
The proposal would let companies take back bonuses — even those already vested — if an employee takes inappropriate risks, draws an enforcement action or exceeds a firm’s risk limits and causes a loss. Clawbacks could happen for as long as seven years and would apply even to former employees who have left the company, according to the proposal, which represents six years of combined work from regulators to interpret one of the core provisions of the 2010 Dodd-Frank law.
To those who say that these a snap decisions from a President feeling a berning rash, I highlighted that last sentence for you. Truth is, the President is a progressive, but purist progressives are impatient and easily disappointed and discouraged.
So Jason is worried that Trump will makeover himself and then become a moderate Democrat and win the election because voters are stupid and have no memory beyond two weeks ago. I’m not at all worried. In the modern day and age, of instant 24 hour cable crap and internet, video does not disappear, and brands do not change. Trump’s brand a racist fascist buffoon is established and is not going to change. Some columnists agree.
Josh Marshall says the Trump Ectch a Sketch is not happening:
The more salient question in my mind is whether Trump can even make the attempt. Remember, this is the second or third time that Trump or those around Trump have tried for the pivot to the center. The last time he tried things immediately lurched into the series of violent incidents at rallies and the protests in Chicago. And as I wrote at the time, what seemed most telling is that it was clearly in Trump’s interest to shift gears and he’d signaled he wanted to shift gears. This is when he started saying he could be the presidentialist guy around. Just everyone watch! Trump may have wanted to leave the primaries behind. But the primaries followed him. He’d kicked up or rather given voice to too many electoral demons. Beyond that, there were and are things within Trump that made the transition hard and quite possibly impossible. At some basic level, it’s really not an act. […]
We’ve seen this movie before. Even if it’s the sequel or another production from the same script, I’m very, very dubious that Trump can pull this off. Set aside for the moment that we’re living in the age of videotape and the implausibility of what Byron York memorably called a ‘personality transplant.’ His personality, his relationship with his supporters who have brought him this far, make it very unlikely he’ll even be to make the attempt. Trump may be full of it. He may be BSing on the margins. But at a basic level, it’s not an act. He can’t control it.
But the idea that Trump could reinvent himself mid-campaign has always been implausible. Aside from his core issues—a draconian immigration policy and mercantilist trade policy—Trump has already been a chameleon, saying whatever he thinks an audience wants to hear. On abortion, he moved in a matter of three days from saying women should be punished to saying there should be no change in the legal status quo. On an appearance on Fox and Friends, Trump embraced the flat tax and then condemned it within a few minutes.
In terms of his persona, Trump’s ability to re-make himself seems minimal. Despite criticisms of his tweeting habits from even his wife, Trump continues to re-tweet white supremacists. And after briefly trying to be polite to “Senator Cruz,” Trump has reverted to his favorite nickname, Lyin’ Ted.
These wild shifts haven’t hurt Trump with his base, who apparently love his stance on immigration and trade so much that they are willing to forgive his ideological heresies. Conversely, though, Trump’s intermittent adoption of moderate positions hasn’t helped him with the general public, where Trump enjoys a near-record level of unpopularity.
Given this enduring unpopularity, any further shifts are unlikely to help.
Jon Favreau (Obama’s speech writer) with a good read:
Hey, Berniacs: I Learned to Love Hillary and So Can You
An Obama 2008 veteran, who’s been on a campaign that was in a position similar to Clinton’s and that had to reconcile with Clinton, offers his thoughts.
Bernie Sanders’ supporters are experiencing the five stages of grief after a devastating 16-point loss in New York Tuesday night, a drubbing that greatly narrowed the Vermont senator’s path moving forward.
After holding out hope, some are beginning to accept the disheartening notion that the Vermont senator is now unlikely to win the party’s nomination. …
Bernie needed NY and he didn’t even come close,” Stonum wrote. “He would need PA too and he’s not going to come close there either. I wish it weren’t true, but it is.”
Just as in New York, Sanders faces another closed primary on April 26 in Pennsylvania, where he currently trails by double digits in the polls. He also faces tough battles that day in Maryland, Connecticut, Delaware and Rhode Island.
As Sanders supporters processed the New York loss and the upcoming map, Stonum wasn’t alone in his resignation.
On pro-Sanders message boards on Reddit — an online community where impassioned discussions of Sanders’ campaign vastly outweigh any talk about Clinton — expressions of surrender began bubbling up after the New York loss.
“It’s the reality of the situation, the chance to win the nomination has passed,” wrote one user, who posts under the username “Sieziggy” in a pro-Sanders forum. “It’s time to shift the energy of his campaign and groups like this subreddit to local and state government, which will have a lasting, meaningful impact.”
Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. Bernie Sanders said in an interview broadcast Friday that he would wait to see what Hillary Clinton includes in her platform before deciding how actively to campaign for her in the fall if she is the party’s nominee.
The senator from Vermont, who has vowed to stay in the race until the Democratic convention, was asked by Andrea Mitchell on MSNBC whether he would try to persuade his young supporters to back Clinton in the same fashion that she supported President Obama after losing the nomination to him in 2008.
“Well, first of all, I’ve got to find out what her platform is, what the views are that she is going to be bringing forth, to what degree she will adopt many of the ideas that I think are extremely popular and I think very sensible,” Sanders told Mitchell.
If Bernie expects a whole scale adoption of his platform, he is going to be disappointed. But he is a purist, so he probably does expect that. Jonathan Alter argues that Hillary should adopt the free public university tuition plan.
If 4.9% unemployment, 70+ months of job creation, +2 liberal SC judges & health reform = status quo, then GIMMIE IT. https://t.co/PeNnhq80zd
— Volguus Zildrohar (@eclecticbrotha) April 22, 2016
Clinton beats Trump 76-11 w/Latinos, per @LatinoDecisions. 2012 exits: 71-27 Obama over Romney w/Latinos https://t.co/vYlsuUEeHF
— Daily Kos Elections (@DKElections) April 22, 2016
[S]peculation should begin and end with Elizabeth Warren. No credible candidate of either gender or from any background could so quickly and definitively prevent the party split that tensions between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton have threatened to create. Yes, in theory Democrats could nominate a “unity ticket” of Clinton and Sanders; neither has ruled that out. But the crow-eating and ego-stroking involved in that scenario probably exceeds the obstacles that prevented an Obama-Clinton unity ticket in 2008.
Besides, is there really a sizable body of Sandernistas out there who would be dissatisfied with Warren on the ticket? She’s the candidate many of them hoped and prayed for in the first place. And despite an unimpeachable record on the anti-Wall Street themes that most excite Sanders supporters, Warren has few of his weaknesses: She’s well under 70, has not made a habit of calling herself a “socialist,” and will never be played by Larry David on Saturday Night Live.
The objections to a Clinton-Warren ticket are not terribly credible. Yes, Warren is from blue-state Massachusetts, not a battleground state. Recent research, however, has pretty conclusively demonstrated that a running mate doesn’t make his or her state significantly more winnable, which reduces the allure of Warren Senate colleagues like Tim Kaine and Sherrod Brown. And yes, Warren would not break any glass ceilings that Clinton is not already breaking at the top of the ticket. But with 92 of 94 major party tickets since the Second Party System emerged in 1828 being composed of two men, can anyone seriously object to one composed of two women? I suspect the first crass joke from Donald Trump about two chicks on the ticket would be pretty severely punished by the swing voters who already look dimly on him and the contemporary GOP anyway.
Conversely, choosing Warren would reinforce the historic nature of the ticket, much as Bill Clinton’s choice of fellow young southern moderate Al Gore in 1992 reinforced his claims to be a “different kind of Democrat” and the avatar of generational change. That partnership worked out pretty well, or would have had the U.S. Supreme Court not had different plans for the country in 2000.
“When jobless claims reach a four-decade low, it’s hard not to feel encouraged about the state of the US job market”
True enough on paper. And yet, it just doesn’t feel right.
Older and younger workers are not experiencing the job growth. More and more working people live without any disposable income and are barred from the carnival of consumer culture that the upper-middle class revels in. The revelers do not understand the problem and think politics is all about the culture wars.
Traditional thrift no longer produces a nest egg but is required just to get to the end of the month. Worker pay is subsidized by Medicaid and food stamps.
The current situation is better than continued recession of course. But here are still many engines in the economy roaring full blast to transfer wealth upward. Obama is tinkering at the margins with a few executive orders, but the upward flow continues at an unsustainable rate.
Sanders has clumsily laid his finger on a few of those engines and offered some rather unsophisticated solutions, but at least he is on the right track.
““Well, first of all, I’ve got to find out what her platform is, what the views are that she is going to be bringing forth, ”
Surely some young person in his campaign can find the url for her website and click to her issues, factsheets, and briefings and then print everything out on paper for Sanders. Right?
“to what degree she will adopt many of the ideas that I think are extremely popular and I think very sensible,”
Well, I imagine that she doesn’t think many of his ideas are sensible or they would have been part of her platform already. Even so, is Sanders suggesting that Clinton adopt his platform or he won’t help?
Sounds passive aggressive to me. Regardless, I think she will can even without his active participation. Either he will support the ticket or he won’t, but the campaign cannot afford the time or energy to play whatever music is necessary to soothe a savage breast. The convention is in July. Her campaign has less than 3 months to short list and vet potential VP running mates, none of whom will necessarily help the campaign, but certainly can hurt the campaign.
RE: Trump Makeover
I disagree that he cannot achieve a makeover. The question is, can he do it without alienating his base? In his attempt to gain gravitas, he has to shed the image that made him popular I the first place. Nearly everything he has said thus far is antithetical to governing. I’m pretty sure his base doesn’t give a hoot about governance but he needs to gain some acceptance from those who do give a hoot in order to have a chance at winning. I’m not certain that he can strike the right balance to gain one demographic without losing the other.
On the other hand, I’ve not discounted Trump thus far and I’m not about to start. The Clinton campaign needs an abundance of caution until this over. Any little slip could result in defeat.
I’m not concerned that Hillary pick a progressive VP, and definitely not Warren or Sanders, but she does need someone who is not aligned with the “corporate Dem” wing of the party. You know… to balance the ticket. And someone who is younger.
Picking a DINO or a corporate Dem would be a slap in the face to younger voters now and in future elections.
She may play identity politics with a woman or Hispanic pick, which is fine with me as long as it’s the right person. Remember how Repubs thought Rubio would have an advantage somehow.
Ya think that public won’t pay attention to the news reports of Hillary being under FBI investigation during the election campaign–reports that are bound to increase because the Republicans will be pushing them and making campaign commercials regarding them?
So if your post trades on people on not forgetting what Trump was like in the recent past, why would you think that the public won’t be attune to an *ongoing* investigation during the election campaign? That will be present and more forceful than something in the past.
@DG “Ya think that public won’t pay attention to the news reports of Hillary being under FBI investigation during the election campaign”
That’s exactly what I think.
I’m sick and tired of hearing about her damn emails.
“I’m not concerned that Hillary pick a progressive VP”
I wouldn’t mind Gillibrand, except that she is a woman, from the north east, and a Senator. All fatal flaws as a running mate in this election.
I don’t really have any druthers, except whatever helps the ticket, geographically or demographically. July will roll around quickly though and it won’t be long before trial balloons need to be launched.