Delaware Liberal

Thursday Open Thread [6.2.16]

Delaware Dem

Donald Trump, “lashing back at Barack Obama after the president waded forcefully into the presidential campaign,” threatened to turn the president’s attacks on him in retaliation, McClatchy reports.

Said Trump: “This is a president who doesn’t have a clue. If he campaigns, that means I’m allowed to hit him, just like I hit Bill Clinton.”

Please proceed Donald. Obama will wipe the floor with you.

Brian Beutler:

Fortunately, the steady pace of disclosures from the civil case against Trump University—including testimony from Trump employees who say his business-education program scammed the vulnerable out of tens of thousands of dollars a head—provides Democrats a way to repurpose the Romney strategy against a very different kind of foe. The Trump University scam undermines the very notion that a man of Trump’s greed can ever be trusted to advance the interests of others. If exploited properly, it will be Trump’s undoing.

The real reason that all Democrats, Sanderistas and Clintonistas alike, want Elizabeth Warren to be VP, is that Hillary’s options for the ticket are remarkably slim:

Outside of Warren, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro gets the most buzz, but he’s laughably unqualified. He hasn’t done much of note at the Department of Housing and Urban Development in the past two years, and he served as San Antonio mayor when that was a part-time job paying $3,000 a year plus $20 a council session; San Antonio uses a council manager system, where the mayor is basically a glorified city councilor.

Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA) is in a swing state and speaks better Spanish than Castro from his time as a missionary in Honduras, but he also has a strong anti-abortion record that wouldn’t be a great addition to the first woman-headed major-party ticket in American history.

Labor Secretary Tom Perez is popular with liberals, but Clinton probably wants a running mate who’s won a more recent and notable election than the 2002 county council race in Montgomery County, Maryland.

Former Sen. Evan Bayh (D-IN) — perennially on Democrats’ VP shortlist, including in 2008 — has ruled himself out by spending the past six years as a lobbyist. Not so attractive in a year when a democratic socialist decrying big money in politics ran a strong campaign against Clinton.

Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) could help shore up Sanders supporters, but he’s a key senator in a swing state whose replacement would be picked by a Republican governor. He’s also not a national figure the way Paul Ryan, Joe Biden, John Edwards, or Dick Cheney was.

And the list of options who are national figures on that scale is very short. There’s Bernie Sanders, of course. There’s Warren. There’s Biden (again). Al Franken was a reasonably well-known celebrity before taking office, but he has purposely not become nationally known as a politician the way Warren has. Martin O’Malley ran a whole presidential campaign but didn’t earn the name recognition boost that Biden and Edwards did when they ran. New Jersey’s Cory Booker is kind of well-known to media figures because Newark is close to New York City, but nationally he’s still fairly obscure.

I think the issue is two-fold: yes, there are not many good choices on the bench, but in Warren, we get a quality and obviously excellent candidate in her own right who serves as a major solution to party unity. In fact, I think Clinton will do more to damage party unity by not picking Warren than if Bernie did not endorse.

Matt Yglesias says Bernie will drop out soon, perhaps after California:

While Sanders’s hypothetical campaign would be premised on the idea of winning superdelegates over to his side, the reality is that after California and New Jersey vote, the opposite is going to happen.

Right now there are still 148 superdelegates who haven’t endorsed anyone yet. That’s everyone from Barack Obama, Al Gore, and Jimmy Carter to about 122 members of the Democratic National Committee whom nobody has heard of. None of these people are going to respond to the end of voting by coming off the fence in favor of Sanders, and some of them will respond to the end of voting by coming off the fence in favor of Clinton.

Elizabeth Warren will say she likes both candidates and Sanders ran an inspiring grassroots campaign, but Clinton won fair and square and now it’s time to come together to ensure Wall Street isn’t left off the leash by Donald Trump. Al Gore will say the same, but he’ll emphasize climate change. Carter will say the same, but he’ll emphasize global humanitarian issues.

At the same time, the small number of Sanders supporters who are also elected officials — most important among them Reps. Keith Ellison and Raúl Grijalva and Sen. Jeff Merkley — will abandon him on the same grounds. They’ll say the campaign accomplished a lot and proved people-powered politics is the wave of the future, but Clinton won fair and square and now it’s time to unite for a higher minimum wage, making the rich pay their fair share, comprehensive immigration reform, and all the rest. […]

At the end of the day, Sanders is a Democrat[.] [U]pon entering the Senate he joined the [Democratic] party caucus and now serves as the ranking member on the Budget Committee. If Democrats win the Senate in November, he’ll either chair that committee or the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee.

Which is all just to say that in a practical sense, Sanders has the same investment in having a strong and united Democratic ticket as any other member of Congress. If Clinton wins in November, he’ll have influence over executive branch appointments and a good chance to chair an important committee and shape legislation. If she loses, he’ll be a member of a powerless minority that stands around and votes “no” while Trump slashes taxes.

At the moment, he would like to win as many votes in California as possible, and maintaining the pretense that he’s not remotely close to giving up is the right way to do that. But when there are no votes left to win and he begins bleeding support, Sanders will come around and bring things to an end.

Jon Favreau, the former Obama speechwriter and not the actor/director, says the coming fall campaign will be Obama’s last stand:

Clinton’s primary victory will allow her to assemble a Democratic Dream Team of political talent to rally the party and take on Trump. She’ll have Bill Clinton, a popular ex-president who can testify to her character and defend her record better than anyone (his speech defending President Obama’s at the 2012 convention is the stuff of legend); Elizabeth Warren, a liberal icon in the Senate who has already begun to prosecute the party’s sharpest case against Trump; [and] Joe Biden, a beloved vice president with a working-class, tell-it-like-it-is, God-knows-what-he’ll-say kind of appeal[.] Clinton will also have by her side the best political player in the game: Barack Obama.

In a few months, my old boss will hit the trail for the last time as president. He’ll do so with an approval rating that has been north of 50 percent nearly every week since March, a high he’d previously reached only in the months after his first and second elections. Political scientists point to a strong historical correlation between an outgoing president’s popularity and the final vote share of his party’s candidate. Obama’s recent surge in popularity has been driven largely by independents, young people, women, and Latinos — four groups most likely to tip the election toward Clinton. He has an 82 percent approval rating among Sanders supporters, whom he’ll work to persuade as America’s most famous Clinton convert — someone who also waged a brutal primary against her, but eventually became a friend, partner, and champion.

I don’t want to overestimate the Obama effect. No one can win this for Clinton but Clinton. […] But I suspect that the president will give this campaign all that he has and more — for Clinton, for his own legacy, and for the vision of America that he’s asked us to believe in since the night he stepped onto the national stage in Boston and delivered his 2004 convention speech, a hopeful, bighearted vision that is the antithesis of everything that Trump represents. The truth is, Obama has understood better than most the forces that gave rise to a candidacy like Trump’s.

Charlie Cook says the Trump-Clinton race is not as close as it looks:

With its nomination settled, the GOP has been healing its wounds, but Democratic feelings are still raw because of the ongoing fight between Clinton and Sanders.

Many es­tab­lish­ment fig­ures, who I nev­er thought would come to terms with Trump as the GOP nom­in­ee, have now moved to heal­ing and clos­ure, if some­what re­luct­antly. They are quick to point out that Trump wasn’t their first choice, but, when the bugle soun­ded, they and oth­er party war horses got in line. Some­times it was more a mat­ter of lin­ing up against Clin­ton rather than be­hind Trump, and some even found it dif­fi­cult to en­dorse Trump by name. One former Re­pub­lic­an sen­at­or com­pared Trump to the vil­lain­ous Harry Pot­ter char­ac­ter Lord Vol­de­mort, “he who must not be named.” Even so, most par­tis­ans ul­ti­mately get be­hind their can­did­ate, for bet­ter or worse, and so it is with today’s Re­pub­lic­ans.

By con­trast, many of Bernie Sanders’s sup­port­ers still seem to be in the deni­al and an­ger stages. Feel­ings are still raw, and the heal­ing pro­cess has not yet be­gun. But after the last round of primar­ies on June 7, most of them will also move from de­pres­sion to ac­cept­ance. …

It is ex­ceed­ingly un­likely that Clin­ton will beat Trump by a wide mar­gin be­cause of her high neg­at­ives and the in­tense par­tis­an­ship that has gripped the na­tion, but the prob­ab­il­it­ies still are in her fa­vor. We are ap­proach­ing a mo­ment sim­il­ar to the one in The Wiz­ard of Oz when Dorothy told her dog Toto that “we’re not in Kan­sas any­more.” No longer are we look­ing at a Re­pub­lic­an nom­in­a­tion fight with an elect­or­ate dom­in­ated by the tea party. We are be­gin­ning to fo­cus on a Novem­ber elect­or­ate that is broad­er, more di­verse, and con­sid­er­ably more mod­er­ate, in both ideo­logy and tem­pera­ment, than the one that se­lec­ted Don­ald Trump. Chances are high that these voters will be­have much dif­fer­ently than the ones in the GOP primar­ies.

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