Delaware Liberal

Friday Open Thread [6.3.16]

Delaware Dem

Steve Benen says Hillary finally did to Trump what Trump’s Republican rivals couldn’t in her campaign changing blockbuster speech yesterday:

Slate’s Fred Kaplan added, “On each point, she contrasted his flimsy prejudices not only with her own experience and thought-out views but also with the long-standing, bipartisan traditions of American diplomacy. Then she kicked Trump in the shins.”

This was not, however, just a kitchen-sink strategy. The point was to underscore a specific kind of argument: Clinton realizes there may be some Americans who believe we can take a chance with a demagogic reality-show personality making life-and-death decisions in the White House, and yesterday was about making the case that the gamble is simply too great.

It’s why Clinton made multiple references to words like “dangerous” (“Trump’s ideas aren’t just different – they are dangerously incoherent”),”risk” (“A Trump Presidency would embolden ISIS; we cannot take that risk”), and “stakes” (“The stakes in global statecraft are infinitely higher and more complex than in the world of luxury hotels”).

Clinton made Trump look like a bad joke yesterday, but just as important is the effort to plant seeds of doubt in voters’ minds about the Republican candidate representing a genuine hazard to the nation’s future.

For his part, the presumptive GOP nominee struggled to respond because, frankly, no response would do – everything Clinton said had the benefit of being true.

Alex Seitz-Wald says Clinton finally cracked the code:

Hillary Clinton may have cracked the code on how to land a real blow to Donald Trump. He has proven a maddeningly elusive target for Republicans and Democrats alike. But on Thursday in San Diego, Clinton delivered what was easily her toughest speech yet on the presumptive Republican nominee, deploying a potent combination of her well-known policy wonkishness with a surprising dose of ridicule.

“It’s clear he doesn’t have a clue what he’s talking about,” she urged, and added, “If Donald gets his way, they’ll be celebrating in the Kremlin.”

Vox: “This wasn’t the restrained, diplomatic Clinton we’ve seen for most of the campaign. This was full-on firebrand, full of righteous rage at the idea that someone like Donald Trump could possibly be president of the United States.”

Chuck Todd: “This speech and overall performance by Clinton is going to quiet the DC-based bed wetters for a bit. Her best campaign moment in months.”

My favorite headline from yesterday, from Daily Kos:

Matt Yglesias says Hillary’s argument against Trump is the one that could deliver a landslide:

Over the course of the past year, Clinton has been talking primarily to Democratic Party primary voters. This argument — and this speech in general — is not one that will be especially appealing to them.

What she’s offering instead is an argument aimed at a much broader audience. It’s an argument that acknowledges, implicitly, that there are tens of millions of right-of-center Americans who’ve never voted for a Democratic presidential candidate but didn’t support Trump in the primary. Clinton is pitching an argument aimed at those people — one designed to offer little ideological or policy content in hopes of appealing to 70 percent of the population rather than 51 percent. […]

In other words, ask yourself: What’s the worst that could happen? Conservative-minded people aren’t going to be thrilled with a Clinton presidency, but they’ve already lived through eight years of Bill Clinton and eight years of Barack Obama. The country is still standing. With Trump, by contrast, we really have no idea what we’re going to get. […]

This is the best argument to use if Clinton wants to persuade right-of-center voters to cross the aisle and vote for her, stay home, or take a look at Gary Johnson and the Libertarian Party.

But it’s not an argument that’s going to warm the hearts of liberals. Pursuing the argument that Trump is simply too risky to serve as president requires Clinton to try to denude the campaign of as much ideological content as possible. Any talk from her side about the big issues and ideas in politics necessarily reminds people that for any given set of big issues and ideas, not everyone is going to agree. By contrast, pretty much anyone can be open to the basic idea that Trump is a loose cannon who doesn’t know much about foreign policy.

Some progressives fear that this kind of campaign means Clinton won’t build a mandate for progressive policy if she wins the election.

The reality, however, is that the biggest objective determinant of how a Clinton administration governs is what happens in November’s congressional elections. Clinton is aiming for a landslide, and if she can deliver one, it will set the stage for a lot of progressive policy — whether or not she talks about it on the campaign trail.

Phillip Bump is on a trolling roll. Today be brings us this gem: Can you tell the difference between a Trump University sales tip and one from a pickup artist?

Ramesh Ponnuru of Bloomberg explains how “Clinton can crush Trump with one message” and notes, “Her most powerful message against Trump might be a non-ideological one: His lack of knowledge, seriousness and impulse control make him too dangerous to put in the presidency…That strategy would have room for many specific criticisms of him that fit within the overall message of his unfitness. Instead of presenting his $11 trillion tax cut as a typical right-wing scheme, for example, she could tie it together with his speculation about defaulting on the debt and suggest that he is far more reckless than normal conservatives. (His encouragement of other countries to get nuclear weapons also illustrates this point.) And she would have to outsource some potential attacks to others. Calling Trump a “fascist,” for example, would make her rather than him look wild-eyed.”

Eric Levitz at New York Magazine:

Hillary Clinton’s argument for why she would make a better commander-in-chief than her Republican opponent is fairly simple: She is not an emotionally erratic ignoramus who has praised the Tiananmen Squarecrackdown, refused to issue any plan for combating ISIS, and called on the American military to kill more civilians. On the other hand, she was in the room when President Obama ordered the hit on Bin Laden. And she did a bunch of other great things as Secretary of State. (You’ve forgotten about that Libya intervention by now, haven’t you?)

The likely Democratic nominee laid out this case in exacting detail in San Diego on Thursday. Her campaign had billed the speech as an attempt to paint Donald Trump as “unfit for the presidency.” This is not a terribly difficult task, but she accomplished it with aplomb — deploying the old rhetorical trick of reciting all the insane, mutually exclusive proposals her opponent had improvised over the course of a 12-month campaign.

Her anger would be more, I dunno, legitimate if she did not give a powder puff one long interview to him just last week. Look, EVERYONE knows he is a blatant racist and a dangerous bigot. EVERYONE knows it. Even Megyn Kelly knows it. So if you are a human being, you can’t vote for him.

EVERYONE also knows he is a fascist authoritarian. More proof of that surfaced last night, when Mein Fuhrer Herr Trump held an unhinged rally in San Jose, California. In this video below, which I have timed to started at the 29:21 minute mark to coincide with the start of the Trump rally, Trump arrival on stage was set to the tune of one of Adolf Hitler’s favorite songs, Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries.

Frank Rich on Donald Trump’s no good very bad week:

By any civilized standard, Trump has had about the worst week a presidential candidate could have. He was caught trying to cheat America’s veterans out of the $6 million he had promised them. He nastily assailed the press for daring to question his bogus philanthropy. He not only attacked the legitimacy of the U.S. district judge presiding over the Trump University case, but tried to denigrate him as “Mexican.” (The judge, Gonzalo Curiel, was born in Indiana.) Then there’s Trump U itself: a scam worthy of Bernie Madoff that preyed on victims far more vulnerable than most of Madoff’s clients. And the week is not over. There’s still time for more Trump outrage. Maybe he’ll slap a baby instead of kissing one at a campaign event.

The question remains, however, whether any of it matters to those voters who see Trump as their champion and have stood steadfastly by him even after he previously insulted one of America’s most famous veterans, mocked a disabled member of the press, slimed Mexicans as rapists, and all the rest. We won’t know until November, I’m afraid, if anything will shake their loyalty.

I don’t care about Trump voters. They are a minority of the electorate. I care about idiot purists deciding that they can vote for Trump or not vote for Hillary because their principles are more important than other people’s lives. Because that’s how Trump wins.

Here are some words of wisdom from the great Molly Ivins that seem perfectly suited to our politics today:

There are three things one must not do in the face of electoral disaster. Whine. Despair. Or fall for that specious old radical crap: ‘Things have to get worse before they can get better.’ The only possible response to that one is, ‘Not with my child’s life.’ Nor is it helpful to sit around hoping that given enough rope, the R’s will hang themselves. They’ll hang us along with them. The only thing to do is to fight harder and smarter.

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