Friday Open Thread, June 10, 2016

Matt Yglesias says the Warren endorsement of Hillary matters:

An early endorsement of Clinton by Warren could have helped the former Secretary of State in the primaries. This late in the process it can’t possibly make a difference, since Clinton has already won. But where it can make a difference is in persuading Bernie Sanders’ supporters to get over their campaign-season anti-Clinton feelings and hop on board.

That’s because, like Barack Obama and Joe Biden, Warren is very popular with Sanders supporters, including Sanders supporters who say they won’t vote for Clinton in the general election.

And while Warren’s support is less significant than Obama’s in this regard, it carries more weight than Obama’s with a small but potentially influential group of thought-leaders and ideological activists. Anti-Clinton Bernie fans who also like Obama are basically confused about where the various politicians stand. Warren is different. Ideologically speaking, she’s considerably closer to Sanders than she is to Clinton or Obama. Specifically she is the most prominent enemy of Wall Street and big banks in American politics, and if she says progressives should get over Goldman Sachs speeches and back Clinton that carries weight.

Not everyone is happy about it. I had to unfriend someone on Facebook who called Warren a “sellout c—” for endorsing Hillary. And if you look at Warren’s Facebook page, you will find similar if not identical sentiments. I am thankful beyond words that our Sanders supporters here at DL are nice and reasonable people. 😉 And I am thankful that the vast majority of Bernie’s supporters are reasonable people, who, in the end, will come aboard and unite as one campaign.

Mark Morford at SFGate has an interesting column:

The one trait Hillary possesses that no one else has – not the pampered males in congress, certainly not the shrieking, thin-skinned bully to her far right and not a single female presidential nominee before her – because there haven’t been any – is an almost inhuman tenacity, resolve, an enviable iron will that can apparently withstand, well, just about anything, and come out even stronger.

This is not to be taken lightly. Bernie doesn’t seem to have it. Trump has exactly whatever the opposite of it is. Bush couldn’t even spell it. Obama has it, but never put much of it to the test. Bill Clinton never needed it (most entitled males don’t).

Yet in the absence of obvious charisma, potent oratory skills or a Zen-like calm, it’s exactly Hillary’s steely confidence and determination, her ability to not merely endure but fully overcome decades of entrenched misogyny and resistance that will make her a hugely effective president.

It’s sort of astonishing, really. After all, no single politician of any party has been so vilified, trolled, spit upon, dismissed, mocked, caricatured and personally disrespected, sometimes justifiably but also horribly unfairly, in the history of America. She’s a one-woman troll magnet. The right’s decades-long campaign of hate against her has often been so vicious, it creates its own weather patterns.

And still she stands. And smiles. And laughs easily. And is truly grateful. Despite attacks of acidic odium that would make most humans wither, she seems almost impossibly intact, headstrong, full of good humor and also a deeply felt appreciation of her uneven, but irrefutably revolutionary, place in history.

Hillary Clinton said she has no doubt that Sen. Elizabeth Warren would be qualified to serve as her vice president — but she refused to say the same of Bernie Sanders, Politico reports.

Said Warren: “I have the highest regard for Sen. Warren. I think she is an incredible public servant, eminently qualified for any role. I look forward to working with her on behalf of not only the campaign and her very effective critique of Trump, but also on the issues that she and I both care about.”

The Washington Post says Trump does not have a national campaign: “Trump’s failure to build a truly national campaign has left it to the GOP to run one on his behalf, while also trying to extinguish the regular political brush fires set off by the unpredictable candidate. The arrangement has intensified the burden on the Republican National Committee, forcing it to absorb core campaign tasks and testing whether it has improved the field and data capabilities that it fell short on in 2012.”

“The Trump campaign has yet to build out its headquarters or national staff, ending the primaries with just 70 employees compared with 732 on the payroll for presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. His backstop is the party: The RNC has deployed 461 field staffers to 16 states — more than it has ever had on the ground at this point in an election — while spending $100 million on its data and digital operations since the last presidential campaign. The investments were pushed by Chairman Reince Priebus after the Democrats outgunned the GOP in 2012.”

The New York Times on how Obama will help Clinton: “Political strategists at the White House and in Mrs. Clinton’s campaign are just beginning to hammer out a specific stump-speech schedule for the president after his endorsement on Thursday of his former secretary of state. Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton will appear together on Wednesday for the first time since she secured the Democratic nomination, and they have chosen Green Bay, Wis., another city where Mr. Obama lifted Democratic fortunes.”

“But that is likely to be one of the few times they appear together. Instead, Mr. Obama will be on his own, cutting a path across white suburbs in the Midwest and Rust Belt and spending time in African-American communities in Mid-Atlantic States like North Carolina and Virginia. The president will reach out to independents and others in New Hampshire and Iowa, and rally young people, Hispanics and Asian-Americans in competitive states like Colorado, Florida and Nevada.”

Politico on why Obama waited to endorse until now:

Sitting presidents often endorse their favorites much earlier in the primary process. But Obama and his team deferred an announcement, a half dozen top officials close to the 2008 rivals told POLITICO, to protect the president — and Clinton — from a backlash born of belief that the election was rigged.

It was a characteristically cool political calculation: Loyalty was a powerful motive to jump sooner, but preserving Obama’s credibility with rebellious progressives was even more important.

“It’s hard to be the president who is elected in the strength of a movement and then throw yourself on the tracks to stop a movement candidate,” said former Obama adviser David Axelrod of his former boss’ strained but cordial relationship with Bernie Sanders.

“The president, by hanging back, ultimately did her a service,” he added. “He was cross-pressured. He has a lot of affection for her, but he recognized that Bernie had a movement behind him. If he had jumped too soon, he would have just reinforced the notion that the establishment was conspiring — and his goal was to be an honest broker who reknit the progressive movement back together.”

Elizabeth Drew: “It’s by now clear that the presidential election of 2016 is something larger than and apart from just another quadrennial contest for the highest office; it’s a national crisis. The crisis will last as long as there’s a possibility that someone totally unsuited for that office could win it. As a potential president, Donald Trump presents us with dilemmas and difficulties we’ve never faced before: his behavior is so out of line with what’s expected, and yet we don’t know what lies at the core of that behavior.”

“It’s one thing to say, as numerous people now have, that Trump doesn’t have the temperament or knowledge or curiosity that are the requirements for anyone who occupies the White House. Trying to envision the candidate in the Oval Office and asking whether he belongs there wasn’t required in any other presidential election in modern history.”

First Read: “Here’s a thought experiment: Imagine if Marco Rubio, not Donald Trump, were the Republican Party’s presumptive presidential nominee. There would be considerable more attention to the Hillary email story, which still hasn’t gone away. We’d be highlighting how Bernie Sanders still hasn’t quit his race, creating a fissure inside the party. And we’d be fixated on Clinton’s all-time low favorability numbers. Instead, the current stories are Trump attacking a federal judge, how the Republican Party is truly divided over its presumptive nominee… and Trump having even worse favorability numbers than Clinton.”

“Bottom line: This 2016 presidential race could have been a referendum on Clinton and the Obama White House, even with the president’s 50%-plus approval rating. Instead, it has turned into a referendum on Trump.”

Paul Waldman makes the case for a Warren VP pick and highlights the Massachusetts law that may make her leaving her Senate seat less risky for Democrats:

For a long time, those in the know would tell you that as much as liberal Democrats would love to have Warren on the ticket in November, it just wasn’t in the cards (I made the argument myself). The cautious Clinton wouldn’t risk an all-female ticket, the two don’t have much of a personal relationship, and Warren doesn’t have foreign policy or national security experience, among other reasons. But the clamor for Warren is rising, and it’s still possible Clinton just might pick her. […]

Even if it’s not critical that Clinton take concrete steps to win over Bernie Sanders’ supporters (despite what some of the more vocal ones are saying now, the overwhelming majority will be with her), there’s little doubt that naming Warren as her running mate would make most Democrats beside themselves with glee. She’s one of the most effective advocates for progressive ideas in politics today, and she would make a historic campaign even more so, even if we have no idea whether an all-female ticket would lose additional votes because of sexism over and above what would be lost by having Clinton as the nominee.

Eric Levitz explains the main reasons Warren would be hesitant to leave the Senate:

Warren would almost certainly have less freedom to openly contest White House policy. During the Obama years, Warren has galvanized opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the appointment of Larry Summers to the Federal Reserve, and Obama’s proposal to cut Social Security benefits by tying increases to the Chained Consumer Price Index

While Clinton currently claims to oppose the TPP, she championed the trade agreement while secretary of State. And Warren’s decision to stay on the sidelines of the Democratic primary was likely informed by her ideological affinity for Bernie Sanders’s platform. Thus, it seems likely that Warren would find herself to the left of a Clinton administration about as frequently as she found herself to the left of Obama’s. Unless Clinton is willing to give her second-in-command veto power over her economic agenda, a Warren pick might muzzle one of progressive Democrats’ most powerful voices.

And as you see above, Obama is still pushing TPP in his Jimmy Fallon appearance. I think the smart move would be for Clinton to ask Warren how she would revise or change the TPP, and then adopt that position.

Ed Kilgore:

Now some new general election polls are coming out, and sure enough, Clinton’s showing some momentum. A new Reuters/Ipsos survey has her up by eight points; IDB/TIPP has her up five. Even Rasmussen — which had Trump leading by five points in mid-May — now has Clinton leading by four. And all these results are occurring before it sinks in that Clinton has now locked up her nomination and made history. What’s more, on Thursday afternoon Fox News came out with a survey showing a six-point swing from a three-point Trump lead in May to a three-point HRC lead now.

These findings, like the earlier pro-Trump numbers, could be little more than statistical noise. But as a mood-changers they could work wonders, as the whole hep political world holds its collective breath to see if Trump’s apparent transformation into just another Republican nominee who had as good a chance of victory as Mitt Romney four years ago was a mirage.