Saturday Open Thread, June 18, 2016

Politico: “By reserving time in key swing states — at least Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, and Virginia — the Clinton camp is sending an unmistakable message to the presumptive GOP nominee that it intends to press into traditionally Republican territory without spending too much time worrying about defending traditionally Democratic destinations where Trump insists he will compete, said a handful of high-level Democrats close to the Clinton effort.”

Reena Flores reports at cbsnews.com that “In the wake of the nation’s deadliest mass shooting in Orlando, Florida, a new CBS News poll has found that a majority of Americans now support a nationwide ban on assault weapons…The survey, conducted in the days following the massacre at a popular Orlando gay night club, shows 57 percent of Americans now favor such a ban. That’s up from 44 percent in December, when the question was last asked in CBS News polling. Now, 38 percent of respondents oppose the legislation, compared to the 50 percent who opposed it in December.”

Mark Murray on Bernie:

But there are still two ways in which Sanders succeeded. One, he performed better than anyone – probably including himself – ever expected, giving Clinton a truly competitive race.

Two, he’s already pushed Clinton and the Democratic Party to the left. Take Clinton opposing the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement early in the primary season, despite her earlier work as secretary of state laying the groundwork for the accord. Or Clinton saying she’d sign a $15-per hour minimum wage bill into law, even though she previously called for $12 an hour. Or President Obama stating he’d expand Social Security benefits.

Yet after those victories, after the final primary results and after Clinton became the party’s presumptive presidential nominee, Sanders still marches on. He hasn’t conceded to Clinton or endorsed her. And on Tuesday, Sanders made a series of demands, including:

1. New leadership inside the Democratic National Committee (presumably replacing DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz);
2. The most progressive Democratic platform in history;
3. More open primaries;
4. And eliminating superdelegates in the Democratic nominating system.

But the demands on DNC leadership, open primaries and superdelegates seem small. Why call for reforms to processes that you and your supporters deem unfair (rightly or wrongly), while not touching other processes (the caucuses) that benefited you?

Not conceding to Clinton appears even smaller, especially after she became the first female to become the presumptive presidential nominee of a major political party.

The failure to endorse or at the very least concede on Thursday was a mistake. Bernie is losing leverage rapidly by the day and he has overplayed his hand. It turns out that Bernie Sanders is not a very good tactical politician, but not many all or nothing purists are.

Greg Sargent tells me to shut it:

Other Democrats argue the same. As one puts it, Sanders’ leverage is “dissipating every day.” I’m having a lot of trouble getting worked up over this.

It is true, as Matthew Yglesias says, that Sanders’s speech did contain some elements that legitimately annoyed Democratic leaders. Sanders did suggest that only he and his movement can ensure that the Democratic Party becomes a “party of working people” and “not just wealthy campaign contributors,” and a party with the “courage” to take on special interests, as if lots and lots of Democrats have not been working incredibly hard for years to pass things like Obamacare and Dodd-Frank, and to defend Obama’s actions on climate change. This is of a piece with Sanders’ broader tendency to be too dismissive of the gains of the Obama years, and too simplistic in his accounting for why Democrats did not accomplish more than they did.

On the other hand, Sanders did accomplish a great deal in the last year. If he wants a little time to try to translate that achievement into some form of lasting influence, well, so what?

Rick Klein: “Leave it to this candidate, and leave it to this political year, to create a new variety of candidacy. After his speech to supporters Thursday night, Bernie Sanders is still an active candidate for president. But that doesn’t mean he’s engaging in any campaign activity. He stated clearly that he wants to defeat Donald Trump. But, since he declined to endorse someone (can’t imagine who) actually running against him in the general election, he’s not yet saying how he wants to accomplish that.”

“The broad goals of his ‘political revolution’ – fighting for the working class, galvanizing a generation, even reforming the Democratic Party – might be things that Hillary Clinton and her team can get behind. But coming from a candidate who was beaten by Clinton in every measurable way – and, if the reminder is needed, never wanted to even be a Democrat until a year ago – Sanders is in danger of losing the leverage he accumulated relatively fast. The party would not countenance Clinton doing what Sanders is now; that’s an undeniable fact, as anyone who remembers 2008 would know. The question now becomes how long Sanders can keep his revolution going without wearing out his welcome.”

Sahil Kapur: Sanders’ long refusal to endorse Clinton hurts his leverage.

In his NYT op-ed “Sanders, the Windows 95 of Progressive Politics?,” Mark Schmitt, director of the political reform program at New America, criticizes the economic proposals of Sen Bernie Sanders, but acknowledges “Mr. Sanders’s achievement has been to show the leadership of his recently adopted party that Democrats and many independents under 35 — that is, those who weren’t adults during Bill Clinton’s administration — are eager for a full-throated progressive agenda and are unafraid of backlash. While Democrats in the 1990s — notably Bill and Hillary Clinton — worried about the party’s mistakes of the 1970s, many in this decade worry more about triangulation and the cautious politics of the 1990s.”

“Hillary Clinton’s campaign isn’t considering primary rival Bernie Sanders as her running mate, but is actively looking at Sen. Elizabeth Warren, whose populist politics line up closely with Mr. Sanders,” the Wall Street Journal reports.

“The vetting remains in its early stages. So far, potential candidates have been scrutinized using publicly available information. The Clinton team hasn’t asked anyone to submit tax returns or other personal information.”

Other prospective candidates: Labor Secretary Tom Perez, HUD Secretary Julián Castro; Sens. Tim Kaine (D-VA), Sherrod Brown (D-OH) and Cory Booker (D-NJ), Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, and Reps. Xavier Becerra (D-CA) and Tim Ryan (D-OH).

The race is between Warren, Kaine and Becerra.

Ryan Cooper:

This election is developing something of a signature: Each and every day, Donald Trump says or does something horrible. Democrats have their squabbles, to be sure, but have now basically settled into a normal pattern. The final primary vote was completed on Tuesday, and now Hillary Clinton is laying the groundwork for what will undoubtedly be a very boring and cautious campaign.

Trump, by contrast, is constantly getting massive attention for being a deluded, ignorant, racist maniac. He combines an unprecedented facility to manipulate the modern media environment with gutter bigotry and a complete lack of policy knowledge. If elected, he would almost certainly displace Andrew Johnson as the worst president in American history.

Vanity Fair: “Trump is indeed considering creating his own media business, built on the audience that has supported him thus far in his bid to become the next president of the United States. According to several people briefed on the discussions, the presumptive Republican nominee is examining the opportunity presented by the ‘audience’ currently supporting him. He has also discussed the possibility of launching a ‘mini-media conglomerate’ outside of his existing TV-production business, Trump Productions LLC.”

“He has, according to one of these people, enlisted the consultation of his daughter Ivanka Trump and son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who owns the The New York Observer. Trump’s rationale, according to this person, is that, ‘win or lose, we are onto something here. We’ve triggered a base of the population that hasn’t had a voice in a long time.’”

Paul Waldman:

Journalists have begun a debate amongst themselves and with their audiences about the best way to cover Donald Trump, and there’s an assumption running through that debate that I want to challenge. Many seem to believe that the kind of unvarnished coverage Trump has received, particularly on cable news, is a great and undeserved favor the media have done him.

But is that really true? Might it be that the most compelling case against Donald Trump is Donald Trump himself?

Let’s start with this. It’s fair to say that in the last couple of days, Trump’s reaction to the Orlando massacre got lots of media attention, and President Obama’s reaction to Trump’s reaction got even more. Hillary Clinton’s reaction got relatively less attention. But a new CBS poll released today showed that when people were asked whether they approved of how the three responded, the differences were striking. If we take the net approval (percentage approving minus percentage disapproving), Obama came out at plus 10 (44-34), Clinton was at plus 2 (36-34), and Trump was at minus 26 (25-51).

So Trump got plenty of coverage for his response, but it only served to turn Americans off.

This “anonymous” official quoted by Politico sure sounds like Donald Trump:

The Trump campaign would not comment on the record about its relationship with the RNC. One Trump Tower official called it “a great relationship. I work well with everybody over there, and I haven’t heard of anyone who doesn’t have a great relationship with them.

“With congressional leaders once again at a stalemate over how to respond to a mass shooting, the Senate’s most moderate Republican, Susan Collins of Maine, is developing a compromise measure that would prevent some terrorism suspects from purchasing weapons, while sidestepping partisan flash points that have doomed similar legislation in the past and threaten to do so again next week,” the New York Times reports.

“The Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky, has already scheduled votes for Monday on four proposals — two sponsored by Republicans and two by Democrats — but all four are expected to fail in a nearly identical replay of votes last December after the attack in San Bernardino, Calif.”

Donald Trump’s campaign schedule “is being driven by his fund-raising needs, prompting him to appear in heavily Republican states like Georgia and Texas and diverting his attention from battlegrounds where Hillary Clinton is spending her time,” the New York Times reports. “Mr. Trump’s aides, scrambling to raise money to compete against Mrs. Clinton’s cash juggernaut and extensive donor network, have scheduled fund-raisers in places like Georgia, North Carolina and Texas this week.”

We are witnessing the most incompetent Presidential campaign in all history.

At a House conference meeting, Rep. Rick Allen (R-GA) read from a Bible verse that calls for death for homosexuals shortly before the chamber voted to reject a spending bill that included an amendment barring discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity, Roll Call reports.

“Passages in the verses refer to homosexuality and the penalty for homosexual behavior. ‘And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompense of their error which was meet,’ reads Romans 1:27, which Allen read, according to his office.

Republicans only care about the gays when they want to exploit their deaths for their own benefit.

“Lawyers for presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump are intensifying their drive to make sure the public doesn’t see videos of Trump’s recent testimony in connection with class-action fraud lawsuits over his Trump University real estate seminar program,” Politico reports.

“In a court filing late Wednesday night, Trump’s attorneys argued explicitly for the first time that the deposition videos should be kept under wraps because they would become weapons in the ongoing presidential contest.”

Amy Walter: “To those GOPers still thinking/hoping that Trump will ‘get the message’ and suddenly become a more focused and disciplined candidate, I have a nice bridge in Brooklyn to sell you. Here’s the deal, Trump is not going to change. Ever. This is the candidate who won the primaries. This is the candidate you are going to nominate in July. And, this is the candidate who you will have to decide to support or not in November. There’s simply no other option.”