Delaware Liberal

Thursday Open Thread [7.14.16]

Delaware Dem

The Huffington Post “attempted to call the contact phone numbers for the Trump campaign in all 50 states. A few of the state operations had no websites or no numbers listed. Many of the other numbers didn’t work. When we left voicemails, we didn’t get callbacks.”

“On only six occasions did someone actually answer the phone. And in several of those instances, the person who picked up explained that a physical office would be opened up only after the convention.”

Ezra Klein has a great and lengthy interview with Hillary Clinton that you should check out. The full interview is here. His accompanying piece, called Understanding Hillary, tackles the Hillary Gap, which I have observed myself. The Hillary Gap is the distance between the Hillary you seen in public, and the Hillary seen when the press is not around.

This is an effort to answer a question I’ve been struggling with since at least 2008: Why is the Hillary Clinton described to me by her staff, her colleagues, and even her foes so different from the one I see on the campaign trail?

I’ve come to call it “the Gap.” There is the Hillary Clinton I watch on the nightly news and that I read described in the press. She is careful, calculated, cautious. Her speeches can sound like executive summaries from a committee report, the product of too many authors, too many voices, and too much fear of offense.

The Iraq War mars her record, and the private email server and the Goldman Sachs paydays frustrate even her admirers. Polls show most Americans doubt her basic honesty. Pundits write columns with headlines like “Why Is Clinton Disliked?”

And then there is the Hillary Clinton described to me by people who have worked with her, people I admire, people who understand Washington in ways I never will. Their Hillary Clinton is spoken of in superlatives: brilliant, funny, thoughtful, effective. She inspires a rare loyalty in ex-staff, and an unusual protectiveness even among former foes.

Obama administration officials, up to and including the president, badly want to see her win — there is something in the way she acted after the election, in the soldier she became and the colleague she showed herself to be, that has curdled the pride they felt in winning the 2008 primary into something close to guilt.

This is the Gap I set out to understand. While reporting this story, I spoke to dozens of people who have worked with Clinton in every stage of her career, going back to her time in the Arkansas Governor’s Mansion. Every single one acknowledged its existence. Many were frustrated and confused by it.

So, too, is Clinton herself.

Josh Marshall:

This isn’t getting a lot of attention. But it should. Everybody took note when Donald Trump repeatedly claimed that American Muslims across the river in New Jersey celebrated and cheered as the Twin Towers fell on 9/11 – an entirely fabricated claim. Last night on Bill O’Reilly’s show and then separately at a rally in Westfield, Indiana he did something very similar and in so doing cemented his status an impulsive propagator of race-hatred and violence.

The details of the rapid-fire fulmination are important. So let’s look at them closely.

Trump claimed that people – “some people” – called for a moment of silence for mass killer Micah Johnson, the now deceased mass shooter who killed five police officers in Dallas on Thursday night. There is no evidence this ever happened. Searches of the web and social media showed no evidence. Even Trump’s campaign co-chair said today that he can’t come up with any evidence that it happened. As in the case of the celebrations over the fall of the twin towers, even to say there’s ‘no evidence’ understates the matter. This didn’t happen. Trump made it up. […]

A would-be strong man, an authoritarian personality, isn’t just against disorder and violence. They need disorder and violence. That is their raison d’etre, it is the problem that they are purportedly there to solve. The point bears repeating: authoritarian figures require violence and disorder. Look at the language. “11 cities potentially in a blow up stage” .. “Anger. Hatred. Hatred! Started by a maniac!” … “And some people ask for a moment of silence for him. For the killer.”

At the risk of invoking Godwin’s Law, if you translate the German, the febrile and agitated language of ‘hatred’, ‘anger’, ‘maniac’ … this is the kind of florid and incendiary language Adolf Hitler used in many of his speeches. Note too the actual progression of what Trump said: “Marches all over the United States – and tough marches. Anger. Hatred. Hatred! Started by a maniac!”

Donald Trump “is seeking $10 million in damages from a former senior campaign consultant, Sam Nunberg, alleging that Nunberg leaked confidential information to reporters in violation of a nondisclosure agreement,” the AP reports.

In a court filing, Nunberg accuses Trump of trying to silence him “in a misguided attempt to cover up media coverage of an apparent affair” between senior campaign staffers.

Yeah, this is normal. A Presidential candidate suing an aide for 10 million. How does he even come up with that figure?



James Hohmann says Pence is practically begging to be VP: “One of the bigger knocks on Mike Pence when he was in the House, whispered privately among some leading lights of the conservative movement, was that he comes across as inauthentic and a little phony. As a former radio host, he still sometimes talks with a bit of an affect and he’s prone to hyperbole. Lavishing over-the-top praise on Donald Trump over recent days in an effort to become his running-mate will only cement this perception.”

“For example, Pence declared last night that, ‘Trump understands the frustrations and the hopes of the American people like no other American leader in my lifetime since Ronald Reagan.’ This is a laughable comment when you consider that he endorsed Ted Cruz on April 29—just 10 weeks ago!—ahead of the Indiana primary. If Pence actually believes the above to be true, why didn’t he endorse Trump then?”

“Pence risks looking desperate as he all but pleads for the job. During their joint appearance outside Indianapolis, it felt at times like the governor wants to be rescued from having to stand for reelection this November.”

Historian David McCullough, “raised in a Republican home and now aligned with no party,” told the New York Times that “the prospect of a Trump presidency so distressed him that he felt he could not remain publicly detached.”

Said McCullough: “When you think of how far we have come, and at what cost, and with what faith, to just turn it all over to this monstrous clown with a monstrous ego, with no experience, never served his country in any way — it’s just crazy. We can’t stand by and let it happen. The Republican Party shouldn’t stand by and let it happen.”

Yeah, there will be no Cornel West or Susan Sarandon or Tim Robbins speaking at the convention. But Jeff Merkley and Tulsi Gabbard and Raul Grivijia, sure.

New York Times: “Republicans moved on Tuesday toward adopting a staunchly conservative platform that takes a strict, traditionalist view of the family and child rearing, bars military women from combat, describes coal as a ‘clean’ energy source and declares pornography a ‘public health crisis.’”

“It is a platform that at times seems to channel the party’s presumptive presidential nominee, Donald J. Trump — calling to ‘destroy ISIS,’ belittling President Obama as weak and accusing his administration of inviting attacks from adversaries. But the document positions itself far to the right of Mr. Trump’s beliefs in other places — and amounts to a rightward lurch even from the party’s hard-line platform in 2012 — especially as it addresses gay men, lesbians and transgender people.”

Charles P. Pierce:

Fifty years ago, a senator from Vermont gave Lyndon B. Johnson the best advice that LBJ ever ignored. The country was just then getting waist deep in the Mekong and the gentleman from Vermont had a suggestion. “Just declare victory,” Senator George Aiken told the president, “and then get the hell out.”

If you want to know what happened on Tuesday in a high school gymnasium here, when another smart senator from Vermont endorsed the presumptive presidential nominee of the Democratic Party, keep Aiken’s advice in mind. Because what Bernie Sanders did was to declare victory and then get the hell out of the race…

And it says more than a little about HRC that she allowed Sanders to take this extended victory lap in his speech prior to endorsing her formally, and that she and her campaign allowed a vigorous debate to take place over the platform. It was both personally classy and politically shrewd—especially since she had to know that the various phrenologists and seers in the campaign press corps were going to divine every blink of an eye on the podium for some hidden conflict or deeper meaning. She was also very gracious in her remarks toward his supporters, some of whom walked out in protest before she began.

Late on Wednesday night, the New York Times revealed the lineup, which it says was confirmed by two people with direct knowledge of convention planning:

Night 1: A Benghazi focus, followed by border patrol agents and [Jamiel Shaw Sr.]. Senator [Tom] Cotton, [Rudy] Giuliani, Melania Trump, [Senator Joni] Ernst and others.

Night 2: A focus on the economy: Mr. White, president of the U.F.C.; Asa Hutchinson, the governor of Arkansas; Michael Mukasey, the former United States attorney general; Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, a vice-presidential possibility; Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader; Tiffany Trump; Donald Trump Jr. and Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin.

Night 3: [Pam Bondi, the Florida attorney general]; [Eileen Collins, the first woman to command a space shuttle mission]; Newt Gingrich, a former House speaker; Senator Ted Cruz of Texas; Eric Trump; [professional golfer Natalie] Gulbis; and the nominee for vice president.

Night 4: Mr. Tebow; Representative Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee; Gov. Mary Fallin of Oklahoma; Reince Priebus, the Republican National Committee chairman; Gov. Rick Scott of Florida; [Peter] Thiel; [Colony Capital’s Thomas ] Barrack; Ivanka Trump; Donald J. Trump.

Take a minute, because there’s a lot to absorb here, from Mitch McConnell’s remarks being followed by 22-year-old Tiffany Trump’s thoughts on the economy to the presence of billionaire PayPal founder Peter Thiel, who successfully funded the Hulk Hogan lawsuit to get revenge on Gawker Media. The schedule may also provide some clues about who Trump has selected as his running mate. Potential VPs Lieutenant General Michael Flynn and Newt Gingrich are named, suggesting they will not be speaking as the “nominee for vice president.” Governors Chris Christie and Mike Pence do not appear on the list, but the Times reports Trump is still inviting people and more speakers may be added.

Weirdly, House Speaker Paul Ryan is not on the list, though he told Politico he’d be delivering a speech. Also missing are several people Trump said he would invite, such as Don King, Sarah Palin, and Tom Brady.

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