Saturday Open Thread [7.30.16]

Josh Barro: “Many of the conservatives who watched with dismay as the Republican Party nominated Donald Trump have now watched with amazement as Democrats co-opted some of Republicans’ favorite themes at the Democratic National Convention.”

“Democrats’ thinking was clear: We’re the only political party left for grown-ups, so we’d better make sure we have something to offer voters on both sides of the aisle.”

“There was a clear choice about tone, especially on the last two days of the convention: Speakers would not mock conservatives for getting into bed with Donald Trump. They would mock Trump and make the case that conservatives should be embarrassed and ashamed that their party nominated him — and should look across the aisle at a party that shares more of their goals and values than they may have realized.”

A federal judge ruled that restrictions on early and weekend voting implemented by Wisconsin Republicans over the last five years are unconstitutional, the Madison Cap Times reports.

Meanwhile in North Carolina, a federal appeals court has struck down North Carolina’s voter identification law, holding that it was “passed with racially discriminatory intent,” Politico reports. The ruling also invalidated changes the state made in 2013 to early voting, same-day registration, out-of-precinct voting, and preregistration.

And then in Kansas:

From Kansas to North Carolina to Wisconsin, judges on Friday issued powerful rulings designed to protect the voting rights of Americans. The most crucial decision locally came in a last-minute victory for 17,500 Kansans, when Shawnee County District Judge Larry Hendricks essentially slapped down part of an overly restrictive 2013 state voter ID law. […]

The right to vote is a cornerstone of American democracy, one that Kobach and too many other Republican elected officials have been trying to chip away at the last few years. In most cases, the attacks end up imposing new requirements that are harder for older people and the poor to meet, such as getting access to birth certificates and acquiring state-approved identification forms for those who don’t own cars.

Fortunately, courts have been striking down some of these restrictive measures, and that happened regarding two other GOP-passed laws on Friday.

David Brooks: “The Sanders people have 90 percent of the Democratic Party’s passion and 95 percent of the ideas. Most Sanders people are kind- and open-hearted, but there is a core that is corrupted by moral preening, an uncompromising absolutism and a paranoid unwillingness to play by the rules of civic life.”

“But the extremist fringe that threatens to take over the Democratic Party seems less menacing than the lunatic fringe that has already taken over the Republican one.”

“This week I left the arena here each night burning with indignation at Mike Pence. I almost don’t blame Trump. He is a morally untethered, spiritually vacuous man who appears haunted by multiple personality disorders. It is the ‘sane’ and ‘reasonable’ Republicans who deserve the shame — the ones who stood silently by, or worse, while Donald Trump gave away their party’s sacred inheritance.”

Todd Purdum: “It’s fashionable to deride party platforms as passé, if not irrelevant. But as black-and-white, albeit non-binding, statements of aspiration and intent, they can still matter, perhaps seldom more than this year, when Sanders really did force Clinton to move the needle on most of the issues he cares about most.”

“That Clinton moved so far, on such core liberal policies, would have seemed inconceivable only a few months ago when Sanders began his ‘political revolution.’”

Politico: “It took Bernie Sanders quite a while to internalize the fact that he hadn’t actually beaten Clinton despite receiving 3.7 million fewer votes – but he’s been a more or less exemplary partner to Clinton as she tried to tame the Never Hillary crowd. The nascent Sanders-Clinton alliance is neither intuitive (she questioned whether or not he was even a real Democrat during the primaries) nor especially warm, but it’s proving durable enough for their mutual purposes.”

“Clinton’s aides were intent to give Sanders something Donald Trump was never willing to offer Ted Cruz – dignity and respect in defeat, a graceful exit, an evening to bask in his accomplishments. It worked. Cruz was defiant and divisive, Sanders was domesticated and uncharacteristically sentimental.”

In watching how Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton handled their intra-party rivals, Steven Waldman wonders whether she is a better deal-maker than the guy who wrote, “The Art of the Deal.”

Throughout the spring, the approach taken by the two candidates to their adversaries on the surface followed cartoon gender stereotypes – the macho man vs. peacemaking woman. But as the convention approached, the styles reversed. For all her solicitousness of Sanders, Clinton apparently drew a hard line: if you want to speak at the convention, you have to first endorse me. And he did.

Trump, by contrast, invited Cruz without having gotten that promise. It was a such an obvious error in negotiation tactics, that it seemed impossible that the author of the Art of the Deal could have done it. It led to speculation that maybe it was an elaborate ambush of Cruz. I doubt it. I think Trump just figured that Cruz had no leverage, and therefore would capitulate. Part of good deal-making is reading people. Trump has always boasted of his ability to do that but he completely misread Cruz, while Clinton acutely understood what motivated Sanders.

Watch: #KhizrKhan asks Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan to repudiate Trump. Tune in to @TheLastWord for the interview https://t.co/rtp6TJOySL

— MSNBC (@MSNBC) July 30, 2016

The Houston Chronicle issued a surprise early endorsement for Hillary Clinton:

‘Any one of Trump’s less-than-sterling qualities — his erratic temperament, his dodgy business practices, his racism, his Putin-like strongman inclinations and faux-populist demagoguery, his contempt for the rule of law, his ignorance — is enough to be disqualifying. His convention-speech comment, “I alone can fix it,” should make every American shudder. He is, we believe, a danger to the Republic.’

‘The Chronicle editorial page does not typically endorse early in an election cycle; we prefer waiting for the campaign to play out and for issues to emerge and be addressed. We make an exception in the 2016 presidential race, because the choice between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump is not merely political. It is something much more basic than party preference.’

‘An election between the Democrat Clinton and, let’s say, the Republican Jeb Bush or John Kasich or Marco Rubio, even the hyper-ideological Ted Cruz, would spark a much-needed debate about the role of government and the nation’s future, about each candidate’s experience and abilities. To choose the candidate who defeated them — fairly and decisively, we should point out — is to repudiate the most basic notions of competence and capability.’

Jonathan Chait: “Since the start of the Reagan era, American politics has revolved around a war over the role of government in the economy. The Republican Party is set apart from major conservative parties across the world in its intensely ideological rejection of the state. And, despite his past rhetorical inconsistency, Donald Trump has faithfully adopted those positions. Yet that war has been largely absent not only from the rhetoric in Cleveland, which revolved around nationalism and identity, but in Philadelphia, too. The Democratic speakers have almost entirely ignored Trump’s proposals to deregulate carbon pollution and the finance industry, lavish tax cuts on the very rich, and snatch health insurance from 20 million people.”

“This is not because Democrats lack the confidence in their ability to win an election centered on these issues. (They did it in 2012.) It is because they have chosen to reframe the election as a contest over the much larger question of the sanctity of American democracy.”

Joe Klein: “And so the crucial question for the Democrats in Philadelphia was the one posed, implicitly, by Sanders: accept reality or retreat into utopian fantasies. This is a particular problem for liberals, who dream of a better world, chockablock with better people; they tend, therefore, to be unduly optimistic about government’s potential to get things done. At its worst, this belief expresses itself in free-range griping. There are always grievances, and too often, the grievance-mongers take center stage; there is always racism and sexism and homophobia and economic inequality to rail against, and there always will be. One reason why Republicans took to wearing American flag lapel pins in the 1970s was to counter, and mock, the Democrats’ sense that the country was going to hell in a limo.”

“Now we have Trump trafficking in gloom, and the Democrats have an opportunity. The real story of the controversial opening day of their convention was not the resentment of the Sanders voters; it was that–for once–the party celebrated the progress that’s been made over the past 50 years. Before prime time, a parade of ‘other’ Americans–blacks, Latinos, gays and the disabled–took the stage and, rather than laying out micromanaged agendas (the Democratic platform did that), told stories of uplift and inclusion.”

First Read: “As soon as President Obama finished his speech here Wednesday night, it was immediately clear that Donald Trump and Republicans made a fundamental mistake by abandoning a hopeful, optimistic message in Cleveland. And Obama and the Democrats seized that message.”

Noted former George W. Bush spokesman Tony Fratto: “Watching Democrats talk about America the way Republican candidates used to talk about America.”

“Oof. Over the last seven and a half years, Republicans have criticized Obama for not believing in American exceptionalism. But last night, Obama and the Democrats owned the optimistic message about the country.”

Politico: “Obama’s preparing a major run of endorsements and campaign stops for statehouse candidates, trying to foster an Obama generation on his way out the door. He’s throwing himself into fundraising, starting Monday with an event for Clinton in Atlanta and with more events being approved weekly … The White House is beginning to plan an October filled with nearly non-stop political travel on behalf of both Clinton-whose campaign aides have in recent months expanded the list of places where they believe he could be helpful-and Senate candidates. Obama’s team is even considering doing some travel specifically on behalf of House candidates.”

The winners and losers of the last night of the Democratic convention. One of them is obviously Hillary Clinton.

[W]hen she just needs to give a speech to a gigantic national viewership, and not vibe and connect with 100 to 1,000 people in a high school gymnasium, she does pretty damn well. Her 2008 address was an unqualified success, doing an even better job than Bernie Sanders did this year of burying the primary hatchet and energizing her supporters in the crowd to support Obama.

And her speech Thursday night was similarly solid. Her delivery was strong, consistent, and confident. She wove in personal anecdotes fluidly rather than conspicuously. She alluded to Sanders at crucial moments (“Bernie Sanders and I will work together to make college tuition free for the middle class and debt-free for all!”) but had notes in there for Republicans scared of Trump as well (“I will be a president for Democrats, Republicans, and independents”).

She had to toe a careful line between shoring up the Bernie-sympathetic base and expanding her appeal to right-of-center voters alienated from an unprecedentedly terrifying Republican nominee, and she toed it well.

And I’d be remiss not to mention the sheer emotional impact of the speech, even apart from how it was delivered. The first speech as nominee of the first woman nominated by a major party was always going to be a moment. And sure enough, Clinton delivered.

Clinton was under tremendous pressure going into tonight. Trump has received his convention bump and is narrowly leading in the polls, and the consequences of his election are legitimately graver than the consequences of Republican victory in any previous election in memory. If Clinton somehow botched her convention speech, she’d never hear the end of it.

But she nailed it. The precise benefits of nailing it, polling-wise, remain to be seen, but it’s hard to imagine what a better closing speech than this would’ve looked like.