Monday Open Thread [8.1.16]
“There used to be some things that were sacred in American politics, that you don’t do, like criticizing the parents of a fallen soldier, even if they criticize you. If you’re going to be leader of the free world, you have to be able to accept criticism, and Mr. Trump can’t.”
— Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), quoted by the New York Times, adding that “unacceptable” doesn’t even begin to describe Donald Trump’s behavior.
NATIONAL–PRESIDENT–RABA Research—Clinton 46, Trump 31, Johnson 7, Stein 2
NATIONAL–PRESIDENT–PPP–Clinton 46, Trump 41, Johnson 6, Stein 2
NATIONAL–PRESIDENT–Reuters/Ipsos–Clinton 40, Trump 35
CALIFORNIA–PRESIDENT–PPIC–Clinton 46, Trump 30, Johnson 7, Stein 6
MISSOURI–PRESIDENT–St. Louis Post-Dispatch–Clinton 41, Trump 40, Johnson 9, Stein 1
PENNSYLVANIA–PRESIDENT–Suffolk University–Clinton 46, Trump 37, Johnson 5, Stein 3
DELAWARE–PRESIDENT–News Journal/PublicMind–Clinton 42, Trump 32
From the PPP poll, it seems the DNC repaired Hillary’s favorability rating by 9 points:
Clinton’s net favorability improved by 9 points over the last month. She’s still not popular, with a -6 net favorability at 45/51, but it’s a good deal better than the -15 spread she had at 39/54 a month ago. The gains are particularly attributable to Democrats increasing in their enthusiasm for her, going from giving her a 76/15 rating to an 83/12 one. Trump, on the other hand, is at a -22 net favorability with 36% of voters seeing him favorably to 58% with a negative one. That’s barely changed at all from the 35/58 standing we found for him in late June.
Donald Trump was interviewed by George Stephanopoulos on ABC News:
TRUMP: Michael Bloomberg has wanted to run for president for probably as long as you have known him and guess what? He never had the guts to do it. And now I see this guy up on stage saying negative things. He knows nothing about me. He’s never been to my office. I don’t know him well.
STEPHANOPOULOS; You played golf together.
TRUMP: Maybe once.
STEPHANOPOULOS: Here’s what he hit you on in the speech….
TRUMP: And I hit the ball a lot longer, and a lot better.
My God, what a petulant small little man.
Ezra Klein says his attack on a grieving Gold Star Father and Mother is an example of Donald Trump’s greatest weakness:
Trump is easily baited. He couldn’t swallow his hurt and anger over the Khan’s speech, he had to lash out, to fight back, to smear them in response. This doesn’t make sense if you understand the goal of an election as getting elected, but it does make sense if you understand the goal of an election as playing out an endless series of dominance games.
This is a point TPM’s Josh Marshall has repeatedly made about Trump. A need for dominance, Marshall writes, “is the key to understanding virtually everything Trump does. Whatever is actually happening he tries to refashion it into a dominance ritual or at least will not engage before performing one. You saw that in those numerous examples where he said he would participate in a debate but only after the other party wrote a major check to charity. It’s primal.”
The Khans’ speech hurt Trump. He watched it. He read the coverage of it. He felt slighted, inferior, humiliated. And so he needed to rebalance the scales. He needed to regain his dominance. He seems confused that anyone faults him for this — isn’t it obvious that they attacked him, and so he should get to attack them back?
This is the logic of a schoolyard bully, which Trump is. But it’s a dangerous mindset for a president.
Putting Trump in the Oval Office would open a huge vulnerability in our national security. It’s much easier to bait Trump than it is to attack the United States. Our enemies’ aim is often to provoke us into overreacting and overcommitting abroad because they can’t hope to seriously hurt us here. With Trump in control of the armed forces, the path to manipulating us into that kind of overreaction would be clear.
[Hillary] stood up with scorn, wit, and no-holds-barred verbal fisticuffs to Donald Trump. The Trump section of her speech makes you long for the debates, not least because she indicated that one of her implicit goals is to provoke him into losing his cool onstage. Never in the history of presidential politics in the age of television have there been two major-party contenders so antithetical in every way, from their worldviews to their intellects to their psyches to their rhetorical styles to, of course, their genders. What voter would not watch?
The speech also reflected just how much an impact Bernie Sanders has had since his movement caught fire. Clinton, who at her worse equivocates on tough issues or dodges them altogether, took unequivocally progressive stands on causes that Sanders advanced in the primary, and even sounded somewhat convincing railing against the one-percenters in her own donor camp.
Various commentators, including Joe Klein and Jonathan Chait, have noted that the Democratic convention is much less about what’s wrong with America, whether that’s rising income inequality or the climate crisis or police violence or our foreign policies, than it is about the progress we’ve made during the Obama administration and more generally over the last century or so.
Part of this is simply that Donald Trump isn’t your typical Republican and there’s a huge opening and also a basic responsibility to disqualify him from holding the highest office in the land. But part of it is that the Obama administration really has been enormously successful and the Democratic Party has become much more ideologically coherent during his presidency.
The progressive coalition is feeling confident, not least because they’re celebrating the nomination of a woman as a major party candidate. The LGBT community has enjoyed a stunning string of successes in the Obama years. People of color have never had more of a presence on the stage, nor have they ever had their concerns more seriously respected in the platform or in the mouths of top Democrats. Tim Kaine didn’t worry about who he’d alienate by speaking Spanish during his speech last night. Even the ideological left represented by Sanders has never been as influential, as seen by the ways the Clinton campaign has bent over backwards to accommodate them and adopt chunks of their agenda as their own.
Democrats are clearly eager to take the risk, careful threading a rhetorical needle. The party believes there are plenty of Americans who may ordinarily be inclined to support the Republican ticket, but who are looking for an excuse not to under the circumstances.
And with that comes an opportunity. With his unhinged extremism, Trump has created an ideological chasm, making it possible for Clinton and her convention to present ideas that appeal to Bernie Sanders and his supporters, while presenting themes and emotions that reassure centrists and Trump’s Republican skeptics.
Kevin Baker and Jack Hitt at the New Republic:
On its last night, the Democratic convention came together, as it so often does, in a celebration of diversity. This is the party that looks like America, and it has been for a long time. This year it came off with an almost runaway momentum.
The Reverend William Barber’s magnificent, rolling cadences, and then speeches from the survivors of slain police officers sought to unify a country divided by racial tensions. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar showed how comfortable Democrats have become as the party of America’s diversity, introducing himself as “Michael Jordan” because Donald Trump “wouldn’t know the difference.” He introduced a Muslim-American father, who movingly eulogized his son, Capt. Humayun Khan, who gave his life for his country in Iraq. At one point he pulled out a pocket copy of the U.S. Constitution to school Donald Trump. “You have sacrificed nothing,” Khan reminded the Republican draft-dodger. “And no one.” A retired Marine general, John Allen, literally marched onto the stage to a martial drumbeat, surrounded by a phalanx of incredibly diverse veterans, one even wearing a Sikh turban, and thundered out a vow of victory over ISIS, while the crowd went wild, waving American flags and chanting, “USA!”
This display of patriotism, predictably, brought about a Berner retort of “No more war!”—even through the following testimony of Captain Florent Groberg, as he described how he won his Medal of Honor and lost part of a leg, saving his fellow soldiers. But it was too late. The crowd had turned, buoying a determined, well-delivered, even eloquent acceptance speech by Hillary. There were intermittent chants and shouts even then, but the Democrats were off and running out of Philly, having out-hustled the outraged and the outrageous, at least for now.
We now have 4 polls with data from after the Dem convention. Heres the trend for all of July https://t.co/q24YnhQ7Nl pic.twitter.com/7MFGBdQ3Yk
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) July 31, 2016
Every word of @SenatorReid’s statement is unobjectionable. There is no valid, on-the-level rebuttal. pic.twitter.com/fuC0uWbNgP
— Brian Beutler (@brianbeutler) July 31, 2016
This is how we will get a massive blue wave that sweeps all Republicans from office: if the GOP doesn’t reject Trump when it is clear he must be rejected.
This–This is how we will get a massive blue wave that sweeps all Republicans from office is sort of the problem.
As we know from Delaware (and Mexico), single-party democracies do not work particularly well.
Exactly, would we be any worse off if Castle was there instead of the dem corporate team?
Single party majority is working pretty well in California and Minnesota.
It’s not so much the party as it is a willingness to take the tough decisions to govern well
Delaware is a bad example. Markell, Carper, Coons, and Carney are all moderate republicans.
Single party majority is working pretty well in California and Minnesota.
In some ways, possibly. Don’t know anything about Minnesota, but I know that California schools are an ungodly mess that has needed to be fixed for at least 15 years, and nobody’s done shit to fix them.
Likewise, California’s one-party rulers have created a “top two” election system intended to eliminate ballot access for other parties. That’s what you get.
Delaware is a bad example. Markell, Carper, Coons, and Carney are all moderate republicans.
Delaware is a perfect example of what happens when there is no viable second party.
Moreover, it’s not so much them you should be worrying about as Karen Weldin Stewart, Dennis Williams, Pete Schwarzkopf and the legions of corrupt Democrats who get in and stay in because all they have to do is win primaries as down-ticket Dems.
@Steve: A blue-wave election will hardly turn this country into a single-party monopoly. Even in a disaster scenario, the GOP will likely retain control of the House, but even if it doesn’t it will be close enough that compromise will be necessary. Even if the Senate flips, the Democrats won’t reach 60 seats.
So while almost everything you say is definitely true, and the rest probably is, I don’t see how it has any relevance at all on the national level.
I expect you will rejoice when Gary Johnson tops 10% of the total vote, as he likely will.
We have to steer hard left for a while to get back to the center.
Here’s an illustration of what Prof. Newton is talking about, from WDEL’s indomitable Amy Cherry:
http://www.wdel.com/story/76426-video-e-mails-show-insider-access-questionable-appraisal-in-controversial-new-castle-county-farmland-deal
Short version: emails detail Gordon administration corruption.
I would hope Democrats keep the pressure on Trump, no matter how lopsided the polls become, and in football parlance make it a 70 – 7 game… By doing so, all up and down candidates can point to their Republican opponents and make them say in public that they’ll support TRUMP if they get elected, and either paint their Republican candidate as a loser, or force them to repudiate Trump in public, (called the Copeland feint) to save their ass.
This could be the greatest thing in democracy we’ll ever see in our lifetimes…. (it took a Great Depression to align all America towards good, the last time.)
If I were Steve Newton, I would start a new party from scratch for a trial run in 2 years, and if it flies, a run in 4… if we are to have a two party system, as this republican primary well shows, it will have to be another party other than the REPUBLICANS… Their party is flat out broken.. decrepit… bankrupt… a disaster… and they’ve been working on fixing it for the past 10 years (beginning 2006) and this is the best they can do. Any protests contrary to my statement by conservative defenders have to address how then, could they have elected Donald Trump as their candidate??? No, we need a brand new competitive party started from scratch…
Bottom line it is hard to start a new party when there is no real need… I believe the case can now be made that there is indeed, a new need….
Ok, one more jot… (and it’s funny to give Republican types advice on a Democratic blog, but it helps all America to do so, and therefore I do it.. 🙂 )
I’d actually vote for Republicans if they said the following:
They’d reduce global warming.
They’d tax the fvck out of our top one percent.
They’d offer interest free loans to small businesses.
They’d write off all student debt and create free tuition at public schools.
They’d offer the ability to completely write off 100% of physical capital costs each year off their taxes.
They’d set a target to reduce the deficit (through additional higher taxes on the top 1%) and then do it. (very interesting idea; like a Medicare payroll deduction of 5% but only on all incomes over $40 million (personal and corporate) which goes solely towards debt reduction and at some future point, can then be rescinded.)
But of course… they won’t.. Which is why we need to lose this party which can no longer make America great again…
And now it’s Trump vs. the VFW:
http://www.cnn.com/2016/08/01/politics/gold-star-families-trump-apology/index.html
I don’t see how Trump digs himself out of this.
@k “I would hope Democrats keep the pressure on Trump, no matter how lopsided the polls become, and in football parlance make it a 70 – 7 game…”
If they want to do that, they need to go after Trump’s past in a way that haven’t yet been willing to.
1. His rape of a 13-year old in 1994. The evidence is credible. Affidavits have been filed. The details are stunning. It could be made into a huge story. Pay for an interview. Make a big deal out of it and then start with the “Lock him up! Lock him up!”
2. His bribe of a doctor to get a medical draft deferment in 1968. He can’t even remember which foot was the problem… How is that believable??? Why not swiftboat him on this? Paint him as blatantly anti-military from the start.
3. His taxes. He’s so eager to leak Hillary’s private information. Why not leak his taxes? It will be damning, and what can the leak cheerleader say about it??
4. Expose his true relationship with Russia. His recent comments on Ukraine have been quite dishonest. He’s lied about his relationship with Putin.
When he bought that place in Florida for $40 million and then resold it to a Russian for $100 million. Was that a $60 million payoff of sorts?? Was that Putin tainted money?
In other words, go after him in an impolitic manner. It’s still less than the tactics that GOP has been using against Hillary with lies that slide so easily off their tongues.
“And now it’s Trump vs. the VFW”
Trump will attack the VFW by this evening.
I heard the VFW is liberal biased
@Anonymous
I expect you will rejoice when Gary Johnson tops 10% of the total vote, as he likely will.
I will rejoice, but probably not for the reasons you expect. I’ve pretty much gotten out of the game of working on libertarian electoral politics–at least in Delaware I can be much more effective if I just work on the issues that interest me and don’t play party politics.
But Johnson breaking double figures is primarily dependent on him (a) getting into the debates; and (b) doing credibly enough to keep interest and at least some money flowing. I have my doubts that he will end up on the stage–the cut-off is 15 August and given the way polling is going I doubt seriously he will hit 15% in five national polls. That leaves it up to one of the major candidates to push for his inclusion, and it would have to be Hillary, who has more to gain from Johnson’s participation than Trump.
If he gets into the debates, that’s another issue: I like Gary, but he’s not a seasoned, sound-bite debater–he goes off the cuff too much and if the mood strikes him he can come across as weird instead of a former GOP two-term governor. But you never know.
If he gets into the debates, does credibly, he could get 10% and he could conceivably be in the running to win Utah or New Mexico, which could create interesting times if Secretary Clinton is not landsliding. On the other hand, if he doesn’t get into the debates you are probably looking at 3% in the final analysis, which would be three times as good as any libertarian has ever done, but ultimately unimpressive.
@Steve: Possibly because I have no dog in the fight, I think Johnson is guaranteed 5%. I have personally met more than a score of local Republicans who will not cast a vote for Trump no matter what. Many of the same will resist voting for Clinton. Whether a hard-core libertarian would scare these folks I don’t know, but Johnson is a far better ambassador than Rand Paul. You’re right about the need for exposure, but if he gets into the debates (if they have debates) he might approach 15% if he avoids stressing pot legalization.
I also know quite a few Mormons, and they despise Trump like I’ve never heard them despise a Republican (naturally it’s his personal life, not his business practices, that disgust them). No candidate will get 50% in Utah, and Trump could come in third.
“When he bought that place in Florida for $40 million and then resold it to a Russian for $100 million. Was that a $60 million payoff of sorts??”
Sorta like Joe Biden’s home purchases and sales, with the decimal points moved.
@anon: Johnson is a far better ambassador than Rand Paul.
If I could just get the Paul people to realize that…
Changing some of the budgetary rules in California so that a simple majority could pass a budget meant that California’s government has had a chance to do its job. And it took care of the last of the recessionary BS and is in a position to re-fund the public college system. So getting the GOP out of the position of being able to obstruct the state’s operation meant that they’ve been able to see some progress. But it was important to want to govern and important to not have to live with folks dictating terms because they could stop the train.
ALL laws requiring supermajorities to pass tax increases are allowing a minority of members to dictate policy. A truly democratic republic would never allow it. Luckily, we’re an oligarchy.
cassandra, my point is a little different, and does not rely on the short-term improvements you mentioned. One-party systems often start out that way, but let’s check in a few years down the road to see what happens.
Changing the rules to a “top two” primary system that allow the Democrats to place two Democrats in the General is not a good idea.
It looks like the NYTimes is working on my #2 above…
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/02/us/politics/donald-trump-draft-record.html
They all but come out and say he flat-out lied.
Best comment by M. Lebow:
“The condition he had was connectionitis, a familial disease that exempts affluent young men from being drafted every time. But it doesn’t keep them from wanting to send other, less-connected young men off to war, however.”
The top two in the CA system puts the top two vote getters on a general ballot. It also exposes the weaknesses of the GOP bench in that state. If you can’t get enough votes to get a candidate on a General ballot, then you have some work to do.
So if you are in Wilmington, you are running as a D, but winking at GOP voters to make sure they know you are one of them or you are doing the hard work of party building in the city. Other than the city’s Republican Club, there is little outreach, voter registration, or even campaigning by the GOP.