Delaware Liberal

Monday Open Thread [8.29.16]

Delaware Dem

“We are going to get rid of the criminals and it’s going to happen within one hour after I take office, we start, okay?” — Donald Trump, setting high expectations for his new administration in the Washington Post.

Indeed. The man needs help.

There was news that the Republicans are already plotting their schemes to obstruct President Hillary Clinton’s plans for her first 100 days, and they plan to deny she has any mandate to govern. Jonathan Chait goes LOL, and says mandates are meaningless.

A mandate is an archaic holdover from the bygone age of weak, ideologically heterogeneous parties. Crossing the aisle was common, so if Washington believed that a president had run on a clear agenda, Congress might feel some added moral pressure to pass it. (This happened in 1981, when the Democratic-controlled House enacted Ronald Reagan’s economic program.) In other words, the mandate is a political norm, a broadly if not perfectly shared sense of how politics ought to be conducted. Like most 20th-century American political norms — “filibusters should only be used rarely,” “the president has a right to fill Supreme Court vacancies with somebody qualified and not too extreme” — it is disappearing.

The negative mandate of George W. Bush’s 2000 popular-vote defeat did not discourage him or his party from passing the largest tax cut they could; neither of Barack Obama’s clear victories gave Republicans any pause in opposing the policies he ran on.

The obsession with a mandate, in which the style and scope of a Clinton victory has crucial ramifications, complicates what is actually a simple series of binary questions. If Democrats control only the presidency next year, Clinton will direct foreign policy and implement federal regulations. If her party adds the Senate, she will also have the ability to nominate judges to open seats. If Democrats win the above plus the House of Representatives, they will be able to pass major legislation for two years (after which Republicans would almost certainly regain their House majority during the midterms). Clinton’s “mandate” is irrelevant. All that matters is the levers of power she commands.

Take over Congress. Go nuclear on the filibuster rule, eliminating all holds and requiring the Senator to stand there until they die in order to filibuster a bill. And then pass your agenda with your majority. That is how you govern in this new order. Fuck mandates. Hillary could win all 50 states and the GOP will declare her an illegitimate President because 1) she is a woman and 2) she only beat Trump.

When Heather McGhee, president of the public policy group Demos, got a question from a caller during her appearance at C-SPAN, it was not about the progressive ideals her group is known for. The question, instead, was about a racism:

I’m a white male, and I am prejudiced. And the reason it is is something I wasn’t taught, but it’s kind of something that I learned. When I open up the papers, I get very discouraged at what young black males are doing to each other and the crime rate. I understand that they live in an environment with a lot of drugs — you have to get money for drugs — and it is a deep issue that goes beyond that. But when, I have these different fears, and I don’t want my fears to come true. You know, so I try to avoid that, and I come off as being prejudiced, but I just have fears. I don’t like to be forced to like people. I like to be led to like people through example. What can I do to change? You know, to be a better American?

This is a racist I can deal with. An honest one. A racist that knows he is wrong and wants to change. McGhee thanked the caller for his honesty and question. And then she explained how all Americans of all races can help solve the subconscious racial biases that study after study have found almost all of us have:

So what can you do? Get to know black families, who are not all and not even any majority are involved in crime and gangs. Turn off the news at night, because we know … that, actually, nightly news and many media markets that have been studied actually over-represents African-American crime and under-represents crimes that happen by white people. Join a church if you are a religious person that is a black church or a church that is interracial. Start to read about the history of the African-American community in this country. Foster conversation in your family and in your neighborhood where you’re asking exactly those kinds of questions.

This fear of communities that we do not live near … We are still a very, very segregated country. Millions of white Americans live in places where they rarely see anyone of a different race. This fear and set of ideas that we only get from the worst possible news, it’s tearing us apart. And we know that in order to be — our name means the people of a nation, “Demos” — in order to be a Demos, that is united across lines of race and class and gender and age, we have to foster relationships. We have to get to know who one another actually is. And we’re always, I think, as Americans, surprised when we build relationships across race.

Politico: “His task, GOP insiders readily concede, seems close to impossible. In an interview Wednesday night, Trump’s new campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, recognized how long it may take to improve the public’s negative perceptions of the GOP nominee, likening her turnaround project to turning a tanker.”

“Trump may not have that kind of time. Early voting begins in 28 days in Minnesota and in 32 other states soon after that. And already as summer inches to its end, 90 percent of Americans say they’ve decided. For all the televised daily drama this race has provided, the final outcome itself is shaping up to be less dramatic than any presidential election since 1984.”

The Washington Post says Trump is way behind with Catholics: “Yes, the man who once feuded with the pope (how soon we forget that actually happened) is cratering among Catholics.”

“Back in 2012, GOP nominee Mitt Romney lost the Catholic vote by just 2 points, 50 percent to 48 percent. And the GOP has actually won the Catholic vote as recently as 2004 and in 5 of the last 10 presidential elections. But Trump trails among Catholics by a huge margin. A new poll from the Public Religion Research Institute released this week shows him down 23 points, 55-32.”

If you want Catholic support, it’s generally a bad idea to diss the Pope, especially the cool social justice Pope Francis that many American “cafeteria Catholics” love. Combine that with the support of white nationalists and Klansmen for Trump, and alarm bells go off in the Catholic mind. Why? Because Nazis and the KKK hate us Catholics just as much as they hate the blacks and the Jews. These Catholic numbers are going to cost him Wisconsin, Ohio and Pennsylvania.

Citing his “grandiose notion of self-worth, pathological lying, lack of empathy and remorse,” former Obama campaign chief David Plouffe called Donald Trump a “psychopath” in an interview on Meet the Press.

Said Plouffe: “I think the assessment was that Donald Trump would try and do some things to appeal to the middle of the electorate, to appeal to suburban college-educated women. He’s not. I mean, basically, we have a psychopath running for President. I mean, he meets the clinical definition, okay?”

“Emboldened by Donald Trump’s struggles in the presidential race, Democrats in Congress are laying the groundwork to expand the list of House Republicans they will target for defeat as part of an effort to slash the Republicans’ 30-seat majority and even reclaim control if Mr. Trump falls further,” the New York Times reports.

“Mr. Trump’s unpopularity, which has already undermined the party’s grip on the Senate, now threatens to imperil Republican lawmakers even in traditionally conservative districts… Democrats are particularly enticed by Mr. Trump’s dwindling support in affluent suburban areas — including those near Kansas City, Kan.; San Diego; Orlando, Fla.; and Minneapolis — where Republicans ordinarily win with ease. Mr. Trump is so disliked among college-educated voters, especially white women, that he is at risk of losing by double digits in several districts that the 2012 Republican nominee, Mitt Romney, carried comfortably.”

Leonard Pitts has read “Hillbilly Elegy”

His name doesn’t even appear in the book.

But make no mistake. “Hillbilly Elegy,” the new bestseller by J.D. Vance, is, in a very real sense, about Donald Trump. More to the point, it’s about the people who have made his unlikely run for the presidency possible.

To these folks, poverty is the family tradition — their ancestors were day laborers in the Southern slave economy, sharecroppers after that, coal miners after that, and machinists and mill workers during more recent times. Americans call them hillbillies, rednecks, or white trash. I call them neighbors, friends and family.”

In other words, Vance’s people are Trump’s base. And the book is a must-read for anyone seeking to understand Trump’s appeal. “Hillbilly Elegy” is a compelling and compassionate portrait of a people politicians seldom address and media seldom reflect.

They love Trump because he sees them.

Trump brought General Flynn and Chris Christie and a phalanx of other aides. Hillary just brought herself.



Brian Beutler says Trump has blown up the Republican’s standard racism defense.

Before Trump came along, it was black-letter law on the right that racism was an overstated problem, minor when held up against the more prevalent sin of false accusations of racism. One characteristic episode occurred in 2014 when, after losing the vice presidency, then–House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan described inner city poverty on a conservative talk radio show as the product of a “tailspin of culture … of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work, and so there is a real culture problem here that has to be dealt with.”

Liberals were quick to characterize these comments as a dog whistle, and most continue to interpret the comments that way. Ryan swore the racial tinge of his comments “never even occurred to me!” Conservatives rushed to his defense. Conservative columnist Noah Rothman called the backlash against Ryan, “a Pavlovian response lingering from a deeply divisive 2012 reelection campaign,” part of a liberal tendency “to identify and decode racial ‘dog whistles’ otherwise undetectable by the public at large.”

Trump’s racism is too overt and widely acknowledged for anyone outside the Trump entourage to deploy this argument in his defense now. But it was just as common for conservatives to play tu quoque against liberals during racial controversies, repurposing the serious language of racial inequality as a partisan brickbat. So familiar was the tactic that you could set a clock by the fixed interval between the moment a Republican found himself mired in a race scandal and the first conservative to tweet a reminder that former Ku Klux Klansman Robert Byrd was a Democrat.

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