Delaware Liberal

Open Thread for Friday, September 16, 2016

Delaware Dem

Ezra Klein imagines if President Romney was running for reelection right now:

Here’s a thought experiment. What if Mitt Romney had won in 2012? What if it was his economy that was seeing sub-5 percent unemployment, falling poverty, and the largest median wage gains since the Census Bureau began keeping records?

There would be parades in the streets. President Romney would be hailed as the second coming of Ronald Reagan – or maybe even better! Progressivism would be discredited. The fundamental wisdom of conservatism would be affirmed.

“A new batch of leaked documents provides the most complete record yet of how Gov. Scott Walker raised millions of dollars for a supposedly independent, tax-exempt group during the 2011 and 2012 recalls — activity that prompted a now-halted John Doe investigation into whether Walker’s recall campaign circumvented state campaign finance law,” the Wisconsin State Journal reports.

“The more than 1,300 pages of documents were posted online by The Guardian… It’s unclear how the newspaper obtained the documents, which had previously been held under seal.”

Matthew Yglesias: “Lambasting Trump while being unpopular herself would be a clear winning strategy in a zero-sum head-to-head race. But in a four-sided race, where the two lesser candidates aren’t receiving much scrutiny from the press or the campaigns, it tends to have the side consequence of pressing a lot of people to Johnson or Stein. The fact that there are two different third-party candidates in the race — one for people who think Clinton’s too left and one for people who think she’s not left enough — makes it really difficult to avoid bleeding voters.”

“If polls stay very tight or Trump pulls into a lead, then anti-Trump messaging to Johnson and Stein voters could take the form of classic warnings about spoilers and wasted votes. But the fact that Clinton has been consistently leading in the polls — and in August was doing so by a large margin — has itself undercut purely tactical arguments for voting Clinton. If she is overwhelmingly likely to win, which is what people have been hearing, then you may as well not vote for her if you don’t like her.”

“It’s simply going to be very hard for Clinton to open up the kind of stable lead that her supporters think Trump’s awfulness deserves while she herself is so little-liked.”

A new Quinnipiac poll shows that American likely voters say by a 62% to 38% that Hillary Clinton is qualified to be president, but by a 61% to 38% margin that Donald Trump is not.

James Fallows has a must-read piece on the upcoming presidential debates:

“If the sound-off image is of a calm, confident Clinton and a fuming Trump, she will have won the debates and moved that much closer to winning the election. But if Trump can seem easily rather than angrily in command, or if he can lure Clinton into joining him in an insult-for-insult exchange, or if she is beset by some new controversy for which she gives a hyper-legalistic rationalization, then the debates could be a turning point for Trump. … If he seems better than expected, either by throwing Clinton off her game or appearing calmer than a wound-up opponent who gives a dense six-point answer to every question, he might achieve something similar to Reagan’s ‘There you go again!’”

A potential strategy for Clinton:

“Most people I spoke with recommended a picador-like mocking approach, designed not to confront Trump directly but to cumulatively provoke him into an outburst. … When Comedy Central hosted a roast of Trump five years ago, he didn’t seem to object to jokes about his hair, about his weight, even about his lecherous remarks regarding his daughter Ivanka. The one subject he nixed, according to Aaron Lee, a writer for the roast, was ‘any joke that suggests Trump is not actually as wealthy as he claims to be.’ So this is a scab Hillary Clinton should deftly pick.”

This has to be one of the best ads this year:

“The media has been her number one surrogate in this. Without the media, this wouldn’t even be a contest, but the media has built her up. They’ve let her slide on every indiscrepancy, on every lie, on every DNC game trying to get Bernie Sanders out of this thing. If Republicans were doing that, they’d be warming up the gas chamber right now.”

— Donald Trump Jr., in an interview on WPHT radio, saying the media treats Hillary Clinton far different than they treat his father.

“I don’t care. My facts are good. My facts are good. I don’t get enough credit for having my facts right. They’ll say I’m wrong even when I’m right.”

— Donald Trump, quoted by Politico, on being fact checked during the debates.

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