Delaware Liberal

Open Thread for Friday, September 23, 2016

Delaware Dem

PRESIDENT
NATIONAL–McClatchy/Marist–Clinton 48, Trump 41
NATIONAL–AP-Gfk–Clinton 50, Trump 44
NORTH CAROLINA–NYT/Siena–Clinton 41, Trump 41
VIRGINIA–Roanoke–Clinton 51, Trump 40
VIRGINIA–Quinnipiac–Clinton 50, Trump 43
ARKANSAS–Talk Business/Hendrix College–Trump 55, Clinton 34
IOWA–Quinnipiac–Trump 50, Clinton 44
COLORADO–Quinnipiac–Clinton 44, Trump 42
COLORADO–Rocky Mountain PBS–Clinton 44, Trump 35
COLORADO–Quinnipiac–Clinton 44, Trump 42
GEORGIA–Quinnipiac–Trump 50, Clinton 44
FLORIDA–Suffolk–Trump 45, Clinton 44
WISCONSIN–Emerson–Clinton 45, Trump 38
ILLINOIS–Emerson–Clinton 45, Trump 39
LOUISIANA–SMOR–Trump 49, Clinton 33
MARYLAND–Goucher College–Clinton 58, Trump 25
CALIFORNIA–PPIC–Clinton 47, Trump 31

U.S. SENATE
NORTH CAROLINA–NYT/Siena–Ross 46, Burr 42
WISCONSIN–Emerson–Feingold 52, Trump 42
COLORADO–Rocky Mountain PBS–Bennet 45, Glenn 32
ILLINOIS–Emerson–Duckworth 41, Kirk 39
MARYLAND–Goucher College–Van Hollen 54, Szeliga 24
CALIFORNIA–PPIC–Harris 32, Sanchez 25

GOVERNOR
NORTH CAROLINA–NYT/Siena–Cooper 50, McCrory 42

Mark Cuban, who has savaged Donald Trump by suggesting the GOP nominee is not really a billionaire, was given a front row seat in next week’s first presidential debate by Hillary Clinton’s campaign, CNN reports.

“Cuban has tried to publicly shame Trump throughout the 2016 campaign, regularly slamming the Republican nominee for not releasing his taxes. The attacks have been particularly effective, given Cuban’s status as a fellow billionaire and his public persona as a similarly brash businessman.”

“They hate white people, because white people are successful and they’re not.” — Rep. Robert Pittenger (R-NC), in an interview with BBC News, commenting on the protests in North Carolina after police killed a black man.

Pittenger added, “We’ve put people in bondage so that they can’t be all that they’re capable of being.”

That last statement puts the racist cherry on top.

Vanity Fair has a must-read interview with President Obama conducted by historian Doris Kearns Goodwin:

OBAMA: I found during the course of my political career on the national scene…there’s a point where the vanity burns away and you’ve had your fill of your name in the papers, or big adoring crowds, or the exercise of power. And for me that happened fairly quickly. And then you are really focused on: What am I going to get done with this strange privilege that’s been granted to me? How do I make myself worthy of it?And if you don’t go through that, then you start getting into trouble, because then you’re just [gesturing, as if climbing a ladder] clinging to prerogatives and the power and the attention. There’s an expression that my daughters use: You get thirsty.

GOODWIN: And the thirst is unquenchable.

OBAMA: And the thirst is unquenchable. And that’s what you see, I think, sometimes with somebody like a Nixon—a brilliant person who, early on, had ambitions that probably were not that different from an F.D.R., certainly not that different from an L.B.J. But that thirst overwhelms everything, and you start making decisions based solely on that.

Mother Jones has a huge list of questions that should be asked by the moderators of Trump and Clinton during the debates.

Frank Rich says Americans are gaining a better perspective on terrorism, something I said in this space on Monday:

Cable news covers terrorist brush fires, as he calls them, the same way it covers the weather, crime, shootings, and just about everything else: Every potential cataclysm is a 9/11, a Katrina, a Sandy Hook until proven otherwise. It is, of course, serious news that lone wolves with seemingly jihadist aspirations savaged victims in New York, New Jersey, and Minnesota over the weekend. But it is not necessarily the apocalypse, or certain evidence that America is under terrorist attack. In these latest instances, we may be dealing instead with unhinged assailants looking for ideological rationales for their violent sprees. If only all terrorists were as stupid as Rahami, who left so many clues to his identity that he could be rounded-up with remarkable dispatch.

Where I part with Shafer is in his conviction that Americans are unable to put Rahami’s small-time infliction of violence into a proper perspective. Maybe more and more Americans are gaining that perspective. The news of the bombing did not cause widespread panic in New York, and the story faded fairly fast from center stage nationwide. Part of this was that no one was killed, good news for humanity but bad news for cable news, which doesn’t know how to keep exploiting a crime scene when there are no lost lives to be milked for sentimental effect, no surviving relatives to be interviewed on camera. The quick fade may also be because the public is simply inured to most violence at this point. Nothing short of an Orlando or San Bernardino can grab the attention of a citizenry numbed by the daily overload of shootings in a nation where there are more guns than people.

Another reason for the story’s short half-life was the predictable responses of both presidential candidates. Donald Trump says that the Rahamis at loose in America can be stopped if we overcome political correctness, legalize ethnic profiling, and stamp out ISIS through magical means yet to be specified. Clinton talks about gathering the facts before lashing out indiscriminately at Muslims. We’ve heard it all before from both of them, and we are as numb to their pat responses to terrorist brush fires as we are to the latest bulletin of a mad gunman at the mall.

Thomas Patterson: “My analysis of media coverage in the four weeks surrounding both parties’ national conventions found that her use of a private email server while secretary of State and other alleged scandal references accounted for 11% of Clinton’s news coverage in the top five television networks and six major newspapers… Excluding neutral reports, 91% of the email-related news reports were negative in tone. Then, there were the references to her character and personal life, which accounted for 4% of the coverage; that was 92% negative.”

“While Trump declared open warfare on the mainstream media — and of late they have cautiously responded in kind — it has been Clinton who has suffered substantially more negative news coverage throughout nearly the whole campaign.”

“How about her foreign, defense, social or economic policies? Don’t bother looking. Not a single one of Clinton’s policy proposals accounted for even 1% of her convention-period coverage; collectively, her policy stands accounted for a mere 4% of it. But she might be thankful for that: News reports about her stances were 71% negative to 29% positive in tone. Trump was quoted more often about her policies than she was. Trump’s claim that Clinton ‘created ISIS,’ for example, got more news attention than her announcement of how she would handle Islamic State.”

Zack Beaucamp at Vox interviews conservative Samuel Goldman about the failure of the conservative movement:

Samuel Goldman is one of America’s most thoughtful conservatives. A professor of political theory at George Washington University and the executive director of its Loeb Institute for Religious Freedom, he spends his days pondering the ideas that define American politics.

Recently, Goldman has come to an uncomfortable conclusion: The conservative movement has failed. Its traditional package of ideas — free market economics, social conservatism, and an interventionist foreign policy — has long dominated the Republican Party but has clearly failed to win over enough actual voters to secure the White House.

“The great message of Trump is that there really are not that many movement conservatives,” Goldman told me during a sit-down near his office. “Since conservative politicians and policies have stopped delivering peace and prosperity, I think it’s more or less inevitable that voters have become dissatisfied.”

Moreover, he argued, the GOP and conservative movement has embraced a vision of America — Sarah Palin’s “Real America,” more or less — that can’t appeal to anybody but white Christians. A (somewhat controversial) census projection suggests that the US will be a majority minority country in the next 30 years — an unfriendly environment, to say the least, for the GOP.

“If you project yourself as a white Christian provincial party, you’re not going to get very many votes among people who are none of those things,” Goldman says. “That’s what’s happened over the last 10 or 15 years.”

The obvious question then becomes — what next? If movement conservatism is doomed, then is the kind of white identity politics that Trump has pioneered the Republican future? Goldman and I talked at length about how the dividing line between liberals and conservatives today appears to be less about economics and more about identity.

Go read it.

Josh Marshall says Trump has gone back to Birtherism after a brief 5 day break:

When asked why he President Obama was born in the United States he said this.

“Well, I just wanted to get on with, you know, we want to get on with the campaign. And a lot of people were asking me questions. And you know, we want to talk about jobs, we want to talk about the military. We want to talk about ISIS and how to get rid of ISIS. We want to really talk about bringing jobs back to this area because you’ve been decimated. So we really want to get just back onto the subject of jobs, military, taking care of our vets, et cetera.”

In other words, I said it because I had to if I wanted to win the campaign.

Not only is Trump refusing to say he has anything to apologize for. He is essentially saying that he hasn’t actually changed his position or his mind. He just said it to get people off his back. […]

Earlier this month I picked up chatter that the Trump campaign was readying Trump to issue a true apology for being a birther – not just changing his position, but a true recantation and admission he’d been wrong. I’ve even heard that something like this was in the works before the interview with The Washington Post forced the campaign up the timeline and combine that terse, teeth-gritted 30 second statement with his DC hotel informercial.

My sense though is that the campaign, which is to say Steven Bannon and Kellyanne Conway, had essentially convinced themselves that Trump would do or had agreed to do something he simply never would: admit he was wrong and apologize. Thus what I said above: even the more disciplined, sharper campaign Bannon ushered in must still contend with, and at the end of the day, fail to overcome Trump’s most profound psychological and moral defects.

Go back and watch the video of Trump ‘renouncing’ birtherism. It’s teeth-gritted and angry, something he was clearly forced to do and could only bear to do by packaging it with more self-assertive nonsense. ‘Hillary wanted to be a birther but she failed. Only I could succeed.’ And now five days on, he’s back to it, back to being a birther, or perhaps a Hidden Birther, whose occultation will end only once he accedes to the presidency.

Brian Beutler of the New Republic says Liberals have failed to teach millennials about the horror of George W. Bush:

Anti-Trump forces aren’t wrong to see millennials as the key to this election. Their error is in short-handing their critique to suggest millennials are somehow more responsible for Trump than older, more conservative cohorts. But if you stop dividing cohorts by age, and do it instead by ideological leaning, the problem becomes clear. The younger and younger that left-of-center voters get, the less and less propensity they have to vote at all, and the greater propensity to vote (if they vote) for a third party…

But here’s a different theory, under which the very liberals who are laying the groundwork to blame millennials also share in the blame themselves. If 18-to 29-year-olds vote for third-party candidates in sufficient numbers to tip the election to Trump, it will be the consequence of a liberal failure to build an oral tradition around the Bush administration, from Ralph Nader’s vote haul in Florida through the injustice of the recount and the ensuing plutocratic fiscal policy; the 9/11 intelligence failure; the war of choice in Iraq sold with false intelligence and launched without an occupation plan; the malpractice that killed hundreds in New Orleans; the scandalousness that makes the fainting couch routine over Clinton’s emails seem Oscar-worthy; and finally to the laissez-faire regulatory regime and ensuing financial crisis that continues to shape the economic lives of young voters to this day.

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