Delaware Liberal

The October 29, 2016 Thread

Delaware Dem

PRESIDENT
NATIONAL–ABC News Tracking–CLINTON 50, Trump 45
NATIONAL–St. Leo. Univ.–CLINTON 46, Trump 35
PENNSYLVANIA–Emerson–CLINTON 48, Trump 43
NEW HAMPSHIRE–Emerson–CLINTON 46, Trump 43
VIRGINIA–Christoper Newport Univ.–CLINTON 46, Trump 39
MICHIGAN–Emerson–CLINTON 50, Trump 43
PENNSYLVANIA–Muhlenberg–CLINTON 45, Trump 39
FLORIDA–St. Leo Univ.–CLINTON 50, Trump 37
FLORIDA–PPP–CLINTON 48, Trump 44

“More Americans than at any time in Barack Obama’s presidency now say that things in the United States are going well, a sharp uptick in positive views and the best reviews of the country’s trajectory since January 2007,” according to the latest CNN/ORC poll.

“Overall, 54% say things in the country today are going well, 46% badly.”

Gross domestic product, a broad measure of goods and services produced across the economy, expanded at an inflation- and seasonally adjusted 2.9% annual rate in the third quarter, the Commerce Department said Friday. That was stronger growth than the second quarter’s pace of 1.4%. Economists surveyed by The Wall Street Journal expected growth at a 2.5% pace for the July-to-September period.Last quarter’s growth rate was the fastest recorded in two years.
The Wall Street Journal’s headline for this story was even more emphatic: “U.S. Economy Roars Back, Grew 2.9% in Third Quarter.”

After all we’ve seen over the last year when it comes to the topic of Hillary Clinton and emails, we should have learned to avoid the media freak-out when something new pops up. It almost always turns into a big nothingburger, as it did yesterday. To review, the new emails:

1. Were not from Hillary
2. Were not from her private server
3. Were not from her investigation
4. Were not withheld from the FBI by Clinton
5. Were found on a computer seized during an investigation of former Rep. Anthony Weiner

Indeed, as the Los Angeles Times and other outlets have reported, they are all likely duplicates. So what we have is a Republican FBI Director who decided to interfere in the election, and Republican Chairman Jason Chaffetz who mischaracterized Comeys’ letter in leaking it to the press (reopening criminal investigation of Hillary, which is false). The result of all this is that Comey is gone. He will be fired for cause after the election by either Obama or Clinton. He no longer has the trust of the Administration. The other affect of this is that Democrats and Hillary supporters are now pissed and no longer complacent. More motivation to vote.

Here is Clinton campaign manager John Podesta’s statement in response to Comey’s letter:

Upon completing this investigation more than three months ago, FBI Director Comey declared no reasonable prosecutor would move forward with a case like this and added that it was not even a close call. In the months since, Donald Trump and his Republican allies have been baselessly second-guessing the FBI and, in both public and private, browbeating the career officials there to revisit their conclusion in a desperate attempt to harm Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.

FBI Director Comey should immediately provide the American public more information than is contained in the letter he sent to eight Republican committee chairmen. Already, we have seen characterizations that the FBI is “reopening” an investigation but Comey’s words do not match that characterization. Director Comey’s letter refers to emails that came to light in an unrelated case, but we have no idea what those emails are and the Director himself notes they may not even be significant.

It is extraordinary that we would see something like this just 11 days out from a presidential election.

The Director owes it to the American people to immediately provide the full details of what he is now examining. We are confident this will not produce any conclusions different from the one the FBI reached in July.

Politico says Hillary can no longer coast towards the finish line: “Dashed are the hopes that the campaign could come to a conclusion on a high note, instilling in Americans a feeling that casting a history-making vote for Clinton is something more than merely a repudiation of Donald Trump.”

“Instead, Clinton is finding herself once again burdened by the twin scandals that have hung over her campaign since before she had a campaign — and devastating her image as an honest and trustworthy leader, even as she tried to make the case that she is the most experienced modern-day candidate for president, and the only option in the race who is responsible enough to handle the nuclear codes.”

Which is fine, since Hillary has never been good at coasting.

Ed Kilgore: “Assuming there is nothing literally incriminating in the emails (or nothing that will come out before election day, anyway), the scariest thing for the Clinton campaign involves the conventional wisdom that the candidate who can best avoid media attention down the stretch is likeliest to win. In a contest where both candidates are unpopular, the reasoning goes, you don’t want voters to head to the polls freshly reminded of what they most dislike about you.”

“The final week or so of the campaign looked like it would be dominated by ever-more-shrill statements by Donald Trump about rigged elections and the women peddling ‘fake’ accusations of sexual misconduct against him. The spotlight had largely focused away from Clinton, aside from thoughts about the prospect of her breaking the glass ceiling, which even a fair number of the people intending to vote against her might appreciate. That’s now changed, for the moment at least.”

“But the underlying ‘story’ of the emails isn’t some sort of bombshell, and the odds are that the negative attention and any lingering substantive concerns among voters will be too little, too late to make much of a difference.”

Catherine Rampell: “The end of a principled, intellectually coherent, organizationally robust center-right party is bad for democracy. It’s also bad for Democrats, given some of the dumb ideas flourishing on the left that desperately need a thoughtful counterweight.”

“But even on priorities on which liberals are likely to make progress, the lack of an honest, articulate, respected adversary is troubling. That’s because liberals need a worthy intellectual rival to sharpen their thinking and keep their own bad ideas in check. Right now a number of bad ideas booming on the left need a credible, coherent, megaphoned rebuttal. These are ideas that may sound nice and perhaps appear helpful. But pursuing many of them would be, at best, irrelevant and ineffective, a waste of time and resources; at worst, they would be actively harmful to the marginalized groups that bleeding-heart liberals claim to champion.”

Politico: “This election, the conventional wisdom goes, has done tremendous damage to the American body politic, but nowhere is the damage as severe as it is inside the party that nominated the wrecking ball known as Donald Trump. Now the party of Ronald Reagan is being led by a man with no discernible ideological leanings, save for an affinity with some of history’s ugliest. In the face of mounting evidence that Hillary Clinton is set to dominate the electoral map on November 8, Republicans across the right side of the spectrum recognize there’s defeat coming. And behind the scenes, in conversations and closed-door venues—the Hoover gathering was not open to the public—the people who once considered themselves the heart, or at least the head, of the party have begun a very pessimistic reckoning.”

“As yet there seems to be no coherent vision for what kind of future November 9 brings for the Republican Party—or, for that matter, if there will even be a Republican Party they could support.”

Joe Klein: “We are about to experience a radical change in American politics: a woman may well be our next President. It’s a transformation that’s been lost in the roil of the campaign. Clinton is so familiar a character that she has been disaggregated from her gender. She is the experienced candidate, the status quo candidate, the Establishment candidate; she is the awkward, slippery, morally challenged candidate.”

“All true, but she is also a woman—and women are different from men…. when you think about it, having an intellectually mature and experienced President would be a seismic shift away from the long run of ‘outsiders’ in the oval office. And guys, if you don’t believe that having a female President would be a dramatic rupture from male governance, well, your wives probably have a list of reasons why it would.”

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