Delaware Dem

Friday Open Thread [6.3.16]

Eric Levitz at New York Magazine:

Hillary Clinton’s argument for why she would make a better commander-in-chief than her Republican opponent is fairly simple: She is not an emotionally erratic ignoramus who has praised the Tiananmen Squarecrackdown, refused to issue any plan for combating ISIS, and called on the American military to kill more civilians. On the other hand, she was in the room when President Obama ordered the hit on Bin Laden. And she did a bunch of other great things as Secretary of State. (You’ve forgotten about that Libya intervention by now, haven’t you?)

The likely Democratic nominee laid out this case in exacting detail in San Diego on Thursday. Her campaign had billed the speech as an attempt to paint Donald Trump as “unfit for the presidency.” This is not a terribly difficult task, but she accomplished it with aplomb — deploying the old rhetorical trick of reciting all the insane, mutually exclusive proposals her opponent had improvised over the course of a 12-month campaign.

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Thursday Open Thread [6.2.16]

Jon Favreau, the former Obama speechwriter and not the actor/director, says the coming fall campaign will be Obama’s last stand:

Clinton’s primary victory will allow her to assemble a Democratic Dream Team of political talent to rally the party and take on Trump. She’ll have Bill Clinton, a popular ex-president who can testify to her character and defend her record better than anyone (his speech defending President Obama’s at the 2012 convention is the stuff of legend); Elizabeth Warren, a liberal icon in the Senate who has already begun to prosecute the party’s sharpest case against Trump; [and] Joe Biden, a beloved vice president with a working-class, tell-it-like-it-is, God-knows-what-he’ll-say kind of appeal[.] Clinton will also have by her side the best political player in the game: Barack Obama.

In a few months, my old boss will hit the trail for the last time as president. He’ll do so with an approval rating that has been north of 50 percent nearly every week since March, a high he’d previously reached only in the months after his first and second elections. Political scientists point to a strong historical correlation between an outgoing president’s popularity and the final vote share of his party’s candidate. Obama’s recent surge in popularity has been driven largely by independents, young people, women, and Latinos — four groups most likely to tip the election toward Clinton. He has an 82 percent approval rating among Sanders supporters, whom he’ll work to persuade as America’s most famous Clinton convert — someone who also waged a brutal primary against her, but eventually became a friend, partner, and champion.

I don’t want to overestimate the Obama effect. No one can win this for Clinton but Clinton. […] But I suspect that the president will give this campaign all that he has and more — for Clinton, for his own legacy, and for the vision of America that he’s asked us to believe in since the night he stepped onto the national stage in Boston and delivered his 2004 convention speech, a hopeful, bighearted vision that is the antithesis of everything that Trump represents. The truth is, Obama has understood better than most the forces that gave rise to a candidacy like Trump’s.

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Wednesday Open Thread [6.1.16]

Yesterday was yet another example of the fascism that awaits us and the press/media should Trump be elected President. So when Trump decided to be a coward and avoid Megyn Kelly’s questions in a January debate on Fox News, he held an alleged fundraiser on the same night for veterans. He said at the time that they raised around $6 million. Several months later, some reporters began looking into whether Trump actually had raised that amount, whether he donated any himself during the fundraiser as he boasted he had, and whether any money had actually been donated to any veteran group at all. The Washington Post published a story questioning the donations last week. The Associated Press reported that about half of the 41 organizations to which Trump’s campaign donated received checks in the past week, typically dated May 24, the day the Post’s story was published. So Donald Trump got caught defrauding Veterans and lying about it, and he lashed out at the press for daring to question him.

He is a fascist dictator in the making. Frack that, he’s already been made.

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Tuesday Open Thread [5.31.16]

Rebecca Traitor at New York Magazine has a lengthy and fascinating profile of Hillary Clinton, that is well worth a full read. But here is an excerpt:

There are a lot of reasons — internal, external, historical — for the way Clinton deals with the public, and the way we respond to her. But there is something about the candidate that is getting lost in translation. The conviction that I was in the presence of a capable, charming politician who inspires tremendous excitement would fade and in fact clash dramatically with the impressions I’d get as soon as I left her circle: of a campaign imperiled, a message muddled, unfavorables scarily high. To be near her is to feel like the campaign is in steady hands; to be at any distance is to fear for the fate of the republic. […]

When I asked her why she thinks women’s ambition is regarded as dangerous, she posited that it was about “a fear that ambition will crowd out everything else — relationships, marriage, children, family, homemaking, all the other parts [of life] that are important to me and important to most women I know.” She also mentioned the unappealing stereotyping: “We’re so accustomed to think of women’s ambition being made manifest in ways that we don’t approve of, or that we find off-putting.”

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Sunday Open Thread [5.29.2016]

Susia Cagle looks at the big problem with the story of Peter Thiel’s secret day in court and how the 0.1% are redefining the rules.

Last week Mr. Thiel revealed that he had funneled “in the ballpark” of $10 million to legal support for plaintiffs suing Gawker Media, most notably Terry Bollea, a.k.a. Hulk Hogan, who recently won a $140 million judgment against the company for defamation. Mr. Thiel made no secret of his grudge against Gawker, since the company’s Valleywag blog revealed his homosexuality in a 2007 post that lampooned the straight male culture of Silicon Valley more than Mr. Thiel himself. (Mr. Thiel is, notably, an investor in the tech site Pando, a media property that regularly insults him in more direct terms.) …

Portraying a $10 million investment in crushing one’s enemy as a charitable act of justice that will make the world a better place is galling. But students of history can hardly be shocked. Tech’s elite, lauded for their originality, are influencing media, politics and society at large with a kind of venture philanthropy, much as their industrial predecessors did more than 100 years ago.

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Saturday Open Thread [5.28.2016]

This is for Jason, from Jonathan Chait, to calm some Trump fears:

Donald Trump’s election as president of the United States would pose an unprecedented threat to the health of American democracy and possibly world stability. There is, however, an upside: Trump’s campaign is an absolute garbage fire. By all accounts it is the most organizationally and strategically inept campaign for a successful major-party nominee in recorded history. Ashley Parker and Maggie Haberman round up many of the details, but the basic story that emerges from their reports and others is that Trump has absolutely no idea what he’s doing. […]

To the extent that running a competent campaign matters, it will hurt Trump very badly. Yes, he won the Republican primary by relying on a massive imbalance of media coverage and exploiting a divided, extremely large field that failed to coalesce against him. Yes, he tapped into deep strains of anger in the conservative base that fellow Republicans ignored. But he’s not a political savant, and he hasn’t abolished the rules of politics. He’s a reality-television performer who tapped into a deep vein of cultural resentment that appeals to a decided minority of the electorate. Fortunately, many of the same qualities that would make Trump epically dangerous in the presidency — his impulsive ignorance, blustering arrogance, and contempt for data — also make him unlikely to obtain it.

Emphasis mine.

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