Tuesday Open Thread [5.24.2016]

Tuesday Open Thread [5.24.2016]

Jesse Berney at Rolling Stone looks at Trump’s donations to veterans groups:
He claimed to have raised $6 million for the various charities — $5 million from others, $1 million from himself. That's real money when it comes to nonprofit budgets. Only… he didn't. Trump being Trump, we'll probably never know how much money he raised that night. But his campaign manager has admitted it wasn't the $6 million Trump claimed. Trump, who went to a rich kids' military boarding school, got multiple deferments to get out of Vietnam, and has said he likes troops who "didn't get captured," loves to fashion himself a champion of veterans. That's what his counter-event that debate night was all about: selling himself as a generous friend of the men and women who serve our country in the military.
Monday Open Thread [5.23.16]

Monday Open Thread [5.23.16]

29 Comments
Jonathan Chait on Why Democrats Have Popular Presidents and Republicans Don’t:
As the matchup between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton takes shape, it has begun to dawn on some conservatives that the Republican Party faces a distinct handicap: The Democrats will have two popular ex-presidents to campaign for them, and the GOP will have none. Bill Clinton is the party's most effective surrogate for wife Hillary, writes Byron York in the conservative Washington Examiner: “Republicans haven't had the same luck. The only two-term GOP president in the last generation, George W. Bush, has stayed mostly out of politics in the seven years since he left the White House.” Meanwhile, writing for The Wall Street Journal opinion page, Richard Benedetto grapples with President Obama’s value as a surrogate. “When Mr. Obama ran for office in 2008, a central part of his campaign strategy was to heap blame on George W. Bush,” writes Benedetto. “How has Mr. Obama dodged similar treatment?” How indeed? The answer, I’d suggest, is something along the lines of by governing competently rather than presiding over a flaming wreck of a presidency. But this answer presumes a level of introspection into the success of the last two Democratic presidents, and the conspicuous failure of the one wedged between them, that is absent from both columns, and from conservative thought in general.

Sunday Open Thread [5.22.16]

59 Comments
Democrats will miss him when he's gone, and should appreciate her while she's here, says Martin Longman:
I expected Democrats to begin expressing much higher approval numbers for Obama once they were forced to really think about Clinton or Sanders in the White House, but the trend is even stronger with independents who basically hate their choices in this election cycle:
Democrats have slowly looked at Obama more favorably since the beginning of 2015, but independents have begun to look at Obama much more favorably. After a sharp slide following his reelection, independents turned their opinions of Obama around at the beginning of 2014. Over the past year, that’s escalated. And since ratings from Democrats and Republicans are more stable, that shift by independents moves the needle a lot.
People don’t always realize that Obama’s approval numbers have been held down by the ambivalence of a lot of Democrats. The same is happening now to a much greater degree to Hillary Clinton. She won’t really have to do anything to see her negatives decline once the Democrats unite around her as the only chance of keeping Donald Trump away from the nuclear codes. If independents follow suit, which they will if they campaign is waged competently, she won’t be laboring under historically high negatives by the time people start voting.
As I said yesterday, Democrats want to fall in love with their candidates, while Republicans want to fall in line. You are seeing that now with all the Republicans falling in line behind Trump. And you will see Hillary's numbers rise when Democrats unite. The story of the Summer is set: The Resurrection of Hillary.

The Weekly Addresses

In this week's address, President Obama discussed one of the single most important steps to help grow middle-class wages – expanding the number of workers who are eligible for the overtime that they have earned. In his weekly message, Governor Markell highlights Delaware's commitment to ensuring students have the skills and education they need to thrive in the new economy.