My hope is that Pena Nieto makes him wait for 15 minutes, marches in, lectures him on what a douche he is, and then dismisses him without giving him a chance to respond. Double bonus points if he uses the phrase "You're fired."
My guess is that Trump's plan is to try to bribe Nieto, so that he'll come out of their meeting, and say that the great Trump has persuaded him, and yes, Mexico will build the wall.
At this point I'm getting all my Trump news from that Twitter feed heebie posted the other day, so I assumed the bit about Giuliani going along for the visit was a joke, and maybe a little too on the nose; but nope, he's going. And Jeff Sessions, too!
Of course, part of the bribe is that he just has to say he will build the wall for now, he doesn't actually ever have to do it.
so I assumed the bit about Giuliani going along for the visit was a joke
Was Giuliani always this crazy? I used to think he was a mean-minded bastard who was basically sane and competent, but maybe I had that wrong?
5: Maybe, but I think that was the consensus on Giuliani.
I don't see what is in this for Pena Nieto, and according to Trump he initiated it. Now Trump is probably lying, because he usually does, but in case he's not, why would the President of Mexico clear his diary to invite a guy who is wildly unlikely to win an election that's still 10 weeks away? Does he just want to tell him to go fuck himself for shits and giggles, and then post it to youtube, or what?
I mean, Nieto cares more about Mexican citizens and Clinton than Trump, so I assume his goal is to make Trump look bad in some way.
7: My understanding is that Pena Nieto invited both Clinton and Trump to visit (no specific timing), and the Trump campaign leapt at the opportunity to do a visit ASAP.
IIRC Pena Nieto's approval rating is about 21% so I think he's probably trying anything he can think of to distract his electorate from his troubles at home.
One other thing that I think has been not well reported is that while all of Trump's speeches say he's going to make Mexico pay for the wall, his actual policy plan (last I looked) was to make Mexicans pay for the wall, both by taxing their remittances back to Mexico, and by raising the fees for the temporary visas and passport cards that people living near the border use to go back and forth.
Clearly the Mexican government has a huge interest in both of these things, from a trade perspective and from an economic development perspective. Remittances have been a significant factor, particularly in poorer parts of Mexico, and programs like Dos Por Uno/Tres Por Uno have encouraged migrants to send money back to Mexico for village improvement projects by promising to match their payments with two or three times as much in government funds. But Trump is not actually proposing -- so far as I know -- any actual policy that would require the Mexican government itself to pay for his wall.
I think 8 is the end game here. He either forces Trump to make fucking absurd statements about Mexico paying for the wall while Nieto tells him to go fuck himself (making him look even more like the clown he is), or Trump backs down and loses some of his rabid base. Either way it hurts Trump in the general, and there is no doubt who the Mexicans would prefer to see in the White House.
I don't think Trump has much connection to whoever writes his policy plan.
Mexico has remittances of $25 billion a year. That's lower than I thought, but I guess you could pay for the wall with a 5% tax on that over a number of years (if the tax doesn't just drive all the remittances underground). But, and I'm not an international banking expert, but I don't see how you tax remittances without also taxing capital movement in general.
Trump is out to prove that nobody respects the US any more. The same way that the tragic shooting of a NBA player's cousin proves that residents of war torn inner cities have nothing to lose by voting Trump.
Actually, I think the play for Trump is to just have a smiling photo op, so he can argue to Republican white women that he isn't the wild racist that big ol bigot Crooked Hillary says he is.
Everything is about gaslighting convincing white women to doubt their perceptions of him.
So the hair is "peacocking," like that asshole with the stupid hat (Mystic?)?
I buy 9.2. Peña Nieto has big domestic issues, and bringing in an entertaining clown everyone loves to hate seems like a good distraction. It should be easy to spin himself as the defender of Mexico and the Mexican people.
Vince McMahon is probably taking notes.
Twitter has been suggesting Trump will winkingly imply to his supporters that of course EPN says publicly he won't pay for it.
According to this Spanish-language source, he'll be late for the meeting.
Trump just needs a visible enemy right? Nieto and the millions of Trump-hating Mexicans will distract people from whatever nonsense he spews in his immigration speech. They're each other's heels.
19: Right. Pena Nieto punches Trump in the face, and everybody wins. Heck, even I'd be happy.
9.3 and 9.4 get it right, as far as I can tell, about Trump's actual policy proposals on getting Mexicans to pay for the stupid wall.
In terms of the reason for Trump's visit now, sure, he wants to present himself as a plausible international statesman: apparently he's ditching his traveling press corps for this meeting. Presumably he/his campaign will present it in the aftermath as having been an amazingly brilliant dialogue, and without any fact-checking to counter that narrative, that story will go ahead. It's all about the spin.
The counter-narrative will be provided by AP from the Mexican government, if it's enough fun.
Well, we'll see, won't we? Either the Trump campaign is utterly incompetent, or it's brilliant.
May I change the subject? I've been interested in the post-primary state of the Bernie Sanders movement, or revolution. It was dispiriting to read that his Our Revolution organization is in disarray.
I'll quote at length from the linked article:
Things haven't been going well for Sanders in general since the end of his campaign. His failure to issue his financial disclosure after having delayed it throughout the campaign has raised a lot of hackles, and his conspicuous purchase of a vacation home on North Hero Island isn't sitting well with a lot of people up in Vermont. There have been a bunch of articles detailing how Jane Sanders ran Burlington College into the ground and about how the state taxpayers will have to pick up the tab for the school's collapse. Sanders is also taking a beating for not doing much for the candidates he's supposed to be supporting, with Debbie Wasserman Schultz's opponent now reduced to begging and pleading for Sanders to show him some love now that he's down by double digits with less than a week to go before the primary and claiming that he can't even get Sanders to return his phone calls.
That paragraph contains numerous links to the stories behind the assertions, and they don't look good. Bernie has basically disappeared, bought a $600,000 vacation home (his third home) allegedly for cash, and never showed up to campaign for Canova in Florida against Wasserman Schultz. She won her primary campaign in Florida yesterday.
Mrm. I wasn't one to declare hysterically that Bernie was a con-man, but jesus this doesn't look very nice. I gotta squint sideways at the man.
I don't know about the rest, but what's the significance of a $600,000 house? Going by that price, Sanders' house is . . . a normal house. He's been a Senator for years, his wife is a doctor or something, of course he can afford to buy one that costs that much, without a mortgage.l
Going by that price, Sanders' house is . . . a normal house.
I'll let that pass without comment, I guess.
I'll let that pass without comment, I guess.
Crazy statistic I saw recently and which still has me shaking my head: Average price of home sales in Oakland is now $632K, which is greater than the average price in NYC*. I can't wrap my head around that.
* with the caveat that the average home in Oakland is presumably larger than the average home in NYC.
Well, we'll see, won't we? Either the Trump campaign is utterly incompetent, or it's brilliant.
If only we had any clues.
In terms of winning the Republican primary, "utterly incompetent " and 'brilliant" turned out to be synonyms.
28: Playing around with that tool on Zillow, Oakland has basically caught up to Brooklyn. The New York average is pulled down by Queens, and probably the Bronx and maybe Staten Island as well (for some reason it doesn't seem to have data on them). Manhattan, of course, is pulling it way up in an outsized way.
Queens is the best part of Long Island.
Cripe, I apologize for raising the Sanders topic if it's going to lead to discussion of real estate prices in the priciest areas of the country. Carry on, though, I'm sure.
35: You're fine. Trump is a real estate mogul so it's not off topic.
I would guess that the Bronx averages significantly cheaper than Queens -- while there are glossy areas in both boroughs, there's more in Queens, and the poorer part of the Bronx goes lower than the poorer parts of Queens.
But I'm unsure enough that I wouldn't be stunned to be wrong about that.
I'm not surprised that the Sanders movement isn't very well organized. Is anyone?
The campaign disclosure thing, though, that's something he really ought to fix.
35: Oh I'm sorry, were you instead hoping to figure out whether it's inherently unethical for a Senator married to a college president to have $600,000 cash on hand? Or whether a political campaign led by an outsider candidate could maybe have been a bit better at the nuts and bolts of administration? Maybe you just thought re-fighting the primary again would be fun.
Sorry if that sounds pissy, I'd totally agree that the campaign was badly run, but I'm not seeing evidence of anything worse and this doesn't seem productive. (The disclosure thing looks bad, and might actually be bad, but in the absence of more facts, call me a shill if you want but "we dropped the ball" seems a hundred times more likely than anything nefarious. We'll know either way when he files his Senate form disclosure.) If sore losers are annoying, so are sore winners.
As for the house, North Hero Island is an island. $600,000 doesn't sound like a crazy price for beachfront property.
33: I meant that in a numeric way, and was not casting aspersions on that fair borough. I agree with LB that the Bronx would be much more below average. My guess is that Staten Island would be a bit higher than Queens, but don't have a good intuition as to whether it'd be above or below the NYC-wide average.
35: If it helps, I put Pittsburgh on there as well and it was nice to see it chugging along on the bottom tenth of the graph.
To your original point, it really doesn't surprise me that a Senator and a college president with no children living with them would have a $600k vacation house. Yeah, that's a lot, especially for a second home. It's nothing compared to what plutocrats have. I'm generally of the view that public officials should be paid well to reduce corruption, so a Senator being in the 1% (but not the .0001%) doesn't concern me. He surely derives less power from his money than from being a Senator, anyway.
40 before seeing 39. Small caveat that it's an island on a lake, not the ocean.
As one might surmise from it being in Vermont.
I always get it confused with New Hampshire anyway.
North Hero Island
Looking it up on wikipedia I find the census history oddly fascinating. It shows up on the 1790 census, grew until it had 730 residents in 1850 and never reached that number again until 2000.
I think the face-rock thing collapsed.
You do always get it confused with New Hampshire, don't you.
New Hampshire is the one shaped like a "V" because white people are deceptive like that.
42: Sure, but that it was in Vermont doesn't appear to have been established knowledge (and definitely not common knowledge), and I found the use of "beachfront" to describe property on a lake island confusing. A quick check on Google Maps confirms that it doesn't have actual beaches. I realize that calling waterfront property beachfront is a colloquialism that isn't necessarily meant literally.
I love nothing more than over-explaining my misunderstandings. So tedious! Anyway, 48's a great mnemonic; really weird how Vermont is shaped like an N next to an H, too.
Returning to the OP, Kevin Drum said there weren't any sparks.
What, no, he missed the damn story. Trump choked. And then lied about it.
https://twitter.com/BraddJaffy/status/771123213447401472
So for the next few days we can discuss whether Trump or the President of Mexico is the bigger liar.
Just now, AP said EPN says he told Trump they wouldn't pay for the wall.
This looks prescient, except for Trump not following through, which he has time left to do.
52: I don't think he missed it, it's just coming out in tidbits if at all.
Another demonstration of the value of posting something incorrect and then being corrected. I hadn't seen that yet.
it's just coming out in tidbits if at all
Fiber is key.
This is a pleasantly nothing-y fracas to come back from vacation to find the campaign about, incidentally.
How long were you on vacation? You might have missed a bunch of really racist stuff.
and I found the use of "beachfront" to describe property on a lake island confusing
But lakes can have beaches! And Lake Champlain is not exactly a small pond. I remember taking a ferry across Lake Champlain as a kid: it seemed like a very large lake, with rough waves and stuff (but: childhood perception, of course).
But yeah, "beachfront" generally makes me think of seaside, ocean, etc.
I don't begrudge Bernie and Jane a summer vacation home, though I do think their ability to pay $600K cash, no financing, suggests something interesting about their household income. Not that I really even care, except that Bernie made such a deal about Hillary's income from speeches, and encouraged his supporters to see him as some sort of modestly-living, if not downright spartan, alternative. And yes, $600K for a house is sort of normal, and nothing like luxury-level, in some parts of the country. But this is a third house for the Sanders; and, after all, most people buying a $600K primary residence have to take out a 30-year mortgage and pay it off slowly, with lots of interest on the loan: it's not as though they're shelling out $600K in cold, hard cash.
Bernie's failure to issue a financial disclosure is pretty much bullshit. I can't even imagine HRC getting away with that! His first extension on the deadline? Well, okay, stuff happens, and sometimes there are extenuating circumstances. His second extension, which allowed him to run out the clock on his candidacy and then not issue a financial disclosure at all? Total nonsense.
Also, Cyrus's description of Jane Sanders as (cough cough) a "college president" in #39 is ... very generous indeed (cough).
I have been on lakes with beaches--there's some okay ones on Lake Erie. But the geological processes that make beaches are absent or tamped down on lakes. Or the lake stops existing before the beach can form.
Even just on a pretty simple demographic level Bernie is different from a normal home buyer. He's 74 and has a $174k/yr job. Those are unavoidable properties of being Bernie Sanders. He's been earning for longer than most people will and will have a shorter retirement than most so his needs in retirement investments and liquid savings are smaller. Heck, can you even get a 30 year mortgage if the actuarial probability of you living 30 years is almost zero?
The financial disclosure stuff does seem like bullshit. I knew nothing about Burlington College, although the confluence of two facts amuse me: 1) its accreditation is on probation and 2) Newsweek ranked it #1 for "Free-Spirited Students." That sounds so much better than "unaccredited."
Lake Michigan has some actually awesome beaches. I was on one not too long ago. It's way better than an ocean beach because instead of jumping into salt water to cool off you jump into fresh water.
On the Bernie stuff, other than feeling EXTREMELY smug, I will say that I don't particularly begrudge the guy a nice lake house or even some time off. I do begrudge the ludicrous naivete of folks who thought he would be a competent President/movement leader/head of the Democratic party. But I'm sure grading on the Bernie curve for effective politicking (remember the "amendment king" nonsense?) I'm sure his tossing off one or two generic fundraising emails while relaxing on Lake Champlain will count as helping Democrats get elected/effective movement building for some.
60. Hillary's income from speeches dwarfs Bernie's income from everything. It's like the top 10% versus the 0.1%. $600K cash is a lot to most of us but it's peanuts to the Clintons.
The Clark Fork has some ok beaches.
What I find interesting about this latest Sanders news is that it indicates that no one outside of Vermont has been paying any attention to him since the convention.
I do begrudge the ludicrous naivete of folks who thought he would be a competent President/movement leader/head of the Democratic party
This. A hundred thousand times this.
You know, I'm really trying to be positive, and to not be all caught up in the negativity of this electoral season. But there are aspects of the Bernie-Bro narrrative (which mostly have to do with rank hypocrisy, but also with privileged-white-dude cluelessness) which truly have me feeling so outraged, I feel an anger in my blood.
So I guess I have some work to do. When it comes to feeling all calm and zen, I am so far from feeling mellow and resigned, I could just about spit nails at the next arsehole who tells me that Jill Stein (that lunatic!) is a viable presidential candidate.
And please don't even get me started on the creepy and rape-y Julian Assange. My mental health is on the line, I beg of you.
The idea that the Bernie voter was a "privileged white dude" is an utter fabrication. The Bernie voter was a young person. Male, female, all races. The Hillary voter was an older person. Male, female, black and white. The Hillary voter was a much richer person than the Bernie voter, mostly because it was a much older person. To the extent that Bernie won in places like West Virginia, that was helped out by the other old white people who are effectively Republicans but still registered Democrats, and are not privileged, and would have voted for any conceivable alternate candidate (Martin O'Malley, Jim Webb, Howard Dean, Dennis Kucinich, Tom Arnold, Mike Tyson) over Hillary, and are now voting for Trump. None of them were vocal Bernie supporters or activists and how Bernie can be blamed for their existence I can't imagine.
And please don't even get me started on the creepy and rape-y Julian Assange
Bringing up Julian Assange would be a complete non sequitur, so don't worry.
I don't care if this analogy is banned but this latest Bernie Sanders kerfuffle (the house thing) reminds me of the whole Al Gore takes airplane flights so he's a hypocrite on global warming.
The Hillary voter was an older person.
Yeah, I'm old and irrelevant, but I'm not going down without a fight. Hey kids, get off my lawn! And then come on over here and let me hit you with my cane. I'm just a wee elderly pensioner on a fixed income, but let me introduce you to my cats (actually, I'm more of a dog person: my canine companion is part pit bull, part black Labrador, and an excellent guide on a hiking trail, and probably the best dog ever, but why sweat the details?).
My FB feed is full of misguided and deluded individuals encouraging Julian Assange to "get that bitch" (there is a disturbing "kill-the-witch" aspect to all of this: it's like 1692 in Salem, MA, or something). These dudes and dudettes are all frustrated Bernie supporters, so far as I can tell.
My FB feed is full of misguided and deluded individuals encouraging Julian Assange to "get that bitch" (there is a disturbing "kill-the-witch" aspect to all of this: it's like 1692 in Salem, MA, or something). These dudes and dudettes are all frustrated Bernie supporters, so far as I can tell.
Once again, this seems to come down to everyone's social media experience being so different. I don't think I've ever seen anything like that on my own feed, which was overwhelmingly Sanders-focused for months during the primaries.
And it's not that the old Clinton voters are irrelevant, at all. I mean, you guys did win. And the Sanders supporters are overwhelmingly falling into line, despite the handful of weirdo hold-outs who make a lot of noise and thus get disproportionate attention.
I know it's a cliche by now, but I wonder if the Democratic leadership really truly understands just how important turnout is to Democratic victory. Every left-leaning think tank in the country should be laser focused on the problem of how to increase it. And in the miraculous case of full Democratic control of the government, passing some kind of voting rights act (Election Day holiday, clarifying the VRA, etc.) should be a high priority.
I know it's a cliche by now, but I wonder if the Democratic leadership really truly understands just how important turnout is to Democratic victory.
I have no doubt they do. This is the sort of thing people like that are extremely focused on, much more than policy of any sort.
Right. That's great! In the end he was a not-particularly consequential mistake (I don't think Sanders did any good, but in fairness he didn't do obvious harm, either -- I for one overstated the "risk" component of Sanders). It's just that I'm still bitter after months of being screamed at for being a neoliberal sellout just because I thought it was pretty obvious that the promise of both the guy and his "movement" were transparently phony.
And on a related note, look who's talking about killing the filibuster.
I'm not on FB but my Twitter feed, overwhelmingly pro-Sanders during the primary, has been harshly critical of Assange for some time. From the rape charges he should be facing in Sweden to some of the latest, publishing emails from the general public to the AKP in the midst of the attempted coup and more.
I mean, you guys did win..
Yeah, my gal Hillary, she really did win this thing, and by about 3.5 million votes. A comfortable margin, by any reasonable measure. And the vagenda of manocide, it begins in 5-4-3 minutes...
I think it is pretty funny how RT 'remembers' the direction of the yelling.
To be charitable, I think the yelling RT is talking about was happening elsewhere and his own yelling here was largely in response to it.
If Hillary loses, and she very well might, it'll be because too many people decide that Sanders and his more vocal supporters were right about her and they either stay home or vote Stein/Johnson.
It's amazing to me -- an old person I must admit -- that while they were going forward, it's a grand society changing movement, and now, if the consequences turn up bad, well, that's someone else's fault altogether.
82 is another of those comments that makes me think we're all living in totally different worlds of political discourse.
If she loses I think it'll have more to do with the need of the press for a horse race to talk about. That and both sides do it balance.
But,
If you think the establishment is corrupt and decide to vote for a non-establishment candidate I think it is pretty natural to blame the establishment's corruption for any resulting problems.
Personally I'm going to suck it up, but I'm not sure blaming the young idealists/ protest vote (That we get every election.) is a good look for an establishment that seems like it could be doing more for the 99% and more to get people IDs and/or registered.
Not sure where the disconnect is: you think the thing is decided? I hope so, but don't want to underestimate the various downside risks. I like Clinton, but a huge number of our fellow citizens -- apparently a growing number -- don't.
Seriously, guys. There's always a protest vote, but one thing I think Sanders really did accomplish was to channel a lot of youthful idealism and frustration into the Democratic party, and it's overwhelmingly staying there and supporting the party's nominee. Another thing he accomplished was pushing Clinton to endorse a few policy positions somewhat to the left of where she started on issues that aren't necessarily very important on their own but symbolic of the direction the party, and especially its younger members, is going. And I continue to think those were actually his main goals in running in the first place.
I don't think the ideals of idealists who fail to prioritize the defeat of Trump deserve any respect at all. Certainly not immunity for the foreseeable consequences of choices they freely make.
There's plenty of work to do to get people registered and out to vote. Anyone who wants to help out on that can find a place to be useful.
83 is actually true, but to be clear, yelling aside and with no aspersions towards other Sanders voters, the cabin boy really is a despicable idiot. Fuck off and die.
Not sure 85 was to me, but if it was: No, I don't think it's decided by any means, but I do think the crucial variable is turnout, especially of non-white Democrats, not Sanders supporters staying home or voting third-party. From what I've seen that's essentially a non-issue; the vast majority of Sanders voters have decided to back Clinton in the general, and that's unlikely to change.
Yeah 86 is both better and less argumentative than 84.
Oh, I think Sanders was a positive, and toyed for months with voting for him. There's a hard core of his supporters, though, that are a negative force at this point.
88- R. Tigre is a bullying asshole and always has been a bullying asshole and he should eat shit and die.
I don't think any part of 86 is actually true (no "youthful idealism" into the Democratic party as a result of the campaign that wouldn't have been there anyway, no significant move to the left that he was in any way responsible for, not his goal in running), but it's kind of a useful illusion for the world so why bother shooting it down.
To make this a little more concrete, I attended a general election kickoff fundraiser for the state Democratic party yesterday. Alaska went overwhelmingly for Sanders in the primary, by a greater margin than any other state except Vermont I think, but his name didn't come up once either in the official speeches or in any of the informal conversations I was part of. Granted, AK is extremely unlikely to be competitive in the presidential race, and the focus was correspondingly on state legislative races (many of which are quite competitive). Even among the Young Dems who were there, who would be expected to be even more pro-Sanders than the state as a whole, there was no anti-Clinton sentiment, and many of us, including me, agreed to co-host* an upcoming fundraiser for her with the proceeds going to local GOTV efforts.
*The fake kind of co-hosting where it's at someone else's house and you're not expected to donate or attend or anything but just get your name put on the flier. I'm not sure why this is a thing, but it is.
I feel like 96 is consistent with the view that the Sanders campaign was a whole lot of nothing that did no real good but caused no real harm (other than annoying me personally). But see 95 last, I'm not super invested in proving this point.
89 -- The persistence of people talking Clinton down may have an adverse impact on non-white turnout. If Clinton loses, it'll be because she loses a couple of states by narrow margins. And that, like 2000, will be because 7 or 10 or 15 but for factors all aligned the wrong way. Many of these are not controllable: whether ISIS cuts off heads, whether there's a late hurricane, whether the press corps decides that Hillary laughed funny on a debate stage, whether they run out of ballots in some county, whether another county has two pages and tells people to vote on both of them, and they write in Clinton's name twice. One thing that is controllable is that people who should know better about the risks that Trump presents should take that seriously into account when deciding when and how much to slag on Clinton.
Well, I registered as a Democrat this year for the first time in my life, and I know other young people who did too, both here and in other states. And that was 100% due to Sanders being in the race. But 95 suggests that you're not going to be convinced on this by anything whatsoever, so whatever. We'll just see how many Clinton fundraisers you fake-cohost.
96 -- Well yeah, the people who are still Bernie or Bust aren't attending meetings like that.
The persistence of people talking Clinton down may have an adverse impact on non-white turnout.
Is there any evidence this is actually happening, though? Non-white voters are scared to death of Trump and his nakedly white-supremacist rhetoric, and new registrations among non-whites are way up in lots of places.
One thing that is controllable is that people who should know better about the risks that Trump presents should take that seriously into account when deciding when and how much to slag on Clinton.
Right, and it seems to be under control. Sanders voters are supporting Clinton by huge margins in recent polls, and I haven't seen any slagging showing up in high-profile media lately. What more do you want?
96: Sure, of course they aren't, but there also just aren't that many of them at this point.
And I know Charley is already very involved in his state party, but anyone else who is seriously concerned about these issues and isn't should consider it. State parties are where the real action is on the ground.
I feel like 96 is consistent with the view that the Sanders campaign was a whole lot of nothing that did no real good but caused no real harm (other than annoying me personally).
It's consistent with the view that the Sanders campaign was far more about issues than it was a personality cult, and it succeeded in changing the issues under discussion and it succeeded in getting young people to be excited about the Democratic Party, and because you hate Sanders personally you were hoping it would fail because you did not want him to have a personality cult, and now you see it as a failure because it has not led to him having a personality cult.
Totally agree with 105. What I meant in 65 was that the near-total lack of national attention to Sanders since he lost the primary indicates that his candidacy was never as much of a personality cult as his detractors claimed, and now that he's clearly lost his supporters have moved on as you would expect supporters of a losing primary campaign to do.
I mostly agree with Teo, but will note that I saw a story today (I think in the Post) that said Clinton's unfavorable ratings are as high as they've been at any point in the campaign and that her favorable ratings among likely voters were almost as low as Trump's.
I mostly blame the media but I do think the fact that Clinton's taken an unusual amount of heat from both the left and right is an important element.
That's a fair point, admittedly. But a lot of the heat Clinton's taken from "the left" is really more from centrist media outlets like the NYT and WaPo. And she still is ahead in polling averages even though the margins have narrowed a bit lately.
105 - to ignore the personal attack, I don't don't doubt that a fair chunk of Sanders' support was motivated by ideology, not cult of personality (though both were clearly present). The two more relevant questions are (a) could he have in fact advanced those ideals effectively as a candidate or sitting President and (b) even if the answer to (a) is "no," did his campaign in fact advance them in any meaningful or important sense (as opposed to just giving some idealists, some Hillary-haters, and some cult of personality types someone to vote for).
To me, the answers to both questions are pretty clearly "no." It was ultimately a giant waste of time and effort. With that said, I don't particularly think it's a bad thing if Sanders voters think that the answer to (b) is yes.
109: I of course agree that the answer to (a) is no, though I also of course think the answer to (b) is yes, but limited the actual idealists rather than the other types, who I still believe are quite limited in number. I don't think it was at all obvious that the sort of idealistic but naive young people who supported Nader in 2000 would have supported Clinton in 2016 if not for Sanders, though they obviously should, and I think the fact that Sanders ran as a Democrat rather than an independent, and endorsed Clinton once he had clearly lost, indicates that he felt the same way and had the same overall goal as both of us. But obviously you disagree and it's not worth fighting over when the alternative is Trump.
Teo, I'm not really disagreeing with you that much. I'm exposed to a bit of BoB stuff in social media -- and have had to do some unfollowing -- and it's more people my age than people your age and younger. And even if they're not BoB, I get more 'well sure I support Clinton, but wish there was someone else because, duh, she's so awful' than I like. Do friends let friends enable Trump? I don't always call this stuff out, but do it more now than I did in 2000 . . .
Sanders should have wound his campaign down in April, I think. Certainly before California, as we know from the convention.
Teo, I'm not really disagreeing with you that much. I'm exposed to a bit of BoB stuff in social media -- and have had to do some unfollowing -- and it's more people my age than people your age and younger. And even if they're not BoB, I get more 'well sure I support Clinton, but wish there was someone else because, duh, she's so awful' than I like. Do friends let friends enable Trump? I don't always call this stuff out, but do it more now than I did in 2000 . . .
Do what you need to do, of course, but for real, I am seeing zero BoB anything right now personally, and nothing in the polls makes me think this is a serious issue nationally either. You and I are both in very white, very red states that are unlikely to go for Clinton, though in both cases it's not totally unimaginable. That means focus on local races and GOTV like crazy, as of course you know. Internet trolls aren't worth any of our time IMO.
It's basically impossible for me to tell what the net effect of Sanders was on potential Jill Stein voters -- did he bring more of them into the Dem party by running as a Dem or drive them into the Green party because they became committed hardcore Bernie Bros? Clearly there was movement in both directions. My feeling is that on net it's pretty much a wash and that the Green/sit this one out on the "left" voter total is about where it'd be if he'd never run at all.
More important to me personally, social media has become tolerable again, back to kid and dog pics. There was a while where I felt like some kind of horrible idiocy epidemic was just spreading pustules everywhere and I couldn't escape it.
More important to me personally, social media has become tolerable again, back to kid and dog pics. There was a while where I felt like some kind of horrible idiocy epidemic was just spreading pustules everywhere and I couldn't escape it.
I know I've said this before, but seriously, dude, you can unfollow people. You're not doomed to see every stupid thing posted by every person you want to stay in contact with for any reason.
On Twitter you can also mute in case you don't want to unfollow or block.
I'm still disappointed in Lessig. There was a campaign that made zero sense.
Since this is the politics thread, I got an e-mail from Bernie Sanders askinge to give money to 4 Democratic candidates for the Senate. mcGinty in Pennsylvania, Hassan in NH, Strickland in Ohio, and Cortez Masto in Nevada. anyone know anything about any of these candidates?
I voted for McGinty in the primary. I don't remember why, beyond her having Obama's endorsement. Now her opponent keeps running TV commercials accusing her of once having earned $125,000 by working.
I think it was mainly to avoid having Toomey vs. Sestak 2.0.
I didn't vote for Fetterman because I'm kind of a snob in the sense that I think a United States Senator should wear something with sleeves.
117 - they have D's after their names? NH, PA, and NV are three of the four highest-leverage races according to Sam Wang (http://election.princeton.edu/); Ohio is a bit further down because for whatever reason Strickland has been doing poorly in the polling so far. (Wang's other highest-leverage race is AZ though it looks like McCain has opened up a bit more of a lead since Wang last updated.)
So anyway Bernie's four is a reasonable list of people to give money to if you just want a D majority in the Senate.
Nate Silver's most recent post is scaring me.
Do not read Nate Silver, he is a pure clickbait merchant now.
That struck me as a perfectly reasonable article.
Article seems kinda okay; the general principle of don't-read-Silver is derived from memories of his OMG OMG HYPERVENTILATION CAST shortly after the RNC convention.
I don't know about hyperventilation, but it is going to be a close election, especially considering only one of the candidates is remotely sane.
It is reasonable. There seems to be an incoherence among many here, trying to hold that
(1) All Republicans are racist idiots, Trump is like any other R candidate but with worse manners; and
(2) Trump will for sure lose.
If any other Republican, but with better manners, were running, would anyone be assuming he was heading for a surefire defeat? No. Why then is anyone sanguine about Trump?
If any other Republican, but with better manners, were running, would anyone be assuming he was heading for a surefire defeat?
Yes. Nothing about the electoral map is that different than 2012. The Democrats always had a huge lead before any candidates were determined.
Also, the Republicans didn't pick the wrong candidate - they had no good options. The reason the field didn't narrow is because they were all mostly-loathed, not because there were too many great choices.
I think 130 and 131 are both wrong.
You have a not-great economy and are coming off eight years of a Democratic president. I think this was the Republicans to lose if they have picked somebody plausible.
It doesn't matter that you loathed all the potential Republican candidates. It matters that a woman in the Philadelphia suburbs or New Albany, Ohio, finds Trump unsupportable but would have been perfectly fine with Kasich or Bush 3.0.
117: I'm making calls into NV for the Hillary campaign and one of our scripts is nice things about Cortez Masto. She sounds like a pretty standard immigrant friendly dem.
Which of them are the most progressive if I want to pick one or two?
The world of purported progressives seems to think that Katie McGinty is "boring" (neoliberal!), but on environmental stuff she'd probably be the best, most knowledgeable US Senator since Ed Muskie (or at least Al Gore).
Odd points about Katie McGinty, who seems to be a middle of the road pro-choice and pro Hilary democrat:
(1) She sends out several emails daily asking me for money. They often have subject lines like "Katie needs you." I didn't know much about her early in the primary season, and for the first few weeks assumed the emails were coming from a prospective mail order bride.
(2) The Philadelphia Inquirer frequently referred to her as "former governor Ed Rendell's protege." I have no inside gossip, but you can almost see the wink emoji in that formulation.
(3) An early campaign scandal resulted in her website bio changing from "first in her family to go to college" to the rather awkward "first in her family to attend a four-year college directly out of high school." Unedited: she's the ninth of ten children in her family, and her father was a Philadelphia policeman.
104: Getting involved in my sclerotic, entrenched state party seems like a coils sa waste of time. The town Democrats might be tolerable.
I live in a very Dem state. If I lived in a swing state, I'd feel differently. A friend of mine got himself elected to some DC dem thing for one of the wards. He was pretty diligent, but I think he face it up, because it was really just a club.
I'm now convinced more than ever that the only reason Hillary is even leading is because Trump was the nominee. Literally any other establishment Republican candidate would be leading right now, and probably leading big (Bush in 2004 numbers). We always knew her unfavorable numbers were super high, and unbelievably they're going up. We've seen that even-the-liberal media outlets like the NYTimes are out for her blood, even knowing full well that the alternative is Trump. They just can't help themselves. If the Democrats pull this out, we will all have Trump to thank.
It doesn't matter that you loathed all the potential Republican candidates. It matters that a woman in the Philadelphia suburbs or New Albany, Ohio, finds Trump unsupportable but would have been perfectly fine with Kasich or Bush 3.0.
No, I mean the primary voters loathed all of the candidates.
I have pretty much the opposite view in every way of 139.
140: But they hate everybody. They probably hate Trump too.
Right. But it's distinctly different from the Democratic side of things, where aside from the fact that the media makes mountains out of molehills, all the candidates were roughly palatable to the bulk of the party. The Republicans have dug themselves into a real shitshow where they can't possibly field a mainstream candidate at this point in time.
It's not like the Republican primary voters were filled with love for McCain or Romney. They were calling the RINOs or whatever.
It's not like the Republican party's been doing very well at the presidential level for some time now.
Two losses in a row? That's not a very long streak, especially considering it was the same Democrat that won both.
146: Optimistic Democrats also count Bush as a loser, which isn't as counterfactual as it sounds. In 2004, he was a wartime president, so that's a bye. In 2000 he definitely lost the popular vote and only won the electoral college vote thanks to the Supreme Court.
Pessimistic Democrats view all of the last four elections as too close for comfort.
I'm not saying this streak will go on for decades, just that it made this specific presidential election easy for Democrats.
147: Even looking at the popular vote, the 2000 election isn't very good indication of resounding Democratic strength.
Possibly I'm nervous because I keep reading that Trump has a pretty plausible path if he can win PA and I know too many people in PA to find that reassuring.
Wall to wall assholes. That's what I'm saying.
I was curious about turnout, so I decided to calculate the total percentage of eligible voters that voted for the Democratic and Republican candidates since the Southern Strategy.
The Republican percentage is highly volatile. It hovered around 25-30% between 1968 and 1988, dropped to 20% during the Clinton years and has rebounded to just over 25% since 2000. The overall trend is negative (0.1% per year)
The Democratic percentage is strangely well behaved. It has been monotonically increasing from a low of 21% in 1972 to 28% in 2012 (with two minor outliers in 1976 and 2008). The overall trend is positive (0.1% per year).
The two trendlines crossed in 1997 and now favor Democrats by almost 5%.
I've been thinking about CharleyCarp's argument, and I guess my objection to it is that to avoid being blamed for a loss people have to avoid telling the truth as they see it. I am mostly avoiding criticizing the Clintons, because I don't think this is a good time for it, and because most of the arguments out there right now are bullshit, but if something is true there isn't just a right to say it, there is something of a duty as well.
This seems on point: http://billmoyers.com/story/takes-ruling-class-village-staff-white-house/
151: It's hard to see Trump's plausible path, even granting him PA.
Also, Lyndon Johnson is the most popular presidential candidate in the modern era (37.8%), and Bob Dole was the least (20%).
Bill Clinton was the least popular winner (23.8%) and Kerry was the most popular loser (26.8%).
Trump will almost certainly not break Bob's record this year and could conceivably be more popular than Bill.
The duty to avoid the harm that comes from a Trump overrides any duty to make mountains out of molehills. Or even to call out mountains, if the alternative is worse. That has to be the calculation.
No one, and I mean no one, who would prefer -- or act in a way the advantages -- Trump has any claim whatsoever to speaking for or on behalf of the 99%. Any who attempts this will more than deserve all the ridicule they get, should Trump win, for the rest of all time.
Offsetting 'we've got to have a movement that acts in the interest of the common folk' with 'I gotta be me, no matter what the consequences others might suffer' does and should make someone a laughingstock.
If Republicans are such disasters in power that everyone has to subordinate themselves to the campaign to defeat them, then by the same token those who want to lead that campaign have much more responsibility. At some point people have to judge for themselves how well those leaders are living up to that responsibility.
If people aren't allowed to reproach leaders, maybe those leaders had better be beyond reproach.
You still don't get it Roger. It's not about Trump at all
In six months it will be:
"Clinton's Treasury Pick? Are you fucking kidding me?
The House is drawing up impeachment articles, Clinton is trying to pass a student loan bill, the SCOTUS nominee is hanging by a thread, and Putin may be about to invade half the world, and you are motherfucking trying to demoralize the base and splinter the Congressional alliances about the Treasury Nominee?
C'mon, if you want women, blacks, and gays to just die, why don't you say so?"
I was there in 2009. There will always be an existential crisis that makes criticism of their God immoral.
Just abandon these sick fucks.
Hillary is embrace of sensible Republicans is a decision that her campaign is purposefully making. She's doing this because she thinks that alienating the left and embracing centrist Republicans is the path to winning. If she loses, it means either 1. there was no possible coalition that would've allowed her to win, and she was a terrible choice for our candidate. 2. it was a terrible tactical decision to go after the Center-right and lose her left wing, and she's bad at running a campaign. Or 3. it was more important to her to prevent the Democratic Party from having left wing policies than it was to win. In any case moralizing over left-wing individuals being alienated by a campaign that is specifically designed to alienate them seems stupid.
Any leftist following politics close enough to complain about her online is going to vote for anyways, and if anything she wants leftist to complain about her online in order to help her establish centrist bona fides .
159- I live here, I'm not in any position to abandon anyone.
160- Good points.
I guess I should add that I think she's going to win and that at least she thinks this is the lowest risk way to do it.
I think she is going to win too. I'm not sure she picked the safest way, maybe she picked the path that keeps her donors happiest.
It's hard to see Trump's plausible path, even granting him PA.
I believe you are correct, heebie, but just now I just can't help worrying. The most recent approval ratings polls are way too close for comfort. I try to remind myself that nationally-based polls don't really mean much, given that it all comes down to a few crucial swing states. But then I recall the significance of the so-called independent voters in those crucial swing states (and though I'm too lazy to google it at the moment, I'm pretty sure independents tend to lean heavily Republican), and I start to hyperventilate all over again.
I'm thinking of going to PA for GOTV in late September/early Oct. There's no point in doing much here in safely-blue NJ, but PA is a real worry.
Re: Trump's 15 or 20 or so rivals in the GOP primaries. They might have stopped the Donald early on in the process, I suppose, but the candidates were too egotistical to give up on their own presidential ambitions for the sake of some greater good (yes, Chris Christie, I'm looking at you); and they were also too craven and cowardly to call out Trump on his racism and xenophobia, for fear of alienating the racist and xenophobic elements of the base.
She's ahead, certainly, but there are a lot of undecideds, and a lot of negativity around her. Bossie joining the Trump campaign means a ramping up of conspiracies, and eventually Trump's going to be spending real money on TV ads designed to dispirit the white women he can't seem to get into his column. Our worthless press will declare him presidential if he doesn't drool in the debates. And declare her a harpy, or some other suitably gendered insult.
The election doesn't get decided by people paying attention, but by people who haven't really been paying attention up to now (or even for several weeks yet). And those people are going to go with their perceptions of character and competence, and not particularly issue positions (within a broad range).
160: I don't see how her speech was specifically designed to alienate anybody but people willing to vote for Trump. The Republican Party as it is currently constituted is a disaster for American politics, win or lose. And eventually it is likely to win no matter how bad it is because that's the way two party systems work.
It does seem like all the talk about inevitability is based on a bunch of polls saying "Hillary 44% Trump 35% Gary Johnson 9%". So of those 9%, most are Republicans who want to think of themselves as good people for supporting the other, non-racist Republican candidate. There is no way Gary Johnson is going to get 9% of the vote. So it's a matter of convincing them to stay home instead of voting for the real Republican candidate. Hence Hillary's "If you like non-racist politicians like Reagan, Bob Dole and George W. Bush, vote for me" theme recently.
160 - It's definitely not the worst argument of this campaign season full of terrible arguments, but it's up there: OMG Hillary is kowtowing to centrist Republicans because instead of saying 'Trump is a racist dumbfuck but guess what your whole party is pretty much one racist dumbfuck after the next" like a good internet commenter would do, she is saying "Trump is a betrayal of everything you are, so don't support him and be ashamed of Republicans who do support him." How could she conceivably think that taking that approach might persuade people to abandon their strongly held political identity! What an idiot about politics! Doesn't she know that on the internet liberal commenters like to get together and call Republicans dumbfucks!
Also, "Why isn't she saying in general election speeches all Republicans are racist dumbfucks! Clearly a plot to kill the left!" Good point!
I'm not sure if viciously insulting Sanders supporters will work better.
170: are you referring to anything Hillary said? Or just mocking Tigre?
I assume it's the latter. But I enjoy calling people dumbfucks, which is just one of many reasons why I probably am not a top tier Presidential candidate in a democracy.
Under Halfordismo calling people dumbfucks will be one of the generalissimo's core duties.
I'm probably too repressed to call people dumbfucks on my own account, but I can enjoy the Halfordismo vicariously.
172: It's certainly a better reason than the guy who keeps sending women pictures of his underwear-clad dick.
If Hillary loses, and she very well might, it'll be because too many people decide that Sanders and his more vocal supporters were right about her and they either stay home or vote Stein/Johnson.
Because it's always, always, always 1968.
166 I wasnt talking her speech specifically, and also did not read the whole thread. I'm being general here.
Historians of the future will consider 1968 to have been just a warm up for 2016. Well, they would if historians were allowed in the future.
Because it's always, always, always 1968.
No it's not, the music is nothing like as good.