Tuesday Open Thread [6.7.2016]

The AP, and all the news organizations that followed their lead, did us a disservice. The stupid superdelegates who could not keep their damn mouths shut for another 24 hours did us a disservice. Hillary was deprived of a clinching victory party tonight. The early call may depress Hillary’s vote in California, allowing Sanders to win and sending him off on a longer yet angrier (if that is possible) quixotic journey. The early call makes both Bernie and his supporters angrier and more irrational than they already are, and more difficult to reason with, and more difficult to get them to accept reality and to stand down. Neither campaign is happy now, and if you think Hillary is happy with this call on a Monday night rather than a Tuesday night, you are very new to politics and know nothing.

The early call presents us with a solution that may diffuse some tension on the Bernie side: pushing reform to the process so that we eliminate super delegates.

Brian Beutler says endorsing Republicans cannot disown Trump’s racism:

Does Paul Ryan support racism? The House speaker endorsed Donald Trump, who claims an Indiana judge overseeing a lawsuit over Trump University is biased because of his Mexican heritage. Does Mitch McConnell support religious bigotry? The Senate majority leader endorsed Trump, who would ban 1.4 billion Muslims from entering the United States because of the God they worship. Does Reince Priebus support sexism? The Republican Party chairman wants to put into the Oval Office a man who publicly calls women fat pigs, dogs, slobs, and disgusting animals.

Although these and other GOP leaders will try to distance themselves from Trump’s most offensive comments, they can’t. First, from the moment he accepts the Republican nomination in Cleveland, Trump will be the titular head of their party. Second, they knowingly backed an intolerant narcissist. This was no accident, no bait and switch. Long before his political meltdown last week, Trump revealed his views on Hispanics, Muslims, and women—not to mention indifference to public policy and the truth. This is no aberration. It is confirmation. […]

Republicans don’t get it. Racial and religious intolerance aren’t something to be “concerned about.” They’re something to denounce and drive out of a political party—to banish to the fringes of the internet where, hopefully, they won’t infect the rest of society.

Trump can’t make “course corrections.” This is not 1992: He can’t “soften” his views or “shift” to the center. There is no pivot from depravity in the 21st century—not when voters are a few keystrokes removed from everything a politician has said or written or done. For Ryan, McConnell, and Priebus, and for every Republican candidate on a ballot in November, there is no pivot from Trump.

They are him.

MSNBC says Trump does not actually have a campaign. MSNBC reporters spoke with three Trump aides and two sources working closely alongside the campaign, all of whom spoke anonymously about the dysfunction that has come to characterize an operation in which Trump’s word is law.

You want to read more about the insanity of the Trump campaign operation, then read this article in Bloomberg:

An embattled Donald Trump urgently rallied his most visible supporters to defend his attacks on a federal judge’s Mexican ancestry during a conference call on Monday in which he ordered them to question the judge’s credibility and impugn reporters as racists.

“We will overcome,” Trump said, according to two supporters who were on the call and requested anonymity to share their notes with Bloomberg Politics. “And I’ve always won and I’m going to continue to win. And that’s the way it is.”

There was no mention of apologizing or backing away from his widely criticized remarks about U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel, who is overseeing cases against the Trump University real-estate program.

When former Arizona Governor Jan Brewer interrupted the discussion to inform Trump that his own campaign had asked surrogates to stop talking about the lawsuit in an e-mail on Sunday, Trump repeatedly demanded to know who sent the memo, and immediately overruled his staff.

“Take that order and throw it the hell out,” Trump said.

Told the memo was sent by Erica Freeman, a staffer who circulates information to surrogates, Trump said he didn’t know her. He openly questioned how the campaign could defend itself if supporters weren’t allowed to talk.
“Are there any other stupid letters that were sent to you folks?” Trump said. “That’s one of the reasons I want to have this call, because you guys are getting sometimes stupid information from people that aren’t so smart.”

John Judis says Bernie Sanders may win California tonight, but he should drop out and endorse Hillary. Period.

I voted for Sanders in the primary, so perhaps I can offer advice that rises above the partisan clamor: drop out of the race, give Clinton your full support, and train your sights on Donald Trump, who thinks a judge whose parents were from Mexico, and who was born in Indiana, is not an American.

Sanders had a commendable political agenda, and he can return to it with some authority after November if Clinton wins and he becomes the Budget Chair. But a convention

battle over delegates and platform won’t help him or her. The clearest precedents are 1976 and 1980. In 1976, Ronald Reagan took the nomination with Gerald Ford to the convention in Kansas City; and in 1980 Ted Kennedy battled Jimmy Carter at the Democratic convention in New York. Ford lost in November, and so did Carter. They might well have lost anyway, but the convention battles certainly did not help their campaigns.

I was at the 1980 convention. Kennedy dominated it. Kennedy had staged a late comeback in the primaries and had won California and New Jersey, but Carter had won the majority of delegates. At the convention, Kennedy tried to get the Rules Committee to allow delegates to repudiate their own voters on the first ballot. He predictably failed. Then Kennedy’s supporters staged a 17-hour marathon battle over the platform, winning support for federal funding for abortions and $12 billion in jobs spending. Then after Carter gave his acceptance speech, Kennedy snubbed him on the stage. What did it accomplish?

To quote CJ Gregg on the West Wing, “in a democracy, often times other people win.”

Nate Silver:

Clinton will be the Democratic nominee because substantially more Democrats have voted for her. In addition to her elected delegate majority, she’s received approximately 13.5 million votes so far in primaries and caucuses, as compared with 10.5 million for Sanders.

Nor, after a strong run of contests for Sanders in late March and early April, is there much sign of forward momentum for Sanders. Over the past seven weeks, from the New York primary on April 19 through Puerto Rico on Sunday, Clinton has won 505 pledged delegates as compared with 428 for Sanders. Her current lead in our national polling average, 14.4 percentage points, is the widest it has been since mid-February.

On Tuesday, Clinton will almost certainly clinch majorities of elected delegates and the popular vote. Suppose that Sanders, who currently trails Clinton by a narrow 5 percentage points in our California polling average, were to win the state by 20 percentage points instead. Even in that case, Sanders would still trail Clinton nationally by almost 200 elected delegates and about 2 million votes, depending on turnout in California.

“Michael Reagan — the son of former president and Republican icon Ronald Reagan — said he would not be voting for Donald Trump during California’s GOP primary on Tuesday. And his late father probably wouldn’t, either,” Politico reports.

New York Times: “In an unusually coordinated series of attacks leveled from congressional offices and the Senate floor, in state capitols and sidewalk protests, Democrats excoriated Mr. Trump as racist and demanded that Republicans either stand behind his comments or condemn him and even rescind their endorsements of his candidacy.”

“Democrats received unexpected ammunition from Mr. Trump himself, who, in an extraordinary conference call with allies on Monday, urged them to defend his criticisms of a federal judge’s Mexican heritage — and then rebuked his campaign staff for having suggested otherwise.”

BuzzFeed has terminated a deal with the RNC to run political advertisements in the Fall, the company’s CEO Jonah Peretti informed employees.

Said Peretti: “Earlier today, BuzzFeed informed the RNC that we would not accept Trump for President ads and that we would be terminating our agreement with them. The Trump campaign is directly opposed to the freedoms of our employees in the United States and around the world and in some cases, such as his proposed ban on international travel for Muslims, would make it impossible for our employees to do their jobs.”

President Obama, “after months of sitting on the sidelines of the rancorous contest to succeed him, is now ready to aggressively campaign for Hillary Clinton, starting with a formal endorsement of her candidacy as early as this week,” the New York Times reports.

“The White House is in active conversations with Mrs. Clinton’s campaign about how and where the president would be useful to her… Advisers say that the president, who sees a Democratic successor as critical to his legacy, is impatient to begin campaigning. They say he is taking nothing for granted.”

“Donald Trump’s New York City property-tax bill, published June 3, shows he once again received a tax break aimed at middle-class New Yorkers,” Crain’s New York Business reports.

“The presumptive GOP presidential nominee’s latest property-tax bill shows he was awarded a credit under the STAR program, or the New York State School Tax Relief Program. To be eligible for STAR, a married couple must have annual income of $500,000 or less. You wouldn’t think a guy as rich as Trump claims to be would qualify, but he has received the credit for several years and records filed over the weekend with the city’s Department of Finance show he received a $304 STAR tax break for his Trump Tower penthouse.”

Jonathan Chait: “The system isn’t rigged. Clinton is going to win the nomination because she has won far more votes. She currently leads with 55 percent of the total vote to 43 percent. That’s fairly close for a primary, but it’s not Bush-versus-Gore close. It’s not even Bush-versus-Dukakis close (the 1988 election, widely seen as a landslide, was settled by less than 8 percent).”

“Clinton’s lead in pledged delegates is proportionally smaller than her lead in total votes because Sanders has benefited from low-turnout caucuses. Yet Sanders has enjoyed astonishing success at framing his narrative of the primary as a contest that, in some form or fashion, has been stolen from its rightful winner. His version of events has bled into the popular culture and fueled disillusionment among his supporters.”