Sunday Open Thread [8.21.16]

Filed in National by on August 21, 2016

Ed Kilgore says the number of people who do not like Trump AND Clinton is very small, actually.

One of the sturdier memes of this presidential cycle is that most voters pretty much dislike both major-party candidates. It’s the foundation for the otherwise forlorn hopes of the Libertarian, Green, and Independent Conservative candidacies. And in the longer run, the idea that other candidates would have done much better is the whetstone on which many knives are being sharpened for a postelection bloodbath. […] But polling maven Mark Blumenthal, looking closely at SurveyMonkey tracking data, disputes the premise rather convincingly. Yes, these are two relatively unpopular candidates. But that’s mainly because each candidate’s supporters hate the partisan “enemy” so fiercely.

Turns out, says Blumenthal, that about a fourth of voters give both Clinton and Trump unfavorable ratings. That’s a pretty high number, but it’s not close to a majority. And then if you look at intensity levels, the universe of “plague on both your houses!” voters shrinks even more significantly: Only about 10 percent of voters dislike both candidates with an equal level of disdain.

Looking more closely at that dyspeptic group, Blumenthal finds, unsurprisingly, that they are disproportionately unconnected to either major party and, more important, less likely to vote at all. If they do vote, a majority of them presently will go Libertarian or Green. It’s a good guess that as the voting decision approaches, a goodly number will either tilt in one major-party direction or another or decide to stay home.

Josh Marshall:

In the two segments in this single video we see the same dynamic which has played out all over the Trump campaign over the last few days. Put simply, they’re so wrapped up in racial antagonism that they can’t keep track of whether they’re trying to execute the standard faux outreach act or just angry trolling. It’s all so close to the surface they can’t help blurting out lines that sound more like something you might say shooting the shit with David Duke. Trump’s ‘appeal’ amounts to a diatribe against African-American life which bristles with contempt. Kingston is the same, just in a different form. In the following interview, when Keilar presses Kingston on why Trump is doing ‘outreach’ from all white suburbs, he tries to parry her question but then he blurts out: “Maybe it would have been nicer if he had a backdrop with a burning car!”

Yikes!

Like I said, they’re so off the rails they can barely stay in character.

Robert Costa:

Trump has disavowed some of those incendiary associations when they have emerged at various points in the campaign, and Bannon has rejected accusations that Breitbart News fuels racial and ethnic divisions. But the links have continued to be made, including from within the GOP.

“Movements like this, with toxic and nasty stuff, have existed in one form or another, but they’ve been kept on the outer fringes of American political life. Now it’s command and control at headquarters,” said Peter Wehner, who was director of the White House Office of Strategic Initiatives under George W. Bush.

“If the GOP fully becomes the home to the Breitbart and alt-right movement, it’ll cease to be the Republican Party as we’ve known it,” Wehner added. “There will be a huge crack-up beyond anything we’ve seen.”


Jeff Greenfield
:

Republicans insist that Democrats bear at least as much responsibility as they do for the ill will that pervades Washington. And, as David Graham has argued in The Atlantic, Democrats have in the past described mainstream GOP nominees in near-apocalyptic terms too. But at least in the view of two of Washington’s most venerable political scholars, there is no real equivalence. Norm Ornstein of the AEI and Thomas Mann of Brookings authored a 2012 book that said flatly: “The Republican Party has become an insurgent outlier in American politics — ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”

The past four years have served to make that an understatement. But Trump and the elevation of Steve Bannon to his campaign chief executive are only the latest symptoms of a transformation that appear to begin with those words Gingrich and Luntz offered more than 20 years ago. Now, as then, Trump’s opponents are corrupt … they steal … they lie … they’re traitors.

Ryan Cooper/The Week:

Unless something changes between now and November — and it will have to be something big — Hillary Clinton is going to win this election in a complete blowout, perhaps by big enough margins to retake Congress. It’s an extremely unusual chance to actually push through some big policy, which raises the question: Where is Clinton’s big plan?

Franklin D. Roosevelt had his New Deal, and Lyndon B. Johnson had his Great Society, both of which went some ways towards building a society that provided a decent standard of living to everyone, without exception. In the 1930s, “New Dealer” meant something. Hillary Clinton can try to finish the job with her own branded policy package — the New Deal Squared? The Extremely Good Society? — that will provide a unifying vision and rallying symbol. Here are some suggestions.

“Hillary Clinton’s increasingly confident campaign has begun crafting a detailed agenda for her possible presidency, with plans to focus on measures aimed at creating jobs, boosting infrastructure spending and enacting immigration reform if current polling holds and she is easily elected to the White House in November,” the Washington Post reports.

“In recent weeks, as her leads over GOP nominee Donald Trump have expanded, Clinton has started ramping up for a presidency defined by marquee legislation she has promised to seek immediately. The pace and scale of the planning reflect growing expectations among Democrats that she will win and take office in January alongside a new Democratic majority in the Senate.”

“While careful not to sound as if she is measuring the draperies quite yet, Clinton now describes what she calls improved odds for passage of an overhaul of immigration laws — the first legislative priority she outlined in detail last year — and what could be a bipartisan effort to rebuild the nation’s roads, bridges, airports, rail system and ports.”

Washington Post: “For those envisioning a line of moving vans at the Supreme Court and a new president immediately reordering life at the marble palace, this small splash of cold water: Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, 83, has already hired the four clerks who will assist her through June 2018.”

Yes, but she will eventually retire in the next presidential term. As might Anthony Kennedy and Clarence Thomas. And as will Justice Breyer. Yes, it is possible that the next President will appoint 5 justices.

“A sharpening debate has emerged in Republican circles over whether and when to cut ties with Donald Trump, who has shaken up his campaign team as his poll numbers have dropped,” The Hill reports. “While some in the GOP have called for Republicans to cut Trump loose sooner rather than later to avoid lasting damage, strategists concerned about control of Congress in 2017 say that would be disastrous.”


Washington Post
: “Until this week, it had been possible for party elders to convince themselves that Trump might prove to be a passing storm in their ranks rather than a portent of climate change. But to their dismay, the party standard-bearer has now signaled that he intends to go for broke in the final stretch of the campaign.”

“Trump’s decision to ditch his establishment-bred campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, in favor of Breitbart News executive Stephen Bannon, who shares Trump’s scorched-earth approach to politics and his worldview, is perhaps the most overt example of the mogul’s closing strategy.”

“Theirs is an amorphous alternative to traditional conservatism — often associated with the ‘alt right’ movement — that is leery of liberal immigration, multiculturalism, military involvement overseas and free trade. Its critics also accuse the alt right of flirting with white supremacism, anti-Semitism and other forms of intolerance.”

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  1. Jason330 says:

    I hope Clintons SCOTUS picks are better than her pick of Ken Salazar to head her transition team.

  2. Delaware Dem says:

    Salazar is a perfectly fine pick to head the transition.

    Some liberal groups were more positive about Salazar.

    “The real fire that he brings in his belly, which we’re delighted to see, is a real commitment to public lands,” said Melinda Pierce, legislative director for the Sierra Club. She expressed no concerns about his past support for the TPP, emphasizing that he expressed those views before he joined Clinton’s campaign.

    “His job is to support and further the Clinton policy agenda, and so I fully expect him to embrace Clinton’s opposition to the pact,” Pierce said. “I just don’t see him as a leading voice pro-trade.”

    Tiernan Sittenfeld, senior vice president of the League of Conservation Voters, said Salazar “has been a longtime environmental ally as a senator and as Secretary of the Interior, and we are confident that he and climate champions Jennifer Granholm and Neera Tanden and others will lead a transition team that is absolutely committed to fighting climate change and protecting our air, land and water.”

  3. Jason330 says:

    TPP, fracking, DLC die hard. No thanks. Clinton doesn’t want or seem to need leftists and progressives.

  4. puck says:

    Obama had Rahm Emmanuel as his initial Chief of Staff, which was a bitter pill with long-lasting anti-progressive effects that we still haven’t fully recovered from. But now Obama has been called by some the Greatest Most Progressive President Ever.

  5. Jason330 says:

    Im at peace with it, I just think it is petty obvious that she is not interested in progressive votes and expect her SCOTUS picks will ref to that.

  6. puck says:

    “Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager, Robby Mook, said they still haven’t found a person to play Donald Trump in mock presidential debates.

    “It’s very hard to find someone to mimic the reckless temperament and the hateful instincts and divisive instincts of Donald Trump,” Mook said Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

  7. cassandra m says:

    From the NYT Editorial:

    Trump supporters have now been promised a nation where non-natives, and their children, are locked outside the borders forever. They have been promised, inside a new wall, new factories where everyone will build things, speak only English and be rich. What will happen when they learn that none of this is real?

    This is a country that can’t keep up with the roads that they built that we all drive on. This is the perfect picture of our failed politics — where we have tons of symptoms and tons of politicians who keep trying to sell voters on the latest fad diet as the cure.

  8. anonymous says:

    That’s why the word that Hillary is looking at infrastructure spending is so welcome. It’s been the obvious solution to a sluggish economy for years, and because it would work and everyone in Washington knows it, the Republicans have blocked it for eight years because they couldn’t allow the Democrats to improve the economy.

    That’s why their party has died. Instead of helping pass such legislation and patting themselves on the back for helping the public, Republicans in DC would rather hurt the Democrats than help even themselves, let alone the country at large.

  9. cassandra_m says:

    ^^I think that the GOP narrative has less to do with opposing Democrats (although that is clearly a piece) than it is being captured by two ultimately competing interests — corporations and their angry base. They’ve been able to push a theory of prosperity that is at the expense of poor people and immigrants, but only provides any benefit to the 1%. They don’t care much about the middle class, because the folks that they can get to vote for them have bought into the “What’s good for business is good for America” schtick and that somehow poor people and immigrants are taking stuff from them. This bit of 3 card monte has enabled them (and some Democrats) to actually shrink the middle class and shrink the possibility to get into the middle class.

    Democrats have some blame here as well — working at trying to capture business campaign donations and living with the always mistaken idea that “moderation” means making sure that the 1% are well cared for. It is the problem of legislators having to spend a bunch of time listening to the issues of rich people because they spend a scheduled part of the week asking them for money. But — to me – there is a real political opening here to race back to supporting the people who really power this country and making sure that the system really does work for them.

  10. SussexWatcher says:

    TNJ has an in-depth story on campaign sign placement laws in which the headline informs us that 13 candidates have been fined … but only names one of them. Nice reporting!

    http://www.delawareonline.com/story/news/2016/08/21/political-signs-bring-fines-politicans-delaware/88991372/

    The reporter or editor also created an entirely new agency – the Department of Transportation and Development. Who knew?

  11. anonymous says:

    Yes, everybody knows it’s the Department of Transportation and Real Estate.

  12. mouse says:

    I hate DelDot. The light’s bettwen Lewes and Dewey are totally random and it un-necessarily backs up traffic for an extra 30-60 mins for no reason other than DelDot’s neglectful incompetance. . I sat in it going both ways to Rehoboth. It took a couple hours out of my weekend. DelDot should be embarassed. This wouldn’t be tollerated if it was in New Castle county

  13. mouse says:

    When I was riding my bike on the avenue Saturday afternoon, I felt like pulling a few DC folk out of their $100K cars and killing them though