Open Thread for Sunday, September 25, 2016

Politico: “At the time of his convention speech, there was compelling political logic for the ambitious firebrand to steer clear of Trump. Cruz appears likely to run for president again, and Trump, at the time, looked like was headed toward a blowout loss. Not to mention, Trump had essentially called Cruz’s wife unattractive and erroneously linked his father to JFK’s assassination.”

“Cruz’s allies believed if he played it right, he could emerge from the election as one of the last principled conservatives — the final bulwark against a candidate who violated many of the values conservatives hold dear.”

“But with Trump approaching Hillary Clinton in the polls, Cruz’s diss had become more of a liability: A narrow Trump loss might have been pinned on Cruz for keeping conservatives home on Election Day because they were following his lead.”

“The uniquely uncivil presidential campaign is about to produce one of the biggest civic gatherings in decades: For 90 minutes on Monday night, a polarized nation will pause to watch the first head-to-head encounter between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump,” the New York Times reports.

“The total audience, network executives and political strategists say, could be as high as 100 million viewers — Super Bowl territory. That would surpass the 80 million who watched Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan in 1980, the record for a presidential debate, and rank among television benchmarks like the finales of MASH and Cheers.”

Dan Balz: “The first debate, at Hofstra University, should be great theater. Trump, an unguided missile, will be seeking to project a calmer demeanor and a command of the facts, enough at least to reassure voters who doubt his capacity to serve. Clinton, a studious and well-prepared debater whose expertise on many issues is deep, will be looking to avoid the weeds, offer a bigger and more affirmative vision and mostly try to prove that her rival is unfit to occupy the Oval Office.”

Josh Marshall on the debate:

For Trump, the bigger problem in a debate setting is the nature of two person debates versus as many as ten on the stage at once. Answers in multi-person debates tend to be short and pointed. Time is in very short supply. Generally you have to fight to get in on a question. There can be back and forth and candidates are sometimes pressed on a given point. But that isn’t the norm. Time is scarce and you can generally just hang back on a question you don’t want to address.

Two person debates have very different dynamics. I think the bigger liability for Trump is what we saw in the national security forum hosted a few weeks ago by NBC News. [….] [There, on a question regarding ISIS,] Trump has very little idea what he’s talking about and when pressed on a clear contradiction he starts making up new nonsense to avoid addressing the question. As I said at the time: I think this exchange is pretty obvious for people in a way that transcends politics and ideology. Trump is the kid telling the teacher the dog ate his homework. Then the teacher points out he has no dog. But he’s not going to apologize or come clean. He’s just going to keep talking.

Trump is extremely ignorant when it comes to public policy. George W. Bush had a pretty limited handle on public policy issues too. But either he or his campaign staff (likely both) had some awareness of this fact and kept his answers general and brief. Trump has no such self-awareness and generally just makes things up on the fly. That’s seldom gone over well in non-Fox contexts – not just because he’s ignorant but because it’s usually pretty obvious he’s just making things up.

I do think it’s possible he’ll be goaded into saying something offensive or unhinged. For instance, I think it would be highly advisable for Clinton to confront Trump on birtherism – to press the point that he needs to provide some explanation and apology for why he spread this lie for six years. He’s shown very little indication that he has a good answer to that question. Questions like that, shaming questions, tend to set him off.

Washington Post: “An examination by the Washington Post of one week of Trump’s speeches, tweets and interviews show a candidate who not only continues to rely heavily on thinly sourced or entirely unsubstantiated claims but also uses them to paint a strikingly bleak portrait of an impoverished America, overrun by illegal immigrants, criminals and terrorists — all designed to set up his theme that he is specially suited to ‘make America great again.’”

New York Times: “The New York Times closely tracked Mr. Trump’s public statements from Sept. 15-21, and assembled a list of his 31 biggest whoppers, many of them uttered repeatedly. This total excludes dozens more: Untruths that appeared to be mere hyperbole or humor, or delivered purely for effect, or what could generously be called rounding errors.”

“Frustration is growing within Donald Trump’s campaign over the Republican nominee’s yawning money gap with Democratic rival Hillary Clinton — just as the presidential race heads into its final fall stretch,” Politico reports.

“Trump’s top advisers have held a series of tense conversations in recent days about how to close a fundraising hole that’s grown to over $200 million – a deficit that’s led Trump to essentially cede the TV airwaves to his Democratic rival. The discussions, which were relayed by more than a half-dozen sources, have veered into finger pointing, with some participants pinning the blame on the Republican National Committee or on Steven Mnuchin, Trump’s national finance chairman and a newcomer to the political scene.”

“The shortfall is putting Trump at a substantial disadvantage during the remaining few weeks of the campaign, as focus shifts to the clinical – and costly — process of bringing voters out to the polls.”

Dylan Matthews at Vox: “The key question on the Clinton Foundation is whether it saved lives. The answer is clearly yes.”

There is little to no evidence that anyone received meaningful favors from the Clintons in exchange for donating to the foundation. There is definitely no evidence that Hillary Clinton altered her policies as secretary of state in reaction to donations. There’s no evidence that the Clintons or their foundation engaged in some of the more egregious activities of Trump’s foundation, like donating to a state attorney general to deter her from an investigation into Trump’s activities, or giving to a nonprofit to fund a lawsuit against another state AG who did opt to investigate, or even paying off the legal bills of his for-profit businesses.

But there is considerable evidence that the Clinton Foundation has saved millions of lives. And there’s evidence that Bill Clinton’s work with the group would make him more useful as first spouse. Presidents rely heavily on special envoys tasked with making deals to resolve prisoner disputes, facilitate peace processes, and the like. Clinton’s time with the foundation exhibited the exact set of skills necessary for a role like that. His presence could greatly expand the diplomatic bandwidth of his wife’s administration.

The fact that Hillary Clinton’s association with a group, and a husband, with that track record has become a liability rather than an asset is a deep indictment of how skewed the press’s priorities in covering this election have become.

Dan Drezner at the Washington Post: “Nate Silver says I should be nervous about the election. Here’s why I’m not too nervous.”

My model of this election is that Trump has a rigid core of supporters but also a hard ceiling on that support. Clinton has more voter support but also more “soft” support. These are voters who become easily disaffected when she has a bad news cycle or two. (It’s also possible that those on the left get disaffected when she appeals to moderate Republicans and vice versa.) So when the race looks close, it’s not because Trump is attracting Clinton voters, it’s because possible Clinton voters are not feeling all that good about Clinton and might choose not to vote — or answer a pollster.

In this way, the very tightening of the race prevents Trump from winning. There is a bevy of voters who are not jazzed by Clinton but are petrified by a Trump presidency. Once polls start to show that it’s close, they will decide to vote for Clinton or say so in a poll. When the lead expands, they get more complacent and disaffected by Clinton’s flaws.

Given the good recent economic news, and the failure of terrorism threats to benefit Trump, my baseline of the 2016 election is that any tightening of the race creates endogenous effects that prevent Trump from taking the lead.

John Stoehr at US News: “Clinton Is Winning”

Yet she’s still ahead – and the bad news cycle appears to be over. The major news agencies, as I have argued, have been her primary rival. They now appear chastened after weeks of fetishizing Clinton’s flaws while glancing over Trump’s. Not only that, but major news agencies are changing tactics to report responsibly on a brazen candidate rolling over the norms of decorum that usually oversee politics and the press.

Indeed, major media appear to have awakened to Trump’s real campaign strategy: to dominate the press and lie prodigiously. The New York Times, the most conventional of elite news media, has finally broken the seal, using “lie” in a headline to describe Trump’s five-year campaign to besmirch America’s first black president. Its executive editor, Dean Baquet, said the paper plans to call out even more lies.

How much impact the Times’ decision will have is hard to gauge, but it will have some.

.@MattMackowiak on belated Ted Cruz endorsement of Donald Trump https://t.co/1ao9U22ti3

— Greg Dworkin (@DemFromCT) September 23, 2016

The New York Times endorses Hillary Clinton, and surprisingly it is a strong and positive endorsement.

In any normal election year, we’d compare the two presidential candidates side by side on the issues. But this is not a normal election year. A comparison like that would be an empty exercise in a race where one candidate — our choice, Hillary Clinton — has a record of service and a raft of pragmatic ideas, and the other, Donald Trump, discloses nothing concrete about himself or his plans while promising the moon and offering the stars on layaway. (We will explain in a subsequent editorial why we believe Mr. Trump to be the worst nominee put forward by a major party in modern American history.)

But this endorsement would also be an empty exercise if it merely affirmed the choice of Clinton supporters. We’re aiming instead to persuade those of you who are hesitating to vote for Mrs. Clinton — because you are reluctant to vote for a Democrat, or for another Clinton, or for a candidate who might appear, on the surface, not to offer change from an establishment that seems indifferent and a political system that seems broken.

Running down the other guy won’t suffice to make that argument. The best case for Hillary Clinton cannot be, and is not, that she isn’t Donald Trump.

The best case is, instead, about the challenges this country faces, and Mrs. Clinton’s capacity to rise to them.

Read it all.

Lisa Barrett on a kind of misogyny that may be encoded into our brains.

When Hillary Clinton participated in a televised forum on national security and military issues this month, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, Reince Priebus, tweeted that she was “angry and defensive the entire time — no smile and uncomfortable.” Mrs. Clinton, evidently undaunted by Mr. Priebus’s opinion on when she should and shouldn’t smile, tweeted back, “Actually, that’s just what taking the office of president seriously looks like.”

The implication of Mr. Priebus’s comment was a familiar one: A woman making stern-looking facial movements must be angry or upset. A man who looks the same, on the other hand, is focusing on the important matters at hand.

This is a classic example of a psychological phenomenon that my lab has studied: how people perceive emotion differently in men’s and women’s faces. It’s something for Americans to consider as they watch the first debate between Mrs. Clinton and Donald J. Trump on Monday.