If she'd kicked him in the balls when he pulled his "Alpha Male" bullshit it might have cost her some votes, but it would have cost him even more. Nothing says "beta cuck" quite like curling up in a fetal position whimpering and cupping your junk. Not that I'm advocating anything, just making an observation. Obviously it's not a good idea fora number of reasons, but the image makes me smile a bit.
Watching the combination of the Russia scandal and his own fecklessness, immaturity and incompetence eat Trump alive is very, very satisfying. It's not quite "worth all this crap" satisfying, but certainly "on track for one of the most poetic poisoned-chalice situations since something was rotten in the land of Denmark" satisfying. I would very much like to see every one of them lashed with the fact of their treason and failure until the end of their days.
Could anything be less profitable than rehashing the virtues of Hillary Clinton?
Trump is still in power and there is no way to remove him from power without the Democrats getting a majority in the House and 67 seats in the Senate, which will not happen. No Republican will vote to impeach Trump, or to remove him for incapacity, whatever he does - this simply will not happen, their sense of loyalty is too great, as is their fear of Trump's supporters. Trump will be in power until 2021 at least.
Not to say that it's hopeless- opposing his policies can produce real successes. But the man himself is not going anywhere until 2021 at the earliest.
Further to 2, you might get a bit of enjoyment out of this.
Could anything be less profitable than rehashing the virtues of Hillary Clinton?
I think you read a different article than I did.
If she'd kicked him in the balls when he pulled his "Alpha Male" bullshit . . .
Ugggh. It's an amusing image, but it just makes me think of the whole debate about "badass" and "strong" female characters. Surely there's a way to appreciate her strength without imagining her kicking him in the calls.
The Russia scandal and associated situation really has no precedent, so I don't place much faith in talk about what would "never" happen in normal circumstances. I do like this analysis over on 538.
4 There could be a time that Ryan et al view keeping him as a greater liability. Let's see how the tax cut plays out.
I didn't read the article. See 3.
(And of course the people around Trump don't have his protections from legal jeopardy. Thanks for 6, Barry.)
I mean, 'also-ran' became a term for a reason.
I am totally with Castock in 2. If Trump had to be in power, watching the deluge of scandals certainly is more fun than watching him sign legislation.
I'm also with Castock in 2. Watching it all come crashing down in chaos (which of course can and probably will last till 2020) and fucking up the GOP agenda as it happens is about as good as it's going to get.
15 Depressed. I'll leave further comment till after the customary 40.
I agree with HG and LC; I sure do want Trump's followers to lose faith in Trumpismo. Not that much sign of this yet, but it's early. My reservation about too much HRC in the spotlight is that it delays that process.
Agreeing with 2 et al. If I can't have real joy and optimism, schadenfreude is the next best thing. I hope that Trump manages to fuck things up so badly and in such a scandalous, corrupt way that it ruins the Republican agenda forever, but I had hoped that about GWB's presidency, and the ability to rationally assign blame doesn't seem like a lasting feature of the American electorate.
I worry with the Trump base, since both they and Trump are pretty policy agnostic, they don't actually care what Trump does in terms of actual governance, they're just happy to see him kick some liberal/cuckservative ass. As long as Paul Ryan and Nancy Pelosi are upset, they're happy.
"Having with her usual discernment and acuity reviewed the post-electoral career of Adlai Stevenson and found it a model worth imitating, Hillary Clinton...."
"If the Electoral College ever gives an honorary degree, it should go to Adlai Stevenson."
Sounds about right.
I also looked up Adlai Stevenson, and the Wikipedia disambiguation page is something: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adlai_Stevenson
As far as I can tell his post-election activity was being ambassador to the UN and dying of a heart attack.
I hope that Trump manages to fuck things up so badly and in such a scandalous, corrupt way that it ruins the Republican agenda forever...
Should I fill the basement with canned goods then?
I mean, 'also-ran' became a term for a reason.
Sure, and yet, why bother jumping in as one of the first comments simply to say, "I find the idea that this article exists tiresome"?
Part of why I mentioned Traister's previous work is that I think she has good reason to have more to say about Clinton, and I thought she rose to the occasion and did have an interesting perspective.
17: It does appear that Trump's base is eroding, in point of fact
20, 21: I was thinking more of liberals' nostalgia for the defeated candidate whom they wanted to have liked.
23: I bothered because today I happened to be annoyed by this nugget from Clinton's commencement address:*
Now, you may have heard that things didn't exactly go the way I planned. But you know what? I'm doing okay.You know what, Hillary? I don't care. You lost to a clown and now the world is on fire. And this was always likely to happen, because, who knew, thirty years of smear campaigns make it really hard to win an election. And the injustice of this doesn't change anything. Justice has nothing to do with winning, as she possibly should have noticed when Obama came out of thin air and beat her into the ground without breaking stride.
26 grates because Clinton herself is one of the people I blame least. A more qualified better candidate was thoroughly entitled to step up and try to win the nomination, and you can blame them for not being the better candidate.
As long as we're rehashing dead horses, Comey can go fuck himself before I snap at Clinton.
Hillary Rodham Clinton vowed Wednesday to continue her quest for the Democratic nomination, arguing she would be the stronger nominee because she appeals to a wider coalition of voters -- including whites who have not supported Barack Obama in recent contests.
"I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on," she said in an interview with USA TODAY. As evidence, Clinton cited an Associated Press article "that found how Sen. Obama's support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me."
"There's a pattern emerging here," she said.
Clinton's blunt remarks about race came a day after primaries in Indiana and North Carolina dealt symbolic and mathematical blows to her White House ambitions.
Nevertheless, I have a good feeling about 2008.
8: true, but I'm no talking about precedent, I'm talking about mechanics, and the fact is there are only five possible scenarios here.
1. He dies in office. Possible but the odds are very much against it.
2. He resigns. I believe this to be even more unlikely.
3. He is impeached. See my earlier comment.
4. He is removed for being unfit for office. Again, see above: 3 and 4 both require majorities at least in both houses. Unlikely that the Democrats will have that before 2020 and very unlikely that any republican will betray president and party in this way.
5. He is still in office in 2020. This is by far the most likely in my view. And I'd give him a 50/50 chance of winning in 2020.
Great. Now I have another reason to drink besides my family.
They always feel better when I carefully explain it isn't their fault.
"I will forever consider the election straight-up hacked and stolen."
No argument with that from here.
33: If they are also in Pennsylvania, it is totally their fault.
I also consider the election straight-up hacked and stolen, and Clinton would have been a fine president, but damn does 25 perfectly capture how I feel about any Clinton post-mortems. It also pretty much captures how I felt about Kerry and Gore. I thought they were terrible candidates with good ideas who would have made good presidents. So I talked myself into rooting for them and got my heart broken. All the more painfully because deep down inside I knew they were going to lose anyway.
Fuck it. I want Clinton run again to punish people who write something like comment 26.
Barry, this is just to get things closer to 40. How are you? Thinking of you.
I'm still betting on 1. Dude's a goddamn actuarial time bomb. I'd actually be interested in what life insurance underwriting would look like given what we know about his family history, public symptoms, and medical condition. 5% chance of dying from a medical condition in the next 12 months? 10%?
26: wait, wut? I LOVE THAT 404 PAGE! It's *excellent*!! What didn't you like about it?
Note that the average across all 70 year old males is 2.4% (2013 SS data)
very unlikely that any republican will betray president and party in this way
At the moment, yes, and a lot would have to change for GOP to turn around on impeachment or removal - viz., he's already done many the exact same things that were on Nixon's articles of impeachment, and they're still just "concerned". But I think there's a real (if unknowable) chance of the investigations uncovering enough shockers to shift things, for them to decide they're better kicking him out despite all. Of course then they angle for a mass forgetting and media valorization of GOP for making hard decisions, sticking up for core principles, etc.
35: Apparently, it's rude to say so.
I was thinking more of liberals' nostalgia for the defeated candidate whom they wanted to have liked.
That seems less a statement about any particular characteristic of Clinton and more about liberals.
For that matter, I don't have any great desire to see Clinton run again. But, for me, part of the value in portraits of Clinton (like this article or her interview with Amanpour*) is that during the election the combination of Clinton's reserve and the amount of bullshit meant that it was easy to see her as purely a political figure and that seeing her as a person helps diminish some of the unpleasant memories of the election.
I think 36 is completely fair. The one thing that I am inclined to push back on is the idea that the loss was an inevitable reflection of Clinton's weaknesses. Even on election day I believed that, had things gone slightly differently, she could have won, and not only do I still believe that, I think that, by and large, members of the Trump campaign believe that. I think she alludes to that in the article, and I've seen that the Trump pollster said, on the record, that, on election day, he thought Clinton was likely going to win.**
Barry, this is just to get things closer to 40. How are you? Thinking of you.
Indeed, wishing you well, feel free to intrude on the thread.
* I was surprised at how glad I was to watch it myself. Precisely because I'd seen one two references to it and, seeing it, I thought they characterized it badly.
** There's also the point that Clinton makes in the article:
Besides, she argues, "what I was doing was working. I would have won had I not been subjected to the unprecedented attacks by Comey and the Russians, aided and abetted by the suppression of the vote, particularly in Wisconsin." She agrees that there are lessons to be learned from her campaign, just not the same ones her critics would cite. "Whoever comes next, this is not going to end. Republicans learned that if you suppress votes you win ... So take me out of the equation as a candidate. You know, I'm not running for anything. Put me into the equation as somebody who has lived the lessons that people who care about this country should probably pay attention to."
I'd actually be interested in what life insurance underwriting would look like given what we know about his family history, public symptoms, and medical condition.
Here's how this simple calculator's life expectancy for him changed as I fed input from his doctor's statements, taking them at face value except where specified:
- 70-year-old male nonsmoker: baseline life expectancy 88
- Height 6'2", weight 236lb (remember he added an inch to his height so it wouldn't calculate as overweight): -2
- Blood pressure normal: +3
- Cholesterol normal but taking medication: +0
- Inactive: -3
- Not drinking alcohol: +1
- No moving violations in past 5 years: +1
All of which brings the LE back to 88 in the end. If he's secretly taking blood pressure medication, it would have been 85.
it was easy to see her as purely a political figure and that seeing her as a person helps diminish some of the unpleasant memories
I don't think we're seeing the real person in these profiles. I think we're still seeing a "purely...political figure". (I think she's seriously considering running again in four years.) To be clear, I don't think this kind of guardedness is unique to Clinton, who I don't believe is any kind of monster. I think the same would be true of profiles of Obama or Kerry. Maybe not of W, who seems unusually childlike/credulous among major political figures.
45: is there a box to tick for "addicted to diet pills" and another one for "early-onset Alzheimer's"?
Also, here's something weird to note, though it's probably just statistics of small numbers: Elected Democratic Presidents are much younger than elected Republican presidents.
Age of Non-Incumbent Winning Democratic Presidents at First Election:
Obama: 47 years old
Clinton: 46 years old
Carter: 52 years old
Kennedy: 43 years old
Roosevelt: 51 years old
(Truman and Johnson were 64 and 56 when first elected, but both were incumbents already)
Average: 48 years old
Age of Non-Incumbent Winning Republican Candidates:
Trump: 70 years old
Bush2: 54 years old
Bush1: 64 years old
Reagan: 69 years old
Nixon: 56 years old
Eisenhower: 62 years old
(Ford was 61 years old but never elected)
Average: 62 years old.
But all the election proves is that Clinton was more popular than Trump, which is literally one of the lowest bars in political history. If she had faced a sane Republican (I know), she would have gotten clobbered. She was definitely a weak candidate who nearly benefited from facing an even weaker candidate.
Will Chelsea turn 35 before elections are suspended in favor of the Ivanka Regency?
46: You are correct. Perhaps I should have said, "pure charicature."
Oooh first nominee for metteur en scene (public) is hot though.
47: it's right above the box for "has a personal physician on standby in his house and is always followed around by a personal ambulance with his own blood type and a paramedic team and has regular checkups and access to unlimited preventative care and generally speaking has probably the highest routine medical budget of any single person in the Western world".
Also, urine is sterile, even from prostitutes.
I suppose what we are talking about is the chance that he will either die or become so ill that even the Republicans will have to admit he's unfit. But that would be pretty ill. Coma or a serious stroke. So not very likely.
This is great, winner for supporting actress (privé) wasn't in attendance, sent a tough old bird in a comfy separates ensemble with a looooong script of remarks and she was not to be stopped, just went on and on, host and presenter interrupting, she soldiering on ...
(I think she's seriously considering running again in four years.)
Oh God, no. And I genuinely like Clinton, and couldn't finish the article because it was making me feel too agitated. But no. No Clinton, no Biden, no Sanders, no one who will be over the age of 70 years by the fall of 2020. The party needs fresh faces, new blood.
Is there a box for "high stress job?" Ain't no job ages people like the Presidency.
I agree 100% with 58, although I doubt any of those people are actually going to run in 2020. Four years is a long time in politics, especially in the age of Trump.
(I liked the HRC article, but I don't think it's particularly relevant to politics going forward at this point.)
Waxed moustache gagné for revélation masculine.
Joke presenter based on host having picked up a nice lady from a check out line at the galeries Lafayette. Not printemps, mind.
I respect HRC, but fuck the baby boomers and may no one from that godforsaken generation that has destroyed the country and the world ever run anything again.
On the one hand yes. On the other hand, Ted Cruz is my age.
and blaming Clinton wholly and neatly takes the heat off everyone else who contributed: from the critics who derided her supporters as empty-headed shills to those supporters who were cowed into secret Facebook groups; from the journalists who treated Trump as a ratings-pumping sideshow and Clinton as the suspiciously presumptive president to all of us who permitted cheerful stories about America's progress on gender and race to blot out the real and lingering inequities in this country.
Yeah, it's like picking at a scab (it's not going to help you heal, but you just can't stop yourself from worrying at that wound), but I belonged to one of those secret, pro-HRC Facebook groups; and while I don't primarily blame myself, or my group, for Clinton's loss in any direct way, I do believe we should have done more, should not have allowed ourselves to be cowed and bullied into silence and secrecy. We should have been out there, loud and proud, but we thought she was going to win, and therefore chose the path of least resistance, because who the hell wants to be hectored and harangued on social media, after all? But we should have been candid, and maybe even openly enthusiastic, in our support for the actual, you know, Democratic candidate.
(And yes, there is a gender-based dynamic to all of this).
47: I'm going to be a pedantic asshole about this. Early-onset Alzheimer's refers to folks who are diagnosed before the age of 65. It's quite rare, and that subset of patients often faces unique challenges, especially re: Medicare eligibility. Early stage Alzheimer's disease is probably the term you want.
On HRC, I legitimately like her and think she has gotten screwed many times over. However, she should be done with politics as a candidate forever. I hoped it was her turn, and I loved her persona of nerdy, hardworking, studious, "bitches get shit done," because it was so easy for me personally to identify with. Whoever she really is (which I think is unknowable), I liked that iteration.
She was definitely a weak candidate
If the Russians, the FBI, the media, and the patriarchy working together can only beat you by 100k votes in the states where it matters, you are not a weak candidate.
I forgot to add Jim Crow to the list in 68.
I generally like Rebecca Traister, but this particular article never quite gelled for me.
Also, I'm boggled at the people who think that HRC would run in 2020. It seems wildly unlikely on every level. But then, I have at this point a 20+ year track record of awful political predictions, so what do I know?
I liked this article much better. Not about HRC the candidate, but about the man who has been managing her correspondence for the last 10 years. Maybe it's the librarian in me, but I have always been intensely curious about the systems that public figures have (or don't have) for their letters.
70: That is an excellent article, thank you.
66: thanks. That was actually exactly what I meant. I might be suffering from early-on...wait, what?
70: I have no idea if she's going to run. What I said, and what I believe to be true, is that she's seriously considering running again. She's said as much in private, apparently. Whether she's said that because she wants to leave the door open, wants to maintain control of the party (which her family has had for the past two decades), wants to keep up close relations with donors, or because she really means it, I don't know.
||
Thanks everyone.
I find myself falling into a bit of a funk. Maybe even more. That really seemed to be my best shot to do something similar for which I'm very well suited but which also stretched myself and stay in the region.
On top of everything I have to move house this week. And I still haven't fully settled on where though I've been working on staying in the same building.
I'll be back in NY from about June 23 to July 13.
|>
Got to run for now....
I'll be back in NY from about June 23 to July 13.
Good grief. I arrive on the 14th. It's like you're not even TRYING to consolidate meet-ups for our harried NY contingent.
Barry, take care of yourself. I hope you have options for respite from family when you are in NY?
The article in 70 was interesting, thanks, Witt.
In conclusion re Les Molières, they are like the Oscars but put on by real people, it is amazing how some stage actors can switch off and on and off their presence from second to second (normal woman walking to stage and off with 90 seconds of Racinian goddess at the podium in between), and sweetly surreal to leave the delayed broadcast at the apartment, walk to the Folies Bergères to pick up the kid and see people holding their awards in the convivial crowd out front of the theater.
Third 75. Does that NY collector still need a liquidator?
When it rains...I just had a talk with the current acting manager/director, apparently my current position is being threatened because of bullshit reasons having to do with last year's arbitrary downgrading on the curve that came down from on high and some other crap* even though I've done a ton of stuff for them here they wouldn't have been able to do otherwise and gotten some amazing things for them they'll be talking about for decades to come that they would never have gotten otherwise either.
*Other crap being I decided it was more important to spend my time on public facing exhibition stuff than processing backlog that I thought could wait but if course processing hits KPIs in a way that qualitative curatorial work doesn't.
Fortunately, it never rains in Arrakis.
That is for some reason a comment which highlights the grotesque element of the NMM trope. I mean, I think Noriega is the least sexual figure of any who have died recently, possibly ever. Though this will be taken as a challenge.
Agree with 77.
48 is striking. There's not even any overlap; there's never been a Republican as young as the oldest Democrat. Though, as you say, small numbers, and you're cutting out Truman and Johnson who were both pretty old, so even smaller.
63 Gets it right, said the boomer.
I fully understand the sentimental reasons for some of the above remarks, but it would be better for the observable universe if nobody who ran for the Democratic nomination in 2016, nobody who advised them, nobody who served on the DLC, and ideally nobody who ran out to get pizza for anybody's campaign office had anything to do with the Democratic candidature in 2020.
Barry, that's a bitch, and I'm really sorry.
This is a curiosity. Of course Sanders' brother lives in Oxford and used to be a councillor, but Green, not Labour.
Sorry Barry. Best wishes for things getting better.
What, no love lust for Old Pineapple Face?
Sadly agree with 77 and 85.1 as well.
And thanks all.
Now I'm finding myself on the cusp of a decision on whether to sign a year lease while under the cloud of possible dismissal.
Have a meeting next week with the director. My immediate supervisor who knows my value, knows what my workflows are and what I've done here is bizarrely not included. It would be hilarious and way fucked up if I got dismissed for not performing up to (their) snuff in an area that is not even under my job description, about which I expressed concrete reservations about being able to perform within the allotted time, as well not being given the materials requested and required in a timely manner to perform it.
Fuck this place. I was this close to escaping too. Time to wipe out the last of my Duvels.
79 He does and coincidentally just wrote me the other day asking when I'd be back. I've been warned about him, specifically that he's crazy, but crazy's become routine to me by this point. May be a good move if I have to do it for at least a year.
I really wish that other thing had panned out.
It's really hard to top "Barry the Liquidator" as a pseud. Just saying.
92 Hum it to the tune of John the Revelator.
You killed the blog with obscure musical references.
As I also just killed the last of the Duvel I laid in before Ramadan.
I also consider the election straight-up hacked and stolen, and Clinton would have been a fine president, but damn does 25 perfectly capture how I feel about any Clinton post-mortems. It also pretty much captures how I felt about Kerry and Gore. I thought they were terrible candidates with good ideas who would have made good presidents. So I talked myself into rooting for them and got my heart broken. All the more painfully because deep down inside I knew they were going to lose anyway.
I think this is really importantly wrong. Gore, Kerry, and Clinton were all pretty good candidates who got ratfucked hard. It is possible to be so glowingly charismatic that the ratfucking doesn't work (Bill Clinton, Obama), but we can't count on reliably finding candidates like that -- they don't always exist.
So, when a pretty good candidate starts getting slandered, it's really counterproductive to blame them for it because if they weren't bad candidates, the attacks wouldn't work. We've got to be able to figure out how to counter the ratfucking rather than waiting for the once-a-generation perfect savior figures as the only Democrats who can survive the process.
Yglesias will occasionally go on about how Kerry outperformed the fundamentals. Here's an old but representative example. Bush was, sadly, rather popular still in 2004. A quick look at 538 says that at end of his first term he was hovering at a 50% approval rating. Still, i don't think his argument is completely persuasive as he's looking at exit poll data, so he isn't taking into account effects on turnout. And that gets us back to both his potential to motivate his natural constituency--he just didn't have the glowing charisma LB mentioned--and the ratfucking that was so bad its name was generalized. Then again, the 2004 turnout--56.7%--was on the high side* for the last twenty years, so maybe I'm reading too much into that.
* Isn't that depressing?
Reading the various postmortems on the Montana special election, it occurs to me that "Here's the hidden silver lining behind the latest democratic loss" is now a well established little subgenre of journalism.
Not an encouraging sign.
70: I really liked that article; thanks for linking it Witt.
97
I think we're going to be talking at cross purposes here. On a purely outcomes-based analysis, we can't just say "ratfuckers gonna ratfuck, oh well". I knew, before the first ratfuck, before the first poll, that Gore, Kerry and Clinton were going to be unpopular. And they were. The ratfucking made sure of it, and made it more extreme, but simple social dynamics between them and the press made it incredibly likely and predictable. I think finding the next Bill or Barry is actually super important. They need to be young and charismatic and be perceived as an "outsider", whether or not they really are.
68
Conversely, if Donald Trump only loses to you by 3%, you're a weak candidate. He's not some magic "Redneck Piper". People really did (irrationally) hate Clinton that much that a demented reality TV show star seemed like a reasonably alternative. I don't blame Clinton for this, but it was true.
I knew, before the first ratfuck, before the first poll, that Gore, Kerry and Clinton were going to be unpopular.
I find that unlikely since the first attack on Clinton was in about late 1992. Were you really, in 1991 or so, pondering the presidential ambitions of the first lady of Arkansas and concluding that she didn't have what it takes?
97: LB, heebie and the various Clinton sympathizers in this thread are entirely correct in my view, but are perhaps a bit too tentative. I'm with Walt in 37.
I've voted against Hillary every time I've been given a decent opportunity. I voted for both Obama and Sanders, and I'm not sorry for either vote.
I expect I'll find a way to vote against her again in 2020 if it comes to that. Gillibrand? Franken? Warren? Sure, I'd likely go for any of them over Hillary.
But the idea that we should be embarrassed to have supported Hillary - or supported a party with such a weak candidate - is nonsense. When the Deep State and the media go all-in against you, sometimes you lose. That dynamic has to change, and -- as LB I think is saying -- blaming Hillary is blaming the victim.
I knew, before the first ratfuck, before the first poll, that Gore, Kerry and Clinton were going to be unpopular. And they were. The ratfucking made sure of it, and made it more extreme, but simple social dynamics between them and the press made it incredibly likely and predictable.
This is, I think, Monday morning quarterbacking. I mean, I can't be sure of it, but for Gore specifically, he went into the election as Mr. Rigidly Upright (maybe kinda boring, but honest). Did you really see the campaign of invented stories about his being a big liar coming? Or are you just saying that you knew the press hated him enough to spread some kind of lies about him?
Conversely, if Donald Trump only loses to you by 3%, you're a weak candidate. He's not some magic "Redneck Piper".
I don't think he was weak against Clinton; or, to put it another way, I don't think she would have necessarily done worse against a sane Republican. Her weak point was that people hated her irrationally, and his strength was that he was willing to go full irrational. Anyone who was trying to make sense on the issues at all would have let her show her strengths more.
ajay is entirely correct about the seemingly insurmountable obstacles to impeachment or removal by other means, but I think Castock in 8 is also correct.
It's a real immovable object/irresistible force kind of situation. It's basically impossible to imagine Trump not completing his term, but it's also impossible to imagine him completing it.
We're not a tenth of the way through his term, and he's already in this much trouble. It's not just his past scandals that might catch up to him, but the fact that he's going to keep doing crazy shit. And he often lacks the self-awareness to even lie about his criminality.
She did much better, and Trump did much worse, than a fundamentals-based model would suggest.
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2014/12/03/economy_doesnt_make_clinton_a_favorite_in_2016_124832.html
If he'd done as well as a generic Republican, Trump should have won the popular vote by more than 4 percentage points. He lost it by 3.
So enough of the "she was a weak candidate" thing.
It's basically impossible to imagine Trump not completing his term, but it's also impossible to imagine him completing it.
This is where I am. I have stopped forming expectations about the future, because everything seems equally absurd.
(I have probably told this story before, but at some similarly unsettled stage of Watergate, my father called home to tell my mother "Oh my god, Nixon's got the 82d Airborne surrounding Washington!" as a joke. She bought it hook line and sinker, and she's not all that credulous -- it was just a moment when anything could have happened next.)
(Stories like that are a large part of why my parents' marriage was unsuccessful, of course.)
Kerry and Gore were both popular well-liked candidates! For whatever mysterious reasons W was more popular, but that doesn't mean they weren't liked. Al Gore won the election against one of the most popular candidates of our lifetime. Kerry significantly outperformed the fundamentals against an incumbent who was still reasonably popular.
You're also giving Bill Clinton a lot of credit for Ross Perot's existence. Bill Clinton only got 43% of the vote in 1992! He was not more popular than Kerry or Gore.
HRC was certainly unpopular relative to other presidential candidates not named Trump, but nonetheless she significantly outperformed the downballot candidates and won the popular vote by a very solid margin.
Good luck Barry.
The Russia influence is horrible and there is more to be learned, but I'd bet that the influence-peddling in exchange for meddling is a thin veneer on a colossal mountain of money laundering. If he remains in office he will have very little authority; if association with his admin becomes a deeper liability, I believe there's hope that at least Sessions and Tillerson will be urged to resign.
We're not a tenth of the way through his term, and he's already in this much trouble. It's not just his past scandals that might catch up to him, but the fact that he's going to keep doing crazy shit. And he often lacks the self-awareness to even lie about his criminality.
But, again, none of that matters. His scandals might catch up to him - but catch up how? Even if every crime he has ever committed is fully documented in the media, even if he admits publicly that he did them, that doesn't mean he won't continue to be president. How would it? There's no "he is obviously a crook" clause in the constitution. It's death, resignation, impeachment or removal for incapacity - or he'll complete his term. And, as I say, death is very unlikely, resignation is (I believe) psychologically incongruous (and therefore very unlikely) because it would be an unambiguous admission of defeat, and impeachment and removal both require either massive electoral upheaval (which is very unlikely) or betrayal from within his own party (which is very unlikely).
I take your point about how difficult it is to imagine him staying in office, but Dawkins was critical of the Appeal to Incredulity for a reason.
His scandals might catch up to him - but catch up how?
The question is whether the Republicans in Congress have a limit of what they will support, and if so where it is. I'm certainly not sure that they do, or if they do where it is (for enough of them to make a difference). But it does seems at least possible that Trump is going to find that point.
I'm not expecting it. As I said, I'm not expecting anything in particular. But I'm not ruling it out.
113: it's definitely possible. If Trump does something that harms enough of them personally, for example. But I think it's unlikely.
I mean, are we even sure that every Democrat in the House would vote for impeachment?
No matter how bad the scandal, impeachment will require either Trump having pivoted towards the center (e.g. support raising taxes to expand Medicare) or a massive massive wave election in the midterms. Most likely it would require both. Hard for me to think what else could do it. A big fight with the military that caused all the veterans in the cabinet to resign? Sexually assaulting a family member of a Republican congressperson?
I mean, are we even sure that every Democrat in the House would vote for impeachment?
I wouldn't say that I was sure of every one of them, because I don't have individual opinions of all of them. But I'd be really surprised if we lost more than, say, four or five.
107: That's from December 2014. Obama gained over 10 points of approval from then to the election.
impeachment will require either Trump having pivoted towards the center (e.g. support raising taxes to expand Medicare)
I don't think they'd bother impeaching for that. They just wouldn't allow it to happen. You mean if he made a speech calling for it? It's up to Congress whether taxes get raised or not, and they control Congress. They'd just let him froth and rant and ignore him until he found something else to do.
or a massive massive wave election in the midterms.
A Democratic House is by no means impossible after 2018. In fact it's likely. https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/a-very-early-look-at-the-battle-for-the-house-in-2018/
But a Democratic Senate is unlikely, and a 67-seat majority is literally impossible without party switching. There are only 9 Republican Senate seats up for grabs in 2018, 2 independents and 23 Democrats. So even if everyone in the entire country suddenly becomes a Democrat, there cannot be any more than 59 Democratic Senators seated in 2019.
http://www.centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/articles/2018s-initial-senate-ratings/
Sorry, 57. The two independents caucus with Democrats already.
I mean, even in a massive wave election where Ted Cruz loses, we still max out at 51 senators. So you need at least 16 republican senators to convict. That means people like Todd Young (IN), Mike Lee (UT), John Kennedy (LA). Boring generic republicans in really safe seats. That's going to take more than a little treason. Nixon would have easily survived this congress.
118 last. I think the logic is that if the Democrats do extraordinarily well in the mid terms, Enough Republicans who might be vulnerable in 2020 would flip to try to save their own arses. I think it's more likely they'd just pass more restrictive voting laws at state level, but I suppose it's possible.
True, but the 67-seat "majority" means less than it did just five months ago. On impeachment, the 2/3rds criteria is in the Constitution, but a mere 51 seat majority would make investigation of the administration so very, very much easier.
6 of those republicans are incumbents in TN, MS, AL, UT, NE, WY. They aren't going anywhere. It's more likely that there won't be a senate election in 2018 than that more than one of them loses.
I don't know about any of those states but NE. Fischer wasn't really vulnerable to a full-court press in 2012. It's possible she'll be primaried by somebody completely fucked in the head. That's about the best shot.
Possibly a fully Democratic Congress could build in a lot of administrative barricades around Trump, like enforcement mandates on agencies and civil service protections, to limit the damage he can do over 2 years. (OTOH he can veto, and preventing a veto may require more budget brinksmanship than is prudent.)
The scenario I'm imagining is:
1) The scandals continue to escalate, for example Jared gets convicted and Trump pardons him, and there's proof that Trump was involved with the meetings. Trump's approval slowly declines into the mid-30s.
2) Democrats win by a margin of 10% in the house in the midterms and Ted Cruz's wins or loses by a tiny margin. The twenty(!?!) Republican Senators up for reelection in 2020 with Trump on the ticket and 2 more years of scandal start to panic.
3) Faced with a democratic house and lacking an principles and seeing how unpopular Republicans in the house were, Trump pivots and abandons Republican priorities other than racism.
It's not crazy to me that in that scenario the senate abandons Trump and puts in Pence.
This thinking is part of the reason I think the Democrats should run people on a "You want your fucking wall, see if I care" platform in public and linking it to an orderly, compassionate process for naturalizing people who are here now in the fine text of the legislation. You don't actually have to be a spiteful human to win election there these days, but it appears to be necessary to play one on TV to get over 50%. Nebraska used to have two Democratic senators on a semi-regular basis. Usually one of them was horribly conservative, but even the most horrible was still better than the most reasonable Republican in the current senate.
I think it's more likely they'd just pass more restrictive voting laws at state level
To me this is one of the key current battles (and probably hurt greatly with Gorusch on the Court). I am trying to think of the best way to contribute when my theoretically ample free time gets here.
I keep trying to think of some application of a Ponzi scheme to get everyone registered (and voting is a difficult for many as well; we really are barely a democracy).
OT bleg for the Brits:
Is there a Dunkirk book you'd recommend? At dinner last night, a friend of mine told me he wanted to read up, but basically every book has been slagged by somebody.
Only British recommendations? The French usually read Good luck sailing: We'll probably be fine right here, I guess.
Thinking good thoughts for you, Barry.
Meanwhile, I have a theory on the Kushner/"backchannel" thing. While it's more than likely that there's some corrupt business thing going on there, I've been struck by an additional plausible rationale that I don't think anyone is talking about.
Think back to Reagan and the Iran hostages at the end of Carter's term. What if Kushner had the brilliant idea to somehow get the Russians to partner with the US and magically end the war in Syria during Trump's, say, first week in office? Kushner, Trump, and Flynn seem stupid enough to think this is possible, it fits into the way they see themselves as brilliant negotiations and smarter than everyone else, it explains why they wouldn't want anyone in the Obama administration to know about it, and accounts for why they couldn't wait until after the inauguration.
Good luck sailing: We'll probably be fine right here, I guess.
Nice.
TN is obviously full of people with interesting problem-solving skills. It might be hard to win back voters capable of smuggling fish down their shorts.
His scandals might catch up to him - but catch up how?
This is the right question, of course, and you're right that some crazy shit would have to happen. But while specific predictions are hard to make, I can absolutely guarantee you this: Some crazy shit is going to happen.
Does he crash the economy? Trigger a war involving Israel in the Middle East? Outright admit to criminality? Or have the Deep State produce the relevant recordings?
The mechanism you're looking for is in the polls - either the opinion polls or the 2018 election. There are a lot of people itching for an opportunity to turn on Trump. There is enough distaste for him in the Republican Establishment and the Deep State that it's possible to imagine him, under the right circumstances, being treated like a Democrat by the media.
This is really a tiny difference of opinion we have, though. I certainly agree that it's going to take something really, really extreme to oust Trump, and for the exact reasons you describe.
Trump only gets removed if/when Republicans, as a group, want him removed. I don't see this as even remotely open to question, and so all the talk about what Dems can do in 2018 r 2019 is irrelevant to that question.
It remains open whether Trump can genuinely try to peel off the 50 most conservative House Dems for some sort of legislative push. He seems completely incapable of this, although the spectacle of him trying to flatter Nancy Pelosi, rather than trying to browbeat her, is worth musing about. Or Steny Hoyer, or whoever he thinks will do a deal with him.
Trump has amply proven, though, that no deal with him of any kind is worth doing, unless you get paid, in full, in advance, and he has no leverage to get it back. This almost never applies to legislation, so no one can ever make a deal with him.
132 -- I'm sure it was just about money.
Outright admit to criminality?
He's already done that. The Trump Organization has stated that he won't even try to follow the Emoluments Clause.
...and so all the talk about what Dems can do in 2018 r 2019 is irrelevant to that question.
I don't think that's true. If there's one thing Darrell Issa has shown, it's that having a majority in a single house of Congress gives you the power to shift headlines onto your opponents regardless of facts, common sense, or the law. We need one house. One committee with subpoena power.
Actually, there are several things Darrell Issa has shown. But that's the only one I think the Democrats should act on.
Maybe I have him confused with the one that looks like Draco Malfoy. It doesn't my for my point, I don't think.
141: Probably Trey Gowdy, a man who has told far more lies about Hillary's email than Hillary or anyone else*.
Well maybe not Chris Cilizza who tweeted this gem today:
Did you spend a second over Memorial Day weekend thinking of Greg Gianforte's choke slam?
Me neither. Which means Republicans bet right.
Oh, we absolutely need to win the House in 2018. Making removal of Trump a pitch for that, though, sets us up for problems when that doesn't happen.
It sets up for far fewer problems than promising to under Obamacare, cut health care premiums, and not have anybody lose their coverage.
142 I have no idea why any thinking person pays any attention to that guy at all.
No offense intended.
It doesn't my for my point
Moby's coming book, "The Radical Right & The My-Mying of American Politics."
I'm not typing well today. Which is probably not good considering that I'm editing a text for wide release in another window.
145: I don't other than seeing that retweeted by many (he has since deleted it). And also that he exists in a fairly powerful position in the media.
Don't go all heartland elite "I don't even CNN" on us, CC. And he's defaming your initials!
wide release
Aka, a Larry Craig discharge.
Last month I connected at MSP, which I hadn't done in maybe 7 or 8 years. I noticed the bathrooms have all been redone and much lighter and more open.
Apparently this is a rare public spotting of Darrell Issa "hiding" from constituents on the roof of his building. He's bigly at risk being close enough to the coast that his districts economic anxiety is not that strong (HRC carried by 7; he squeaked by with 1600 vote margin).
Obviously that has much more light and air than any MSP men's room.
I guess there are different grades of exhibitionism.
Issa's ambiguous Lebanicity might also make it harder for him to rally the racist vote.
Issa tweeted what it looked like from his perspective. Not sure how why he thinks this helps him.
155. The crowd is tiny and there he is talking to them. I hate so much that completely superficial images are so politically relevant.
If celebrity politicians and soundbites are all that we can manage, then really bad outcomes are pretty likely.
Chris Arnade had this assessment a couple of days ago:
He makes/builds stuff that is tangible. Many value that & can imagine being him. It is far more relatable than being paid to tweet takes
Going on to describe idiots whom he swears are goodhearted imagining a nineteenth-century economy, incapable of understanding the value of ideas. Those people and all the frightened prisoners of Fox need a path back to reality, and I am nervous and uneasy because I cannot imagine such paths.
And also that he exists in a fairly powerful position in the media.
He is also provides a window into how media-types think.
I'm impressed that he was sufficiently shamed to remove the tweet. As with Trump, I didn't know Cillizza could feel shame.
I wonder if the investigations will be helped by 45's stultification. I can imagine a Russian emissary trying to use the basic conversational method "quid, on a completely unrelated subject, quo" to communicate an offer (Sir Humphrey Appleby, Rod Blagojevich), getting nowhere, and having to get a lot more explicit.
156: I was thinking that he wasn't talking to them. Or that is, he talked to the one pro-Issa guy on the motorcycle in two of the pics, and in the other he's not actually talking to the anti-AHCA people, he's using his phone.
158: There was a good bit on The Simpsons that was an extended riff on that--maybe involving Homer and the mafioso, Fat Tony?--but I can't recall it.
159.2: From a webcomic that used to update:
"Thanks for the, ah, unofficial incentive."
"'Unofficial incentive' is such an ugly... pair of words. Let's just say I bribed you with full knowledge that I'm violating the law."
I imagine there's a huge amount of overlap between the readership here and at LGM, but Lemieux is nearly perfect on Hillary.
Note the succinct response to Mossy @3:
If you don't want to talk about Hillary Clinton, don't talk about her.
This is the only part that seems off to me:
There is no chance that Clinton will run for the Democratic nomination in 2020.
Surely Von is correct in 46. Obviously a year ago, she planned to run in 2020, and she was no more discredited by her defeat than Gore was by his. Gore didn't run because he didn't want to, not because he couldn't have won. Does anyone think that Hillary knows today that she won't want to run in 2020?
It is in no way clear how Hillary will factor her own mortality into the equation. After all, she'll still be younger than Trump in 2020.
Yeah, sure, losing in 2016 changes her calculation, but this is someone who won three debates by absurd margins, whose convention was a home run, and whose primary handicap was running for office in a society where important elements -- most obviously the media and the FBI -- have a complete inability to deal objectively and professionally with any Democrat.
I think ajay's pessimism in 31.5 is reasonable, but there there is one happy thought: It seems likely that Trump will face a brutal, party-splitting primary challenge from somebody.
162: Given recent Twitter comments, I'm predicting it'll be Chuck Woolery.
Pat Sajak beat him to that schtick like a decade ago.
165: More optimism: Sensible liberals are starting to have some of the same kind of success working the refs as the nut-right has had.
Sabato has a long history of being a go-to resource for hack journalists, and I'd betcha he has his own history of promoting false equivalence. Nice to see him realizing that there's a constituency for non-stupidity. And nice to see him get rewarded for it -- looks like his little confrontation is going viral-ish.
Being linked positively by me is reward enough. I saw it on 11d.
and I'd betcha he has his own history of promoting false equivalence.
Yes, mildly encouraging to see him be this way. However (as I have written here before), I will never truly forgive him for a really stupid segment on CNN where he responded to the newly-revived* Swift Boat conflagration with enthusiasm, "I like it when campaigns get rough." I remember distinctly because we had just had a great day of family vacation in northern New Mexico. I stupidly turned on the TV in our motel in Chama for the first dose of news in several days and there he was flapping his asshole...
*Most probably do not remember that there was an attempt to get it going in May but it fizzled. There was then a meeting of some of the key accusers to "align" there stories, and it was a much more consistent line of BS when it came back that August (and of course more timely and people paying more attention). I only saw this reported in Knight-Ridder. (Had the best nat'l political reporting at that time--especially on Iraq run-up. Bought by McClatchy in 2006.)
True story. I was like 30 before I figured out it wasn't "Knight Rider".
I do blame Hillary. She had one job....
168: The point is that Sabato is subject to rational self interest, and the liberals are finally comprehending that they need to raise hell to give people a rational self-interest in serving liberal ends. No need to forgive Sabato (or Hillary, for that matter). Just get them to do the right thing.
Likewise, I recently linked the blowback on Bret Stephens' appointment to the NYT op-ed page -- another fine moment in liberals giving the media well-deserved shit.
The state liquor store nearest my house was closed. I now hate government.
Also, white people. When I was buying limes, before I knew there was no off-sale vodka or gin in a five minute walk from my house, there was this old white lady in the express lane who held out $10 to pay for a $16 & change bill. She was either unable to understand or able to fake such inability until the cashier just shoved her out with her groceries and having paid only $10.
106: It's basically impossible to imagine Trump not completing his term, but it's also impossible to imagine him completing it.
Quite. Interesting times, neh?
I think I need to learn reams of Mandarin cursing, Firefly-style, to help me cope.
172 There's a single state liquor store in all of Arrakis and it's closed for the entire month of Ramadan. All the hotel bars go dry too.
I was right, looks like he had a stroke mid-tweet.
Despite the constant negative press covfefe
Sort of on topic, I've started reading Traister's All the Single Ladies. Ladeez.
My wife has been sending me funny replies to that tweet. I think it's the first moment of happiness I've experienced since Election Day.
Under the presidential records act, he can't legally delete it, right?
The situation is unprecedented.
It's the only good thing he's ever done in his horrid little miserable existence. I suggest he goes out now while he's ahead.
It's gone now. Add this violation of the Presidential Records Act to the articles of impeachment.
Even allowing for typos he's short one letter, a verb and a subject.
Ask not what your countwiwi
The only thing we have to fetata
I did not have sex widodo
Mr Gorbachev, tear domama
Four score and seven yesisi
The people of the United States have a right to know whether their president is a crook. Well, I am novuvu
In the criminal political-system, the people are represented by two separate yet equally assholish groups: the Congress, who taxes poor people to protect the rich's wealth, and the president, who uses gratuitous insults and poorly conceived tweets to cover the former. These are their stories.
Now Trump is joking about it. I'm sure some pundit (Cillizza) will point out that hey, he might have some cognitive disease, but at least he can make fun of himself.
I assume he dodged the usual health disclosures for the same reasons he dodged the usual financial disclosures.
He used his organs as collateral to get a loan from the Russians?
Which is prima facie corrupt. No bank would take Trump's organs as collateral unless some other remuneration were promised.
"Only my testicles, pancreas and brain. All things I can live without."
I do blame Hillary. She had one job....
To violate the analogy ban, I've been thinking about this article about NBA coaches, which says.
It has always baffled me how superficially we discuss coaches. Follow the public debate and you mostly hear arguments about whether a coach is good or not, with no room for much in between. Perhaps you'll hear general criticism of their offense or defense, or that they've lost the players in the locker room. But even that level of evaluation of coaches feels cartoonish.
Think about everything a coach has to be good at. They need to be cool under pressure, able to make quick decisions in the moment. They need to be strategic thinkers, able to design schemes and rotations and decide how to tweak them before each game depending on the opponent. They need to be adept at managing players, motivating and meshing a variety of personality types. They need to be charming with the media, have strong relationships with the GM and front office, and get the most out of their coaching staff. They need to effectively teach, calm, and inspire -- all at the appropriate times. And that's just to name a few of the requisite skills. In short, they need to be superhuman, to possess a combination of qualities that themselves are each fairly rare.
Imagine if we did this with players, if we analyzed them in such an imprecise fashion and focused only on their shortcomings to determine whether they were good or not -- it would seem ridiculous. But that's exactly what we do with coaches. We don't acknowledge that coaches, like players, have different skillsets; that, like players, they can improve over time; that, like players, the context in which they operate can have a big impact on their production.
I think the same lesson applies to politicians. It's easy to fall into talking about a clear dichotomy between people who successful and failures, but almost everybody is going to have strengths and weakness.
Take Clinton, for example, when I saw her new slogan, "resist, persist, insist, enlist" and laughed a little because it's classic Hillary Clinton -- each word represents an important idea, but there's one too many. Pick any 3 of those 4 and you'd have a better slogan. In an ideal world I'd just chuckle at that as a recognizable quirk, but not one which represents the total of her abilities. But it's hard to do that when the standard is perfection.
I don't have anything against Clinton but if she runs in the '20 primary I will vote against her with so much vehemence that Rush Limbaugh will get his first spontaneous erection in decades.
197: Yeah, people have a hard time considering context. If Hillary had won the election by 3 million votes, the conversation about her candidacy would be entirely different.
You're right, of course, about the inartful slogan. That's the kind of thing that Obama nailed 100 percent of the time. But she was running against Donald Trump for chrissakes. Elegant phrasemaking was not what this election was about.
Elegant phrasemaking was not what this election was about.
No, that was what the election was about. "Make America Great Again", "Drain the Swamp". "Lock Her Up", "What have you got to Lose?". Elegant might not be the right word.
In short, they need to be superhuman, to possess a combination of qualities that themselves are each fairly rare.
Or maybe they just have to have to hand the ball to Lebron and say, "You know what to do."
Or maybe they just have to have to hand the ball to Lebron and say, "You know what to do."
LeBron has gotten two coaches fired (Mike Brown, David Blatt).
Lebron had hit his constitutional season limit.
Lebron had hit his constitutional season limit.
And you get to explain that to this girl.
The standard isn't perfection; the standard is not losing to a fascist clown. As for context, I... can't even. I honestly don't hate or even dislike her, but thinking about how much support the Democratic Party has given her despite her poor political skills and [unfairly] huge liabilities infuriates me. There is too much at stake for the Democratic Party to be run for the benefit of a few insiders, and the sooner we leave the DLC and their shitty policy preferences and terrible electoral track record behind the better.
I have feelings. Still too soon for me to join post-mortem conversations, evidently.
I have feelings. Still too soon for me to join post-mortem conversations, evidently.
I understand. That reaction makes complete sense.
There is too much at stake for the Democratic Party to be run for the benefit of a few insiders, and the sooner we leave the DLC and their shitty policy preferences and terrible electoral track record behind the better.
So I saw two different articles on the theme of messaging recently which, annoyingly, pointed in opposite directions. Kevin Drum says, "Democrats Don't Brag Enough About the Stuff They Do
Basically it's this: what do you expect if Democrats don't support their own policies? For the past five years, Republicans have battered Obamacare as the most horrific policy ever enacted. Democrats have--what? Hidden under rocks, mostly. Moderates looked at the polls and decided to avoid even talking about Obamacare. Progressives mostly scorned it as a piece of crap and spent their energy explaining why we should all support single-payer instead. So what's the result? Lots of people think Obamacare is horrific. After all, that's what one side says, and the other side hardly even fights back.
Simultaneously, there's this.
One potential problem identified by some political analysts is the ability of Republicans to run attack ads tying Democrats to the party's coastal and culturally liberal wing.
[Founder of The People's House Project Krystal] Ball and the House Democrats behind the People's House Project say they're determined to shake that image. They'll try to fundraise for the PAC's candidates, recruit candidates that fit the bill, and give them a slogan to use to try to distinguish themselves from the national party. "It will allow them to say, 'I'm a different kind of Democrat,'" said Rep. Tim Ryan (D-OH), one of the House Democrats backing the project, in an interview. "It's hard to convince people around here sometimes how toxic our brand is. But, clearly the brand is damaged, and we need to see if something else can work."
Which is just to say that lots of people are annoyed by the DLC but aren't ready to coalesce around one alternative.
202: Yes. Maybe they were trying to give him more detailed instructions.
This is just impotent cursing the darkness, but I do not understand why the liberal/coastal Democratic brand is so toxic. Drum just had an annoying post about how Democrats need to be less contemptuous of middle America. And sure, contempt is bad and all that, and to the extent that's happening, people should stop. But urban coastal Democrats demonstrably have no problem at all voting for people sending small-town country-boy cultural signals. They may be riddled with contempt, but they don't actually mind people like that in power. In the other direction, Middle America really seems to feel very negative about my kind.
Nothing to do about it, but it's fucked up.
"It will allow them to say, 'I'm a different kind of Democrat,'"
This pisses me off. How is "those guys are bad but I'm not like them even though I'm one of them" anything but an endorsement for the other party?
This pisses me off. How is "those guys are bad but I'm not like them even though I'm one of them" anything but an endorsement for the other party?
When Eggplant says it?
That was my point, actually. My politics are closer to Eggplant's, and I don't have a lot of patience for that description of The People's House Project (the American Prospect article about Montana election did a better job of making the "let politics be local" argument). But I also think that there is a problem with going around saying "those guys are bad" without having an alternative waiting in the wings.*
* with various predictable caveats.
I try not to be culturally hostile to people. But that linked article is enraging. I have nothing at all against the Montana hunting-n-fishing lifestyle, and I'd have no trouble at all voting for someone sending those signals who I agreed with on the substantive issues. The voters quoted who can't possibly dream of forgiving a candidate for not matching all of their cultural shibboleths? I find that maddening.
I'm skeptical that Democrats performing authenticity is the key to winning middle America.
Maybe if they perform really well.
...I do not understand why the liberal/coastal Democratic brand is so toxic.
I have various and inchoate thoughts on that issue. Part of it, and this is most of the inchoate part, is that I think rural conservative people have have some very fixed ideas about masculinity that are obviously unworkable (even to them) but that they are not willing to challenge openly. I'm not talking about teh gay, but rather the idea that a man is someone who is afforded deference by others and is to a certain extent feared. That nearly all of the men involved are not physically dominating (either from age, working at a desk job, or Burger King) and are not economically influential enough to punish others doesn't make it any easier to accept the idea that maybe its a bad idea to be continually pretending each man is (or should aspire to be) the selfless, unchallenged head of a pioneer family alone in the world. I'm going to stop here because the choate part didn't come.
(Also, you can't discount years and years of demonizing liberal elitists.)
When Eggplant says it?
Well, obviously it makes a huge difference whether its coming from the left or the right side of the party. Eggplant's critique is a lot different from making the case that Democrats should be more like Republicans.
You will notice that basically no Republicans ever make the case that their party should be more like Democrats. And that strategy seems to be working for them.
Maddening, yes, but most of the people saying that stuff are giving excuses, not reasons, for their votes. I suppose the same can be said of the self-styled "progressives" who've already declared undying enmity to Sen. Tester for not supporting a particular bill advanced by Sen. Sanders.
I didn't read the article because I was too busy thinking about how to care for my testicles.
The voters quoted who can't possibly dream of forgiving a candidate for not matching all of their cultural shibboleths? I find that maddening.
I would be terrible at that sort of politics. I have no ability to code switch, generally speaking, and I probably sound like an obnoxious egghead half the time. I'm just saying that I can understand why this sort of politics works:
"This isn't the party or the state I grew up with," Pat lamented. "We don't have two railroads, the unions are all but dead, the things that I remember in my formative years no longer exist. I think back to my sophomore year of high school, and Max Baucus came to our basketball game."
"Believe it or not, he came to work with us one day," Ken recalled. "We were painting stripes for the day, and we got him a hard hat and vest. That was in character with the guy. It showed he cares. You got any questions, he was there."
I'm skeptical that Democrats performing authenticity is the key to winning middle America.
On the other hand, I agree with this as well. And it gets to something else that I have strong but not fully formed feelings about -- I'm not sure that we (I?) still have a good sense of what has gone wrong with the Democratic party. There is more than one explanation that has obvious appeal, but would point to different solutions.
During the campaign there were people saying that if the Democratic party lost, it would finally prove that the politics of neo-liberalism were failing. I noted that, conversely, there's an element that the people who were able to win would carry more weight because they could say, "I know how to win elections, when other Democrats are losing" and those people would tend to be more conservative. That article demonstrates my point, in that Bullock absolutely gets to say, "I'm clearly doing something right." But it's not obvious how broadly those lessons apply.
We have to do a better job reaching out to the minority of rural voters who will even listen to us, but where we're getting killed is millennials who aren't voting. We'll keep trying different ways to reach them.
You think inauthenticity will work?
This is a hackneyed critique but Democratic politicians reliance on "poll-tested" and "focus-grouped" language, while ensuring they never offend anyone, makes them sound inauthentic. That is, it makes them sound like they are lying. Good performers can pull it off, but that's a rare skill in the party.
This is a hackneyed critique but Democratic politicians reliance on "poll-tested" and "focus-grouped" language, while ensuring they never offend anyone, makes them sound inauthentic. That is, it makes them sound like they are lying. Good performers can pull it off, but that's a rare skill in the party.
Okay, one more thought, continuing 219. This is where I think it's important to start assigning weights to various critiques. Let's say that "poll-test" language is a problem (and let's remember, at the same time, that Frank Luntz did more to popularize focus groups as part of politics than any Democrat) is that 50% of the Democrat's problem, 20%, or 5%? Off the top of my head here a handful of areas in which the Democrats could improve: (1) Fundraising gap, particularly in state/local races, (2) grassroots often gets excluded by the national parties (3) recruit better candidates (4) recruit candidates with more local ties (5) figure out how to roll back voter suppression/gerrymandering (6) better social media strategies (7) more progressive politics / more direct programs to benefit the working class (8) less identity politics (when identity politics sound like condescension).
I would prioritize some of those over others but all to often it sounds like people are saying, "we can't address everything at once. Let's take most of those issues as a given, and focus in the short term on this one thing which might make a difference" and then get annoyed if it doesn't work. We can't have a good sense of how likely it was to work without having some sense of how large a share of the pie the problem that we're trying to address is.
For any given thing you would like the Democrats to do is it possible to have any sense of, "if they did that one thing perfectly, how much would I guess it would shift the vote? 1%, 2%, 10%?"
It's an impossible question to answer with any accuracy, but it still matters for these sorts of discussions. There has to be some sense of scale.
209 They really think coastal liberals will try to take their guns away.
You think inauthenticity will work?
It got the Democrats this far, so... no.
I would like to see most Democrats adopt a calm, matter of fact tone while concretely describing the consequences and goals of Republican rule and policy. Evoke a prosecutor, or a spokesman for the military.
I do think Trump/Ryan/McConnell will semi-destroy the Republicans. But I see no chance that the Dems will stop semi-destroying themselves soon enough to take any real short term advantage. I am certainly part of that. For instance, if asked, my inclination would be to vote against Bernie Sanders in 2020 with a similar vehemence as Eggplant expressed above re: Clinton. This is bad, but it is my deeply felt feel (and I even have tiresome supporting logical arguments as ell!).
I'm most certainly on a bozo bus headed over a cliff; but so are we all at the moment.
In the end that only thing that matters is keeping a careful accounting of the dead getting the vote to be truly representative of the population of the country.
224: That's a good list and a good question. Trying to answer it makes me all "zeros across the board we're doomed it's too late" though.
The bad news is that the federal government may be lost as a force for good. The good news is that Facebook is just now becoming aware of the power they possess to shape our destinies.
Did I say good news? I meant to file that under "too soon to be determined news", alongside the coming Singularity.
Trying to answer it makes me all "zeros across the board we're doomed it's too late" though.
Again, that makes perfect sense.
But, you can think of everything that I'm saying as related thoughts to 197. I'm happy to say that "resist, persist, insist, enlist" is a slightly dopey slogan. I get annoyed if it seems like people are saying, "Clinton has a hard time coming up with pithy slogans. Clinton lost to Trump. Post hoc, ergo proctor hoc. Clinton's inability to come up with pithy slogans is a sign of what a terrible politician she is, and losing to Trump just proves it."
I buy the premise, but the conclusion doesn't necessarily follow. There's more than one thing going on -- and, frustratingly, it's really difficult to separate them out and untangle one from another. But we still have to recognize that.
224 That's an interesting list, but I don't see much in there that actually tells anyone what they can do. (1) Funding: are you suggesting we take more corporate money? In our recent race, the big difference was outside expenditures. How can that be fixed? (2) I have no idea what this even means, and what you think ought to be done differently. (3) Our recent race should dissuade any thinking person from ever running for office. It's awful. That said, I'm not sure what you mean: an organization that must stay neutral in primary races should go find people it (?) likes better than the people who self-select? (4) What? (5) Not an issue here; obviously, the main solution s gaining power. Chicken/egg problem, yes, so it's not part of a strategy to gain power. (6) Maybe, but what does this actually mean? (7) OK; we didn't have as much luck with healthcare as we hoped to have; a lot of that s media (8) I don't see that we're actually doing much of this, but rather it's more the other guys. That sad, the biggest applause line in any speech I've attended in the last half year -- and I've attended a lot, in different places -- is a re-affirmation on choice.
I think the canned messaging problem is below trivial. Hostile media is a much bigger deal.
For instance, if asked, my inclination would be to vote against Bernie Sanders in 2020
I love me some Bernie, but I don't want him running in 2020 either.
232: Hostile media is a much bigger deal.
Definitely. Thought about adding "fixing" that to my in-the-end statement. But I really have no useful prescription. I guess subscriber/advertiser pressure. Maybe the Fox News semi-crack-up will actually help?
215: Chris Arnade who writes about people living in declining places in the US wrote this on Twitter a couple of days ago, perhaps writing about the same people
Value of intellectual life is hard to comprehend. I mean. A large building is solid/clear. An academic paper? A tweet storm? Less so 8/ That distrust of intellectuals -- especially far off intellectuals who remove themselves from community -- again is just a reality. 7/ There is a skepticism of folks with too much book smarts (I know this viscerally from growing up a geek in small working class town). 6/ Beyond that there is a sense amongst liberal elites that all the working class must automatically hate the wealthy. But they just don't. 5/ He makes/builds stuff that is tangible. Many value that & can imagine being him. It is far more relatable than being paid to tweet takes 4/
Not sure how to bridge this gap. This is a limited perspective from the 19th century honestly. I sympathize with people who are upstanding (arguendo) in their personal lives and immediate circles. But to the extent that this accurately describes a view of the world, that view doesn't fit this century, and no policy derived from it is going to make Flint or Akron better places.
The good news is that Facebook is just now becoming aware of the power they possess to shape our destinies.
Will that still be the case in 2020? It will still be important, sure, but I'm guessing its influence has peaked. Their main product is getting long in the tooth, and the whole advertiser-supported-media model seems to be fading.
But I could be wrong. I hope President Zuckerberg won't have me flogged.
235: The somewhat purer version via Matt Taibi: As one Trump voter said to me: "You media assholes are always telling us how to live, but you can't change a fucking oil filter."
226. You wants us to play Jeb in the age of Trump?
There is a skepticism of folks with too much book smarts (I know this viscerally from growing up a geek in small working class town).
I know that very well, but I don't think that's the cause of the Democrats problems in rural areas. Aside from a few fools and some Juggalos, most people in those areas know the book smarts are essential for jobs. They push their kids to get educations. They may be different from people living in depressed working class towns in that regard.
The Fox news crackup may be an unalloyed good. We'll still have our NYT problem.
238. Al Franken, Chris Rock, or Jenji Kohan maybe.
Hostile media is a much bigger deal.
Well, yeah.
You wants us to play Jeb in the age of Trump?
No? Calm and forceful, not apathetic and spineless.
I don't know what to do about it, but I think the money thing is really big. Like, the Republicans have a stable of rich people who will reliably donate maximums to local races nationwide, and we don't.
I don't know if that's a real difference in the amount of political donation money that's plausibly available -- that we're screwed because they're just, as a party, richer than we are -- or if there's some fundraising choices the national party could be making to tap what rich people we do have nationwide. But I don't know how fundraising works at all.
Rob spent more than twice what was spent on the seat in the 2016 cycle, which was itself twice what had been spent on the seat in the last 20 years.
He was hugely outspent on the independent side.
I don't understand 'the independent side'? Was there a third candidate?
Hostile media is a much bigger deal.
Thesis: Publishers are pretty hostile to dems, individual journalists often aren't. Individual journalists tend to be young urban types, and tangential or superficial suggestions of that identity are what right-wingers latch on to when they vociferously claim that the media is hostile to Rs. Taps into LBs 212.
245: I think he means outside/dark money.
Oh, I got it. Yeah, exactly what I was talking about. I don't know if it's impossible for us to match that, or if there's something the national party could be doing to make it happen.
I would like to see most Democrats adopt a calm, matter of fact tone while concretely describing the consequences and goals of Republican rule and policy. Evoke a prosecutor, or a spokesman for the military.
I'm struggling to figure out how Hillary, Obama, Kerry and Gore failed to do this. This has been the Demorats' thing for a long time, and in fact, they are much more commonly criticized for their bloodless reliance on factuality and logic.
There's more than one thing going on -- and, frustratingly, it's really difficult to separate them out and untangle one from another.
It really isn't that complicated. The country's institutions have failed us, especially the media, which has enabled and encouraged the breakdown of other institutions.
Any time Hillary was given an opportunity to make her case, she crushed. Any time her message was filtered through the media, she got clobbered.
The media stands above the corpse holding a bloody knife, but people are still desperately searching for the real killer. It's nuts.
248 et al - basically, the sane billionaires don't seem to think it's worth their while to oppose the insane billionaires (cf. Kung Fu Monkey a while ago). Will they ever change their minds? I'm thinking probably not. I hear that Elon Musk might withdraw from Trump's council of economic advisors.
The media stands above the corpse holding a bloody knife, but people are still desperately searching for the real killer. It's nuts.
Well, yeah. The question is how to win notwithstanding the media headwind. Some candidates, for example Gov. Bullock, are able to get enough good media to squeak by.
248 The money has to come from somewhere. You get th immediate Willie Sutton problem. Or let's just call it a Bernie Sanders problem, because going where the money is, even if you're not going to give a meaningful quid pro quo, creates a terribly bad visual.
I'm enjoying procrastinating, and trying to write out some of the things I've been thinking about for a while. But I also have to do work, so this will be broken up into multiple comments.
That's an interesting list, but I don't see much in there that actually tells anyone what they can do.
First thought: I don't want to tell anyone what to do. If you're in a position to work on something you think will help, by all means do so. There's more than enough work to go around, and I don't claim to have a silver bullet.
Second let me extend the basketball analogy a bit further (and perhaps dangerously so). The following things are true (and mostly obvious). (1) In a basketball game the team that makes a higher percentage of their shots will generally win. (2) Some shots are more likely to go in than others and you can usually tell if something's a high-percentage shot at the time that it's taken. (3) Teams, of course, try to take high-percentage shots and prevent their opponents from doing so. (4) The teams that do so more successfully will be the most successful at the end of the season.
What's not obvious is that, for any given game, that balance of shot-selection and preventing the opponent from getting good shots is not the determining factor in winning the game. It's a make or miss league. The outcome is more likely to be determined by one team shooting above or below their average percentages than by shot selection.
That reflects fairly new research. Video tracking has allowed people to statistically examine, "what was the expected percentage of the shots that the team took in that game." Prior to that the only thing that was visible was the final percentage at the end of the game, and it was always possible to look at the team that shot a lower percentage, find some examples of them taking bad shots, and say, "they needed to take better shots." But, it turns out, one game isn't a large enough sample for randomness to even out.
The point of all of that, in relation to politics, is to push back against arguments in the form of, "something must be done. This is something, therefore we must do it." We can see problems, we can see bad outcomes, it's worth trying to improve on those problems, but it doesn't mean that the problems caused the bad outcome -- we have to consider the possibilities that either the outcomes were just the result of bad luck (or transient events, if that's a better framing than luck), or that they're the product of large structural issues. I don't think we know enough to be able to definitively identify which is which.
I don't mean to argue that we should just give up, and stop trying to do anything or stop trying to call out when the people we support make stupid decisions. I'm just saying that no one explanation gets to have a monopoly.
Does that make sense?
I'm struggling to figure out how Hillary, Obama, Kerry and Gore failed to do this.
This part: while concretely describing the consequences and goals of Republican rule and policy.
253 Sure it does. I'm just not seeing the content in 'we should get more money and get better candidates.' I'm involved in the process of trying to solve the problem, and am looking for ideas we can use. Saying we need better candidates and more money doesn't tell me anything new.
Where are we going to get more money? How are we going to get better candidates?
How can we get people under 30 to vote who are not doing so now, despite our offering a very clear choice on the issues they say are important to them?
The idea that HRC failed to say bad the things about the outcomes of Republican policies is just mind-bending. It reminds me of ignoramuses who think she only ever visited Philadelphia or never spoke about jobs (when that was, literally, the single word she used most in her speeches).
Atrios has written approximately 142,000 posts about how Democrats only ever say how Republicans will be bad, and never advocate for their own, positive policies. I assume he's working from observation.
I have harassed my kids to get their over-eighteen friends to register. That's three or four right there!
Saying we need better candidates and more money doesn't tell me anything new.
I think the "better candidates" part really speaks to the weakness of the Democratic farm system.
Eight years of Obama should have spawned a generation of strong, progressive candidates and office holders for local and state positions, with the backing of a robust national network of support. But it seems to have done the opposite.
Well, yeah. The question is how to win notwithstanding the media headwind. Some candidates, for example Gov. Bullock, are able to get enough good media to squeak by.
I don't know the details of Bullock's case, but in general, the regional and local media isn't as diseased as the national media.
But the real question, especially on a national level, is how to reform the media.
Or, failing that, the question is how to circumvent the media, as Trump did (and as Hillary, on a few brief occasions, did).
Trump's strategy is largely incompatible with Democratic politics, but there is one thing the Democrats can learn from him: They need to display public, unapologetic contempt for the media, and they need to encourage the rank-and-file to do so too.
The media - even the "good" media - aren't merely complicit with the Clinton impeachment craziness, the Iraq War lie, the e-mail "scandal" etc. The media drove these phenomena.
260 - although with Sinclair buying up local media everywhere, maybe it will be.
Saying we need better candidates and more money doesn't tell me anything new.
Which is why I say you should absolutely keep doing what you're doing. I don't think effort should stop while we argue about these questions. What's more, the long run isn't everything. Some of these questions are only answerable with the benefit of hindsight but, in the meantime people still need to figure out short term ways to win.*
But consider the Adlai Stevenson example above. It seems likely that nobody was going to be able to beat Eisenhower. If you believe that the question is, "did Adlai Stevenson do a decent job of playing the cards he had to work with and lose in a not embarrassing way." Alternately you might view him as an also-ran who never did anything to try to shake up the fundamentals and who took a difficult position and ran it in way that almost guaranteed defeat.
I don't know those elections well enough to have any sense, but which way you lean will depend in part on how large you thought the challenge was, and how bad the odds were going in.
* However, that's exactly what The People's House group is saying, and I think they're being obnoxious.
259 You're suggesting that the DLCC spend more money on ur legislative races? Yes! Where are they going to get the money, and who's not going to get funded because the guy running for state senate where I live is a targeted race?
Second let me extend the basketball analogy a bit further ...
You can be as clever a basketball strategist as you want to be, but if the refs are against you, you're screwed.
Saying we need better candidates and more money doesn't tell me anything new.
Well, half the left side of the country is arguing that Dems need different policies and better messages, so I'd argue that there's a concrete debate to be had there.
Indeed, that's precisely what the endless refighting of the primary via special elections is: an attempt to prove, through outcomes, that Dems would win if they only had one thing or the other. I mean, "better candidate" can be a proxy for "different policies", but I think the DNC leadership battles show just how shallow those debates are (that is, nobody had a plausible case for why either guy was a "better" (more effective) candidate or represented different (more liberal) policies; they just wanted to insist that their guy was both).
I think the farm system is also money. That is, I have the impression that a bright young Republican interested in politics can find all sorts of supportive developmental gigs that groom them for office, and there's nothing similar for Democrats. Democratic 'political' jobs for young people are more about actually doing good rather than getting groomed, and are scrambling for funding.
Meanwhile, as Yggles has pointed out, the way to win legislative elections is to lose the Presidency. Dems have yet to win a US House seat, but they're running 10+ points ahead of their last few special elections, and they have already won some statehouse elections.
Gerrymandering and vote suppression may counter it, but fundamentally, Dems will pick up a shit-ton of seats, at all levels, as long as the GOP is in the White House. There will be edge cases where money, personality, and policy matter, but the numbers are going to change dramatically--unless they're allowed to prevent fair elections, which is a fairly explicit goal of theirs.
Come to think, actually, and this is no help at all. But are we getting screwed again by being geographically concentrated? Like, do the underpopulated Republican parts of the country have more elected officials per person, so there are more easy, low pressure, local entry points?
To put it another way, people occasionally tell me I should run for office. They're wrong, because I'm terrible at names and faces and I don't like people. But also, in NYC, the lowest-level elected positions are pretty big-deal professional; running for city council as an amateur lark would be very unlikely to get me anywhere. If I lived in an implausibly Democratic small town in South Dakota, I have the impression that the lowest levels of electoral office would be a lot easier to access. Do Republicans (and I honestly don't know if this is true, I just thought of it) control areas with a whole lot more elected officials to build a farm team from?
Maybe the problem with Democrats being more critical of Republican ideas is that its ultimately playing on Republican turf. Bernie got popular - even drawing curiosity from Red Staters - by talking about shit that's been outside the Overton Window for decades.
266 is really interesting. I think the Trump Effect will overwhelm that over the next 4 years--we're going to get more and better candidates than we have in 12 years, maybe 44--but it is a structural problem.
OTOH, these guys are clowns in terms of both governing and facing difficult situations (whether hostile constituents or not saying stupid things about e.g. rape), so I'm not 100% clear on what the GOP pipeline is really producing. I guess it produces guys like Ryan, whom the press wants to fellate but who are otherwise incompetent at everything except internal power struggles.
I have various and inchoate thoughts on that issue. Part of it, and this is most of the inchoate part, is that I think rural conservative people have have some very fixed ideas about masculinity that are obviously unworkable (even to them) but that they are not willing to challenge openly. I'm not talking about teh gay, but rather the idea that a man is someone who is afforded deference by others and is to a certain extent feared. That nearly all of the men involved are not physically dominating (either from age, working at a desk job, or Burger King) and are not economically influential enough to punish others doesn't make it any easier to accept the idea that maybe its a bad idea to be continually pretending each man is (or should aspire to be) the selfless, unchallenged head of a pioneer family alone in the world. I'm going to stop here because the choate part didn't come.
Moby is probably right here. I think what he's getting at is that conservative people are voting for the guy they think their dream woman is more likely to screw.
265 A lot of that argument is useless, and most of the rest is bad faith. Young people who are direct beneficiaries of the ACA declined to vote in a race between a guy who as in favor of shoring it up and moving to universal coverage, and a guy who hedged but was clear that he'll go with Ryan. And had Trump Jr and Pence actively campaigning for him.
Other than Nancy Pelosi taking your guns away, and Republicans selling the national parks, this is what the campaign was about, day in and day out.
260 Our local media failed spectacularly in the recent election.
268: could be. Although here, at least, the first step in politics is either state rep in our absurdly oversized lege or staffer for a City Councilperson, the latter of which is the sort of thing you can reach relatively easily if you're ambitious. School Board is semi-accessible to amateurs, but it's not really a stepping stone, or at least not a reliable one.
BTW, I don't want 267 to read as if I think everything is hunky dory, just that the panic about the party is driven in large part by structural/cyclical things that nobody can change. In another universe, Gore was seated in 2000, lost in 2004, then the Dems won a wave election in 2010 that gave them redistricting control in 35 states. In some ways I think the best reason to want better candidates is to make them less vulnerable to the waves: a generic Dem in a swing district will get washed away every time the GOP has a national advantage of (say) 4%, but a really good Dem can maybe survive until 6%. And "good Dem" there can mean lots of things, whether it's outstanding constituent service, great grass roots, charisma.... I'll admit I don't think policy is on that list, although a specific position may help (and yes, I largely am thinking guns & abortion, but I don't think they're the only ones).
Abortion seems popular. Maybe Dems should run on a platform of free abortions for everyone.
I tried again to be choate and failed.
They're wrong, because I'm terrible at names and faces and I don't like people. But also, in NYC, the lowest-level elected positions are pretty big-deal professional; running for city council as an amateur lark would be very unlikely to get me anywhere.
I'm occasionally reminded that Allegheny County has 130 municipalities. The lowest office in Pittsburgh itself is City Council*, and there's only a dozen or so of those--so each person represents almost 30k people. Infeasible. But in those other municipalities, 15 have less than a thousand people and another 20 are less than two thousand. There has to be a real shot there for those who are willing to move to the burbs.
Written before seeing 273. City councilor staffer does seem a very popular route.
* Well, the school district is coterminous with the city (plus a small borough) and I think it has more seats, so maybe that's easier. But point stands; there's still a five figure constituency.
Interesting to listen to Clinton speaking at the Code Conference (I haven't listened to the whole thing yet).
It convinces me that she's not planning on running in 2020. She seems to be heading in the direction of NGAF.
She's cranky, and obviously doesn't want to spend a lot of time talking about what she did wrong. I would have been interested if she'd given a real answer to the question of, "what misjudgements did you make" but (unlike the author at that link) I don't fault her too much for not doing so. I think the reasons for her annoyance are obvious.
This article might be relevant. I didn't really read ii because it started to seem cloying.
Our state party is making a huge effort to get Democrats to run for every little thing everywhere. It's not a problem here: our city council (12 people for a city of 80k) is nominally non-partisan, but nearly all of them seem Democratic. As are all 3 county commissioners, and all the other county elected officials.
There are already candidates for all the state legislative seats in the county held by Dems -- including several where the incumbents are terming out. This isn't some sort of Trump reaction at all -- it's been like this for the 8 years I've been here. This doesn't step lots of people from showing up to tell us that politics was invented in 2016.
Statewide, we're having a bench problem. Dems from here are not electable statewide. We're the ATM, and, a turnout engine (and just imagine what would happen if people under 30 would vote) but there's a cultural bar across the statewide path.
Do you think Quist was a good candidate?
Thinking about it, here's my capsule post-mortem of the 2016 elections.
1) I think Democrats have a real, structural problem at the state & local level, and I think institutionalized funding is the biggest reason.
2) I'm not sure what I think about the Senate. I feel like Democrats should be doing better, and I'm not sure if there's one reason that they aren't.
3) At the presidential level I think Democrats have the advantage and that Trump's victory was, on some level, a fluke. I think that a lot of things had to break well for him, and that he was a longshot who managed to pull it off.
As a rough estimate (all numbers pulled out of my ass, and everything based around share of 2-party vote) I'd say that:
I think Trump's absolute floor was around 40% once he got the nomination*. We talk about the 27% crazification factor, but I can't imagine a world in which Trump would have gotten under 40% of the vote. I blame Republicans for that, and mostly for not having enough sense of civic pride or duty to have blocked him from winning the nomination.
Beyond that, I think cable news was worth another 2-3% for him. Both Fox news as a partisan entity and the fact that he was catnip for all the worst habits of cable news in general.
So I think even if you imagine Bernie Sanders running an absolutely electrifying campaign (and no Russian interference) I'd expect Trump to get 44-45% of the vote. That is a depressing conclusion. I'd would be happy to be convinced otherwise, but that's about where I am.
So, for me, everything else, Clinton's strengths and weaknesses as a candidate, the Comey letter, the NYT being awful, the difficulty of one party winning 3 elections in a row, etc . . . was enough to get him from 45% to 48.8% of the (2-party) vote, and of that he just happened to get barely enough in all the swing states.
Nate Silver has estimated that the Comey letter was worth about 1% by itself. So I'd say that I don't think Clinton was a terrible candidate or campaigner. I don't know that she was an overall plus on the ledger, but I don't think she was a significant minus, and I could imagine somebody else doing worse (it's plausible to me, sadly, that in a different world Trump could have merely lost the popular vote by 1M, and won the crucial states by 3-400K combined rather than 77K).
I don't know how much any of that changed the picture going forward, but that's how I would score it in my head.
As someone (pf?) said upthread, Clinton did great when she made the case for herself. The convention was probably the best that the Democrats have run in the era of modern politics (Obama's first was also quite good). She absolutely slayed in the debates. She was supposedly reasonably good on the stump, too. I never saw her, so I don't know. On the other side of the ledger, she was was the least popular major party candidate ever (except for her opponent). She was running against a hostile press that believed her victory was inevitable, so reporters felt perfectly comfortable taking all kinds of ridiculous shots at her. The same was true of Comey, obviously. And maybe most important of all, the Democratic electorate was relatively complacent. It's VERY hard to win the White House for a third straight term. Even given all of that, she finished with 3.5 million more votes than her opponent. The whole thing is a waking nightmare.
I mean, I blame her for some things -- mostly for how she and her husband have run the Democratic Party over the past few decades -- but relatively few once she was the nominee. She got caught in the riptide of history. Bummer.
how she and her husband have run the Democratic Party over the past few decades
Could you elaborate?
The Clintons have run the Democratic Party since 1993. Even under Obama, they maintained control of the party apparatus. Their loyalists were in charge. They maintained their donor lists. And so on. It was a great strategy for Hillary, obviously, but maybe not so great for the party. On the other hand, when Bill won in 1993, the Democrats were pretty deep in the weeds, so it's very hard to know in what measure to apportion credit and/or blame.
A minor point on the local races/bench-building issue: I find myself kind of annoyed at some local elections (registrar of deeds is the biggest example) that seem like they shouldn't really be elected positions, but seem to occupy some space in the local farm-team system. I wonder how it should affect my voting - I have no sense that any of these people will be better/worse/different-at-all registrars, but maybe I should be trying to figure out who is a better politician generally? (Or that's exactly what the election does).
This is total introspective noodling. I would like to get rid of such positions as elected positions, but maybe that's a bad systemic idea because of the farm-team role.
Is anybody else picturing Susan Sarandon talking about the "religion of politics" and seducing a single candidate for a low-level office each season?
280 I like him personally, and I don't think any of the other folks who sought the nomination would have done any better. Most would have done worse. He's definitely not a perfect candidate.
I'm not hoping he tries again.
286 It seems to me, as a partisan, that if you don't know much about the candidates, you're better off leaving the line blank in the primary.
280, 288 He was recruited by Brian Schweitzer, who was saying we needed to cast the line further from the boat. Rob did better than any Dem has in 20 years for that seat, and although turnout was ok for an off-year -- especially here -- it was still below what we needed (and what we'll need for Tester).
Thanks, Charley. My MT friends weren't impressed by him, but I don't think any of the other folks who sought the nomination would have done any better goes a long way with me.
Were they Amanda Curtis bitter-enders?
Rob certainly isn't a policy wonk, if that's what didn't impress them.
They're not bitter-enders of any kind. They just thought that Quist wasn't especially effective on the trail. One of them went to a rally at which he read one of his poems personifying Montana as a woman, complete with huge peaks, being raped by Republicans. Another thought that he didn't do enough outreach in the Native community.
294. Too dull; didn't watch. Those of the media who still have one foot in the real world seem to think he did ok without being earth moving. He's the only part leader still trying to talk about policy. All the others have gone full on ad hominem, and I suppose will go on like that for the next week.
one of his poems personifying Montana as a woman, complete with huge peaks
I thought that was Wyoming.
Yeah, the poem. That's to be taken seriously, not literally, as they say about some other guy. Obviously not effective on a whole bunch of folks -- I'm kind of surprised the consultants didn't put the kibosh on it early. My guess is that they found that older folks liked it.
Outreach to the Native community might be a fair point. I'm pretty sure he went to all the reservations. He had a meet and greet event here that was designed for a Native audience -- at the house of a Native local legislator. I had the occasion to talk with the campaign's Native outreach coordinator about 10 days before the election; they were definitely thinking about how to do better. It's a pretty difficult bit of logistics, especially in a very short campaign.
Tester will definitely do better.
Meanwhile, this schmuck represents my old district.
Looking at this wikipedia page, I must have had a class with him. We graduated the same year from the same school. I don't recognize the name. I didn't spend much time with the ambitious kids.
Trump isn't going to move the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Even his desire to recklessly upend U.S. foreign policy can't overcome is desire to tell the self-deluded assholes who voted for him that he's a going to fuck them over.
Sheldon Adelson must be turning over in his grave.
Was that one particularly high up on the self-deluded assholes' wish list?
301 is cruel because it got my hopes up for a minute.
303: Sorry. I saw a picture of him and just assumed.
302: It was the main wish of a very small subset of the assholes. I would suspect it got him at least a few tens of thousands of votes in PA.
275: Because I am an American writer, my subject and material has to be a handful of incoherent people in an incoherent country.
http://bostonreview.net/books-ideas/ed-pavlic-james-baldwin-letters-brother
That's a link to a refried fundamentalist harassing a UCC minister. I don't know how she manages to be so exceptionally reasonable in the face of such jackassery.