Castration

Pitiful, helpless giant.

Early on tax day, 2015, Axios reported

The Trump administration's abrupt walk back of tariff exceptions for cell phones, computers and chips has Wall Street guessing, but it made sense to those who understand the president's thinking: He doesn't like the "E" words.

"Exceptions and exemptions are weakness," said a Trump adviser who has discussed tariff policy with him. "Trump is for strength."

Why it matters: President Trump's determination not to appear weak — or wrong — on tariffs and his erratic, real-time tweaking of his policy have confused investors, deflated the dollar and shaken the stock market.

Investors and the nation's financial system crave stability and predictability — the opposite of what Trump's delivering.

Zoom in: The president's trade policies revolve less around traditional economic theories and more around semantics — and his desire to project power.

Amidst the dubious claims made by Tom Homan, the President's border czar maintained

El Salvador makes that decision. Now, the court says we have to facilitate. We'll facilitate but- but El Salvador has full authority on this. Again, a terrorist- now if somehow he comes back and that happens, he's going to be detained and removed again.

Homan on Abrego Garcia: "If somehow he comes back and that happens, he's gonna be detained and removed again ... what's the sense of bringing someone back who's simply going to face deportation again?" pic.twitter.com/VgKGvgLfnd

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 15, 2025

Obviously, Homan is lying when he claims "El Salvador has full authority" on whether Kilmer Abrego Garcia is released from one of the most brutal prisons in the world and returned to the USA. (And note to the US Supreme Court: this is an immigration issue, not a foreign affairs issue.)  We got Homeland Security secretary Kristi "Dress Up" Noem into the prison and we got her out. We can do the same for anyone we want.

Nonetheless, what the public sees most clearly is that Garcia remains in El Salvador. Instead, in what Republicans won't acknowledge and Democrats are blind to, President Trump is in effect lowering the greatest superpower in world history to its knees. His failure to assert the power and authority of the United States of America to secure the release of the man they contend, with very limited evidence, is a member of MS-13 is an affirmation of American weakness.

The Donald Trump of today is relatively unchanged from the Donald Trump of 2019, when David Axelrod recognized that the President "is playing a role and the role, much like on 'The Apprentice,' was of the strong, able character but it's a role. Every foreign leader and every practicing politician has taken a measure of him and understands the basics, that he responds to strength and there's not a lot behind the facade."

Yet, there is a great opportunity for the Democratic Party to paint the portrait of President Trump as a pitiless, helpless giant. President Trump's popularity has not dropped since January 20, 2025 commensurate with the damage he has imposed upon the country, as well as aviation disasters and other factors beyond his control. 

President Richard Nixon understood how important it is to the American people that we identify with our nation as being strong and dominant. Announcing on April 30, 1970 that he had ordered an incursion into Cambodia, Nixon explained

My fellow Americans, we live in an age of anarchy, both abroad and at home. We see mindless attacks on all the great institutions which have been created by free civilizations in the last 500 years. Even here in the United States, great universities are being systematically destroyed. Small nations all over the world find themselves under attack from within and from without.

If, when the chips are down, the world’s most powerful nation, the United States of America, acts like a pitiful, helpless giant, the forces of totalitarianism and anarchy will threaten free nations and free institutions throughout the world.

Despite the nation being in apparent freefall, Donald Trump's approval rating stands at 48%, his disapproval rating only at 46%. The President is recognized as doing things, though most of them bad. he is seen as being in charge, despite having created a co-presidency with Elon Musk. Most of all, he appears to the public as being strong.

The memory of Donald Trump, playing a strong man (now being a strongman) in The Apprentice lingers. He is viewed as being in control because that's the role he is playing because he realizes Americans respond to a perception of strength.

It's critical that Democrats break that, in part because voters will continue to believe K.A. Garcia is a terrorist, whatever the evidence. Democrats must uniformly slam Trump because he is the head of an extraordinarily powerful nation who is unable to force a tinpot dictator from Central America to do as he wishes. 

In December of 2002, Bill Clinton stated "We (Democrats) have got to be strong. When we look weak in a time where people feel insecure, we lose. When people feel uncertain, they'd rather have somebody who's strong and wrong than somebody who's weak and right."

People sense that liberals, wedded to facts and reality, usually are right. Democratic pundits and politicians frequently maintain that most people are with them on the issues. Yet, Republicans now control the White House and both houses of Congress. "Wrong and strong," they are not, or at least that's how they appear to most voters. Donald Trump consistently appears, inaccurately, as strong and roughly half the country approves of the guy who could be no more horrific were he trying to be so. It's time to  It's time to wrest Elon Musk's chainsaw from him and bust up the myth of a manly Donald Trump.

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The Carville Prescription

In his daily poll for January 4, 2025, Philadelphia-based CNN talk show hostMixhael Smerconish asks "Do you agree with James Carville that Kamala Harris lost for one simple reason: the economy?" The question probably was written by Smerconish's producer, who is in the habit of asking unclear, ambiguous, or misleading questions.

This question, prompted by Carville's 1/4/25 op-ed in The New York Times, falls into either the second or third categories. Acknowledging error in being convinced that Kamala Harris would defeat Donald Trump, Carville remarks "We lost for one very simple reason: It was, it is, and it always will be the economy, stupid. We have to begin 2025 with that truth as our political north star and not get distracted byy anything else."

Carville may be as famous for his stock phrase "it's the economy, stupid" as he is for having been one of the two primary campaign strategists for Bill Clinton's successful 1992 presidential campaign, which spawned the expression.

  nbsp;

However, the advice of the Ragin' Cajun for his Democratic Party did not pertain primarily to the price of eggs or of gas. Carville, who has slammed the Party for concentrating on "woke,"argues in his op-ed

While Democrats have next to no chance of passing a bold, progressive economic agenda in the next four years, what we can do is force Republicans to oppose us. We must be on the offensive with a wildly popular and populist economic agenda they cannot be for.

Let’s start by forcing them to oppose a raise in the minimum wage to $15 an hour. Let’s make Roe v. Wade an economic messaging issue and force them to block our attempts to codify it into law. And let’s take back the immigration issue by making it an economic issue and force the G.O.P. to deny bipartisan reform that expedites entry for high-performing talent and for those who will bring business into our nation. This year the Democratic Party leadership must convene and publish a creative, popular and bold economic agenda and proactively take back our economic turf. Go big, go populist, stick to economic progress and force them to oppose what they cannot be for. In unison.

Amen and amen. Add to it consumer regulation (put into a sexier package) and raising Social Security benefits. However, Carville adds

To Democratic presidential hopefuls, your auditions for 2028 should be based on two things: 1) How authentic you are on the economy and 2) how well you deliver it on a podcast.

How authentic you are on the ecobomy? In August during the campaign, Donald Trump promised "promises will come down. You just watch. They'll come down, and they'll come down fast. Not only with insurance, with everything." Having now been elected, he says of grocery prices "It's hard to bring them down once they're up. You know, it's very hard."  Not very authentic but very effective, and the candidate was elected.

This is not an anomaly. On March 26, 1992, the "I feel your pain" was born as Democratic presidential candidate Bill Clinton- the most famous of Carville clients- told an AIDS activist 

I feel your pain, I feel your pain, but if you want to attack me personally, you're no better than Jerry Brown and all the rest of these people who say whatever sounds good at the moment.

It's hard to believe Bill Clinton ever felt anyone's pain except his own but voters bought it, He was elected and four years later was re-elected. "Strong and wrong beats weak and right" asserted Clinton, who understood the strategic importance of faking self-confidence.

As President, Clintom succeeded Ronald Wilson Reagan who, like the former Arkansas governor, won his re-election bid. In that latter race, in 1984, Reagan was re-elected on the theme of "It's Morning in America"-  with an economy weaker than the one Americans enjoyed in this, the last year of the Biden presidency.

               

But voters bought it. They bought it because Ronald Reagan prior to his political career was a professional actor. He didn't lose his acting skills, riding them to the California statehouse and later two elected terms as President of the USA.

Obviously, Donald J. Trump, despite his obvious unfitness for the office, has now been elected twice to the presidency. He was a bad businessman and terrible president but an excellent actor on The Apprentice. 

And so it is:two professional actors and the chaming and cunning "SlickWillie," each of them elected and re-elected. They were elected not because they were "authentic" on the economy but because they appeared authentic.

James Carville's emphasis on performing well on a podcast is interesting and at least legitimate, and the impact of social media generally is not going away. Touting the importance of economic populism also is a counter-weight to the obsession with race plaguing the Democratic Party. Nonetheless, it needs to be recognized that for authenticity in presidential elections, perception trumps reality.

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The Election that May Not End on November 5

The debate Donald Trump endured with Kamala Harris on September 11 was not a shining moment in his campaign. Yet, that was only one of the acts of political malpractice by the Republican campaign.

At a rally in Pennsylvania in September, Donald Trump maintained "as President I have to be your protector," a remark which would alienate some women and please only those women who already were determined to vote for the faux macho ex-President. Then he added  "women will be happy, healthy, confident and free. You will no longer be thinking about abortion," thus reinforcing the Democrats' claim that the GOP ticket is weird. 

Recently, at a rally near Green Bay, Wisconsin

"My people told me about four weeks ago, I would say 'no, I want to protect the people. I want to protect the women of our country. I want to protect the women,'" (Donald) Trump said, describing how his advisers said it would be "very inappropriate for you to say."

Inappropriate, patronizing and creepy but then the Republican presidential nominee continued "I said "Well, I'm going to do it, whether the women like it or not, I'm going to protect them.'" The "whether the women like it or not" is akin to bad icing on a terrible cake. It only made it worse. 

Further, if his advisers told him it would be "inappropriate" to say, it should have brought to mind Hillary Clinton's infamous "basket of deplorables" comment in September of 2016, which was immediately preceded by 'You know, to just be grossly generalistic..." Pro tip:  when you suspect you're being "grossly generalistic," stop right there. And when your advisers suggest your words would be "very inappropriate," stop right there.

But that was not Trump's biggest mistake of the week. When comedian Tony Hinchcliffe at the Madison Square Garden rally of the ex-President characterized Puerto Rico as a "floating island of garbage," he sparked inevitable backlash.

The remark itself was not disastrous. It was Trump's reaction to it which was, if not disastrous, obviously self-defeating. The candidate could have absorbed the blowback and let it die out. Or he could hold a rally in majority-Latino Allentown, Pa. and turn it into a Sister Souljah or Sister Souljah-like moment, turning the kerfuffle to his advantage

Continuing a bad campaign, he decided to do neither.

Trump could have denounced the offensive, pejorative remark, a la Bill Clinton's attack on Sister Souljah. Or he might have criticized comedian Hinchcliffe while insisting that this has nothing to do with immigration or the "the border," Republican-speak for "illegal immigration" (or perhaps "immigration," period).  Puerto Ricans, he would have explained, are Americans and are entitled to respect and protection- unlike the hordes of individuals who, in MAGA world, threaten the homeland, take benefits from taxpayers, and vote Democratic.

Instead, he took the weasel's way out and ignored the controversy. Thrown a hanging curve by the intemperate remark of a comedian, Trump took the pitch for a called strike.

As Kamala Harris toured with Liz Cheney, touted endorsements from hundreds of Republicans, and promised to put a Republican into her cabinet and otherwise sought the vote of Republicans skeptical of her opponent, journalists, pundits, and others noted the absence of Nikki Haley in the Trump effort. The nominee would have had to swallow a little pride, but among Republicans, Haley trumps Cheney and then some.

In the past month, the GOP presidential candidate has traveled to California, New York City, and New Mexico: Safe bet: Kamala Harris wins all three states, the first two easily, the third fairly comfortably.

Something very unusual is occurring in the Trump campaign. However, if one is to recognize this and also believe journalist and lawyer Eli Mystal, there may be an explanation, though it is a little complicated.

Set-up:

During the Nazi-throwback rally at Madison Square Garden on Sunday, after Donald Trump and his MAGA cohorts finished insulting pretty much every non-white person who might even think of voting for him, Trump revealed that he doesn’t actually need votes to be installed as president again. Referencing a “secret plan” he has with Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, Trump said this: “I think with our little secret we are gonna do really well with the House, our little secret is having a big impact, he and I have a little secret, we will tell you what it is when the race is over.”

When pressed, Speaker Johnson released a statement effectively confirming the existence of the plot: “By definition, a secret is not to be shared—and I don’t intend to share this one.”

Constitutional background:

Most educated guesses assume that Trump and Johnson are “secretly” talking about installing Trump as president through a “contingent election,” whereby the House of Representatives, not the Electoral College, determines the president. I think the plot goes deeper than that, but let’s start with the contingent election idea.

To understand how this could work, you have to understand the 12th Amendment of the Constitution. Here’s the key language: “The person having the greatest number of votes for President, shall be the President, if such number be a majority of the whole number of Electors appointed; and if no person have such majority, then from the persons having the highest numbers not exceeding three on the list of those voted for as President, the House of Representatives shall choose immediately, by ballot, the President. But in choosing the President, the votes shall be taken by states, the representation from each state having one vote[.]”

This is what people are talking about when they mention a contingent elAs John Roberts and his cabal of antidemocratic goons (and their wives) have repeatedly shown this year, the Supreme Court is willing to do Trump’s dirty work. In 2020, the Supreme Court rejected almost all of Trump’s various nonsensical claims to overturn that election. But I wouldn’t be so sure they’ll do so again, especially because this time the Trump people will not necessarily be asking the court to overturn the results of a state’s election. They’ll just be asking them to delay certification of those results, until some later date. In addition to ruling for the Trumpers outright, the court could simply delay hearing the case for as long as the delay is helpful for Trump. The Supreme Court can put its thumb on the scale for Trump simply by pretending to “stay out of it” and allowing the “process” to play itself out.

If enough states refuse to certify the results of the election and submit a slate of electors—with the Supreme Court’s blessing—the math is not actually hard for Trump. What the amendment means is that, if no candidate wins a majority of the Electoral College, the House gets to decide who the president is. The key here is that the process is based not on a vote of the full House but a vote of House delegations, with each state getting an equal vote. Currently, Republicans control 26 of the 50 House delegations, meaning they could hand Trump the presidency in a contingent election scenario.

Method:

That would be a neat trick for Trump, but I don’t think the Republican plan even requires them to get to a contingent election where the House chooses the president. I think the plan is to steal the Electoral College outright by getting states Trump loses to refuse to certify the results of their election. That’s because the 12th Amendment provides that the president is the person who wins the majority of the “whole number of Electors appointed.” That “whole number” is supposed to be 538. But one potential reading of the amendment is that Trump doesn’t have to win 270 Electoral College votes but just a majority of however many electors show up. Trump’s goal, I believe, is to decrease the number of electors appointed until he wins.

The first step in such a process is to get Republicans in states Trump loses to contest the certification of their own elections. In 2020, Trump and his team illegally tried to get slates of alternate electors submitted in states where Republicans control the state legislatures. They could try that again, but for this scheme to work, they don’t even have to get “fake” electors submitted but just to convince Republican state legislatures or Republican governors not to submit their valid slates of electors before statutorily imposed deadlines. All slates of electors are supposed to be certified by December 11. Those electors are then supposed to vote and submit their results by December 25.

What this means is that Republicans just have to delay long enough to pass those deadlines. They don’t have to win; they just have to stall.

There are currently 27 states with Republican state legislatures, including Arizona, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, and Wisconsin. There are currently 26 Republican governors running states like Florida, Georgia, Nevada, and Virginia. If some of these people are able to delay certification past the deadline, the “whole number of Electors appointed” would be diminished, lowering the number of electors Trump would need to hold a majority.

Johnson:

The new House isn’t sworn in until January 3. As the violent MAGA people in your family already know, January 6 is when the House certifies the results of the Electoral College, but that is just a ceremonial day. By the time we get to January 6, the electors are supposed to have voted. December 11 is the deadline for appointing electors, December 25 the deadline for voting. Mike Johnson will still be in charge on both of those days.

The odds are against this ensuing because Trump has an approximately 50% chance of winning outright, itself a frightening prospect and damning indictment of the American electorate. However, if Harris wins and without an Electoral College blowout, chances are that Trump and/or Johnson will attempt this maneuver or something very close to it.

The late, great New York-based radio host Barry Gray would frequently assert "I love a hungry fighter."  Trump certainly is a fighter, going even so far as threatening enemies with execution. However, a plan to manipulate the 12th Amendment to his advantage, coupled with the conduct of a very bad campaign, should prompt doubt that Donald Trump is hungry for an actual win at the polls.

 

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All Lies Are Not Created Equal

Some say "it is what it is." However, as Bill Maher understands, sometimes it isn't what it appears to be. 

A misguided tweet prompted by Friday's Real Time with Bill Maher:

Fareed Zakaria and Bill Maher discuss Ronna McDaniel's firing from NBC News:
Zakaria: "How much do you punish her for her past lies? Bill Clinton lied under oath. Last time I checked he's been on MSNBC. She's an election denier. Well Stacey Abrams was an election denier and… pic.twitter.com/7mt7iudoaZ

— Eric Abbenante (@EricAbbenante) March 30, 2024

Maher responded (bad audio on the video, with relevant portion beginning at 17:53)

Also, when you say "a third of the country." It' a third of the country that thinks the election was stolen. But it's another, something like 14%- almost half that thinks the election was stolen and doesn't care because they're still going to vote for Trump,. So it is almost half the country. For that reason, I'm with you. 

But I don't agree with you on the idea that a lie is a lie. Bill Clinton's lie, Obama's lies, whoever lies, is different that that the election doesn't count when our guy doesn't win. That is a separate thing- - I totally get that point of view.

Zakaria then stated that he had once interviewed (or tried to interview) Gus Hall, once a Communist Party candidate for President of the USA, inferring that would have been analogous NBC putting Ronna McDaniel on the air. However, this point was mute. NBC's issue was not whether the former RNC chairperson should be a guest, but instead a $300,000 a year contributor.

A lie is a lie but one lie differs in magnitude and effect than another. Or as another tweeter explained, "Clinton lied about an erection. Ronna lied about an election. Very different things."

 

                                              HAPPY EASTER

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A Quirk of Human Nature

During the Republican National Convention in 1988, George Herbert Walker Bush was facing a tight race for President against Michael Dukakis. Therefore, encouraged by Karl Rove, he declared

And my opponent won’t rule out raising taxes. But I will. And the Congress will push me to raise taxes, and I’ll say no, and they’ll push, and I’ll say no, and they’ll push again. And I’ll say to them: Read my lips. No new taxes.

Bad policy, great politics, and Bush went on to defeat Dukakis- and later to raise taxes. As Time magazine reminisced 

Before his first year in office was complete, he had signed into law a “stealth budget” that, while leaving the income tax alone, raised various fees and levies. In 1990, David Letterman was joking that Bush’s catchphrase should be updated to “Read my lips: I was lying”; sure enough, it was clear that the original promise had to go.

The following year, I was talking to a friend of mine, a moderate who was a big supporter of President George Herbert Walker Bush. He was not a fan of paying higher taxes, and I asked him how he still could be a supporter of Bush, who appeared to have lied about something so important. 

I can remember his response only roughly because I didn't realize how telling it was, and it was over thirty years ago. He stated in essence "But that he promised that made it clear that he wanted to lower taxes."

He wanted to lower taxes, it was reasoned, and by voicing his intent demonstrated that he wanted to help taxpayers. We currently have a prominent politician and ex-actor who strategically makes ridiculous and outlandish claims (even more than his rivals).

After getting indicted for illegally removing top secret documents and storing them in his bathroom, endangering US national security,

Donald Trump tells evangelical activists: “I was indicted for you.”

Are people really that stupid to believe this? pic.twitter.com/HnajJiJevo

— Republicans against Trump (@RpsAgainstTrump) June 25, 2023

 

Trump: They don't even have the right to ask. And if they do ask, they have to be very nice and I don't have to give it. And yet I'm being prosecuted pic.twitter.com/OtoI6BVTAs

— Acyn (@Acyn) June 25, 2023

 

Donald Trump tells evangelical activists that he's being prosecuted- and he means persecuted. The man who once declared "I am the Chosen One" also says that he is being indicted for you.

This is not unintentional and it is not stupid, but rather impressive strategy. When Trump was to be nominated, he selected for his running mate Mike Pence, who was not only a favorite of such Christians but an evangelical himself. Trump's strength among these voters grew and solidified but reportedly has slipped in the past couple of years. The ex-President, still the favorite for the GOP nomination, nevertheless hears footsteps, and not only from Ron DeSantis. Tim Scott is at least somewhat of a threat and Trump needs to shore up his support among religious conservatives.

Most of those voters don't buy the idea of Donald Trump, he of the "Two Corinthians," who says "I drink my little wine (and) and have my little cracker" at communion is one of them. Most suspect, if not believe, that he's not the believer that they are.

Nonetheless, he pretends to be, even claiming the Bible as his favorite book. And in pretending to be, he is obviously trying to appeal to them. He clearly values their support and is essentially asking for their vote. Claiming he was "indicted for you," he is trying to forge a bond with those individuals, and they sense it.

Running against Bill Clinton for the 1992 Democratic nomination for President, former Massachusetts senator Paul Tsongas spoke disparagingly of the former Arkansas governor as "the pander bear" and "someone who will say anything to get elected." As it turned out, voters felt positively about the "I feel your pain" guy precisely because he did pander to them.

It sent the message that Bill Clinton understood that voters were important enough that he would try to appeal to them.  When Donald Trump says "I was indicted for you," some Republicans believe him and some don't. However, most of them appreciate a politician who will take on their burdens for them. And if a few find that it reminds them of their savior and redeemer, even better.

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Where "Patsy" Is Not "Cline"

The editors of The New York Times deserve credit.  On Saturday, The Times called for the resignation of New York governor Andrew Cuomo, whom it acknowledged it had endorsed for re-election, including for re-nomination.  Its twelve paragraph editorial not only emphasized the charges of sexual harassment against the governor but said nothing about his nursing home scandal.

The Times thereby avoided egregious disingenuousness. As policy, the decision to send Covid-19 patients from the hospital to nursing homes, then hiding statistics about the deaths of nursing home residents, was atrocious. As scandal, it didn't amount to much.

Without the sex charges leveled against the governor, the nursing home disaster would be an occasional topic for the Times and even less often a topic for The Washington Post and other great newspapers.  There would have been relative silence except for a few calls from New York state legislators for Cuomo to step down because they have their own, generally justified, beefs with the governor.

Neither Majority Leader and New York senator Chuck Schumer nor New York senator Kirsten Gillibrand would have proposed he resign, nor would there have been speculation that President Biden would do so, and The New York Times itself would have been reticent. After an initial uproar, social media would have gone on to other things and the unnecessary deaths of many elderly New Yorkers would have been forgotten.

So make no mistake: pressure is mounting on Governor Cuomo to quit because of terrible behavior toward women and for (virtually) no other reason. As marketing professor Scott Galloway remarked in a discussion (in a video no longer available; I've substituted another) on Bill Maher's Real Time

But at the same time, they trigger me because women and people of color lost one of the most powerful advocates when Kristen Gillibrand decided to disappear Al Franken so she could have a seven minute run for President. And we're in the midst of a pile on and here's the reality: voters get to decide in 18 months. The majority of- of- 48% of white people, 63% of non whites believe he should not resign. We as Democrats need to be the party of women but we also need to be the party of due process. We need to slow down, let those women be heard and let due process occur here and not just pile on.

Twenty-three years ago, during the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal, Democrats understood that sex improprieties were insufficient cause for dismissal short of an election.  That has radically changed as many, boasting enlightened thought, rush to judgement because they fear the opprobrium of mainstream media and the outrage of a portion of their base.

If Democrats continue to succumb to pressure and demand ouster of their own elected officials, they will not earn respect from Republicans. They will receive passing praise from the media, which will do Democrats no good. And that portion of their base demanding the man's scalp will move on to the next outrage. On a positive note, they could begin wearing bright blue jerseys reading "patsy."

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The Rebuke Which Won't Be

With some evidence, progressive journalist David Sirota this (Wednesday) morning posted an article arguing that these are the "six takeaways" from the elections:

Democrats’ Weak Economic Message Hugely Helped Trump; The Lincoln Project And Rahm Emanuel Embarrassed Themselves; People Don’t Love The Affordable Care Act;  A Lot Of Grassroots Money Was Set On Fire; Democrats’ Court Calculation Was Wrong; A Large Percentage Of Americans Have Lost Their Minds.

It was clear to many of us that any money (however much, from wherever) thrown at the Democratic senatorial candidates from Kentucky or Alabama would be futile, thus far better spent elsewhere.

I never bought the idea that Republican voters could be wrested from Donald J. Trump. They loved him in 2016, they love his presidency, and they would love him in 2020. It's how they roll. Nonetheless, if Biden were to be elected, it might be attributed to Never Trump Republicans (such as the Lincoln Project) and that would curb any enthusiasm of the Democratic establishment to promote a progressive economic message. 

Certainly, whatever the outcome of the presidential race, it's clear that Americans "have lost their mind"- or their sense of fairness, belief in democratic principles such as free expression or the notion that no one (including the President and his family) are above the law.

I also am convinced, as I always have been, that voters don't love the Affordable Care Act. 

But here is where the rubber meets the road. It's going to be close to impossible to advance that (accurate) narrative if simultaneously Democrats were unable to regain a Senate majority but the vice president to the architect of the Affordable Care Act has been elected President. Similarly doomed is this prescription, right on policy but an extremely hard sell:

I think an open rebuke of Bill Clinton and Obama is necessary. Defending Obamacare is incredibly tone deaf when it was clearly a massive policy failure.

Everything Clinton and Obama touched turned to shit. https://t.co/rBkHGznOWc

— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) November 4, 2020

Everything" is an exaggeration but both the Obama and Clinton administrations failed at reversing the trend toward privatization, presided over an increase in income inequality, and harbored an unhealthy fondness for balanced budgets.

However, it's unlikely that the Democratic Party will abandon Obamacare.  As CNN reported in mid-October, Joe Biden had not

swayed from his commitment to continue allowing private plans -- despite the pressure from the Democrats' progressive wing, which wants to put the federal government at the center of the nation's health care system, akin to Sen. Bernie Sanders' "Medicare for All" proposal.

"Competition and the option of private insurance plans remain central in this approach," said Linda Blumberg, institute fellow in the Health Policy Center at the Urban Institute.

If Joe Biden has won the presidency (which at this moment, 1:00 eastern time on Wednesday, is probable), it will be hard to dislodge him from the notion that health care is not a right which must be free to everyone regardless of economic or health status.

It will be nearly impossible with a Senate maliciously and effectively led by Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (a title I had not expected him to have the opportunity to hold in the next Congress). Further, that "nearly" can be erased because (as Matt Stoller has lamented previously) Barack Obama, AKA Mr. ACA, remains extraordinarily popular among Democrats.

After a string of primary and caucus defeats this cycle (and never having won any such contest previously), Joe Biden even in early February had

looked to the black voters of South Carolina to hand a win to his flagging campaign. On Saturday, they delivered.

Biden won 61% of the votes cast by non-white voters, dominating a crowded Democratic field among a group that made up more than half of the electorate. Biden also performed strongly with older voters, women, regular churchgoers and moderates and conservatives, according to AP VoteCast, a wide-ranging survey of more than 1,400 voters in South Carolina’s Democratic primary.

Biden’s strength with the state’s African American voters helped him edge out second-place finisher Bernie Sanders. The Vermont senator won roughly 14% of African American voters, while billionaire Tom Steyer won 15%.

Biden wouldn't have blown away the field, and might not even have won in South Carolina, without the extraordinarily influential support of House Majority Whip James Clyburn who, like the President Biden loyally served, is black.

Once his nomination was clinched, the Party's choice nominated for vice- president a black woman (Asian on the other side, but really), who is not progressive but does support the Affordable Care Act.

That legislation is the signature achievement of President Barack Obama and is what his favorable legacy hinges on.  Neither Kamala Harris nor Jim Clyburn is progressive and both support Barack Obama. Biden is being called upon by Matt Stoller to move away from Obamacare and repudiate the last Democratic President and the president previously known as "the first black President."

It should happen, just as Biden and the Democratic Party ought to disregard the (centrist) policy positions of the Never Trump crowd and replace them with economic policy centered on restoring the hollowed-out manufacturing base of the country, reducing income inequality, and a health care plan which acknowledges the severe limitations of the Affordable Care Act.

They should, but won't. It's not where the electoral base of the Democratic Party is now and it's even further from those special interests now dominating the Party.

 

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With Feeling

"But amid the prime-time lineup,"  Christopher Cadelago and Natasha Korecki wrote in Politico Thursday morning

that nodded to the past (the Obamas and the Clintons), or to the moment (Joe and Jill Biden), Harris’ address Wednesday served as the de facto convention keynote and clinched her status as the embodiment of its future establishment wing and the likely inheritor of their coalitions.

If successful in being elected and nudging Joe Biden out of running for a second term, Kamala Harris will indeed be the inheritor of the Clinton/Obama coalition. Moreover, the convention stood as strong evidence of the enduring legacy of Bill Clinton.

It's not only the Clinton who repealed Glass-Steagall with the Graham-Leach-Bliley Act, embodied in nomination by the "liberal" Democratic Party of a ticket of staunch defenders of the Wall Street establishment. Nor is it selection by the Party as its presidential nominee the man who as recently as 2015 referred to as the "Biden Crime Bill" the law signed by President Clinton which allegedly was the root of the mass incarceration which the remarkable protests of spring 2020 supposedly were intended to protest.

It was more the disposition, the spirit, the temperament which the candidate and almost everyone else at the recently-concluded national convention successfully evoked.

Will Bunch writes

More than any political convention in my lifetime, the 2020 virtual DNC hung on a theme that could be summed up in one word: Empathy. The empathy and ability to relate to everyday folks that has defined Biden’s 50 years in the public eye, the empathy that is so lacking in a president unable to acknowledge the enormity of 170,000 coronavirus dead, the empathy that was beamed into your living room Tuesday night from a windswept Montana prairie and a Mississippi HBCU.

Joe Biden is more-  maybe much more- sincere than Bill Clinton, albeit not a high bar to eclipse.Empathy, though, is merely shorthand for "feeling your pain." Demonstrating empathy, especially as compared to explaining policy or defending his political past, is in the nominee's wheelhouse, whether for a Comcast executive or an individual needing support.  That's why we had this:

13-year-old Brayden Harrington shares how Joe Biden helped him overcome his stutter at #DemConvention:

"I'm just a regular kid, and in a short amount of time Joe Biden made me more confident about something that's bothered me my whole life." pic.twitter.com/WnSAJBCubW

— MSNBC (@MSNBC) August 21, 2020

The convention could have been comprised of various disparate parts but instead clung to its theme, one believable as applied to Biden. Moreover, it contrasts dramatically with the soulless incumbent, who can say only "itis what it is" of 1,000 Americans dying daily from a novel coronavirus.  The elevation of feelings over ideas, and sometimes even over reality, courses through American society and was dramatized over the last few nights.  It may be Joe Biden's ticket to victory- and it began in presidential politics with the hugely successful Bill Clinton.

 

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Fair Is Fair. Do We Have A Deal?

Slate's Ruth Graham approvingly, even satisfyingly, summarizes

The nonpartisan nature of the current moment of reckoning helps explain why the Bill Clinton moment has finally arrived. On Monday, Caitlin Flanagan published an essay in theAtlantic arguing that it’s time for liberals to reassess Bill Clinton’s moral legacy. On Tuesday, Michelle Goldberg wrote a column in the New York Times titled “I Believe Juanita.” “I think we got it wrong,” Matt Yglesias wrote in Vox on Wednesday. “The [Lewinsky] scandal was never about infidelity or perjury—or at least, it shouldn’t have been. It was about power in the workplace and its use.” In hindsight, he concludes, Clinton should have resigned.

In hindsight, Yglesias is wrong, except that had Clinton resigned, Al Gore would have become President and been elected in 2000, which probably would have prevented US military involvement in Iraq, brought the issue of climate change to the fore, and would have kept Samuel Alito and John Roberts off the Supreme Court.

That's not what Clinton's critics have in mind, but let's strike a deal.  Democrats will acknowledge that Bill Clinton should have been convicted by the Senate and hence removed from office. In return, Republicans agree that a major mistake was made in the autumn of 1991.  Given that both events are well in the past, comparison of the latter with Clinton is far more appropriate than comparing Bill Clinton to Roy Moore, Al Franken, or anyone else.

Clarence Thomas was a liar. He did not merely deceive, obfuscate, or misled, but instead lied his way onto the United States Supreme Court while playing the race card more ruthlessly than it ever was or has been, alleging a "high-tech lynching for uppity blacks...."





We know Clarence Thomas sexually harassed Anita Hill because Angela Wright, who had worked under Thomas at the EEOC, had told Senate interviewers that Thomas once asked her on their way to a meeting "What size are your breasts?" However, Biden harbored doubts about her veracity and discouraged her from testifying. Yet, in a 2010 memoir Lillian McEwen, Thomas' girlfriend at the time of the disputed events, says Thomas "was obsessed with porn. He would talk about what he had seen in magazines worth noting" and that he would talk aout the women with whom he worked- especially regarding their breast size.

We know Thomas sexually harassed Anita Hill because, as laid out by Steve Kornacki in 2010

Rose Jourdain, who had worked with Wright under Thomas, told committee investigators that Wright had spoken to her while they worked together about their boss' conduct. As later reported by Graves, "Though her recollections had differed slightly from Wright's, Jourdain ... had confirmed the basic elements of Wright's account, including Wright's anger at Thomas for what Wright had said was overtly sexist behavior. Jourdain had mentioned "comments [Wright] told me that he was making concerning her figure, her body, her breasts, her legs, how she looked in certain suits and dresses."

We know Thomas sexually harassed Anita Hill because

Three Hill friends -- Susan Hoerchner, Ellen Wells and John Carr -- testified under oath that she had told them about Thomas' conduct as it happened between 1981 and 1983. "Anita said that Clarence Thomas had repeatedly asked her out ... that he wouldn't seem to take 'no' for an answer,'' Hoerchner told senators. "The thing Anita told me that struck me particularly and that I remember almost verbatim was that Mr. Thomas had said to her, 'You know, if you had witnesses, you'd have a perfect case against me.'"

We know Thomas sexually harassed Anita Hill because

In a letter to the committee, a former aide to Thomas at the EEOC, Sukari Hardnett, wrote that many black women at the agency felt they were "an object of special interest" to their boss. "If you were young, black, female and reasonably attractive," her letter read, "you knew full well you were being inspected and auditioned as a female."

We know Clarence Thomas sexually harassed Anita Hill because as the Washington Post three years after Thomas' confirmation described the book written by then-Wall Street Journal reporters Jill Abramson and Jane Mayer

"Strange Justice" uses statements from Thomas's friends and associates to undermine Thomas's testimony that he never talked dirty with Hill. The authors, after interviewing acquaintances as far back as his college years at Holy Cross, report that he often recounted sexually explicit films in lurid detail. Kaye Savage, a former colleague, reports that the walls of his bachelor apartment were covered with Playboy nude centerfolds. The owner of a video store near the EEOC said Thomas was a regular customer for pornographic movies."

There was more from Kornacki. But since then we also learned that lawyer Moira Smith- in an incident she described contemporaneously wth four individuals- on 10/7/16 (October 7!) wrote on her Facebook page

At the age of 24, I found out I’d be attending a dinner at my boss’s house with Justice Clarence Thomas. I was so incredibly excited to meet him, rough confirmation harings notwithstanding. He was charming in many ways- giant, booming laugh, charismatic, approachable. But to my complete shock, he groped me while I was setting the table, suggesting Ishould sit "right next to him." When I feebly explained that I'd been assigned to the  other table, he groped again.... "are you'sure'"?? I said I was and proceeded to keep my distance.

Thomas was approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee and confirmed by the full Senate for several reasons. Supporers of Thomas included southerners- and southern blacks, who were important to southern Democratic senators, of whom there were a few back then. Judiciary committee chairperson Biden choked. Additionally, a defiant Thomas was more believable than Hill because sexual harassment and intimidation was little understood at the time and while Hill was calm, the extraordinarily self-righteous Thomas skillfully acted as the aggrieved victim.

But now, some feminist writers and Republicans maintain, we must be more willing to accept the accusations of women that they have been the object of unwanted attention and abuse from men, and the charges against Bill Clinton must be viewed in this spirit of enlightenment. So, okay- let's investigate Mr. Clinton, shall we? And while we're at it, we'll reconsider the case of Hill v. Thomas.

Better yet, if both are found responsible, we can demand that neither hold an office or position in the United States government from this point onward. Game on.





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4.5, At Least

The people at fivethirtyeight analyzed factors which may have contributed to Hillary Clinton's defeat. They include: Russian intervention; the Comey letter; media obsession with emails; hostility toward cultural change: never-ending coverage of Trump; resentment inspired by Fox News; sexism/misogyny; Clinton fatigue; Bernie Sanders; Clinton's Midwest strategy.

There was one more. As described in a snarky,lengthy tweet by an anti-Clinton Washington Examiner reporter, "the problem started with history. It was exceedingly difficult for either party to hold onto the White House for more than eight years in a row."

Nate Silver, who on fivethirtyeight's 1 to 5 scale assessed this at 4.5, remarked

It’s not clear to me whether a party is actually at a disadvantage after holding the White House for two straight terms. But it’s certainly not at an advantage either, and Gore lost in 2000 under highly similar circumstances to Clinton.

The parallels go beyond Clinton and Gore both winning the national popular vote while losing in the electoral college, and both being decidely more qualified and clearly less charismatic than their opponents.

Coal: On November 5, 2000 The New York Times quoted a West Virginia logger, alienated by Al Gore's emphasis on environmentalism, remarking of a possible Democratic victory: "'There'd be a lot more new laws, All the guys who work up on the mountain think he'd be bad.''  Strip mining did not fit into Al Gores' prescription for climate change, and he narrowly lost both West Virginia and Ohio.

President Obama was responsible for (as the industry termed it) "a wave of environmental rgulations" which, according to Politico "conservatives contend is the reason 40,000 coal miners have lost their jobs"  and which they absurdly termed "the war on coal." Candidate Clinton did not help herself in West Virginia and Kentucky (where she was shellacked), in Ohio, or in Pennsylvania (where she lost narrowly) when she backed this approach by seemingly accepting the loss of thousands of additional jobs.









Cuba:  The Clinton Justice Department approved a raid, extremely unpopular with Cuban-Americans, in which on April 22, 2000 young refugee Elian Gonzalez was seized.  Candidate Gore fumbled the issue, which could only have hurt him anyway, and he lost the election by narrowly losing Florida.

In both cases, the approach of the Democratic president was good policy but bad politics for his would-be successor.

Of course, Al Gore did not have to deal with a propaganda campaign directed by Russia to undermine a presidential election.  By late September 2016, President Obama was aware of  the Kremlin campaign to defeat Hillary Clinton. But the President wanted a buy-in from GOP congressional leaders- which he didn't get, Donald Trump was claiming the election was rigged, and the President who had spent 7+ years being intimidated by Republicans wasn't about to change course abruptly.

Nor did Al Gore have to explain away health plan premium increases averaging 25 percent announced the month before the election and an increasing number of health insurers dropping out of exchanges established by the Affordable Care Act, ridiculed as "Obamacare."

In July, 2013 a wise Megan McArdle estimated that, given the Democrats would be asking in 2016 for a third term, the 2016 GOP presidential nominee would have a 75% chance of being elected.  In September 2016 an "ex-Obama aide" unironically slammed Mrs. Clinton's book as "the Hillary Show, 100 percent. A lot of us are scratching our heads and wondering what she’s trying to do. It’s certainly not helpful.”

They are loathe to point their finger at an individual who was elected twice to the White House. However, McArdle, Silver, and some others have a sense that the last eight years played a major role in the victory of a guy who irresponsibly and ridiculously- but brilliantly- called President Obama "a racist" who "has done a terrible job" and "will go down as perhaps the worst president in the history of the United States."








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The Evil University

Quoting The Philadelphia Inquirer's Will Bunch, Steve M. notes Anthea Butler is

A religious studies professor at the University of Pennsylvania, a black woman who teaches a class about the religious right in America and has a fiery liberal persona on social media, Butler’s been ridiculed in recent years on primetime TV by the right’s Sean Hannity and called out on AM radio by Rush Limbaugh....

But when a fellow professor contacted her a few weeks ago and told her she’d been placed on a brand new nationwide “professor watch list” intended to help conservatives identify faculty liberals, Butler felt like rising McCarthyism on America’s campuses just surged to a new high water mark.

The watch list [was] created and promulgated by a nationwide youth-oriented conservative group called Turning Point USA....

Steve perceptively recognizes that with the Democrats controlling neither the White House, the House of Representatives, nor the Senate, conservatives will have to look outside government to play the blame game. And

The right never wants the public to believe that Republicans are responsible for what's going on in government, even when they are responsible. So conservatives look for scapegoats in and out of politics, and they talk about them as if they have tremendous power. Recall the amount of effort the right invested in denouncing Ward Churchill, a professor who wrote an inflammatory essay in the wake of 9/11. If you paid attention to the right back then, you might have thought Churchill was the most important academic in America. 

But what was the right supposed to do? There was no Democratic president. Democrats didn't run the House or Senate. So Churchill had to be portrayed as a national menace. The same with liberal-leaning celebrities such as Barbra Streisand and the Dixie Chicks.

But there are at least two other reasons the organization has targeted institutions of higher learning.

After the 2002 election, Bill Clinton famously commented "When people are insecure, they'd rather have somebody who is strong and wrong than someone who's weak and right." The nation now has elected a big guy who admires  Sadaam Hussein, Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong Un, Bashar al Assad, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has said "I alone can fix it," and is wrong constantly and consistently.








"Hate crimes" appear to have increased dramatically since the election, and it's no surprise that supporters have been emboldened by the election of Donald Trump. He has not been gracious in victory, and neither will they.

This tendency to pile on is refected in an irony Bunch recognizes when he notes

Yet one other troubling aspect of the list is that the majority of the supposed heresies didn’t even take place in a classroom, where critics on the right have long insisted that students are indoctrinated with liberal ideas.  Many happened on Twitter, during televised appearances, in published op-eds or at political rallies.

Twitter is responsible for most  (choose one) a) extremist, b) obnoxious, c) offensive, or) all the above remarks. Yet, the list promulgated by Turning Point USA includes, Bunch explains, "several well-known professors with ties to Penn, Temple, and other local schools among its roster of roughly 200 faculty."

Twitter is not directly attacked.  Colleges (especially of the elite), though, are easy targets because the right perceives them as a hotbed of liberalism. One anti-abortion rights Catholic ethicist, Charles Camosy, argues

campus cultures have strictly (if not formally) enforced dogmatic views aboutt he nature of gender, sexual orientation, a woman's right to choose abortion, guns and the role of the state as primary agent of social change.

Further, he contends, they encourage "the reduction of all disagreement to racism, bigotry and ignorance- in addition to being wrong about its primary source."

Traveling in the world of academe, Camosy is much too polite (or naive) to sugest conservatives are more prone than liberals toward racism, sexism, or class bias.  It is out of necessity that the right sends its children off to university, generally the key to professional success. But to most conservatives, it represents much of what is wrong with society, helps explain Anthea Butler's unwanted attention, and why someone must "make America great again."






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Conway Emulating Trump

On his way to the presidency, Donald Trump told lie after lie, including about the Clinton Foundation. However, as Clinton campaign spokesman Brian Fallon noted twenty months ago, no one "ever produced a shred of evidence supporting the theory that Hillary Clinton ever took action as secretary of state to support the interests of donors to the Clinton Foundation.”

We're still waiting, even after an appearance Sunday on CBS' Face the Nation, when Kellyanne Conway stated

When it comes to Russia and coziness, let’s not forget it was Hillary Clinton through her craven foundation requests -- Bill Clinton got a million bucks to give a speech in Russia. And then she turned over 20% of US uranium rights. So let’s be honest about who for money, and who for power, and who for access has cozied up to the Russians.  

That's one powerful Secretary of State.  As explained in factcheck.org when Peter Schweizer made a similar claim in his hit job, "Clinton Cash"

The fact is, Clinton was one of nine voting members on the foreign investments committee, which also includes the secretaries of the Treasury, Defense, Homeland Security, Commerce and Energy, the attorney general, and representatives from two White House offices — the United States Trade Representative and the Office of Science and Technology Policy. (Separately, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission needed to approve (and did approve) the transfer of two uranium recovery licenses as part of the sale.)

Additionally, fact-checker Snopes pointed out

By law, the committee can't veto a transaction; only the president can. According to The New York Times, Clinton may not have even directly participated in the Uranium One decision. Then-Assistant Secretary of State Jose Fernandez, whose job it was to represent the State Dept. on CFIUS, said Clinton herself "never intervened" in committee matters.

The "million bucks" Bill Clinton got for a speech in Russia turns out to have been $500,000, and The Wall Street Journal reportedly "found no evidence that speaking fees were paid to the former president in exchange for any action by Mrs. Clinton."

Mrs. Conway did not explain how Mrs. Clinton "who for access has cozied up to the Russians" (cartoon below from Signe Wilkinson, The Philadelphia Inquirer).  Nor did she explain why Clinton would want to gain access to the Russians, nor whom "the Russians" she was referring to are.  And former President Clinton earned $500,000 rather than $1,000,000 for a speech to "Russians." (If that seems a mere technical point, please mail me a half million dollars and I'll respond with a gracious thank-you note; no personal checks, please.)

That's par for the course for Conway, however.  When Obama press secretary Josh Earnest recently noted Russian influence in the election, Conway commented

That is just remarkable. That is breathtaking. I guess he’s auditioning to be a political pundit after his job is over soon. That is incredibly disappointing to hear from the podium of the White House press secretary. Because he basically — he essentially stated that the president-elect had knowledge of this, maybe even fanned the flames. It’s incredibly irresponsible and I wonder if his boss, President Obama, agrees.

Jonathan Chait countered with

Notice, Conway isn’t directly challenging the truth of the allegation, she’s just calling it “remarkable” and “breathtaking” and “disappointing” and “unfortunate” that people mention it in public. That’s how professional liars in Washington do it. 

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