After Mitt, Carly

GOP  presidential candidate Carly Fiorina was ready to pounce when Jake Tapper asked at a debate on September 16, 2015 the inevitable question:

In an interview last week in Rolling Stone magazine, Donald Trump said the following about you. Quote, "Look at that face. Would anyone vote for that? Can you imagine that, the face of our next president?" Mr. Trump later said he was talking about your persona, not your appearance. Please feel free to respond what you think about his persona.

Following laughter, Fiorina replied "You know, it's interesting to me, Mr. Trump said that he heard Mr. Bush very clearly and what Mr. Bush said. I think women all over this country heard very clearly what Mr. Trump said."






She might have added "what women everywhere heard was 'that is the face of the next Director of National  Intelligence.'"

Presumably, Fiorina won't be tapped for the job, with Trump adding her to the list including Mitt Romney of  People I Really Want to Humiliate.

And so we have Fiorina, having descended from on high at Trump Tower, telling (as she stated it, video below) a group of reporters

First thing is he has really cool stuff in his  office.  All thee athletes have given him incredible memorabilia. I was particularly taken by Shock O'Neal's shoe, which is huge.I guess it takes a champion to know a champion.

Cool! But note to Carly: No one believes you spontaneously came up with "I guess it takes a champion to know a champion." If you're going to be fed your lines, the least you can remember is that "Shaquille O'Neal" is pronounced as "shack," not "shock."








After the Access Hollywood tape was revealed in October, Fiorina wrote "Donald Trump does not represent me or my party,.  I understand the responsibility of Republicans to support their nominee. Our nominee has weighty responsibilities as well. Donald Trump has manifestly failed in these responsibilities.”  Now she says "people recognize the opportunity our new president-elect has to really make a huge impact on peoples' lives in this country..."

No more accurate statement can be made about the guy who has bragged about not paying taxes, has encouraged violence at rallies, and once commented "You know, it doesn’t really matter what [the media] write as long as you’ve got a young and beautiful piece of ass.” That huge impact awaits as the march of the deplorables continues, a group well represented by Mrs. Fiorina.






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Able And Not Willing

In a classic example of a Friday night news dump, The Washington Post has reported

The CIA has concluded in a secret assessment that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump win the presidency, rather than just to undermine confidence in the U.S. electoral system, according to officials briefed on the matter.

Intelligence agencies have identified individuals with connections to the Russian government who provided WikiLeaks with thousands of hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee and others, including Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, according to U.S. officials. Those officials described the individuals as actors known to the intelligence community and part of a wider Russian operation to boost Trump and hurt Clinton’s chances.

“It is the assessment of the intelligence community that Russia’s goal here was to favor one candidate over the other, to help Trump get elected,” said a senior U.S. official briefed on an intelligence presentation made to U.S. senators. “That’s the consensus view.”

After months of considering how to respond to the consensus assessment, the White House in September decided to call out the Russians

but they worried that doing so unilaterally and without bipartisan congressional backing just weeks before the election would make Obama vulnerable to charges that he was using intelligence for political purposes.

Instead, officials devised a plan to seek bipartisan support from top lawmakers and set up a secret meeting with the Gang of 12 — a group that includes House and Senate leaders, as well as the chairmen and ranking members of both chambers’ committees on intelligence and homeland security.

Obama dispatched Monaco, FBI Director James B. Comey and Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson to make the pitch for a “show of solidarity and bipartisan unity” against Russian interference in the election, according to a senior administration official.

Specifically, the White House wanted congressional leaders to sign off on a bipartisan statement urging state and local officials to take federal help in protecting their voting-registration and balloting machines from Russian cyber-intrusions.

Though U.S. intelligence agencies were skeptical that hackers would be able to manipulate the election results in a systematic way, the White House feared that Russia would attempt to do so, sowing doubt about the fundamental mechanisms of democracy and potentially forcing a more dangerous confrontation between Washington and Moscow.

In a secure room in the Capitol used for briefings involving classified information, administration officials broadly laid out the evidence U.S. spy agencies had collected, showing Russia’s role in cyber-intrusions in at least two states and in hacking the emails of the Democratic organizations and individuals.

And they made a case for a united, bipartisan front in response to what one official described as “the threat posed by unprecedented meddling by a foreign power in our election process.”

The Democratic leaders in the room unanimously agreed on the need to take the threat seriously. Republicans, however, were divided, with at least two GOP lawmakers reluctant to accede to the White House requests.

I'm shocked! Shocked, I tell you, that Republicans would put politics above country.  There should have been little surprise that

According to several officials, McConnell raised doubts about the underlying intelligence and made clear to the administration that he would consider any effort by the White House to challenge the Russians publicly an act of partisan politics.

Mrs. McConnell, more commonly known as Elaine Chao, now is the President-elect's choice for Secretary of Transportation, several years after she largely slept on the job as George W. Bush's Secretary of Labor.

Yet no one, especially President Obama, could have expected Mitch McConnell to prioritize the national interest.  During the transition in 2008, seven GOP senators told Vice President-elect Biden to expect "unified resistance," as demanded by then- Minority Leader McConnell. In October, 2010, McConnell stated "the single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president." And then there is the matter of Judge Merrick Garland.







Still, the President took "no" as an answer.  McConnell threatened Obama, and Obama blinked. That is a sound metaphor for the past eight years.  The Post report concluded

Some Clinton supporters saw the White House’s reluctance to act without bipartisan support as further evidence of an excessive caution in facing adversaries.

“The lack of an administration response on the Russian hacking cannot be attributed to Congress,” said Rep. Adam B. Schiff (Calif.), the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, who was at the September meeting. “The administration has all the tools it needs to respond. They have the ability to impose sanctions. They have the ability to take clandestine means. The administration has decided not to utilize them in a way that would deter the Russians, and I think that’s a problem.”

We have a problem, and with Obama's willingness to take what McConnell gave him, we soon will have a  President Trump and a Senate of 52 Republicans. Atta guy, Mr. President.







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Robots, Immigrants. And No Citizens

AFL-CIO  President Richard Trumka says Andrew Puzder, President-elect Trump's choice for Secretary of Labor, is “a man whose business record is defined by fighting against working people."

As the awful cliche would have it: "what was your first clue," Mr. Trumka?  The New York Times reports

.... he has argued that the Obama administration’s recent rule expanding eligibility for overtime pay diminishes opportunities for workers, and that significant minimum wage increases would hurt small businesses and lead to job losses.

He has criticized paid sick leave policies of the sort recently enacted for federal contractors and strongly supports repealing the Affordable Care Act, which he says has created a “government-mandated restaurant recession” because rising premiums have left people with less money to spend dining out.

Speaking to Business Insider this year, Mr. Puzder said that increased automation could be a welcome development because machines were “always polite, they always upsell, they never take a vacation, they never show up late, there’s never a slip-and-fall or an age, sex or race discrimination case.”

There is one additional, significant indication of animus toward the working man and woman neither Mr. Trumka nor The New York Times will acknowledge.   CNBC found that in a Wall Street Journal op-ed last year

Puzder supported a "path to legal status" that would be "short of citizenship" so long as the undocumented are "willing to accept responsibility for their actions and take their consequences." That path would include passing a background check, paying a fine and learning English, among other measures.

Puzder admitted on another occasion

If we were able to hire people who are currently here illegally, if there were a way to change their status so that they are here legally that would be a big benefit I think to us and to everybody else that has to hire workers in that category

It shouldn't be surprising that a  guy who opposes an increase in the minimum wage and mandatory sick leave policies and prefers robots to human beings would want to hire illegal immigrants with no chance to become citizens.  And of course

At an American Enterprise Institute conference in 2013, the CEO of CKE Restaurants, parent of Hardee's and Carl's Jr., riffed on the virtues of low-skilled immigrants and backed immigration reform.

"Our Hardee's restaurant operators in the Midwest and the Southeast often use the labor force in California as an example of what they would like their labor force to be," he said then.

"They're very hardworking, dedicated, creative people that really appreciate the fact they have a job," Puzder said. "Whereas in other parts of the country you often get people that are saying, 'I can't believe I have to work this job,' with the immigration population you always have the, 'Thank God I have this job' kind of attitude. So you end up with a real different feeling."

It is no surprise, either, that Andrew Puzder is particularly proud of his marketing approach, including Mexican guy and (white) American guy salivating over sexy, bikini-clad women playing volleyball in the desert at the Mexican/USA border. Profit is king and if women or immigrants can be exploited along the way, all the better. In the Wall Street Journal, he had written "every option should be on the talbe, except amnesty, which firgives illegal conduct. It isn't amnesty if immigrants admit wrongdoing and accept punishment."  And, apparently, substandard wages with no right to vote or opportunity to become citizens.














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Bad Politics, Bad Policy

When he announced his presidential candidacy in June, 2015, Donald J. Trump declared

I will build a great wall- and nobody builds walls better than me, believe me- and I'll build them very inexpensively. I will build  a great, great wall on our southern border, and I will make Mexico pay for that wall. Mark my words. 

We didn't have to mark his words, because they were repeated often, and to cheering crowds.  As recently as the first of this month he maintained "trust me, we're going to build a wall."

He won't, of  course, and has no real intention to do so. Remarks substituting "fence" for wall, Trump's recent meeting with Paul Ryan, and his prospective Cabinet members- eager to shrink government so it can be drowned in a bathtub- testify to his disinterest.

Nonetheless, there may not have been  a candidate Trump, would not have been a presidential nominee Trump, and certainly wouldn't be a President-elect Trump without the pledge to build a wall, especially that voters generally (and especially GOP voters) always have been keener about building a wall than, say, deporting illegal immigrants.

Rahm Emanuel offered an autopsy of that election and noted that voters were presented "a change versus a status quo candidate in a change election."  He remarked

"I'm all for a socially inclusive message, but not at the exclusion of an economically robust message," Emanuel said at a Brookings Institution panel on the presidential election and the U.K.'s surprising vote to leave the European Union earlier this year.

"Look at when we won versus when we lost," he continued, after referencing Bill Clitnon's and Obama's successes. "The takeaway is  clearly about something tha's a more robust and inclusive economic message versus one that is just socially."....

That would be mere political pablum had not

Also at the event, Emauel reaffirmed that Chicago will remain a "sanctuary city" and offered a loud defense of the young undocumented immigrants known as Dreamers.

Asked if there were issues on which cities could work with the incoming Trump administration, Emanuel said there may be, in areas sch as infrastructure and, depending on the proposal, taxes, but not on immigration.

Under the latest iteration of Trump's tax plan, the average dollar amount the wealthy gain would far exceed the amount gained by the poorest taxpayers; the percentage of income saved by the rich is greater than that saved by taxpayers of modest income; and even the percentage of income which is recovered by the wealthy is greater than that of the working and middle classes.  But Emanuel proposes to cooperate with Trump on his tax initiatives.

Odder, though, is that Emanuel reaffirmed that Chicago will remain a "sanctuary city."

The Chicago mayor had concluded "I think we should go back to what I think has worked. And that to me is a .... very strong economic with a strong socially inclusive message. But not one at the expense of another."

Mrs. Clinton (and other Democrats) did have an economically inclusive, as well as a socially inclusive, message.  But there is little doubt that she emphasized- as a share of her cultural message and of her overall message- support for comprehensive immigration reform, for a welcoming approach to both immigrants (including ones here illegally) and refugees.

By contrast, on his way to nomination and election, Donald Trump opposed sanctuary cities. The platform of the Republican Party- in an effort to harmonize its position and that of its candidate- called for penalizing sanctuary cities (an imprecise term, admittedly).







Not by coincidence, Donald Trump won the presidency and his Party did quite well in congressional elections. Now Rahm Emanuel, advocate of sanctuary cities, scolds the Democratic Party for emphasizing social issues, which it did with immigration and with its attacks on Trump for belittling immigrants.

 The Democratic Party evidently had excessive faith in the power of changing demographics- especially the growing Latino population- which apparently has escaped the attention of the Chicago mayor. The prescription offered by Rahm Emanuel, who made his millions through investment banking, fervently promotes the charter school industry, and is hospitable to illegal immigrants, is more than a little suspect.

A greater emphasis on economic concerns shared by the middle classes and the poor,by minorities and whites, probably would have mitigated losses on November 8. That would conflict with the positions of Emanuel, a supporter of sanctuary cities and foe of unions, and is precisely the message the Democratic Party should reject.








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John Glenn Has Died, And Not Only Literally

Former Ohio Senator John Glenn, who died on Thursday, unexpectedly failed miserably in his effort to obtain the Democratic presidential nomination in 1984. Jeff Greenfield remarks

There were important lessons from that failed campaign that resonate—or ought to resonate—today. A candidate without a compelling, thematically consistent message is at an enormous disadvantage. Attributes that political insiders see as powerful assets may turn out to be irrelevant to an electorate looking for something new.

Not only did Glenn lack the "compelling, thematically consistent message" necessary for a presidential nomination, he lacked the character needed, even then, to be win a general election for President. Charlie Pierce comments

In 1984, when John Glenn was preparing to run for president, I sat down in a bar on Beacon Hill in Boston for a chat with one of his chief strategists. This fellow smacked my gob across the room when he said that the campaign was planning to "downplay the hero stuff." My god, I thought. Without The Hero Stuff, Glenn was just a kind of boring old sod from Ohio. Without The Hero Stuff, he wasn't the first American to orbit the Earth. He wasn't the guy who spent the last of those orbits in a tiny spacecraft with a problem the gravity of which the folks on the ground could only guess. Without The Hero Stuff, he wasn't…an astronaut.

He would downplay the hero stuff.  Winning presidential candidates are hardly humble, whether like Ronald(6) Wilson(6) Reagan(6) and Bill Clinton they fake humility, or don't even bother, in the manner of George W. Bush, Barack Obama, or Donald J. Trump. It was on May 1, 2003 when President Bush made history for the

first time a sitting president has arrived on the deck of an aircraft carrier by plane. The jet made what is known as a "tailhook" landing, with the plane, traveling about 150 mph, hooking onto the last of four steel wires across the flight deck and coming to a complete stop in less than 400 feet.

The exterior of the four-seat Navy S-3B Viking was marked with "Navy 1" in the back and "George W. Bush Commander-in-Chief" just below the cockpit window. On the plane's tail was the insignia of the squadron, the "Blue Wolves."

Moments after the landing, the president, wearing a green flight suit and holding a white helmet, got off the plane, saluted those on the flight deck and shook hands with them. Above him, the tower was adorned with a big sign that read, "Mission Accomplished."

Pretty bold stuff from a guy who skipped out of his National Guard duty. He was in turn succeeded in office by the guy who on Super Tuesday 2008 declared "change will not come if we wait for some other person or if we wait for some other time. We are the ones we've been waiting for. We are the change that we seek." He defeated a guy who downplayed his heroic military service, which did spare the nation a Vice-President Sarah Palin.






We now have elected as President a man who in the last thirteen months alone, with the eyes of the nation upon him, stated

"I know more about ISIS (the Islamic State militant group) than the generals do. Believe me." 
"Nobody knows jobs like I do."
"I know more about foreign policy than anybody running." 
"Nobody reads the Bible more than me."
"Nobody knows more about trade than me." 
"Nobody knows the (visa) system better than me. I know the H1B. I know the H2B. Nobody knows it better than me."
"I've studied (the Iran deal) in great detail, I would say actually greater by far than anyone else."
"I know more about renewables than any human being on Earth."
"Nobody knows more about taxes than I do — maybe in the history of the world."
"There is nobody who understands the horror of nuclear more than me." 
"I understand money better than anybody,"
"Nobody knows debt better than me."
"Nobody in the history of this country has ever known so much about infrastructure as Donald Trump." 

Donald Trump has shattered all records in the narcissistic sweeptstakes. Although it wasn't as bad in 1984,when  the failure of the self-effacing John Glenn may have foreshadowed a great cultural shift in which voters increasingly to elect candidates with extraordinary egos. And here we are.

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GOP Operative James Comey

Donald Trump was a fine choice as Time Magazine's Man of the Year. Charlier Pierce remarked "the fact remains that the president-elect is the only obvious choice for the award. There simply was no figure more important in shaping the news and the nation than he was."

He was, ultimately, a legitimate choice because- against great odds- he was elected President of the United States, the most powerful nation on earth.  He was inarguably the most "obvious" choice. But whether he was the best, rather than the most obvious, choice is arguable.  

Trump pollster Tony Fabrizio and Clinton pollster Joel Benenson discussed the election in a podcast last week. The Daily Beast's Gideon Resnick writes

In the final week after FBI director James Comey released a vague letter saying that the agency was examining new emails found on Anthony Weiner’s computer, the husband of Clinton aide Huma Abedin, Benenson said that Clinton’s  defectors just didn’t come back.

“Ours were coming back after the third debate,” Benenson said of the Clinton defectors. “We had actually solidified our lead for a period of days after that debate. Comey happens on that Friday, eleven days out, and that’s when we see—our defectors leave, their defectors get loyal and that keeps moving and probably in the end tips the balance.”

Fabrizio completely agreed with him and said if one didn’t understand the polling fluctuations, “you’d think the bottom fell out.”

The groups Fabrizio was tracking, specifically “Trump targets”—a cohort which they consistently tried to sway from supporting Johnson and/or Clinton—drastically decreased in the final week after the Comey letter. They all essentially came home.

But Fabrizio said they “held their breath” because just days later Comey cleared Clinton once again. Benenson said that second announcement did not help them either “because it just put it back into the conversation again.”

There was no accident.  Law professor David Cole has described, FBI Director Jim Comey disregarded a rule which

requires law enforcement officials to avoid public comment on ongoing investigations. The Justice Department’s guidelines on “Disclosure of Information Concerning Ongoing Investigations,” set forth in the US Attorneys’ Manual, provide that, as a general matter, officials “shall not respond to questions about the existence of an ongoing investigation or comment on its nature or progress.” 

The rule recognizes that on “matters that have already received substantial publicity” or where public safety requires, “comments about or confirmation of an ongoing investigation may need to be made.” But that exception is plainly a narrow one. The general no-comment rule is designed to prevent prosecutors and law enforcement officials from using their authority to cast aspersions on the reputations of citizens; their job is to conduct investigations, not offer public character assessments.

When in July the FBI director gave "his highly unusual press conference"

rather than simply reporting that he had closed the e-mail investigation because he had found no evidence of Clinton violating any laws, he went on to castigate her as “extremely careless.” The federal criminal code is byzantine, to be sure, but carelessness is not a federal crime, and therefore, as FBI director, Comey had no business offering his personal opinion. 

"Having violated the rule against public comment once," Cole continued,

Comey then went further, using that violation to justify another infraction. In an e-mail to his staff, he defended his extraordinary step of publically announcing the resumption of a closed criminal investigation by stating that he had promised to keep Congress informed when he testified in July about the investigation’s closure.

The job of the FBI, however, is not to offer Congress public progress reports on criminal investigations, but to conduct those investigations in confidence unless and until they warrant an indictment or dismissal. And Comey’s October 28 “report,” a brief letter to Congress, was bound to be misleading. The announcement followed the discovery of e-mails of Huma Abedin, Clinton’s chief of staff at the State Department, on the computer of Abedin’s now-estranged husband, Anthony Weiner, who is under a separate investigation for allegedly “sexting” with a minor. Neither Comey nor his staff had actually read any of the newly discovered e-mails when he first notified Congress, and therefore had no basis for believing that they constituted evidence of wrongdoing. But the announcement nonetheless set off a flurry of renewed accusations against Clinton.

Moreover, every four years for the last few decades, including 2016, the Justice Departmenent has issued a memorandum strongly discouraging returning an indictment against a candidate (at all levels) within 60 days of an election. Therefore, Cole reasons, "even if the FBI had acquired enough evidence to charge Hillary Clinton formally with knowingly transmitting classsifed information or otherwise violating criminal law, that fact should not have been made public until after the election." When Comey announced eleven days before the election that additional e-mails had been found- on the server of the spouse of a Clinton aide- he had no reason to believe the messages were pertinent, especially since the FBI at that time had not even obtained a warrant to examine them.

Even though Clinton was ahead in polling in the vast majority of swing states when Comey made his statement on October 28, we don't know for sure who would have won the election had Comey not intervened.  Pigs may fly, Arizona may be swept into the Pacific Ocean, and Trump may have prevailed in the presidential election.  But if Donald Trump is the Person of the Year, Jim Comey deserves honorable mention.

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Voting For A Man Of The People

Slate's Jamelle Bouie tweets "I am... troubled by the choice to use the brutal murder of a homeless man as a device for explaining Trump voters."

He is referring to a piece by one Evan Smith, who finds serious poverty, drug addiction, and hopelessness in the "small Appalachian hill town" of Zanesville, Ohio, in which there are more high school dropouts than high school graduates. The journalist is unsurprised that last month, police there found the charred remains of a 62-year-old man, who had died from blunt force trauma.

There is a prosperous north side of town and a poor south side of town, where

In just the past year, they’ve seen sword stabbings, shootings, deadly police stand-offs, dozens of heroin overdoses each month, too many petty robberies to count, house fires, and now a burned homeless man.

"Everything is falling apart," Smith observes and

Go down those streets and you won’t see a Trump sign,” said county engineer Doug Davis, who knows the bridges and roads of the area better than anyone else. “No, instead you’ll see ‘Hillary for Prison’ signs. You’ll see ‘Drain the Swamp’ signs.”

“It’s about more than just Trump, believe me,” Davis said.

Maintaining "so nothing is surprising," even to see "a man killed and burned over $20" and Smith argues

This is the simple reason why Zanesville voted for Obama in 2012 and then flipped for Trump in 2016: the people on the southside began to rise up. It wasn’t about bankers, lawyers and doctors. Instead, it was about the unemployed, the former-factory workers, the trailer-park dwellers, the looked-down-upon, the white and angry, the white and depressed, and the lost.

Call them racist, xenophobic, deplorable. Go ahead — they’ve heard it all before from their northside neighbors.

But now, for the first time in a long time, they’ve swung back.

They've swung back on behalf of a man who claims to be worth billions and owns a  fleet of five jets, one of which has a 24-karat gold fixture and a leather toilet seat. They clobbered the opponent of a fellow who owns four mansions (Mar-a-Lago, below), as well as a Manhattan penthouse valued at $100 million, and nearly 40 other buildings in the heartland city of New York.. And they swung back on behalf of a guy who brags that not paying any federal income taxes "makes me smart."

Notwithstanding Smith's implication, Zanesville's homeless man was not killed because Hillary Clinton supports the Affordable Care Act or that Donald Trump opposes abortion rights and gun safety legislation, or even because of e-mails or Clinton's representation of the Establishment. The connection of the murder and Trump's election is somewhat tenuous.

Rather, as Bouie notes, the article gives the impression that Zanesville's voters are "justified in directing their anger toward people as or more marginalized."  But it's worse if Smith is correct when he suggests voters on the southside went for Trump because they  were "rejecting the elites on the other side of town — your neighbors who don’t see you as equals — coupled with the impossibility of crossing over to the green grass on the other side."  If widespread, such a perception of "elitism" is a disturbing sign, for Zanesville, for the American voter, and for the nation..












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