I’m going to keep this short (you’ve heard that before from me) because my disdain for punditry extends to my own attempts.
Still, it seems to me that there is one real measure of success or failure (“winning” or “losing”) for any political event: did what just occurred move votes to one side or the other. Everything else is just noise, or, as our elite bloviators perform it, theater criticism.
By that criterion there were only two moments that mattered last night, and both did real damage to Team Trump.
The first was obvious from the moment the words left Mike Pence’s mouth: “You whipped out that Mexican thing again.”
I’m sure I’m not alone in my instant reaction: “He just said WHHHAAAATTTTT!” Latino Twitter was unamused, certainly — and this is key. There are some constituencies in which Trump cannot fall any further. The number of Black Trump supporters is hovering around the margin of error — he’s polling between two and six percent nationally.
But there are still Latino votes to lose. A Univision battleground state poll found Hillary lagging about eight points behind Obama’s numbers in each state, with Florida’s 24 percent gap between the two the narrowest of the lot. Did Mike Pence help Trump with those voters last night?
The question answers itself.
The other meaningful moment was equally apparent as it happened. That would be this exchange:
Governor, why don’t you trust women to make this choice for themselves? We can encourage people to support life. Of course we can. But why don’t you trust women? Why doesn’t Donald Trump trust women to make this choice for themselves?
That’s what we ought to be doing in public life. Living our lives of faith or motivation with enthusiasm and excitement, convincing other, dialoguing with each other about important moral issues of the day…
PENCE: Because there are…
KAINE: … but on fundamental issues of morality, we should let women make their own decisions.
PENCE: Because there is — a society can be judged by how it deals with its most vulnerable, the aged, the infirm, the disabled, and the unborn. I believe it with all my heart. And I couldn’t be more proud to be standing with a pro-life candidate in Donald Trump.
One man said that American women are the agents of their own lives. The other said that they cannot be, that his personal religious commitment pre-empts any decision a woman might choose to make. All the squid-ink of piety Pence spewed did not obscure the painfully clear: Mike Pence would use the force of law to ensure no woman had more authority over their bodies than the state would.
While abortion remains an issue on which the American electorate is divided, and there are certainly plenty of women who are committed to the anti-abortion cause — and plan to vote accordingly — plenty more voters recoil at the idea of the Trump-Pence punitive approach. ETA: As valued commentator RaflW notes below , an overwhelming majority of Americans favor at least some abortion rights. But almost half of those polled identify as “pro-life.” And those are the people who seem to me to be the focus of the argument that Kaine advanced against Trump and Pence: even if you are queasy around the topic of abortion, the reminder of the blunt rejectionism and punishment-centered views of the GOP has some force. Given the significance (we are told) of the suburban woman and millenials in this year’s swing states, there’s no joy for the Trump crowd here either; shoring up the base that’s already enthusiastically committed to you is less important than giving those who might be persuadable to pull the lever for your side.
To me, everything else that occurred in the debate takes second place to those two brief passages. Kaine did well, I think, to get Pence on record denying his savior thrice before cock-crow — that helps drive the second day narrative, which is certainly useful. But in terms of actually grabbing votes?
Further alienating the Latino/a vote and making it ever harder for women to cast a GOP ballot — and not just women, but any man who sees women as actual people — ain’t exactly a royal road to victory.
And as for the moment that never happened?
We’ve had 180 minutes of debates so far. 180 minutest to go.
As I write this, after the hottest half year on record; after devastating drought; after horrific fires; after record floods; with a Category 4/3 hurricane bearing down on Florida, having already wrecked Haiti — with all this, there have been exactly zero questions on climate change. Tim Kaine managed to slip in a mention in a national security answer, praising Clinton for forging “strong alliances to battle terrorism and climate change.” Clinton did get Trump to deny saying climate change was a Chinese hoax — as he did. But that’s it.
This is simply disgraceful. One more piece of evidence that our elite political media if f**king hopeless.
That is all. [Flips Pundit-Mode to “off”]
Image: J. M. W. Turner, Shade and Darkness — The Evening of the Deluge, 1843.
Corner Stone
Since when did FlipYrWhig make it to elite status?
Corner Stone
I loved that part! I giggled gleefully like a young person being asked to their first big dance.
I could envision Senor Kaine with an embroidered sombrero, a 70’s stache and a thin cigar between his lips, looking down at Pence from the saddle.
cervantes
The effect of abortion policy on voters’ choices is already completely baked in. I can’t see any discussion about it making any difference at this point.
liberal
Time to start sleeping better
eric
The better analogy is music criticism (not to denigrate theater) because there is a very real difference between what a trained ear can hear and what an untrained ear can hear. I play guitar and have a good ear, but my brother is a virtuoso musician and has a remarkable ear. I am left explaining what I hear in terms of how it came across — did it groove or swing — while, not only can he do that, he can tell you if it was original or innovative. That type of expertise takes YEARS of DEDICATED training. The same is true in policy discussions. so, lets leave it at “Pence really grooved” at the peril of our democracy.
JMG
@cervantes: I disagree. Frank Luntz’s focus group (yeah, I know) felt that was the only part of the debate where Kaine bested Pence. Since Frank collects the lowest information voters extant, there would seem to be an audience for a pro-choice message that doesn’t get to hear it much.
jeffreyw
Love ya, Tom, but this blog is up 24/7 and you really do need to do your part. Maybe some art criticism in lieu of political punditry? That Turner, for example, just doesn’t do anything for me. You?
Barbara
@JMG: They forget it. The one side wants them to forget how punitive and demeaning its position is for women, and the other side doesn’t want to be tagged as the pro-abortion party. So I think Kaine framed this perfectly (as Obama did in one of his debates with John McCain).
RK
Some feel Pence’s performance stops the bleeding over the last week.
Tom Levenson
@jeffreyw: I am still digesting a huge new dose of Turner. Last month I made my first visit to Tate Britain, home of the largest collection of Turners in the world. So while, yeah, Shade and Darkness is not my go-to “atmospheric” Turner, I find it interesting, and I’m still trying to process the way he ran aesthetic themes through hugely different subjects and overt stylistic choices.
That a start?
rikyrah
When I read that online , I was like…
DA PHUQ?
JMG
@RK: Unknown at this point.
Cacti
@RK:
Only true if Trump can stop acting like an enraged gibbon for a few days.
Robin G.
How — seriously, how — can there be Latino votes for Trump to lose?
peach flavored shampoo
@jeffreyw: I assumed that “painting” was a finger-job brought home by Tom’s 5-year old. Please, please tell me that abortion on a canvas is not hanging in any art gallery beyond that found in a McDonald’s restroom.
jeffreyw
@Tom Levenson: That is a start! My vocabulary is deficient in this area and I am hoping to learn some new words. You, sir, have some of the best words!
eric
@Robin G.: amen. also, there are a fair number of jewish people on the book of friends that support him to the point where i guess “never again” only means “never again in 20th century europe to jewish people.”
Rathskeller
I still don’t think there will be much impact on voters, but I am loving this news from inside the Trump camp, which is that Trump allegedly hated the debate because of Pence’s demonstrable attitude towards him:
https://twitter.com/JohnJHarwood/status/783514764249034754
https://twitter.com/JohnJHarwood/status/783513968006537217
Walker
@Robin G.:
There are plenty of conservative Latinos. It is far less of a uniform voting block than African Americans.
RaflW
Tom, dear. You are a great member of the BJ front pagers. But this
is just flat wrong.
The RW noise machine has been incredibly successful at painting this as a divided-nation thing. But it just ain’t so. Gallup has the numbers for us.
OK, Abortion is an issue on which voters feel quite uncomfortable. When pushed, they’ll often hem and haw (in part because the RW noise machine has been too successful at misrepresenting things) when the have to discuss the issue with friends, etc.
But a massive majority of Americans support some or all abortion rights. 79-19 is the margin.
This is not a divided nation, it is a country that is being given bullshit info by a press that I’d daresay are more squishy and uncomfortable about abortion than most voters are.
So, with that said, carry on Tom. And please think of this scolding the next time you bring up abortion. Because we do need to talk about it. We do need to counter the myth that the electorate is reachable with the current extreme GOP position. It isn’t, if we tell the truth.
oldgold
I thought the moderator was poor.
She failed to exercise much, if any, control. It was unclear to me at many points of the debate, who actually had the floor and if the person speaking had gone past their allotted time. Most of the questions had a conservative frame. The Social Security question was a real groaner.
In addition, she placed way too much emphasis on Syria. Yes, it is an important matter and deserving of attention, but not at the level she featured it.
Tom Levenson
@RK: I felt that right after the debate; I don’t now. Partly for the reasons above — the election now is about grabbing whatever tiny tranches of persuadable voters may remain, and I think Pence did the ticket harm in that domain. But also because in order to perform (and that’s the word to focus on) as well as he did, Pence had to make a bunch of statements that weren’t true about what his running mate had said. That’s a major element of the narrative today, and though I hate the word and the phenomenon, still the theme of the week has returned with astonishing rapidity to the problem of Trump as a potential president. It may be that at the high 30s the GOP ticket has hit its bottom, which may mean that if there’s no bounce out of Pence’s as-good-as-could-be-hoped-for outcome, that’s not stopping the bleeding so much as having bled out.
RaflW
ETA (since WP won’t let me edit my comment): The pro-choice/pro-life Gallup question is useless. We all think we know what those terms mean, but they are far too imprecise to act as a stand-in for actual questions on abortion.* But clearly, clearly many people who label themselves pro-life are OK with abortion in some situations.
Pence et al want to make abortion illegal, period. Who knows how Trump really feels on the issue. But he is campaigning on an anti-choice platform, and would certainly defer to Pence on crafting and moving legislation if (shudder) they win.
*I personally would like Gallup to ask all these people where they stand on the death penalty (though the answer will make me sad, we are a very eye-for-eye, punish-y nation). And then right after the death penalty Q, ask again if ppl call themselves pro-life.
Face
@Robin G.: If one conflates (which seems to happen all the time) “Latino” with “Cuban”, there’s quite a few rock-ribbed Republicans of Cuban heritage in FL. I’d proffer that some Latinos are quite religious, apparently enough to think a religious bond with the candidate outweights the fact that said candidate would deport this person’s mother on Day One if he could. And maybe there’s just some Latinos that like to fuck with the pollsters, or don’t understand English well enough to understand the questions asked.
My shock is that Trump has 2-6% support among AAs. Just who are these 6%ers who think life would be so awesome under (perhaps) the most racist president of all time?
liberal
@shomi: Well, all the Trumpheads losing their shit because Assange didn’t destroy Hillary at the appointed hour was good for a few chuckles, if nothing else.
OzarkHillbilly
@RK: Some Republicans you mean.
Tom Levenson
@RaflW: Thanks for this; it’s a needed corrective.
I didn’t make my point as clearly as I should have in the OP. The importance of Pence’s unequivocal forced-birtherism that Kaine exposed is that despite the topline number you correctly emphasize, when you go to the second graph on your link you see the problem. 47% of the sample identified as pro-choice; 46% as pro life. That’s the divide I was trying to reference. Kaine’s laying out the difference between support for some or complete abortion rights and the Republican position is aimed at that subset of the 46% who have to be reminded what the GOP position really is, once you get rid of all the pietistic noise.
liberal
@Face: Come on. It’s a poll. You could ask people (of any demographic group) if the sky is green, and 10% would say “yes”. The number you cite is actually astonishing low. Such numbers are never zero.
NorthLeft12
Tom, thanks for acknowledging that the Dems are trying to sneak some small mention of climate change and the threat it poses, not only to the world at large, but to the US in particular.
Unfortunately, that issue seems to be a non-starter with a vast majority of people. It is just too big and too long term for people to deal with. The fact that those fine upstanding and family oriented people do not care to give up anything [money, convenience, etc.] to make their children’s and grandchildren’s lives better is all the more telling. Hypocrites.
RaflW
@shomi: Here is why Twitter matters. It has become a big driver in the media landscape.
And as at least one critic put it this morning, pre-Twitter the pundit conventional wisdom that Pence won on style would have been the main narrative today. The rapid pushback on Twitter last night about how often and forcefully Pence was lying helped tip the coverage to: Pence won on style but did it by lying/distancing like crazy.
That is a not-insignificant shift from our shitty, theater-critic media.
Dork
@shomi: Someone last nite said it best: The hurricane about to hit/graze/spook FL is going to wipe out any vestiges of this VP debate analysis. In less than one day, Hurricane Matt is going to be the 24/7 news item run on all the cable news orgs.
So argue away about who “won”…you have less than 24 hours to be heard.
cmorenc
Bill Clinton off-the-cuff and not Tim Cane during-the-debate made a problematic gaffe yesterday in Bill’s unfortunately phrased criticism about the problems in the ACA with folks just above the cutoff level for insurance subsidies. Pence’s performance probably did help at least temporarily quell the nerves of some GOP partisans (or strong leaners), which could modestly lessen the portion who will stay home or would otherwise have only voted in down-ticket races. However, it’s doubtful Pence successfully attracted any voters who were not already strongly inclined to vote R and likely to turn out any way, but-for doubts about Trump.
It’s the Clinton gaffe about the ACA that will become the subject of GOP attack ads, rather than anything Kaine or Pence said last night. AND YES, I get what it was that Clinton was trying to constructively drive at – that this subsidy threshold matter is one of the areas where the ACA needs tweaking, but geez what a damagingly counter-productive way to say it, ready-made for incorporation in attack ads.
hovercraft
@Tom Levenson:
Nicole Wallace was funny, she said Pence won the debate by being calm and presidential, with only one tiny little problem, he was not truthful about a lot of things. This will be the conversation the next couple of days Pence’s style was more palatable than Kaine’s, but he lied his ass off. Hey media you don’t get to say he won but he lied. The fact that you had to lie your way through an entire debate to make yourself palatable to the electorate means you lost and are still losing. The fact that the two pundits focusing on this point on the “liberal” msnbc are Steve Schmidt and Mike Murphy, while Tweety rhapsodizes about how wonderful he was tells you all you need to know. Style is all that matters, because substance is boring.
NorthLeft12
@JMG: I agree with you and disagree with Cervantes. It is never a bad thing to articulately and passionately restate your core beliefs. This highlights the difference between the Dems and GOP, and the philosophy espoused by Sen. Kaine also applies to other issues having to do with personal freedom and civil rights and government intrusion in personal matters.
bystander
@Tom Levenson:
I would love to see the real Turner, but apparently it was stolen from a museum in Frankfurt in the late 90s.
I for one welcome your provocative art selections, Tom.
Cermet
Climate change should be addressed? No, and NO! All that mattered was the moderator was hot …well, for someone my age. Get your head on backwards like most people who consume the boob tube – it is entertainment that matters; those damn pesky facts just ruin everyone’s ability to kept their heads firmly up their ass’s. So, did we get any important questions like is Kim OK after her good luck to look down a barrel of a gun? The NRA must be off-the-chart’s happy …
Corner Stone
@jeffreyw:
You know who else has some of the best words? The very best words, believe me.
RaflW
@oldgold: On the moderation issue, I thought they spent a bizarre amount of time on foreign policy issues for a Veep debate. At one point last night I was (in very rare form for me) ALL-CAPs-ing tweets about whether we were ever going to get questions on health care, education, anything else. Gaaaaahh!
Tom Levenson
@bystander: Yes. It’s impossible to get a deep sense of a lot of Turners (most painters, really) w. out seeing them in the flesh. He’s so much about the paint.
Elizabelle
Pence’s response about social security: he and Trump are going to keep their commitment to seniors.
From NY Times transcript:
Sounded very much like he was speaking only of those who are seniors NOW. “Our seniors.” Not future ones. It’s the way he said it; may not come across in the transcript.
Hope middle aged and the smarter* younger folks heard that one loud and clear.
* the glib and uninformed are already cynical. Thanks, Pete Peterson. Greedy gazillionaire jackhole.
StringOnAStick
@Face: My new Sister in law’s ex husband is a Fox watching, BillO loving, evangelical African American, so they do exist. That he’s an authoritarian prick pretty much explains it.
bystander
@NorthLeft12: Well said. It is also a restatement of the Dems’ core belief in the equality of women, in healthcare and in the market place.
Cermet
@RaflW: Damn it; there they go again! FACTS! What do you Balloon-Juicer’s think? We come here for facts!? No, we come to be entertained … where are the naked … never mind, that is just too stupid a remark to make even for sarcasm.
NotMax
@liberal
Recent poll of (IIRC) likely voters in Detroit had African-American support for Trump at zero per cent.
Seem to recall same thing out of Philadelphia a while back.
OzarkHillbilly
@hovercraft: Yes but he lied presidentially.
cleek
NPR managed to find a couple of women who very impressed with Pence’s stance on abortion. so much that they both said they were now more inclined to vote for Trump.
scav
Haven’t an extensive knowledge of Turner, but what suddenly struck me is that many of his blurry / atmospheric ones seem somehow to incorporate time in the paint: the speeding train, the one where he’s lashed to a ship during a storm, even the Temeraire one as an echo, although that last is an easier atmospheric. I don’t think I get that from any of the Impressionists.
NorthLeft12
@Tom Levenson: I did not know that the Tate was so blessed. My daughter lives in London and I have been to the British Gallery [Trafalgar Square] a couple of times and loved that [they seemed to have more than a few Turners] so I will put a visit to the Tate on our next agenda.
Thanks for the heads up.
Matt McIrvin
@RK:
It might have, but we’ve got another presidential debate coming up real, real soon.
Face
I was unaware that Clinton had anything to do with Obamacare or that Obama would be running for his 3rd term. Connecting Hillary to the ACA is akin to blaming Clinton for Deflategate.
rikyrah
@cervantes:
I dunno. There are a lot of young women who don’t understand that the GOP is serious about not only turning around Roe, but also taking away birth control. They really look at your strange when you try and explain it to them.
MattF
@cervantes: There may be only a small percentage on the margin– but that’s where they are. Like it or not, these questions are decided by people who can’t make up their minds. Elections are often decided by people on the margin.
rikyrah
@Face:
Eh…that’s the usual group…
GregB
@Corner Stone:
Tremendous.
jeffreyw
@Corner Stone: Yes! You do, Coner Stone! Don’t try to hide your light under a bushel, Mr Stone.
Elizabelle
@cleek: NPR is just so. Precious.
I won’t be hearing anything from them today. Well, their “news” offerings. Music and Terry Gross is fine.
NorthLeft12
@Robin G.:
This is what is called a softball. You might wonder why members of the LGBTQ community vote for Republicans too. Those Trump Latino supporters just don’t identify with the Latino community at large and believe that the Repubs are targeting THOSE Latinos. They think they are immune and safe from harassment. After they get asked for their “papers” a few dozen times and have to pick up their teenage son from the ICE office they may feel differently. By then it will be too late.
MomSense
@oldgold:
Was I imagining things or were all her budget and economic questions asking the candidates to comment on Pete Peterson projections?
Mike E
You forgot
Polandal gore, shomi!But, lil miss manners is right and Trump will scorpion-fuck himself in the face, repeatedly, making all of us wonder (hopefully), “Why didn’t we focus on the down-ballot races?” BR and GOTV!
hovercraft
@Face:
Usually the black republicans are business types who like the fiscal policies, and there are also religious types who are pro-life. Remember that many AA’s are also evangelicals, it’s just that for most of them they the issues of racism and social programs override their concerns about culture warrior concerns. We’ve gotten better, but we have still have a lot issues in our attitudes towards the LGBT community. Most of the black pastors supporting Trump are doing so largely because of his supposed pro-life position.
I think that 6 % is a little high, I suspect he’ll be closer to about 3 %, my dream would be ! %. A girl can dream.
Tom Levenson
@NorthLeft12: Note that it’s Tate Britain (in Pimlico) not Tate Modern (south of the river).
Timurid
Most ordinary people don’t care much about VP debates… I just hope this tiny glimmer of good-ish news for Trump is not enough for the MSM to peek out of their air raid shelters, sniff the air and… “Is that a horse race I smell?”
MomSense
@hovercraft:
It’s even worse than style versus substance. Pence lied and denied multiple times last night and the pundits normalized that behavior. We wouldn’t let someone who lies so calmly, convincingly, and frequently teach a kindergarten class or babysit our kids. They are saying that lying is acceptable if you do it with style. That is an incredibly disturbing thing for journalists to say. They are supposed to be in the provide accurate (truthful!) information service so citizens can make informed decisions.
Starfish
@oldgold: The moderator was just trying to help Gary Johnson figure out what Aleppo is.
rikyrah
@RaflW:
Also,
“You whipped out that Mexican thing again.”
While the MSM media poo-pooed and glossed over it, the SPANISH-LANGUAGE MEDIA HAS NOT.
And, Non-White Twitter was all over it.
schrodinger's cat
@MomSense: She was awful, why was she picked? I had never heard of her before last night.
JPL
Hillary Clinton is pro-life and she’s proven this by her support for the CHIPS program and her work with the children’s defense fund. Trump is pro fetus. His plan for working mothers is okay if you are married and wealthy. Single parents are left by the wayside.
hovercraft
@OzarkHillbilly:
My bad.
How’s the shoulder doing?
schrodinger's cat
Mike Pence conflated with visa overstayers with criminals. In most cases overstaying your visa is not a criminal offense and pretty Elaine did not correct him.
Enhanced Voting Techinques
Oh god lord, the pundits are the political equivalent of movie critics, the sort of bizarre and comical uselessness of them makes a lot of sense now.
Cermet
@rikyrah: Had he just watched “Blazing Saddles”?
JPL
@RaflW: Ask the candidates how they feel about free pre-natal care, and then you can see how pro life they are.
Starfish
@schrodinger’s cat: I thought she asked some good questions, but there were times that the candidates were definitely not answering what she was asking.
hovercraft
@Matt McIrvin:
It may have stopped the constant chatter about the race slipping away from Trump because of his erratic behavior, but all the villagers agreed that it will not move the numbers, it will sever only to calm the rats who once again were running for the exits. The polls are going to keep rolling in with bad numbers for Trump, so he will continue to get more and more frustrated, by Sunday he should be well primed.
schrodinger's cat
@Starfish: Most of her questions had a right wing framing. She let Pence lie through his teeth. She did not counter any of his BS regarding immigration.
Ohio Mom
@peach flavored shampoo: Turner doesn’t usually photograph well because there are a lot of subtleties that get lost. His surfaces are very delicate and layered. Add to that that this is a computer screen image of a photo and there isn’t much left. I could see why you are less than impressed.
To me the most amazing thing about Turner is how ahead of his time he was — how did he know you could do those sorts of things with paint? He was an envelope pusher, an impressionist before anyone else (albeit, without the bright candy colors).
Big G
There’s a thing in here that always bugs me when I see it – you can’t compare polls and voting outcomes in this way. Polls have an “undecided” category, which by definition doesn’t exist in voting. In this election year, that is fraction is relatively high, 8-9% in the polls referred to. If you look at Clinton/(Clinton + Trump) she’s actually beating the Obama/Romney spread pretty handily, and could do even better if, as I think, half of the Johnson/Stein support evaporates, and most of those still “undecided” probably wind up not voting. This is looking for a problem where none exists.
MomSense
@schrodinger’s cat:
Even the known ones are terrible. Lauer is paid 25 million a year and my 12 year old was doing better factchecking in my living room than he did.
Chris Wallace has already notified us that he doesn’t plan to do any factchecking. What is the point of having moderators?
Matt McIrvin
@hovercraft: I am assuming that Hillary Clinton should expect debate questions from here on in to be basically framed in Republican terms.
I’m also assuming that she knows this and is furiously gaming it out. (What it reminds me of is actually something Bill did once at a townhall-style event: someone asked him about “the deficit” and he instantly pivoted to talking about jobs and the general state of the economy, because he knew that when people asked about the deficit, that was what they were really worried about.)
Corner Stone
@schrodinger’s cat: To be fair, it has to be very difficult to moderate a speaker who just calmly lies at a consistent pace. And no one is better practiced at that than a rightwing radio talk show host.
But, she did a very poor job of keeping them (Kaine and Pence) framed into a series of questions and whoever prepped her questions definitely works or has worked at a rightwing “think tank” or two.
Cermet
@JPL:Or, I think you mean, how to PAY for such care for people without the means to afford such care …then the real pro-lifers, who support a woman’s right to control her own body, really shine and prove was ass wipe’s all thugs really are when it comes to all life.
Chyron HR
@JPL:
Then why didn’t they have Erik Estrada speak at the convention?
NobodySpecial
@RaflW: You’re wasting way too much patience on a guy who gets paid by the nickel.
comrade scott's agenda of rage
@cleek:
No shock there. Some intern was probably set on this assignment by Mara Liarsson the instant Pence made that statement. Of course NPR wanted this since it addressed so many Villager pet reporting rocks in one minor report: continue the HORSE RACE angle, show that Trump does appeal to women so all that polling about Clinton’s appeal to women is just so much nonsense, etc.
@rikyrah: Amanda Marcotte of all people has written cogently on the real aim of forced birthers: take away birth control. Period. Why this point isn’t hammered home any time a forced birther opens his or her mouth is beyond me. Millennial women need to understand this early and often.
NorthLeft12
@Tom Levenson: Thanks! That would have been embarrassing. Although now that you mention it, we walked by the building and my daughter pointed out that it was for modern art. She actually attended a show there and said we should go to it sometime.
But there is so much to do in London, it is hard to get to see all these things in so little time.
hovercraft
@MomSense:
@schrodinger’s cat:
Elaine Quijano used to be on CNN, I remember her from years ago. I think they picked her as part of their effort to show diversity, she is the first Filipino American to moderate a debate. The Trump team is trying to make a thing about Kaine interrupting her. She was awful apparently she didn’t listen to the debate, she had a script and she was sticking to it, regardless of the fact that in several cases the question had already been answered. At this point why not just have a disembodied voice read a question and then just have a buzzer at the end of each segment, it would be about as useful as she was.
scav
@hovercraft: Well, that does seems to be the self-appointed role of the media and political golden ones (as well as local one-offs): telling everyone else what we think and will do. Although I agree that VP debates are traditionally of low importance, in the ravening maw of 24/7 media and constant digit-streams multi-universes, even teeny chaff is grist to the mill. I’d be wary of any statements confidently annoucing it will or will not matter.
hueyplong
Just like everything else in this campaign, the only thing that matters in the few post-debate days before the next debate is going to be Donald Trump’s next move.
Is he going to go on a Twitter rampage, or act like a flamboyantly angry clown at his next rally? That’s it. The rest (new polls, things Hillary says, etc.) are merely the triggers for what Donald does next.
You could argue that that’s what makes this campaign so awful and so unsettling to a fairly large percentage of the globe. When Donald doesn’t work his phone, and when he blandly reads off a teleprompter, things trend toward the frighteningly close divide between Dems and GOPers.
Apparently he’s going to have to be baited every other day between now and election day. I hope and believe the Clinton campaign has that many bullets to fire.
NR
CNN’s poll had Pence with a 6-7 point win over Kaine. Not amazing, but not insignificant either. But like I said last time, the debate isn’t what matters, the post-debate spin is what matters. We’ll see if the Dems can make hay from Pence’s repeated denials of things Trump is on video saying.
catclub
@jeffreyw:
Is it on velvet? Part of a triptych with dogs playing poker, and Elvis?
Iowa Old Lady
Has everyone seen the ad Clinton has out, showing tape to prove Pence lied? I thought it was effective.
catclub
@hueyplong:
Normal people might be glad Pence tried to defend Trump by ignoring things he said. This might not work at all with Trump. Trump could decide he wants to drop Pence because he was weak. Or did not make Trump the center of attention even more.
hueyplong
@catclub: I agree. Pence himself might be a trigger by failing to worship Trump sufficiently.
Iowa Old Lady
Nate Silver’s Now Cast shows both Iowa and Ohio as faintly blue. That seems unlikely but I’ll enjoy it while I can.
WereBear
I was scrolling down and saw the first third of the painting and I knew it was Turner. Because he’s a favorite.
Did not want to see and hear Pence because the more I hear about him, the more I know it would send me into a pointless rage. In a field dominated by self-important moralistic jerks, he’s upper tier.
Matt McIrvin
@Iowa Old Lady: He doesn’t have any polls actually saying that, of course–as usual, his model is trying to extrapolate trends in each state by using national polls, and it’s super-sensitive to small swings.
schrodinger's cat
@Matt McIrvin: Does not sound like it is robust.
NorthLeft12
@comrade scott’s agenda of rage:
BOOOM! Yes, this has been obvious for a long time. Forced birthers do not care about the life of the mother. They do not care about the health and well being of the mother and child, before, during, and after the pregnancy. They care about the birth of children and are against anything……anything that gets in the way of that.
BlueDWarrior
@Iowa Old Lady: I think Iowa is going to go Trump but only by a couple of points, and Ohio will go Clinton, but only by a couple of points. You have a real problem of rural and suburban White Men feeling aggrieved for all numbers of reasons (racist and not-racist) and will vote Trump, but at the same time you have all numbers of White Women who’d ordinarily vote ‘generic’ Republican who are horrified of the cheeto-faced shitgibbon.
Either way with the map most people are looking at, neither Iowa or Ohio are necessary for a win for Clinton, but running up the score in Politics is never a bad idea.
piratedan
@schrodinger’s cat: that was my biggest issue, it seemed like every question that dealt with policy was put into a GOP policy powerpoint frame. The only ones that weren’t were the ones where Trump statements and positions were mentioned. That social security and terrorism wording felt like they were discussion points straight out of Meet The Press.
You want to shore up Social Security, allocate more funding… there, fucking case solved, if the GOP is so fucking concerned about it, they’ve had the house and Senate for the last two years, why not do some fucking budget work and fix it?
crickets chirp…..
hovercraft
@Matt McIrvin:
Probably, but that is not necessarily a bad thing. During the Commander in Chief Forum on CNN last week, Obama had to deal with several RWNJ questions from the Gold Star family members, and the answers he gave were some of his best.
Why won’t you say “Islamic Terrorism”
Lone wolf homegrown terrorism
Being able to handle crazy questions in a calm rational manner could be her best moments in a town hall setting. Hopefully she has watched Obama’s performance from last week.
WereBear
It is not hammered home because the media is not interested in pursuing anything that will trip up their mission; which is supporting Republicans. And I have told many people about how they want to take away birth control and I am simply not believed.
I have been reading many Holocaust memoirs lately, and over and over again, it’s the rare person who saw the trend and got out. And I can’t blame them. They weren’t religious, their family had lived there for generations, they were part of the financial, military, and business elite; and perhaps most importantly, waves of anti-semitism had come and gone before.
The concept that ten years down the road their friends and neighbors would round them up to be murdered seemed utterly impossible.
Likewise, these younger generations who have never known anything but free access to information and multiple options and affordable equipment just can’t believe such a thing could occur, especially those in blue areas. It sounds like the most extreme paranoia they have ever heard.
Tom Levenson
@NorthLeft12: I know. That’s why I’d never made it to Tate Britain. But it’s definitely worth a visit. Turners like you wouldn’t believe, some very good Constables, some interesting contemporary art and a fascinating historical view of Britain’s society and landforms through their chronological (permanent) exhibition. Some of the Elizabethan stuff is knock-your-socks-off.
hovercraft
@hovercraft:
Oh and in case you missed his answer to a wife whose husband suffered from PTSD and committed suicide, here’s that.
Matt McIrvin
@schrodinger’s cat: Nate himself admits that the now-cast is intentionally designed to swing around as dramatically as possible. But his polls-only projection has the same quality to some degree–an excessive degree, I think. And then the polls-plus filters some of it out again, resulting in a map that never seems to look too different from the “now” snapshot that Sam Wang gets from polls alone.
JMG
Overnight ratings for this debate down 26 percent from the 2012 VP debate.
Jeffro
OT but a few ideas for improving gridlock (short of praying for a meteor to hit the next RNC):
Here is my 8-point plan:
1) Get rid of the Senate’s involvement in passing laws/budgets/etc. They would be solely restricted to a) impeachment trials, voting on executive & judicial nominations, ratifying treaties, and dealing with their own membership (censure, expulsion, rules). No filibusters, no holds, no investigations. All nominations receive an up or down vote within 60 working days, no exemptions.
2) Limit Senate membership to 1 per state, with 8-year terms (concurrent with presidential election years), offset by 4 years (ie, 25 of them would be up for election in 2020, say, with the other 25 up for election in 2024). Cuts their expenses in half and reduces number of blowhards who think they ought to run for president by 50% as well.
3) The House is now solely responsible for voting on budgets, conducting investigations, etc. House terms would run for 4 years, concurrent with presidential election years. House districts would be un-gerrymandered and automatically generated for ‘compactness’ every mid-term in this method (let me know if link does not work…should take you to a WaPo article called “This is what America would look like without gerrymandering”
4) House also has to pass budget resolutions on time or lose their seats…would probably have to have each member able to get ‘off the hook’ for this (in case it’s their leadership holding things up) by indicating they are ready to vote, then once a quorum of those folks are reached, it’s vote time.
5) Blue-ribbon panel of former state Governors convened to identify ways to streamline the tax code, eliminate exemptions/distortions, etc, with the idea that whatever is identified is phased out over 10-20 years…House must vote on panel’s report within 60 days of delivery.
6) Repeat #5 with different players in regards to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and Defense budgets…
7) Campaign finance reform: no corporate contributions, PACs must pay taxes on any contributions made to them, and individual donations limited to “X per year per citizen”, with X being 10% of whatever annual salary a minimum wage worker would make (at 40 hours/week).
8) Oh and a) all federal, state, and local elections must be held on 2nd Tues in November*, which will now be b) a national holiday.
*special elections/emergencies/impeachments excepted
BONUS: I need both parties to require that their candidates for national offices a) produce previous 10 years’ worth of tax returns and b) have served for at least 2 years in some sort of elected office…dogcatcher is fine, but they have to have been elected.
“Make Governing Boring Again!” I think it’s a winner.
Humdog
@Iowa Old Lady: Thanks for sharing that
Clinton ad! I wish the news would play it. They owe HRC after the free billions of $ of coverage they’ve givenDonnie.
hovercraft
@NorthLeft12:
But they’ll never actually come out and say it, they’re trying to employ the boiling frog to get there. But if they ever actually went there, they would suffer a beatdown the likes of which they’ve never seen. You think trying to privatize SS was bad, this would be 100 times worse.
Starfish
@schrodinger’s cat: I thought Kaine was doing a good job calling out Pence on his lies that the moderator did not really need to do it. Here is something about the Syrian family that Pence did not know anything about that I saw retweeted by Emily Hauser who used to comment here a lot. The comments are terrible because it is Twitter.
Seanly
But, but, but Kaine interrupted Pence! Ipso facto Kaine loses! [never mind that Trump spent his debate interrupting Clinton]
And David Greene at NPR talked with apparently 3 of the most conservative Catholics in Arizona this morning and one Hillary supporter. Why do I always forget that NPR’s idea of balance is one moderate and several conservatives?
Amir Khalid
@Jeffro:
Most of your bullet points would require Constitutional amendments, it seems to me.
patrick II
A society can also be judged on how much it respects the rights of its potential mothers. In Mike Pence’s Indiana, not much : Woman sentenced to 20 years in prison after claiming she had a miscarriage
Pavi Patel, an Indiana native under an Indiana law signed by Mike Pence, was sentenced to 20 years in prison after taking abortion drugs to induce an abortion. The appeals court overturned that conviction, but upheld conviction for neglect of a dependent conviction.
gene108
@hovercraft:
The critiques of last night’s debate reminds a lot of the critique of a Bush v Gore debate, back in 2000.
Gore laid out well thought plans.
Bush, Jr., at best spouted speculative statements, “I’ll get things done because I’m a uniter and not a divider” to out right lies, with regards to how his tax cuts would not pay for themselves.
Gore was getting buried in the bullshit and had to both make his own case for the Presidency and check Bush, Jr.’s bullshit in real time.
I think Democrats have gotten better at this, since then in Presidential debates.
Edit: The chattering classes declared Bush, Jr. the winner because he didn’t step on his own dick, while Gore lost because he got exasperated with Bush, Jr.’s bullshit and let it show.
Jeffro
@Amir Khalid: Or just one really, really big amendment…=)
gene108
@Jeffro:
Unlike the Senate, there’s no law that says the House has to limit itself to 435 members. Expand that number, so more densely populated / urban areas get better representation.
Rural areas are over represented.
? Martin
@rikyrah:
Yes. Young voters are key to getting this message out. But Kaine’s response was broader than that:
My daughter perked up at that line. It doesn’t just apply to abortion but to gay marriage and other LGBT rights, to issues like divorce, adoption, and anything else that is defended from a ‘the bible says this’ stance. Young people need to see the separation of church and state in action, and often times they don’t. It was very good of Kaine to articulate the Democrats current position so clearly.
Matt McIrvin
@Jeffro: Nice, but #2 has the problem that it’s impossible to alter a state’s Senate representation without its consent, even by Constitutional amendment (it’s the only thing expressly forbidden in the Constitution’s amendment procedure).
JPL
@WereBear: Ayotte wants birth control to be otc. The problem with that thinking is it is no longer affordable for those who need it the most.
According to the right, Griswold decision was a mistake.
gene108
@JPL:
Republicans were saying this in 2014. It makes a good sound bite, “I’m not against contraception, I think it should be OTC”.
Most folks are not going to work through the difference between paying cash OTC and having insurance pay for it.
? Martin
Price of birth control pills will drop once they’re OTC. There’s multiple competing brands and it’s a large market. I expect they’ll drop to about $10/mo. I doubt there are many people that are paying less than $10/mo even with insurance. And the lower cost means that Planned Parenthood can afford to subsidize even more women.
And OTC doesn’t mean insurance can’t cover it. Insurance covers lots of OTC things.
Miss Bianca
@cleek: NPR has decided that they need to find the outliers on each and every position, and interview only them. They must have a team dedicated to finding the last true Bernie-or-Busters, the only African Americans who would ever vote for Trump, the only women who think that outlawing abortion sounds like great news. I wonder two things: one, how much of the money they’re constantly begging for is going towards this effort (or do they have volunteer “chimera chasers”?), and two, whether this trend of theirs means that they are planning for their branch-out into paranormal investigations (“Today on All Things Considered: Yetis who plan to vote for Trump!”).
glory b
@Elizabelle: Well, On Point is pretty good, too.
On the Media is okay (they roasted the NY Times over weapons of mass destruction back in the day), but they could do better too.
But like I said the other day, where do they find these people??
Jeannet
As usual, I’m posting in a dead thread, but I wanted to point out that Turner’s sunsets/skyscapes could well have been accurate depictions of conditions in the year/s after massive volcano eruptions: Turner’s message from the skies
Gretchen
The part that stood out for me was when Pence said we shouldn’t have abortion when there are so many families that want to adopt. He actually came out and said that he sees unplanned pregnancies as a baby farm for adoption (for white Christian married couples) and abortion (and birth control) interfere with that. The wishes of the pregnant woman are so far off his radar they disappear. Kaine came right back with “trust the woman”. Only one side even sees the humanity of the pregnant woman involved.
RaflW
re: Climate change. “One more piece of evidence that our elite political media is f**king hopeless.”
Jared Diamond’s book Collapse was certainly flawed. But I think his general premise–(if I’m remembering it correctly, I read it quite some time ago–is that societies throughout time have had serious, often catastrophic difficulties recognizing such game-changing shifts in ecology or human support levels of an environment.
Yes, our elite media sucks. That’s pretty obvious by a lot of different measures. But I’m not sure what it is that can work to rattle our collective human conscience. The US is worse on climate issues than other countries (esp by total carbon output! but also in political obfuscation), but I think we still have a global collective action problem. I sincerely hope Clinton wins and that what she and Kaine are soft-peddling now they will act on quite forcefully in office (there are political reasons to think this is possibly the plan. See Gore, Al, fat.)
Also, thx Tom for the shout out in the update. I agree with you that Kaine did a good thing in reminding voters that the GOP is currently, and has been for some time, maximalist in opposing abortion.
J R in WV
I used to drive to work every morning listening to Morning Edition, and then I started to listen to Spa on Sirrius/XM with the seat heater on. Much more relaxed when I got to work.
Now I’m retired, I stay up late reading, sleep in unless we have an appointment somewhere. We still contribute to local WV Public Media, but since they cut out most night time classical music for budgetary reasons (already paid for BBC, could run it all the time for no additional fee!) we pretty much don’t listen to Public Radio any more,
We rarely receive a Public TV signal at all. So we rarely bother even trying.
Very sad, what has happened to Public Broadcasting since Republicans have taken over their funding and editorial management. Faux Non-Commercial Media rather than a real alternative to the noise-box media.
Steeplejack (tablet)
@Jeannet:
Also air pollution in an age when everything was fueled by coal and coke.
PatrickG
@glory b:
Dead thread, but …
Periodically they put out calls on social media about “are you a person who can’t afford to do X because of economic insecurity? We’re doing an interview soon…”. That kind of thing is guaranteed to draw out self-reporting outliers who are always, always willing to be interviewed on any subjects.
That’s my theory, anyway.
Ben Cisco
@Face: Every plantation had at least one.
bluefish
Pence is creepy. “The Handmaid’s Tale” kind of creepy. “I Dream of Jeannie” comes to mind too. The notion that one can be so craven and expect to get away with it in this environment–that these creeps have created with such devotion–has blown my old mind every single day for months now. It’s important not to go mad. It’s imperative that they not be allowed to get away with this. The cable guys will take their sweet time pointing out the obvious, eventually. I’m sure their interns are lurking all over the boards to get the flavor of the next chatty wave about to crash down on us. Shameful.
The ad that was put out this morning needs to be played over and over and over again all over the country. And, yeah, the womenfolk around these here parts do see themselves as more than just baby farms. I wanted Kaine to punch him right in the kisser. Points for self-restraint, Tim. Clinton will dismantle DT on Sunday. I’m doing Pink Floyd and grass.
Sam Dobermann
@Face: Cubans get in free — once they touch ground in US they are ok. Plus there are the “old” Cubans who fled Batista who really was a demon, the Castro fleers — first los ricos who fled Castro at the start of his reign because they lost property, then the poorer ones. They all beyond touching.