Professor Krugman:
…[H]ere’s a contrarian thought: Maybe Mrs. Clinton is winning because she possesses some fundamental political strengths — strengths that fall into many pundits’ blind spots…
When political commentators praise political talent, what they seem to have in mind is the ability of a candidate to match one of a very limited set of archetypes: the heroic leader, the back-slapping regular guy you’d like to have a beer with, the soaring orator. Mrs. Clinton is none of these things: too wonky, not to mention too female, to be a regular guy, a fairly mediocre speechifier; her prepared zingers tend to fall flat.
Yet the person tens of millions of viewers saw in this fall’s debates was hugely impressive all the same: self-possessed, almost preternaturally calm under pressure, deeply prepared, clearly in command of policy issues. And she was also working to a strategic plan: Each debate victory looked much bigger after a couple of days, once the implications had time to sink in, than it may have seemed on the night.
Oh, and the strengths she showed in the debates are also strengths that would serve her well as president. Just thought I should mention that. And maybe ordinary citizens noticed the same thing; maybe obvious competence and poise in stressful situations can add up to a kind of star quality, even if it doesn’t fit conventional notions of charisma.
Furthermore, there’s one thing Mrs. Clinton brought to this campaign that no establishment Republican could have matched: She truly cares about her signature issues, and believes in the solutions she’s pushing.
I know, we’re supposed to see her as coldly ambitious and calculating, and on some issues — like macroeconomics — she does sound a bit bloodless, even when she clearly understands the subject and is talking good sense. But when she’s talking about women’s rights, or racial injustice, or support for families, her commitment, even passion, are obvious. She’s genuine, in a way nobody in the other party can be.
So let’s dispel with this fiction that Hillary Clinton is only where she is through a random stroke of good luck. She’s a formidable figure, and has been all along.
Apart from approving this message, what’s on the agenda for the day?
waspuppet
It is remarkable, isn’t it? So many millions of people are going to vote for her, and if you listen to the Chuck Todd/John King/Joe Scarborough axis, it’s for no reason at all. It never occurs to these (almost exclusively) guys to consider they might be missing something,
raven
Getting colder but still no rain on the forecast. No Dawgs this weekend so the town has tons of weddings and other events so I may not start watching football until 3:30!
Mary G
Some pundits have harped for a year about her not having a clear message and a snappy slogan. She’ll have the last laugh, because from the convention to the debates to these superb ads and tweets, her messaging is crystal clear.
OzarkHillbilly
@raven: Calling for scattered frost here, not that we’ll get any up on top of the ridge here.
Truegster
On local TX right-wing am radio, they always act as if “both sides” have no policy…none that any one could ever find out or decipher from hearing them say it out loud at the debates. They gloss over the substance of Hillary’s argument to talk about “tone” and personality. I truly can’t tell if they internalize this b.s., or if it’s an act. The Trumpster at work also absolutely hates to talk policies and will shout over facts (literally just like Trump) rather than let them be said clearly, as if it pains him to hear about wage growth or climate change.
Felonius Monk
@raven: I don’t think Illini vs Wolverines is going to be pretty.
OzarkHillbilly
Bill Murray crashes a White House press briefing to talk Cubs baseball
amk
All I have seen of Hillary in this vicious campaign cycle was her maintaining her poise and cool all the time.
satby
@waspuppet: this and
@Mary G: this.
You might just think it’s because women aren’t worth listening to in “media world”. They just have the ladies on for an appearance of balance, no one has to pay attention to what they say.
raven
@Felonius Monk: Nope, it’ll be Bama and A&M for me.
OzarkHillbilly
@Truegster: Over at the Guardian they always have this “Who won” bs collection of shorts by various pundits, left, right, dead opossum. This weeks had one conservative starting out with,
“Trump won because he finally forced Hillary to talk policies…”
raven
@OzarkHillbilly: I’d love that, it would kick the kudzu down!
ThresherK
@amk: After Hillz’ performance at the 11-hour “I’m not trapped in here with you, you’re trapped in here with me” GOP inquisition on Capitol Hill, how can it be such a secret (to certain media types) that she has this in her?
Amir Khalid
I wonder how the idea ever arose that Hillary was a weak candidate. She’s always been the best-prepared candidate among the Republicans and Democrats, the one with the strongest resume, the one with the best retail politicking skills, the one with the most executive, political and diplomatic experience directly relevant to the job. She put together by far the best campaign org out there, everyone admitted that. I always thought her the only really strong candidate in the race.
Baud
Still should have picked Baud!
Oh well. She’s good too.
Baud
@Amir Khalid:
She lost against Obama and that was used against her in the primary.
amk
@ThresherK: It was a master class performance in a literal witch hunt by the rethugs. Even Obama was not subjected to this level of personal viciousness that was thrown at her by her opponents and the fucking corrupt media.
Baud
@Amir Khalid:
@Baud:
To follow on, in 2015, she was portrayed as a strong candidate, and the story was about which Republican could beat her.
rikyrah
Good Morning ?, Everyone ?
Felonius Monk
@raven: I’ve got to wait til 8:00 PM for Buckeyes vs Penn State.
raven
@Felonius Monk: zzzzzzzzz :)
rikyrah
They have been lying about her for 25 years, and still she is here. If course, she is tough.
Baud
@rikyrah: Good morning.
raven
It’s the meeeeeeeeeeeedia. WHAAAAAAA!
Comrade Scrutinizer
@Amir Khalid: “Weak” in the sense that she came to the campaign with a horrible unfavorable rating, due mostly to the decades long character assassination job the Republicans did on her, aided by the credulous media. One of her unsung accomplishments during this campaign is how she’s almost managed to erase that unfavorability gap. I’m a yellow dog Democrat to the bone, so I would have voted for Clinton regardless, but I have been deeply impressed with how she has managed her campaign this year.
Felonius Monk
@raven: Better than a backyard full of kudzu. ?
Which reminds me. I still have to mow the backyard here and it’s raining.
Comrade Scrutinizer
@raven: Fuck LBJ!
Baud
@Comrade Scrutinizer: Again, in 2015, I believe her favorablity was still high. Agree about the media and fake scandals. THE Atlantic has a post up today still trying to push a Clinton Foundation pay-for-play angle.
Felonius Monk
@rikyrah: Good morning, Smiley. ?
Kay
@Amir Khalid:
This cycle it came from Republicans. It’s what they believe if you read them, almost to a man.
And I do mean “man” :)
That’s how it became conventional wisdom. Republicans still believe it, even the never-Trumpers. They think any non-Trump Republican could have beat Clinton. I don’t. I think she would handily beat Cruz and Rubio. Kasich might have beat her but that’s because he has a temperament and presentation that is moderate and he would carry Ohio and (more importantly) be competitive in Pennsylvania.
I also think they’re ignoring that Obama is popular and the economy is good. They flat-out refuse to admit Obama is popular. It goes back to how they think vast chunks of the electorate don’t count- “sure- he’s popular with women and African Americans and Latinos and young people and Asians but those are his interest groups!”
geg6
Amen, Professor Krugman.
Kay
@Baud:
The emails were a fake scandal. I don’t care how many ways they present it, how many attenuated “what ifs” or “what could have happened” or “what might be in the emails” they come up with, they were and are a fake scandal.
Have you seen those words clouds of coverage of Clinton? It’s a giant EMAILS. It’s the opposite of transparency and accountability. They didn’t cover any of her policy plans because they were covering the emails. If she wanted to get in there and do a 180 on what she promised she could easily do so, because no one heard what she said she would do.
Erisia
@Baud: I think the protracted fight with Bernie that was propped up by the media and his campaign was a continuatiin of it to. I think there was a perception of weakness that she couldn’t “put him away” by some and that perception moved on to Trump and continued to be pushed by the media and idiot Stein supporters through today.
Baud
@Kay:
Well the NYT said the emails have cast a cloud over her campaign.
Raven
@Erisia: I agree, it’s the MEDIAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!
Ramalama
@Comrade Scrutinizer: I get my colors mixed up – so yellow dog, blue dog…what does that mean when you say you’re a yellow dog Dem? Serious question.
Baud
@Ramalama: Yellow dog means loyal Dem voter. Blue dog is a conservative Democrat.
Jim Parish
@Ramalama: It means that you’d vote for a yellow dog (i.e., an ugly mutt) if it had a (D) after its name.
Ramalama
Some musical enjoyment by a singer I just heard and can’t stop playing. She’s got a really lovely, old-fashioned voice that made me think she was old-school. But according to a friend of mine, Angel Olsen is all the rage with the yutes these days. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ug_e19gv7Xs
geg6
@Ramalama:
It comes from southern Dems who voted for Al Smith despite their antipathy toward him. They said they’d vote for a yellow dog before they’d vote for a Republican.
Comrade Scrutinizer
@Kay: Other than some of the self-inflicted damage from the 2008 campaign, which really doesn’t rise to the level of scandal, has any Hillary Clinton “scandal” ever had substance?
msdc
@ThresherK: Hurm. Good joke. Everybody laugh. Curtains.
Ramalama
@Baud: @Jim Parish: Ah ok. Got it. I’m more of a sled dog Democrat.
Ramalama
@geg6: You mean the Al Smith of the dinner that Hillary and Strumpf just attended with all those Catholics?
Kay
@Baud:
She runs a long-ish ad on the debt free college plan on the music sites my 14 year old son listens to and watches online. I heard one last night and I thought “I forgot about that!”. It’s a huge deal and a heavy lift to get done. No one knows anything about it, so it probably won’t matter if she never does it :)
I know all about her server though. I know she’s a poor email manager. Hours and hours and hours. Millions of words.
Comrade Scrutinizer
@Kay: And the particularly galling thing about the EMAILS! thing is that she was just doing what Rice and Powell did before her.
MJS
@Amir Khalid: She was perceived as a weak candidate only by those who attempted to make her a weak candidate through 25 years of creating phony scandals about her. The process has been 1) Make phony accusation; 2) investigate said accusation endlessly; and 3) report on accusations and investigations, but never the fact that the investigations found nothing
OzarkHillbilly
@Comrade Scrutinizer: No.
Kay
@Comrade Scrutinizer:
For me personally I think the worst thing she ever did was run the Clinton health care effort. It offended me on “unelected” grounds. I knew the second it was announced they would get shit for it and they deserved it. Just a bone-headed idea, for so many reasons, some of which are substantive. You don’t appoint your spouse to do something like that. It’s arrogant and worse, it’s stupid. First Ladies aren’t accountable in the way someone reforming 1/6th of the economy need to be and they’re not elected. I found it impossible to defend. They would have viciously attacked it anyway, no matter who was running it but I didn’t approve of her doing it in the first place.
But you’re right, that’s not a “scandal”.
waspuppet
@Amir Khalid: Between Republicans and Our Media Stars, those qualities are seen as nerdy and uncool. They want a Cool Guy for president.
Raven
@Kay: that and the media
geg6
@Ramalama:
Yes. And now you see one of the reasons those southern Dems had so much antipathy toward him. Southern Dems of that era weren’t exactly into diversity, if you know what I mean. So you know they had to be truly dedicated Dems to vote for the Catholic.
waspuppet
@MJS: 4) Report on those fruitless investigations by saying “she’s dogged by a scandal that won’t go away,” “her message is having trouble getting through the scandals,” etc. At all times, refer to the fact that you copy-paste every RNC press release you get, without checking whether any of it is true, as some natural force that you have nothing to do with,
Ydobon
Krugman also falls into the trap! Her speeches are actually good, very good, if you listen to them. And her prepared zingers are fine, more than fine; better than the “there you go again” crap that has become a legend among pundits.
Peale
@Comrade Scrutinizer: I’m also a little put off by the fact that despite endless coverage of the emails, it’s clear to me that the media isn’t actually reading them. They’ve just outsourced it to the republicans. Like I could understand good reporters pouring through them hoping to find a scandal, not wanting to be scooped. But since they know republicans will do that for them, they seem to be lazily waiting for them to hand over the bullet points on what’s in them. And when its nothing, they just speculate about how the next batch could have something.
amk
@Ydobon: there you go again was the stupidest childish “zinger” ever. only a juvenile mind like raygun’s would think it as a winner.
Iowa Old Lady
@satby: Good point. Every woman has had the experience of saying something as having men react as if they didn’t hear her. Then a man says the same thing, and they all sit up and take notice.
ETA: Also we watch Colbert and it drives me crazy when he mocks her for being ambitious for the presidency. Anyone who runs for president is ambitious, but it’s unseemly only in the woman.
Comrade Scrutinizer
@Kay: I agree with you about the health care issue. I wonder, though, if that didn’t also bring the idea of FLOTUS as a quasi-political office into prominence. I know: Edith Wilson, and Eleanor Roosevelt, but apart from them, what First Ladies were seen to have really influence, until Clinton? Now it’s almost a given that the President’s partner has political power too.
Mai.naem.mobile
I have mentioned this before. Hillary reminds me of my eldest sister who is several years younger than Hilz. She just works away like the energizer bunny. She worked hard at school and was always one of the top.students. Took jobs through high school and college. Faced racism and sexism in her professional schooling and profession but just kept at it. We all know somebody like Hillary in our lives and admire and respect them.
Kay
@Comrade Scrutinizer:
I worry a little about Bill Clinton being given a bigger portfolio than I think is proper, not because Hillary needs “help” or they will be “co Presidents” but because neither one of them realized it was a bad idea to have her run health care reform as First Lady. They all have advisers and that’s fine but he can’t take any big public role- trade negotiations or something- because that’s outside of our accountability system.
OzarkHillbilly
Heh:
bemused
Should the words “silent majority” be relegated to the dust bin? I don’t think “silent majority” has any relevant meaning anymore if they ever did.
satby
@rikyrah: Good morning!
Comrade Scrutinizer
@amk: That ‘there you go again’ comment was a masterstroke. Reagan’s policies were shit, he should have been impeached for Iran-Contra, and he was diminished by disease in his second term, but Reagan played avuncular candidate and President like few we’ve had.
Comrade Scrutinizer
@Kay: I’m not sure that WJC’s health is up to the task.
Comrade Scrutinizer
@OzarkHillbilly: Sounds like a Trump speech!
Bill E Pilgrim
@Ramalama: And green dog means that it was left stuck in the fridge for too long. Or, in the 1960s.
Kay
@Mai.naem.mobile:
It’s funny what people see. One of my less political sisters was impressed by how many life-long friends Clinton has. She’s right, too. That is impressive. She would have voted for the Democrat anyway but to her testimonials from friends means “loyalty” and “reliability”. Good character. Trump, for example, has no friends. All his surrogates outside his children are like “I just met the man 6 months ago-don’t blame me”.
OzarkHillbilly
@Comrade Scrutinizer:
the Dragon Lady Nancy Reagan.
MattF
Not much planned for the weekend. The big day coming up is Monday– Verizon is coming to pull out my copper wires, and then install fiber and FiOS. Since my present home connection is via DSL, I don’t really have a choice about getting a new ISP, and since Verizon is coming anyhow to remove the copper, it makes sense to do the dual birdicide. It should all work out easily, but, needless to say, I’ve made sure that my iPhone hot spot capability is in working order.
JMG
Going to the Wang Center today to see Mel Brooks! He’s hosting a screening of Blazing Saddles with a Q and A. I am beyond psyched.
Kay
@Comrade Scrutinizer:
I saw him speak at a state Party dinner in Ohio and it made me a little sad how I felt people were pretending he was “on his game” because he wasn’t. There were parts where he frankly looked bored and a little annoyed, like he was tired of explaining things to inattentive and poorly-informed people :)
He’s still really politically savvy, though. We had an absolute loser running for Governor and Clinton made sure they weren’t on stage together. Clinton was long gone when dufus came out.
amk
While all the other poll aggregators (nyt’s upshot, huffpo, sam wang, drew linzer) have donnie dick’s chance in single digit, why does lil nate has him at double digit of 13% even now? the primaries burn?
Baud
@OzarkHillbilly: Just Say No.
Gvg
Huh, I disagree. Bill Clinton had accountability. Anyone he appointed for any task reflected back on him and that’s the way it always was. No President can actually do it all himself. He has to delegate well. If someone screws up, it reflects badly on him and how he reacts with firing, removal, replacement or coverup, is part of how we judge Presidents. It was his first term and there was accountability.
One thing about the emails, I know some people with government jobs who say they would be fired if they didn’t use the official email and are thus unforgiving of the emails in a real way. I see it more as she was at a higher descissions level with a get things done higher responsibility and also a set the policy itself level not at a buricratic follow the rules or else level so I don’t agree but that is a factor in the email scandal. In my view the concern is there is no way to be secure and that is the real problem.
MattF
@amk: My suggestion is to aggregate the aggregators. Random error doesn’t go away with aggregation, it’s just smaller.
ETA: It’s also true that random error has a larger effect in the tail of a probability distribution, and that’s where we are now.
Comrade Scrutinizer
@Gvg: Her email server was never hacked, you know.
Jeffro
@Comrade Scrutinizer: I agree with every bit of this – the way that 30 years of negative attacks have weighed on her, it’s amazing that she’s gotten this far.
I also think Trump being this horrible has really pushed them to the limits of their “both sides do it/both sides are horrible” mentality in the media, and this has also dragged her down just as $2 billion in free advertising for Trump has been difficult to overcome.
And yet thanks to her here we are about to elect one of the most experienced and capable leaders this country has ever had, helping continue the same outstanding work President Obama has done.
confidence and poise will out!
Kay
@amk:
You know what would be kind of interesting? If Nate Silver would do an analysis of how many candidates have won when he has them pegged at lower than 50%. I’d be curious at what per cent that gets to zero. So, is there a candidate he has had at 25% who went on to win? 30%? My experience following him is no one I have seen at 25% has gone on to win. I’m an optimist generally so I’m like “1 in 4! That’s not impossible!” Then all my candidates at 25% lose.
Maybe he hasn’t been around long enough for that to mean anything-he needs more races? Thousands and thousands?
OzarkHillbilly
@Baud: If only we had.
Jeffro
@Erisia: I think we should remember that on both sides there was a great deal of desire for an outsider and for authenticity… Hillary is authentic in her motivations and her policies are sincere but in service of both of those she most certainly is calculating ( as any highly competent politician would and should be) and there’s no way to avoid that.
This is the thing that drove me nuts about Bernie: sure he’s ‘authentic’ but what has he ever done for progressive causes and what could he possibly get done in this environment? I know I’m being a little simplistic there but I think most folks will get the point.
Ramalama
@Bill E Pilgrim: Well in other dog related news, my brother became part owner of a candle company in Wisconsin. He’s working on a series of joke scents with guys in mind, though to be fair the first joke candle went out to my high school friend for her wedding present: hot dog water.
OzarkHillbilly
@Kay:
In theory, 4 should be enough ;-)
Jeffro
@Iowa Old Lady: I think you’re exactly right about ambition – Who wants a president with little ambition for the job? It’s just a fake way of trying to seem more a “person of the people” (or ‘authentic’) for whatever that means
rikyrah
@Kay:
If a Republican had accomplished what Barack Obama has done, they would already have written the legislation to put him on
Mount Rushmore
rikyrah
That Khan ad is brutal.
MattF
@Kay: You have to be careful about what those percentages mean– considering particularly that they are applied to single, non-repeatable events. It’s probably better to interpret them as estimates of the reliability of your knowledge rather than as frequencies. So, 25% means, roughly, that there’s some not-to-big chance that there’s some piece of data out there I don’t know about that might change my knowledge.
rikyrah
@Kay:
They thought that if they wrote it as a scandal, it would make it one. In fact, it showed a lapse in judgment and it was always an unforced error. I hope that this had made clear that the MSM will NEVER give her or her Administration the benefit of the doubt, so don’t do shyt or hire people that will need the benefit of the doubt.
the Conster, la Citoyenne
Any political speeches or events that warrant really listening to just has to be watched on CSPAN. A few years ago I watched one of Obama’s important speeches on CSPAN – I wish I could remember which one, but he had the floor for over an hour I think, addressing whichever crisis or topic it was in great clarity and detail. When the speech was over I flipped over to CNN, and the panel’s discussion was mindblowing – like I hadn’t just seen and heard what I had just seen and heard with my own lying eyes and ears. Hillary has been subject to this constant distortion, insinuations, petty sniping and built in faulty assumptions about motive and trustworthiness for her whole adult life, and yet here she is. Every day I admire her more and more.
JMG
@MattF: In his own explanation of the percentages Silver posted last night, the main thing holding Trump at a 14 percent chance of winning is that Nate’s model is influenced by relatively large number of undecideds and third-fourth party support in polls. As those decline the closer we get to Nov. 8 (still quite a ways away, alas), either they’ll break for Trump or they’ll split and/or trend to Clinton and his percentage will change accordingly. It all makes sense. Nate cannot afford to get this wrong, as ESPN would dump him in a heartbeat, so he built a very conservative model designed to put more emphasis on long-tail risk. But he still had the chances of a Clinton blowout at twice that of a Trump win.
amk
@Kay: In drew linzer’s votamatic, I see nearly 500 polls just in the swing states (as per him) of AZ, CO, FL, GA, IA, MI, NV, NH, NC, OH, PA, VA and WI. That’s a good enough base.
Baud
@rikyrah: We all need the benefit of the doubt.
OzarkHillbilly
@MattF: Oh c’mon now, it’s much more fun to say ‘1 in 4’.
tobie
@JMG: Go Mel! It makes me so happy to know he’s still out and about.
Kay
@rikyrah:
I don’t think it matters. He’ll be considered a serious contender for a good spot, I think. I don’t think historians are all hacks and they seem to take that ranking seriously. Popularity to me is a little different. I think a lot of people like Obama and his family. They’re admirable people. They’ve worn well, you know what I mean? You’re not like “OMFG will these people ever leave?” I’m a Democrat and I was sick of the Clinton drama by the end. All those surrogates who talk so much, the personal drama, the periodic giant political blunders. After they left and we read all those stories about people working until 3 AM and the general frantic nature of Clinton’s management approach it made more sense.
NorthLeft12
@Amir Khalid: I slept in this morning, so I am late to this thread. I could not have put it any better than you did.
As for the pundits’ blindspots regarding Hillary; they, more than most Americans, have completely bought into the last twenty-five years of propaganda against her and just can’t get past that. Who knew that the pundit class would be the most susceptible and gullible to that stuff? Maybe the Repubs knew?
And second, I think that most pundits are disarmed by her intelligence, and the hard work she puts in to be so well informed and prepared. As a group, pundits have no appreciation for hard work. Period.
MattF
@OzarkHillbilly: I have a sign on my office wall, “It’s hard to make predictions, particularly about the future.”
MuckJagger
At the risk of playing concern troll, let me ask everybody how concerned we should be about this new Reuters/Ipsos polll: It shows HRC up by only 4 over Trump, down from 7 lasIweek. I read about it at AOL; I thought maybe they were playing to their audience, but it looks as though the article was written by Reuters staffers.
One of the reasons I’m “concerned” is that there seems to be nothing this asshole can do to get his followers to leave him. If they’re not going to leave him despite evidence that he’s a pervert they sure aren’t going to leave him over “Nasty Woman.”
I suppose — hope — it’s an outlier, but AFAIK Reuters is a reliable pollster. This is not the direction I expected after the last debate.
rikyrah
@Kay:
Ferret Head has no friends. He is 70, and nobody in that “class” that will speak up for him.
Joey Maloney
@Comrade Scrutinizer: Absolutely, and it showed me that Clinton has one of the traits she’ll need most as President – adaptability, and the ability to learn from mistakes. Shitgibbon Dunning-Kruger over there doesn’t even realize when he’s made a mistake, much less learn anything from it.
Kay
@MattF:
Thanks. “Not enough information” or “uncertainty” makes a lot more sense than how I was looking at it, which is “4 candidates at 25%, show me the one who won”. I was thinking of Strickland in ’10. Silver had him at 25% and I was annoyed that people here were so dispirited. I was like “1 in 4, you quitters!”
Joel
@amk: Nate is a notorious hedger.
JMG
@MuckJagger: Throw it in the aggregation blender with all the other polls. Look, I am old enough to remember 2004, a genuinely close race, and while some polls had Kerry a bit ahead, a majority had Bush a bit ahead. And look what happened. If Clinton leads by four, that’s a lead, and that’s the lede you should take away from the poll, too.
MattF
@MuckJagger: Well, e.g., Huffpost pollster aggregate percentages have not changed significantly for the past two weeks.
Baud
@MuckJagger: Single polls are worthless.
Iowa Old Lady
@the Conster, la Citoyenne: That’s one reason I think the debates have had an impact. People see both candidates with minimal filtering for 90 minutes. They’re often surprised by what they see. Then the pundits come on and steer us back to the pre-existing narrative, but it’s been dented.
NorthLeft12
@Jim Parish: Funny, in Canada there are areas where it is said that a dead dog could get elected if he ran as a Conservative. I used to live in an area like that [rural eastern Ontario].
And yes, we had national and provincial parliamentarians who were not much better than a dead dog. Back bench zombies.
OzarkHillbilly
@MattF: I have a 100% success rate in predicting the past.
Princess
I wonder if Krugman is looking at a cabinet position in a Clinton administration (and now I am having one of those moments when I can’t remember if Americans say ‘cabinet” and I’ve lived here for 20 years)
Kay
They’ll do it again. You know they will. As long as they’re all Republicans it’s fine with me. The only somewhat comparable Democrat I can think of is Jerry Springer and he’s actually smart. In real life.
Immanentize
@Amir Khalid: I think, as suggested by others, that the media folks equated a vulnerability (low favoribility ratings) with weakness all around. These two are simply not the same, so when their framing failed in real time, they chose to support the frame regardless of the reality.
debbie
I usually fall asleep with BBC on the radio. Some mornings, I’m not sure if I really heard something or not. This morning, it turns out that I actually heard Russia wanted to observe the election in three states. Good grief, this election has turned into a real shit show.
MattF
@Princess: Seems doubtful to me. Many economists have had stints in government, but Krugman hasn’t. That’s probably because he doesn’t want one.
ETA: And yes, ‘cabinet’ is the right term.
NorthLeft12
@Gvg:
I really don’t have a lot of patience with this mindset. Can people just acknowledge that executives [and I think Sec. of State qualifies as an executive] are not bound by the same rules as bureaucrats? I would hazard a guess that those people in government were not expected to have reliable access 24/7 to allow them to make real decisions at all times?
Kay
@debbie:
It’s kind of amazing that the hatred of Hillary Clinton is so strong that the “story” is the emails and how she’s an untrustworthy she-devil instead of what seems to be blatantly obvious interference/propaganda by Russia.
That’s a big story.
debbie
@Kay:
How long ’til Ted Nugent?
JMG
Krugman has stated publicly he prefers his Times gig to a government job. He could change his mind, I guess, but he sure seems to feel more comfortable outside the tent.
OzarkHillbilly
@efgoldman: Nah, the Ig Nobel awards are reserved for actual science. Now if somebody does a paper on how/why nonsense papers get accepted for presentation at nonsense conferences and publications, THAT might get an Ig Nobel.
Kay
Sherrod Brown is running ads for Jeep again :)
Fuck off, haters. It is his job. Has he told you about his suit? Made in Cleveland by union members.
WereBear
@NorthLeft12: The right wing has corrupted every institution that used to be against them. For good reason, I might add.
If news reported the actual results of their policies… if pundits explained what they really want to do… if all colleges adhered to strict standards instead of the loopholes W created for Christian colleges… if all those think tanks actually thought instead of hoovering up cash from rancid crazy billionaires… if the Right Wing Wurlitzer wasn’t continually throwing up a cloud of bullshit to throw off the Reality Radar…
We wouldn’t have Trump voters. People who have been fed lies for decades. And because they like the lies, because no one in our current society grabs them by the back of the neck and makes them admit their worldview is utterly and completely fact-free, they will continue to be the kidney stone in our political system.
Kay
@debbie:
That’s just one sector. I bet there are a lot of country musicians and NASCAR drivers.
OzarkHillbilly
@Kay: I have read that he was a very good mayor.
Immanentize
@JMG: That is so Cool! Have fun at the Wang. It is so beautiful. But the nosebleed seats require opera glasses….
amk
Watch out florida. orangegutan is about to hit your state.
HRA
@Kay:
Hillary did say what Bill’s role would be in her administration during one primary debate with Bernie. Her answer to the question would Bill be picking out the China for state dinners was no she would be doing it and he would have the duty of working on the economy.
I has never been really a secret that they work or worked together on whatever position Bill held in government jobs. During Bill’s first campaign for president he said “You get 2 for the price of 1”.
OzarkHillbilly
Suuuuurrre, sure you are, you betcha, gotcher Scion Hotels right here…
Vhh
@Princess: prob not. There was a Hey Paul Krugman song on this that went viral in 2009. He had dinner with Obama, but said in a column that he felt more useful on the outside than on the inside.
Immanentize
@OzarkHillbilly: Ha! Mine is about 80% accurate when it is about past relationships.
Taylor
@OzarkHillbilly: The big question is: Will his research grant pay for the
vacationresearch travel?I heard of someone getting a paper accepted to one of these conferences with the title “Take Me Off Your Fucking Mail List!”.
tobie
When Obama was elected in 2008, Josh Marshall wrote that the media was wired to the Republicans because they had been in power for some time and predicted that this would change now that Democrats held two branches of government. This never happened of course, as many have noted, but what’s gotten less attention is how this affects the media’s treatment of HRC. The debates revealed just how much the Republican party still determines the prism through which all political matters are viewed in this country. Think about the questions about the debt; the refusal once to pose a question about how changes in fiscal policy might affect the record of continuous jobs growth over the past 7 years; the willingness to ignore wage growth and the first real strides toward universal health care coverage in the US; the failure to acknowledge successful partnerships with other governments on foreign affairs (e.g., the EU’s sanctions against Russia over the Ukraine; the Iran deal; the START treaty, etc.); etc. Not once was Trump asked to explain how his policies would affect any of these developments. The entire tenor of the questions is that we’re careening toward an apocalypse caused by Obama’s / Democratic policies, and HRC just represents more of the same. Honestly…how else could someone like Trump be considered a candidate of change without this frame?
WereBear
@Joey Maloney: Also, as someone who negotiated the corporate world in the 80’s, when women wore skirt suits with floppy bows and was expected to be “one of the boys,” I admire Hillary’s achievement in crafting what works for her.
Socially we are a highly accomplished baboon troupe. Krugman is exactly right to point out that there was no template for her the way groups of men have handled politics for generations. No matter how well she’s dressed, some good ol’ boy would have given her a reflexive go-make-coffee response. She could make the most brilliant observations and the group would not hear them because some men put everything a woman says into the dead end filter because women can’t possibly have anything to contribute.
If she had the kind of Obama charisma it would have worked against her. Because then she would have been put into another dead end of charm and all her accomplishments would have been attributed to that, and easily dismissed. Again.
Hillary Clinton lost in 2008 because she wasn’t the right candidate at the right time. Running against a military guy, a former POW, with all that legislative experience? The optics would have been disastrous.
But she is the perfect opponent for a spoiled man-child.
Another Scott
@NorthLeft12: It was explained to me once that:
Also,
IOW, especially places like State, the mission continues even if the rules haven’t been updated to the reality of current technology and current requirements. We need to put people in those positions of responsibility who can perform the mission with intelligence and integrity and know what are rules and what are RULES, and when to ask for permission and when to ask for forgiveness.
The critics, who weren’t there, who say “she should have done thus-and-so”, take as their starting point that she’s somehow obviously Corrupt™ and is always looking for some way to grift from the taxpayer. Instead, if she bent or went around some rule or recommendation, it’s clear (based on the evidence and the years of investigations) that it was to further the mission.
Critics should recognize that it’s always easier to just shrug one’s shoulders and say “oh well, those are the rules; nothing can be done.” (That’s one of the canonical criticisms of bureaucracies for crying out loud!) The fact that she didn’t shows that she was trying to make the system work better.
But, no, Hillary is Corrupt™ because reasons. (groucho-roll-eyes.gif)
Cheers,
Scott.
Kay
@OzarkHillbilly:
He’s really smart and also self-deprecating. I think those shows he did were horrible for the people on them, though, like a precurser to reality tv and I can’t think of a single good thing reality tv has contributed, to anyone. It seems to destroy the people IN the shows, even.
Okay, one good thing. I think Teen Moms is an accurate portrayal of young people having children- how hard that is- and probably acts as a warning.
OzarkHillbilly
@efgoldman:
A study on the effects of wearing polyester, cotton, or wool trousers on the sex life of rats may not lead to a cure for cancer, or the unified field theory, or even a cure for male infertility, but it is science. It just happens to be science done just for the hell of it.
Just One More Canuck
@JMG: that is amazing – have a great time
workworkwork
I’m going to visit my wife in respite care, bring her a goody bag, pictures of the kitties and join her for lunch.
Met with a nutritionist yesterday who helped tweak my meal plan to bring my blood sugar down and it was actually down a bit this morning. (Clearly, I need more data points.)
I’ll be seeing the surgeon on Monday to see if we can take these staples out of my body.
Apart from that, just resting.
Another Scott
@Truegster: I think that in most cases the “both sides” stuff is a mutant version of trying to be balanced. I hear it in all the talk about how “Washington is broken/dysfunctional”. “Washington can’t pass a budget because there’s too little compromise”. Etc.
It’s kinda true, but phrasing things that way, and not giving any context and background, feeds GOP memes. Somehow, the press is too afraid to call out the GOP for being incompetent obstructionists. It’s not being “balanced” to gloss over that.
The majority party has the responsibility to pass legislation, budgets, approve or reject nominees, vote on treaties, address questions of war and peace. If the majority cannot do those things in the House, it’s not the fault of the minority. If the majority cannot do those things in the Senate, one can make the argument that it’s the fault of the filibuster/cloture/hold rules, but one can also argue that it’s the fault of the majority for not changing those rules.
It’s JC’s “tire rims and anthrax” story yet again. Both sides aren’t equal. It’s not somehow “biased” for reporters and editors to point that out.
Maybe after Hillary wins and we have a functioning national legislature again, maybe that will change. We can hope. And we can help it happen sooner by running up the score so that the do-nothings have much less power.
Cheers,
Scott.
WereBear
@Another Scott: If the media reports facts, the Wurlitzer hammers them for it. They should ignore that, but their bosses do not.
OzarkHillbilly
@Taylor: The funny thing about that paper was all it said was “Take me off your fucking mailing list. Take me off your fucking mailing list. Take me off your fucking mailing list. Take me off your fucking mailing list. Take me off your fucking mailing list. Take me off your fucking mailing list. Take me off your fucking mailing list. Take me off your fucking mailing list. Take me off your fucking mailing list. Take me off your fucking mailing list. Take me off your fucking mailing list. Take me off your fucking mailing list. Take me off your fucking mailing list. Take me off your fucking mailing list. Take me off your fucking mailing list. Take me off your fucking mailing list……”
Gvg
@NorthLeft12: apparently not. I get it, but some I have talked to don’t. It makes me impatient. I think it’s a matter of fairness. If they would be fired for doing it, the boss should too. It doesn’t compute that the top boss has a more demanding responsibility with no forgiveness and must get the job done. Following procedures can mean failures, so….different actions are right.
There is far more dumb follow the past pattern Clinton’s are always in a scandal about the emails. It’s only a little piece that is about the I would be fired for same.
So many people including pundits can be manipulated by hearing or reading descriptions that sound alarming without noticing that there is no there there. Drives me crazy. Back in forth grade my teacher spent a lot of time teaching us about how to notice advertisements were trying to sell us stuff. How language and tone effected us, how to ignore it and think do I really need that? She taught us to be little cynics. Most influential teacher I had. I know she made up the materials herself too. Apparently most people didn’t have that luck. I have used that start to realize how much it’s going on everywhere and it seems to me the media which does this stuff itself is also vulnerable to it impacting them. They don’t even seem to notice they just take it ALL in and never evaluate. Hysteria sells.
One of the things I love about Obama is calm. Hillary seems calm now but didn’t come across that way before she lost to Obama. I hate the whole republican style lately of everything is dreadful. It is not a superficial thing either. It actually impacts judgement.
philadelphialawyer
@rikyrah: Neither a lapse in judgement nor an unforced error. It was literally nothing at all. Just like all the other “scandals.”
Another Scott
@Comrade Scrutinizer: Well I hear-tell that about 25 years ago she had lunch with a group and they didn’t leave a tip. That tells you what a mean, horrible, nasty woman she is, amirite?
:-/
Cheers,
Scott.
JMG
@Gvg: The apostate Republican David Frum said it best. There are two Americas. The safe and prosperous one people live in, and the America of people who watch cable news. It’s on those networks where dystopia exists.
OzarkHillbilly
@Kay:
After the first few shows, all his guests had to know what they were signing up for. Question: Do you know if there was any monetary compensation for their appearances? I always kind of assumed there was.
liberal
@NorthLeft12:
I’ll stipulate that, in the grand scheme of things, the email “scandal” is small potatoes.
But please stop with the excuse that she had to have this email server to have reliable email access. I worked at a Federal institution for a total of 16 years, and email was very reliable.
OzarkHillbilly
@workworkwork: good.
Kathleen
@waspuppet: But they got a cool President with Obama and he couldn’t do anything right either. I see a pattern here with the media, starting with “Democrat” and moving on to race and gender.
Getting ready to canvass this morning in Cincinnati. The last 2 weeks were focused on Hillary and pitching early voting. Today it’s pushing the entire Democratic ticket. I will cast my ballot in the next week (tomorrow if BOE is open).
OzarkHillbilly
@liberal: I have read that that the issue was reliable real time access to secure email, especially while traveling.
Another Scott
@MattF: Krugman worked in Reagan’s administration for a year or two. He’s said on his blog, multiple times, that he doesn’t have the personality to go back into a government job and has no interest in it.
He does much better on the outside, and can still get his views known to people on the inside (he said he spoke with Obama a time or two (as part of a panel) during the depths of the crisis).
Cheers,
Scott.
Jeffro
@OzarkHillbilly: they might not have got the memo where it is a trans parent age – just as easy to find out and then get the word out that Trump hotels are now called Scion
Kay
@OzarkHillbilly:
I don’t know. And just because people will do something that doesn’t mean he should be making big bucks having them do something.
Reality tv freaks me out. There was a show on MSNBC with juveniles at hearing in Indiana. The judges had to allow that, or it wouldn’t have happened. Are they insane? That 15 year will grow up and now his appearance in juvenile court is forever out there. I know their parents probably consented but their parents are idiots if they did and the juvenile deserves protection because they don’t think past next week. Those hearings are closed and the files aren’t available to just anyone. WTF is wrong with these people? Why don’t they have any sense of privacy?
Fair Economist
@Baud:
The right-wing has a special hate for the Clinton Foundation because it puts the lie to the usual claim that the right is more charitable. The Clinton Foundation is by FAR the most successful and worthwhile charity created by any American politician since at least WWII. It’s the primary reason HIV is a treatable disease even in poor countries.
Stella B.
@Ydobon: Of course her zingers fell flat. Women aren’t funny. Ask anyone (male).
aimai
You know what–she IS the better choice. I’ve been up early working on several projects/homework that is due on Monday. I am in AWE of her stamina, her commitment, and her vision. Since starting back to school–at 56–I have had the privilige of working twice a week with the most dedicated, energetic, group of teachers you can imagine at a little public school.We have kids there who are in such dire need: homeless, learning disabled, you name it. And Hillary has been working for and with these kids and families for decades. Its energizing, its rewarding, its meaningful but when on earth was the last time we had a President whose aspirations were at once so lofty and so mundane? Whose experience was at once so “kitchen table” and so sublime? Just like we had to sit through two hundred years of white guys blathering on and on about what they thought was important in society before we got to a President who could speak directly to race issues we have had to sit through two hundred years–heck, two millennia–of women’s concerns, mothers concerns, grandmother’s concerns, being treated as just kitchen table crap. Now, at last, we have someone who is out and proud about her concerns for our children and our children’s children. I am IN LOVE with her. She is my spirit animal.
Amir Khalid
@OzarkHillbilly:
You have to wonder, don’t you, what the “conferences” where they present these “papers” are like. I’m imagining something mind-bendingly surreal.
aimai
@liberal: You don’t know what the fuck you are talking about. This is a discussion about cables, state, and email not about whether you got the memo at some fucking department.
Woodrowfan
@liberal: every agency has their own and they are all over the place in terms of reliability. Unless you were at State, you can not compare.
Baud
@Kay:
It’s ok, Kay. No one watches MSNBC.
NotMax
@efgoldman
If Krugman left, the NYT might well hire Laffer to fill the slot.
Elizabelle
ABC this morning. Big media, giving another assist to wired for Republicans (IMHO).
ABC poll question: are you voting for downballot Republicans as a check on President Hillary Clinton? (Hint, hint, hint.)
Did they do this with Obama in 2008 or 2012? I don’t recall.
Kay
@Baud:
I love the court-appointed attorneys sitting there going along with this. “Hey! Dopey! Mr. Potted Plant! You’re supposed to be advising that 13 year old!”
I would never do it. Not in a million years. We have whole hearings on whether the newspaper can come in. For some reason none of this applies. It’s bizarre.
Elizabelle
@aimai: wonderful post.
Good luck with the degree. Proud of you! And there will be lots of work out there for you.
Fair Economist
@Kay:
I did that for states in the Presidential elections of 2008 and 2012. By his percentages he should have gotten eight states wrong and he only missed one. That’s actually statistically significant even with the small sample size. So, yes, his error bars have been too high.
That said, I think there’s really more uncertainty about this elections and higher error bars are appropriate. His are still too high even with that. Trump doesn’t have a 5% chance of winning Oregon.
Cheryl from Maryland
@liberal: I’ve worked at a Federal Institution for 30 years, and I have found the system and its managers to be capricious, unreliable and uninterested in assisting our work. My employer, the Smithsonian Institution, only set up capacity for a small number of off-site log-ins, so I get bumped and don’t have access when I need it. The computer information system set parameters for documents though e-mail which are inconsistent with my needs; the response I get for a solution is to save the file on a thumb drive and use my personal file sharing account. For years staff were not supposed to have thumb drives or portable had drives (although we were told to use them!). This regulation did not apply to the IT department. Large files, which I have regularly as I am involved in museum exhibition design, were not generally saved to the back up tapes. Often these files would be purged from the network without notice because some one in the central computer department decided they were unnecessary. Only my own backups saved my work. We were told to use our personal social media accounts to promote the organization and our partners. Last year we were asked to download an app to our personal smart phones so central management could “locate” us in the event such as the bombing in Paris of the Bataclan. No one agreed to this. I am in complete sympathy with Sec. Clinton, especially since my social security # was hacked from OPM, forcing me to make regular credit checks.
Elizabelle
@JMG:
I’d say there are three Americas.
There is a definite “precariat” out there — people in jobs that don’t support them, or living paycheck to paycheck. That’s why Bernie Sanders and Trump caught fire this year.
Also: for those who say Trump’s supporters are not motivated by economic anxiety: that falls flat for me. A lot of them have certainly heard that robotics are on the way to take their jobs. Or that their kids won’t have the opportunities they did. I feel like a lot of people give that concern short shrift.
Yeah, a lot of Trump supporters are magical thinkers and mean-spirited, but how much opportunity is out there if you lose or get replaced on your job when you’re 35?
That said, cable and broadcast news does go with fear-mongering and dystopia, every single hour. We’d be better off without that. Broadcast is absorbed far more efficiently than print media, and it seems more ubiquitous.
sunny raines
silly Krugman
Another Scott
@Cheryl from Maryland: OMG! You’re just like that BAH contractor in the news who (supposedly) had 50TB of classified stuff in his backyard shed! How can you be such as traitor like that!!11
;-)
Seriously, as I said above, the rules and systems change very slowly, but the job requirements march on. People have jobs to do and find ways to do them even if they have to bend the obsolete rules to do them.
Thank you for finding ways to do your important work effectively. The last thing the federal government (and related agencies) needs is more drones who just says “rules are rules” and does nothing.
Cheers,
Scott.
(Who thinks BAH needs a management housecleaning. Snowden, now this guy…)
Baud
@Elizabelle:
I guess I don’t agree. That the issue is a real one doesn’t mean that that is what is motivating Trump supporters. The most I would say is that if things were better, GOP voters might have been inclined to support a more establishment candidate and perhaps have a better shot of winning the general election.
OzarkHillbilly
@Amir Khalid: In the case of the paper I originally posted on, one had to put up a $1099 presentation fee. It’s a scam to rip off every whack job inventor of perpetual motion machines.
Joel
@Taylor: the paper was submitted to a predatory publisher — open access journals is notorious. That was the point. They get the cash and everyone is none the wiser.
Corner Stone
@philadelphialawyer:
So much this. So very tired of people accepting and/or pushing the notion that this was not “a scandal” but rather an own goal of some kind. It’s bullshit and there is nothing to it beyond more political hackery.
I quoted it in a thread the other day, but people seem to want to forget that we only even know about an email server because of the Benghazi Select Committee scam the Republicans put together as nothing but a pure hit job.
“Everybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, right?” McCarthy said on Fox News. “But we put together a Benghazi special committee, a select committee. What are her numbers today? Her numbers are dropping. Why? Because she’s untrustable. But no one would have known any of that had happened had we not fought.”
WereBear
Human brains are hard wired to scan the environment for threats. It’s basic survival.
However, it takes cognition to sort out which threats are real, since they are coming at us from every corner of the globe. Right wingers are so wired for fear that ANYTHING makes them afraid, like the way the tiniest towns in the US were all utterly convinced they were a terrorist target.
Baud
@philadelphialawyer:
@Corner Stone:
Also agree.
OzarkHillbilly
@Kay:
I really believe the people he had on his shows were being paid to be there, and probably a fairly decent days wage. People by and large** know when they are being laughed at and to subject themselves to that kind of ridicule without compensation… I just don’t see it.
(** the obvious exception being the autistic)
As to juvenile court on TV… WTF???? That is a complete failure in governance. I can not imagine laws that allow for it, but then “the law is an ass.”
OzarkHillbilly
@Elizabelle:
In fairness, this question is a direct result of what many Republicans are telling their voters to do. Some might consider not polling on this question journalistic malpractice. Myself, I’m trying to figure out just exactly what journalistic goal polls achieve.
Jeffro
@Baud: Baud, I think you were right that most of what was motivating Trump supporters was not economic anxiety but I don’t think they would be voting for an establishment candidate if things were even better because…by most measures things are pretty good economically. People are seeing large wage gains and the unemployment rate is pretty low. And by and large (per Elizabelle’s earlier comment) both trumps and Bernie’s supporters were higher income folks.
I think that Trump supporters were largely there because their party had slid into nothing but Obama derangement syndrome and no one on the Republican side was principles enough to say they ought to stand for anything more than that. Republican leaders kept promising to fight Obama and yet on both pocketbook (Obamacare) and cultural (marriage equality) issues Democrats continued to push forward.
Things like that plus GOP leaders’ tendency to turn arguments up to 11 (like with the Iran deal) instead of weighing them on the merits and actually participating in the process left their constituents without a voice. Democrats largely deliver or at least show that they are trying to deliver on the major positions of their party and its constituents.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Amir Khalid:
She did truly horribly in the 2008 primaries. Wasn’t ready for a contested primary, had an idiot for a campaign manager told some pathetically obvious lies. On the other hand her opponent was Barrack Obama who had to spent a life time making his detractors look like idiots as a matter of survival and it’s clear she learned from that defeat. That’s probably the real sign the “pundits” are idiots that they got this image of Hillary based on that primary and refuse to budge.
Matt McIrvin
@Kay: I’ve had more than one person tell me the real story is that US intelligence hacked the DNC’s emails and released damaging info about the conspiracy’s own favored candidate to WikiLeaks so they could blame it on Putin.
Peale
@tobie: yes. The media may pretend that trump is a rube, but they have totally bought into the idea that it is a disaster and a crisis out out there that needs to be solved.
Cheryl from Maryland
@Another Scott: Thanks, that means a lot. Anyone who wants to check out the fruits of my labors and is around Huntsville, AL, go to the Huntsville Museum of Art to see the Smithsonian Traveling Exhibition: What’s Up, Doc? The Art of Chuck Jones. I don’t work with state secrets, but I do work to share the Smithsonian with the nation.
Matt McIrvin
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: She came very close to winning in 2008, even so. The problem was mostly that they had no strategy for gaming the delegate system, and Obama did.
Amir Khalid
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
Horribly? As I recall, it was pretty close between Barack and Hillary for much of the way.
hovercraft
We saw a new Hillary Clinton on Wednesday night, the Shade Queen that America deserves
From The LA Times
Go read the whole thing.
FlipYrWhig
@Elizabelle: I really don’t think people voting for Trump are using it to make a statement about economic anxiety. I think the vast majority of them are them same raging assholes who vote for Republicans in every election because Democrats give free goodies to Those People.
Jack the Second
@Matt McIrvin: I also seem to recall the media being pretty big into the “Hillary Clinton is the anointed heir of the establishment, but maybe this charismatic outsider Obama can save us from her” narrative. Which fed into the disappointment when the media found out Obama was a mainstream establishment Democrat also.
hovercraft
@OzarkHillbilly:
We are all going to die.
WereBear
@hovercraft: Great stuff. Thanks!
@FlipYrWhig: If the Trump voters really did have economic anxiety, wouldn’t they vote for the candidate (Clinton) who is actually addressing such?
Instead, they want to vote for the racist, sexist, xenophobic idiot bully. THAT is their interest!
FlipYrWhig
@Jeffro: I think the whole “establishment candidate” thing is way overblown. It’s really just a matter of attitude. They like the idea of a president who’s good and pissed off, or maybe even better, a president who pisses off the liberals (see also cleek’s law). He could be named Rockefeller for all they care.
scav
There’s something quietly emblematic about this whole Reagan childhood home story. House is falling into disrepair, private donations are not coming in, they threw away a chance to get it into a program with guaranteed long-term maintenance because they’re weren’t paid enough for what they considered Reagan’s “legacy” and their evaluation of their effort (shades of Trump’s worth!) and now say it’s all about their being able to control the story told (it’s theirs theirs theirs!). Probably a well-meaning bunch (they’re not letting it be used as a cheap prop) but still somehow very very emblematic of what sort of governance ensues from their priorities and expectations. WaPo Reagan’s boyhood home is falling apart. And its director is begging for money to fix it.
FlipYrWhig
@Jack the Second: The media finds Hillary Clinton boring and familiar. Black President would be the story of a lifetime.
waspuppet
@Kathleen: Not the right kind of cool, of course. Obama is ACTUALLY cool, as in 2008-present Cool. Republicans and Media Stars want 1985 Cool*, which is recycled 1955 Cool*.
(*”Cool” herein defined as “cool to middle-aged white people,” also known as Not Actually Cool. I wasn’t there in 1955, but as regards to 1985 I can attest to this.)
OldDave
@Cheryl from Maryland:
Road Trip! (I love the cartoons of the Termite Terrace.) Thanks for the heads up.
Doug R
State asked NSA for a secure blackberry like the one they provided for President Obama. NSA told them to pound sand. So Hillary asked people who HAD ACTUALLY DONE THAT JOB what their solution was. She followed advice the best she could with 2009 technology. She did a helluva job at State and her server was NEVER hacked.
Enough Already.
Gin & Tonic
@FlipYrWhig: I read it somehwere, maybe here, that most Trump voters would prefer to vote for “Fuck You”, but since that isn’t on the ballot, Trump is the next best thing.
WereBear
Man. That is just the conservative movement in a whacked out nutshell.
hovercraft
@Jeffro:
This.
Elizabelle
@FlipYrWhig: That’s certainly the prevailing thought here. And I don’t deny there’s tribalism afoot.
WRT why aren’t they voting for Hillary, if they’re economically anxious? Because of the tribalism? Because they’ve been lied to so long, they don’t want to do their own thinking? Because they are magical thinkers — Trump says he is going to make America great again. Simplistic slogan for simplistic thinkers.
They can’t discern that Trump is actually a terrible businessman. Overpays time and again for his properties (dealmaker!), doesn’t pay his contractors, is a serial bankrupt, can’t get financing from most US banks because he’s a bad risk with known nonpayment history.
They just see that he’s rich. Which must mean that he’s good at something. (*note: does not apply to Clintons. If they’re rich, it’s because “corruption”)
Again, magical thinking.
Elizabelle
@Doug R: Succinct enough to print out and hand out.
Elizabelle
@FlipYrWhig: And they’re totally missing how much women think it’s time for a female commander in chief. Particularly when the candidate is up against a superannuated preteen.
That’s why the flap so hard “Hillary is same old, same old, same old.”
Uh, no.
Jeffro
@WereBear: maybe we should all pony up and convert that house into a teens’ shelter or orphanage or some other useful purpose other than glorifying St Taxcuttius
hovercraft
@Jeffro:
No one who runs for president lacks ambition and ego. To look yourself in the mirror and say I think I am the best person for this job, the most difficult and complicated job in the world, where I will literally hold the power of life and death in my hands for the world, out of all Americans, me. It’s just that when it’s a woman or a blah man, they are deemed arrogant. Does anyone doubt that Newt or Kasich, or Christie, haven’t been working their entire careers towards a run for president? And yet that is one of the criticisms I frequently hear when idiots in the media do their “man on the street” interviews, “she’s too ambitious, she wants it too much”. A person who is willing to blow up the whole system, a person willing to incite people to violence, if they don’t win, that is a person who wants it too much. A person who accepts defeat with grace and dignity, and then is willing to go back to the drawing board and start again, is resilient and determined, and that is someone I am proud to say I support and admire.
RandomMonster
@Amir Khalid: I think a not small amount of the “weak candidate” business comes from A) Unconscious disrespect of women. Any man with her credentials and temperament would have been immediately accepted as the strongest candidate on the field; B) Years of anti-Clinton smear to the point that “Of course she’s two-faced” is common wisdom among pundits.
MomSense
@Amir Khalid:
I agree that not only is she a really strong candidate, she has also already received millions of votes from people who prefer her to the other candidates.
The media filter applied to this election says a lot about who comprises our media and not much at all about the voters or the candidates.
MomSense
@Baud:
Baud is best!
WereBear
@Jeffro: LOL! The burn.
Jeffro
@FlipYrWhig: they like a president who’s good and pissed off or follows cleek’s law = nothing but ODS = kinda what I said. They serve their base nothing but a diet of rhetorical red meat instead of the real thing for decades and Trump is what they got.
One thing I think we haven’t discussed a whole lot on this board believe it or not is the advantages that Trump had going in to The GOP primaries… massive name recognition; and alignment of reality/shock TV with the needs of the Republican base to act out; perception as a hugely successful billionaire which in America usually translates to “genius to be envied and followed ” not to mention at all of that translating into billions of dollars in free airtime
Couple that with the very large field of candidates enabled by a weak party and bythe ability of sugar daddies to keep their pet candidates in the race long past when they normally would have had any support whatsoever … it was quite fortuitous for Trump to be running this time . if it had been a two or three person race from the start or if the GOP had any history whatsoever of actually trying to deliver on realistic governing principles Trump would’ve been found unacceptable muc if it had been a two or three person race from the start or if the GOP had any history whatsoever of actually trying to deliver on realistic governing principles Trump would’ve been found on acceptable earlier in the process. I know others may feel differently but I had any much less several of those parameters changed they wouldn’t of found themselves in this mess and that’s their way out of it if they should choose to finally get themselves together .
Walker
@hovercraft:
Ruling: Not Shade
Jeffro
One other thing that I think deserves a mention: while we have discussed a lot of the media coverage of the primaries and the general election, if you look at it on the whole the media has been trying to fact check Trump and call him out on things to a pretty high degree, especially since he won the nomination back in March .
It took many of the organizations a while to find their footing and figure out how to deal with this extremely abnormal person and figure out how to report on what has been going on in the Republican Party but when you look at the historical number of newspapers coming out for Clinton early (even Republican ones) and when you look at the job at the print media especially is doing, i’d have to say that our Free Press is working . Yes the cable TV new shows have been pretty horrendous ( including morning joke and all of CNN of course ), but the magazine and major newspaper reporting has been pretty good. Trump himself has been so horrendous that he seems to have lost almost all mainstream conservative newspaper columnist that I can think of although it took a few of them a while to get there.
Anyway now my hope is that they will continue on this “professional growth trajectory” LOL and begin to look at all the ways that Hillary has been a great leader and will make an awesome president.
( why yes I would like a pony for my birthday also why do you ask ?)
hovercraft
@Kay:
@rikyrah:
Debate-Watching With Hillary Clinton’s BFFs
dexwood
Early voting begins today in my state. I can’t wait for the office to open. My wife is even more excited about voting today than I am. Yes, we’re voting against Trumpolini, but, more important, we are voting for Hillary.
JMG
I don’t think it can be overemphasized how much of the opposition/resistance to Clinton is based on plain old sexism. I believe a lot of “anxious” Trump supporters are men who believe (whatever the reality is) that the only thing in life they dominate is their marriage. A woman President strikes at that belief in a big way.
Jeffro
@hovercraft: I think we are agreeing here that ambition is normal and desirable in a politician; you are adding that people of color and females get knocked for it, correct? I agree with that too.
Taylor
@Jeffro: No doubt because they were being critical of Trump, our media elite found it necessary to balance this out with equal criticism of Clinton. Hence thousands of man-hours fluffing up the emails nothingburger.
Meanwhile, voters waited for these geniuses to tell them about the candidates’ policies.
In retrospect, Trump’s policies (Build a wall! Ban all Muslims!) were genius. They had the show appeal that made the media want to talk about them. None of that boring Clinton stuff about investing in the country’s infrastructure, fighting climate change…. Yawn.
hovercraft
@debbie:
Putin is simply trolling us.
Corner Stone
@OzarkHillbilly:
“Suuuuurrre, sure you are, you betcha, gotcher Scion Hotels right here… ”
I am loving this sooo, so much. “Scion Hotel”? The only thing they had over the last two decades was leasing their name, their “brand”. And it’s ruined. All gone. Buh-bye, Executive Vice President of Development & Acquisitions.
amk
Everything aside, even after a quarter century of the rethugs, the shock jocks and the corrupt media smearing and stalking her, she is still standing and is about to make history. That is a BFD.
Prescott Cactus
Mixing paint to turn AZ blue.
2 hours GOTV phone banking
2 hours door to door
Elie
I’m not glad that she has received such unfair scrutiny by the media, but she has weathered it and gotten stronger. You don’t get stronger without resistance and challenge and she has risen to it AND gotten better! I loved her at the last debate, all in white — cool but lethal. She cut him every time he leaned in to attack and she never got a drop of blood on that brilliant white. I was jumping up and down almost….
hovercraft
@OzarkHillbilly:
Well they have to think of something, Trump is now synonymous with shit, so why not Scion?
scav
@Corner Stone: pppphhhh. Scion: “a descendant of a notable family.” “a young shoot or twig of a plant, especially one cut for grafting or rooting.”
O! that self-made man starting off with a meager million dollar loan from Daddy and his equally self-made chillins.
hovercraft
@workworkwork:
Glad you’re doing better.
Gindy51
@JMG: Truth. In my Indiana town, in 2016, I still have to get my husband to make calls to certain trades people because they will not answer my phone messages. They call him back, same number, but not me. Yet I am they one who is at the top of the checks and who pays the bills.
Srv
I was a janitor at the local post office for 16 years. My experience with emails is exactly like that of the Secretary of State.
Elie
@JMG:
I agree.. And women have to check themselves out — not always a comfortable thing so she has women who don’t support women against her. She’ll do fine and similar to Obama, our country will never be the same — in the best way. It IS tough to make these changes, but its necessary…
Corner Stone
@scav:
Kurt Eichenwald just laid the Eichen-SLAM down on Trump on AMJoy. Said that $1M dollar thing was a complete lie. He had traced how much money Trump had at one point from his family and it was $200M in 1982. Left alone it would be something like $15B with a B now. So Trump’s “genius” cost him something like $12B or so and he destroyed millions of small investors along the way.
hovercraft
@Kathleen:
Yes he was cool, but he refused to let them into his “cool” circle, he barred them from his celebrity laden parties, he refused their dinner parties. Remember all the stories at the beginning of his presidency about by claiming they had young children and using that as an excuse for not being part of the beltway social scene they were neglecting an important part of their job as the First Family. It’a all well and good to talk about family values, but to actually want to practice them, scandalous!!
Mike J
Any Seatllites going to see Chelsea today? (No, not the grudge match against José Mourinho, that’s tomorrow.) She’s at Town Hall at 1:30 for a GOTV rally with Patty Murray and Tina Podlodowski.
scav
@Corner Stone: Numbers numbers, numbers, it’s all all just money from under the couch, nothing to disprove his personal Horatio Alger storyline, repeated each generation of the dynesty. Who’s dad hasn’t thrown a five dollar bill onto the table when one ran a bit short covering dinner or running a casino empire into the ground?
sdhays
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: Her hawkish foreign policy instincts and the mess of the 2008 campaign were the two things which always worried me about HRC. I’m still very nervous about her foreign policy instincts, but she clearly learned from “No Drama Obama” for the 2016 and I’ve been very impressed. She learns from mistakes. So that gives me a glimmer of hope that she’s not going to do anything LBJ-level stupid on foreign policy (although the bipartisan Washington FP establishment licking their chops over Obama’s departure has me worried).
Mike J
@JMG:
I’m sure you’ve seen the polls about what percentage of men say their wife is voting for Trump v the number of married women who say they’ll vote for Trump.
Another bit of anecdata for your point: Fred at Slacktivist brought up, and I’ve seen it myself, what happens when you’re canvasing and have a woman’s name on your list and a man answers the door. I suppose it’s possible none of those women are ever home, but statistically unlikely.
Gelfling 545
@rikyrah: at the time, how could it have needed the benefit of the doubt? Her two immediate predecessors did exactly the same and there was certainly no regulation preventing it. If she is to do nothing, including following an established precedent, that cannot be made into something questionable by opponents/media at a later date, then she will do nothing at all. The woman can’t even cough without starting a media sensation.
amk
Tied in friggin IN?
scav
@amk: I Need DATA!
(ok ok, I am 100 % devoted to the ethos of Sam Wang but I still want data fast fast fast, mea culpa, mea statistical culpa!)
Starfish
People in Morgantown, WV are silly. Here is my anecdata.
WereBear
@Gindy51: Why I left Indiana, part 1,654.
Anoniminous
@amk:
Obama carried Indiana in ’08 so the votes are there. The problem is getting them.
Wapiti
@amk: Some fraction of Indiana might be voting against Pence, to attach an anchor to his hopes of returning to Indiana politics.
Corner Stone
@Starfish: Mustn’t say it…must not…say i…
TS
@Gindy51: All my life – the exact same thing. Even the spammers want to speak to the “man of the house”
amk
@scav: You should see da #deplorables (expect the stupids to embrace that meme proudly to their nyms) swarming all over harwood calling him all kindsa names. LOL.
japa21
@amk: Steve Schmidt said she is heading towards 400 electoral votes. I think that can happen. The party’s internal polling is probably pretty accurate. Either party. I would not have thought Indiana was in play, but if it is, so is Georgia, Missouri, Texas. Even Alaska. If you look at Silver’s maps, the blue states are getting bluer and a lot of the red states are turning pinkish. Not sure this is due to increased votes for Clinton or people just turning off of Trump or deciding not to vote.
amk
@Anoniminous: yeah, that was a pleasant surprise for me too but I knew the kenyan was doing some serious gotv there under the radar.
Another Scott
@sdhays: I worry about things like her “No Fly Zone” stuff in Syria(, and her continued rather hawkish tone on Iran), too. But she made a decent case for the NFZ at the last debate (though I still don’t think it’s a strong enough case, yet).
But the thing that makes me less concerned about her supposed hawkishness is that she’s a team player and a diplomat and a shrewd politician. She’s not going to to go it (quasi-) alone in something as important as increasing military involvement in Syria. She may argue strongly for some policy, but if she can’t get sufficient support for it, or if events change so that her desire for stronger action is clearly counter-productive, she’s not going to rush in regardless. Just like Obama and his Syria red-line (when the actual intelligence about who was using the chemical weapons wasn’t iron-clad), she can and will change her mind when necessary.
We need to keep an eye on her, and argue with her policy proposals when we think they’re wrong, but I don’t think we need to worry that she’s going to do something pig-headedly stupid. We always need to be vigilant – no matter who is in the Oval Office.
We’ll see soon enough. ;-)
Cheers,
Scott.
germy shoemangler
@TS:
True story: about twenty years ago my wife and I were trying to buy furniture. We walked into a big furniture store (they have multiple stores and advertise constantly on our local TV) and the salesman are ready to pounce on anybody who walks in their door.
We walked in. We wanted to buy a sofa, loveseat, several chairs. A big purchase. Salesman pounces on us. Gives ME his card; says let him know if we need any help, etc. Completely ignored my wife.
She was insulted, of course, because the furniture decisions were all her idea. I honestly didn’t give a shit what she wanted to buy; she was designing our house, not me.
We left finally without buying anything (she didn’t like their prices). On the way out I gave him a valuable piece of advice. Don’t ignore wives on furniture shopping expeditions.
amk
eta: linky under paywall.
Ceci n'est pas mon nym
@JMG: I keep reading people who have worked him talking about his comedy instincts. People on his movie sets for instance say, if Mel tells you to do it, do it even if you don’t know why. It will be funny.
And Carl Reiner in his autobiography obviously worships the guy.
I always thought his movies were funny, but I didn’t put him on this pedestal above other writers or performers, and frankly some of the bits struck me as stupid. But if these other amazing comics keep talking about him as a Comedy God, maybe there’s really something there…
Anoniminous
@amk:
Gary IN turned out big time, ran the rate to 60%, and flipped the state in ’08. In 2012 they didn’t turn out as much, rate fell to 55%, and it went for Romney.
amk
@Anoniminous: IIRR, he made a last minute dash to Indiana and sure enough, squeezed out an upset win there. Just like in FL in 2012.
Corner Stone
@Ceci n’est pas mon nym:
I am not a Comedy God but believe Mel Brooks to be one. Some of his bits were not to my taste but I could always see how well done they were. Even the absurd “in your face” comedy bits had several layers that all played on other things going on.
However, whatever you do. Do not watch the Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee episode featuring Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks. You may not have an appetite for days after.
germy shoemangler
What herr drumpf and HRC said to each other. Cardinal Dolan shared:
Gex
@Baud: I’m with you. Atwater flat out said that Republican economic policies hurt white people, but hurt black people more. And it is the latter part that draws some white voters to that party. While they may actually have economic concerns, voting for policies that hurt them because those policies hurt others more (considering these same voters are just as angry about offshoring/jobs/corporate power as everyone else) only makes sense if you admit they aren’t voting on their economic concerns.
Petorado
Watching “Terry Tate, Office Linebacker” give Trump his due is worth the minute or so of your time.
sdhays
@Another Scott: This worries me. The FP establishment has coalesced into dangerous group-think about how awful and weak President Obama has been (I honestly find it baffling to call President Obama “weak”; their whole critique terrifies me because it’s clear that they live on a different planet than I think most regular people do – and they don’t realize it). The current President is basically the only major check on their rapacious desire to get forcefully, violently involved in as many conflicts as possible (especially in the Middle East), and they see Hillary as one of their own.
I’m fine with a team of rivals, but the implication of all this is that Hillary’s going to have to really work at stacking in skeptics into her FP team to provide the balance that President Obama himself now provides, and there’s a lot of reason to believe that she might not. There are very, very few institutional checks on military adventurism. I think Libya’s a great example – President Obama was basically the only one in the Western world trying to hold back, but France and Britain pushed him to intervene, promising more involvement in the aftermath and after they got rid of Gaddafi they lost interest. Hillary won’t make the mistakes W made, but there are other mistakes that she’s definitely more susceptible to.
But it was not my intention to start the handwringing before she’s sworn in. Like I said, she clearly learns from mistakes and I prefer to remain hopeful that she’ll incorporate some of President Obama’s skepticism into her decision making when she’s the one sitting in the chair. And on domestic policy…there’s a lot to be excited about if we can get a Democratic Congress.
Gelfling 545
@amk: Helped by good folks like these!
Anoniminous
@amk:
I think you are right. Have to do some research to check. It’s Saturday. I’m lazy.
hovercraft
@Matt McIrvin:
Study it out sheeple! Did they whip out a chalk board?
Alex Jones has a lot to answer for.
Anoniminous
@Matt McIrvin:
And these are the people who ingested goodly amounts of LSD in the 60s?
hovercraft
So Trump is attacking Amazon(WAPost) for not paying taxes and hurting department stores, unfair, very vert unfair. Comcast through it’s ownership of NBC is trying to poison the mind of the American voter. The women are liars, and they will all be sued after the election. If all these people can do this to me, think of what they can do to you.
dogwood
@Anoniminous:
In ’08 the Obama campaign built a big gotv apparatus during primary season. Since the investment was made they continued working the state during the general. McCain didn’t have a single field office in Indiana, and lost by less than a percentage point. It’s not surprising that in ’12 the Obama campaign didn’t contest Indiana. The amount of money and manpower it would take to attempt to win a squeaker just isn’t worth it.
amk
@Anoniminous: I remember thinking at the time, what the hell is he doing there wasting his precious time. This was very close to the election day.
Peale
@hovercraft: the hacker attack yesterday was just a precursor to the one ordered by the Clinton foundation on November 8 to steal the election. New World Order is coming. Bank on it, libtards.
hovercraft
@Peale:
Dean Obidahlah said it was actually Kellyanne, she couldn’t get the phone, so she simply shut that whole thing down.
Brachiator
@sdhays:
And how do you know this?
Villago Delenda Est
@JMG: Ask him about “Ma’am, you’re sucking on my arm”!
Chris
Also a stronger coalition than anyone else right now.
Not to take anything away from her, but that’s the other BFD that the media is determined to ignore. As has been pointed out here before, the media’s talked endlessly about Trump voters, Sanders voters, and NeverTrump voters: the one thing that apparently doesn’t even exist in their world is the Hillary voter. The sheer number of people who will absolutely vote for Hillary now and again in 2020 is one they’re completely ignoring, which isn’t surprising given that it’s basically the Obama coalition that rests heavily on women and nonwhites – i.e. people who are invisible to the MSM.
Ruckus
@Ydobon:
You are correct, her speeches and zingers are good. She delivers. But she doesn’t soar. You have to listen to her, you have to accept her first, as a very decent, reasonable person running for office. If you do that you will like what you hear, because she is good. Very good actually. But if you decide first that she doesn’t soar in her speeches and soaring is the most important thing, you won’t accept her. She is a great politician, she should make a great president, but you have to actually listen to her to want to defend her, to follow her, to fight for her, to elect her. And of course another issue is she is a strong female and many men can feel their dicks shrivel up whenever they encounter a strong female because their entire rational for living is in their dicks. To shorten up the process of describing these types of men, we just call them dicks.
Brachiator
@Peale:
Is this a joke?
Otherwise, you idiots with this new world order stuff are as nutty as the Monty Python “Spanish Inquisition” skit.
hovercraft
Day one of Trump Admin
1 Constitutional amend. to impose term limits
2 Hiring freeze on all federal employees except military, public safety and health
3 Require for every new regulation two existing regs are eliminated
4 A 5 year ban on congress people becoming lobbyists
5 Lifetime ban on WH officials lobbying on behalf of foreign governments
6 Complete ban on foreign lobbyists working on behalf of candidates
Vhh
@liberal: I’ve had a .gov address for many years too, and until the Citrix server system was perfected about 3 years ago, email via mobile devices sucked, and was frequently unusable from Europe and Japan where I often go for work. It is still sometimes a problem even with Citrix on slower connections So guess what—I had and still sometimes have to use Gmail on travel!!! Hillary set records in her travels to far less well connected places, so I am not surprised that she needed a non govt server pre 2012.
Chris
@Jeffro:
The only way to keep your hands clean at all times is if you’ve never worked a day in your life.
Another Scott
@sdhays: As you’ve said, she’s smart and she learns from mistakes. I think she recognizes the benefits of Obama keeping the “foreign policy establishment” at arms-length:
I think he’s right. It’s similar to the (stupid) argument that we have to cut Social Security benefits now because projections are that the Trust Fund surplus will be gone in 2033, or something.
Even though she was immersed in the FPE at State for 4 years, I think she recognizes the benefits of Obama’s approach when it comes to military involvement (especially in the ME). Even if she would have tried to do “more”, she wouldn’t/won’t run rough-shod over essential allies the way W did.
Being a woman who has fought for a place at the table for her entire life, I don’t think that she’s suddenly going to be under the spell of the FPE once she’s in the WH. I also think she recognizes the difference between the historical approach at State and even the DoD compared to the noisy armchair generals who never saw a conflict that they didn’t think called for missiles and bombs and the 1st Infantry Division. A lot of the criticism in the WP and in Goldberg’s pieces sound like sour-grapes to me. I am confident that she’s going to look at the evidence and carefully weigh all the options.
We’ll see. :-)
Cheers,
Scott.
(Thank the FSM that we don’t have to worry about Donnie being in that position!)
Ruckus
@Mai.naem.mobile:
Your sister probably, also like Hilary Clinton, didn’t work hard and succeed at the expense of stepping on other people. Many people equate success as how many people you stomped on to climb that ladder of success, not realizing that the ladder is made up of hard work, not bodies to stomp on.
Cheryl from Maryland
@OldDave: The show has an original background of What’s Opera, Doc? right next to a monitor playing the entire film. Hope you like it! Also, for any Juicers in Las Vegas, here’s another exhibition of mine.
Chris
@tobie:
I wonder: was this ever not the case?
The mainstream media punditariat and owners, as near as I can tell, skew disproportionately Rich, White, and East Coast. For roughly the last century and a half, that would correspond with “skew disproportionately Republican” – even if it’s not always the same kind of Republican. I can imagine that the MSM of fifty years ago would’ve been horrified by Goldwater much the same way they are by Trump today, but I can also easily imagine them swooning over, say, Nelson Rockefeller – right pedigree, right connections, respectably “establishment” and moderate and Very Serious. Was that in fact happening at the time, or were they actually better in those days?
JJ
@Comrade Scrutinizer: Right. And that detail has long since been forgotten. The latent narrative has become one of the dotty old woman typing away on a hotmail account. The server she was using was Bill’s- securely set up for the former president.
aimai
@hovercraft: I love you, hovercraft. But not in a creepy way.
Brachiator
@Ruckus:
I think that Clinton has been a good, solid politician, but not great. Her actual hands-on political career has not been that long compared to some others.
But what you say about people having to listen to her to want to defend her is very interesting. She is obviously ambitious, but is not a charismatic leader, not an obvious one. But I find it notable that she has commanded great loyalty in some of the people who have worked for her, and some of them have been with her for years.
We have had presidents who were great orators and also were tremendously inspiring. And we have had presidents from our earliest days (Adams and Madison come to mind) who were more sober and hard working types who impressed with their tenacity and ability to use their intellect to govern.
I look forward to see what a Hillary Clinton presidency will look like.
Btw, I understand what you mean about the strong woman thing, but it is not like Clinton will be the first woman leader ever. It will be interesting to see her with other women leaders, such as the leaders of Germany and the UK.
Villago Delenda Est
@Chris: Imagine it? Only if you’ve read the history of the thing and realize that this is pretty much how the then MSM reacted to Goldwater. It was really somewhat unfair to Goldwater, who would be dismissed as a RINO in the modern GOP, but the rabid, ignorant, racist base was there supporting Goldwater and booing Rockefeller.
Chris
@sdhays:
Ugh, Jesus. Don’t remind me.
I moved back to DC at the beginning of this year, and have been spending the lulls between part-time jobs going to FP related events at local colleges and think tanks, since that’s my field. The number of speakers who are Deeply Concerned that Obama has retreated too much from the world, that he sees American power as something to be curtailed, that his “leading from behind” and retreating from the world are the reason the world’s in such a mess, is high and depressing.
I left DC in 2012. I was already doing this kind of thing before that, but I don’t remember this kind of consensus at the time among speakers. Presumably, the shell-shock from the utter catastrophe that was Iraq was still lingering enough at the time. Now, it’s all “Obama’s failed presidency” all the time.
Villago Delenda Est
@Brachiator: I do believe that snark. We are living in the Age of Poe, so yes, it’s easy to get things mixed up.
Villago Delenda Est
@Chris: It’s very easy to be enthusiastic about “engagement” when you or your children (or grandchildren) are not the ones toting the weapons in the war zone.
JR in WV
@hovercraft:
I could be wrong, but I understand that the Obamas had a standing invitation to congressional Republicans for cocktails and entertainment at the White House weekly, and no one ever RSVP’ed or attended.
Because, of course, what Republican would attend a party thrown by one of those people?
So eventually the Obamas began having the most cool entertainment, shown on PBS, for the best guests, none of whom were Republicans, because Republicans don’t go to parties thrown by black people, even at the White House.
Sometimes we get a PBS broadcast signal, after the leaves fall, we’re right at the edge of their signal range, and we watched some, they had Aretha, BB King, Carol King, Lyle Lovett, Mavis Staples, The Alabama Shakes, Natalie Cole, Joan Baez, Stevie Wonder, Tony Bennett and Los Lobos, just to name a very few.
And none of the congressional Republicans attended. Anyone can see some of these performances today, online. Take advantage of what the Republicans were too, conservative shall we say, to attend.
Mnemosyne
@Chris:
I am a middle-aged, married white woman, and I LOVE that Hillary is all in with Black Lives Matter. I love that she picked a VP who is not only a longtime friend and experienced politician, but who speaks fluent Spanish and worked as a civil rights lawyer.
Hillary knows that she is running to lead a coalition, and she’s been very careful to make sure that every member of that coalition, including disabled people and transgender people, feel like they’re important and their issues are important.
I think that this is the aspect of her campaign that all of the white male pundits are blind to, and it’s going to bite them in the ass on Election Day. Stronger Together, assholes.
Brachiator
@Another Scott:
This was a bold move in that it prevented the US from becoming deeply mired directly in the Syrian conflict, but it didn’t resolve anything. Not only did Assad continue his murderous rampage, but he now has Russia acting openly as a buffer. And the refugee problem is a global embarrassment that is straining the resources of Europe and the Middle East.
aimai
@Brachiator: Look–just because she’s not a charismatic leader for you, or for guys like you, doesn’t mean she is not a charismatic leader for other people. I am extremely inspired by her work and her life story and by her style of leadership. And I am not alone. If we could stop attacking her with these worn out right wing and, frankly, misogynistic, tropes I would be so very grateful.
dogwood
@JR in WV:
Republican leaders turned down invitations to State dinners. Before Obama that was unheard of.
hovercraft
@aimai:
Back at ya. Going back to school later in life is a wonderful thing to do it you have the opportunity.
Ruckus
@the Conster, la Citoyenne:
I admired her in 2008. But I saw that President Obama had hired better people to work with and for him. That was the distinction that made me vote for him over her. He seemed to recognize the very basic principle that it takes more than just a leader to make things happen, it takes people who will never get the public acknowledgement of their accomplishments doing the minute by minute work to make things happen. I knew this as a young boy, watching men work in a machine shop, each making part of an assembly that would go together and work together, ending up making the product a success. It took a leader and many workers to make it happen. It isn’t a top down or a bottom up effort, it is a collaborative process. And it looked like in 2008 she didn’t really get this. But for sure she does now.
I’m glad to support her now because her policies are sound, her ideals are realistic/achievable and her understanding of process is great.
Shana
@Kay: Jerry Springer was also mayor of Cincinnati before his talk show career. Hubby (from Cincy) tells me his downfall was paying a prostitute with a check.
amk
@Brachiator: riiight, and getting involved in syria in full blown mode would have somehow improved the situation.
Matt McIrvin
@hovercraft: The lack of evidence for the conspiracy just proves how all-encompassing the conspiracy is!
Brachiator
@JR in WV:
Even though this stuff can seem trivial, I would be curious to learn how the Obamas interacted with the Washington social scene. And how that compares to say, the Clintons and others. I vaguely recall that Jimmy Carter was not big on mingling with social Washington, but I didn’t pay much attention to that aspect of political life back in the day.
Ruckus
@MattF:
LOL One of the better office wall posters.
Chris
@Villago Delenda Est:
Can I also add that I actually love the fact that Obama spent time outside of the country while growing up, and that as a result his view of the rest of the world isn’t entirely shaped by the consensus views within the U.S. Not the same as living in a war zone, but still a valuable POV that most politicians don’t have.
@Mnemosyne:
Yesterday I compared Hillary to Harry Truman – somebody with a tough act to follow, who wasn’t nearly the rock star the previous president had been, who was distrusted by some of her own left wing as a party hack and pilloried in the media as a crook, etc. Part of the comparison, though, is that Hillary Clinton can count on the vast majority of the Obama coalition, the same way Harry Truman could count on the vast majority of the Roosevelt coalition.
But of course that coalition was/is skewed in the opposite direction from the way the MSM skews – women and nonwhites are invisible to them, much as immigrants and the working class were to their predecessors seventy years ago. So we’re getting a total lack of coverage of Hillary voters today, and the reason for it is the same provincial mindset that led whatever newspaper editor it was to print “Dewey Defeats Truman” back in the day before the votes were even in.
(In both cases, what really makes it inexcusable is that Roosevelt/Obama had just got done proving that having such people as your base could make you a very successful politician).
hovercraft
@JR in WV:
I know the republicans never gave him a shot, they turned everything down.
I’m referring to the villagers, they wanted in on the cool new president and his family and celebrity friends. The Reagan’s socialized with the beltway types, they had hollywood glam, and let them come in a rub shoulders with them and their friends. The Poppy Bush WH was old money/society and knew their obligations and mixed with them. The Clinton’s were the hicks who came in too eager and desperate to fit in. W was in bed by 9 o/clock but he had the Cheney’s who had been part of the scene for decades to fill the role, point in fact they are still holding their soiree’s to this day with all of the beltway opinions writers. So when the Obama’s came in with all of their celebrity, and the celebrity “friends” were supposed to be the beginning of a new cool Camelot, but the Obama’s refused. Yes Michelle wanted to open up the WH to the American people, so she did all of those concerts featuring different American genres, and the garden and all kinds of public events. But they did not attend the private parties at the homes of the gatekeepers, when they held private events at the WH they did not invite the movers and shakers in the media. They wanted expected to get into the Obama’s inner circle, and they didn’t, that’s when they turned on him.
Ruckus
@OzarkHillbilly:
I’ve written emails like that. I was amazed, it actually worked.
NorthLeft12
@WereBear:I’ll simply quote Mark Twain here;
JR in WV
@Gindy51:
@Mike J:
Same here, phone banking.
Phone banking, a guy answers the phone, I ask for Ms whatsis, “She’s not here” or “Who are you?” Dude, I wanna say, it’s none of your business, put Ms whatsis on, please!” but I know a guy asking for some abusive slob’s woman could be trouble. So I always tell them who I am if they give me a chance.
I will confess, Mrs J, my wife, uses me as her filter to not speak to people she doesn’t want to speak to. So I mostly answer the phone, and I ask who’s calling?, she hears and either hold out her hand or shakes her head. That’s a favor to her, not abuse. But you can hear abuse, sometimes, in the belligerent voice on the phone.
I always hang up thinking, there’s a woman voting for Hills, for sure. A good thing about the secret ballot and voting booths, with people protecting everyone’s privacy.
Shana
@Cheryl from Maryland: Cool! My younger daughter took a gap year between undergrad and grad school (“Mom, I’ve been in school since I was two. I need a year off.”) and worked at SAAM this past year. She worked in several different areas and really liked it. I wonder if you two crossed paths…
NorthLeft12
@OzarkHillbilly: I recall reading something about lack of reliable access, although I did not know the precise details. Thanks for chiming in.
Brachiator
@aimai:
Why don’t you read what I wrote. I specifically said that she has commanded the loyalty of people who work for her, many of whom have worked for her for years. I think that Huma Abedin first worked for her as an intern and has been with her ever since.
Going further, I get a sense that she encourages and cultivates the strengths of people working for her, which is always one of the key indicators of a good leader, of any gender. Unlike some overrated male politicians, I don’t get a sense that Clinton has a need to surround herself with toadies or ass kissers.
However, a president, of any gender, has to be able to rally the citizens. And this is something that Clinton will have to work on. It is not just a gender thing. Competent male leaders have lost votes of confidence because they could not be inspiring. And Donald Trump knows how to get deep into the souls of his supporters, but he is a human piece of shit.
But the bottom line is that I have no problem in trying to look at Clinton’s strengths and weaknesses. Overall she comes out above most other politicians. If you think I am just attacking her, or attacking her because she is a woman, you need to take that crap somewhere else.
WaterGirl
@Mnemosyne:
It’s not like she didn’t tell them. :-)
Ruckus
@Elizabelle:
I’m sure that you are correct, that a lot of his supporters are concerned about economic issues. The difference is between them and everyone else is that his supporters are blaming only certain people for their economic woes, perceived or not, and they aren’t the people who had any causative effect on any of those woes. In other words, they are racists. It really is that simple. Every explanation I’ve heard for supporting tRump is that he will get rid of all those people causing all the problems. Every last fucking one. They. Are. Racists.
NorthLeft12
@srv: You are so precious. Please proceed with your nonsense.
sdhays
@Brachiator: The thing that I feel that President Obama understands better than the critics I read is that some situations have no good options. It’s a cliche, but I don’t get the feeling that the FP establishment actually objectively measures what that actually means – to them, it’s an excuse to get out from criticism. The establishment grades on a curve – if something was done according to the playbook it’s better than the alternative, even if it was a disaster, because at least it followed the playbook.
The current situation in Syria is a total humanitarian disaster. But would Obama escalating our direct involvement there early on (when the Syrian military still had chemical weapons, I might add!) have produced a better result? Perhaps, but the path from a more direct intervention, from dumping American advanced weaponry in the hands of the “good guys” we couldn’t actually identify to missile strikes, to an objectively better situation, in humanitarian terms or using other measures is dubious at best. These ideas usually come down to underpants gnomes theories:
1). Increase American-sponsored violence in X.
2). …
3). Rainbows and roses.
I also feel that the Washington FP establishment often has no appreciation for how much worse things could be if some of their ideas had been followed. The Syrian chemical weapons issue is an important example. That shit could have been unleashed by the Assad regime, or captured by ISIS or al Qaeda – and it could have been used against American troops and even made it to the shores of the US of A. It’s now gone. There are thousands of ways that those chemical weapons could have made the situation much, much worse than it is even now.
Obama’s restraint in Syria was important for the Iran deal as well. It showed the Iranian leadership that Obama was willing to buck the American FP establishment and make a deal – he wasn’t just jerking them around about nuclear weapons as a way to punish them for having a revolution (which became obvious was the whole objective of Benjamin Netanyahu’s “concern” about a nuclear Iran). He was truly negotiating in good faith.
A lot of stuff is going on in foreign affairs, and it’s not all about the US and its super military. Foreign policy is incredibly hard. The Washington Playbook dramatically oversimplifies these things, and President Obama actively works to see them in all their complexity. He’s not perfect, but it much better than these “experts” who arrogantly think they know everything.
TL;DR: It’s not always within the US’ power to resolve things. The Washington establishment doesn’t get that, but Obama does.
JR in WV
@Chris:
Bigots, the Scary Black Guy pretending to be President MUST be seen to have failed, else we might get another Black Guy, who would be even more scary, being the second, and proof that it can happen over and over.
Bigot racists, all of them. The only possible answer to accusations of failure on Obama’s part.
comrade scott's agenda of rage
A really good aggregating the aggregators from Teh Orange:
http://www.dailykos.com/stories/2016/10/21/1585408/-Aggregating-the-Presidential-Aggregators-Oct-21-2016
JR in WV
@hovercraft:
Well, not a shock to hear that. Some people are shy, and some people are twice bit, thus shy. Imagine how many times both Obamas were bitten between beginning school and arriving in DC! It is really hard to identify a bigot at any distance, and who wants to invite one of those into your home… like clasping an asp to your bosom! By accident!
Steeplejack (tablet)
@comrade scott:
You got the link in the Reply button. Fixed here: “Aggregators.”
ETA: And you erased the comment. D’oh!
Chris
@sdhays:
All that you say is true. I would add one equally important thing: Obama is also much more in tune with the American people than the FP establishment is, and therefore much more realistic in terms of what he can actually achieve. He hasn’t let himself be sucked into some PNAC messianic vision of what the U.S. could do to change the world, partly because he realizes that it’s not something the U.S. would do – most of these visions would run afoul of public opinion and an ultra-divided political system even if they were somehow technically possible to accomplish.
I think he also realizes a very simple fact that I think many aren’t fully aware of: not everything in the world is about the U.S.
Ruckus
@Brachiator:
But she really isn’t like the German and UK female leaders. They are more/much more conservative than she is. They lead countries with different types of political systems, ones that have more than 2 sides, even if the minority sides have to end up working together to get much done.
I see that part of the problem is that while she really has been a politician for a long time she is now getting to be very good at it. I think it is harder to recognize how good because her opposition is such a fucking disgrace of a human. Of course they have been disgraces for a long time now but this one is just from another planet bad.
Brachiator
@sdhays:
Interesting stuff, but cold comfort to suffering Syrians. And it is not as though the situation is in stasis. One set of problems may have been avoided, but an entirely new set of problems has emerged, such as Russian closeness with both Iran and Syria. Obama may have a deeper understanding of the FP establishment. In fact, an early debate in which he implied that he might go after bin Laden despite Pakistan’s objections made me warm to him, and clearly was an example of his saying that he was not going to do foreign policy the way that it has always been done.
However, in the case of Syria, Russia is eagerly rushing in to fill the vacuum of US leadership. It is not always within US power to resolve things, but the world will not stop just because the US decides to do nothing. And the results may result in horrible problems that we will have to deal with.
Ben Cisco
@JR in WV: It is indeed strange, the frequency with which this simple, obvious truth must be stated. It’s as if there was something to be gained by NOT acknowledging this.
Fascinating.
rikyrah
@Matt McIrvin:
No, she did not. It was over the night of the Wisconsin primary, but she hung on until June.
Which is why she didn’t come close to winning in 2008
Brachiator
@Ruckus:
Why is this significant? And Angela Merkel is arguably one of the most powerful leaders in the entire world. Period. With or without regard to gender. The UK still has some influence. It will be wild to see that three of the most powerful and influential world leaders are all women. In this respect, Clinton will be joining a very exclusive club. This has got to be inspiring in all kinds of ways. But the US is catching up in some ways. Other countries have had women leaders for a long time. This does not undercut Clinton’s achievement (still to come, obviously), but let’s put it into perspective.
Again, her active political career has been relatively short. She had an opportunity to observe and learn much as first lady of Arkansas and the United States, but she was not actively in the political arena.
I agree with you totally here.
Omnes Omnibus
@Brachiator:
It really depends on how you define political career. If you mean elective and/or appointed office, then you are correct. OTOH, she has been a political player for several decades.
Brachiator
@Chris:
Of course, Truman found a way to talk to and inspire the average citizen, inspiring them to rally to him to “Give ‘Em Hell, Harry!”
Let’s see if Hillary finds her way to do this as well, if necessary (and it probably will be).
Joel
@Elizabelle: trump supporters may be motivated by economic anxiety, but no more than the average voter.
In other words, economic anxiety does not explain Trump.
Brachiator
@Omnes Omnibus:
That’s one of the reasons I added the qualifier “relatively.”
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Matt McIrvin: How about the TLDR version; she lost in 2008 and that’s all the Pundits see, Okay?
liberal
@Brachiator: yeah, yeah, yeah, because we know ISIS and Al Nusra are such swell guys. And it’s not like SA, which effectively enslaves half its population, intervened in Syria at all.
You’re either too fucking stupid to understand that there are no moderate rebels, or you’re an AQ sympathizer.
Jesus, pull your fucking head out of your stupid fucking neocon asshole.
JAFD
@Villago Delenda Est: There were enough copies of Theodore H White’s _The Making of the President 1964_ printed – Book of the Month Club 4/0.99 offers, etc – that finding one at rummage sales shouldn’t be difficult. You may not agree with Teddy, but he could write a readable story.
Then to Rick Perlstein for the historical view.