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The Democratic Strategist

Political Strategy for a Permanent Democratic Majority

Month: July 2015

The Occasionally Necessary But Always Perilous “Hidden Majority” Strategies

In a discussion of Bernie Sanders’ campaign, which is gaining strength but is struggling to convince skeptics he has a realistic path to the nomination, I offered some thoughts today at Washington Monthly about electoral strategies that rely on unconventional coalitions and the risk they run of descending into wishful thinking.

If you are a political party or party faction, and you find yourself in what appears to be a durable minority position with the electorate as it currently exist, you have four basic options to boost your standing: (1) you can tailor your message to pick off “swing voters” (e.g., the median voter theory that constantly dictates “moving to the center”); (2) you can increase your appeal to the marginal voters who already support you but need encouragement to vote (conventional GOTV efforts), recognizing that the noisier techniques help the opposition turn out their vote, too; (3) you can somehow try to engage consistent non-voters who you think agree with you; or (4) you can reshuffle the deck by creating new coalitions that raid your opponent’s ranks without moving in your opponent’s direction.
It’s natural to the more movement-oriented and ideological party factions who hell no don’t want to move to “the center” and who recognize the shortcomings of conventional GOTV, to gravitate towards the third and fourth approaches. But while such “hidden majority” strategies may represent imaginative “outside the box” thinking, they can also represent wishful or even delusional thinking, too, particularly for those who simply don’t want to adjust their creed to public opinion and so are tempted to treat public opinion as an illusion created by The Man’s false choices and voters’ “false consciousness.”
A good example is the “libertarian moment” argument that someone like Rand Paul can draw disengaged young people into the political arena and/or pull liberal voters across the line via his positions on non-interventionism or privacy or drugs and criminal justice. As I and other critics have pointed out, young people are almost always relatively “disengaged” from voting for reasons that have little or nothing to do with the political choices they are given, and party preferences run a whole lot deeper than any one or two or three issues, for very good reasons.
It’s not that surprising we are hearing similar “hidden majority” talk on the left with the rise of Bernie Sanders, who indeed could use a theory of “electability” to defy the inevitable derision of MSM analyts who assume his screw-the-traitorous-center approach would mean death for Democrats in a general election. Yesterday at Ten Miles Square our own Martin Longman thought out loud about the kind of strategy that could make a Sanders election realistic. It’s interesting that he mentioned Rand Paul as another “unorthodox” pol that might find a way to stick it to The Man:

To win the overall contest, including the presidency, however, he is going to have to achieve a substantial crossover appeal. If he beats Hillary, he’s going to lose a portion of the Democratic coalition in the process, and he’ll have to make up for it with folks who we don’t normally think of as socialists or liberals.
Some of this deficit can be made up for simply by bringing people into the process who would otherwise have stayed home, but that alone will never be enough. If you think the electorate is so polarized that Bernie can’t change the voting behaviors of very many people, then there’s really not even a conceptual way that he could win. If, on the other hand, you’re willing to wait and see if he can appeal to a broader swath of the electorate like he has consistently done in his home state, then the “white liberal” vote isn’t quite as decisive.
Honestly, a lot of these potential Bernie voters are probably toying with Rand Paul right now. Most of them probably can’t imagine themselves voting for a socialist from Vermont. But substantial parts of his message are really almost tailor-made for these folks. They hate big money in politics, for example, and feel like everyone else has a lobbyist in Washington but them. They hate outsourcing and are suspicious of free trade agreements. They’ve lost faith in both parties and their leaders. They can’t pay their rent or afford college. Their kids are all screwed up on painkillers and are seemingly never going to move out of the house. They’re sick of investing in Afghanistan while American needs get ignored. And they want the blood of some Wall Street bankers.
Bernie Sanders is going to make a lot of sense to these folks, even if they think Hillary Clinton is the devil and are trained to despise liberals.

Now anyone with a sense of history realizes there have been moments when new and at the time radical options have emerged and scrambled existing party coalitions. Just possibly hatred of financial elites could be like slavery or trust-busting or civil rights, a powerful sentiment just waiting for a galvanizing movement or candidate to reduce prior notions of partisan differences to dust. But if so, it should start becoming apparent at some point via measurements of public opinion, like general election polls (not just early-state surveys or crowd sizes in activist centers).
Bernie Sanders and his supporters have every right to claim they are in the process of overturning the table of the moneylenders in the temple of Democracy, and creating a mind-bending coalition that combines liberals with former non-voters and “populist” conservatives; that may be the only plausible theory of “electability” Team Sanders can muster. But at some point it needs to materialize in measurable ways, and beyond that point it could become cranky and then delusional.

This obviously won’t be a problem for those Sanders supporters who are really only interested in “keeping Hillary honest” or moving the party in a progressive direction, though such folk could be a problem for Sanders if they start dropping out of his camp once those tasks are completed. But in general, anyone in politics must remain aware that “hidden majorities” may not be real if they stay hidden.


GOP’s Frankenstein Runs Amok, Outs Fellow Candidates

Behold the fruits of their labors. Just about any news-oriented web page you visit today will present for your enjoyment the belligerent mug of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, mouth agape and bellowing some half-baked thought to drag the GOP brand through the mud one more time.
But Trump’s views are not so far out of line with the rest of the Republican field of president-wannabees, just more crudely-stated. Dana Milbank takes a stab at explaining the Trump phenomenon in his Washington Post column, “Donald Trump is the monster the GOP created“:

It has been amusing to watch the brands — the PGA, NBC, Macy’s, NASCAR, Univision, Serta — flee Donald Trump after his xenophobic remarks. Who even knew The Donald had a line of mattresses featuring Cool Action Dual Effects Gel Memory Foam?
But there is one entity that can’t dump Trump, no matter how hard it tries: the GOP. The Republican Party can’t dump Trump because Trump is the Republican Party.
One big Republican donor this week floated to the Associated Press the idea of having candidates boycott debates if the tycoon is onstage. Jeb Bush, Lindsey Graham and other candidates have lined up to say, as Rick Perry put it, that “Donald Trump does not represent the Republican Party.”
But Trump has merely held up a mirror to the GOP. The man, long experience has shown, believes in nothing other than himself. He has, conveniently, selected the precise basket of issues that Republicans want to hear about — or at least a significant proportion of Republican primary voters. He may be saying things more colorfully than others when he talks about Mexico sending rapists across the border, but his views show that, far from being an outlier, he is hitting all the erogenous zones of the GOP electorate.
Anti-immigrant? Against Common Core education standards? For repealing Obamacare? Against same-sex marriage? Antiabortion? Anti-tax? Anti-China? Virulent in questioning President Obama’s legitimacy? Check, check, check, check, check, check, check and check.

But Milbank then recounts Trump’s more progressive views back in 1999, when Milbank interviewed him on a flight:

I flew on his 727 with the winged “T” on the tail and the mirrored headboard on the bed, and I learned all about his prospective platform: progressive on social issues such as gays in the military, for campaign finance reform and universal health care, in favor of more regulation, opposed to investing Social Security money in the stock market. Most of all, he preached tolerance — contrasting himself with Pat Buchanan, his rival for the nomination, who had made statements considered anti-Semitic and anti-immigrant.
…Trump back then issued a statement saying he hates intolerance because in New York, “a town with different races, religions and peoples, I have learned to work with my brother man.” I accompanied him as he underscored the point by touring the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles.

Quite a contrast from Trump 2015, who has viciously disparaged Mexican immigrant workers, whose construction labors have helped make him filthy rich, as Milbank points out. But Trump is not the lone immigrant worker/Latino-basher in his party. Far from it:

…Scott Walker talks about self-deportation, Graham talks about ending birthright citizenship, Ben Carson blames illegal immigrants in part for the measles outbreak, Rand Paul describes as lawbreakers those who were brought to the United States illegally as children, and even relatively moderate candidates such as Bush and Marco Rubio have hardened their immigration positions. Ted Cruz actually praised Trump.
Trump’s position also closely follows those that came from Arizona in 2010 when then-Gov. Jan Brewer and other Republicans attempted an immigration crackdown. They spoke about illegal immigrants on the border as a source of beheadings, kidnappings and police killings.

Nor are Trump’s other positions so dissimilar from those of his fellow GOP candidates

..The mogul’s broader basket of issues is also in tune with those of a slate of candidates who have compared homosexuality to alcoholism (Perry), likened union protesters to the Islamic State (Walker) and proposed elections for Supreme Court justices (Cruz), and who virtually all oppose same-sex marriage and action on climate change.

Further adds Milbank, “The previously tolerant Trump may be a phony, but he’s no dope: He recognized that, in the fragmented Republican field, his name recognition would take him far if he merely voiced, in his bombastic style, the positions GOP voters craved…It worked. Trump placed second in national polls by Fox News and CNN, virtually guaranteeing him a place in the first debate, on Aug. 6 — unless the GOP persuades Fox News, the host, to dump Trump.”
“That would be hard to justify,” concludes Milbank. “Trump may be a monster, but he’s the monster Republicans created.”


July 9: Those Purple-State Republicans Haven’t Faced a Presidential Electorate

At the Washington Monthly today, I drew attention to a very important set of observations by Ken Goldstein of Bloomberg Politics:

[Goldstein] looks at the candidates’ record of “electability” from the point of view of the “two electorates” issue that’s become so important:

Six of the Republican contenders (Cruz, Graham, Huckabee, Jindal, Paul, and Perry) are from states that are reliably red–and have never faced electorates that would have the partisan distribution they would encounter in purple states. Two of them (Carson and Trump) have never ever faced any electorate whatsoever and one (Fiorina) ran and lost in a blue state.
Five (Bush, Gilmore, Kasich, Rubio, and Walker) have won statewide elections in purple states, and three GOP contestants have won statewide contests in blue states (Christie, Pataki, and Santorum).
But, even for those purple and blue state winners, presidential year electorates are fundamentally different than mid-term electorates. Presidential electorates are less white, younger, and more Democratic than mid-term electorates. And only one of the eight candidates who have previously won in blue or purple states has ever run statewide in a presidential election year. Jim Gilmore ran for Senate in Virginia in 2008 and lost by more than 30 percentage points. In fact, according to my calculations, of the 40 elections that the 17 announced or soon to announce GOP candidates have collectively run in at the state level (not all of them wins), only four of those contests were in presidential election years–Gilmore lost in Virginia in 2008, Lindsey Graham won re-election in South Carolina in 2008, Ted Cruz was elected in Texas in 2012, and Rick Santorum was re-elected in Pennsylvania in 2000. None of the other 13 candidates has ever faced statewide voters in a presidential election year.
This means that even candidates who’ve won in battleground states face significant hurdles. For example, Marco Rubio won election to the Senate in 2010 in an electorate which, according to the exit polls, was 71 percent white, and in which Republicans enjoyed a four percentage point (40 percent to 36 percent) advantage in party identification. In 2012, the Florida electorate was 67 percent white and Republicans suffered from a two-percentage-point deficit in partisan identifiers (33 percent to 35 percent). Looking at the voter file in Florida, of the approximately four million registered voters who vote in just about every election, Republicans have a five-percentage-point advantage. But among the three million-plus registered voters who vote only in presidential elections, Democrats have a six-percentage-point advantage.

Remember this analysis when you are tempted to look at a general election scenario and mentally put Florida in the GOP column for Rubio or Bush, or Ohio in the column for Kasich, or Wisconsin in the column for Walker (I don’t think anyone is going to assume New Jersey will go for Chris Christie or Pennsylvania for Rick Santorum or California for Carly Fiorina). None of them has faced a statewide presidential electorate.

That’s doesn’t guarantee they’ll lose these states in a general election, of course, but does mean it may be more difficult than is generally assumed.


Those Purple-State Republicans Haven’t Faced a Presidential Electorate

At the Washington Monthly today, I drew attention to a very important set of observations by Ken Goldstein of Bloomberg Politics:

[Goldstein] looks at the candidates’ record of “electability” from the point of view of the “two electorates” issue that’s become so important:

Six of the Republican contenders (Cruz, Graham, Huckabee, Jindal, Paul, and Perry) are from states that are reliably red–and have never faced electorates that would have the partisan distribution they would encounter in purple states. Two of them (Carson and Trump) have never ever faced any electorate whatsoever and one (Fiorina) ran and lost in a blue state.
Five (Bush, Gilmore, Kasich, Rubio, and Walker) have won statewide elections in purple states, and three GOP contestants have won statewide contests in blue states (Christie, Pataki, and Santorum).
But, even for those purple and blue state winners, presidential year electorates are fundamentally different than mid-term electorates. Presidential electorates are less white, younger, and more Democratic than mid-term electorates. And only one of the eight candidates who have previously won in blue or purple states has ever run statewide in a presidential election year. Jim Gilmore ran for Senate in Virginia in 2008 and lost by more than 30 percentage points. In fact, according to my calculations, of the 40 elections that the 17 announced or soon to announce GOP candidates have collectively run in at the state level (not all of them wins), only four of those contests were in presidential election years–Gilmore lost in Virginia in 2008, Lindsey Graham won re-election in South Carolina in 2008, Ted Cruz was elected in Texas in 2012, and Rick Santorum was re-elected in Pennsylvania in 2000. None of the other 13 candidates has ever faced statewide voters in a presidential election year.
This means that even candidates who’ve won in battleground states face significant hurdles. For example, Marco Rubio won election to the Senate in 2010 in an electorate which, according to the exit polls, was 71 percent white, and in which Republicans enjoyed a four percentage point (40 percent to 36 percent) advantage in party identification. In 2012, the Florida electorate was 67 percent white and Republicans suffered from a two-percentage-point deficit in partisan identifiers (33 percent to 35 percent). Looking at the voter file in Florida, of the approximately four million registered voters who vote in just about every election, Republicans have a five-percentage-point advantage. But among the three million-plus registered voters who vote only in presidential elections, Democrats have a six-percentage-point advantage.

Remember this analysis when you are tempted to look at a general election scenario and mentally put Florida in the GOP column for Rubio or Bush, or Ohio in the column for Kasich, or Wisconsin in the column for Walker (I don’t think anyone is going to assume New Jersey will go for Chris Christie or Pennsylvania for Rick Santorum or California for Carly Fiorina). None of them has faced a statewide presidential electorate.

That’s doesn’t guarantee they’ll lose these states in a general election, of course, but does mean it may be more difficult than is generally assumed.


Political Strategy Notes

New PPP poll has Trump leading pack of GOP prez candidates in NC with 16 percent, with Jeb and Huck 4 and 5 points back, respectively (both within m.o.e.). A key swing state, NC also has one of the fastest-growing Latino populations.
Jamelle Bouie notes at Slate.com that Scott Walker is deploying a more subtle form of immigrant-bashing than Trump, and adds that “As of October, notes Latino Decisions, just 32 percent of Latino voters would consider a vote for Jeb Bush, just 35 percent would consider a vote for Sen. Marco Rubio, and just 24 percent would consider a vote for Sen. Ted Cruz.”
Andrew Perrin and Maeve Duggan have an interesting report at Pew Research Center, “Americans’ Internet Access: 2000-2015. As internet use nears saturation for some groups, a look at patterns of adoption.” Among their findings, which political ad-makers may find of particular interest, “Older adults have lagged behind younger adults in their adoption, but now a clear majority (58%) of senior citizens uses the internet…African-Americans and Hispanics have been somewhat less likely than whites or English-speaking Asian-Americans to be internet users, but the gaps have narrowed. Today, 78% of blacks and 81% of Hispanics use the internet, compared with 85% of whites and 97% of English-speaking Asian Americans…Those who live in rural areas are less likely than those in the suburbs and urban areas to use the internet. Still, 78% of rural residents are online.”
Patrick Healy and Maggie Haberman make a case in their NYT article that “Hillary Clinton’s Economic Agenda Aims at a Party Moving Left.” The hope is that “Mrs. Clinton is revealing her natural political self: a blend of progressive and pragmatic, an apostle of government policy as a force for change, and a more left-of-center leader than her husband.”
Dare we hope that Republican SC State Rep. Jenny Horne’s moving — and successful — appeal to remove the Confederate battle flag from the state capitol will herald the beginning of more decency on racial justice issues in the GOP?
The Upshot’s Nate Cohn crunches polling data and concludes that, to win the nomination, Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign should focus more on the “less liberal and less educated Democratic voting blocs, whether white, black or Hispanic.”
David Byler explores “the reason for GOP Down-Ticket Dominance,” including demographic, structural, mid-term turnout and gerrymandering factors, at Real Clear Politics.
“The Fed’s charter was amended in 1978 by the Humphrey-Hawkins bill to give it what is known as the “dual mandate.” Unlike other central banks, the Federal Reserve is charged with maintaining both price stability and high employment. It is a sign of how far right the Republican Party has moved that this latter goal has now become controversial…While some Republicans have introduced legislation to remove employment from the mandate, political prudence has kept them from putting it on the floor. Blaming Obama because unemployment has not fallen fast enough is hard enough in the face of the numbers, without explicitly repudiating a national pro-jobs goal. Instead, they seek its de facto elimination by denouncing any actions the Fed takes to execute it as not only mistaken but illegitimate.” — from “The Republican War on Wages” by former Rep. Barney Frank.
Silver spooner Jeb Bush says Americans, who are already working an average of 47 hours per week, according to the Gallup poll, should work “longer hours.” Oliver Willis tweets in response: “yeah. im gonna need you to come in on the wknd. me? no, going to the family compound for some r+r.”


Sargent: Dems’ Edge with Latino Voters Formidable, But…

So “Is the overwhelming advantage that Democrats appear to be building among Latinos durable? Or could it prove far more ephemeral than it appears?” Greg Sargent addresses the question at The Plum Line and observes”

…Can Democrats count on the 2016 GOP presidential ticket re-running Mitt Romney’s historically bad performance among Latino voters? Or could a Jeb Bush (or, less likely in my view, Marco Rubio) general election candidacy whittle away at the Dem edge among those voters and reverse gains that had seemed to be hardening? Folks with long memories will recall that George W. Bush successfully pulled that reversal off in 2000. Couldn’t that happen again?…This is one of the big questions of 2016, and its answer could be key to the campaign’s outcome.”

Thanks, in part, to recent Repubican bungling and indecision, Sargent sees Democrats in good position to win a healthy majority of Latino voters in 2016.

The case for Dem optimism has been fortified by Donald Trump, who in recent days has been spraying inflammatory quotes about immigrants around like a garden sprinkler. It’s true that a number of GOP candidates have condemned his remarks. But as Michael Gerson details, Republicans still appear locked in a debate over the fundamental underlying question of whether their route to the White House lies in pumping up the white vote in the Rust Belt (a strategy perhaps foreshadowed by Scott Walker’s move to the right on immigration) or in broadening their appeal beyond their demographic comfort zone (a strategy that Jeb Bush has urged on the party).
An additional reason for Dem optimism: Some Republicans are reportedly skeptical that the party should bother focusing its energy on nominating a candidate who might appeal to Latinos, on the grounds that those voters agree with Democrats on many issues, so being pro-immigration reform (as Jeb is) won’t be enough anyway

Sargent cautions, however, that there is a possible GOP presidential campaign ticket which might take a big enough bite out of the Democrats’ edge — “a GOP ticket that includes Bush and Nevada governor Brian Sandoval as vice president.” Further, adds Sargent, “Sandoval won a third of the Latino vote in his 2010 race, despite striking a hard-ish line on immigration, from which he has since backed off. Sandoval is relatively young. A Bush-Sandoval ticket would be led by a man with a Mexican wife and Latino-American children, and backed up by a man of Mexican descent…”
Sargent quotes progressive political strategist Simon Rosenberg:

“While the Democratic advantage today is significant, what we don’t know is what happens with an historically Hispanic and Spanish friendly GOP ticket of, let’s say, Bush and Sandoval. One Bush already used a smart Hispanic strategy to get to the White House. Given that, Democrats should be anything but confident and complacent right now. They need to be doing more, now, to make it harder for any GOP ticket to dig out of the hole Trump and others have dug for the GOP.”

Always wise to prepare for any game-changers. For now, however, Sargent concludes, “So, yes, perhaps Republicans have moved so far to the right on immigration that the party can’t conceivably re-run the 2000 Bush immigration strategy, or perhaps even reconstituting that strategy wouldn’t be enough to reverse GOP losses among Latinos at this point.”


‘Rules’ for Covering Hillary Clinton Reveal Disturbing Bias

From Jonathan Allen’s post, “Confessions of a Clinton reporter: The media’s 5 unspoken rules for covering Hillary” at Vox.com:

The Clinton rules are driven by reporters’ and editors’ desire to score the ultimate prize in contemporary journalism: the scoop that brings down Hillary Clinton and her family’s political empire. At least in that way, Republicans and the media have a common interest.
I understand these dynamics well, having co-written a book that demonstrated how Bill and Hillary Clinton used Hillary’s time at State to build the family political operation and set up for their fourth presidential campaign. That is to say, I’ve done a lot of research about the Clintons’ relationship with the media, and experienced it firsthand. As an author, I felt that I owed it to myself and the reader to report, investigate, and write with the same mix of curiosity, skepticism, rigor, and compassion that I would use with any other subject. I wanted to sell books, of course. But the easier way to do that — proven over time — is to write as though the Clintons are the purest form of evil. The same holds for daily reporting. Want to drive traffic to a website? Write something nasty about a Clinton, particularly Hillary.
As a reporter, I get sucked into playing by the Clinton rules. This is what I’ve seen in my colleagues, and in myself.

Quite an extraordinary admission, that. Here are the five “rules”:


Political Strategy Notes

In connection with the Trump dust-up, Marcus Brenton makes a compelling argument at the Sacramento Bee that Latino consumer power is a more mighty force at this juncture than Latino political power. “Latinos were only 15.4 percent of California voters in 2014, Romero said. Of course, voter turnout was awful in 2014 – it’s usually lower for all groups during midterm elections. But in the previous midterm cycle, Latinos were 16.7 percent of voters…”In the Texas race for governor, Democrat Wendy Davis won the Latino vote 55 percent to 44 percent but lost the election to Republican Greg Abbott,” wrote Jens Manuel Krogstad and Mark Hugo Lopez for the Pew Research Center. “In Florida, Gov. Rick Scott won re-election despite losing the Hispanic vote to Democrat Charlie Crist by a margin of 38 percent to 58 percent, according to the state exit poll. That’s a marked decline from 2010, when 50 percent of Hispanics voted for Scott, and from 2006, when the Latino vote was split 49 percent to 49 percent between the two parties,” Krogsad and Lopez wrote…The Nielsen Company recently published a study showing that the average age of Latinos in America is 27, meaning they have more years of prime purchasing power than any other group…But if these consumers don’t find their ways to the polls, they will never realize their true power to affect change…Focusing on the numbers, it is clear that Latino purchasing power is a force in American culture – one that caused those big companies to move away from Trump for fear of offending customers.”
At The week Paul Waldman’s “Donald Trump is a complete lunatic on immigration. But he’s no crazier than much of the GOP” puts Trump’s Latino-bashing in perspective: “A Pew poll from last month asked people whether they thought that “Immigrants today are a burden on our country because they take our jobs, housing, and health care,” or that “Immigrants today strengthen our country because of their hard work and talents.” Republicans preferred the first statement by 63-27, while Democrats chose the second statement by 62-32.”
Here’s an encouraging post by Murphthesurf3 at Daily Kos: “A GOP strategist, columnist at the Houston Chronicle who goes by the handle GOPLifer, Chris Ladd, has declared that the week of the Midterm Elections “was a dark week for Republicans, and for everyone who wants to see America remain the world’s most vibrant, most powerful nation.”…In a careful analysis, Ladd builds a case: The Midterms of 2014 demonstrate the continuation of a 20 year old trend. Republicans are disappearing from the competitive landscape at the national level where the population is the largest utilizing a declining electoral base of aging, white, and rural voters. As a result no GOP candidate on the horizon has a chance at the White House in 2016 and the chance of holding the Senate beyond 2016 is vanishingly small.”
Here’s why pundits who jabber about “social issues” are probably wasting your time.
Peter Grier’s Monitor post “Honey, we shrunk the undecided voters” notes that “At the beginning of President Obama’s reelection campaign about 20 percent of voters overall were persuadable, since they were either undecided or committed to a candidate other than Mr. Obama or Mitt Romney, according to John Sides and Lynn Vavreck, another pair of political science professors…Mr. Sides and Ms. Vavreck then followed this cohort of the undecided through the ups and downs of the campaign. They found that dramatic gaffes made little difference to these voters, as the miscues were lost amid the tsunami of general campaign coverage…Then came the kicker: In November, almost half of the persuadable voters didn’t vote at all. Those that did vote, split. About half went for Obama, and half for Mr. Romney.”
Jamelle Bouie has an interesting argument at Slate.com, “Why Hillary Clinton Should Go Full Nerd: The Democratic front-runner should offer voters her authentic, geeky self.”
In his New York Times op-ed “The Democrats’ Fractured Views on Trade,” Vikas Bajas explains: “…Both sides assign far too much importance to individual trade agreements, pro or con….The economic gains from the agreement will most likely be modest. The most frequently cited study on the impact of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, by the economists Peter Petri, Michael Plummer and Fan Zhai, says it will boost gross domestic product in the United States by 0.4 percent by 2025 — hardly a significant economic stimulus. Economists who are more skeptical of trade deals say the income gain could be even smaller and would mostly benefit people at the top of the income distribution…The way to shore up the economy and expand job creation is to make investments in public goods, like transportation systems, better housing, stronger schools and skills training, especially for the most disadvantaged Americans.”
Both major political parties will likely spend considerable time, energy and verbiage trying to paint the opposition as “the party of the past” in 2016. At The Plum Line Greg Sargent explains why Democrats will have the edge on issues in this contest of memes, while Republicans will probably focus on the Democratic nominee’s “longevity.”
After spending a weekend in Blue Ridge, GA, I was somewhat surprised to see that a huge Confederate battle flag usually seen above a gas station on the main highway had been taken down and replaced by an American flag, perhaps for the Independence Day weekend. But there were lots of pick-up trucks flying the Confederate battle flag, driven by young men, who I gather were being egged on by local reactionary ideologues. But most of the people on the street, locals and visitors alike, seemed bored or indifferent about all of the flag fuss. Mary Francis Berry, former chairwoman of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, has a good article on the subject, “The Confederate Flag is Just a Distraction.” putting it all into sensible context. Yes, take it down from all government facilities. But don’t let the issue become a substitute for needed racial justice reforms.


Ferrera’s Open Letter Clarifies GOP’s Trump Problem

“America Ferrera: Thank You, Donald Trump!”, Lauren Moraski’s CBS News report on the actress’s perceptive open letter on Trump’s Mexican-bashing at HuffPo, should provide cause for concern among smarter GOP strategists. As Moraski quotes Ferrera:

“You’ve said some pretty offensive things about Latino immigrants recently, and I think they’re worth addressing. Because, you know, this is the United States of America, where I have a right to speak up even if I’m not a billionaire. Isn’t that awesome?” she wrote.
“Anyway, I heard what you said about the kind of people you think Latino immigrants are — people with problems, who bring drugs, crime and rape to America. While your comments are incredibly ignorant and racist, I don’t want to spend my time chastising you. I’ll leave that to your business partners like Univision and NBC, who have the power to scold you where it hurts. Instead, I’m writing to say thank you!”
“You see, what you just did with your straight talk was send more Latino voters to the polls than several registration rallies combined!” the former “Ugly Betty” star wrote in a blog post published Thursday, adding, “Remarks like yours will serve brilliantly to energize Latino voters and increase turnout on election day against you and any other candidate who runs on a platform of hateful rhetoric.”

Ferrera then provides an instructive lesson in political math for the clueless tycoon:

Do you know why that’s such a big deal, Donald? Because Latinos are the largest, youngest and fastest-growing constituency in the United States of America. That’s right! You are running for President in a country where the Latino population grew by over 49 percent from 2000-2012, while the rest of the country grew by 5.8 percent. What’s more, we are the future. The median age of the average Latino is 27 years old, compared to 42 years old for white Americans. In case you need a translation, that means there are a whole lot of Americans who are Latino and have the right to vote. And, we’re not going anywhere.

With his remarks stereotyping immigrants of Mexican origin as criminals, drug smugglers and rapists, the tone-deaf Trump crossed the line from silly gasbag to dangerous demagogue. Other Republican presidential candidates have hinted at similar stereotypes, albeit with less blustering stupidity. GOP leaders are apparently divided on how to respond, and the more they equivocate, the worse for them.
No matter. Ferrera is surely right that Trump’s comments could swell Latino voter registration, and that alone is very bad news for all Republicans. Once they enter the polls, the GOP’s 2016 prospects head further south.


Marcotte: ‘Ralph Nader’s Dishonest, Sexist Rant Against Hillary Clinton’

From Amanda Marcotte’s “Ralph Nader’s Dishonest, Sexist Rant Against Hillary Clinton” at Talking Points Memo:

Nineties nostalgia is cute when it’s all about overalls and Nicki Minaj sampling “Baby Got Back,” but Ralph Nader is taking it too far, by trying to revive his all-too-successful late ’90s campaign to convince huge numbers of American liberals that there is no meaningful difference between Republicans and Democrats.
In a recent interview with Larry King for Ora.TV, Nader launched a rather scurrilous accusation of secret Republicanism at Hillary Clinton that recalled his similar efforts against Bill Clinton and Al Gore in the ’90s, only this time he added a sexist kicker to it. King asked Nader about recent accusations that Nader has lobbed at Clinton, namely that she evinces a “shocking militarism that is a result of trying to overcompensate for her gender by being more aggressive and macho,” and that she’s “reversing the tradition of women of peace.”

Since the Florida mess in 2000, Nader has pitched nonsense like a left-lbertarian alliance, which neither side wants, and he has gushed positively about Rep. Ron Paul’s isolationist credo, despite Paul’s racist newsletter and opposition to racial justice. Further, adds Marcotte:

Nader talks about politicians from both parties. He concedes that Jeb Bush is just like his brother and calls him a “corporatist and a militarist,” but he elides talking about specifics. For Democrats, however, his language gets aggressive and colorful. He outright accuses Obama of being worse than George W. Bush, Same story with Clinton: To watch this interview, you’d think that the country is much more likely to get into a war under Clinton than under Jeb Bush,
Nader is playing the same game on domestic policy, too. He tacitly admits that Clinton might be able to do things like raise the minimum wage or improve the social safety net, but immediately shifts gears back to trying to convince you that there’s no real difference between Republicans and Democrats on economic issues,
It’s clear that Nader is really gunning for a rerun of the 2000 election. He is still pushing the toxic narrative that the Democrat and the Republican are indistinguishable, with heavy insinuation that the Democrat may even be worse. Even if Nader doesn’t run–here’s hoping!–that narrative is a godsend for Republicans hoping to chip off votes from the Democrats. If liberals are discouraged from thinking that a vote for the Democrats matters, they’re not going to vote, which will help the Republican, likely Jeb Bush, coast to victory.

Many believe that the fallout from Nader’s 2000 foray into presidential politics includes two wars, a depression, the extremist conquest of the GOP and the destruction of countless norms of democracy. Enough Nader already.