Now might be a good time for Democrats engaged in the interminable globalist vs. nationaists trade argument to give it a rest and think about a reasonable compromise that can unify Dems and advance our trade policy to a more beneficial level. At In These Times, Leon Fink, editor of the journal Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas, has a timely post on the topic, “On Trade, Our Choices Aren’t Only Xenophobic Nationalism Or Neoliberal Globalization.” As Fink frames the argument,

Few issues are receiving a more insipid—and thus more harmful—treatment in our public discourse than world trade. Along with immigration, “free trade” is now the foremost symbol of a supposed either/or choice between globalism and nationalism.

“Globalists” generally hail the liberal marketplace as the engine of economic prosperity and assail its critics as uneducated and irrational isolationists, while “nationalists” instinctively identify trade with economic decline (or at least the loss of good working-class jobs), rising inequality and a general loss of control over the future.

…Absent a move towards what we might call progressive internationalism, we are forced to choose between “globalists,” heedless of the consequences of development for those outside the professional and financial classes, or “nationalists,” suspicious of and hostile towards the world beyond our borders. Neither posture holds out much prospect for economic renewal, either at home or abroad.

…This framework risks closing off our best possibilities for building a progressive economic future. We need a new paradigm.

Fink reviews the effects of trade agrrements, from Breton Woods, to Smoot-Hawley and NAFTA agreements, leading up to the current conflict over TPP. He pegs the still-central argument as “how best to tackle the negative effects of globalization without upsetting the entire applecart of world trade?” and notes, “Oddly, most other problems of world economic integration have found solutions through compromise, whereas trade has remained the province of extreme either/or.”

Perhaps the “extreme either/or” character of the TPP debate is symptomatic of the hyper-polarization of the 2016 political environment. Fink reminds his readers that it wasn’t so long ago that international economic policy conflicts were resolved through well-reasoned compromises, like mining and fishing territorial agreements, or IMF/World Bank protection of vulnerable currencies. However, explains Fink,

…There is no such movement towards an adoption of mutually-agreed international principles on matters of trade. In a politically suffocating manner, one is either pro-free trade (most big business and most Clinton-Bush-Obama policies), anti-free trade (Donald Trump with a proposed 45% tariff on China) or stumbling in the middle (pro-then-anti-TPP Hillary Clinton). The Trans-Pacific Partnership, in particular, attempts to overcome First World skepticism with side agreements on labor, affecting workers in Vietnam, Malaysia, and Brunei, but the record of enforcement for such guarantees is spotty at best.

The options here present a silly, self-defeating set of choices and one that both workers and consumers in the United States and Europe need quickly to transcend.

Fink calls for a new world framework which establishes “Not just financial stability, but the regulation of trade and debt” and “Global exchanges” that “yield equitable employment as well as enhanced bottom lines.” He urges that “NAFTA or TPP-type agreements” should provide “a step ladder of wage increases in the cheaper-labor countries as well as plans for displaced workers in the higher-wage countries before approving massive shake ups. In return, poor countries could count on significant debt relief.”

Instead of drifting into hyper-partisan camps bellowing against the evils of globalism or protectionism, Democrats should light a path forward to a new era of mutually-beneficial trade agreements that protect workers and transcend ideological extremes. Republicans are ideologically incapable of providing the needed leadership. For Democrats, it could be the pivotal compromise that wins the support of millions of working-class families and ensures a stable majority well into the future.

The following article by Democratic strategist Mike Lux, author of The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came to Be, is cross-posted from HuffPo:

The problem for a campaign and political party where you seem to be way ahead is the tendency to get cocky and begin to coast. There is great danger in such a moment, especially for a party in need for a historically big victory, as Democrats are right now. Now is the time to work with even greater urgency and aggressiveness to win this campaign, and hopefully win it by a big enough margin that we crush Trumpism and throw it into the dustbin of history. But right now we are at a particularly dangerous moment. Democrats should take nothing for granted and work our hearts out to make damn sure this moment and this potentially historic victory does not slip away from us.

Before talking more about 2016, let me go back in time and remind everyone of some presidential elections in past years. In 1976, Jimmy Carter came out of the two conventions with a huge lead, more than 20 points in many polls. Jerry Ford was burdened with the residue of Watergate, his pardon of Nixon, and an especially nasty recession over the previous couple of years. Had Carter won that race by a big margin, building on the Republican wipeout in 1974, Democrats would have had enough votes and momentum to easily pass sweeping legislation on health care and labor law, and change the political dynamics in the country for a long time to come. Instead the Carter campaign played it safe and coasted, and the lead kept shrinking. In the end, Carter won by only two percentage points. Had a very close Ohio result gone the other way, he would have lost the race entirely. There were no coat tails, no political momentum, and Carter’s early mistakes led to a very weak presidency. In 1988, Dukakis led by 18 points after his convention, with voters tired of a lack of pay raises and massive deficits over the last 8 years. Dukakis took a long August vacation, didn’t respond to the infamous Willie Horton attacks, was awful in the debates, and ended up losing by six points. And in 2000, Gore came out of the conventions up by five points, and I remember Democrats in D.C. being surprised when I said it would be a close race coming down to a few votes in a few states. But Gore was weak in the debates, Karl Rove ran a very effective campaign, and we end up with the Supreme Court giving the election to Bush.

Presidential races can change in a heartbeat or alternatively go slip sliding away. An over-confident campaign can lose its edge, become too cautious and be reluctant to aggressively answer attacks, all of which combine to gradually cause the campaign to lose momentum. In the 1992 Clinton campaign (which, full disclosure, I was a part of), there was never any chance of us losing our edge because we had all just lived through the horror of watching an over-confident and slow to respond Dukakis let his big August lead be reversed. And I have a feeling that Hillary Clinton, being the steely competitor that she is, won’t let her team get over-confident. But the entire Democratic party, from elected officials to grassroots activists, are going to need to, in the old Obama campaign’s signature phrase, stay fired up and ready to go. Never forget that in politics, it is the aggressor who usually wins. Especially in an unpredictable, anti-establishment year, where the pundits and the polls have been proven wrong repeatedly, we must make sure we don’t let Trump, the ultimate unpredictable anti-establishment guy, get a second life.

At the same time we need to fight with the same urgency as if we were in a dead heat or even a little behind, Democrats should be working hard to create the biggest, most sweeping wave election possible. This might seem like a contradiction but it isn’t. Both scenarios demand that we keep our edge and stay aggressive; both scenarios require that we leave no stone unturned to get out every vote possible and persuade every swing voter we can. In fact, I would go so far as to argue that the two most likely scenarios in this election are a Democratic wave and a narrow Trump victory — the latter coming if Hillary’s campaign loses their edge and aggressiveness, and if Democrats in general don’t put enough resources and passion into turning out the Democratic base vote.

Here’s the other thing: Democrats should work toward a wave election with a great deal of urgency, because we are in big need of one. Two of the last three elections have been massive Republican wave elections up and down the line, giving them the biggest margin in the House since the 1920s and most of the governorships and state legislative chambers. We desperately need to build a counter-wave to make up at least some of those numbers, especially considering that off-year turnout in 2018 isn’t going to be demographically as favorable as in a presidential year. And think about how much more Hillary and Democrats can get done if we get a big enough wave to retake the House as well as the Senate, which is a lot more possible in a wave election than conventional wisdom would allow. To actually have at least two years where we could try to pass some good legislation and a decent budget rather than constantly dealing with Republican threats to shut down the government would be a pretty phenomenal thing. One more note: if this turns into a close race, Trump is going to stoke up the “we were robbed” theme and we could have ugliness and violence in this country not seen since the Civil War. If we win big, on the other hand, Trump is humiliated, and Trumpism goes into history’s dustbin.

Such a big year up and down the ticket is in fact made possible by this year’s unique Trump dynamic. It is important to understand the recent history of wave elections: Republicans have been able to keep from losing as many seats in a wave election against them as Democrats have because they have maintained party unity and focused on turning out their base vote. In the 1994 election, Republicans won 52 House seats; in 2010, they won 63. In the 2014 blowout, the only reason they didn’t pick up those kinds of numbers in the House was because they had already won so many two cycles before, and hadn’t lost all that many in 2012, but in statewide races and races further down the ballot they dominated us. By contrast, Democrats only picked up 31 seats in 2006 and 20 more in 2008, both very good years up and down the ballot for Dems. The reason that Democrats tend to get blown out in down years is because they have historically shown much more disunity in bad years, running from their president and their party’s historic message and platform. The result is the Democratic base turnout tends to be abysmal in those kinds of years. Republicans in Democratic leaning years, on the other hand, have doubled down on the historic anti-government, anti-tax, traditional values rhetoric of their party in order to keep their base from deserting them, and thus been able to cut their losses — in 2006, for example, we actually lost more House close races than we won, missing our chance at a much bigger wave.

This year, the Trump factor turns this traditional GOP unity on its head. As Glen Bolger, a Republican pollster working on many of this year’s races asked in an important NYT article,

Do we run the risk of depressing our base by repudiating the guy, or do we run the risk of being tarred and feathered by independents for not repudiating him?… We’re damned if we do and damned if we don’t.

This dynamic gives Democrats a huge opportunity if we only keep our edge and press our advantage. So what does this mean in practical terms? For local progressive activists and Democratic Party people, we shouldn’t only be focused on beating up on Trump. We have a genuine opportunity to win a lot of elections — congressional, state legislative, local offices — that we might not win in another kind of year. We should be doubling down on getting out the vote and energizing the Rising American Electorate (RAE): young people, unmarried women, and people of color around those local races while we keep reminding them of how important it is to beat Trump.

For national party people and the Clinton campaign, an election like this where we are running ahead means a couple of big things:

First, double and triple down on voter registration and getting out the vote. We don’t need ever more TV ads in this environment; we just need to stay on the air at respectable levels in the target states to make sure Trump isn’t coming back. What we do need is the biggest investment ever in making sure every Democratic leaning voter and constituency makes it in to vote, especially in the face of all the voter suppression the Republicans have done and will continue to do. We could still lose this election if voter turnout is weak among the RAE in key states, but if we can expand the RAE vote to 2008 levels, we could deliver a serious sweep for Democrats.

Second, expand the map. When you are leading nationwide by several points, you have the opportunity to force the other side to play defense in all kinds of states they don’t normally have to worry about, and we should press our advantage in states that are suddenly in play. In 1992, I was on the Clinton campaign’s targeting committee, and we forced the Bush campaign to spend tons of money holding us off in states like Texas and Arizona that we were unlikely to win. One example: in Texas, we spent $400,000 on advertising, a few hundred thousand more on Latino and African-American voter registration and GOTV, and that modest amount made the numbers close enough that the Bush people ended up spending $27 million holding us off. More importantly, we helped down ballot Democrats win crucial contests they wouldn’t have otherwise won.

Right now, Hillary Clinton leads Trump or is very close in traditionally Republican states like Georgia, Arizona, North Carolina, Indiana, Missouri, even Utah. Spending a modest amount of money right now in those states on voter registration and digital media to keep them in play for at least a while will force the Republicans to scramble, dilute their resources, and pay dividends down the road in terms of potential down ballot pick-ups.

We need a big win in 2016. We can’t afford to take this election for granted, and we can’t afford to let the opportunity for a sweeping victory to pass us by — we need to do everything in our power to keep aggressively pushing for every possible Democratic vote in every race.

In his Wall St. Journal op-ed, Ruy Teixeira explains “Why the Democrats Have Turned Left.” In addition to the demographic transformation that is profoundly changing American politics, public skepticism is growing about our economic system’s failure to deliver economic progress. Teixeira adds, “Mrs. Clinton has repeatedly said that during her first 100 days she would call upon Congress to dramatically increase spending on roads, bridges and other public works, including to provide universal broadband and build a clean energy grid. Her $275 billion program, if implemented, would represent the greatest investment in American infrastructure since the development of the interstate highway system in the 1950s.”

Ed Kilgore observes in his New York Magazine post, “Trump No Longer Kicking Ass With the White Working Class,”: “As the New York Times’ Nate Cohn noted on July 25, Trump was winning white working-class voters at a better than a two-to-one clip in some surveys (66-29 in a July CNN poll, 65-29 in a July ABC/Washington Post poll) …That could be changing. A new NBC/Wall Street Journal survey showed his lead among non-college-educated white voters drooping to 49-36. Similarly, McClatchy/Marist pegs it at 46-31. These are not world-beating numbers. And you have to wonder: If Trump is losing his special appeal to the voting category that has long been his campaign’s signature “base,” where is he supposed to make that up?”

A downer convention of historic proportions for the GOP: “Gallup has been tracking the response from voters to conventions since 1984, and the Republican National Convention of 2016 was the first for which more people said it made them less likely to back the candidate.” – from Philip Bump’s post “The new Post-ABC poll shows just how badly Donald Trump blew his convention” at The Fix.

According to a new poll by Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, conducted July 9-20 for the Black Youth Project at the University of Chicago, “Twenty-four percent of young blacks, 23 percent of young Latinos, and 19 percent of young Asian-Americans live in gun owning households, though just 10 percent of Latinos and Asian-Americans and 11 percent of African-Americans say they own one personally…Yet more than half of Americans age 18 to 30 say it’s more important to control gun ownership than to protect gun rights. That includes 76 percent of young Asian-Americans, 63 percent of African-Americans, and 60 percent of Latinos. Young whites are divided, with 53 percent saying it’s more important to protect gun rights and 46 percent saying it’s more important to control gun ownership.” (M.O.E. 3.8 percent).

The legality of a major Illinois voter suppression law is on deck, reports Rich Miller at Crain’s Chicago Business.

Adam Eichen and Bob Vallier report at billmoyers.com, via salon.com: “The approximately 8 million American expats make up a voting bloc nearly double that of Washington state, the 13th most populous state in the nation. Were they to constitute a state, they would have about 14 electoral votes. Americans abroad are students and retirees, military and diplomatic personnel, people on short- and long-term job assignments, Americans with foreign spouses and their children…This year, DA’s[Democrats Abroad’s] global primary had record turnout. The 34,570 voters who cast ballots exceeded the number of Democrats who showed up for state party presidential caucuses this year in Nebraska, Idaho, Alaska, Hawaii and Wyoming, according to votes compiled by University of Florida turnout expert Michael McDonald’s United States Election Project...Expat votes often make the critical difference in close contests across the country…Just ask Sens. Al Franken (D-MN) and Jon Tester (D-MT) — both of whom were elected by slim margins in 2008 and 2012, respectively. The number of votes they received from abroad exceeded their margins of victory in their first Senate races.”

From Bill Weissert’s AP report, “Divided America: Texas Hispanic Voting Bloc Largely Untapped“: “Texas is home to 10.2 million Hispanics, 19 percent of the country’s Latino population. Excluding noncitizens and those under 18, about 5 million Texas Hispanics will be eligible to vote in the 2016 presidential election, but less than half may register and fewer still are likely to cast ballots…No Democrat has won statewide office here since 1994, the country’s longest political losing streak…A 2014 Gallup poll found that Texas Hispanics prefer Democrats to Republicans by a 19 percentage-point margin. Nationwide, Democrats enjoy a more comfortable 30 percentage-point advantage.”

The latest Sabato’s Crystal Ball electoral college forecast: 347 D to 191 R, basically unchanged from March 31. Sabato adds, “We’ve made modest changes since: Pennsylvania has morphed from Likely Democratic to Leans Democratic, while Virginia — after Tim Kaine was added to the Democratic ticket — went the other way from Leans Democratic to Likely Democratic. Arizona and Georgia went from Likely Republican to Leans Republican, and usually reliable Utah from Safe Republican to Likely Republican…Today we add one further alteration: We are moving Colorado from Leans Democratic to Likely Democratic. This also does not affect the Electoral College total, though it does push a competitive state further toward Clinton.”

ACORN founder Wade Rathke has a messaging suggestion that taps the positive “invest in America” flip side of whatever traction Trump gets with the working-class as a result of his anti-trade posture: “T-shirts saying “Build Infrastructure, Vote Hillary” may not seem like a catchy slogan, but it might wrong foot the Republicans and catch them in the bind of their own base, including the angry and entitled white voters, who want to see this kind of economic interference that delivers growth and visible progress.” Might make a good fall campaign slogan and bumper sticker as well.

In the wake of Trump’s meltdown in the polls, buzz is building across the trad media, as well as the internets, that Trump may bail. The argument boils down to ‘Trump will quit because his ego is too big to cope with a huge rout’ vs. ‘Trump won’t quit because his ego is too big.’  At Politico Steven Shepard posts on an “insider poll” of GOP activists in 11 swing states, which found that “70 percent, said they want Trump to drop out of the race and be replaced by another Republican candidate — with many citing Trump’s drag on Republicans in down-ballot races. But those insiders still think it’s a long-shot Trump would actually end his campaign and be replaced by another GOP candidate.”

But Michael Tomasky warns that “It’s Too Early for Liberals to Gloat About Trump” at The Daily Beast, and observes “It’s a good week to gloat if you’re a liberal, but gloat weeks are exactly the weeks that make me a little nervous.” Tomasky advises, “that that’s how to beat Trump: get under his skin. Tick him off. Unnerve him. Bait him, goad him, see what he’ll say…He has grudges and resentments and a constant need to be seen as dominating…feed his grudges in the hope that he’ll say something offensive”

NYT columnist Paul Krugman warns of the perils of the Clinton campaign tilting too far to the right to accommodate Republican refugees:”There’s absolutely no evidence that tax cuts for the rich and radical deregulation, which is what right-wingers mean when they talk about pro-growth policies, actually work, or that strengthening the social safety net does any harm…Trumpism is basically a creation of the modern conservative movement, which used coded appeals to prejudice to make political gains, then found itself unable to rein in a candidate who skipped the coding…If some conservatives find this too much and bolt the party, good for them, and they should be welcomed into the coalition of the sane. But they can’t expect policy concessions in return. When Dr. Frankenstein finally realizes that he has created a monster, he doesn’t get a reward. Mrs. Clinton and her party should stay the course.”

Well, this is disappointing — when the largest organization representing senior citizens makes deals with an organization which develops state-level legislation that screws consumers and suppresses voting.

At ThinkProgress Bryce Covert spotlights “The States That Do Nothing To Help Working Parents” according to a new report from the National Partnership for Women & Families. The 12 states that earned an “F” grade are depicted in black.

At The New York Times Leah Wright Regueur, author of “The Loneliness of the Black Republican: Pragmatic Politics and the Pursuit of Power,” drills down on the question, “Why Can’t the GOP Get Real with Black Voters?,” and notes of the Republican convention “Of the 2,472 delegates, only 18 were black. It is the lowest percentage on record, lower even than 1964, the year the party selected Barry Goldwater as its presidential nominee.”

“Clinton showed up in small factories in places the new American economy has all but forgotten: Johnstown, Pa.; Pittsburgh; Youngstown, Ohio; places where a guy straight out of high school used to be able to support his wife with a mining or manufacturing job and even give his kids a shot to move up in the world. And these white voters have even been the focus in the diverse swing states of Colorado and Nevada, where Clinton has been fundraising and making public appearances late this week.” – from Kasie  Hunt’s “Hillary Clinton Looks to Win Over White Working-Class Male Voters” at nbc.com.

Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson, who will be on the ballot in every state, jockeys for a place in the upcomming debates. “The eligibility requirements, set by the nonpartisan Commission on Presidential Debates, state that a candidate has to hit 15 percent in five national surveys a few weeks before the debate to earn a place on the stage,” according to Josh Katz at The Upshot.

And yet another opportunity squandered?

There’s been a lot of argument since the Democratic convention as to whether in her acceptance speech Hillary Clinton “pivoted to the center” and potentially abandoned the progressive voters she appealed to earlier. I don’t think so, and I discussed this issue at New York:

Between the first and last days of the Democratic National Convention last week, there was a much-discussed change of tone. Monday was all about progressivism and unity between Clinton and Sanders supporters. Thursday was about the flag, and national security, and chants of USA! USA!

Now, it’s not surprising that folks with Bern marks on their psyches — who weren’t totally convinced by Monday’s unity display — got the willies from Thursday’s rhetoric. OMG, some doubtless thought. Here’s the Clintons triangulating again, and “pivoting to the center.” Progressives could be abandoned entirely by Labor Day!

Was there actually a contradiction between Clinton’s progressive gestures and outreach to Republicans in Philly? Is it possible to energize the base while persuading swing voters at the same time, without betraying somebody’s trust?

To answer that question, it’s important first to take a look at the nature of Clinton’s “outreach to Republicans.” Andrew Prokop put it well at Vox:

“If you look closer, it turns out that Clinton and the Democrats are indeed embracing the symbolism and tropes that the right has loved — but they really aren’t making policy concessions to win them over … Indeed, all of this imagery and rhetoric was deployed in service of an agenda that is remarkably liberal — at least when it comes to domestic and economic policy.”

Even on national-security policy, notes Prokop, Clinton didn’t really “pivot to the center”; she stayed pretty much where she has always been. But the heart of her persuasion technique was not about convincing swing voters she was something they did not think she was; it was about convincing them — and most definitely including Republicans — that Donald Trump was exactly what they feared he was.

In this respect, Clinton deployed a technique I used to call “Barbara Boxer centrism” (named after the famously combative liberal senator from California), wherein a politician “seizes the center” not by occupying it with any surprising or “moderate” policy proposals, but by pushing their opponents out of the center by constantly labeling them as extremist. It just so happens that Clinton’s opponent is an exceptionally good foil for this kind of attack. And so she does not really have to choose between “left” and “center,” or between base mobilization and swing-voter persuasion. He’s dangerously crazy is a message that serves both purposes equally.

You cannot get much better than that.

At Brookings William A. Galston and Elaine Kamarck explain why “Trump’s acceptance speech failed to broaden his support“:

Donald Trump faced two main political challenges in his acceptance speech—unifying a badly divided party and expanding his support beyond the passionate minority that has rallied to his cause.

How did he do?

On the first challenge, pretty well. For the first time in weeks, he didn’t attack other Republicans, although it must have been tempting to say something about Ted Cruz. In fact, he has flipped his campaign in recent weeks to focus on security and law and order issues that tend to bring Republicans together, and they dominated the first and longest part of the speech. He endorsed the policy concerns of the party’s major interest groups, including the NRA…Only the corporate and financial communities came away empty-handed.  The party of business could not have been happy about Trump’s repeated opposition to almost every trade deal that has been negotiated in the past quarter century—or his declaration that the era of multilateral trade agreements is over.

Turning to the second challenge, he and his warm-up acts did in fact reach out beyond the base…Perhaps the most surprising outreach came from Trump himself when he talked about protecting the LGBTQ community against Islamic terrorism after the hateful attack in Orlando. And then Trump followed up with  an unscripted comment meant to emphasize the point: “As a Republican, it is so nice to hear you cheering for what I just said.”

…Nonetheless, his Nixonian invocation of “law and order” gave no ground to the many African-Americans who experience contemporary policing as oppressive and unfair. His stated determination to enforce the law against illegal immigration could not have swayed the millions of Latinos whose families will be directly affected.

Galson and Kamarck add that “No one believes that Mr. Trump can win with 41 percent of the vote, even if the Libertarian and Green Party candidates do much better than ever before. So he needs to move some voters in groups not naturally inclined to back his candidacy.” Further,

The broadest question is whether Trump’s dark picture of a country under threat, in decline, and undermined by elite corruption is shared by a majority of his fellow-citizens.  While most Americans are frustrated, many fewer are as angry as were most of the Republican delegates in the hall.  Are the American people prepared to lurch from hope and change to fear and loathing?

Kamarck and Galston conclude that Trump’s speech “left Republicans more reassured and unified than they had been during the first three days of their convention” although he quickly reversed whatever good he did with his response to the Khan family and his refusal to endorse JohnMcCain or Paul Ryan’s for re-election.

In his analysis of Hillary Clinton’s Democratic convention speech, Galston said,

As Hillary Clinton came to the podium to deliver her acceptance speech, a well-run Democratic convention had already accomplished a number of important political tasks.  Careful preparation, especially the incorporation of platform planks that Bernie Sanders had pushed into the Party’s platform, helped heal the breach between Sanders’ supporters and the Clinton campaign.  Well-crafted speeches by leading Democrats laid out the stakes in this year’s election and sharpened the case against Donald Trump.

..Her task was to achieve a credible balance between continuity and change—to argue that President Obama created a firm foundation for the change we must build together during the next decade…Her second challenge was to drive a wedge between change in the abstract, which 7 in 10 Americans favor, and the kind of change Donald Trump is offering, which is ill-informed, misguided, and much too risky to be worth the gamble…Her third challenge, on which much ink has been spilled, was to begin the task of reversing negative perceptions of her character—most important, that she cannot be trusted…

…Her challenge was to make a virtue of necessity by underscoring the principles (and the faith) that have guided her public life.  This strategy could also help counter a related accusation, that she is a cold-blooded pragmatist, moved by burning ambition, who lacks a moral core and changes direction in response to shifting political winds.  In the end, trust rests on authenticity.

All very difficult challenges, but Clinton, Galston argues, did well with it:

It was not an oratorical masterpiece, but it was a sturdy, workmanlike presentation of who she is, how she thinks, and what kind of president she would be…She acknowledged being a public servant who has always been more comfortable with the “servant” rather than the “public” dimensions of her work.  She affirmed the obvious: she is a policy wonk who sweats the details, as she insisted a president should.  She set forth her guiding principles and quoted the Methodist credo.  She praised the accomplishments of the Obama-Biden administration while making it clear that she is far from satisfied with the status quo.

And she raised questions about Donald Trump that go to the core of his candidacy…In one of the speech’s most notable lines, she said that “A man you can bait with a tweet is not a man we can trust with nuclear weapons.”

“By itself, a single speech cannot solve a candidate’s problems,” concludes Galston. “But it can set a sense of direction and mark out a way forward.  Hillary Clinton’s acceptance speech was a good beginning—an honest presentation of self.  In that sense, it was completely authentic.  And authenticity is the basis of trust.”

All in all, both the Trump and Clinton convention speeches served the Democratic cause well enough, as Galston and Kamarch show. Trump’s meltdown since then has added momentum to Clinton’s candidacy, to the point where a Democratic landslide that could flip majority control of both houses of congress is no longer a distant dream. The most important decision Democratic strategists now face may now be  how to allocate resources between investing in House and Senate races.

A prominent member of the House Freedom Caucus, Rep. Tim Huelskamp (R-KS), lost in a primary on Tuesday. A lot of the immediate reaction made it sound like a nationally-driven counter-purge of a Tea Person by the Republican Establishment. I didn’t entirely agree, as I noted at New York:

[I]t is true that national groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Ricketts family super-pac fought a proxy war with Huelskamp’s allies in the Club for Growth and Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity in Kansas’s 1st congressional district.

But in a very real sense what Huelskamp’s defeat showed is that ideology does not always trump local factors, even in the ideological hothouse of the contemporary Republican Party. The endorsement that really lifted the challenger Roger Marshall to victory was probably one from the Kansas Farm Bureau.

Huelskamp’s district, which covers most of western Kansas, is dominated by farm and ranch interests; it famously has more cattle than people, and grows wheat, sorghum, sunflowers, and hay. So it mattered a great deal when Huelskamp, then a House freshman, was kicked off the Agriculture Committee for serial defiance of the GOP leadership. Even more eyebrows were raised when Huelskamp became one of just 12 House GOPers to vote against the last omnibus farm bill in 2013, partially because of its SNAP (food stamp) spending levels, but also because the whole bill included a lot of “corporate welfare.” The revolt against the farm bill by House tea-partyers struck at the very heart of the ancient urban-rural compact that supported agricultural programs deemed essential to places like the 1st congressional district of Kansas. In retrospect, it’s rather amazing Huelskamp survived as long as he did.

But there was another primarily local factor that contributed to Huelskamp’s demise: a backlash from Republican voters against the ideologues closely associated with Governor Sam Brownback, whose tax-cutting “experiment” in Kansas produced a fiscal disaster and a particular crisis in public education. In yesterday’s GOP primary, pro-Brownback state legislators lost ten of 16 contested seats; the Wichita Eagle called it a “brutal night for conservatives.” Reality matters, and if Tip O’Neill overstated things by saying “All politics is local,” it’s clear local issues do matter when they are in sharp conflict with ideology.

In many respects, the overriding story in Republican politics for a very long time has been the conquest of the party by conservatives who imposed a rigid ideology on themselves and others not just in the right-wing fever swamps of the Deep South or the Mountain West, but across the country. What’s happening in Kansas right now doesn’t indicate conservatives are losing their grip on the GOP; a stronger data point for that proposition would obviously be Donald Trump’s hostile takeover of the national ticket. But Kansas is showing there are limits to the power of ideology.

It’s about time.

Robert Kagan’s latest Washington Post column, “There is something very wrong with Donald Trump” merits a slow, serious read, especially by Trump’s fellow Republicans. Kagan, a senior Brookings fellow and Clinton supporter, explains:

One wonders if Republican leaders have begun to realize that they may have hitched their fate and the fate of their party to a man with a disordered personality. We can leave it to the professionals to determine exactly what to call it. Suffice to say that Donald Trump’s response to the assorted speakers at the Democratic National Convention has not been rational.

Why denigrate the parents of a soldier who died serving his country in Iraq? And why keep it going for four days? Why assail the record of a decorated general who commanded U.S. forces in Afghanistan? Why make fun of the stature of a popular former mayor of New York? Surely Trump must know that at any convention, including his own, people get up and criticize the opposition party’s nominee. They get their shots in, just as your party got its shots in. And then you move on to the next phase of the campaign. You don’t take a crack at every single person who criticized you. And you especially don’t pick fights that you can’t possibly win, such as against a grieving Gold Star mother or a general. It’s simply not in your interest to do so.

The fact that Trump could not help himself, that he clearly did, as he said, want to “hit” everyone who spoke against him at the Democratic convention, suggests that there really is something wrong with the man. It is not just that he is incapable of empathy. It is not just that he feels he must respond to every criticism he receives by attacking and denigrating the critic, no matter how small or inconsequential the criticism. If you are a Republican, the real problem, and the thing that ought to keep you up nights as we head into the final 100 days of this campaign, is that the man cannot control himself. He cannot hold back even when it is manifestly in his interest to do so. What’s more, his psychological pathologies are ultimately self-destructive…

Kagan, of course, is not the lone ranger in suggesting that Trump may be more than a little unhinged, and in a dangerous way. See here, here and here for example. “He must attack everyone who opposes him, even after he has defeated them,” Kagan continues. “He must continue talking about Texas Sen. Ted Cruz’s father, even after Cruz has thrown in the towel. He must humiliate New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, even after Christie has lain down before him.”

Kagan’s Fellow WaPo columnist Eugene Robinson has also observed Trump’s tantrum about the Democratic convention and commented that “he’s alarmingly thin-skinned. Referring to critics who spoke at the Democratic National Convention, Trump said Thursday that he wanted to “hit a number of those speakers so hard, their heads would spin.” And: “I was going to hit one guy in particular, a very little guy.” Trump made clear Friday on Twitter that he was talking about “ ‘Little’ Michael Bloomberg, who never had the guts to run for president.” (The bet here is that ‘Little Michael Bloomberg’ would likely flatten Trump in any such physical altercation).

Kagan doesn’t use the word. But millions of Trump-watchers must be thinking that this may be the first overtly sadistic presidential nominee of a major political party. Trump seems unmoved by criticism of his cruelty, or worse, maybe he likes it, since many sadists have a masochistic side. As Kagan adds, “he is unable to control his responses to criticism. He must double down every time, even if it means digging himself deeper and deeper into the hole.” Worse, adds Kagan,

And because it is a defect and not a tactic, it would continue to affect Trump’s behavior in the White House. It would determine how he dealt with other nations. It would determine how he dealt with critics at home. It would determine how he governed, how he executed the laws, how he instructed the law-enforcement and intelligence agencies under his command, how he dealt with the press, how he dealt with the opposition party and how he handled dissent within his own party. His personality defect would be the dominating factor in his presidency, just as it has been the dominating factor in his campaign. His ultimately self-destructive tendencies would play out on the biggest stage in the world, with consequences at home and abroad that one can barely begin to imagine. It would make him the closest thing the United States has ever had to a dictator, but a dictator with a dangerously unstable temperament that neither he nor anyone else can control.

Kagan believes that “his defects will destroy him before he reaches the White House. He will bring himself down, and he will bring the Republican Party and its leaders down with him.” It’s scant comfort, however, because an individual with such disturbing ‘character defects’ has risen as far atop one of the major political parties as has Trump, and that some horrific event, such as a terrorist attack, scandal or economic meltdown just might put him in charge as the leader of the world’s most powerful nation.

If Democrats needed a reason to reject complaisancy or overconfidence and get busy organizing a record GOTV effort, Kagan’s column is a good starter.

Just the headlines and links:

Donald Trump isn’t crazy

Air Force mother booed at Pence event

Donald Trump’s revisionist history of mocking a disabled reporter

From ‘Yes we can’ to ‘I alone can fix it’

Trump steers clear of the Khans, but finds other distractions: The GOP nominee attacks Hillary Clinton at a rally but interrupts himself with seemingly random thoughts and grudges.

Meet Trump’s latest political enemy: Fire marshals

Donald Trump’s praise for Vladimir Putin

America’s Electronic Voting Machines Are Scarily Easy Targets

Trump: Wind power ‘kills all your birds‘

Donald Trump’s Long, Fruitless Quest for Business in Russia

Harry Reid To Intel Community: Give Donald Trump Fake Briefings

Trump Defends Roger Ailes: ‘He Helped Those Women’

Trump boots baby from Virginia rally

In their New York Times article, “Donald Trump’s Draft Deferments: Four for College, One for Bad Feet,” Steve Eder and Dave Philipps report that during the Vietnam War era Trump:

…stood 6 feet 2 inches with an athletic build; had played football, tennis and squash; and was taking up golf. His medical history was unblemished, aside from a routine appendectomy when he was 10.

But after he graduated from college in the spring of 1968, making him eligible to be drafted and sent to Vietnam, he received a diagnosis that would change his path: bone spurs in his heels.

The diagnosis resulted in a coveted 1-Y medical deferment that fall, exempting him from military service as the United States was undertaking huge troop deployments to Southeast Asia, inducting about 300,000 men into the military that year.

The deferment was one of five Mr. Trump received during Vietnam. The others were for education.

Trump’s military deferrment history is not so different from that of many young men during the era. But Trump has called attention to himself with comments disparaging Sen. John McCain’s p.o.w. experience, explaining, “I like people who weren’t captured.”  He has also been criticized for disrespecting the grieving Khan family, who lost their son, Captain Humayun Khan, in the Iraq war.

As for Trump’s actual physical condition at the time, Philipps and Eder note,

Mr. Trump’s public statements about his draft experience sometimes conflict with his Selective Service records, and he is often hazy in recalling details.

In an interview with The New York Times last month, Mr. Trump said the bone spurs had been “temporary” — a “minor” malady that had not had a meaningful impact on him. He said he had visited a doctor who provided him a letter for draft officials, who granted him the medical exemption. He could not remember the doctor’s name.

“I had a doctor that gave me a letter — a very strong letter on the heels,” Mr. Trump said in the interview.