Associated Press’s Thomas Beaumont explains why “Kaine May Give Democrats an Edge in Swing-State Virginia” and quotes Virginia Republican strategist Chris Jankowski: “Tim Kaine is an example of putting someone on the ticket that will impact their home state…Putting him on the ticket turns Virginia from a true, toss-up state to one that leans Democratic.” Beaumont adds, “Kaine has been a fixture in a metro area that accounts for 10 percent of Virginia’s voting population, including heavily Democratic Richmond…it’s this doughnut around Richmond —- politically and culturally diverse Henrico County to the north, east and west, and whiter, GOP-leaning Chesterfield, to the south and west — where Kaine’s potential impact on the presidential ticket can really be seen…”Chesterfield is the county to watch,” said former longtime Republican state Sen. John Watkins. “If Kaine can help shave Trump’s margin to less than 10 percentage points, Clinton will win Virginia.”

Harold Meyerson argues that “The Democrats must be the party of the 99 percent” at pbs.org.: “The Democrats need to be, as the Occupy movement put it, the party of the 99 percent. Their economic agenda needs to recognize how deeply the fundamental changes in capitalism over the past four decades have wounded the American people and diminished the American middle class. They need to respond with economic reforms as far reaching as those of the New Deal were in the 1930s. This pivot in the party’s central direction need not and cannot lead it to abandon its advocacy for minority rights, but now is the time to reinvent its majoritarian program: an economics to create a more thriving and egalitarian nation.”

In Matt Viser’s Boston Globe article, “Bruising contest now heads to swing states,” he notes, “Trump is also continuing the approach that worked for him during the primary campaign, but could be risky during a general election: spending very little on television ads…As of mid-July, his campaign and super PAC supporters had reserved only $655,000 in television and radio ads, according to an analysis by Ad Age. Clinton had reserved $111 million across 10 states, with much of it concentrated in Florida and Ohio.”

At Bloomberg View Ramesh Ponnuru and Francis Wilkinson discuss “Two Views on the Democrats’ Strategy to Isolate Trump.” Wilkinson speculates about the down-ballot effects of a Trump meltdown, “Democrats didn’t like Mitt Romney one bit. But they didn’t think he was, as Trump ghostwriter Tony Schwartz went so far as to suggest about Trump, a “sociopath.” And it’s hard to imagine most Democrats getting especially anxious at the prospect of Romney controlling nuclear codes. That’s simply not the case with Trump…If you effectively make the case that Trump is a candidate better suited to the “Friday the 13th” franchise than to the leadership of the free world, that implies a question or two about the party that nominated him for president.”

At The Washington Post, Iraq war veteran Rafael Noboa y Rivera has an eloquent description of the difference between the Democratic and Republican convention that merits repetition: “…Patriotism isn’t just about wars and tanks and planes and troops. It’s about the ideas that make America great, not empty boasts that you’ll make it great again…No one who watched Clinton’s convention — least of anyone who saw Khizr Khan’s dramatic elegy of his son’s sacrifice, and consequent challenge to Trump — can doubt that Democrats are abounding in that love…Contrast that with the carnival of fear and terror we saw the preceding week in Cleveland. There, Trump and his minions painted a nightmarish hellscape of an America only one man could save. Where Obama said Americans do not seek to be ruled, Republicans prostrated themselves before Trump and implored him to rule over them. Nowhere in Cleveland was there to be found love of what America is, or what it is becoming; only fear, terror and fury. Only that, and a desperate, animal desire to restore America to a pale caricature fantasy. What patriotism was there to be found in the empty exhortations to “make America great again,” when that America explicitly doesn’t include me or my friends or anyone I know?”

Blue Nation Review’s Eric Kleefeld provides an encouraging report on the good news from appeals courts,  “Three GOP Voter-Suppression Laws Struck Down — in One Day” But Democrats should remain vigilant, because Republicans also have a history of voter suppression tricks that can be deployed independent of legal status, including: providing misleading information about polling places, intimidation of Latino voters by phony “security” guards, “voter caging,” putting few or faulty voting machines in minorty precincts, creating parking problems near polls, reducing the number of polling cites to create long lines and others. And Democrats should never forget the “Brooks Brothers Riot” and its disastrous consequences.

And despite the favorable court rulings for Democrats, there are other unresolved legal issues, as Michael Wines reports in his NYT article “Critics See Efforts by Counties and Towns to Purge Minority Voters From Rolls.” As Wines notes, “…Republican legislatures and election officials in the South and elsewhere have imposed statewide restrictions on voting that could depress turnout by minorities and other Democrat-leaning groups in a crucial presidential election year…A June survey by the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund found that governments in six former preclearance states have closed registration or polling places, making it harder for minorities to vote. Local jurisdictions in six more redrew districts or changed election rules in ways that diluted minorities’ votes.”

At rollcall.com Shawn Zeller gives Democrats a little something to worry about: “…Obama’s solid Electoral College win in 2012 was predicated on some narrow state wins. His margins were extremely tight in Virginia (115,910 votes), Colorado (113,099), Ohio (103,481) and New Hampshire (40,659) and the crucial state of Florida went his way by only 73,189 votes out of more than 8 million cast.” However, concludes Zeller, “Rory Cooper, a former spokesman for Eric Cantor of Virginia when Cantor was the Republican House majority leader, says Trump’s argument that he can expand the Republican presidential playing field into Democratic strongholds is hard to believe…”He is underwater with women, young people, Hispanics and with African-Americans. To make inroads in blue states, you have to make inroads into those communities,” says Cooper…”

This headline, and the story that goes with it, flags a possible turning point that will substantially reduce Trump’s acceptability to veterans and their families.

In his HuffPo article “Understanding Trump,” Psycholinguist George Lakoff, author of “Dont Think Like an Elephant” and other works, takes an in-depth look at the 2016 presidential election and finds an emblematic contest between leaders of the nurturing ‘Mommy’ and authoritarian ‘Daddy’ parties.

It’s hard to imagine a more authoritarian personality than Donald “I alone can fix it” Trump to head the ‘Daddy party.” As presidential candidates go, he is the all-time poster boy for name-calling, bellowing authoritarianism and narcissistic male chauvinism. He favors simplistic “solutions,” like building a wall between the U.S. and Mexico, banning Muslim immigrants and openly using torture and assassination of family members of terrorists as political remedies. Google ‘Trump Mussolini’ and you get around 468,000 hits.

As the first woman and mother nominated presidential candidate by one of the two major parties, Clinton is quite literally a perfect fit for leader of the “Mommy party.” In addition, she has acquired a polished skill-set as a negotiator and advocate during her career roles as First Lady, Senator from New York and Secretary of State, as well as during her earlier work as an advocate for the Childrens Defense Fund. However, nurturing Moms can also be pretty tough, as Bernie Sanders, Martin O’Malley and others who have done political battle with Clinton can attest.

The nomines of the two major parties set the stage for a full-blown Lakoffian analysis of the political messages and Lakoff provides it. Among his insights:

…In a world governed by personal responsibility and discipline, those who win deserve to win. Why does Donald Trump publicly insult other candidates and political leaders mercilessly? Quite simply, because he knows he can win an onstage TV insult game. In strict conservative eyes, that makes him a formidable winning candidate who deserves to be a winning candidate. Electoral competition is seen as a battle. Insults that stick are seen as victories — deserved victories.

Consider Trump’s statement that John McCain is not a war hero. The reasoning: McCain got shot down. Heroes are winners. They defeat big bad guys. They don’t get shot down. People who get shot down, beaten up, and stuck in a cage are losers, not winners.

The strict father logic extends further. The basic idea is that authority is justified by morality (the strict father version), and that, in a well-ordered world, there should be (and traditionally has been) a moral hierarchy in which those who have traditionally dominated should dominate. The hierarchy is: God above Man, Man above Nature, The Disciplined (Strong) above the Undisciplined (Weak), The Rich above the Poor, Employers above Employees, Adults above Children, Western culture above other cultures, Am,erica above other countries. The hierarchy extends to: Men above women, Whites above Nonwhites, Christians above nonChristians, Straights above Gays.

As we await the next batch of polls to determine if and to what extent Hillary Clinton got a convention “bounce,” it’s a good time to gain some perspective on these often short-lived phenomena, as I discussed at New York.

[H]istory offers a cautionary lesson that some convention bounces are like young love in the early spring: They just don’t last. As Harry Enten shows at FiveThirtyEight, presidential candidates’ net favorability ratings often rise or plunge between the conventions and Election Day. And some famously large convention bounces were really misleading when the deal went down.

One such bounce was in fact so chimerical that it’s now puzzling it existed at all. The 1980 Democratic Convention that renominated Jimmy Carter is now remembered as a rolling disaster, which began with an effort to dump the sitting president, continued with a speech by losing primary candidate Ted Kennedy that upstaged the nominee, and then concluded with Carter chasing Kennedy around the stage pursuing in vain the traditional clasped-hands unity gesture.

But guess what? Carter’s net favorability rating rose 24 points between the beginning and end of the two conventions that year. He was unpopular earlier and unpopular on Election Day, but for a while there the sun really shined on the 39th president that year.

A more recent and less dramatic example of this dynamic was in 2008, when John McCain got a net 8-point convention advantage, drawing even with Barack Obama before both Sarah Palin and the U.S. economy imploded.

So yeah, the bounces are important, and we are all in a perfectly appropriate habit of beginning to pay attention to polling once the conventions have ended and we are truly into the general-election season. But you cannot take bounces to the bank, and particularly in a year when the conventions are relatively early, the numbers can turn on a candidate like an old love gone sour.

The full text of  Hillary Clinton’s speech to the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, July 28, 2016, follows below.

Thank you! Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you all so much. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you all very, very much. Thank you for that amazing welcome. Thank you all for the great convention that we’ve had. And Chelsea, thank you. I am so proud to be your mother and so proud of the woman you’ve become. Thank you for bringing Marc into our family, and Charlotte and Aidan into the world.

And Bill, that conversation we started in the law library 45 years ago, it is still going strong.

You know that conversation has lasted through good times that filled us with joy, and hard times that tested us. And I’ve even gotten a few words in along the way.

On Tuesday night, I was so happy to see that my Explainer-in-Chief is still on the job. I’m also grateful to the rest of my family and the friends of a lifetime. To all of you whose hard work brought us here tonight. And to those of you who joined our campaign this week. Thank you.

What a remarkable week it’s been. We heard the man from Hope, Bill Clinton. And the man of Hope, Barack Obama. America is stronger because of President Obama’s leadership, and I’m better because of his friendship. We heard from our terrific vice president, the one-and-only Joe Biden, who spoke from his big heart about our party’s commitment to working people as only he can do.

And first lady Michelle Obama reminded us that our children are watching, and the president we elect is going to be their president, too. And for those of you out there who are just getting to know Tim Kaine – you’re soon going to understand why the people of Virginia keep promoting him: from city council and mayor, to Governor, and now Senator. And he’ll make our whole country proud as our Vice President.

And, I want to thank Bernie Sanders.

Bernie, your campaign inspired millions of Americans, particularly the young people who threw their hearts and souls into our primary. You’ve put economic and social justice issues front and center, where they belong. And to all of your supporters here and around the country: I want you to know, I’ve heard you.

Your cause is our cause. Our country needs your ideas, energy, and passion. That’s the only way we can turn our progressive platform into real change for America. We wrote it together – now let’s go out there and make it happen together.

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After noticing, along with everyone else, that the first two days of the Democratic National Convention were extremely light on discussion of certain issues like terrorism and crime (they did spend a lot of time on the former on Day Three), it occurred to me that perhaps an old vice had returned to the American political scene. So I addressed it at New York:

[T]here is some evidence in both parties that a bad old habit is coming back: the tendency to talk predominantly about issues of most concern to the party base, and where the party’s policy prescriptions are relatively popular, and refuse to talk about anything else.

For many years, Democrats avoided talking about national security partly because they thought they looked and sounded weak on the subject, and partly because they figured if voters were absorbed with “good Democratic issues” like education and health care and wages they’d forget to worry about threats to the country. Republicans had a mirror-image delusion, trying hard to ignore “their” issues to the benefit of “our” issues.

One of the reasons Bill Clinton did well politically is that he refused to play that silly game and talked about crime and national security and, yes, even welfare dependency. You can make a good argument (on welfare policy, anyway) that he made the mistake of adopting conservative policies to address these problems. But he recognized something very simple: When politicians refuse to talk about something voters care about, voters fill in the blank with whatever distorted attributed positions the other side suggests. So when Democrats ignored crime as a “Republican issue” and Republicans accuse them of hating cops and sympathizing with violent criminals, a lot of voters had no real reason to conclude otherwise.

Republican George W. Bush (or his “brain,” Karl Rove) got this basic point, insisting on offering conservative prescriptions to improve education, to cover prescription drug costs for seniors, and to deal with the problem of undocumented workers. He even addressed Social Security, though his desire to “reform” the program and improve its solvency by simply reducing benefits was a little too apparent.

The issues discussed at this year’s Republican convention were remarkably straitened. One of them, climate change, was naturally ignored because most Republicans don’t even believe in it. But big areas of economic policy, education policy, health-care policy, environmental policy, food and nutrition policy, and on and on, were at most paid lip service in Cleveland. And even on issues they did address, they often exhibited a cramped perspective: By refusing to acknowledge the issue of police misconduct toward the minority citizens they are supposed to correct, their silence encouraged the impression that they thought police should be able to do any damn thing they want, and that the odd beaten or murdered African-American John Q. Citizens was just the price to be paid for keeping crime under control. Is there any wonder Republicans continue to struggle with minority voters?

But Democrats are making the same mistake if they minimize discussion of terrorism specifically or national security generally, or of immigration enforcement, or of crime policy. On the racially fraught subject of policing, Republican charges that Democrats don’t give a damn about police or even public safety gain traction they do not deserve from a convention where murdered police officers and their families are rarely mentioned.

Again, refusing to cede ownership of entire issue areas to the other party does not mean accepting their policy prescriptions; indeed, it means denying false choices between, say, strong and proactive policing and the liberties of citizens who ought to be presumed innocent when walking the streets or driving their cars.

Political parties ought to have something to say about any issue voters legitimately care about, if only to show they are listening. And any ideology worth having doesn’t let its acolytes fall silent when an inconvenient topic comes up.

The full text of President Barack Obama’s speech to the Democratic National Convention in Cleveland  follows below:

Thank you, everybody. Thank you. I love you back. Hello, America. Hello Democrats.

So, 12 years ago, tonight, I addressed this convention for the very first time. You met my two little girls, Malia and Sasha, now two amazing young women who just fill me with pride. You fell for my brilliant wife and partner, Michelle, who has made me a better father and a better man, who’s gone on to inspire our nation as first lady. And who somehow hasn’t aged a day.

I know, the same cannot be said for me. My girls remind me all the time. Wow, you’ve changed so much, daddy. And then they try to clean it up. Not bad, just more mature. And, and it’s true. I was so young that first time in Boston. And look, I’ll admit it, maybe I was a little nervous. Addressing such a big crowd.

But I was filled with faith. Faith in America. The generous, big-hearted, hopeful country that made my story, that made all of our stories possible. A lot’s happened over the years. And while this nation has been tested by war, and it’s been tested by recession, and all manner of challenges, I stand before you again tonight after almost two terms as your president to tell you I am more optimistic about the future of America than ever before. How could I not be?

After all that we’ve achieved together. After the worst recession in 80 years, we fought our way back. We’ve seen deficits come down, 401ks recover, auto industry set new records, unemployment reach eight-year lows and our businesses create 15 million new jobs. After a century of trying, we declared that health care in America is not a privilege for a few, it is a right for everybody.

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