The first day of the Democratic National Convention put the party's best face forward. It featured Michelle Obama, a couple of prominent senators who could have mounted credible campaigns for what Howard Dean once called "the democratic wing of the Democratic Party" -- Al Franken and Elizabeth Warren -- but didn't dare run up against the the Clinton machine, and one guy who did have the guts to try, and who damn near won, because he had the issues and integrity to pose a real alternative to the party's comfort with the status quo: Bernie Sanders. It offered a glimpse of what might have been, and more than hinted that Hillary Clinton might have learned something from Sanders' "political revolution."
I didn't see Michelle's speech, which was by all accounts monumental. I did catch bits of Raul Grijalva and Keith Ellison, and all of the speeches by Warren and Sanders -- both superb, and in the former's slam on Trump and the latter's mapping of his agenda to her platform more than she could have hoped for. Could be that if the occasion presents itself she's opportunistic enough to slide to the left. At least in presenting this night she showed some recognition that she understands what the Democratic base wants. Not that she didn't keep three more days open to pander to the donors.
One retrospectively nice thing about the first night was that I didn't hear a single mention of foreign policy, war, America's vast military-security-industrial complex, and all the mayhem that they have caused. This is odd inasmuch as those issues weigh heavily in any comparison between Sanders and Clinton, but expected in that they still loom as major differences. It's not so much that Sanders has promised much change from fifteen years of "war on terror" -- the self-perpetuating struggle to shore up American hegemony over a part of the world which has suffered much from it -- as that Clinton's instinctive hawkishness promises even more turmoil as far out as anyone can imagine. Of course, the jingoism would come back in subsequent nights, but for Monday at least one could hope for a world where such things would no longer be worth fretting over.
I skipped the second night completely, including Madeleine Albright's neocon horror show and Bill Clinton's soggy valentine ("not quite first-spouse speech").
Also missed the third night when Tim Kaine, Joe Biden and Barack Obama spoke. I gather that Obama spoke in his usual mode, as a pious Americanist, a super-patriot proud of his country's deep liberal roots, validated by his own elevation to the presidency. He may not have reconciled Republicans and Democrats in the real world, but he's unified us all in his own mind, and that's such a pretty picture only those with their heads implanted in their asses can fail to take some measure of pride. Even if he hasn't fully convinced the talking heads of the right, hasn't he at least made it ludicrous for people like Trump and Cruz and Ryan to argue that they can "bring us together" in anything short of a concentration camp?
I paid even less attention to Hillary Clinton's speech, which I gather was superbly crafted and broadly targeted. John Judis faulted her for not weasel-wording enough on immigration -- after all, Trump already set the bar on that issue awfully low, so why not split the difference and still look relatively sane? Paul Krugman tweeted: "I keep talking to people asserting that she'll 'say anything,' but last night she clearly only said things she really believes. Socially (very) liberal, wonkish with center-left tilt on economic and domestic policy, comfortable with judicious use of military power. So, do we people realize that HRC's speech didn't involve any pandering at all? It was who she is." Either that, or Krugman's fooled himself into thinking he's looking at her when he's looking in the mirror.
But rather than ruminating more on this -- at some point I do have to just post what I have and catch up with what I missed sometime later -- let me point you to a long piece on the many complaints people have had lodged against her since she came to prominence in 1992: Michelle Goldberg: The Hillary Haters. Goldberg comes up with a long list illustrated by real people: "She strikes me as so programmed and almost robotic"; "She is disingenuous and she lies blatantly"; "I think she's more of a Republican than a Democrat"; "If I could make her a profit she'd be my best friend"; "She is a sociopath"; "She feels like she's above the law, and she's above us peasants." Reading this list (and the article that expands on them) I'm not sure which I'd rather argue: for one thing, none of these strike me as particularly true, but even if they were true they don't strike me as good reasons not to vote for her (at least given the Republicans she's run against). On the other hand, the Goldberg line that the editors pulled out as a large-type blurb -- "Americans tend not to like ambitious women with loud voices" -- does strike me as being at the root of much opposition to her (and also helps explain why some people, and not just women, like her so much even when they disagree with much of her policy record).
I had rather high hopes for Bill Clinton after his 1992 campaign, which were quickly diminished after he cozied up to Alan Greenspan and capitulated to Colin Powell and sunk ever lower pretty much month by month over eight years. By 1998 I would have voted to impeach him, not because I cared about the Republicans' charges but because I was so alarmed by his bombings of Iraq and elsewhere, acts I considered war crimes (even if I didn't fully comprehend how completely they set the table for the Bush wars that followed). Even so, I thought he might redeem himself after leaving office, much as Jimmy Carter had done. However, it's been hard to see his Foundation as anything other than the vehicle for a political machine, one intent on returning him to power through proximity to his wife. My view was influenced by the fact that through the 1980s most of the women who had become governors in the South were nothing more than proxies for their term-limited husbands. Nor had I ever been a fan of political dynasties, a view that became all the more bitter after the Bore-Gush debacle.
Of course, Hillary was different from all those other Southern governors' wives, and I recognized that -- even admired her at first, a view that diminished as her husband got worse and worse but never quite sunk so low. Still, her own record of policy and posturing in the Senate, as Secretary of State, and campaigning for president, never impressed me as especially admirable -- and sometimes turned out to be completely wrong, as with her Iraq War vote. Given a credible alternative in 2008 -- one that would break the tide of nepotism and dynasty building, and one that offered what seemed at the time like credible hope -- I supported Obama against her. Of course, I was later disappointed by many things that I thought Obama handled badly -- all too often noticing folks previously associated with Clinton in critical proximity -- but I also appreciated how much worse things might have been had a wacko warmonger like McCain or an economic royalist like Romney had won instead. Again this year I found and supported an alternative to Hillary -- one I felt could be trusted to stand up to the Republicans without degrading into what I suppose we could call Clintonism. In the end, she wound up beating Sanders, something I don't ever expect to be happy about. But we're stuck with her, and all I can say is that we owe it to her to treat her honestly and fairly. Which means rejecting all the mean, vicious, repugnant, and false things people and pundits say about her, while recognizing her limits and foibles, and resolving to continue saying and doing the right things, even if doing so challenges her. After all, what really matters isn't whether we're with her. It's whether she's with us. That's something she's actually made some progress towards this week -- not that she doesn't still have a long ways to go.
Some links:
George Zornick: Welcome to the 2016 DNC, Sponsored by Special Interests: Points out that these are the first presidential conventions since 1968 for which there is no government financing, leaving the parties at the mercy of private donors and loose regulations.
The Atlantic is doing daily coverage of the DNC, with lead-in pieces and lots of short notes from their many writers. See Day 1: Bernie Gives in to Hillary, Day 2: The First Lady to Become the Nominee, Day 3: Obama Endorses Hillary as America's Best Hope, Day 4: Hillary Clinton Begins Building Her Coalition. The comments jerk in and out of chronological sequence, some are scattered and many are trivial, but they probably give you as thorough an idea of what's happened as sitting on a cable new station (or surfing between them whenever anything annoying happens, which is often).
Molly Ball: The Long Fall of Debbie Wasserman Schultz: The Sanders campaign has been feuding with the Democratic Party Chair since she tried to stack the debate schedule to ensure minimum press coverage. Her bias was unsurprising given how effective the Clintons were at clearing the field of potential challengers, and of course became even more obvious with last week's Wikileaks dump of her emails, but she would probably have been dumped anyway.
Few Democrats will miss Wasserman Schultz, who was widely seen as an ineffective leader. She was a poor communicator whose gaffes often caused the party headaches; a mediocre fundraiser; and a terrible diplomat more apt to alienate party factions than bring them together. "Only Donald Trump has unified the party more," Rebecca Katz, a Democratic consultant who supported Sanders in the primary, told me wryly. [ . . . ]
The litany of Wasserman Schultz's offenses during the primary was familiar to supporters of Sanders and other Clinton rivals: scheduling debates at odd times, shutting Sanders out of the party's data file, stacking convention committees with Clinton supporters. But her tenure was rocky long before that -- in fact, within a month of her being named in 2011 to finish the term of Tim Kaine, who had just been elected to the Senate, Democrats were starting to grumble about her. When her term ended after Obama's reelection, there was more sniping about her leadership, and Obama's advisors urged him to bring in someone new, but Wasserman Schultz made it clear she wouldn't go without a fight, according to reports at the time and my sources inside the DNC. And so the White House chose the path of least resistance and kept her in.
"Good fucking riddance," one former top DNC staffer during her tenure told me of Wasserman Schultz's ouster. "But she was convicted for the wrong crime." Critics charged that Wasserman Schultz treated the committee as a personal promotion vehicle, constantly seeking television appearances and even urging donors to give to her personal fundraising committee. A different former staffer went so far as to compare her personality to Donald Trump's, describing a "narcissism" that filtered everything through her personal interests.
The larger issue, many Democrats told me, was the White House's lack of concern with the health of the party, which allowed the DNC to atrophy. "There's a lot of soul-searching and reckoning to be done going forward about the role of the party," Smith said. Obama won the nomination by running against the party establishment, and once he got into office converted his campaign into a new organization, Organizing for America. It was technically a part of the DNC, but in reality served as a rival to it that redirected the party's organizing functions, effectively gutting its field operation. The weakened DNC bears some of the responsibility for the epic down-ballot losses -- in Congress, state offices, and legislatures -- that have occurred during Obama's presidency.
"The president doesn't give a shit about the DNC, and he's the only one with the leverage to do something about it," said Jamal Simmons, a Democratic consultant and commentator who has advised the DNC. "Barack Obama made it abundantly clear that he didn't care about the DNC, so why have that fight?" [ . . . ]
The irony to many of Wasserman Schultz's critics was that if she was, in fact, trying to "rig" the primary for Clinton, she didn't do it very well, and by antagonizing Sanders supporters she might have even helped power Clinton's opposition. "She had lost trust from every corner of the party," said Mo Elleithee, a former communications director for the DNC under Wasserman Schultz. "Congressional Democrats had lost trust in her, the White House had lost trust in her, the Clinton campaign was rapidly losing trust in her. So once she started to lose the grassroots, which was her only strength, she had nothing left."
Timothy B Lee: DNC email leaks, explained: A fair introduction to the Wikileaks dump of some 20,000 DNC emails. Key lines: "The email trove contains some embarrassing revelations but no bombshells"; "The hack included a lot of donors' personal information"; and "There's significant evidence linking the attacks to the Russian government." I'm not so sure about the latter point, which has been repeated so many times that it's turning into an assumption -- see, e.g., Patrick Tucker: Was Russia Behind the DNC Hack? and Isaac Chotiner: Is the DNC Hack an Act of War?. It's easy to be sloppy here because anti-Russian prejudice is such a well-practiced art in Washington that it's almost second nature. (For instance, we routinely hear that Putin is a dictator, even though he's in power by virtue of having clearly been elected in competitive contests. Also, Putin is easily charged with being the aggressor in places like Georgia and Ukraine -- ignoring that the US engaged in covert campaigns in both to turn governments there against Russia.) It's easy to imagine that Democrats jumping on the opportunity to blame Russia -- it certainly helps distract from the embarrassments in the emails itself, and it's the sort of rhetoric that Americans have long fallen for. The big problem here is that the US seems hell-bent to resurrect some sort of Cold War against Russia, as seems clear by the steady advance of NATO forces toward Russia's borders and the imposition of crippling economic sanctions on Russia's already depressed economy. Given all this, it's pretty easy to imagine Russia "striking back" via cyberwarfare -- after all, the US is already heavily invested in that sort of mischief. On the other hand, the stakes -- chiefly embarrassing the already discredited Debbie Wasserman Schultz -- are pretty low.
On the other hand, this gives Democrats who have already shown a knack for Putin-baiting an opportunity to rehash the supposed ties between Putin and Trump, which must be true because Trump hasn't shown much relish at joining in on the Putin-bashing as have the Democrats -- one of the few areas where Trump has been significantly less crazy and reckless than Clinton. Possibly the most extreme statement of this is Franklin Foer: Putin's Puppet:
Vladimir Putin has a plan for destroying the West -- and that plan looks a lot like Donald Trump. Over the past decade, Russia has boosted right-wing populists across Europe. It loaned money to Marine Le Pen in France, well-documented transfusions of cash to keep her presidential campaign alive. Such largesse also wended its way to the former Italian premier Silvio Berlusconi, who profited "personally and handsomely" from Russian energy deals, as an American ambassador to Rome once put it. [ . . . ]
There's a clear pattern: Putin runs stealth efforts on behalf of politicians who rail against the European Union and want to push away from NATO. He's been a patron of Golden Dawn in Greece, Ataka in Bulgaria, and Jobbik in Hungary. [ . . . ]
Donald Trump is like the Kremlin's favored candidates, only more so. He celebrated the United Kingdom's exit from the EU. He denounces NATO with feeling. He is also a great admirer of Vladimir Putin. Trump's devotion to the Russian president has been portrayed as buffoonish enthusiasm for a fellow macho strongman. But Trump's statements of praise amount to something closer to slavish devotion. [ . . . ] Still, we should think of the Trump campaign as the moral equivalent of Henry Wallace's communist-infiltrated campaign for president in 1948, albeit less sincere and idealistic than that. A foreign power that wishes ill upon the United States has attached itself to a major presidential campaign.
Most of this is fantasy stitched into conspiracy -- not that I doubt that Putin has pitched some money at right-wing (ultra-nationalist) political movements in Europe, but Russians got a raw deal in the '90s when they opened their doors to capitalism, leaving them defensive and nostalgic for a leader that demanded more respect. One can argue whether he is one, or whether he's succumbed to the corruption of the Yeltsin era, or whether his occasional flex of muscle is productive, but it's absurd to claim he intends to destroy Europe and America, and even more so to think he can do so by cyberhacks -- especially ones that at most reveal their victims to have been fools.
On the other hand, the neocon idea that they can push and prod a nation with a staggering number of nuclear weapons into a powerless little corner is dangerous indeed -- and that's what Clinton risks by slipping into Cold War revanchism. As for Trump, he's demonstrating a truism: that people and nations that do business together are less likely to confront each other militarily. Indeed, the real distinction between America's "allies" and "enemies" almost exactly correlates with ease of doing business together -- which is why, of course, neocons are so eager to impose sanctions on countries like Russia and Iran (and why they turn a blind eye to the real Islamic state, Saudi Arabia, and why they are so eager to quash Boeing's airliner deal with Iran).
For more on Trump's business dealings with Russia, see Josh Marshall's initial post, Jeffrey Carr's fact-check, and Marshall's riposte. I do admit that all this leaves me with a serious question: if Trump's business ties to Russia compromise his ability to put his own finances aside and serve the interests of the American people, what about the rest of his business interests? As I recall, the Kennedys put all of their vast inherited wealth into blind trusts when they went into politics. Wouldn't it be fair and reasonable to insist that Trump do the same thing?
PS: Marshall later tweeted: "Everything else aside, let's stop talking about 'red-baiting,' 'McCarthyism.' Russia's not a communist or a left state. That's silly." Sure, there's no reason to think that Trump has fallen under the spell of Bolshevism, but anti-Russian rhetoric both before and after the fall of Communism has been remarkably consistent -- in both cases Russia is casually charged with plotting the destruction of Europe and America, and motives are rarely discussed (mostly because they would make one wonder "really?"). And today's Putin-baiting works so effortlessly because yesterday's red-baiting so effectively greased the slide. Moreover, although Russia may have moved from left to right since 1990, America's unelected "security state" is still run by the same people who cut their teeth on the Cold War, and who will to their deaths view Russia as the enemy. Does anyone really think that the US is surrounding Russia with anti-ballistic missile rings because we're worried about oligarchy and corruption?
Gideon Lewis-Kraus: Could Hillary Clinton Become the Champion of the 99 Percent? The political winds have changed since the early '90s brought the Clintons and their "blue dog" DLC coalition to Washington, so opportunist that Hillary has always been, could she blow back the other way? One thing that's happened is that as the right-wing "think tanks" have lost touch with reality, left-leaning ones have matured -- the article here features Felicia Joy Wong of the Roosevelt Institute, and also singles out long-time Clinton economic adviser Joseph Stiglitz (who's moved steadily leftward since the '90s), whose Rewriting the Rules of the American Economy is a full-fledged political platform. Another thing is that Bernie Sanders nearly beat her running further to the left than anyone previously imagined possible. Still, very little here about Clinton:
To Wong, though, much of the hand-wringing about Clinton is beside the point. People like to kibitz on the subject of who a politician "really" is, to claim that some votes or statements or gaffes or alliances are deeply revealing and others merely accidents, frivolities or improvisatory performances. We isolate and label a politician's essence in the hope we might predict with certainty how she'll behave in the future. But in Wong's view, the question of who a politician is -- and above all who this particular presidential candidate is -- is irrelevant. Her strategy is to proceed in public as if the candidate is certain to rise to the occasion. [ . . . ]
"After all," Wong said to me more than once, "she is unknowable. Nobody can know her. I certainly can't know her. All I can go by is what is on the public record, and who she's got around her. I'm sure I'll be disappointed again. Over the next few months, we'll all be disappointed again. But I'm only optimistic because there's evidence for me to be that way."
When people talk about Hillary as a "genuine progressive" I can't help but scoff: where's the evidence, anyone? On the other hand, it has occurred to me that the situation might nudge her in the right direction. I even came up with a precedent, Woodrow Wilson: early in his administration he oversaw a number of progressive reforms, even though he really didn't have a progressive bone in his body -- he also adopted Jim Crow as federal policy, started two fruitless wars with Mexico, blundered into the big war in Europe, implemented the most draconian assault on civil liberties in the nation's history, and was so ineffective in negotiating the end of the war that he was soundly rejected both at home and abroad. Still, if Wilson can be remembered as a progressive, maybe the bar isn't too high for Clinton. Of course, you might argue that FDR was another one who rose to progressivism because the circumstances dictated it.
Also along these lines: Mark Green: Is Hillary Ready for a Progressive 'Realignment'?, and Katrina vanden Heuvel: Hillary Clinton Can Become the Real Candidate of Change.
Allegra Kirkland: Conservatives Stunned by How Much They Liked Obama's DNC Speech: There's an old Mort Sahl joke where he quotes Charlton Hesston as saying that he hopes his children will some day live in a fascist dictatorship, then quips that if Hesston was more perceptive he'd be a happy man today. One of the great absurdities of our times is that conservatives have been so hateful to Obama, who has always gone out of his way to embody and celebrate their most cherished and most hackneyed myths. As I've said before, Barrack Obama is a man whose conservatism runs so deep he's incapable of imagining a world where Jamie Dimon isn't still head of JP Morgan-Chase. There has never been a better "poster child" for the American Dream than him, yet many self-proclaimed conservatives have insisted on attacking him, insisting that he is perversely bent on destroying the very nation had flattered him so by electing him president. That's never been credible, but it's taken eight years and the counterexample of Donald Trump for it to sink into these numbskulls.
Pundits who fundamentally disagree with the majority of Obama's policies expressed grudging admiration for an optimistic speech that praised America's inclusive democracy. It provided a stark contrast to the ominous address about the threats facing the United States that Donald Trump gave at last week's Republican convention in Cleveland.
Some suggested that Obama's speech, which quoted the Declaration of Independence and framed the U.S. as a "light of freedom, dignity and human rights," did a better job at expressing conservative values than Trump's did.
In some ways we're fortune that they were so dense. Give his lifelong habit of sucking up to power and his earnest desire for "bipartisan" solutions, there's no telling what "compromises" he might have made had the Republicans not been so obstructionist. His continuation of the Bush wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, his revival of the war in Iraq and Syria, his expansion of loosely targeted assassinations via the drone program, and his relentless defense of America's secret police against whistleblowers have been among the darket blots on his administration -- all cases where Republicans have cheered him on and taunted him to do even worse. Even today, Obama remains the last significant politician supporting TPP. In time conservatives will appreciate what they missed and lost -- much like today they hail the once-hated Harry Truman for blundering his way into the Cold War. But their blinders are a necessary part of their identity: whenever you look back at American history for something inspiring, something to be proud of, you necessarily have to embrace some aspect of liberal tradition. What makes Obama such a great conservative is his liberalism, and that's what they cannot abide, even less admit -- at least until they've found themselves stuck with Trump, a convervative standard bearer who promises to usher a smaller, poorer, meaner America -- and all he has to do is call it Great. That makes Trump the perfect anti-Obama, logically the ideal candidate for everyone who bought the anti-Obama vitriol of the last eight years. If some conservatives are having second thoughts, maybe they're more perceptive than we thought.
Shibley Telhami: Are Clinton's supporters to the right of Sanders's on the Middle East? Hardly. Telhami has been polling on questions like this for years:
Over the past few years, I have asked Americans about their attitudes on American policy toward Israeli settlements. In a November 2015 poll, 49 percent of Democrats expressed support for imposing sanctions or harsher measures on Israeli settlements. In a May 2016 poll, 51 percent of Democrats expressed the same view (within the margin of error of the November poll).
Those expecting Clinton's backers to be less supportive of such measures than Sanders's are in for a surprise: 51 percent of Sanders's supporters wanted punitive measures imposed, and 54 percent of Clinton's expressed the same opinion -- a statistical tie. In contrast, only 24 percent of Trump supporters voiced support for such measures.
Telhami asks a number of similar questions, again finding no real differences between Clinton and Sanders supporters' views, so he asks "why are candidates' rhetoric different when supporters' views are similar?" He doesn't really answer this clearly, but two reasons seem obvious to me: one is that Clinton has two levels of donors, and the big shots -- the ones who kick in enough to get personal contact -- are rabidly pro-Israel, so they pull her in that direction; Sanders, on the other hand, draws nearly all of his financing from his base, so he leans that direction. But also, both Sanders and Clinton start out exceptionally pro-Israel, partly because the Israel lobby has become so hegemonic in Washington, partly because the very powerful defense complex is so intertwined with Israel. Sanders is also Jewish, and of an age when Israel was a much more attractive proposition. Still, I would imagine that while there is no general difference in opinion between Sanders and Clinton supporters, those who are very concerned about the issue should favor Sanders -- if only because Clinton has boxed herself into a hole from which she has effectively committed to do nothing whatsoever to help resolve the conflict. Sanders at least understands something that political expediency doesn't allow Clinton to admit: that Palestinians must be treated as human beings. This makes me wonder how many other issues there are where Clinton supporters are well to the left of their candidate.
Clare Foran: Can Jill Stein Lead a Revolution? Nothing here suggests to me that she can -- not that there's much here to suggest what she stands for or why that matters -- it's mostly about Bernie supporters who aren't reconciled to Hillary, a number that's likely to drop by half come election day. The fact that Stein is in Philadelphia this week suggests she realizes that the real forum for the left isn't her third party effort -- it's the Democratic Party, which Bernie came close to winning over, and even after Hillary's win is still where most of the people "the revolution" needs do their business. Still, neither Foran nor Jordan Weissmann (in Jill Stein's Ideas Are Terrible. She Is Not the Savior the Left Is Looking For) talk about the one idea that could make a difference, which is to play up the fear that Hillary's hawkishness could be even more self-destructive than Trump's brutishness, and that people who believe that America should radically retrench from the ambition to be the world's sole hegemon need to withdraw their votes from both. That at least is an argument, one that needn't depend on the tired homily that both sides are equivalent, and one that might scare or shame Hillary enough that she makes an effort not to alienate the large number of antiwar voters who otherwise see her as preferable to Trump. Of course, Stein will still lose half of her sympathizers on election day (as will libertarian Gary Johnson), just because votes aren't worth so much that they have to be perfect.
Michelle Goldberg: The DNC Has Been a Rousing Success. So Why Am I Terrified? Basically because she doesn't trust the American people to do the sane thing:
One of the unofficial slogans of this election, at least among the green room flotsam and millennial ironists on Twitter, is "nothing matters." It's an expression of weary incredulity at each new Trumpian outrage that should be the end of him but isn't. This election isn't a contest of ideology. It's certainly not about experience or competence. It's being fought at the level of deep, unconscious, Freudian drives. Trump promises law and order, but he is the Thanatos candidate, appealing to the people so disgusted by the American status quo that they're willing to blow it up. Clinton is the candidate of dull, workmanlike order and continuity. She once described herself as a "mind conservative and a heart liberal," but her convention has almost been the opposite, with the most liberal platform in decades married to a show of sunny, orderly patriotism. "America is already great!" is as anti-radical slogan as can be imagined. The question in this election is whether the forces of stability are a match for those of cynical nihilism. This convention has been, for the most part, impeccably choreographed. Will it matter? Will anything?
That "mind conservative/heart liberal" thing tells me that she's bought the conservative line hook and sinker: only conservatives think that liberalism is an ailment of the heart, and only people hopelessly mired in the past fail to recognize that conservatism has become a form of mental derangement. (I would concede that a conservative ethos is a good thing for a person to have, provided you understand that it doesn't work for social/political/economic matters. It's all good and well any person to be self-sufficient, but as a society we need mutual respect, concern, and help.)
My own great fear is watching Hillary one-on-one in the debates as Trump goads her into World War III.
On the other hand, see: Jamelle Bouie: The Democrats Make Their Pitch to a New Silent Majority. Not my favorite turn of phrase, but they started making this pitch in 2012, when after four years when it seemed like only the Tea Party could get media attention Obama won the presidential election rather easily. (Still, only 57.5% came out to vote in 2012, less than the 62.3% who voted in 2008 when Obama won even more handily.) I'm less impressed by the Wednesday lineup than Bouie is ("figures of authority -- all white men -- who in different ways sought to delegitimize Donald Trump and persuade the most Republican-leaning whites with degrees to switch sides and abandon the GOP") -- Leon Panetta, Admiral John Hutson, Michael Bloomberg -- but they do suggest that a swath of the establishment realizes they'd be better off with Hillary, and not rocking the boat has much to do with that. I think it is the case that an awful lot of Americans don't like to rock the boat -- otherwise why would they have stuck with so many losers for so long?
Plus a few shorts:
Harry Reid Wants Intelligence Agencies to Give Trump "Fake" Briefings After Russia Comments: Because, I suppose, he's not misinformed enough as it is.
No, Donald Trump Did Not Commit Treason When He Suggested Russia Hack Clinton's Emails: Glad we cleared that one up.
David Frum: Donald Trump Has Turned the Republicans Into the Party of Russia: Piling on, from the guy who coined the phrase "axis of evil."
Ron Fournier: How TV Networks Can Force Trump to Release His Tax Returns: "broadcast outlets need to apply pressure where it counts -- to Trump's ego." Yeah, good luck with that. But he would be exposing himself to huge liability: I doubt if anyone who makes that kind of money from as many sources as Trump can file a tax return that doesn't have something dodgy enough that it can't be turned into a federal case on close inspection. Then there's the suspicion that he's not actually making that much money and not worth nearly as much as he claims.
Uri Friedman: What If Russia Invaded the Baltics -- and Donald Trump Was President? My first reaction is if Trump was president we'd have far worse problems. But what do they want him to do? Start WWIII?
Trump: You Know I Love the Disabled Because My Buildings Are Accessible: Couldn't possibly be because federal law mandates accessability?
Peter Beinart: Bill Clinton's Lapse Into Trumpism: Actually just a quibble over an unfortunate turn of speech, even if, like most gaffes, it exposes mental rot underneath. On the other hand, Beinart trivializes Trumpism by suggesting it's just about Muslims -- so Beinart matches one gaffe with another.
Trump Jr.: Obama Plagiarized a Line From My RNC Speech! He further asked, "where's the outrage?" The line was "This is not the America I know." Turns out Obama had used the same line previously, so maybe Trump Jr. is the plagiarist? But others have also used the line, or close variants. Really not a very original turn of phrase -- just another cliché, something political speeches (Obama's included) are full of.
Nancy LeTourneau: Trump Says That He Wants to Hit the "Little Guy": Watching the DNC, all Trump can do is lash out: "I was gonna hit one guy in particular, a very little guy" -- evidently fellow billionaire and New Yorker Michael Bloomberg. LeTourneau suspects the cause was this bit from Bloomberg's speech: "Throughout his career, Trump has left behind a well-documented record of bankruptcies, thousands of lawsuits, angry shareholders, and contractors who feel cheated, and disillusioned customers who feel ripped off. Trump says he wants to run the nation like he's run his business. God help us."
Tamara Draut: The new working class: Trump can talk to disaffected white men, but they don't make up the "working class" anymore: And, one might add, those who do got more urgent things to worry about than immigrants and terrorists.
Andrew Kahn: How to Tell When Donald Trump Is Joking: Of course, it's hard for people who find Trump utterly horrifying to distinguish when he's merely being sardonic, as opposed, say, to when he's saying something utterly horrifying. Would be easier if he were funnier but, hey, not everybody is.
John Judis: Trump's very peculiar and unprecedented appeal to Bernie Sanders' supporters: Evidently Trump has been taken in by some of the dumbest political observers in the country -- the ones who see the Trump and Sanders campaigns as parallel efforts by outsiders to counter the deep corruption of American politics. So now he's accusing Sanders of "selling his soul" and hoping that will deflect his followers to the last outsider champion still in the race. In fact, the campaigns have nothing in common, and Trump has no answers for the problems Sanders identified. Still, amusing to watch him try.
Katherine Krueger: The Reviews Are In: Conservatives Say the DNC Was 'Disaster' for the GOP: As recounted in 14 tweets. Not sure that constitutes a significant sample. Of course, she could have pointed to David Brooks: The Democrats Win the Summer, but maybe that was too long to read (or maybe she already knew better). Brooks quote: "Trump has abandoned the Judeo-Christian aspirations that have always represented America's highest moral ideals: toward love, charity, humility, goodness, faith, temperance and gentleless. He left the ground open for Joe Biden to remind us that decent people don't enjoy firing other human beings."
Ezra Klein: This election isn't just Democrat vs. Republican. It's normal vs. abnormal. Klein argues that "the Republican Party has become an abnormal political party that has nominated an abnormal presidential candidate," but maybe he should consider why. Since Obama won in 2008, Republicans have done everything they could to prevent the Democrats from delivering on their campaign promises, repeatedly predicting doom if the Democrats succeed, yet during that time the economy has gotten stronger, and almost everything else has improved, at least relative to the eight previous years when Bush was president. So the Republicans have to keep repeating their narrative, even though it's long lost any tether to reality. Consequently, Republicans have abdicated any claim to the status quo, allowing the Democrats to take over the center (in addition to being the only realistic haven for the left). For more, see Klein's Have we stopped to appreciate how crazy Donald Trump has gotten recently?
Greg Grandin: Eat, Pray, Starve: What Tim Kaine Didn't Learn During His Time in Honduras: One of the blackest marks on Hillary Clinton's tenure as Secretary of State was her support for a murderous coup in Honduras. Kaine spent nine months in a Jesuit mission in Honduras, learned Spanish, says that time "made him who he is." Those nine months coincided with the CIA setting up the Contras in Honduras to wage war against Nicaragua, also with targeted assassinations of Jesuits in El Salvador, also backed by the US. "Kaine helps the Clinton campaign transform Honduras from a real place, engaged in political struggle, into an imaginary kingdom of banality."