Recognizing that he’s not making many friends within the Latino population in his bid for the White House, candidate Donald Trump is approaching powerful Hispanic media organizations in hopes of changing the conversation. Meanwhile, the Donald remains a lightning rod for Spanish-language talk radio.
Advocacy group National Hispanic Media Coalition says it was “quietly” contacted last week by the Trump Organization’s head of strategic development, proposing a peace-making meeting. Politico quotes coalition CEO Alex Nogales regarding three calls the advocacy group has received from the Trump camp—first, one threatening to sue, a second attempting to change what Trump had said about Mexicans and “the third time was ‘Let’s get together to talk so we can solve our differences.’”
Yeah, I think that ship sailed.
Jeb’s got a long way to go too. The statisticians all say that the GOP needs to get around 45% of the Latino vote.
Lazier pundits like to view Sen. Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump as fringe candidates. But that’s Village-speak for “not establishment.” What fans find attractive about both is their iconoclastic styles, which couldn’t be more different. Writing for Bloomberg News, Will Leitch attended Donald Trump’s event in Mobile, Alabama last weekend and found that the common thread among those standing in line in the heat was this:
They were sick of all the bulls–t. They were sick of being talked to like they’re idiots. They might not be up on the policy papers or every specific detail of the Iran deal. But they can smell bulls–t.
Trump, the flashy billionaire, the reality show host, the consummate bullshitter, uses bullshit to cut through bullshit. They like that. Leitch explains:
They hate Hillary Clinton, they hate Obama, they hate Jeb Bush, and they hate them all for the same reason: They think they’re lying to them. Many, I found, especially hated Bush for his Spanish-language campaign ads. This came up several times. Bush is “as bad as any of them,” said Tony Hamilton, a truck driver from nearby Pensacola, Florida. “I voted for his brother and his dad, but not him, never. He’s just like the rest of them.”
They hate them so much that even if incoherent — his speech was all tangent and no theme — Trump’s unabashed bullshit comes across as authenticity, and that’s good enough. Even when Trump asks an audience of lower-income, southern T-party voters, “anybody here have a Mercedes-Benz? They’re wonderful, right? Great, great cars,” the crowd goes with it.
Meanwhile, for all his unhipness, Bernie Sanders has attracted a large percentage of the youth vote, Nathan Heller writes at the New Yorker. Sanders feels “open and friendly,” but in a more coherent way:
… From 1981, in his first elected post, as the mayor of Burlington, he fought for corporate regulation and against big-money fundraising. He sought to lift the minimum wage. Recently, his supporters have produced old footage from his early years, as if to show that, in a field of opportunists, Sanders has held firm to his beliefs. The anachronism of his world view proves both his authenticity and his lack of hidden baggage as a candidate. For young voters, who approach the booth with shallow political memories, this “open” attitude toward Sanders’s past can come as reassurance: they don’t have to worry about being pinioned by a history that they don’t know, because history, for Sanders, is a backward projection of the behavior that they saw last week. The approach is striking in an era when even personal life is preconceived, polished, performed. Sanders is exceptional because he seems, demonstrably, the same guy who he was before the iPhone cameras first appeared.
With 37 percent favorable among under-30 voters in one poll, Sanders hardly sounds fringe. Hillary Clinton polls 40 percent among the same age group, writes Heller.
Both Sanders and Trump supporters seem tired of business as usual. But while Sanders seems like a seasoned veteran with ideas whose time has come, Trump comes off as a pitchman selling himself as “new and improved.”
Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz has called on baristas to be extra patient with customers on Monday, given the dramatic stock market swoon that no doubt has left countless coffee addicts anxious about the state of their retirement holdings.
“Today’s financial market volatility, combined with great political uncertainty both at home and abroad, will undoubtedly have an effect on consumer confidence and perhaps even our customers’ attitudes and behavior. Our customers are likely to experience an increased level of anxiety and concern,”Schulz told staff in an email obtained by Fortune. Fusion earlier reported on the email.
“Let’s be very sensitive to the pressures our customers may be feeling, and do everything we can to individually and collectively exceed their expectations,” he told his “partners,” Starbucks terminology for employees.
These people used to just buy access but now they have so much money that it’s a drop in the bucket to just buy politicians outright. And a whole lot of them have much more specific interests than just that.
Just in case anyone thinks that good ole moderate Jeb! is one of those libertarian type Republicans who will take the national security state in hand here’s a little dose of reality:
Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush on Wednesday said he favors broader government surveillance of Americans, calling for private tech firms to cooperate better with federal agencies to “make sure that evildoers aren’t in our midst.”
“There’s a place to find common ground between personal civil liberties and [the National Security Agency] doing its job,” the former Florida governor said. “I think the balance has actually gone the wrong way.”
At a national security forum in South Carolina on Tuesday, the presidential hopeful addressed the ongoing battle between Silicon Valley and the Obama administration over whether law enforcement officials should have guaranteed access to encrypted customer data at major tech firms.
Bush said encryption “makes it harder for the American government to do its job” and called for “a new arrangement with Silicon Valley” to address what he termed as a “dangerous situation.”
Prominent tech CEOs — such as Apple’s Tim Cook — have argued for strong, universal encryption, in which even the company can’t see customers’ communications. Security experts support such calls, arguing that a guaranteed “back door” weakens worldwide encryption and compromises privacy.
I’m sure whomever the Democratic nominee is will not be a whole lot better. But I haven’t heard any of them saying we need to spy on Americans even more than we are in order to root out “evil-doers in our midst.” There’s lots of evil in this world. In fact, the line between good and evil usually manifests itself inside each human being. That’s a pretty sweeping edict right there — if you declare war on evil-doers the government is going to be very, very busy.
Considering that Trump has been China bashing almost as much as Latino bashing, Bush pointed at the “asian” anchor babies today and now this, I’m going to guess the Republicans have decided they can dogwhistle Mexican hating (and, needless to say, African American hating) by attacking the “yellow peril.”
They figure that to their bigoted base voters, any and all foreigners look alike so as long as they’re bashing somebody they’ll be fine. Whether Latinos and Asian-Americans are equally dumb is highly unlikely.
My God. Trump really is driving the train now. He’s out there saying that China is kicking our asses, they’ strong, we’re weak and the truth is that it’s the exact opposite. We’re in bizarroworld again.
I have often said that nobody should ever judge another’s marriage especially those that are long term over many years. It is the most complicated relationship of our lives and it requires privacy in order to survive and flourish. I wrote that back in the day when everyone and their mother was weighing in on Clinton’s indiscretions and publicly judging both him and his wife and I still feel that way today. (It’s my original reason for hating Joe Lieberman, although he gave me plenty of others over the years.) If you want to destroy the institution of marriage one good way to do it is to force everyone to expose theirs to public scrutiny.
Anyway, I think this Ashley Madison hack is nothing more than sophomoric gossip parading as moralism. I don’t even care that Josh Duggar cheated on that poor wife of his — I assume that all those patriarchal moralists do that. It’s one of the perks. I feel sorry for his wife both because of what he did and the fact that she now has to be publicly humiliated all over again. I’m sure he deserves to be held up for ridicule for his hypocrisy, but in the end the whole thing is just a sordid, small town gossip fest.
Ever since I wrote on Thursday about the Ashley Madison hack and resulting reactions and consequences, I’ve heard from dozens of people who used the site. They offer a remarkably wide range of reasons for having done so. I’m posting below one email I received that I find particularly illuminating, which I very lightly edited to correct a few obvious typographical errors:
Dear Glenn,
Thank you for the kindness and humanity you have manifested to those of us whose data is now a source of public mockery and shame on AM.
I am female, hold a job with a lot of responsibility, have three kids, one with special needs, and a husband with whom I have not been intimate for several years due to his cancer treatments.
I also used to write about marriage law policy, encouraging traditional marriage for the good of children. My institution has a morality clause in all contracts.
Mine is a loveless, sexless, parenting marriage. I will care for my husband if his cancer spreads, we manage good will for the sake of the children, but we cannot talk about my emotional or sexual needs without him fixating on his death and crying.
I went on AM out of loneliness and despair, and found friendship, both male and female, with others trapped in terrible marriages trying to do right by their children.
My experiences have led me to soften my views of marriage as my own marriage is a deeply humbling, painful longterm commitment.
I expect to be ridiculed by colleagues, to lose my job, and to be publicly shamed, especially as a hypocrite. Yes, I used a credit card. In my case, I will get no sympathy from the right or the left as I do not fit into either of their simplistic paradigms.
I have received email from Trustify that I have been searched, and it is soliciting me to purchase its services. And I am receiving lots of spam with racy headings
That is my story. When my outing happens, I suppose I might as well take a stand for those who are trapped in bad marriages. Many of us are doing the best we can, trying in our own imperfect way to cope with alienation, lovelessness, and physical deprivation.
I do not want to hurt my children or husband. I truly wish I had a good one and I want happy marriages for others. I did what I did trying to cope. Maybe it was a bad idea but again, I have met some very decent people on AM, some of whom are now dear friends.
Thank you again.
Anonymous
As I argued last week, even for the most simplistic, worst-case-scenario, cartoon-villain depictions of the Ashley Madison user – a spouse who selfishly seeks hedonistic pleasure with indifference toward his or her own marital vows and by deceiving the spouse – that’s nobody’s business other than those who are parties to that marriage or, perhaps, their family members and close friends. But as the fallout begins from this leak, as people’s careers and reputations begin to be ruined, as unconfirmed reports emerge that some users have committed suicide, it’s worth remembering that the reality is often far more complex than the smug moralizers suggest.
The private lives and sexual choices of fully-formed adults are usually very complicated and thus impossible to understand – and certainly impossible to judge – without wallowing around in the most intimate details, none of which are any of your business. That’s a very good reason not to try to sit in judgment and condemn from afar.
I wrote about the sad performance of the media on the Sunday shows in discussing the Clinton email pseudo-scandal for Salon this morning. I also explore the Clinton scandal phenomenon in general, how they tend to unfold in the Village and how the American people react. This is an excerpt:
One of the major effects of the patented “Clinton Scandal” that’s become a fixture of political conversation over the past two decades is the helplessness in engenders in Democrats who feel like they are swimming in quicksand trying to make sense of the whole thing. They know it’s not a real scandal, and yet the press is blatantly aroused by the opportunity to speculate wildly about “what it all means” while the Republicans smugly repeat their talking points with robotic military precision. But again, that’s the point. It’s even got a name: “Clinton Fatigue,” which Charles Krauthammer, among others, declared was already in full effect many months ago:
Hillary Clinton is running on two things: gender and name. Gender is not to be underestimated. It will make her the Democratic nominee. The name is equally valuable. It evokes the warm memory of the golden 1990s, a decade of peace and prosperity during our holiday from history.
Now breaking through, however, is a stark reminder of the underside of that Clinton decade: the chicanery, the sleaze, the dodging, the parsing, the wordplay. It’s a dual legacy that Hillary Clinton cannot escape and that will be a permanent drag on her candidacy.
You can feel it. It’s a recurrence of an old ailment. It was bound to set in, but not this soon. What you’re feeling now is Early Onset Clinton Fatigue. The CDC is recommending elaborate precautions. Forget it. The only known cure is Elizabeth Warren.
You know that Charles Krauthammer only has the best interests of the Democratic party at heart, right? You can almost hear him laughing maniacally as he wrote that.
I know many Democrats would have loved to see Elizabeth Warren run, and many women, including yours truly, especially would have been thrilled to see two such formidable women leaders go head to head on the campaign trail. And Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden are welcome to join in too, as is any other Democrats who wants to try his or her hand. This is democracy and nobody’s automatically entitled to be president.
But there are millions of Democrats who also really don’t like the idea that Republicans are manipulating the system to choose their own rival and neither do they care for the media deciding who should be running on a Democratic ticket. And that’s very much what’s going on here. The Benghazi investigations are a joke, but they are providing the GOP with a excuse to go nosing around in Clinton’s business in a way that gives them access to information they can dribble out over time to create the atmosphere I describe. The political press is, as usual, helping to do their dirty work for them. They are Ahab’s obsessively chasing their white whale with visions of Pulitzers dancing in their heads.
The pundits all assumed that President Clinton would have to resign in 1998, but they underestimated the people they were dealing with. I’m not talking about the Clintons, I’m talking about the American people — who, unlike the beltway elites who get nervous at the sound of a loud noise, tend to respond to this political gambit with a stubborn insistence that they should be the ones to make these judgements and choose their own leaders.
Democratic primary voters may very well decide they don’t want Clinton as the nominee for president. But it’s highly doubtful they want a bunch of beltway elites and Republicans telling them they can’t have her. Indeed, unlike the establishment, it tends to energize them to do the opposite. Just ask Newt Gingrich who lost his Speakership when he bet the House in 1998 on Clinton being vanquished by Ken Starr.
Myanmar has stripped the minority Rohingya of their right to vote. The details are complex but essentially, Buddhist extremists (yes, even Buddhism has its Tea Party/Trump faction) have decided to to take the disenfranchisement of the Muslim minority to genuinely alarming lengths:
As an elected lawmaker and member of Myanmar’s governing party, U Shwe Maung attended dinners with the president and made speeches from the floor of Parliament. But this weekend, the country’s election commission ruled that despite more than four years in office, he was not a citizen and thus was ineligible to run for re-election in landmark voting in November.
“I was approved and considered a full citizen in 2010,” he said in an interview on Saturday. “Now, after five years, how could I not be eligible?”
Mr. Shwe Maung’s plight is but one example of what appears to be the mass disenfranchisement of the Rohingya, a persecuted Muslim minority who number around one million in Myanmar.
Hundreds of thousands of Rohingya who cast votes in elections five years ago have been struck from the electoral rolls, election commission officials have confirmed, although without providing a precise number.
Disgracefully, “Even Aung San Suu Kyi, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize and champion of democracy, has been largely silent about the plight of the Rohingya.” The Nation continues:
Myanmar’s appalling treatment of the Rohingya constitutes an early warning sign of genocide. The second-class status, government-built camps, – plans to curb movement, plus social mobility and basic well-being of the Rohingya are already in the pipeline.
Any American who has any doubt about the pernicious nature of voter suppression efforts in our country should be closely following this truly ominous story. It is not going to end well.
Elizabeth Warren on Democratic Party insiders and what they want
The news part of this piece may be old news (as in, not yesterday) but I’ve seen almost no mention of it, so I want to help publicize one craggy corner of the jockeying within the party for the right to name its nominee.
In addition, I want to make a general point that primary voters forget. It’s not your party; it’s theirs. Voters don’t have the largest say in who will be a party’s nominee. The party does.
The Democratic Party debate schedule
This electoral season, the Democratic party, nominally led by DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz, has decided to hold six presidential debates during the primary season. Here’s the list of dates according to CNN, which will host the first debate (my occasional emphasis):
CNN and the Democratic National Committee announced Thursday the network will host the first Democratic primary debate in Nevada on [Tuesday] October 13. The exact location will be announced in the coming weeks.
The rest of the schedule, according to CNN:
The other five debates will be hosted by:
CBS, KCCI and The Des Moines Register in Iowa on [Saturday] November 14
ABC and WMUR in Manchester, New Hampshire on [Saturday] December 19
NBC and the Congressional Black Caucus Institute in Charleston, South Carolina on [Sunday] January 17
And two more will be hosted in either February or March: One by Univision and The Washington Post in Miami, Florida, and another by PBS in Wisconsin.
For reference, here’s the early part of the Democratic primary schedule:
Monday, February 1 — Iowa caucus
Tuesday, February 9 — New Hampshire
Saturday, February 20 — Nevada caucus (Dem)
Saturday, February 27 — South Carolina (Dem)
Tuesday, March 1 — Super Tuesday
So, one debate in October (almost two months from now), one on a Saturday in November, the next on the Saturday before Christmas, the next on a Sunday in January, then the voting starts.
The Saturday before Christmas? If you wanted to kill the Nielsen ratings, this is how you’d do it. (I kept looking for a debate during the Super Bowl. Maybe that February to-be-determined date is the one.)
The CNN article notes an objection by Bill Hyers, an O’Malley strategist:
“It’s ridiculous,” Hyers wrote, noting that Democrats held 15 primary debates in 2004 and 25 debates in 2008. “The campaign for presidency should be about giving voters an opportunity to hear from every candidate and decide on the issues, not stacking the deck in favor of a chosen candidate.”
Keep his “giving voters an opportunity” and “not stacking the deck” comments in mind. Hyers has things wrong, exactly backwards.
Let’s start with the claim made in the title of your book, which is “the party decides” who the nominee is going to be. At one level, that sounds almost banal. Is there something about your findings that is controversial, or contrary to conventional wisdom?
I think that there’s a fair amount that’s contrary to conventional wisdom. You see a lot of analysis of primary campaigns, both from political scientists and in the media, that orients everything around how this candidate is going to win in this state or build this result into winning later, and it’s all about these individual candidates who are competing.
The key insight of the book is to look at presidential nominations not from the point of the view of the people trying to get the nomination, but from the point of view of the party that’s trying to bestow it. There are only a handful of people in the party that are running for office. Most of the people in the party are not running for office, but they really care about who wins the nomination and who wins the general election. And so we should tell the story from the point of view of the players in the party who have an opinion about who the nominee should be and can do something about it.
I think that’s the big difference. We generally talk about individual candidates building a campaign, hiring people, doing the strategy, and all of these things. And they are doing that, but they’re doing it in the context where there’s a bunch of other people who are very, very important, who have a lot of influence, and can kind of decide, “Look, you can build all the campaigns you want, but if you’re Pat Robertson, you’re not going to be taken seriously, no matter how much money you’ve earned.”
Whom are you talking about when you talk about “the party”?
That’s part of the controversy about the book, which is that it’s hard to identify. Our argument is that the party is not just the formal DNC and RNC chair and the official hierarchy. It’s all of the people who have made a commitment to be part of the group that’s coordinating together to try to advance the party’s interests.
You could say the voters count too, because they’re doing some type of coordination and trying to encourage their friends. But their contribution is much smaller, because they don’t have as much influence. So we focus more on the high-profile actors, but we have an expansive definition to encompass all the elite actors who are trying to help the party achieve its collective goals.
And those goals are to find a nominee who can win, but who is also someone they can trust. Whether they can trust them because they’re in the right place ideologically is part of it, but it’s richer than that. It’s someone who they think will advance party goals over their own personal goals. One of the problems with someone like John McCain in 2000 is that one of his signature issues was campaign finance reform, which many Republicans were not pleased with. So, here’s somebody who, with the power he has as senator is doing things we don’t like. We make him president, and maybe he’ll do even more things we don’t like. You don’t want to nominate that person.
So what is the process through which this group makes its decision? And what are some of the key indicators of that decision?
They make their decision by talking to each other. These are people who are interacting with each other at various conventions, and in social settings. And they are debating amongst themselves the merits of the candidates, just as there is a debate in the media and ordinary voters are debating and so forth. But they’re listening to each other in particular because they know that they have particular insights beyond what some voter who just heard about the candidate knows.
These folks might not tell you what they’re thinking while they’re still figuring it out, but one way to see it happening is through endorsements. When one of the elite actors says, I support Mitt Romney, that’s part of that conversation. And it’s a signal to other people that the private conversation about the person being for Mitt Romney is for real.
A moment ago you said voters were typically less important than party elites in this process. Of course, the decision is ultimately made by voters in primaries and caucuses. What role do endorsements play in shaping that choice?
When endorsements start to converge, voters can sense that most of or all of the party is for a particular candidate. For the most part, people who are voting in the primaries are partisan, and they listen to that party signal. We show in the book that the relationship between who has the most endorsements and who does well is strongest among partisan voters. Independent voters don’t pay much attention, but then independent voters are a smaller share of the primary electorate.
But probably the biggest way in which endorsements matter is that they’re a way for us to observe the support that’s going on behind the scenes. …
I think if you ask yourself — “What are the collective goals of the ‘high-profile actors’ in today’s Democratic Party, and who can they ‘trust’ to execute those goals?” — the debate schedule makes a ton of sense.
After all, the frontrunner’s leading challenger wants to take apart the insider game. I’m not sure how much support he’s going to get from the “high-profile actors” who are part of that game, if any.
