Month: September 2016

I wrote about the latest call for Clinton to “pivot” to a positive campaign for Salon today:

One of the most tedious moments of any presidential campaign is when everyone in the country decides they are better campaign strategists than the professionals. It’s like watching the World Series at a bar full of drunken fans in the losing team’s hometown. They all know more than the experts, or so they think, because they’ve watched a lot of baseball. This time it’s more tiresome than usual because it’s pretty much tied going into the ninth inning, and both team’s supporters are yelling their advice at the TV screen.

In recent days we’ve seen most prescriptions directed at the Hillary Clinton campaign, as the always nervous Democrats are waking up the startling reality that the flamboyant, white nationalist demagogue on the other side might just pull this off. And they have as many different ideas as there were GOP all-stars Donald Trump smoked in the primaries. These range from “She needs to take the fight to Trump and call him out” to “She should attack the Republican officials who endorse him” to “She should stop attacking him and lay out a positive policy agenda so people have a reason to vote for her” — which, to be fair, sounds like a good idea.

But the question is, if someone lays out a positive policy agenda and nobody hears it, did it really happen? Let’s take Wednesday as an example, when Clinton gave a big speech about something that is important to millions of Americans. She went to Orlando, a major city in a crucial swing state, and spoke about disability rights, expressing her plans in terms of American values of equality and inclusiveness. This is the fourth in a series of “Stronger Together” speeches the Democratic nominee has given recently about faith, community service, families and children, designed to display her values and vision for the future and show how her policies will achieve them.

Clinton also published an Op-Ed in the New York Times on Wednesday called “My Plan for Helping America’s Poor,” in which she discussed a comprehensive policy including one modeled on Rep. Jim Clyburn’s 10-20-30 plan, “directing 10 percent of federal investments to communities where 20 percent of the population has been living below the poverty line for 30 years,” putting “special emphasis on minority communities that have been held back for too long by barriers of systemic racism.”

Did you know about any of that? Has the press asked her questions about those issues in the now-frequent press avails she’s given over the last few weeks? Did you see any of those speeches in their entirety? Probably not. And that’s not the campaign’s fault. I get inundated with notices and press releases from the Clinton campaign, its surrogates and outside groups promoting her public speeches and other appearances. There’s no coverage of this “good news” stuff. Unless she’s thumping Trump the media is basically not interested.

Harvard’s Shorenstein Center has been tracking media coverage throughout this campaign and yesterday released a fascinating study of the four weeks around the political conventions in the middle of the summer. The study’s author, Prof. Thomas E. Patterson, wrote about it for the Los Angeles Times, and its conclusions are depressing. Clinton’s so-called email scandal was the single most important story of that period, and the coverage of it was overwhelmingly negative and without context. In fact all the coverage of Clinton was overwhelmingly negative:

How about her foreign, defense, social or economic policies? Don’t bother looking. Not a single one of Clinton’s policy proposals accounted for even 1 percent of her convention-period coverage; collectively, her policy stands accounted for a mere 4 percent of it. But she might be thankful for that: News reports about her stances were 71 percent negative to 29 percent positive in tone. Trump was quoted more often about her policies than she was. Trump’s claim that Clinton “created ISIS,” for example, got more news attention than her announcement of how she would handle Islamic State.

Even with the email story that dominated Clinton coverage, of course, journalists largely failed to provide the context that would allow voters to put the issue into proper perspective.

The Shorenstein study was backed up by an ongoing Gallup survey that asks people to give them the first word that comes to their minds when they hear a candidate’s name. Since July 11, the words most commonly cited for Clinton are “email,” “lie,” “health,” “speech,” “scandal” and “foundation.” Trump, by contrast, brought to mind the words “speech,” “president,” “immigration,” “Mexico,” “convention,” “campaign” and “Obama.” As you can see, the Clinton words are loaded with negative judgment. Trump’s, not so much.

Clinton has given prepared remarks on 22 occasions since the end of the Democratic convention. Some of these were standard stump speeches, while others were major policy addresses. She has dozens of positive ads running in media markets all over the country. But the only Clinton speech that garnered the full and interested attention of the press corps was her “alt-right” speech in Reno, Nevada, in late August. Almost all her speeches are covered the way the New York Times covered the disability speech on Wednesday: Clinton’s remarks are framed as a political ploy designed to evoke Trump’s ugly comments about a disabled reporter (which she did not discuss in the speech at all.) At the very end of the article, the reporter mentions that “some of [Clinton’s] most affecting moments on the campaign trail” come when she speaks with disabled people and their families, and that she often spontaneously brings up the subject in informal settings. There’s no reason to think she isn’t sincere about the issue, even if the campaign is subtly trying to highlight Trump’s cretinous attitudes by contrast.

It’s an old truism that negative campaigning works, so it’s no surprise that Clinton’s campaign would try to leverage Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric against him. But there is plenty of positive material out there as well. It’s just the press isn’t interested, and there isn’t a lot of evidence that the voters are either. This doesn’t seem to be that kind of election.

The armchair strategists who think a more positive, uplifting message is what Hillary Clinton needs to put this election away may be right. But the question is whether anyone could hear such a message above the din of cynicism and negativity that characterizes the coverage of this campaign.

Gary’s downside

by digby

Kevin Drum noticed that polling shows there are a fairly significant number of Sanders voters who are saying they prefer to vote for Gary Johnson over Clinton. He thought it was worthwhile to list some of Johnson’s policy positions:

In one sense, this is easy to understand. Johnson favors legalization of marijuana. He’s good on civil liberties and wants to cut way back on overseas military interventions. He’s moderate on immigration. He’s pro-choice and supports gay rights. There are plenty of things for Bernie supporters to like about him.

On the other hand, Johnson is a libertarian. Here’s a smattering of what else he believes:

• He supports TPP. 
• He supports fracking. 
• He opposes any federal policies that would make college more affordable or reduce student debt. In fact, he wants to abolish student loans entirely. 
• He thinks Citizens United is great. 
• He doesn’t want to raise the minimum wage. At all. 
• He favors a balanced-budget amendment and has previously suggested that he would slash federal spending 43 percent in order to balance the budget. This would require massive cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and social welfare programs of all kinds. 
• He opposes net neutrality. 
• He wants to increase the Social Security retirement age to 75 and he’s open to privatization. 
• He opposes any kind of national health care and wants to repeal Obamacare. 
• He opposes practically all forms of gun control. 
• He opposes any kind of paid maternity or medical leave. 
• He supported the Keystone XL pipeline. 
• He opposes any government action to address climate change. 
• He wants to cut the corporate tax rate to zero. 
• He appears to believe that we should reduce financial regulation. All we need to do is allow big banks to fail and everything will be OK. 
• He wants to remove the Fed’s mandate to maximize employment and has spoken favorably of returning to the gold standard. 
• He wants to block-grant Medicare and turn it over to the states. 
• He wants to repeal the 16th Amendment and eliminate the income tax, the payroll tax, and the estate tax. He would replace it with a 28 percent FairTax that exempts the poor. This is equivalent to a 39 percent sales tax, and it would almost certainly represent a large tax cut for the rich.

His position on choice, by the way, is that it’s up to the states. So your “personal freedom” is subject to whatever yahoos in the state capitol decide it is i you’re a woman. But hey, whatever. People feel differently about fundamental human rights in different parts of the country so we shouldn’t force them to acknowledge those they think are icky. But other than that he’s a real civil liberties champion.

This can’t hurt

by digby

Joss Whedon usually leaves the heroics for characters in his movies, but the Avengers director’s next project is battling what he believes could be a big threat in the real world.

Whedon has founded the pro-Hillary Clinton super PAC Save the Day and donated $1 million toward helping her beat Donald Trump in the presidential election. Instead of going on the defensive, Whedon is focusing on encouraging people to vote through a series of star-studded online videos. He’s hoping that these videos will resonate with several groups of people that are likely to vote for Clinton, including rural college-educated white women and groups that often have low voter turnout such as black men and millennials.

“It’s not about attacking because Donny’s real good at attacking himself,” says Whedon. “It’s about getting people to vote, because it’s frightening the apathy that people are treating the most crucial election of their lifetimes with.”

Whedon has never been shy about his political leanings. During the 2012 election, he made a tongue-in-cheek video in which he proclaimed that Mitt Romney had “the vision and determination” to take the country on a path toward a zombie apocalypse. Last year, he signed a petition encouraging Sen. Elizabeth Warren to run for president. But he’s been a loyal Clinton supporter since she entered the race, even when she was fighting for the Democratic nomination against Sen. Bernie Sanders. “I really loved a lot of the things that Bernie had to say,” he acknowledges, but adds that ultimately believes “Hillary will be better at this job.”

Before the Democratic National Convention, he began to convene small get-togethers of other Hollywood writers to discuss what could be done to lend Clinton their support. “I wasn’t going to do anything until she got the nomination,” he says. “And then it was the first night of the Democratic Convention — before Michelle Obama spoke — when the Democrats were so fractious that I just went into the sweats and was like, ‘I’ve misinterpreted what needs to be done.’”

Whedon had the time to commit to the effort. His last film, Avengers: Age of Ultron, was released in 2015, and he stopped writing his next script to work full time on Save the Day, building up a small but experienced team that includes executive director Ben Sheehan, who hails from Funny or Die, and head of media partnerships Carri Twigg, who previously worked in the office of public engagement for Vice President Joe Biden.

The team is currently at work on more than 10 videos and plans to make between 15 and 25 before the election. It launches today with a spoof of a traditional campaign ad, called “Important,” that is jam-packed with A-listers, including Neil Patrick Harris and Avengers stars Robert Downey Jr., Scarlett Johansson and Mark Ruffalo. Grey’s Anatomy’s Jesse Williams, Keegan-Michael Key and Stanley Tucci have also shot videos, which range from comedic to earnest, for Whedon. Says Sheehan: “They’re passionate about the cause, but they also love Joss and the things he wrote.”
[…]
Save the Day is taking a measured approach, first encouraging voter registration, then voter turnout and finally voting down the ticket on all races, both national and local. The team is doing outreach to ensure the videos are seen by the right people and, if lucky, go viral. Whedon acknowledges that “no one really cares what an actor’s opinion is,” but he says that’s not the strategy. “Seeing somebody famous makes people stop. Seeing something funny makes people stop. Seeing something with emotion makes people stop,” he adds. “Those are the ways you can get to people.”

Like I said, it can’t hurt. We need all hands on deck.

.

Unless, of course ….
by Tom Sullivan

Another night of unrest in Charlotte in response to the police shooting of Keith Scott. One man went to the hospital with a gunshot wound and was reported critically injured. (No shots fired by police, spokesmen say.) Tear gas. Flash-bangs. Riot gear. Gov. Pat McCrory declared a state of emergency for the city. The Guardian’s Ijeoma Oluo wrote about the events of the night (you need to click through to see the photo described below):

A line of police officers stand in the dark on a Charlotte, North Carolina, highway. They look like an occupying force with their helmets and face shields and various weaponry strapped all over their armored clothing. A large bus illuminates them with its headlights. The front of the bus declares in bright lights: “NOT IN SERVICE”.

It’s as if these police responding to protests of Tuesday’s shooting death of Keith Scott are carrying with them a lighted banner that declares what black Americans already know: they are not in service. Not for us.

It’s the message that police have always been sending black Americans. Blacks make up about 13% of the US population, and yet accounted for 27% of the approximately 1,146 people killed by police in 2015. “Not in service” is the message we got when Tamir Rice was killed, when Freddie Gray was killed, when Eric Garner was killed. This was the message we got when Terence Crutcher was killed this week while asking for service. We understand that if our police force really does exist to protect and serve, it does not exist to protect and serve us.

One has to wonder what sort of mindset is being trained into police cadets these days. Officer Betty Shelby’s attorney and the Tulsa police department gave this account of the shooting of Terence Crutcher:

When Shelby approached the car, the doors were closed, and the windows were open, Wood said. She looked into the passenger’s side to make sure no one was on the floor of the car, and as she was getting ready to move to the driver’s side, she turned around and saw Crutcher walking toward her, Wood said.

Wood said that Shelby then said to Crutcher, “Hey, is this your car?”

Crutcher didn’t respond, simply dropping his head while continuing to look at Shelby, “kind of under his brow,” Wood said. Crutcher then began to put his hand into his left pocket, Wood said, adding that Shelby told Crutcher, “Hey, please keep your hands out of your pocket while you’re talking to me. Let’s deal with his car.”

Crutcher did not respond, Wood said, so Shelby ordered him again to get his hand out of his pocket. He then pulled his hand away and put his hands up in the air, even though he was not instructed to do so, which Shelby found strange, Wood said.

Shelby tried to get Crutcher to talk to her, but he simply mumbled something unintelligible and stared at her, Wood said. He then turned and walked to the edge of the roadway and turned to look at her, his hands still in the air, Wood said. He put his hands down and started to reach into his pocket again, Wood said, and she ordered him again to get his hands out of his pocket.

At this point, Shelby, a drug recognition expert, believed Crutcher was “on something,” Wood said, possibly PCP.

Shelby then radioed in that she had a subject “who is not following commands.”

“You can kind of hear a degree of stress in her voice when she says that,” Wood said.

Shelby then pulled out her gun and had Crutcher at gunpoint as she commanded him to get on his knees, Wood said. She pulled out a gun instead of a Taser because she thought he had a weapon, and she was planning to arrest him for being intoxicated in public and possibly obstructing the investigation, Wood said.

Shelby ordered Crutcher to stop multiple times as Crutcher walked toward the SUV with his hands up, Wood said.

But those orders cannot be heard in the audio from the dashcam video, which starts as another patrol car pulls up to the scene, showing Crutcher walking toward the SUV with his hands up as Shelby follows him, apparently with her weapon drawn and pointing at Crutcher.

As the video from the helicopter begins, Crutcher was “angling” toward his car while Shelby repeatedly commanded him to stop, Wood said. His hands were still in the air.

“As a police officer, you have to wonder — why would someone ignore commands at gunpoint to get to a certain location?” Wood said.

Crutcher’s arms came down, and he turned to face the car, Wood said, and he reached into the driver’s side window with his left hand. That’s when Shelby fired one shot and a fellow officer, Tyler Turnbough, deployed a Taser, Wood said.

Shelby believed that when Crutcher attempted to reach into the car, he was retrieving a weapon, Wood said. In her interview with homicide detectives, she said, “I was never so scared in my life as in that moment right then,” according to Wood.

He might have had a gun in his pocket. He might have been on PCP. He might have been going back to his car to reach for the gun that might have been inside instead of for the one that might have been in his pocket. After Ferguson and countless “Hands up. Don’t shoot.” Black Lives Matter protests, a black man, encountering police, puts his hands in the air unasked and that’s “strange.” “You have to wonder” why a guy who might have been on PCP might be doing something irrational at gunpoint, police said. Crutcher had no gun. If police received better training (and if Crutcher were white), he might still be alive.

Gregory Wallace, a law professor at Campbell University in North Carolina, cites a 2013 Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals case and asks, even if Keith Scott had a gun, whether police were even justified in stopping and questioning him about it. North Carolina is an open-carry state:

“The mere possession of a handgun does not give the police probable cause or reasonable suspicion to briefly detain you for stop and frisk,” Wallace said. “The mere fact that you have a handgun isn’t enough – it’s legal in N.C.”

Unless, of course ….

Bono drops the mic on Trump

By Dennis Hartley

From The Los Angeles Times:

Donald Trump has “hijacked” the Republican Party and comes in as possibly the “worst” idea ever for America, the lead singer of the band U2 said. 

“America is the best idea the world ever came up with,” Irish singer-songwriter Bono told “CBS This Morning” in an interview that aired Tuesday. “But Donald Trump is potentially the worst idea that ever happened to America – potentially.” 

Bono, whose real name is Paul David Hewson, argued that the Republican presidential nominee threatens America’s underlying values of justice and equality for all. 

“He’s hijacked the party. I think he’s trying to hijack the idea of America,” he said. And I think it’s bigger than all of us. I think it’s …really dangerous.”

BOOM! Couldn’t have summarized it better myself.

I can’t wait to see Trump’s flurry of after-midnight tweets, firing back:

Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump

“Pudgy Bono” said bad things about me. Ivanka tells me he’s this big deal rock singer. I bet I can do what he does so much better. Believe me.

Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump

I hear Pudgy Bono does lots of work for charities. I don’t know, but that’s what people say. Maybe someone should investigate these “charities”.

Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump

So I hear Pudgy Bono has been performing concerts in America. He’s not even a citizen. Does he have a work visa? I don’t know. We should check.

Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump

Have you seen Pudgy Bono’s tiny little hands? And he’s so short. I think he actually might be a leprechaun. I’m not sure. We’re looking into that.

Stay tuned…

—DH

by digby

This is just …awesome:

Sarah P at Crooks and Liars tells you why you should watch it:

Honestly, there is not much I can say because this video is absolutely perfect. Rep. Luis Gutierrez used his 5 minutes today to multitask and cover a variety of issues, including: 

Skittles
Refugees
Race
Religion
Acceptance
Donald Trump
IRS
Trump Foundation
$10,000 portrait
Golf scandal ($1M hole in one shot and the lawsuit following)
Trump litigation
Misappropriation of funds 

Did I mention this all happened while he was (a) eating skittles and (b) questioning IRS Commissioner Koskinen on whether it’s legal for a foundation to pay an individual or a corporation’s debts with foundation money?

About that Clinton Foundation

by digby

Man of the World: The Further Endeavors of Bill Clinton

This interview with Joe Conason by Amanda Marcotte about his new book on Bill Clinton’s post-presidency called “Man of the World” is a must must read if you’re interested in hearing something about the substance of what the foundation actually tried to do in the world rather than Village gossip about Huma and Hill and who they sat next to at dinner:

No one has been able to produce real evidence of corruption at the Clinton Foundation, but the relentless media chatter falsely implying otherwise has had its effect: Few voters know about the good work that the foundation does. Americans are instead more likely to believe false stories about corruption than know about the foundation’s work.

Journalist Joe Conason wants to change that. In his new book, “Man of the World: The Further Endeavors of Bill Clinton,” Conason profiled Bill Clinton’s post-presidency career in philanthropy. Through his work for the Clinton Foundation, the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) and other activities, former president Clinton has devoted himself to fighting against poverty and for greater access to education, nutrition and health care around the world. I recently spoke with Conason over the phone. The interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

You’ve written a lot about the Clintons for how long now?

Well, I mean since he first ran for president. So that’s — what is it? Almost 25 years? Something like that.

So what motivated you to write this book about Bill Clinton’s post-presidency?

Esquire magazine asked me to write a profile about him in 2005 when he was just about to launch Clinton Global Initiative. That summer before [he and his associates] launched it, I went to Africa with him on his annual Africa trip, and we visited several countries.

And when I came back and went to the first CGI and wrote the piece for Esquire, it got a huge reception. I realized sometime after that that what they were doing was really interesting and different from what other presidents had done when they left office and that there might be a book in it.

It took a couple of years, but I persuaded [the Clintons] to cooperate with a book that they would have no control over. President Clinton didn’t see the book until August, when it was all ready to hit the printer.

But they nevertheless were very cooperative, and I went on a couple of more trips to Africa with him and other places, traveled with him a lot and interviewed him, you know, more than a dozen times — sort of sit-down, taped interviews. And it turned out that I was right, there was really a lot to write.

How would you say President Clinton’s vision of a post-presidency differs from other presidents before him? And, well, after him, as well?

Well, we’ll see what comes after. In spite of their sometimes tense relationship, President Obama has displayed a lot of interest in what Clinton has done since he left the White House since he knows he’s leaving soon, and they’ve talked quite a bit about it. So we’ll see what Obama does.

Clinton studied the post-presidencies of earlier presidents very carefully, and especially Jimmy Carter, who[m] he hosted at Camp David just before his own presidency ended to talk about what Carter had done. That again was a very tense relationship, one that had big ups and downs, but I think Clinton really respected what Carter had done.

But [Clinton is] a bigger personality in a lot of ways and more ambitious and wants to do more things. He never sort of set a boundary around what he was doing.

He started out realizing that something really needed to be done about AIDS treatment in the developing world, because there were likely to be 100 million AIDS victims if nothing was done.

He never decided, Well, it’s only going to be about these things or it’s only going to be about these themes or I’m only going to do health or I’m only going to do education. He really allowed himself to cast a very wide net. And I don’t any other president had done that yet after leaving the White House.

How do you see the Clinton Foundation and [its] work? And how does that differ from the way it’s being portrayed in the media?

I’d say it’s night and day, Amanda.

The media is focused on false stories about conflicts of interest, or true stories about potential conflicts of interests that don’t seem to me to matter very much. They want to know about every email that was ever sent on behalf of any donor or anybody that might’ve been a donor or attended CGI.

I’m looking at things like they’ve had 11 and a half million AIDS victims on treatment who otherwise would have died, for instance. That’s just one thing. Or, rebuilt the entire health system of the country of Rwanda. Or, you know, they’ve eliminated malaria from most of Tanzania and saved thousands and thousands of people’s lives that way.

It would take a long time to enumerate all the accomplishments of the foundation. This is not just Clinton himself. This is a lot of people who are either volunteers or employees there — doctors, volunteer business executives, all kinds of people who decided they wanted to address these problems. It’s why I wanted to write the book in the first place.

For some reason, very few of our colleagues have the slightest interest in that. I’ll hear, as I have already a few times while I’m going around talking about this book, Well, no one would deny the good work, but …

That’s fine, don’t deny the good work because you don’t know anything about it. But what if you looked at the good work for 15 minutes? What if you sent somebody overseas to look at the good work? Almost nobody ever does.

That’s the difference between my outlook on it and what I would call the conventional media narrative now, which is all about this idea that somehow something corrupt had to have happened.

Keep in mind, these were people who, up until the election cycle started, would go to Clinton Global Initiative every year and suck up shamelessly to Clinton trying to get an interview. [The] same people now only want to talk about why nobody trusts the Clintons and ask, Don’t you think that they should shut down the foundation?

Sure, they should shut down the foundation and if those 11 million people die, nobody in our media world would care. I think says a lot more about them than it does about Clinton.

In the book, I talk a lot about The New York Times, which influences all media coverage basically, especially in politics. And The New York Times has been very focused on the foundation and problems that [Times journalists] allege in the foundation, such making up this whole story about Russian uranium, which was a completely fabricated, phony story taken from “Clinton Cash” that they put on the front page.

You know what, they know better. Celia Dugger, who is a very good reporter for the Times, went to Africa with Clinton and saw what he did — and saw what the foundation had done. So they know, and they ran a very good story about it years ago but this is years ago. And that was one time in 15 years basically that they paid attention the real work. Meanwhile, they are constantly on this, and it’s all part of the political cycle.

The popularity of the Clintons goes up and down. You can see it in Gallup polls that are taken every year, it goes up and down whether one of them is running for office — especially her. And I think you know the basis for all of that.

How would you characterize Bill Clinton’s philosophy of philanthropy?

He talks often about keeping score. He wants to know what works. He wants to know how many people are getting the medicine and how many clinics are being refurbished. Whatever the metrics might be, he’s very interested in keeping track of that. And his daughter, who knows a lot more of how to do that than he does, is even more interested in that than he is. Being a millennial, that generation and having worked at McKinsey, she knows how to do those kinds of measurements and metrics.

He cares a lot about directing markets toward solutions. He is not a socialist. He believes the market is here to stay in one form or another. But he also know we have what economists call “market failures” — that is to say, big problems market don’t solve, for one reason or another.

AIDS treatment was a very good example of that. We had AIDS medications that worked, that kept people alive at least. We had gigantic potential market for them in the rest of the world besides the West. And yet, there was no way to harness the demand to create this supply at a price that could be afforded.

So they addressed that in a lot of ways that I described in the book and succeeded, to a great extent, in making AIDS treatment — and that doesn’t mean just drugs but testing and all the things you need to do around treating AIDS — available at an affordable price, given the amount of money that you could raise worldwide to do it.

Is that a market-oriented solution? It is, in a way because they drew the generic drug manufacturers into it, and the people who supplied chemicals to those manufacturers. They made it into a market for those people, those companies. Would it have worked if it was just left to the magical forces of the market? Definitely not. And he understands that. It’s government and social networks, government and private philanthropy, government and citizens, who he sees work[ing] on modern problems.

A lot of the focus on your work is on Bill Clinton’s uniqueness in his philanthropy, but there is a very good chance that he’s going to be unique in another way: He’ll be the first president to be a spouse of another president.

The first president to go back to the White House in any way, that I know of.

What sense do you have of how he feels about that? How he is going to approach this unique role he is about to take — well, hopefully will take?

He’s the kind of person who, when I used to try to talk to him about whether Hillary was going to run for president when she was a senator, he would just scold and say, “You know, she has to win her second Senate race first. We’re not going to talk about that because if you start talking about the next thing before you’ve done the thing in front of you, you might very well lose the one you are trying to do now.”

So he’s not going to talk about that in any meaningful way now. What I can say about him is, just observing him — there are things that he is interested in that if someone asked him, “What would you like to do?” I think there would be places where his talents, interests and even obsessions would take him.

For instance, even his adversaries agree that he is one of the most skillful diplomats we have ever had in public service in this country, both in and out of the White House. And I think a lot of the relationships that he’s had with heads of state and leaders of political parties and social movements and all kinds of organizations abroad, corporations, labor unions, he knows people all over the world.

He could serve President Hillary Clinton very well in diplomatic roles. Whether dealing with specific problems or overarching issues, I think, that’s something she would be wise to call upon him.

He is really concerned about climate change and about the transition to clean energy. He has been quite interested in this since [Al] Gore became his vice president and persuaded him that this is a huge issue that threatened the planet.

In his post-presidency, he has certainly tried to emphasize that. He has given Gore as much of a platform as he could at CGI. He has tried to bring those same kinds of market forces to bear and making clean energy affordable in cities.

He had less success at that than he would have liked because it is still a huge problem.

But . . . as a spouse of a new president, I think, he would be interested in trying to move that stone up the hill.

I’m halfway through the book and it’s really interesting.  It’s not what I expected, it’s a complicated look at  complicated man trying to do a very complicated thing. It’s well worth reading if you’re interested in informing yourself about what he was trying to do and what the project accomplished and what it didn’t.

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Yes, the media is why Trump is close

by digby

They refuse to admit it and probably never will. But it will be a miracle if Clinton manages to pull this off.

Here are the hard facts:

My analysis of media coverage in the four weeks surrounding both parties’ national conventions found that her use of a private email server while secretary of State and other alleged scandal references accounted for 11% of Clinton’s news coverage in the top five television networks and six major newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times. Excluding neutral reports, 91% of the email-related news reports were negative in tone. Then, there were the references to her character and personal life, which accounted for 4% of the coverage; that was 92% negative.

While Trump declared open warfare on the mainstream media — and of late they have cautiously responded in kind — it has been Clinton who has suffered substantially more negative news coverage throughout nearly the whole campaign.

Few presidential candidates have been more fully prepared to assume the duties of the presidency than is Clinton. Yet, her many accomplishments as first lady, U.S. senator, and secretary of State barely surfaced in the news coverage of her candidacy at any point in the campaign. She may as well as have spent those years baking cookies.

How about her foreign, defense, social or economic policies? Don’t bother looking. Not a single one of Clinton’s policy proposals accounted for even 1% of her convention-period coverage; collectively, her policy stands accounted for a mere 4% of it. But she might be thankful for that: News reports about her stances were 71% negative to 29% positive in tone. Trump was quoted more often about her policies than she was. Trump’s claim that Clinton “created ISIS,” for example, got more news attention than her announcement of how she would handle Islamic State.

I also looked at the year before the 2016 primaries began, and even then Clinton had a 2-to-1 ratio of bad press to good press. There was only one month in the whole of 2015 where the tone of her coverage on balance was not in the red — and even then it barely touched positive territory.

During the primaries, her coverage was again in negative territory and again less positive than Trump’s. After the conventions got underway and Trump got embroiled in a testy exchange with the parents of a slain Muslim U.S. soldier, the tone of his coverage nosedived and her coverage looked rosy by comparison. But even then it was not glowing. Her convention-period news coverage was 56% negative to 44% positive.

Clinton’s emails and the accompanying narrative — “she can’t be trusted” — have been a defining feature of coverage from the campaign’s start. Only occasionally have reporters taken the narrative a step further. How important, exactly, are her emails in the larger context of presidential fitness? And just how large a transgression are they?

Judging from their stories, journalists rate the emails as being a highly important and very serious issue. They cover it heavily and with damning tone. When 90% or more of the coverage of a subject is negative, the verdict is in. Even good news gets turned to her disadvantage. For example, when the FBI announced that her emails did not violate the law, the Los Angeles Times ran a story focused on Trump’s response, quoting him as saying, “This is one of the most crooked politicians in history…. We have a rigged system, folks.”

In today’s hypercompetitive media environment, journalists find it difficult to resist controversies. Political scientist W. Lance Bennett explored this phenomenon around Trump’s 2011 allegation that President Obama was not a native-born American. Trump’s “birther” statements were seized upon by cable outlets and stayed in the headlines and on newscasts for days. Veteran CNN correspondent Candy Crowley even interviewed Trump, who was then not a political figure at all. She justified it by saying on air: “There comes a point where you can’t ignore something, not because it’s entertaining …. The question was, ‘Is he driving the conversation?’ And he was.” In truth, the news media were driving the conversation, as they have with Clinton’s emails.

Decades ago, the Hutchins Commission on Freedom of the Press concluded that reporters routinely fail to provide a “comprehensive and intelligent account of the day’s events in the context that gives them some meaning.” Whatever else might be concluded about the coverage of Clinton’s emails, context has been largely missing. Some stories spelled out how the merging of private and official emails by government officials was common practice. There were also some, though fewer, that tried to assess the harm, if any, that resulted from her use of a private server. As for Clinton’s policy proposals and presidential qualifications, they’ve been completely lost in the glare of damaging headlines and sound bites.

Thomas E. Patterson is a professor at Harvard and the author of “Informing the News.”

By the way, they’re still doing it. If we end up with President Trump, which is certainly possible, you’ll know who to thank.The only upside is that they won’t be immune from Emperor Trump’s authoritarian crack-down. He isn’t a big fan of press freedom. On the other hand, if history holds they’ll be good boys and girls and serve him well so it probably won’t be a problem.

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A chip off the old block

by digby

I wrote about Trump Jr for Salon this morning:

In the beginning of the 2016 campaign the only one of Donald Trump’s five children with a high public profile was his daughter Ivanka who has her own celebrity brand just like her father’s. The two older sons were unknown to the general public but they made quite a good first impression when the whole family appeared on a CNN family special. They are all so attractive and glamorous that many people came to believe they were Donald Trump’s best feature. Indeed, it was said that the fact he’d raised such an admirable family spoke so well of him that it smoothed some of  the rough edges of his own personality. Unfortunately, as people have gotten to know them better, they’ve revealed themselves to be as rough edged as dear old Dad, particularly his namesake, Donald Jr.

For most of the primaries Trump proudly evoke his two older sons when he talked about the 2nd amendment, touting their NRA membership and love of guns.  It was a little bit shocking to see the ghastly pictures of their African big game kills including a horrific shot of Trump Jr holding a severed elephant tail, but they seemed to otherwise be pretty ordinary hard-working businessmen devoted to their family. For the most part they kept a low profile, serving as the usual family props in a political campaign.

When Donald Jr spoke to a white supremacist radio host in March it set off a few alarm bells simply because his father’s extreme immigration policies had been so ecstatically received by white nationalist groups. But most chalked it up to inexperience and let it go. Surely Junior wasn’t as crudely racist as the old man who was reported to keep a book of Hitler speeches next to the bed. But just a few days later he retweeted a racist science fiction writer named Theodore Beale who goes by the handle of “Vox Day” claiming that a famous picture of a Trump supporter giving a Nazi salute was actually a follower of Bernie Sanders. The apple didn’t fall far from the tree after all.

At the GOP convention in July, all four of the grown kids gave heartfelt speeches about their Dad, even as they made clear through their childhood anecdotes that the only time they ever spent with him was at the office and it seemed that Junior in particular had taken a more active role and was seen in a more serious light. people were talking about him as a moderating voice in the campaign.

Right after the convention, however, he let out a deafening dogwhistle that left no doubt as to his personal affiliation with the far right. He went to the Neshoba County Fair in Philadelphia Mississippi, best remembered as the place where three civil rights workers were murdered in 1964. But it has special political significance as the site of Ronald Reagan’s famous “states’ rights” speech in 1980 where he signaled  his sympathy for white supremacy by delivering it at the scene of that horrendous racist crime. (The man who coined the term “welfare queen” was always a champion dogwhistler.) Trump Jr went there to represent and represent he did. When asked what he thought about the confederate flag he said, “I believe in tradition. I don’t see a lot of the nonsense that’s been created about that.”

Since then it’s been revealed that he follows a number of white nationalists on twitter and he’s retweeted several including a psychologist who believes Jews manipulate society.  And in the last couple of weeks Junior has let his alt-right freak flag fly.  First he got excited about Hillary Clinton’s “deplorable” comment and proudly retweeted a picture with the title “The Deplorables”  that had been making the rounds featuring Trump, Mike Pence, Rudy Giuliani, Chris Christie, Ben Carson, Eric Trump and Donald Jr along with conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, right wing hit man Roger Stone, alt-right leader Milo Yianopolis  and white supremacist symbol Pepe the Frog.  There’s no indication that any of them had a problem with that but a lot of other people found it to be revealing, to say the least.

A couple of days later Trump Jr stepped in it again, saying the media would be “warming up the gas chamber” for Republicans if they lied and cheated the way Hillary Clinton does. He claimed he was talking about capital punishment but his association with virulent anti-Semites makes that claim ring a little bit hollow.

And then there was the Skittles incident. Donald Jr tweeted out a deeply offensive image of a bowl of skittles with the words “If I had a bowl of Skittles and I told you three would kill you would you take a handful? That’s our Syrian refugee problem.” It’s a terrible metaphor, wrong in every way and Donald Jr took some heat for it. But it’s yet another window into his association with alt-right white nationalism. That bad metaphor has been around in various forms for a long time. In this country it was usually a bowl of M&Ms representing black people. The people who traffic in this garbage fairly recently changed it to Skittles because that was the candy Trayvon Martin had bought on the night he was murdered by vigilante George Zimmerman. Yes, it’s that sick.

Junior didn’t just see that disgusting dehumanizing tweet and send it off without thinking. He knew exactly what he was sending out there because he’d said the same thing in an interview the week before to Pittsburgh Tribune reporters and editors:

“If we had a bowl of Skittles on this table, and three of the 1,000 in there were poisonous, would you take from the bowl? You wouldn’t until you could figure out which ones were bad.”

You hear pundits and commentators saying that Donald Trump is sui generis and his phenomenon won’t be recreated. They’re probably right. But perhaps they are not aware that his son also has political ambitions and he is simply a younger, better looking version of his father with much more hair. If alt-right white nationalism is going to be an ongoing feature of American political life, they have their leader. He is one of them.

There is Only One Candidate Part Three 

by tristero

Go out and pick up a hard copy of the NY Times.  The online edition is different, you need the full effect of actual hard print here. I’ll wait.

Got it? Great! Now look on the front page. There’s a headline with the word “Trump” in it above the fold. Now, go through section A (the main news section of the paper). The word “Trump” is on a smaller headline in the news summary on page 2.

Keep going. Page 10, “Obama” gets a headline. Page 16, again there’s a “Trump” in the headline.

Page 18, again, two headlines above the fold with the word”Trump.”

Page 25, an above the fold headline with the word “Trump.”

Now, the editorial pages.

“Trump” is in the headline of the lead editorial on page 26. “Donald Trump” is in the headline of Tom Friedman’s editorial on page 27. Both above the fold, by the way. And that’s the front section of the paper of record.


Not a single headline mention of any rival candidate.

This regularly goes on day after day after day everywhere, in every media outlet in this country. All Trump, all the trumping time. There is no one else running for president.*

Whoops! Wait-a-minute, wait-a-minute… Flip back. On the op-ed page (nearly missed it!) there’s an editorial entitled “My Plan For Helping America’s Poor” with a byline by – wow, I can’t believe it, they’re letting her publish something?- Hillary Clinton!!! Let’s look!!!!

Oh, dear… Oh, no. Oh.

It’s unreadable, completely unreadable. Clinton takes 7 long and statistic-bloated paragraphs to tell us that (who knew?) she thinks it’s bad that some American children are growing up in poverty.

And then her plan! A… a what? A 10-20-30 plan? What the hell is that? And who is Jim Clyburn? Is he running for president, too? Clinton finally gets her name (albeit in tiny type) mentioned above the fold and this is what we get, the best cure for insomnia ever, guaranteed?

We are doomed.

——

*Because who, including Times readers, has time to read more than one or two articles beyond the headlines, except for politics junkies?