Month: December 2018

There’s only one Trump. Thank God.

by digby

Adam Serwer explains why the asymmetry of America’s political parties means that Democrats are unable to elect a divisive emagogue like Trump:

Although the Republican Party has grown more conservative in recent years and the Democratic Party has grown more liberal, the Democrats rely far more on conservative voters than the GOP does on liberal voters. According to Pew, only 4 percent of Republicans identify as liberal, 27 percent as moderate, and 68 percent as conservative. By contrast, 46 percent of Democrats identify as liberal—a large increase from 2000, when that figure was only 28 percent, but far less than the percentage of Republicans who identify as conservatives. Moderates account for 37 percent of Democratic voters, and conservatives 15 percent.

That asymmetry means that Democrats are forced to appeal to groups that lean Republican in order to win. This sometimes leads to comically awkward pandering—think of former Vermont Governor Howard Dean declaring that he wants to be president for the guy who has a Confederate flag on his truck, or Hillary Clinton needling Barack Obama over his lack of support from “hardworking Americans, white Americans.” When a Democrat with statewide or national ambitions does antagonize one of these conservative-leaning groups, whether it’s Obama describing Clinton primary voters as people who “cling to guns and religion” or Clinton saying that half of Trump supporters are racist, it is a potentially campaign-ending gaffe.

Contrast that with a Republican senator like Ted Cruz, who accused his Democratic rival of trying to make Texas like California, “right down to tofu and silicon and dyed hair.” When Democrats trash Republican-leaning constituencies, it’s a political catastrophe. When Republicans trash Democratic-leaning constituencies, it’s Tuesday.

A premature autopsy of Beto O’Rourke’s run against Cruz, in which he came within three points of unseating the incumbent, argued that “Democrats win in red states … not by painting bold contrasts but by minimizing differences.” This was a bit of a strange assessment—O’Rourke did far better than a number of more conservative Democrats running in other states, who got wiped out; he helped Democrats overwhelm Republicans in dozens of down-ballot races; and he came closer than any Democrat in a generation to winning a statewide race in Texas. But it underscores the point that unlike Republicans, Democrats cannot afford to alienate huge swaths of the population and still expect to win big races. O’Rourke came close not because he trashed prospective Cruz voters or even Cruz himself, but because he offered the kind of unifying, starry-eyed liberal rhetoric that has proved successful for certain Democrats in the past.

This asymmetry isn’t just ideological. Forty-three percent of white voters are Democrats, compared with 51 percent of white voters who lean GOP. That means white voters remain an essential part of the Democratic coalition—which is precisely why Fox News and other conservative media outlets serve so much culture-war red meat, fomenting white panic about diversity, telling their audiences that Democrats are racist against white people or want to take away Christmas. But unlike the Republican Party, Democrats must also draw support from black, Latino, and Asian voters—meaning they can’t afford to antagonize them, and must be responsive to their interests.

Republicans are almost entirely reliant on white voters—which is why generalizations about racial and religious minorities meet with so little pushback within the party. There is simply no constituency willing to hold Republican politicians accountable for such remarks—on the contrary, most of the party either sees both the generalizations and the discriminatory policy approaches that emerge from them as admirable or remains in denial about what is happening.

The divergence is clear even in the respective parties’ choice of standard-bearers. Obama’s rise to political stardom came after a speech in which he declared that “there’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America.” And Trump’s came from his strategic deployment of the slander that the first black president was born abroad and was therefore illegitimate.

These distinctions mean that Democrats cannot afford to attack Americans who have only a high-school education the way that Republicans wage culture war against academia. Democrats cannot dismiss seniors the way Republicans condescend to young voters. Democrats cannot represent white men as a national-security threat after a terrorist attack the way Republicans can call to ban members of an entire religion from entering the country. Democrats must take care to not alienate police in the aftermath of unjustified police shootings, while Republicans can assassinate the character of entire communities. Democrats seeking higher office cannot hate the people who vote Republican the way that Republicans can hate people who vote for Democrats, not because Democrats are inherently better people but because they need the votes. And that means that without a fundamental change in the constituencies of both parties, there can never be a Democratic Trump.

The media have made the mistake of interpreting this data as meaning the country is “right-leaning.” It’s obviously not. But it does mean that the Democratic party has a more ideologically diverse coalition and has to take that into account. The Republicans can run on hate and bile (and cheating) and win.

It’s also true that the center has moved left in recent years and much of what was once considered too extreme for the moderates is not mainstream. That’s the result of the long-term, patient organizing and education of progressives and the real-life horrors inflicted by GOP rule.

Democrats tend to win with forward-thinking, inspirational paeans to American progress. That often has broader appeal than the dark underbelly of the American character that Republicans successfully use to activate their conservative base. In fact, it wasn’t long ago that Republicans also tried to appeal to that “moderate” middle with their usual ugly dog whistles tempered by a little bit of optimism. They don’t bother with that anymore because their coalition is so heavy with far-right extremists brainwashed by the conservative movement and wingnut media that they can’t win if they dilute their hate. They’ve made up for the loss of moderates by relying more heavily on their old tactics of cheating and undemocratically manipulating the system in their favor.

Democrats are relying on a different model which requires the candidate to unify rather than divide. It’s a different game altogether with a much bigger upside.

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My Salon column this morning:

Of all the cooperators in Robert Mueller’s investigation, the one who has been quietest through the whole thing is former national security adviser Michael Flynn. It’s rather unexpected considering his rash statements during the campaign, tweeting conspiracy theories and leading chants of “Lock her up!” at the GOP convention. Everything pointed to him being more like Roger Stone or Jerome Corsi than the disciplined military officer he presumably was before he got bitten by the right-wing activist bug.

Not that Flynn has had an awakening on that count. His one foray back into the political scene was to campaign last March for a Republican named Omar Navarro, the longshot opponent to Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif. Navarro was also endorsed by former Phoenix sheriff Joe Arpaio and Roger Stone. So Flynn is still a member of the club, but has at least followed his lawyer’s advice to keep a low public profile while he awaited sentencing for lying to the FBI about talking to the Russian ambassador during the presidential transition period.

That was smart and it paid off. The special counsel’s office finally submitted its sentencing memorandum to the court late yesterday and it turns out that while Flynn may not have been saying much to the public he was talking up a storm to prosecutors. The memorandum says he’s met with them 19 times, which most experts said was the number of meetings you’d typically only hold if you were preparing for a trial. It’s a lot.

Apparently, Flynn impressed Mueller’s office with the depth and breadth of his cooperation, particularly since he sang very early in the process and the information he provided was vital in convincing others to come clean as well. Mueller’s team is so happy with Flynn’s testimony that they are recommending he serve no jail time.

This is unlikely to be such a happy day for President Trump, however. One of the main reasons the special counsel asked for the most lenient sentence possible is because Flynn offered prosecutors “first hand” knowledge of events. According to former federal prosecutor Chuck Rosenberg on MSNBC, that means he “was in the room where it happened” (quoting “Hamilton”). Since Flynn was traveling with Donald Trump during the campaign and worked closely with him during the transition on issues of interest to the Mueller team, it stands to reason that Trump is likely to be one of the people who was also in that room. Rosenberg pointed out that the recommendation says Flynn provided “substantial” cooperation, a term of art among prosecutors used when a witness has provided extraordinarily useful information.

Unfortunately, and much to everyone’s disappointment, there isn’t a lot to go on to determine what Flynn actually told them. The sentencing document is more redacted than not, although it does provide a few tantalizing clues. First, it appears that aside from cooperating in the Russia investigation as we understand it, Flynn also gave evidence in an unknown criminal investigation, as well and a third investigation that as completely redacted so we literally have no clue what it might be. It could be criminal, civil or counter-espionage; there’s no telling. It’s totally blacked out. Whatever these investigations may be, they seem to be important enough that Mueller continues to pursue them.

National security reporter Marcy Wheeler speculates that the criminal case may be related to Flynn’s business connections to Turkey and that the third, completely redacted case might be a counter-espionage investigation. Recall that Flynn was also involved in a scheme to sell nuclear power plants to Saudi Arabia and was implicated in a weird plot with a now-deceased right-wing activist named Peter Smith to find Hillary Clinton’s emails. It’s also possible these investigations could be related to matters we haven’t yet heard about.

Most observers thought that Flynn being sentenced would signal that the Russia probe is coming to an end. His date has been postponed numerous times, so it seemed logical to assume that they were holding back until they were finished. But it now appears prosecutors believe he will be cooperative in the future, even without a jail sentence hanging over his head, which probably means Flynn has testified before a grand jury and they have his testimony locked in. They may have come to appreciate his candor, but I doubt any of this is based on trust. Flynn is smart enough to listen to his lawyer but he’s not smart enough to avoid Donald Trump. So it’s doubtful Mueller is letting him off the hook without guarantees of his future cooperation.

To me, it’s been obvious from the start that Flynn’s behavior during the presidential transition was an act of betrayal. Back in 2017, I wrote for Salon:

Michael Flynn has admitted to calling up Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak — at the behest of other members of the incoming administration and likely the president himself — and telling him not to worry about any U.S. retaliation against Russia for its election meddling, because when the Trump team took office they’d make it all go away. He might as well have said, “Tell Vlad thanks for the help. We’ve got his back.”

Trump himself tweeted the next day:

Great move on delay (by V. Putin) – I always knew he was very smart!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 30, 2016

The sanctions imposed by the Obama administration were not meant to delegitimize the election or threaten Trump. They were meant to punish the Russian government for its interference in the election. And the incoming Trump administration — on whose behalf we have later learned the Russians were explicitly acting — effectively told the Russian government that it needn’t worry, those punishments would be reversed as soon as the new boss assumed office. That is and always was outrageous.

Now that we know how obsessed the Russian government was with lifting existing sanctions, that history takes on an even more ominous light. There appears to have been a private understanding between Trump and the Russian government on this matter. If Flynn has first-hand knowledge of that understanding — if he was “in the room where it happened” — it could be one piece of this puzzle that will be very damaging to Donald Trump.

Your Tuesday heavily redacted
by Tom Sullivan

Photo by Gage Skidmore via Flickr.

No prison time. Little new information.

Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s office last night issued its anticipated sentencing memo for former national security adviser Michael Flynn. Owing to Flynn’s early guilty plea for lying to FBI investigators in the Russia probe and his “substantial assistance” in “ongoing investigations” (three), Mueller effectively recommended no prison time for Flynn.

Flynn participated in 19 interviews with investigators in multiple investigations in addition to the Special Counsel’s Office (SCO) probe into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and any involvement with the Trump campaign. The memo did not elaborate on the others. Marcy Wheeler (emptywheel) speculates they could involve the Ukraine peace deal or meetings with Russians in the Seychelles by Erik Prince, founder of the private security firm Blackwater.

Strategic redaction

The Tuesday memo is the first of three expected this week. The others are expected to be for Michael Cohen and Paul Manafort.

The addendum section of the memo is heavily redacted because, the memo explains, “the Addendum includes sensitive
information about ongoing investigations.” More may be revealed when the SCO files documents for Cohen and Manafort. Likely, the redacted sections reference inquiries beyond theirs.

Flynn’s early felony plea and cooperation, however, as “one of the few people with long-term and firsthand insight regarding events and issues under investigation by the SCO,” the addendum explains, “likely affected the decisions of related firsthand witnesses to be forthcoming with the SCO and cooperate.”

News of Flynn’s cooperation may be sending a signal to the White House because Flynn “provided firsthand information about the content and context of interactions between the transition team and Russian government officials.” The Atlantic‘s Natasha Bertrand explains:

Flynn was in the national security adviser job for a little more than three weeks before reports surfaced that he had discussed the issue of sanctions with Kislyak during the transition period, despite repeated denials—to Vice President Mike Pence and to the FBI—that the topic had ever come up. Trump has also said he did not know about Flynn’s lies to the FBI when he fired him in February 2017—a point that Flynn was in a position to either confirm or deny to the special counsel.

The Washington Post’s Philip Rucker observed last night on “The 11th Hour” how unusually subdued Trump has been lately. He may have reason to be. Don’t expect it to last.

If the GOP is hacked and nobody leaks it, did it really happen?

by digby

Oh look:

House Republicans’ campaign operation suffered a cyberattack during the 2018 midterm election cycle, it said Tuesday.

A spokesman working on behalf of the National Republican Congressional Committee acknowledged the compromise and said it was reported to authorities.

“The cybersecurity of the committee’s data is paramount, and upon learning of the intrusion, the NRCC immediately launched an internal investigation and notified the FBI, which is now investigating the matter,” said Ian Prior, a vice president of Mercury Public Affairs, which has been retained by the NRCC on the matter.

Prior wouldn’t say anything more in order to protect the ongoing investigation.

The FBI told NPR on Tuesday that it generally does not confirm or deny the existence of investigations. The Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Detected earlier this year

The news of the major intrusion was first reported by Politico, which said that the email accounts of four senior NRCC aides were “surveilled for several months” and exposed “thousands of sensitive emails to an outside intruder.”

“Party officials would not say when the hack began or who was behind it, although they privately believe it was a foreign agent due to the nature of the attack,” the Politico report said.

The breach was detected in April, but the hackers penetrated the system a few months before that, a person familiar with the investigation told NPR. Those behind the hack are very sophisticated based on the tactics and methods they used, the person said.

Top GOP officials, including House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., and House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., weren’t notified about the attack until Monday, when Politico reporters began asking questions about the compromise.

So far no attribution

It wasn’t immediately clear who might be responsible for the cyberattack, but the news followed months of increased preparations by the government to defend against foreign influence in America’s democracy.

The House Democrats’ campaign arm, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, along with the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, also were hacked during the 2016 cycle.

Prosecutors say Russian military intelligence officers pilfered sensitive material with the aim of releasing it to embarrass Democrats. So far, there doesn’t appear to have been any release of data taken in this year’s intrusion of Republicans’ campaign operation.

President Trump taunted Democrats for the 2016 cyberattacks, arguing that Republicans had stronger security measures in place.

Earlier this year, the DCCC and the NRCC tried to negotiate a truce in which neither side would use any hacked material in attack ads and other strategic decisions, but those talks eventually broke down.

Defense, law enforcement and intelligence officials, however, say they’ve stepped up their efforts since Russia attacked the 2016 presidential election. The threat from Russian and other foreign interference continued, officials say, including through the midterms.

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said Saturday at a defense forum in California that election interference has further soured a poor situation between Washington and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“There’s no doubt the relationship has worsened,” Mattis said. “He tried again to muck around in our elections just last month, and we are seeing a continued effort along those lines.”

A couple of thoughts here. First, the RNC must feel very secure now. After all, nobody leaked their secrets so it’s pretty clear they’refavored by the hackers over the Democrats.

Second, they must also be very insecure knowing that this hacker has all of their secrets and hasn’t leaked it. Who knows? Maybe they’ve even heard for them:“nice little party you have here, be a shame if anything happened to it …”

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Yes he IS TOO a very good boy

by digby

This misanthropic piece from Slate is making everyone laugh. Not me. I love all the good dogs and cats no matter how long they’ve worked for someone or how much people project their feelings on to them. They are all good boys and girls.

I have to have somewhere to put my emotional energy that isn’t twisting me into knots in soul destroying hate and despair.

Let me have this!

Fact check: We don’t deserve dogs.

Verdict: TRUE https://t.co/uRrEsCbzAW— Kaz Weida (@kazweida) December 4, 2018

He’ll be going to Walter Reed to work with a wounded veteran.

(By the way, yes, it’s true he was only Bush’s service dog for six months. But the Bush family are all dog lovers so this is typical of them. It’s the one thing I always liked about them.)

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Good guys with guns had better be white

by digby

This is just heartbreaking:

A black man killed by the police in an Alabama mall in November was shot three times from behind, according to a forensic examination commissioned by the man’s family.

The finding, announced in a news conference on Monday, was seen by the man’s family and lawyers as evidence he was running away and posed no threat to the officer who shot him.

Emantic Fitzgerald Bradford Jr., 21, was fatally shot in the middle of a panicked crowd at the Riverchase Galleria in Hoover, Ala., on Nov. 22, as officers responded to reports of gunshots on Thanksgiving night. Witnesses said Mr. Bradford, who was legally carrying a handgun, was directing shoppers to safety.

But the authorities publicly identified him as the gunman, an initial misidentification they retracted a day later. The shooting and its aftermath have ignited protests in Hoover, a predominantly white suburb about 10 miles south of Birmingham.

There have been enough events lately with black men attempting to do the right thing getting shot on sight anyway that I would think even the racists would see how ludicrous their “good guy with a gun” theory really is — and maybe begin to perceive just a little bit of the agony suffered by African Americans in this country and why they have to insist that Black Lives Matter. After all, they get shot all the time when they aren’t armed.

This sick gun culture combined with racism and trigger-happy cops is a lethal combination.

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He’s a “tariff man.” Too bad he doesn’t understand how they work

by digby

Look at that embarrassing rogue’s gallery on the American side of the table.

If we ever needed an illustration of how dangerous it is to put so much power into the hands of the executive, this should be it. It’s clear that Trump is completely clueless about the economy. He truly is dumber even than most of his voters and certainly virtually anyone who has some expertise in economics, even conservatives. He’s an idiot — that guy at the end of the bar ranting drunkensly about stuff he doesn’t understand.

But becuse he is preident and they apparently feel they have to appease him, so he’s just barreled ahead with no coherenet understanding or any rational plan. (Remember his repeated screaming “bring me tariffs! I want tariffs!)

Now he’s adding blatant lies and confusion on top of it. Think Progress reports:

Following his meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping over the weekend, President Trump said on Twitter that China had “agreed to reduce and remove tariffs on cars coming into China from the U.S.” — which currently sit at 40 percent. He also claimed that China had agreed to purchase more American farm products the following morning.

He told reporters on Air Force One on his way back to Washington that he and Xi had worked out “an incredible deal.”

Then, his administration began to walk back the president’s assertions.

On Monday evening, Bloomberg reported that Chinese officials would not formulate a response to Trump’s assertion until Xi got back to the country later this week. It also reported that Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and top economic adviser Larry Kudlow “dialed back expectations and added qualifiers” to Trump’s claim that there was a deal on auto imports.

Kudlow told reporters on Monday, “I’ll call them ‘commitments’ at this point, which are — commitments are not necessarily a trade deal, but it’s stuff that they’re going to look at and presumably implement,” according to Bloomberg. “We don’t yet have a specific agreement on that,” he said. “But I will just tell you, as an involved participant, we expect those tariffs to go to zero.”

Mnuchin told reporters at the White House, “I think there is a specific understanding that we are now going to turn the agreement the two presidents had into a real agreement in the next 90 days. I’m taking President Xi at his word, at his commitment to President Trump. But they have to deliver on this.”

The White House also had to correct Kudlow on when the window to negotiate a final deal started (it started December 1, not January 1).

Trump’s top economic advisers couldn’t specify what China had agreed to do, and there was no joint statement from the United States and China following the meeting.

The White House statement from December 1 does not mention any agreement on auto tariffs or anything about Chinese tariffs at all, and is vague on Trump’s claim about farmers: “China has agreed to start purchasing agricultural product from our farmers immediately.”

On Tuesday, Trump walked back his assertion of a deal with China. He issued a series of tweets in which he said Kudlow, Mnuchin, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, and trade adviser Peter Navarro would work with Trade Representative Bob Lighthizer to see “whether or not a REAL deal with China is actually possible.” He said it “probably will” but if it didn’t, “remember, I am a Tariff Man.” He concluded with a spinoff campaign slogan, “MAKE AMERICA RICH AGAIN.”

This reflects a broader misunderstanding the president has displayed on how tariffs work. First, most American automobiles sold in China are built in China already, so the impact of any deal will be small.

His use of tariffs to get his way on the world economic stage often has detrimental impacts on American industries.

For instance, tariffs on imported steel and aluminium might benefit the domestic steel and aluminium industry so that they can hire a few more workers. But this comes with a cost — for every job created in this fashion, 16 other jobs are lost in the rest of the U.S. economy.

Companies like GM, Ford, and Harley Davidson find it much harder to manufacture their products in the United States, and they have to move production overseas where they can get cheaper materials. GM’s Lordstown plant in Ohio announced it would close last week, one year after Trump promised that the jobs would stay in his booming economy.

This is ridiculous.  And the fact that Republican elites are hanging in with him because of their tax cuts and a daft belief that they are better off with Republicans, even mentally deranged ones, confirms that they are not capable stewards of the economy even on their own terms.


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Portrait of a mainstream Republican racist

by digby

I think this guy is pretty representative of the average Trump voter. Note that he was a Tea Party guy first. It’s not just Trump. These people were animted and activated by the election of the first black president.

At the Texas Republican Party’s 2018 convention, Ray Myers was a part of a select group of activists charged with crafting the platform for the biggest and most influential state party in the country. Myers is also a white nationalist, a fact that he declared last week. “Damn Right, I’m a WHITE NATIONALIST and very Proud of it,” Myers wrote in a Facebook post last Tuesday.

Myers is a 74-year-old activist who has been involved in GOP politics for decades. But “the pivotal political moment came when Obama came on the scene. I knew immediately that America was in trouble,” he said in an Empower Texans profile. Soon after, he founded a tea party chapter in Kaufman County, just east of Dallas. More recently, Myers was a member of Ted Cruz’s “Texas Leadership Team” during his presidential campaign, served as a Cruz delegate at the RNC convention and went on to become a Trump volunteer, according to his Facebook profile.

Reached by phone on Friday, Myers insisted that he saw nothing wrong with labeling himself a white nationalist. “I am Anglo and I’m very proud of it, just like black people and brown people are proud of their race. I am a patriot. I am very proud of my country,” Myers said. “And white nationalist, all that means is America first. That’s exactly what that means. That’s where the president’s at. That’s where I’m at and that’s where every solid patriotic American is. It doesn’t have anything to do with race or anything else.”

Myers told the Observer that he agrees with Trump’s claim that the media “is the enemy of the people,” and said the left is pushing a narrative to make white people ashamed of their heritage and to cast nationalists as racist right-wing Nazis, which he insisted “is the furthest damn thing from the truth ever.”

“We’re just patriotic Americans, just like anybody else. I’m a tea party guy and I’ve got brown and black and American Indians in our tea parties,” he said.

Did he really not see a problem with embracing the “white nationalist” label, I asked. “Is there anything wrong with saying they’re black and proud? Is there anything wrong with being an American Indian and saying that we’re red and proud?” Myers responded. “I mean, just like Black Lives Matter, white lives matter, too. We’re all in the same melting pot. Now why can’t we say, as Anglos, that we’re proud?”

In June, Myers helped to draft the Texas GOP’s platform, a document that frequently draws attention for pushing the limits of mainstream conservatism.

The 2018 platform includes numerous planks that espouse a nationalistic view, including a demand for using “English, and only English” voting ballots; “the reasonable use of profiling” to defeat radical Islamic terrorists; a condemnation of participation in the United Nations as a threat to U.S. sovereignty; an abolition of the refugee resettlement program; the prohibition of any sort of immigration amnesty; a constitutional amendment defining citizenship “as those born to a citizen of the United States or through naturalization,” among many others.

It’s tempting to think he doesn’t know that he’s a racist. But he does. It’s obvious. He has just come to believe that he can espouse his views openly without incurring resistance from his compatriots. That’s Trump’s contribution to this phenomenon. They used to have to couch it in “small government” dogwhistles. Trump has made it safe to be an open racist again.

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Biden his time

by digby

I’m trying to keep an open mind about the Democratic primary but damn… this makes me so queasy:

“I think I’m the most qualified person in the country to be president. The issues that we face as a country today are the issues that I’ve worked on my whole life — the plight of the middle class and foreign policy,” Biden told an audience in Montana, according to The Missoula Current. “But my family and I need to decide as a unit whether we’re ready — we do everything as a family.”

Biden was asked about factors that may hurt him if he runs — his reputation for gaffes among them.

“I may be a gaffe machine, but my God, what a wonderful thing compared to a guy who can’t tell the truth,” he said. “No one doubts what I say, the problem is I sometimes say all that I mean. The question is what kind of nation are we becoming?”

My instincts all say that Democrats need to find someone who can speak to the future in contrast to the antediluvian fantasy of Trump’s past. I may be wrong about that. But I just think the Democrats would do better with a younger, fresher face that doesn’t carry decades of baggage. The Democrats do better when they are inspirational and forward looking and in our modern political scene the candidate who embodies progress has a better chance of connecting across a broad swathe of voters. (But what do I know?)

Still, I believe there should be a lively primary campaign featuring as many different people as feel they have a shot. Nothing will be more important than defeating Trump and the Republicans in 2020 and the best way to ensure that is testing all the different candidates to see which one has the best chance of winning and properly representing those who elected him (or her.)  A win in a hot primary is the best way to determine that.

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All’s fair in love and war?

by digby

According to the Republicans, all’s fair in politics too. Here’s one of the most unnerving things you might read today:

Demographic change might very well give Democrats a durable edge in national elections over the coming decade. But by exploiting (and creatively exacerbating) our political system’s structural biases toward rural voters — and the extraordinary powers of our federal judiciary — Republicans can plausibly retain a “floor” of power high enough to frustrate progressive reform without expanding its existing coalition, or moderating ideologically. And in a two-party system, if the GOP can maintain power in the courts — and remain (at the very least) in perpetual striking distance of a Senate majority — then it would only ever take one ill-timed recession for Republicans to regain unified control of the federal government.

All of which is to say: The GOP does not have a plan for remaining electorally competitive in a democratic United States. But it doesn’t necessarily need one.

If you read the whole piece by Eric Levitz at New York magazine, you’ll see a rundown of all the ways in which these Republicans are undemocratically working the system to their advantage. It explains why they are perfectly happy to keep backing Trump and coddle his cult.

I’m not sure what can be done about this. After all this is a country that elected a man who boldly admitted that he didn’t pay taxes because he’s “smart.” He said he’d only accept the results of the election if he won. He lies as easily as he breathes and they love him. So cheating to win has become the open strategy of the Republican Party and it’s eagerly endorsed by the voters who have been convinced that they are in an existential fight for America with liberals, immigrants, people of color and women. What will change that?