Month: November 2019

Suburban women do not like him one little bit

by digby

We’re starting to see some feature reporting on disaffected Republican women, particularly in the suburbs along with the usual obsessive focus on the Trump voters in the rust belt. I don’t know exactly how it will shake out in the election but it’s interesting to see the utter disdain they feel toward him. It’s very familiar if you know what I mean…

For decades, there was an unvaried rhythm to life in America’s suburbs: Carpool in the morning, watch sports on weekends, barbecue in the summer, vote Republican in November.

Then came President Trump.

The orderly subdivisions and kid-friendly communities that ring the nation’s cities have become a deathtrap for Republicans, as college-educated and upper-income women flee the party in droves, costing the GOP its House majority and sapping the party’s strength in state capitals and local governments nationwide.

The dramatic shift is also reshaping the 2020 presidential race, elevating Democratic hopes in traditional GOP strongholds like Arizona and Georgia, and forcing Trump to redouble efforts to boost rural turnout to offset defectors who, some fear, may never vote Republican so long as the president is on the ballot.

Emily Romney Sanchez is one of them.

The GOP has “gone from defending conservative principles” like free trade and a muscular stance against Russia and North Korea “to defending [Trump’s] latest Tweets,” said Sanchez, a life coach and mother of five in this prosperous desert community. (She is a distant relative of Republican Utah Sen. Mitt Romney.)

Sanchez considers Trump “reprehensible as a human being” and the Republican Party morally bankrupt. “I couldn’t be a part of it anymore,” she said, and as a result, at age 40 the newly registered independent is weighing her first-ever Democratic vote for president.

In an emailed statement, a spokeswoman for the Trump campaign, Sarah Matthews, said “over the next year, our robust ‘Women for Trump’ coalition will continue working to mobilize supporters across the country and share the President’s record of success.”

The erosion of support among suburban women began during the 2016 campaign — for many the breaking point was the “Access Hollywood” video, in which Trump boasted of grabbing women by their genitals — and increased dramatically in the 2018 midterm election, costing Republicans control of the House.

The trend continued in the recent off-year elections, in suburbs from Wichita, Kan., to northern New Jersey to DeSoto County, Miss. Democrats won two of three gubernatorial contests, in Kentucky and Louisiana, in good part because of their strength in those Republican redoubts.

The sentiment extended down ballot as well. Outside Philadelphia, Democrats took control in Delaware County for the first time since the Civil War. In suburban Virginia, just outside Washington, D.C., the party won every state House seat in Fairfax County, a shift nearly on a par with the 2018 Democratic sweep of congressional seats in Orange County.

“It’s amazing the change, in just the last few years,” said Q. Whitfield Ayres, a pollster who has spent decades strategizing for Republican campaigns and causes. “It’s not any one place. It’s everywhere.”

That includes Arizona, where in 2018 Kyrsten Sinema, a congresswoman from the Phoenix suburbs, became the first Democrat in 30 years to win a U.S. Senate seat. She ran as a centrist focused on bipartisan problem-solving, a direct appeal to pragmatic suburban voters, and her success is seen as a model for turning the state from red to blue in 2020 — or at least making Arizona competitive in a way it has not been in decades.

With 11 electoral votes, Arizona is a bigger prize than Wisconsin — a Midwestern battleground both parties view as a key to the election — and the Grand Canyon State is expected to draw lavish attention and a fortune’s worth of advertising over the next year. Visiting last month, Vice President Mike Pence said he and Trump “are going to be in and out of Arizona a lot.”

The ancestral home of conservative icon Barry Goldwater and John McCain, the 2008 Republican nominee, Arizona has undergone a slow but steady transformation as the growing Latino population and a flood of newcomers from places like California erode Republicans’ long-standing hegemony.

The movement has been accelerated by Trump and his alienation of voters in typically Republican suburbs like Scottsdale, Gilbert and here in Mesa, which has grown from a far-flung satellite of Phoenix into the state’s third-largest city.

Of course, the president has plenty of supporters amid the sere landscape and red-tiled rooftops of the region’s sprawl-to-the-horizon suburbs, including some like Sarah Roork who came around after initial skepticism.

She has more work, Roork said, thanks to the percolating economy, and brings home more pay as a result of the tax bill Trump signed into law. “Actually, I’m pleasantly surprised on policy,” said the 43-year-old flight attendant.

Sandy Wong said the reasons she reveres the president are almost too many to list.

“Sure he has a so-called unpredictable, so-called un-presidential manner of speaking,” said the 65-year-old retired healthcare executive, who does part-time Web design from her home in Ahwatukee, a family-oriented enclave of Phoenix in the foothills of South Mountain.

“But his very explosive rhetoric is very effective to stop this toxic metastasizing political power that Democrats, even more left of [President] Obama, represent at this time,” Wong said.

That, however, is a distinctly minority view; surveys have consistently shown most suburban women have little regard for Trump.

The exodus stems not so much from his policies — many of which are standard GOP fare, like cutting taxes and regulations — but rather the president’s behavior: the bullying, belligerence and ad hominem insults.

“Sometimes I want to print out every single one of his Tweets and tape them to people’s doors,” said Christie Black, a 35-year-old stay-at-home mom who abandoned the GOP and voted independent in 2016 rather than support Trump. “I want them to see in writing that these are the things he’s saying. Those are worth tax cuts to you?”

“Yeah,” her brunch companion, Kaija Flake Thompson, chimed in sarcastically. “We have no moral compass, but, hey, we have conservative judges!”

(Thompson’s brother, former Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake, is a prominent Trump critic. But Thompson, a 41-year-old nurse, said her feelings about the president have nothing to do with his attacks on her kin; others in the family strongly support Trump, making for some lively discussion.)

Neither lapsed Republican has decided on a 2020 candidate, though both like Pete Buttigieg, the youthful mayor of South Bend, Ind. Black, a self-described conservative, said she could even vote in good conscience for Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, with her vision of a vastly expanded federal government.

“We would still have our checks and balances,” Black said, which she fears are steadily eroding under Trump. “I think right now the most important thing is to get those principles of democracy tied down, get that return to regular order, and then we can worry and get back to squabbling about conservative versus liberal.”

I don’t know how many like her are out there, but hopefully there are enough to make a difference where it counts.

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Dream on fellas

by digby

Nearly a year after Ms. Warren proposed it, the wealth tax has the support of six in 10 Americans, according to a new nationwide poll conducted by the online research firm SurveyMonkey for The New York Times. That support has dipped slightly since July, but Ms. Warren’s plan remains more popular than most proposed tax increases, and its appeal across coalitions is unusual among high-profile campaign proposals. 

Senator Elizabeth Warren’s plan to tax the assets of America’s wealthiest individuals continues to draw broad support from voters, across party, gender and educational lines. Only one slice of the electorate opposes it staunchly: Republican men with college degrees. 

Not surprisingly, that is also the profile of many who’d be hit by Ms. Warren’s so-called wealth tax, which has emerged as the breakout economic proposal in the Democratic presidential primary race.

No, not many will make over $50 million. They just like to identify with those who do, which shows they are actually quite dumb.

A stirring call for impeachment

by digby

This is quite an argument for impeachment, don’t you think?

It has been rightly observed that we are a government of laws and not of men, and, I would add, neither are we are government of the opinions of men and women…With the intense media attention paid to the president’s approval ratings before and after his half confession/half excuse speech, a passive observer might conclude that we live in a pure democracy, the likes of which was sought in the French Revolution.

In such a realm, the Supreme Law of the Land is the Vox Populi, literally ‘the voice of the people’. There is no law apart from what the people recognize to be the law at any given time. This was best illustrated to me recently by a security guard who approached as I read a front page story about the President and the polls and sarcastically asked, ‘what is the law today?’.

News flash to the major media networks: we live in a constitutional republic. We are governed by written constitution which defines, among other things, the rights, privileges and responsibilities of high office with great clarity. Under Article II, Section 1 the executive power of the United States of America is vested in the President. In the oath of office proscribed, a president commits to faithfully execute the office and preserve, protect and defend the Constitution.

While the office brings with it the duties that attend the administration of the government, as President Herbert C. Hoover wrote, “The Presidency is more than executive responsibility. It is the inspiring supreme symbol of all that is highest in our American ideals.” When a president fails to fulfill his oath of office, as is the case where the law is broken in a big way or a small way (another way of saying high crimes or misdemeanors), the Constitution provides for a mechanism whereby the legislative branch might impeach him.

This may seem drastic to the average American. It is. Our founders intended it to be so because they intended the President of the United States to be the center of the government of the United States. Other constructs were considered, including the appointment of a prime minister-like president by the legislative branch, but all were rejected in favor of a strong and elected President. Alexander Hamilton defended this concept in ‘The Federalist’ writing, “the Executive is a leading characteristic in the definition of good government… it is essential to the steady administration of the law.”

Hamilton also cautioned against long suffering where a President failed to meet this high standard, writing, “a feeble Executive implies a feeble execution of government. A feeble Executive is but another name for a bad executive; and a government ill-executed… must be proclaimed a bad government.”

Stirring isn’t it? I’ll bet you’re wondering who wrote it.

That was Mike Pence in 1998:

Against this recitation of the Supreme Law of the Land, only one sad conclusion attaches; President Bill Clinton must resign or be removed from the office of President of the United States.

That “crime” you’ll recall was about lying in a civil case, backed by right wing operatives, that was dismissed by the judge. The lie was about an extramarital affair.

Paying off porn stars, monumental grifting from the oval office, selling out the country to foreign adversaries, alienating and betraying allies and generally behaving in petty, vindictive, juvenile fashion aren’t big deals, apparently. Perhaps it was the trivial nature of Clinton’s alleged crime that offended Pence so much. If only he’d acted more like a real traitor, he would have been respected.

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#Fail That Must Not Be Named
by Tom Sullivan

Wall Street bull statue. Photo by Glen Scarborough via Flickr [CC BY-SA 2.0], 2009.

It’s the young. It’s the libs. It’s substance abuse. It’s definitely not metastatic capitalism.

Conservatives have sounded the alarm about birthrates in the West since Mark Steyn’s “It’s the Demography, Stupid” appeared in the Wall Street Journal in 2006, if not much earlier. The West is at war, Steyn argued. At war with Others From Another Culture. With their unholy higher birthrates, those Others will soon replace white-Christian Real Americans™ and Europeans.

Our problem is lack of “civilizational confidence,” Steyn argued. For which the remedy, no doubt, is some form of civilizational Viagra. A little blue pill here, a little “kill ’em all, let God sort ’em out” over there.

Since then, that dog whistle claxon has reappeared periodically in different forms, some with actual evidence to support the data if not the sentiments. Lately, the argument has shifted from white-Christian cultural survival (The Muslims are coming!) to an economic one that still doesn’t address the economy’s dysfunction.

“The American Conservative” in October lamented European youths’ lack of vigor in the area of reproduction:

“The problem of low birthrates ultimately lies internally, within Europe’s culture and social life. A young generation that doesn’t aspire to have families and that’s increasingly alienated from any sense of community has driven much of the crisis.”

Those damned kids!

David Atkins replies, “that, or the fact that the brutality of modern capitalism combined with gerontocratic control of government means that young people can’t afford to have kids.”

It’s the economic system? Blasphemy!

Or is it?

Joel Achenbach wrote in the Washington Post this week about a report in the Journal of the American Medical Association examining a decline in longevity among Americans despite the insane amounts spent in the U.S. on health care. Between 2010 and 2017, there has been a 29 percent rise in the death rate among people age 25 to 34. This, of course, is not supposed to happen in the land of the free and the home the greenback:

About a third of the estimated 33,000 “excess deaths” that the study says occurred since 2010 were in just four states: Ohio, Pennsylvania, Kentucky and Indiana — the first two of which are critical swing states in presidential elections. The state with the biggest percentage rise in death rates among working-age people in this decade — 23.3 percent — is New Hampshire, the first primary state.

“It’s supposed to be going down, as it is in other countries,” said the lead author of the report, Steven H. Woolf, director emeritus of the Center on Society and Health at Virginia Commonwealth University. “The fact that that number is climbing, there’s something terribly wrong.”

At New York Magazine’s “Intelligencer,” Eric Levitz comments on how “deaths of despair” as well as delayed childbearing contribute to lowering birthrates. Perhaps it is “women making the conscious choice to delay reproduction until they can gain a more secure foothold in the labor market.” As Atkins said.

Levitz writes:

Yet because the structure of our economy incentivizes couples to delay reproduction — and penalizes those who have children early in their careers — this is only to some extent a choice. In the abstract, it may be preferable for men and women to start families in their 20s when they tend to be slightly healthier and more likely to have the aid of grandparents. The problem is it’s increasingly difficult for young Americans to attain a relatively stable, middle-class existence until later in life. Surveys suggest that, were it not for this fact, America’s fertility rate would be higher: A significant percentage of American women say they would like to have more children but only if they could afford to do so. The misalignment of a human being’s prime reproductive years and a worker’s prime earning years is impossible to resolve (at least under capitalism), but the U.S. government could do more to mitigate the issue through pro-natal social policies. Regardless, the CDC’s findings confirm the utter inviability of the nativist right’s vision for America. Although child allowances and public day care may facilitate marginal increases in birth rates, all available evidence suggests that such policies would be insufficient to ward off demographic (and thus economic) decline in the absence of a robustly expansionary immigration regime.

Despite the marketing, you can’t have it all. Even in God-bless America. You cannot have a xenophobic, white-nationalist, über-capitalist America without cultural and economic decline over time. Even, perhaps, with more “pro-natal social policies.” Not that by eroding women’s reproductive autonomy the right isn’t trying hard to indirectly mandate reproduction, as the “handmaids” protests contend.

Rising short-term mortality rates among white Americans “‘seems driven principally by anxiety among whites about losing social status,’ even though there is no evidence that they are in fact worse off,” a University of Toronto study suggests:

“The anxiety of whites is coming from a misperception that their dominant status in society is being threatened, which is manifesting in multiple forms of psychological and physiological stress,” said Siddiqi, who also holds an academic appointment at the Gillings School of Global Public Health at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

These psychological and physiological stressors are resulting in more “deaths of despair”—due to alcohol consumption, opioid use, drug overdose and suicide—and, to a lesser extent, rising chronic disease, including hypertension and obesity, according to the study. This widespread decline in health status is actually consistent with—and may even reinforce—a despair-based explanation for worsening white health, explains Siddiqi.

Black mortality rates are going down while white mortality rates rise and white birthrates decline. This, of course, is the real source of fretting over low birthrates with respect to those Others. As Steyn and other conservatives imply, the Others are coming to do to whites what whites historically did to them. They blame the young, the libs, or substance abuse for trends that threaten white social status and are, studies suggest, driving them to drink or worse.

But heaven forfend we should weigh metastasized, free-market, financialized, monopoly capitalism and find it wanting.

The rotten apple doesn’t fall far from the tree

 by digby

“I wish my name was Hunter Biden. I could make millions off of my father’s presidency—I’d be a really rich guy! It would be incredible!” — Donald Trump Jr.

Yeah, I know. Not the sharpest tool in the drawer. But you really can’t make this stuff up:

Boxes began arriving in early November at the Phoenix headquarters of Turning Point USA, a conservative student group with ties to the Trump family.

They contained copies of the new book by Donald Trump Jr., “Triggered,” according to a person who works in the building. The stockpile grew to roughly 2,000 copies, stored in an underused second-floor office under a poster bearing a slogan: “Capitalism Not Cronyism.”

May I just take a moment to admire that magnificent lede?

Turning Point is not the only conservative group making bulk purchases to aid Mr. Trump’s new career as an author. At least nine Republican organizations, G.O.P. candidates or advocacy groups are selling “Triggered” or promoting Mr. Trump’s book tour, according to emails obtained by The New York Times, interviews and disclosures filed with the Federal Election Commission.

The president’s son has emerged over the past few years as a political star in his own right, often said to be considering a run for office. It is neither illegal nor uncommon for candidates and political organizations to use books in fund-raising drives: The National Republican Campaign Committee, for example, has also sold its donors titles by the former speakers Newt Gingrich and Paul Ryan.

But the breadth of the Republican establishment’s effort behind Mr. Trump is striking for a noncandidate whose most significant claim to fame remains his parentage, and who has sought to deflect criticism of his recent attacks on impeachment witnesses by asserting that he is merely a “private citizen.” And it underscores the unusual cross-pollination between the Trump family’s political ambitions, its business ventures and the party President Trump now leads.

Some groups are harnessing the younger Mr. Trump’s popularity to raise political donations while also driving his sales. The N.R.C.C. bought $75,000 worth of books in November, a spokesman said, in a promotion that took in almost $200,000 in contributions. The National Republican Senatorial Committee ordered about 2,500 copies, which it said sold almost immediately.

The Republican National Committee and Citizens United, a conservative activist group run by a former deputy campaign manager to the president, are also offering the book to donors.

Earlier this month, the R.N.C. denied making large bulk purchases of the book, a practice that some best-seller lists, including that of The Times, may penalize authors for when ranking sales. But F.E.C. records released last week showed that it spent almost $100,000 on copies on Oct. 29, a transaction the committee acknowledged was part of its “Triggered” promotion.

That’s not all.

The Trump family grift is quite awesome to behold. They seize every single opportunity to cheat.

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QOTD: Former Navy Secretary Richard Spencer

by digby

“[T]the president has very little understanding of what it means to be in the military, to fight ethically or to be governed by a uniform set of rules and practices.” — Former Navy Secretary Richard Spencer

He has very little understanding of what it means to be a normal adult, the live ethically or be governed by the rule of law either.

That’s not all Spencer had to say.

And yes, it was inevitable that he’d destroy the military too. This CNN report shows that there are some very serious issues emerging within the chain of command:

Tensions that have been mounting for months between some of the nation’s most senior military officers and President Donald Trump are boiling over after his decision to intervene in the cases of three service members accused of war crimes. 

A long-serving military officer put it bluntly, telling CNN “there is a morale problem,” and senior Pentagon officials have privately said they are disturbed by the President’s behavior. 

Dismay in the Pentagon has been building over Trump’s sporadic, impulsive and contradictory decision-making on a range of issues, including his sudden pullback of troops in Syria. But now there are new and significant worries, as multiple military officials and retired officers say Trump’s intervention into high-profile war crimes cases cannot be ignored. […] 

Trump had upped the ante at a rally on Tuesday by issuing an extraordinary declaration that he took action in the face of “deep state” opposition. In fact, senior Pentagon officials had been unanimously opposed to the President’s intervention because they believed it would undermine military discipline and order. 

The President’s comments and his intervention — at the urging of Fox News commentators — reflect another worry among military leaders that Trump continues to be influenced by the network in ways that encourage him to politicize the military, an institution that is meant to stay above the political fray. 

Top military leaders say they are concerned about Trump’s divisive rhetoric and politicization of the military. They also tell CNN they worry the President’s mercurial management style — often expressed through tweets — may be undermining national security by making military planning increasingly difficult. 

CNN has learned that at least two senior military officers were reluctant to appear alongside Trump at events in recent months, because of unease that he might make partisan political remarks while they were present. CNN has been asked by sources close to both officers not to identify them or the events involved. 

Several senior commanders are considering writing a memo to the troops reminding them of their moral and legal responsibilities on the battlefield. The matter is so sensitive that some are privately indicating they want high level Pentagon approval before they proceed because the memo could appear to be a rebuke of the President. 

Trump’s intervention in the war crimes cases has created “confusion, there’s chaos, and it makes it appear like, as if there’s really not accountability, that if people violate their oath or commit crimes, there’s a way out,” said retired Marine Corps Colonel David Lapan, a former senior military spokesman, discussing Trump’s intervention in the case of Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher and two other servicemembers. 

Lapan is concerned some troops could now believe “they can escape accountability if they get the President in their corner.”
Even more worrying, “the military is divided,” one official said. “There are two camps. Half are ardent Trump supporters that believe the President is watching out for the troops.” But the other half, many of whom are high ranking, believe the military must remain independent of partisan political influence and they don’t see the President adhering to that. […]

Trump claimed Monday that he had been thinking about firing Spencer “for a long time” before he took action on Sunday. “That didn’t just happen,” Trump told reporters. “I have to protect my warfighters.” […] 

Senior and junior officers were deeply angry after Trump tweeted Oct. 12, “We train our boys to be killing machines, then prosecute them when they kill!” 

One young officer pushed back, suggesting — just as Spencer has — that the President fundamentally misunderstands the military, its culture and its ethos. “That is not who we are,” the officer told CNN. 

Army officials are now holding their breath to see what happens with Maj. Mathew Golsteyn, who was pardoned by the President on murder charges. Golsteyn has had his medals and his Special Forces tab returned, but a formal Army review could lead to them being stripped and create another standoff with the President. 

On Wednesday, the Navy announced it will not carry out a review of three Navy SEALs connected to the Gallagher case. 

The concerns about the President’s war crimes interventions come on top of long-simmering frustrations at the Pentagon.
Altogether, the strain on the military is palpable, said Mark Hertling, a former commanding general of the US Army in Europe. […]

It goes on to describe how insane it is trying to follow Trump’s impulsive orders since he clearly doesn’t understand military affairs, national security or foreign policy and refuses to consider any info that doesn’t fit his biases. Mike Pompeo is quoted trying to defend him by saying, that his “experience with the President is that he makes decisions and then absorbs data and facts.”

My God. He said that out loud.

Military officials have tried to navigate Trump’s decisions-first, facts-later approach since he took office, but they tell CNN they are more uneasy than ever about his behavior given impeachment inquiry pressures and the looming 2020 campaign. 

They express discomfort about Trump’s politicization of the military and his attacks on individual servicemembers, such as Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, the NSC official who testified before the House impeachment inquiry. After Trump targeted Vindman, the decorated war veteran reached out to the Army about his family’s safety. 

Trump’s attacks led Gen. Joseph Dunford, who was just hours before retiring from his own 40-year career, to take the extraordinary step of opposing the President to defend Vindman, who had served on his staff. 

“He is a professional, competent, patriotic, and loyal officer,” Dunford told CNN. “He has made an extraordinary contribution to the security of our Nation in both peacetime and combat.” […]

The President’s politicization of the Pentagon has particularly worried leaders, for whom the military’s nonpartisan stance is sacrosanct. 

Clint Lorance, one of the two servicemembers Trump intervened to pardon in early November, has tweeted that he is willing to campaign for the President, appalling military leaders. 

Trump’s campaign marked Veteran’s Day by encouraging people to say “thank you” to those who have served — by donating to the President’s re-election efforts. 

“He says ‘my generals’ and ‘my military,’ he sees the military as belonging to him as opposed to belonging to the nation,” Hertling observed. […]

Trump has repeatedly undermined US military alliances, denigrating NATO to the point that it has eroded European confidence in America’s commitment to the trans-Atlantic pact. 

French President Emmanuel Macron said in a November interview that America under Trump was “turning its back on us. 

In Asia, analysts say Trump is destabilizing the longstanding relationship with South Korea, where 28,000 US troops are based, and Japan, by demanding they each pay 400% more for the American presence next year. 

In Syria, Trump took the Pentagon by surprise by fulfilling a campaign promise to bring troops home. The move damaged US national security interests by handing victories to Russia and Iran; Trump was universally scorched for abandoning Syrian Kurd allies who had led the fight against ISIS. 

Initially, the Pentagon announced troops would be moved to Iraq, only to have the Iraqi government refuse to take them. 

When Trump ordered troops back into eastern Syria to prevent ISIS from getting any oil revenues, the exact mission parameters weren’t clear for weeks. There was no clear direction of how, when or whether US troops could challenge Russian, Turkish or Syrian regime forces. And no clarity on who had claim to the oil revenues. 

“They had no clue what they needed to do,” Hertling said of military leaders, who were caught “flat footed” and continue to try to figure out how to respond. 

Without time for coordinated planning to deal with these complex issues, “there’s a good chance people might die needlessly and the operation might fail,” Hertling says. In the interim, it creates confusion on the ground that can damage soldiers’ confidence in the chain of command. 

“When you’re a commander and a subordinate comes up and says, ‘what the hell are we doing,’ it undermines trust and credibility,” he said.

It certainly does. Of course we all feel that way about everything.

It all unraveling.  The guardrails have been failing all along but the military seemed to be staying more or less above the fray. The Syria decision showed that it too was going to be a victim of the Trump wrecking ball. Now this. The next year could be dangerous.

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How impeachment might affect the election

by digby

If you are looking for some interesting fodder for a Thanksgiving conversation about politics, I recommend this piece by Ron Brownstein:

History signals that the public’s final verdict on President Donald Trump’s possible impeachment won’t be delivered until the 2020 election — whatever happens next in the House and Senate, and however Americans react to it.

The public reactions to impeachment proceedings against Presidents Richard Nixon in 1974 and Bill Clinton in 1998 fundamentally diverged, with most Americans ultimately supporting the former and a consistent majority opposing the latter.

Yet the outcomes in the next presidential elections converged. In each case, the president’s party lost the White House to a candidate — Democrat Jimmy Carter in 1976 and Republican George W. Bush in 2000 — who played off lingering public unease about the scandal that had precipitated the impeachment process against their predecessor. In each instance, impeachment functioned like a leak that corroded the foundation under the president’s party in the next election.

Those precedents suggest the revelations about Trump’s conduct in the Ukraine investigation could complicate his path to a second term, whatever polls say now about the public response to his potential impeachment and removal from office. Recent polls indicate that while the controversy is not reducing the share of Americans who approve of Trump’s job performance, it does appear to be hardening the opposition he faces among those who disapprove of him.

“The whole impeachment debate has intensified preexisting feelings about the President,” says Republican pollster Whit Ayres. “Most people who like him do so with their eyes wide open. … They understand his strengths and his weaknesses and they prefer him to the alternatives as they see it. On the other hand, people who dislike him will be even more appalled because what they are seeing reinforces their existing views.”

The risk for Trump in that dynamic is that a majority of 51 to 55% of Americans have consistently said they disapprove of his performance, while only around 40 to 45% have usually said they approve. Even if Americans remain closely split on whether Congress should impeach and remove Trump from office, the scandal may be solidifying a division of attitudes that forces him to find a path to reelection without support from anything close to a majority of the electorate.

“At the very least it is deepening a lot of Trump’s problems,” says Democratic pollster Geoff Garin. “I think it is confirming for voters that Trump is a person lacking in integrity and ethical standards in a way that is particularly concerning to college-educated men. And I don’t think we are done with the impeachment story yet.”

Striking similarities in campaigns

Impeachment provided a critical backdrop to both the 1976 and 2000 elections, which followed the proceedings against Nixon and Clinton. Nixon resigned in August 1974 after the House Judiciary Committee approved impeachment articles against him; the Senate failed to remove Clinton in February 1999, after the Republican-controlled House of Representatives voted on a near-party-line basis to impeach him in December 1998.

The public reaction to these two confrontations utterly diverged. During the long gestation of the Watergate scandal, from early 1973 through Nixon’s resignation, support for his impeachment slowly grew and his job approval rating steadily eroded. In Gallup polling, a majority of Americans supported Nixon’s removal from office only in the final survey before his resignation; by then his approval rating had fallen to about 24%, though it remained around 50% among Republicans.

By comparison, public opinion remained remarkably stable through 1998 during the House GOP’s long march toward impeaching Clinton. Consistently in Gallup polling through that year, Americans opposed his impeachment and removal by about 2 to 1, and his approval rating remained well above 60%.

Yet, despite these differences in the immediate public reaction, the presidential campaigns that followed these two impeachment proceedings unfolded with some striking parallels. In each case, the party that drove the impeachment inquiry won the next presidential election. And in each instance, that party did so behind a nominee who did not dwell on the scandal that had prompted impeachment — but unmistakably presented himself as the antidote to it.

Jimmy Carter, the Democratic former Georgia governor, did not stress Watergate during the 1976 campaign, insisting the American people had heard enough about it. But Watergate still infused everything about his campaign. Carter centered his candidacy not on a big, ambitious policy agenda but on an overriding promise to unify the nation and restore to America “a government as good as its people.” That struck a powerful chord with voters exhausted by Watergate and allowed Carter, a one-term Georgia governor and former peanut farmer, to overcome doubts about his experience and narrowly defeat Gerald Ford, who had served as Nixon’s vice president and then succeeded him as President after Nixon’s resignation.

In 2000, George W. Bush likewise did not dwell on the affair with a White House intern that triggered Clinton’s impeachment. But it too infused Bush’s campaign. Like Carter, Bush presented himself as a unifying figure, “a uniter, not a divider,” in his phrase. And the Clinton scandal provided the backdrop for Bush’s core promise in 2000: to “restore honor and dignity to the Oval Office.” That messaging helped Bush squeeze out his narrow Electoral College victory over Al Gore, Clinton’s vice president, even while narrowly losing the popular vote. 

As Tad Devine, one of Gore’s top strategists, told me earlier this year, Bush skillfully found ways to tap the unease over Clinton’s behavior without directly embracing the unpopular impeachment itself. 

“It became a very valuable tool even though Bush didn’t go around saying, ‘Impeachment, impeachment,’ ” Devine told me. “He took the bad stuff from impeachment and put it front and center [in the campaign]. What could Gore say? ‘I’ll restore honor too’?”

Trump’s situation is different

Public opinion over Trump’s possible impeachment has followed a middle course between these two examples. Support for impeachment jumped to around 50% after Democrats formally announced their inquiry in September but has stagnated since then. Trump’s job approval ratings have remained almost unchanged: In a new CNN survey conducted by SSRS and released this week, 50% of Americans supported Trump’s impeachment and removal, a number unchanged since October. His job approval rating stood at just 42%, with 54% disapproving. Through all of this year, his approval rating in the CNN poll has varied only between 39% and 43%.

In another important regard, Trump’s situation differs decisively from these precedents: Unlike Nixon and Clinton, Trump himself will be on the ballot in 2020 if the House impeaches him and the Senate does not vote to remove him from office. Under that scenario, Trump would become the first impeached president to appear on the next general election ballot. (The only other president who faced this sanction was Andrew Johnson, Abraham Lincoln’s vice president, who was impeached but not removed by the Republican-led Congress in 1868; Johnson sought to run again that year as a Democrat but didn’t win the nomination.)

Trump’s presence on the ballot might change the dynamic from the Nixon and Clinton precedents in some respects — but likely won’t alter them in others. The biggest difference is that unlike Ford or Gore — who did not attempt to relitigate whether impeachment had been appropriate for the presidents they had served under — Trump will likely try to mobilize more turnout from his core backers by insisting he was unfairly persecuted by an “unholy alliance” of Democrats, the media and the deep state, as he put it during a recent rally.

Ayres, the Republican pollster, says Trump’s unbending response to impeachment underlines the pugnacious take-no-prisoners posture that thrills his core supporters.

“Supporters take away he’s a fighter, that he’s never backs down, that he never gives in to the carping critics and that he will stand his ground no matter what the situation and hold his head high in the face of unrelenting criticism,” he said.

But Ayres, like a wide array of Democratic strategists, agrees the revelations in the Ukraine investigation are serving just as powerfully to reinforce the doubts Trump faces among those skeptical of him.

“It is another strike against him,” says Josh Schwerin, senior strategist and communications director for Priorities USA, a leading Democratic Super PAC. “It reinforces the negative feelings they have about his actions and the way he carries himself.”

He goes on to explain how the “lesser of two evils” argument could play out and points out that “Trump fatigue” is a real possibility.

I thought this was an interesting analysis and one that could bring an informative dimension to political discussions people may be having this week-end. I don’t know exactly how this might affect the campaign of your favorite candidates but it seems to me that if the argument is that the Democrat will return the presidency to decency and honesty, they are all winners.

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What Thanksgiving is all about

by digby

It’s not this:

Last month, for the first time since records began, the number of refugees resettled in the US hit zero. The nosedive is the result of a State Department freeze on admissions, according to a World Relief press release, resulting in hundreds of canceled flights and yet more uncertainty for the thousands of refugees hoping to resettle in the US.

It’s heartbreaking to think about that on Thanksgiving, a holiday celebrating all that Americans have in common, most of whom are either immigrants or the decedents of immigrants.

Here’s a beautiful Thanksgiving story from the NY Times last year. It’s all about the America Trump and his cult are trying to kill. I don’t think they can:

JERSEY CITY — Two years ago this month, Mayada Anjari was only dimly aware that a holiday was approaching. After the family’s three-year journey as refugees from Syria, her sons — Hayan, Mohammed and Abdulrazaq — had just started school here; her husband, Ahmad Abdulhamid, was looking for work; and she had a baby girl, Jana, to chase after.

By last fall, the boys (now 14, 12 and 10) had learned about the Pilgrims (and to dislike broccoli), their father was working full time, and Ms. Anjari had memorized the two-mile walk to the nearest store that stocked staples like grape leaves and flatbread and olives. She had cooked for the church group that sponsored the family’s resettlement, and some people in Manhattan had even paid to eat her kabsa (spice-rubbed chicken with scented rice), her expertly stuffed vegetables, and her fatayer, folds of flaky pastry stuffed with ground meat or spiraled around soft cheese.

A new friend who was also Muslim gave her a turkey from a local halal butcher for Thanksgiving. Ms. Anjari cut it into pieces, covered it with water, and simmered it into soup with potatoes, carrots, ginger and cumin. Her family liked it, she said, but it didn’t seem very special to her.

This fall, Jana began prekindergarten, and fans of Ms. Anjari’s food helped her publish a cookbook of Syrian recipes. So she decided to take a test run at making her first Thanksgiving feast.

Like many people who have recently arrived in America from other countries, Ms. Anjari, 33, found the holiday a bit perplexing. At home, she said, family celebrations and feast days are reserved for religious events. “People do things in so many different ways here,” she said: how they dress, how they raise children, how they worship. “I was surprised that there’s a holiday that everyone celebrates.”

Before she even began cooking, there were many mysteries to be solved, with the help of people like Jennifer Sit, her co-author on the cookbook; Mira Evnine, who assisted with the book’s photography; and Dave Mammen, part of the refugee task force at Rutgers Presbyterian Church on the Upper West Side.

Were the apples really going to be baked with cinnamon, a spice that Ms. Anjari uses with meat and chicken? Why would you roast a bird whole — how would it get evenly cooked that way? How can macaroni and cheese, one of her children’s favorite dinners, be a side dish? Were the mashed potatoes not going to be seasoned with a little garlic and a lot of caramelized onions, the way she makes them?

“Without it, there isn’t much flavor, no?” she asked, speaking through an interpreter, knitting her expression into a question, as she so often must in her new life.

The family left their home city, Homs, on March 31, 2013, when the daily violence of the civil war had made their lives untenable. They walked across the Jordan border in darkness, were picked up by the Jordanian military and were settled in the small city of Ajloun. They registered as refugees with the United Nations, so the boys could attend school, but the adults couldn’t work legally. Food and money were always scarce.

Working with the United Nations Refugee Agency, the Department of State brings a certain number of refugees each year — most of them families with young children — to resettle in the United States. Only people displaced by violence or the threat of violence (like asylum seekers) can apply; the program is separate from other American immigration quotas and regulations.

In 2016, the year the family arrived in New Jersey, the United States accepted about 85,000 refugees for resettlement, including more than 15,000 Syrians; in 2017, the total dropped to about 52,000. So far in 2018, about 22,000 people have been allowed in, and just 50 of them were Syrian. Despite the continuing civil war and refugee crisis, Syria is one of seven countries from which the Trump administration has forbidden people to enter the United States.

The vetting process for resettlement takes about two years. While Ms. Anjari, her husband and their children were admitted, dozens of their relatives are still stranded in Syria, Jordan and Lebanon.

With public and private funding, the State Department and nine independent agencies (like Church World Service, which guided the Rutgers group) sponsor and shepherd the refugees through their first year of American life, providing money, clothing, shelter and guidance on everything from groceries to G.E.D.s.

From the day of arrival, food is an integral part of adjustment to a new country.

On the State Department’s list of things that sponsors must provide immediately is a “culturally appropriate” meal for the family. Some sponsors interpret this in religious terms, and provide store-bought halal fried chicken or kosher pizza. But others take the responsibility more literally, going to great lengths to greet arrivals with home-cooked food that is specific to their place of origin, familiar and comforting.

“They already have been through so much when they get here — they shouldn’t have to get used to another new thing right away,” said Ulla Farmer, a member of the Rutgers congregation, who made the first dinner for the Anjari-Abdulhamid family even though she had never tasted Syrian food. (She immigrated from Finland in 1963.)

Working from online recipes and grocery lists, Ms. Farmer cooked a dinner of lamb stew and cracked wheat, and stocked the family’s new kitchen with key ingredients like tahini, yogurt, cucumbers and rice.

“The culturally appropriate hot meal is simply the best federal regulation of all time,” said Chris George, executive director of Integrated Refugees & Immigrants Services, a New Haven agency that has resettled more than 6,000 refugees in Connecticut since 1982.
[…]
Dima King, who arrived in the United States last year, is seeking asylum because of the anti-gay persecution and legislation that have taken hold in his native Russia since 2013. He is cooking his first Thanksgiving dinner this year.

“I understood it right away as a celebration of new Americans and Native Americans,” he said. Holidays that celebrate a good harvest are universal, he said, but Thanksgiving also honors the practice of treating strangers with generosity, charity and humanity. “Of course, that is a holiday I want to cook for.”

It’s one of our best traditions. And no, Fox News and Donald Trump, nobody wants to change it but you!

 If you have the time, read the whole story. It’s just fantastic. And I would really like to go to their houses for Thanksgiving. The foreign influences on the traditional meal sound fantastic!

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Lincoln’s Thanksgiving tweet

by digby

It wasn’t actually a tweet. You may not know this younguns but president’s used to give speeches and proclamations in a formal official style instead of just hurling insults on twitter. It was a different time.

Here’s Abraham Lincoln’s Thanksgiving proclamation, given in the middle of the country’s greatest crisis.

Transcript for President Abraham Lincoln’s Thanksgiving Proclamation from October 3,
1863

By the President of the United States
A Proclamation

The year that is drawing toward its close has been filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and
healthful skies. To these bounties, which are so constantly enjoyed that we are prone to forget the
source from which they come, others have been added, which are of so extraordinary a nature
that they cannot fail to penetrate and even soften the heart which is habitually insensible to the
ever-watchful providence of Almighty God.

In the midst of a civil war of unequaled magnitude and severity, which has sometimes seemed to
foreign states to invite and provoke their aggressions, peace has been preserved with all nations,
order has been maintained, the laws have been respected and obeyed, and harmony has prevailed
everywhere, except in the theater of military conflict; while that theater has been greatly
contracted by the advancing armies and navies of the Union.

Needful diversions of wealth and of strength from the fields of peaceful industry to the national
defense have not arrested the plow, the shuttle, or the ship; the ax has enlarged the borders of our
settlements, and the mines, as well of iron and coal as of the precious metals, have yielded even
more abundantly than heretofore. Population has steadily increased, notwithstanding the waste
that has been made in the camp, the siege, and the battlefield, and the country, rejoicing in the
consciousness of augmented strength and vigor, is permitted to expect continuance of years with
large increase of freedom.

No human counsel hath devised, nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things. They
are the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who while dealing with us in anger for our sins,
hath nevertheless remembered mercy.

It has seemed to me fit and proper that they should be solemnly, reverently, and gratefully
acknowledged as with one heart and one voice by the whole American people. I do, therefore,
invite my fellow-citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and
those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of
November next as a Day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in
the heavens. And I recommend to them that, while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him
for such singular deliverances and blessings, they do also, with humble penitence for our national
perverseness and disobedience, commend to His tender care all those who have become widows,
orphans, mourners, or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably
engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty hand to heal the wounds of the
nation, and to restore it, as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes, to the full
enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquility, and union.

In testimony whereof, I have hereunto set my hand and caused the seal of the United Stated
States to be affixed. 

Done at the city of Washington, this third day of October, in the year of our Lord one thousand
eight hundred and sixty-three, and of the Independence of the United States the eighty-eighth. 

Abraham Lincoln

Weirdly, he didn’t brag about himself or complain about his enemies even once.

(Most people don’t know he was a Republican, dontcha know.)

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Thought and prayers to the brave fighters in the War on Thanksgiving

by digby

To the brave men and women fighting in the war on thanksgiving, thank you for your servicepic.twitter.com/wK3nu2NmIl

— John Kerr (@JohnnyHeatWave) November 27, 2019

Lol.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone.