Yes there is such a thing
Probably my favorite part of the election season is stuff like this.
Here’s one for Trump from 2016:
"what digby sez..."
Digby's Hullabaloo Posts
I’ll confess that I got a little teary last night at the ovations for Biden. It was nice to see him get a little love from the party. His accomplishments have gone largely unappreciated by the public and his decision to withdraw from the race had to be incredibly difficult. He deserves all the appreciation we can give him for all of it.
David Leonhardt had an interesting piece today about Biden’s legacy. And he defined him perfectly as a man who travelled his whole career in the mainstream of the party, whether more right or left as the party felt the times required.
But Biden has not simply gone with the Democratic flow. Over his more than 50 years in politics, he has periodically shown strong opinions about how his party should change — and helped it do so.
Biden has always understood the class resentments that many Americans feel. (If you haven’t read Robert Draper’s profile of Biden for The Times Magazine, I recommend it, including the section in which Biden analyzes George W. Bush.)
Biden’s political career began in 1972, when he defeated an incumbent Republican senator in Delaware even as Richard Nixon won a landslide. Biden ran as a subtly different kind of Democrat, with a more working-class image than the party’s presidential nominee that year, George McGovern. Biden simultaneously distanced himself from the liberal fervor of the 1960s and portrayed himself as an economic populist. He criticized both draft dodgers and “millionaires who don’t pay any taxes at all.”
Five decades later, Biden became the most populist Democratic president in modern times. This positioning wasn’t just about his background, either. Populism has recently gained a new appeal, thanks to the failure of the market-based economic policies of the past half-century — which are often known as neoliberalism — to deliver broad-based prosperity.
Instead of focusing on trade deals, Biden tried to build up American manufacturing. He joined a picket line with autoworkers and appointed labor-friendly regulators. He gave Medicare the power to negotiate drug prices. He cracked down on “junk fees.” He tried to end decades of gentle antitrust regulation.
Biden devoted much of his speech last night to this agenda. He claimed to have rebuilt “the backbone of the middle class.” He said, “We finally beat big Pharma,” and “Wall Street didn’t build America, the middle class built America.” When the crowd chanted, “Union Joe,” he replied, “I agree. I’m proud.”
These economic policies are largely popular even though Biden is not. If the Democratic Party’s shift away from neoliberalism — toward what I’ve called neopopulism — continues, Biden’s presidency will be a major reason. And Harris’s initial economic proposals suggest that much of the shift will continue if she wins.
I don’t know how I feel about this particular branding but I do agree with the analysis
Biden’s signature line about foreign policy is that the world is witnessing a struggle between democracy and autocracy. You can quibble with the details, but his basic point is correct.
U.S. allies are mostly democracies — including Western Europe, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, India, Australia, Mexico and Canada. The countries that treat the U.S. as an enemy are autocracies — China, Russia, Iran and North Korea. Increasingly, these autocracies are collaborating with one another.
Biden has defined the United States as the leading player in an alliance to combat autocracy. “Who can lead the world other than the United States of America?” he asked last night.
As president, he confronted China economically and promised to defend Taiwan. He rallied a pro-Ukraine coalition after Russia invaded. He withdrew from Afghanistan — chaotically — partly because of its limited strategic importance. He abandoned his initial reluctance to work with Saudi Arabia, an autocratic ally, and embraced it as a counterweight to Iran. He continued to embrace Israel for similar reasons, despite the death and destruction in Gaza.
Biden’s foreign policy is based on the idea that the world has entered a new cold war (even if he rejects the term). And Harris? Her campaign has said little about foreign policy or her worldview. Maybe that will start to change in Chicago this week.
I don’t see it as “a new cold war” either. It’s just a recognition of the growing global fascist movement which requires the United States as the world’s only super power to use its influence to rally the democracies around the world to oppose it. The worst thing in the world would be to put our heads in the sand.
Right now we are fighting our own internal fascist threat and even if he loses in November I don’t think the demise of Trump will end it. The GOP is infected with it. But the worldwide threat is real and must be dealt with.
The conservative writer JV Last at The Bulwark had a more sentimental take, but I agree with that as well:
I hope you drank it in last night. It was one of the most human moments I’ve ever seen in politics, from the second the president stepped on stage and embraced his daughter.
But it was more than that. It was America saying goodbye to this ordinary man who has become an extraordinary president. A president who saved our democracy.
This is one of those cases where the transcript doesn’t give you enough context. You need the video. You need to see Biden’s face and feel the vibrations from the crowd. And you absolutely need to watch his final section, when he transitions from a campaign speech to a valediction.
This is the story of a nation grateful to a president not just for his accomplishments, but for his sacrifice. For his ability to understand that he was dispensable.
It was this extraordinary willingness, when American democracy was threatened from within, that made Joe Biden the indispensable man.
I know I’ve said this before but I want to say it again: Biden is our greatest living president.
There’s more but I thought this was particularly on point:
Over and over Biden tried to make space on the right for a Republican party independent of fascist overtones.
That Republican voters affirmatively chose another run with Trump is no fault of Biden’s. He did everything he could. But his big domestic project failed because the base fact is that a political party can only be as healthy as its voters let it be.
And these days the GOP is a party where voters wear t-shirts bragging about how their nominee wants to be a “dictator.”
Faced with this failure and the resurgence of the authoritarian movement, Biden saved our democracy again—this time by walking away from power. When he realized that he could not win the battle a second time, Biden anointed Kamala Harris—shutting down any contest and giving her the space to establish herself as a force.
He was too old to campaign effectively in 2024 but his age and experience served him well in this time of great peril with Donald Trump directing the GOP from his Mar-a-Lago White House in exile.
We were lucky to have him.
But what do I know?
Judy Woodruff reports that as the administration is trying hard to get a cease fire and hostage release in Gaza, Donald Trump is on the phone exhorting his buddy Netanyahu not to do it.
How can this be ok? More importantly how have we come to the point where it’s just a passing comment instead of front page news?
I realize that the Logan Act is pretty much a joke. And there are certainly previous examples of Republicans doing this for political gain during an election (I’m looking at you Nixon and Reagan.) But it’s still not right, especially now what with Trump being a convicted criminal and a fascist and all. The media should never treat this as normal but they especially shouldn’t be doing it now.
You may be wondering where Tom Sullivan is today. Well, as he has vaguely mentioned, much more humbly than he should have, he’s in Chicago as a delegate to the DNC this week. That’s him above with rising star Anderson Clayton the chair of the North Carolina Democratic Party. Tom recognized Clayton as a singular talent some time ago and worked to help elect her to the post.
North Carolina may very well be in play this election. At the very least Clarton and Sullivan are going to make Trump fight for it. I couldn’t feel more privileged than to have Tom writing here every day for all these years. He’s out there getting done.
Not everything, that’s for sure.
Here's Raphael Warnock's full speech.
— Matthew Sheffield (@mattsheffield) August 20, 2024
This is an important address for MAGA to hear because he went hard after Donald Trump for rejecting Christianity.
It's a message that Fox didn't air for even a second live. pic.twitter.com/i9Q9b4RMTl
Matthew Sheffield watched Fox News’ coverage of the DNC last night and found that they censored the Black politicians except for Kamala Harris’ brief remarks. Seriously. They did not show the speeches by Karen Bass, Laphonza Butler, James Clyburn, Jasmine Crockett, or Raphael Warnock. They also didn’t show the speech by Sean Fein, which says everything:
Another very powerful speech which Fox did not air for even one second was by UAW president Shawn Fein.
— Matthew Sheffield (@mattsheffield) August 20, 2024
This was a really important address because Fein meticulously showed how Donald Trump pretends to support working people but never actually does so. Here it is in full. pic.twitter.com/6XhZEbvfV7
The crowd erupted into “Trump’s a scab” chants repeatedly. I can only imagine how much that irritated him.
The Fox audience might have learned something if the network had shown it — which is why they didn’t, of course. The oligarchs and greedheads which run the right wing media universe must keep the rubes in the dark if they hope to maintain power.
As for the Black officials, I wouldn’t expect anything else. Seeing all those exceptional, decent, highly accomplished Black Democrats would disorient many of their racist viewers and they might even change the channel. Can’t have that.
Saving the country from Donald Trump is the most important job the Democratic Party has ever had. Without that nothing else will matter. They (we) came through in 2018 to take the House and end the trifecta. In 2020 we kicked him out of the White House. In 2022 we stopped the Red Wave. The Party hung together throughout all the chaos and attempted destruction. I couldn’t be more surprised.
And now it is more united than I’ve ever seen it to put an end to his reign in the GOP once and for all. The Democrats shouldn’t have to do it. The Republicans have abdicated their responsibility to purge him themselves. But that’s how it is, and it means that the GOP itself is infected and will have to be dealt with over time. But job one is to stop Trump. What’s shocking is that it’s so hard to do because so many of our fellow Americans worship the man.
Brian Beutler has a nice analysis of the situation on the morning after night one of the DNC:
Early in Donald Trump’s presidency—perhaps as early as one day after his inauguration, when millions of protesters flooded streets around the world—it became clear that the anti-Trump opposition was the largest and most powerful coalition in American politics.
Anyone without a factional ax to grind should’ve been able to see it, too. We’d had enough time even by then to examine the results of the election. We understood the basic nature and advantages of Trump’s minoritarian coalition; we knew he’d assembled an electoral college majority while losing the popular vote after a campaign marked by criminal sabotage of his opponent and myriad institutional failures in his favor. We knew Trump wasn’t just unpopular, but that almost everyone who disapproved of him strongly disapproved of him.
Hillary Clinton probably would’ve won despite her baggage and missteps, and the unique obstacles she faced, if the anti-Trump majority hadn’t been too complacent about his chances of winning. But it was simple to see, even back then, that Democrats lost a winnable race. Anyone who “wins” a two-person race with 46 percent of the vote is no colossus. The anti-Trump opposition was big and broad enough to beat him time and again if it could be assembled. Clinton just happened to be the wrong leader to assemble it.
We watched this theory bear out repeatedly over the next six years as the anti-Trump coalition aligned in 2018, 2020, and 2022 to defeat Trump and his biggest enablers: MAGA candidates and swing-state Republicans alike. It was such a dependable formula that it almost lulled Democrats back into a false sense of inevitability.
The waning days of Joe Biden’s aborted re-election campaign were a reminder that, while big enough to defeat Trump in election after election, the anti-Trump coalition still has to be held together and mobilized. A Democratic Party that didn’t seem mission driven to beat Trump could shatter the resistance, allowing Trump to sneak into power once again.
Kamala Harris, or whoever had succeeded Biden atop the Democratic ticket, could’ve squandered this energy just the same. A leader with too much baggage, or too mired in factional infighting, might be losing just as Clinton lost, and as Biden was on track to lose.
Instead, Harris is rebuilding the Democratic Party purposefully to hold that winning coalition together. She’s doing an exceptionally good job.
She’s great and so is Walz. Joe Biden is a good man who did the right thing for the country. The elected officials past and present are all there, doing what’s necessary. But I think the resistance, aka the anti-Trump coalition, should get a pat on the back as well.
There are many ways this coalition could have shattered but even through the dark days of worrying about Biden’s public performance and the doldrums, it really didn’t. Most people said they would vote for anyone over Donald Trump. Now they don’t have to — they can vote enthusiastically for a ticket they believe will beat him once and for all. As Beutler says, it was “purpose built” to do that.
I can’t believe he did it:
Noooooo!
Back in 2004 during the presidential campaign, George Bush ordered his cheese steak “Whiz wit,” while John Kerry asked for his with Swiss cheese, a misstep that solidified Kerry’s effete reputation and made him the subject of ridicule across Philadelphia.
Vance is supposed to be the salt o’ the earth guy…
“Did you know the Kamala price hikes have cost the average American family $28,000?”
— Donald Trump, in a TikTok video, Aug. 15
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“As a result of Kamala’s inflation price hikes, they’ve cost the typical household a total of $28,000. These are numbers coming from the government. They are not coming from me.”
— Trump, media event in Bedminster, N.J., Aug. 15
Former president Donald Trump rarely updates his political rhetoric — he’s using many of the same lines against Vice President Kamala Harris in 2024 that he used against Joe Biden in 2020 — so it’s always news when a fresh talking point emerges.
In recent days, Trump has claimed that the “average American family” or the “typical household” has suffered a hike in spending of $28,000 under the Biden presidency.
Nobody knows where he got that amount and the campaign isn’t saying.
They previously fact-checked a Kevin McCarthy claim that “families have lost the equivalent of $7,400 worth of income” which came from a Heritage Foundation research fellow named E.J. Antoni. It was a bogus number that made littyle sense to economists.
Now, just 16 months later, as inflation is easing, Trump suddenly touts a figure almost four times McCarthy’s number. Trump claimed these were “government numbers,” but economists we contacted scratched their heads about where this could have come from.
One economist suggested that Trump might have been taking total personal consumer expenditures and dividing by total households. But that doesn’t exactly match $28,000, and personal consumer expenditures includes items (stuff the government buys for people like health care,for example) that would exaggerate the impact.
In any case, the experts said Trump is ignoring income gains that have accompanied the rise in prices, putting the finances of many Americans in the net positive territory.
Moody’s economist Mark Zandi, for instance, provided a spreadsheet of data on real personal income less transfer payments from the government per capita. “It has increased 4.2 percent between January 2021 and June 2024,” he said in an email. “A little more than one percent per annum. A solid performance.”
They eventually found the number in a blog post by the same Heritage fellow which doesn’t really add up either. And honestly, I’m pretty sure Trump just pulled that out of his hair helmet. It’s not like he cares about providing any back-up.
And in any case, it’s the opposite of reality:
Oddly, when Bankrate.com conducted this same survey in 2023, Americans said they needed $233,000 a year to be financially secure. So in one year, the surveys indicated a $47,000 improvement — perhaps a sign that as inflation eased, Americans felt less stressed about their finances. A representative for Bankrate.com did not respond to a request for comment.
Ya think?
The election is only about principals, values and morals. You either have them or you don’t.
The press keeps yammering about Trump policies and Harris policies and “the economy” and “immigration: as if that’s what it’s about.
This guy knows what it’s about:
Retired federal appeals court Judge J. Michael Luttig, a prominent conservative legal scholar put on the bench by President George H.W. Bush, is endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris over former President Donald Trump, whose candidacy he describes as an existential threat to American democracy
It will be the first time Luttig, a veteran of two Republican administrations, has voted for a Democrat.
“In the presidential election of 2024 there is only one political party and one candidate for the presidency that can claim the mantle of defender and protector of America’s Democracy, the Constitution, and the Rule of Law,” Luttig wrote in a statement obtained exclusively by CNN. “As a result, I will unhesitatingly vote for the Democratic Party’s candidate for the Presidency of the United States, Vice President of the United States, Kamala Harris.”
“In voting for Vice President Harris, I assume that her public policy views are vastly different from my own,” Luttig writes, “but I am indifferent in this election as to her policy views on any issues other than America’s Democracy, the Constitution, and the Rule of Law, as I believe all Americans should be.”
I probably disagree with this man on virtually everything when it comes to “policies” too. But he is a level headed person of integrity who believes in democracy and the rule of law. There used to be a lot more conservatives like him but I guess they all died.
Rachel Maddow has an oped in the NY Times today bringing her historical knowledge to this scheme that’s percolating in the swing states run by Republicans about decertifying the vote. She reminds us that back in the very close 1960 election some fringe wingnuts floated the idea of refusing to certify the results in certain states in order to give Nixon the electoral college victory over Kennedy. At the time, it wasn’t even considered but, as we know, times have changed.
She observes the most recent activity in Georgia which gives local election boards the power to challenged and overturn a valid election. And it gets more troubling every day:
On Monday, the board is expected to consider yet another revision to the rules that would afford members of county election boards an additional option for delaying or refusing certification. The rule would allow local board members to demand “all election-related documentation” before certifying the results.
Imagine an election night this November in which the two parties are trading swing-state victories. The Democrats capture Nevada, while the Republicans take Arizona. The Republicans win the big prize of Pennsylvania, while the Democrats top them in Wisconsin and Michigan. The nation is waiting on Georgia. If Georgia goes red, it’s President Trump; if Georgia goes blue, it’s President Harris.
Then, local news headlines start to circulate. There are reports of unspecified “problems” in the vote in Fulton County. And in Gwinnett County. And in DeKalb, Coffee and Spalding Counties. Republican officials are refusing to certify the results in their counties. They say they are making “reasonable inquiries.”
As legal challenges wend through the courts, a wave of disinformation, confusion and propaganda swells, fueled by unproven claims that something is amiss in these Georgia counties, and also by similar noise — and possibly also certification refusals — in Michigan, Pennsylvania, New Mexico and Nevada. (All have seen local Republicans try the certification refusal ruse since 2020.)
She points out that the states only have until December 11 to send official certify results to Washington but notes that nobody knows what will happen if they don’t:
The point of these certification refusals may not be to falsify or flip a result, but simply to prevent the emergence of one. If one or more states fail to produce official results, blocking any candidate from reaching 270 electoral votes, the 12th Amendment prescribes Gerald L.K. Smith’s dream scenario: a vote in the newly elected House of Representatives to determine the presidency. Each state delegation would get one vote; today, Republicans control 26 state delegations; Democrats control 22; and two are evenly divided.
Our democratic system is not invincible, but it is strong. Certification of election results is a ministerial responsibility that is not discretionary. Legitimate election challenges are handled with recounts and litigation, not by individual election board members. There is no loophole that allows bad-faith officials to so flummox the electoral system that they take the choice of the next president away from the American people.
But in the past three and a half years, the ad hoc certification ploys that failed to flip the last presidential election to Mr. Trump have been professionalized and systematized by Republican officials and their allies. A recent report in The Times quoted an official with the conservative Heritage Foundation saying that “the conditions” in the country are now such that “most reasonable policymakers and officials cannot in good conscience certify an election.” Michael Whatley, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, has declined to answer when asked if the party intends to try to block vote certifications.
I sure wish the race could open up a bit and provide a large enough margin that this wouldn’t be a possibility. But if the swing states are as close as they have been we’re going to have a fight.
There was a time when a big popular vote win would allay these fears simply because both parties believed in democracy and in a case where the electoral college was tight the loser would easily concede knowing that the will of the voters across the country had chosen their opponent. Republicans have made it clear that they don’t care about the spirit or the letter of elections law. If they can game the system, they will do it. lt worked in 2000 and might have worked in 2021 if they could have gotten Mike Pence on board. Of course they will do it again.