Sunday, July 31, 2016

Must Wins for Trump

On an Ominous Map for Trump, These 3 States Are Must-Win

Mr. Trump intends to focus on the three biggest swing states: Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania. Without sweeping them, he has no path to victory, his campaign believes.

At Least

Football practice starts next week.  Something to take our minds off of politics.

Saturday, July 30, 2016

Trump and Putin

by George Will
In Wednesday’s news conference, Trump said, “I have nothing to do with Russia.” Donald Trump Jr. says, “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets. We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”
Trump Sr. can end the speculation by providing information. If, however, he continues his tax information stonewall, it will be clear that he finds the speculation less damaging than the truth would be, which itself is important information.

Friday, July 29, 2016

The End of Bipartisanship


MEDIA

Bipartisanship is Dead in the Age of Nonsense

Trump has rocketed us past polarization into an alternate universe, making it impossible to see the other side’s point of view.
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump signs autographs during a campaign rally at the Sharonville Convention July 6, 2016, in Cincinnati. (Photo by John Sommers II/Getty Images)
We’ve asked historian and author Eric Alterman to watch the national party conventions and share his reactions with us in a series of blog posts.
Pundits have long been bemoaning what has come to be called the “cocooning” or the “Facebook Effect,” whereby each side of the political divide see and hear only news that flatters the point of view he or she already holds. Pundits by and large don’t like this because, with few exceptions, they worship at the shrine of “bipartisanship” despite the fact that the far-right takeover of the Republican Party long ago made genuine bipartisanship — as opposed to Democratic surrender — impossible.
This is the problem facing not only bipartisanship-mad pundits but also the speakers at the DNC tasked with reaching out to potentially undecided voters and convincing them to vote for Clinton.
Donald Trump’s takeover of the party from the extremists who had already taken it over has made this problem visible to all. No bipartisan consensus could ever stretch itself to include his fantasy wall, his kicking out of 12 million undocumented workers, his singling out of Muslims for special discrimination, his exhortations to violence on the part of his supporters and his admiration for vicious dictators like Saddam Hussein and Vladimir Putin. And that’s just for starters.
Given the fact that not only are Trump’s views anathema to those of any thinking, fair-minded person, the solutions he proposes to address the problems he identifies are also patently ridiculous. It is actually inaccurate even to call them “solutions.” Trump’s M.O. is simply to label anything or anyone he doesn’t like a “disaster” and insist that as president he “alone” could fix it because “I AM YOUR VOICE.” (The caps are in the official document.)
Hearing this, I was reminded of the crazy statement made by Martin Heidegger in 1933when he announced: “The Führer alone personifies German reality and German laws, now and in the future.” Keep in mind the fact that Heidegger is probably the consensus choice for the most influential philosopher of the 20th century. And yet somehow, his detachment from the reality that he was able to embrace the Nazi regime wholeheartedly because he thought “thinking” and “being” (or I would say in this case, “doing”) were two different things.
The problem for analysts of this election is that Trump has broken the system. It was near the breaking point with every rejectionist action and anti-intellectual argument made by Republican politicians and repeated ad nauseum on Fox News and talk radio for the past decade or more, but it’s no longer possible to pretend to be able to see the world from the other side’s point of view. The Trump point of view, pure and simple, is based on nonsense. (Remember his early successes in the polls among Republicans relied largely on this refusal to accept Obama’s birth certificate as legitimate.) Some conservatives accept this. Stephen Hayes, formerly a shill for Dick Cheney’s lies and crimes at The Weekly Standard — which naturally got him a gig as an analyst for CNN — headlined his coverage in that same magazine of Trump’s Cleveland remarks, “Donald Trump Is Crazy, and So Is the GOP for Embracing Him.” (Having Dick Cheney’s shill call you “crazy” is a bit like having Keith Richards do your drug intervention, whichactually happened to the late Gram Parsons.)
This is the problem facing not only bipartisanship-mad pundits but also the speakers at the DNC tasked with reaching out to potentially undecided voters and convincing them to vote for Hillary. If they are Bernie Bros, then the “ask” is easy. It’s some form of Sarah Silverman’s request that they stop being “ridiculous.”
But ask yourself: How to you try to reason with people who are susceptible to a candidate whose entire appeal is unreason? And ditto their voices in the ditto-head right-wing media?Michelle Obama gave that beautiful speech, the highlight of which was the moment in which all Americans could justifiably share with pride: Black children playing in the White House when, in fact, it was built by slaves.
And what was the reaction of the right-wing punditocracy? Bill O’Reilly, I kid you not,argued that the slaves had a pretty good time of things.
How to you try to reason with people who are susceptible to a candidate whose entire appeal is unreason? And ditto their voices in the ditto-head right-wing media?
Last night, two posts crossed my screen as I watched Bill Clinton, Meryl Streep, Lena Dunham and those incredible moms of fallen children try to speak to an audience that it’s hard to imagine can even exist: the undecided, or even unmotivated voter. (The threat of fascism is not enough to motivate you to vote? Who the hell are you?) The first was this extremely funny and profoundly profane post written in the voice of Hillary Clinton if only she were allowed to speak truthfully (and profanely) to the American voter.Read it here if you have not already. (I can’t even print the title on this family-oriented website.) The second was called “Someone You Love Is Voting for Donald Trump — Now What?” The post professes to advise a person about how to reason with this hypothetical individual. My advice, rather, is: Forget it. You can continue to love that person if you like, but you should also pity him or her. And whenever possible, exclude them from any significant decisions that might affect themselves or their families or anyone else. They are beyond reason and beyond reach.
Bill Clinton gave a lovely speech last night that fundamentally showed a man who loved and admired his wife after half a century of trials and tribulations that the rest of us cannot (and would not) hope to experience. Did it move the needle on these nudniks who cannot choose between Donald “%#$%@*$” Trump to America’s most qualified presidential candidate since John Quincy Adams? Who can say? Pollsters cannot answer this question. If they could, Trump would be in the news today only for having to face students, investors and workers whom he has been bilking and lying to in recent years, rather than threatening to destroy 230 years toward progress of a more democratic and inclusive America.
Addendum: So now we know that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange released the hacked DNC material purposely to hurt Clinton and help Trump and that “US intelligence agencies are said to have “high confidence” that the Kremlin was behind the hacking of the DNC’s emails.”
This means, almost by definition, with the consent of Trump BFF Vladimir Putin. I’m all for sending Debbie Wasserman Schultz packing, but how can members of the media justify using this material exactly its thieves intended? Right-wingers used to call naïve liberals “useful idiots.” But aren’t articles that simply repeat what was found in these hacks — hacks by an adversarial government and a wanted criminal — without providing any context about how the information became available and why it now being made public — far worse than that?

Things Have Changed (As Dylan would say)

Welcome to 2016. Things have changed. There was a time when a presidential candidate flirting with treason would have seemed impossible. There was a time when a foreign government trying to influence an American election and one of the Presidential candidates actually encouraging this would have been unthinkable. There was a time when one of the two major political parties nominating a person for President who is clearly unqualified and downright dangerous not only to the country but the world would have been horrifying. But it seems things have changed and not for the better.
Welcome to 2016. Things have certainly changed.

Wednesday, July 27, 2016

Wil Haygood - Showdown (Book Review)

This excellent biography of Thurgood Marshall is a great reminder of a great American who provided unprecedented service to the country.  He was first and so far one of only two African-American justices of the Supreme Court.  He did the legal groundwork that led to the Brown decision in 1954 that legally integrated American's schools.  For many years he was a steady liberal vote on the court.  He was a great, great, man and this biography does him justice.

No Doubt About It


The Most Important Part of Day One That No One Is Focusing On

Last night, Sen. Elizabeth Warren called out Donald Trump and the GOP for the dog-whistle politics they are playing. Democrats need to amplify her message if they want to win in November.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) addresses the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia on July 25, 2016. (Photo by Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images)
The attention on Day One of the Democratic Convention was on healing rifts in the party, but the most significant moment may have slipped under the radar, in the framing of the arguments against Donald Trump. There, something truly new happened, and no one is yet paying attention.
The standard rips on Trump criticize his personal defects as a bully and a blowhard spewing hate and division through schoolyard taunts spread on Twitter. Comedian Sarah Silverman skewered him along these lines, describing Trump’s antics as “major arrested development stuff, that’s I’m-still-emotionally-4-and-calling-people-names-from-my-gold-encrusted-sandbox-because-I-was-given-money-instead-of-human-touch-or-coping-tools stuff.”
First lady Michelle Obama brilliantly centered the same narrative around what she wants children, hers and the nation’s, to learn from public figures. “In this election, and every election,” she said, the most important issue is “who will have the power to shape our children for the next four or eight years of their lives.” And in perhaps the most remarked-upon line of Monday night’s speeches, Obama seemingly offered not just an indictment of Trump but sound advice for Hillary Clinton: “When they go low, we go high.”
Trump ascended to the pinnacle of the Republican Party by tapping the two great anxieties roiling many white persons in the country: economic distress and the changing face of the country.
Silverman and Obama helped construct striking tonal and emotional distinctions between the Democratic and Republican conventions, sharply contrasting maturity, substance, enthusiasm and humor versus crudeness, fear, empty bombast and outrage. These differences will play an important role in the ensuing months, with the emotional register in particular key as voters so often respond viscerally.
But on another level, these responses to Trump fall short, for they do not address the core of his appeal to millions of voters. Why, precisely, do roaring multitudes rally to his fulminations? Unless Democrats speak to what makes Trump wildly popular, they risk losing the election.
Trump ascended to the pinnacle of the Republican Party by tapping the two great anxieties roiling many white persons in the country: economic distress and the changing face of the country. In Trump’s telling, these are not separate issues but one and the same. Demographic change is ostensibly destroying everything good about America, including the economy.
Trump did not originate this message, though he has been more aggressive in spreading it. Instead, he had fertile ground to till: for 50 years, conservatives have been telling white voters they should fear people of color for bringing crime and stealing jobs; they should resent big government for coddling minorities with welfare and through the lax enforcement of criminal and immigration laws; and they should instead trust the marketplace and the job creators.
Meanwhile, Democrats either stayed silent on race, fearing it was too divisive a topic, or imitated the Republicans, competing for the allegiance of racially anxious white voters. But a critical crack in that self-defeating pattern appeared at the Democratic Convention.
As she has over the campaign season so far, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) forcefully pressed the case against Trump, slamming his selfishness, lack of business acumen, multiple bankruptcies and willingness to defraud investors as well as workers. But most important of all, on by far the largest stage she has held to date, Warren called out Trump for his dog-whistle politics.
Warren named Trump’s racism for what it is: not simple hatred, but a political weapon. “’Divide and Conquer’ is an old story in America,” she said, explaining how “poor whites in the South were fed Jim Crow, which told a poor white worker that ‘No matter how bad off he was, at least he was a white man, better than the black man.’ Racial hatred was part of keeping the powerful on top.”
Unless Democrats speak to what makes Trump wildly popular, they risk losing the election.
Then she connected the past to the present: “That’s Donald Trump’s America. An America of fear and hate. An America where we all break apart. Whites against blacks and Latinos. Christians against Muslims and Jews. Straight against gay. Everyone against immigrants. . . . . But ask yourself this. When white workers in Ohio are pitted against black workers in North Carolina or Latino workers in Florida, who really benefits?”
There it was: the essence of Trump’s secret strategy laid bare. Trump is a billionaire building support among working people by fanning group hatreds. Democrats so far have largely failed to call this out, missing how Trump connects economic fears to racial resentments. But Warren bluntly named it, no more so than when she said “When we turn on each other, rich guys like Trump can push through more tax breaks for themselves and then we’ll never have enough money to support our schools, or rebuild our highways, or invest in our kids’ future.”
An Excerpt from Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s Speech
Trump thinks he can win votes by fanning the flames of fear and hatred. By turning neighbor against neighbor. By persuading you that the real problem in America is your fellow Americans — people who don’t look like you, or don’t talk like you or don’t worship like you. He even picked a vice president famous for trying to make it legal to openly discriminate against gays and lesbians.
That’s Donald Trump’s America. An America of fear and hate. An America where we all break apart. Whites against blacks and Latinos. Christians against Muslims and Jews. Straight against gay. Everyone against immigrants. Race, religion, heritage, gender, the more factions the better. But ask yourself this. When white workers in Ohio are pitted against black workers in North Carolina or Latino workers in Florida, who really benefits?
“Divide and Conquer” is an old story in America. Dr. Martin Luther King knew it. After his march from Selma to Montgomery, he spoke of how segregation was created to keep people divided. Instead of higher wages for workers, Dr. King described how poor whites in the South were fed Jim Crow, which told a poor white worker that “No matter how bad off he was, at least he was a white man, better than the black man.” Racial hatred was part of keeping the powerful on top.
And now Trump and his campaign have embraced it all. Racial hatred. Religious bigotry. Attacks on immigrants, on women, on gays. A deceitful and ugly blame game that says, whatever worries you, the answer is to blame that other group, and don’t put any energy into making real change.
When we turn on each other, bankers can run our economy for Wall Street, oil companies can fight off clean energy and giant corporations can ship the last good jobs overseas.
When we turn on each other, rich guys like Trump can push through more tax breaks for themselves and then we’ll never have enough money to support our schools, or rebuild our highways, or invest in our kids’ future.
When we turn on each other, we can’t unite to fight back against a rigged system.

Clinton understands that to win the White House she needs the Obama coalition, the so-called “new American electorate” of women, younger voters and people of color. To that end, she started her campaign with major addresses on racial justices issues like voting rights, mass incarceration and immigration.
But the very effort to speak to racial justice framed solely in terms of harms to nonwhite communities risks buttressing Trump’s fundamental message. Unvarnished, Trump’s core argument is that big government and the Democratic Party have turned their backs on whites, caring more about helping undeserving people of color. Every time Democrats focus on racial minorities — or women, the disabled, the LGBTQ community, Muslims and so on — they help confirm in the minds of the many who see themselves as part of “the silent majority” that Trump is basically correct.
Democrats in general and Clinton in particular should follow Warren’s lead. Don’t abandon talk of racial justice, but make it clear that this is an issue for whites too. Hammer the message over and over that racial fear and other culture-war issues are the divide-and-conquer weapons conservatives have wielded for decades to win popular support for policies that mostly help the plutocrats.
Trump’s use of dog-whistle politics in 2016 is egregious, bordering on open demagoguery and deepening the racial wounds in our country. But exactly because it is so obviously central to Trump’s frightening success, his blatant racial pandering provides the best opportunity in half a century to confront and defeat the manipulation at the heart of American electoral politics. Warren is pioneering that message. “When we turn on each other, we can’t unite to fight back against a rigged system.” We should amplify it

Slavery According to Bill O'Reilly


O'Reilly's Benevolent Slaveowners


Slave House in Washington, D.C.
Slave House in Washington, D.C.
Bill O’Reilly “just can’t get rid of that history teacher thing.” Last night O’Reilly offered a brief response to Michelle Obama’s DNC Convention speech in which she cited the role of slaves in building the White House. The First Lady used the opportunity to remind her listeners of how far we’ve come as a nation and to impart some understanding of what it has meant for a black family to occupy this home for the past eight years. Not surprisingly, many listeners were surprised to hear this little tidbit of history and others, no doubt, refused to believe it.
For O’Reilly, however, the issue is not whether the claim is true. He admits that it is, but he still manages to reveal his own lack of comfort by employing one of the most deeply embedded tropes in our history and memory of slavery. First, O’Reilly references the fact that “free blacks, whites, and immigrants also worked on the massive building” which serves to collapse the salient economic, social, and political distinctions between the freed and enslaved.
But it is this comment that stands out.
Slaves that worked there were well-fed and had decent lodgings provided by the government, which stopped hiring slave labor in 1802.
I don’t know for sure, but I assume the date of 1802 is a reference to the completion of the White House, but this does not include the role that slaves continued to play in the construction of the rest of the capital. The more interesting question is why O’Reilly felt a need to claim that slaves were treated well. What does this even mean in this context beyond a vague reference to government housing – a reference that viewers likely filtered through their assumptions about a supposedly failed welfare state..
O’Reilly falls back into the standard argument – first offered by slaveowners themselves and later popularized in post-Civil War accounts, including popular Hollywood movies such asGone With the Wind – that slavery was not so bad. As far as O’Reilly is concerned, slaves were no different from free blacks and immigrants.
In doing so, O’Reilly undercuts the story of ‘slavery to freedom’ outlined by Michelle Obama as a means to minimize the problem of race relations throughout American history. He could have just as easily used the occasion to highlight the theme of American Exceptionalism outlined in her speech. No doubt, O’Reilly’s viewers are hardwired for such an interpretation, but to do so would have forced his audience to confront the tension between freedom and slavery that existed at the very moment of the nation’s founding.
Imagining slaves toiling on the grounds of the White House serves to remind Americans that the institution of slavery could and did continue to exist in a new nation pledged to the principle of “equality for all.” That is the intellectual and cultural space in which the stories of many black families struggle to find a voice. Unfortunately, it is much more comforting to imagine “well fed” slaves working diligently to construct a new nation alongside their free black and immigrant brothers.
And that’s Bill O’Reilly’s “history thing.

Tuesday, July 26, 2016

Ready for Bill

I am ready to hear Bill Clinton at the convention tonight.  Nobody knows how to rip the Republicans better than Bill Clinton.

Monday, July 25, 2016

The Democratic Convention

Though I choose not to watch, I am hopefully for a productive convention.  I get too nervous and worked up to watch.  I remember the violence in the streets of Chicago in 1968.  I remember Senator McGovern's too late acceptance speech in 1972.  I remember the drama of President Obama in 2008.  All that matters is winning in November.

Sunday, July 24, 2016

Frank DeFord - The Old Ball Game (Book Review)

I do not follow major league baseball much anymore, but I do like reading baseball books about the old days.  Back when the game was fun, the players weren't all multi-millionaires, and the game meant something.

Frank DeFord is one of the leading sportswriter of our time.  He is known primarily for writing in Sports Illustrated.

This book is about the days of John J. McGraw and Christy Matthewson.  McGraw was the manager of the New York Giants in the early years of the century.  His Giants dominated baseball until Babe Ruth joined the Yankees, the ball was juiced, small ball went by the wayside as power hitting took over.  Christy Matthewson was a hall-of-fame pitcher for McGraw's Giants and the first great baseball hero in this country.  He was college-educated and the All-American hero in the early years of the 20th century.

McGraw had the hardscrabble upbringing of a boy who left home at 16 and never looked back. Baseball was his passion, and a great passion it was.  He was the ultimate competitor.  He grew up in Baltimore but ended up in New York.  He was the great practitioner of small ball: speed, stealing bases, one base at a time baseball.

Matthewson was larger than life to the public but outside of baseball was a pretty regular guy.

McGraw said Honus Wagner was the greatest baseball he every way. It was common at that time to call German-Immigrants "Dutch."   It must have galled him how Babe Ruth came to New York and stole the public's affection for his Giants.

Every man wore a hat in those days.  I remember this when Cobb was being filmed at Rickwood in 1994.

Matthewson was good and well-know for playing checkers.  Funny to imagine him making a big deal out of such a boring game.

Of all the old New York stadiums the Polo Grounds haunts me the most, more than the original Yankee Stadium or Ebbetts Field.  The horizontal shape and deep, deep centerfield and short fields down the lines are so intriguing.  This is where Willie Mays made his famous catch against Vic Wertz in the '54 Series.  So said it's gone forever.

Friday, July 22, 2016

Donald Trump doesn’t want to make America great. He wants to make it afraid.

BY Ezra Klein
Vox
21 July 2016

Donald Trump is not a candidate the American people would turn to in normal times. He’s too inexperienced, too eccentric, too volatile, too risky. Voting Trump is burning down the house to collect the insurance money — you don’t do it unless things are really, really bad.

Here is Trump’s problem: Things are not really, really bad. In fact, things are doing much better than when President Obama came into office.

Unemployment is 4.9 percent nationally — a number Trump knows is far from a crisis, because it’s lower than the unemployment rate Mike Pence is presiding over in Indiana, and Trump keeps bragging about his running mate’s economic record. The deficit has gone down in recent years, and the stock market has gone up. The end of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars mean fewer Americans are dying abroad. A plurality approve of the job Obama is doing.

So Trump needs to convince voters that things are bad, even if they’re not. He needs to make Americans afraid again. And tonight, he tried.

"Our convention occurs at a moment of crisis for our nation," Trump said. "The attacks on our police, and the terrorism in our cities, threaten our very way of life. Any politician who does not grasp this danger is not fit to lead our country."

As Jon Favreau, a former speechwriter for Obama, wrote on Twitter, this was Trump’s "Nightmare in America" speech. The address had one goal, and one goal only: to persuade Americans that their country is a dangerous, besieged hellscape, and only Donald Trump can fix it.

And so Trump spoke of the "illegal immigrants with criminal records" who are "tonight roaming free to threaten peaceful citizens." He warned of the gangs, violence, and drugs "pouring into our communities." He invoked "the mothers and fathers who have lost their children to violence spilling across our border."

Perhaps the night’s ugliest moment came when he spoke of Sarah Root, a college student killed by a drunk driver who was also an unauthorized immigrant. "I’ve met Sarah’s beautiful family," Trump said. "But to this administration, their amazing daughter was just one more American life that wasn’t worth protecting. One more child to sacrifice on the altar of open borders."

For the record, almost 10,000 people were killed in America by drunk drivers in 2010 — the overwhelming majority of them by American citizens. Trump had neither answers for nor interest in their deaths.

And it is when you tug on these threads that Trump’s speech unspools and its grossness, and uselessness, becomes clear.

There are many ways in which Americans are actually not safe. More than 600,000 Americans died of heart disease in 2015, many of them unnecessarily. More than 130,000 Americans died in accidents. More than 40,000 died by suicide. There were a record number of drug overdoses in 2014, and gun deaths in America are far beyond those in any developed country.

These tragedies can be ameliorated by policy. Cigarettes can be taxed, alcohol regulated, addicts treated, guns made less accessible. But Trump wasn’t interested in making Americans safer, and so he did not mention any of these policies. He was interested in making Americans more afraid, and so he focused on the dangers that scare us, as opposed to the ones that truly threaten us.

"The first task for our new administration will be to liberate our citizens from the crime and terrorism and lawlessness that threatens their communities," he said.

"Liberate." The America Trump speaks of requires an occupying force sent by a strongman to free and stabilize cities that have fallen into anarchy. But our cities have not fallen into anarchy. Our borders are not swarming with illegal immigrants. Murder rates remain far below what the America of the '70s, '80s, and '90s experienced. Terrorism is a horror, but successful terrorist attacks are a rarity, and one that would be most straightforwardly addressed through gun control. No liberation is necessary.

"In this race for the White House," Trump said, "I am the law and order candidate." And the law and order candidate can only win if there is a crisis of lawlessness and disorder. But there isn’t. Trump isn’t worried about your safety. He is worried about his own electoral prospects.

And this is what made Trump’s speech so truly ugly. It is one thing to whip up fear of the Other when the Other is a threat. But it is fully another to try to scare the shit out of Americans because you’re afraid they won’t vote for you unless they’re terrified. It is demagogic to warn, on national television, of foreign criminals "roaming" our streets simply because you’re behind in the polls. It’s telling that Trump fears only the threats that can be blamed on outsiders while ignoring the more lethal, more pervasive killers that afflict the citizenry.

Trump’s speech was a procession of horrors for which he did not even bother to propose real solutions. He has no actual fix to immigration, no theories on how to reduce crime. Here, his statement bordered on self-parody. "I have a message for all of you: The crime and violence that today afflicts our nation will soon come to an end," he said. "Beginning on January 20, 2017, safety will be restored."

But then, perhaps there’s truth to his absurd promises: When the crisis is invented, the solution is simpler. Once Trump no longer needs the nation to be afraid, he will stop scaring it. It is his nightmare, and only he can wake us from it.

Look Who's Praising Trump!

White Nationalists Love Trump’s RNC Speech: “Couldn't Have Said It Better,” “Couldn’t Be Happier”

White nationalists leaders are heavily praising Republican nominee Donald Trump’s “awesome” convention speech. The pro-white racists said they “couldn't have said it better” and “couldn’t be happier.” They also praised Trump for focusing on the “negative effects” of immigration and using “codewords” that appeal to whites. 

From Media Matters for America

Trump's Midnight in America

BY Paul Begala
CNN
22 July 2016

(CNN)There were two enormous problems with Donald Trump's speech at the Republican National Convention: too much darkness, not enough inspirational personal biography.

First, the tone. If Trump needs a theme song he should consider the opening line of Simon & Garfunkel's "Sounds of Silence": "Hello darkness my old friend." This was one of the darkest speeches I have ever heard from a major party candidate. It's midnight in America.

Trump is blessed with truly impressive children and a gifted wife; they were the highlight of the convention. Indeed, the only person named Trump who gave a lousy speech was The Donald. He failed to build on their strong performances.

Donald Trump's America is fearful. Afraid of crime, afraid of terrorism, afraid of immigrants. His America is angry. Angry about political correctness. Angry about international trade. Angry with President Obama. And very, very angry about Hillary Clinton's candidacy.

Speaker after speaker at this convention excoriated Clinton. That's standard political fare. But Dr. Ben Carson compared her to Lucifer. Gov. Chris Christie called for her imprisonment. And one informal Trump adviser called for Clinton to be shot for treason. (The Secret Service is investigating that one.)

"Fear and loathing on the Campaign Trail" was a great book by the late Hunter S. Thompson, but it's a lousy campaign strategy. Americans want lift and loft, especially when they are anxious. In the depth of the Depression, FDR won with the song "Happy Days Are Here Again." Ronald Reagan, running in a recession, was a sunny optimist.

In another recession, my old boss Bill Clinton told his convention, "I still believe in a place called Hope." And with a crumbling economy and two mismanaged wars, Barack Obama had "the audacity of hope."

Optimism is central to the American character. A focus on the future, and an endless faith that we can make tomorrow better than today -- these are at the heart of the American dream.

Trump should have read Ronald Reagan's 1980 convention address. Like all challengers, he hammered the incumbent. But unlike Donald Trump he spoke of a bold, optimistic country. In fact, Reagan's words that night in Detroit 36 years ago were a cautionary note about dark demagogues like Donald Trump:

"The American people, the most generous on Earth, who created the highest standard of living, are not going to accept the notion that we can only make a better world for others by moving backwards ourselves. Those who believe we can have no business leading the nation."

Donald Trump wants to move America backwards, but he couldn't even move his party to unite behind him. He misreads the American character if he thinks darkness and division are winning political themes.

Which leads me to the second major failing of Trump's speech: The absence of a personal narrative. Whether it was Lincoln's rail-splitting or Barack Obama's Kenyan-Kansan unity, character, as reflected in biography, is the ultimate issue in selecting a president.

When people select a legislator, from city council to the Senate, they go through a checklist of issues, and ask, "Who will represent me on the issues I care about?" But when we choose an executive -- especially president -- we ask more fundamental, existential, self-definitional questions, like, "If my spouse and I both die, which candidate would we want to raise our children?"

This is especially important for a candidate with high negatives. Going into the 1992 Democratic convention, voters knew Bill Clinton had been accused of dodging the draft and cheating on his wife. They knew he'd gone to fancy schools like Georgetown and Yale and Oxford. So, many of them connected those dots and concluded Clinton was a wealthy, entitled, spoiled rich kid who didn't know or care about the struggles of the poor and middle class.

So we created "The Man From Hope." We could not erase the dots folks already had, but we added more: His mother was widowed before he was born; he was for a time raised by his grandparents, who ran one of the few general stores in Arkansas that served African-Americans as well as whites; he faced down his abusive, alcoholic stepfather when he threatened his mother; he went to college on a scholarship, and turned down lucrative jobs back East to return to Arkansas to make it a better place.

Trump's narrative arc is that he inherited a fortune, made even more, and married beautiful women while starring on a reality show. Perhaps he is satisfied with that, but voters want to know their president is one of them, that he, as President Clinton famously said, "Feels their pain."

As the Democrats prepare to gather in Philadelphia, here's a pro tip. The party that wins the White House is the one that is viewed as more unified and more mainstream. It's hard to be both at once.

You can unify around an extreme conservative or an extreme liberal, as the parties did under Barry Goldwater and George McGovern. And you can be in the mainstream, but if your party isn't unified you can be torpedoed by a fringe, as Al Gore was sunk by Ralph Nader.

Trump's divisive, dark and disastrous convention is an opening for Hillary Clinton and the Democrats. If they can come together, speak to the concerns of the forgotten middle class, campaign in search of, as Clinton has said, common ground instead of scorched earth, she will go a long way toward turning out the lights on Donald Trump's dark brand of politics.

Thursday, July 21, 2016

Republican Farce

I have not watched any of the Republican convention this week.  Nor will I watch any of the Democratic convention next week.  Here's hoping that Trump makes a complete fool of himself (though that's hard to do for him) tonight in his acceptance speech.

Monday, July 18, 2016

The Death of the Republican Party

 

GOP, RIP?

 Opinion writer  
The Republican Party came to life as the bastion of “Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Speech, Free Men.” It was a reformist party dedicated to stopping the spread of slavery and to fighting a “Slave Power” its founders saw as undermining free institutions.
The new political organization grew out of the old Whigs and reflected the faith that Henry Clay and his admirer Abraham Lincoln had in the federal government’s ability to invest in fostering economic growth and expanding educational opportunity. Its partisans embodied what John C. Calhoun, slavery’s chief ideological defender, described disdainfully as “the national impulse.” It was, in fact, a good impulse.
But the Republicans who held their first national convention 160 years ago were more than just Northern Whigs. Their ranks also included many former Democrats who shared a fervor for the anti-slavery cause and helped take some of the Whiggish, elitist edge off this ingathering of idealists and practical politicians.
“The admixture of Whig and Democratic politics inside the Republican Party,”writes historian Sean Wilentz in “The Politicians & The Egalitarians,” his recently published book, “created a forthright democratic nationalism, emboldening the federal government, for a time, at once to stimulate economic development and broaden its benefits.”
The Republicans descending on Cleveland would thus have every right to insist that all Americans owe a large debt to the GOP. We are a better, freer and more prosperous nation because their party was born.

What the heck is happening at the Republican National Convention?

 
Play Video1:23
Kayla Epstein explains what the heck is going on at the 2016 RNC. (Peter Stevenson, Dani Johnson/The Washington Post)
Of course it would be historically naive to pretend that time has stood still since 1856. To do so would mean ignoring that the South, which hated the original Republicans, is now the dominant force in the party. It would involve being blind to the way in which our two great political parties have switched sides in how they view the capacity of our federal government to promote a more inclusive prosperity.
It would be equally untrue to history to claim that the nativism of Donald Trump is alien to the party. On the contrary, the anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic Know-Nothings were an important force in early Republicanism, and the party embraced opposition to newcomers at various points in subsequent eras.
Nonetheless, Republicans who are not in the least progressive have reason to mourn what is likely to come to pass this week: the transformation of the Party of Lincoln and Dwight Eisenhower into the Party of Trump. Some are bravely resisting this outcome to the end — and good luck to them. A fair number of leading Republicans have stated flatly that they will never vote for Trump. Their devotion to principle and integrity will be remembered.
But so many others in the party have found ways of rationalizing support for a man who plainly does not take governing, policy or even what he says from one day to the next seriously. It is comical but also embarrassing to watch politicians and consultants fall all over themselves to declare that Trump is “maturing” because every once in a while, he reads partisan talking points off a teleprompter. This is seen as a great advance over the normal Trump, whose free-association rants refer to his opponents as “lyin’,” “crooked,” “sad,” “weak,” “low-energy” and — in the very special case of Sen. Elizabeth Warren — “Pocahontas.”
Liberals have long complained about conservatives “dog whistling” appeals to racial animosity. But hypocrisy really is the tribute vice pays to virtue and so it does mark a decline in simple decency that Trump has shouted out his prejudices openly: falsely claiming that Barack Obama, our first African American president, was not born in the United States; railing against Mexican immigrants as “rapists”; and calling for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.”
And a party that helped build popular support for internationalism after World War II is about to turn to a man whose foreign policy pronouncements defy coherence. He’s not even consistent in supporting noninterventionism or protectionism, both of which are part of a historically legitimate Republican tradition. He substitutes bullying for choosing, bluster for strength.
Many Republicans oppose Trump because they see him as the one candidate most likely to lose to Hillary Clinton. But others fear something worse: a Trump victory. They know that his presidency would represent a grave danger to the republic, a repudiation of the most noble Republican aspirations, and the end of their party as a serious vehicle for governance. The GOP can survive a Trump defeat. It will never get over being permanently defined by his politics of flippant brutalit