Tag Archives: 2016 election

“What went wrong” in 2016? Are they kidding?

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Going where the denial is thickest–in the news media

As a rape survivor myself*, I believe Juanita Broaddrick. I listened to Ms. Broaddrick when she was interviewed on Dateline NBC back in 1999. I listened carefully to everything she said, and–as a lifelong registered Democrat myself–I believe her with all my heart. Her accusation was that Bill Clinton assaulted her, in Arkansas, years earlier, when he was State Attorney General and widely believed to be a rising political star and a local political wunderkind. This was a rape allegation–different in degree from the several sexual harassment allegations also leveled against Clinton, and in 2016 against Donald Trump, and very different from Clinton’s compulsive philandering. Broaddrick accused Clinton of forcible rape, on national television–network, not cable–credibly, with detail, not concealing or denying her own errors or her anger at Clinton. Yet after the Clintons left the White House, Broaddrick’s name was scarcely mentioned in what are often called the ‘elite’ media. As the highly respected late columnist William Blackberry commented, it was mystifying that a credible accusation of such magnitude could be passed over. This while The Washington Post deemed that President Clinton’s affair with an intern warranted a special pull-out section titled “Presidency in Crisis”( temporarily), and Republicans in the House were voting to impeach Clinton.

It is an unanswered question, now, how many people even know who Juanita Broaddrick is. Many younger people who voted in 2016 would not have recognized her name in 2015. The fact that she became part of the public discourse largely through some rightwing outlets and Donald Trump’s presidential campaign is a source of regret for me personally.

The Democrats who should have acknowledged her story dropped the ball. So did the GOP, of course. Neither major party moved constructively to address the issue of rape, in the 1990s or under the George W. Bush administration. President Obama and Vice President Biden did more than any previous White House, addressing sexual assault on college campuses and problems such as the backlog of unprocessed rape kits in the criminal justice system. But much remains to be done.

Our top media outlets did far too little. Millions of words have been written about the 2016 election, with more to come; hundreds of opinion polls were taken, countless models predicted the outcome–wrongly–but so far as I know, no major media outlet polled the public on awareness of Juanita Broaddrick’s accusation against Clinton, or even on her name recognition.

A couple of points here. First, rape is a difficult topic, grim and painful, and difficult things by definition are harder to deal with than easy things. Fewer people will deal well with something difficult than with something easy, including people in the news media. Second,  as mentioned above, few people in large media outlets tried to deal with the Broaddrick story well. This gap is not consistent with a belief in Clinton’s innocence, which would have emphasized accuracy. It sweeps an issue under the rug instead of addressing it.

Third, a media focus on horse-race politics shed too little light on rape as an issue. Thus if Broaddrick’s name was mentioned at all, it was usually through the prism of possible effect on the campaign of Hillary Clinton for president. Those media personalities are now consumed with the question of ‘what went wrong’ with the 2016 election, and what went wrong with their predictions.

Conceding defeat in 2016

Conceding defeat in 2016

Democrats are also addressing the question of ‘what went wrong’, especially since the Clinton campaign is not telling.

And the Clintons are of course being faulted for not telling. On this narrow point, I can help them. This is a question they will not answer fully, because they cannot.

‘What went wrong’ is that the wife of a rapist ran for the White House.

Unthinkable? One would think so. But it wasn’t. There was no one to advise the Clintons, effectively, that Clinton should not run.  A deadly simple timeline resulted. The Clinton team decided to try the run and accumulated all the money not going to the GOP. Meanwhile, Republicans salivating at the prospect of running against ‘Hillary’ lined up, and money or no money, the GOP field was self-destructively large. Trump was the cue ball. Wham. He broke the rack on the table wide apart. And while Trump was breaking things open on the Republican side, the Clintons and their media allies were shutting out every better candidate on the Democratic side–Vice President Biden first, before the primary season even began; then Senator Bernie Sanders in the primaries.

So on one side Trump benefited from the arithmetic of the field, and on the other Clinton, with no essential constituency or platform except narrow self-interest, shut out the field.

Net result: 1) A small cadre of Democratic insiders decided to paste in a nominee before any votes were cast, and 2) they picked the worst possible candidate. The Clintons with their greed problem, their old-time insider status, their treatment-of-women problem, their ties to Wall Street, etc., etc., etc., were the worst possible choice to run against Donald Trump. Not that they knew enough to take Trump seriously, any more than they knew enough to take Sanders seriously. (So much for ‘electable’.) So much for the high-paid expertise with which they theoretically surrounded themselves.

I believe that even the quiet Lincoln Chafee would have done better than Clinton. Joe Biden would have crushed Trump. Bernie Sanders would have crushed Trump. But every political and/or media insider was convinced that Clinton was a shoo-in. And not content with being convinced themselves, they exerted pressures huge to tiny, broad and narrow, to exclude any contrary voice or dissenting opinion.

On a small scale, I saw a little of the action even near my own neighborhood. (A realistic pre-election poll might have taken into account how many millions of Americans witnessed unbecoming behavior by individuals who thought they were going to have the upper hand come Election Day.)

By the weekend before the election, I for one was wondering about the much-touted ‘landslide’. I was not very surprised at the outcome but was disappointed that Russ Feingold lost the Wisconsin senate race. Knowing the Clintons, Feingold’s appeal is probably one of the reasons they neglected Wisconsin. Much of their joint public career for forty years has consisted of playing keep-away, and much of their appeal has been to media insiders who play keep-away themselves. (A realistic post-election investigation might try to examine how the Clintons went about rewarding or enticing favorable media coverage.) No wonder they were so surprised: they shut out the very people they should have been listening to.

These issues connected to the Clintons and to the Democratic Party establishment extend to the news media which confidently predicted a big-time Clinton victory. For now, space and time constraints preclude my going into the media issues. Suffice it to say that we are now hearing self-serving commentators mutually affirming their moral superiority to the unwashed masses. Largely these are the people who went along with Bush’s invasion of Iraq. As with sexual assault, it saddens me to see Iraq swept under the rug. On top of the loss of blood and treasure, in all that (temporary) emphasis on sexual assault during the campaign, no one mentioned that rape follows war.

One last point: owing to the experience I suffered, I felt pummeled throughout the 2016 election cycle–beginning with the smug, complacent assertions of Clinton’s being the inevitable nominee, in 2015 and before. The reaction is difficult to write about, even now. Several media theories about election 2016 have addressed the wrongness of the opinion polls–silent Trump voters, distrust of pollsters, faulty polling methods. I have another theory to add: that I am not the only one in my position. Few Americans would have wanted to share an intensely private perspective on Bill Clinton with pollsters. Even fewer would have wanted to volunteer their private opinion–for example, believing Juanita Broaddrick–with pollsters, without being asked to do so.

And no pollsters asked.

*This was a childhood incident. I was in elementary school at the time, an undersized fifth-grader walking alone through a big park in Houston, to a Brownies meeting. The perpetrator was not someone I knew, and the police never caught him. But at least there was none of that nonsense about not believing me. Everyone knew I could not have made it up, and anyway I was taken to the ER of the local charity hospital–Ben Taub–for an exam.

 

 

“Russia”? Really?

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Democrats and Republicans

Is the national Democratic Party trying to burn into extinction any hope that it is the party of the people? A couple of weeks ago, the word “recount” was on the lips of every mouthpiece. A week or so ago (and before and since), proposals to abolish the Electoral College were bruited. Now the drive is on to investigate Russia.

Margie Burns artwork

Modern Russian art — is a stage set really  nonobjective?

A ‘bipartisan’ alliance of the most comprehensively bought-and-sold members of Congress–led by Mitch “Big Tobacco” McConnell for the Repubs, Chuck “Big Banks” Schumer for Dems–has as of this writing signed on to allegations that Russia backed Julian Assange. Not surprisingly, entrenched Republican Senate hacks have joined ditto Dems in what is being hailed in some media outlets as an instance of bipartisan cooperation. (What these insiders chiefly have in common is that they were up-ended by Trump’s victory. This point is not being emphasized in the news media.)

Basically the claim seems to be that a) Russia hacked into U.S. Democrats’ emails, and that b) it did so to throw the election to Donald Trump. This is not a Q.E.D. It is preposterous. For one thing, the emails came from leaks, not from ‘hacking’. (Most in the McConnell-Schumer cohort would not likely know the difference.)

cropped-DSCN0289-1.jpg

(The photograph is just for fun. Merry Christmas.)

So why would any Democratic office holder, let alone one of any prominence, sign on to this Cold-War-redux saturnalia? Well, a simple motive is that in fact some Dems in office really are threatened by populism, and by elections. Some, not all. But some are genuinely threatened by any possibility of base-broadening. They live in safe congressional districts, or states (Schumer), themselves. Why would they open up access, just because not doing so is a losing proposition? After all, the smaller the pie, the larger their own piece in proportion.

Another motive is the obvious denial. Blaming ‘Russia’ is another way to delay the reckoning about their hand-picked candidate, Secretary Clinton.* That it makes them look like lying imbeciles is a small price to pay. The previous efforts at denial didn’t work–yes, Trump won Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin; no, abolishing the Electoral College and throwing a whole campaign into California wouldn’t help. But there’s always another effort, and another. (Looming behind this one is the next, exhorting faithless Electors to throw away American history and just vote for someone other than President-elect Trump.)

CIA

Meanwhile, someone knocked on the right office door in halls of CIA, and found–predictably–the right leaks for their kind of investigation.

From those wonderful people who brought you the Iraq War

These are national party leaders? They don’t notice that they are leaving it to Trump to point out a fundamental fact? — “These are the same people that said Saddam had weapons of mass destruction.”

Fortunately, some CIA analysts still retain a more sensible perspective.

The news media

There is no point in listing all the media outlets now boosting the ‘Russia’ meme. Most of them also boosted the recounts. Almost all also tout Clinton’s popular vote lead without mentioning the massive vote total in California, thereby creating a vague impression that the national popular vote lead was across-the-board. The impression is false.

Clinton’s vote lead is IN CALIFORNIA

For the record, below is a sprinkling of the countless recent articles that refer to Clinton’s popular vote lead without mentioning that the numbers come disproportionately from California. This very quick list does not include television programs or online news aggregates, which would run the total into thousands. We may have a new conventional wisdom here, hardening like concrete before our very eyes. Or putting it a different way, we may have a spectacular example of a narrative fueled largely by reification, denial, and cross-cultural stereotyping taking on a life of its own inside national media outlets. (See ‘Russia’, above. Even the estimable Eugene Robinson seems to be getting on the bandwagon.)

Insert the words “IN CALIFORNIA” where needed:

New York Times, December 13: “Hillary Clinton’s growing lead over Donald J. Trump is now over 1 million votes, making this the second time a president has been elected without a popular majority since 2000.”

Chicago Tribune, December 12: “With almost all ballots finally counted, Hillary Clinton won the “popular” vote — that is, the total number of votes cast — by more than 2.8 million, about a 2.1 percent edge over Trump’s tally. This is a larger gap than the one in the 2000 election, when Al Gore won about a half-million votes more than George W. Bush did.”

Washington Post, December 12: “In the end, Clinton won the popular vote by more than 2.7 million votes, or 2 percent of all ballots cast.” (A bunch of WaPo writers have done the same; too many to list.)

International Business Times, December 12: “The latest popular vote totals Monday, as reported by nonpartisan election analysis group The Cook Report, show Clinton garnering 65,746,544 votes compared to Trump’s 62,904,682, a difference of more than 2.8 million votes. In percentages, Clinton’s locked down a plurality of 48.2 percent of the vote and Trump 46.2 percent.”

Mother Jones, December 7: “I figure it’s still worth periodically posting a reminder that far more people wanted Hillary Clinton as their president than Donald Trump.”

Time.com, December 1: “Hillary Clinton’s lead in total votes over President-elect Donald Trump has reached 2,526,184 as ballots continue to be tallied.”

What is the issue here, you ask? One issue is the credibility of major periodicals. When a big-city daily newspaper refers to Clinton’s popular vote lead without mentioning the massive four-thousand-vote lead in California, big newspapers lose even more credibility. Every thinking person who followed the election at all sees that item, or that headline about Hillary Clinton’s popular vote lead, and thinks, That’s mainly from California. But the self-styled analysts or pundits do not mention the obvious and valid point. The line from omission to distortion is short.

*I will deal more fully with the Clinton candidacy after the holidays, speaking of denial. It isn’t a very Christmas-like topic.

San Andreas Fault: Those three little words that mean so much

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Would abolishing the Electoral College really be grass-roots progressivism?

The 2016 popular vote and the Electoral College

One result of the 2016 elections is the new call to abolish the Electoral College. This move is  supported by some progressives, but it is a sad divagation for progressivism. To throw away a huge swath of the polity, to cut large areas of thin population density out of the polity–this is grass roots?

Principle aside, supporters of eliminating the Electoral College should beware unintended consequences. In other words, try to figure out what abolishing it would actually accomplish. Predictions are dicey, but so far as can be predicted now, one effect of abolishing the Electors would be to magnify the importance of cities or metropolitan areas beyond even their current importance in elections.

U.S. population growth: cities

U.S. population growth: cities

Full disclosure: As someone who grew up in Houston and lives in the metropolitan Washington, D.C., area, I myself love cities. In America’s tiny towns there would be few jobs for me–or for the host of our many-times-wrong cable commentators. (Hence the ‘flyover’ perspective often seen in media.) But throwing away our ‘country’ in elections is waste on a grand scale. On principle, I support maximizing nationwide participation at the grass roots. Therefore I am against the converse, whether it is represented as rejecting Howard Dean’s ’50-states’ strategy (why was that rejected?), repudiating the Deep South, or in Barry Goldwater’s words, cutting off the Eastern Seaboard and letting it float out to sea. (At least back in Goldwater’s time, nobody called it commentary, let alone political science.) Also, I would have liked to see Texas metro areas get more attention from national Democrats. I got my start in political volunteering in high school, licking envelopes for Sissy Farenthold and Frankie Randolph. If direct election by voters would help, I’m all for it.

But that it would help is not a given. Looking at the last two years and focusing a bit more on people than on ‘demographics’, Texas cities would seem to have held rich potential for Democrats. The dozen largest U.S. cities-metro areas in 2015 included Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston, combined population more than 13.6 million. Add Austin for another two million-plus and the San Antonio region for another 2.3 million-plus. Furthermore, these Texas cities are growing, a trend projected to continue; they will be even more vote-rich targets in 2020 than now. But would Texas cities–still harping on my hometown–actually receive the attention from national campaigns that their population would seem to justify? If so, why don’t they receive it now? According to the U.S. census, the population of Texas is about 27.4 million. The metropolitan areas named add up to more than 18 million, more than half the state total, conveniently findable in areas where people live close to each other. Not that whole Houston neighborhoods would likely be driving across each other’s front yards to hear a candidate, like people getting their cars out of the way of a hurricane, but still–you’d think they would be reachable. Other Texas metro regions are also growing fast, as reported in this article from the estimable Texas Tribune.

Added to the above data is the fact that Democratic candidates ousted Republicans in Houston-Harris County in November 2016. In fact, Democrats defeated all the GOP judges in Harris county, along with a new sheriff whose first moves in office had included demoting all non-white, non-males in his command staff. A gay woman also defeated the female District Attorney. According to an old friend, this was probably because “the sitting DA jailed a rape victim for 30 days because the victim fell apart on the stand at the rapist’s trial and the DA was concerned that the victim, who had mental illness issues, would not return when the trial continued. The victim was held in the county jail, not a mental health facility, for 30 days.”

Such are the times when genuine grass-roots progressivism is needed–and it happened in Harris County, ‘Red State’ or no. So if votes are desired, and direct participation is encouraged, why don’t the Democrats and others upset about the Electoral College spend more time and attention in Texas now? After all, in the Electoral College, Texas has 38 votes.

Electoral College 2016

Electoral College 2016

You see where I’m going with this. If a national Democratic Party doesn’t campaign in Texas now, with the combined prizes of popular vote and 38 Electors, what is the guarantee that it would campaign in Texas for the popular vote alone?

Yes, Austin is a long way from Madison, Wisconsin. But the same question arises in regard to Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. As written in the previous post, one problem with the abolish-the-Electoral-College picture is that it is hard to envision these three ‘Rust Belt’ states getting more attention without the prize of Electoral votes than they got in 2016 with a combined 46 Electoral votes, or 17 percent of the total needed to win the White House. Adding Ohio, Iowa, Indiana, Minnesota, and Illinois constitutes 41 percent. But as written, this entire block of Electoral votes outside Illinois was written off by the Clinton campaign with its ‘electable’ candidate. The ‘Rust Belt’ perspective in the media seems to have been matched in the campaign.

For further perspective, let’s go to another state, even more vote-rich than Texas, with large populations concentrated in metro areas–California. It is essential to note that California is the source of Secretary Clinton’s popular vote lead. This spreadsheet from Cook Political Report puts Clinton’s lead over Trump nationally at more than 2.6 million. Subtract California from the votes for each candidate, however, and Trump leads Clinton by 1.6 million votes nationally. The Clinton lead comes from the yawning gulf of 4.2 votes in California, the state which singly produced more than 13 percent of Clinton’s votes–more than twice as many as New York State, more than the total of all the smaller ‘blue states’ combined, and more than Florida and Texas combined.

(As of this writing: 62,808,243 – 4,463,932 = 58,344,311 Trump. 65,462,476 – 8,719,198 = 56,743,278 Clinton.)

Thus if the Electoral College were abolished, any national Democratic campaign would have to devote time and resources to California for the sake of its popular votes alone. Mentioning Clinton’s popular vote lead is the short argument for abolishing the Electoral College (though without mentioning that most of the lead comes from California). Indeed, one could guess that national Democrats would focus on California more than on any other single part of the country.

So what might the reckoning be? For a start, nothing in this picture screams that voters in smaller states would necessarily get more attention, even on the coasts.

But in terms of campaigning, there is a rawer point. In this picture, if what appeals to California voters also appeals to the nation at large, all is well. But suppose there were some divide? Suppose what pleased California did not equally please the nation at large, and vice versa, or did not equally please Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania? Again, wasn’t that the situation this time?

Moving from past to future, let’s get really creative, or fiendish. Those three little words that mean so much . . .

San Andreas Fault map

San Andreas Fault map

San Andreas Fault

 

Suppose someone were to remind the nation, as the late Molly Ivins did back in the 1990s, that the U.S. economy underwrites real estate development on the San Andreas Fault. Saturn-like real estate prices in California rest economically on factors including population, climate, and high-profile industries. They rest politically on ignoring the risk. They rest geologically on the meeting of two tectonic plates. Suppose someone were to present a rational proposal addressing this geological fact? (Far-fetched, I know, but use your imagination.) What would that do to a national campaign concentrating a third of its resources on California?

Going a little deeper, what would it do to the polity, to ask the rest of the nation to bail out California real estate and developers building full-steam-ahead in California? To ask the rest of the nation to bail out insurers in California?

If the entire nation actually got a vote, how would that vote turn out?

 

Recount may add Trump votes

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Update December 6: Clinton supporters in Florida are petitioning for a recount there. Let’s take another look at the numbers in Florida, from the New York Times and that spreadsheet by Cook Political Report. As with Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin (the piece below), there are no anomalies that suggest hidden votes for Clinton lurking uncounted in Florida.

Trump leads Clinton in Florida by 112,911 votes, as of now–a narrow win, in a big state. But the vote for “Others” is 297,178–more than twice Trump’s margin, for a total of more than 409,000 people who didn’t vote for Clinton, well outside a margin where a recount might reasonably be called for.

More importantly, those “others’ broke heavily for right-leaning candidates rather than for Jill Stein. As of now, the numbers in the NYTimes page are 207,043 for Gary Johnson; 16,475 for the Constitution candidate; 9,108 for Rocky de la Fuente; and 74,684 for Independent–a total of 307,310. Stein got 64,399.

In other words, any hope for a changed outcome for Hillary Clinton in Florida has to upset or reverse not only the margin between the major party candidates, but also a roughly five-to-one margin in favor of conservative-leaning ‘third party’ candidates. The hope is a null set. It is preposterous, and our news media who ignore the third-party tallies are failing in their duty to the public which has to determine when, and whether, a recount is called for.

[previous post below]

For the record, I support recounts. The right to vote is paramount, it should be an equal right, and tabulating votes accurately is more important than tabulating them fast. The public should be able to observe. Vote in private, count in public.

However, a recount will not only not change the 2016 outcome in Michigan, Pennsylvania, or Wisconsin, as the Jill Stein and Hillary Clinton campaigns themselves acknowledge. It is unlikely even that Clinton will net additional votes.

Take a quick look at the numbers for candidates other than Trump or Clinton. Reality check for commentators eager to blame ‘third parties’ for Clinton’s losses: in Michigan, Stein pulled 51,463 votes. But Libertarian Gary Johnson pulled 172,136. That’s a margin of more than three to one for the right-leaning ‘third party’ candidate over the left-leaning ‘third party’ candidate. Yes, the number of votes going to Stein in Michigan is more than the number by which Trump beat Clinton (10,704)–almost five times more. But the number going to Johnson is more than sixteen times greater than the winning margin.

Dr. Jill Stein

Dr. Jill Stein

In Pennsylvania, Stein pulled 49,278 votes. But Johnson pulled 144,536–almost three times as many, and more than twice the margin by which Trump beat Clinton in Pennsylvania (70,779). Trump’s margin as seen exceeded Stein’s votes. Conservative Party candidate Darrell Castle pulled another 21,242.

Gary Johnson, Libertarian candidate

Gary Johnson, Libertarian candidate

In Wisconsin, Stein got 30,980 votes–greater than Trump’s net over Clinton of 27,257. But Johnson got 106,422 votes, and the conservative Constitution Party candidate got 12,179. Adding these votes to those for the major party candidates yields a left-ish total of 1,413,190 and a right-ish total of 1,528,068. That’s a margin of more than 100,000 votes (114,868 to be precise, using the unofficial results given so far)–not the eyelash-thin margin screamed by the headlines.

Quick points: First, nothing in this picture suggests that hidden hordes wanted to vote for Clinton and were thwarted. Second, it’s funny how the name ‘third party’ applies no matter how many parties are listed. This dismissing everyone not locked into a major party should be rethought–especially in Wisconsin with its proud populist tradition. Third, even if the Democrats had won by a razor-thin margin in Michigan or the other two states, the thin margin would be shameful. From a small-d perspective, the Clinton candidacy was an embarrassment.

Fourth, blaming Clinton’s loss on a ‘third party’ is exactly what might be expected of the Clintons and their media allies (Rachel Maddow, for example)–but it is hardly progressive. Nor is it accurate. The fact remains that Jill Stein’s vote was substantially smaller in all three states than the votes for the Libertarian, Constitution, and other right-leaning candidates.

Meanwhile, this from Politico:

PROPUBLICA KNOCKS DOWN VOTER FRAUD CLAIMS — “We had 1,100 people monitoring the vote on Election Day. We saw no evidence the election was ‘rigged’ no matter what Stein or Trump say,” the investigative non-profit outlet said in a series of tweets last night. “Electionland had huge amounts of data. 600 ppl monitored social media. We had @LawyersComm call logs. We had 120,000 people texting us. We had 400 partner reporters across the country, including three of the largest news organizations in the U.S. We had voting experts in the room with us and election sources all over the country. We saw plenty of problems: Long lines, broken voting machines, incorrect poll books, confusion abt voter ID laws. But we saw no reason to doubt the results.” [Here, please imagine ‘handclap’ emojis where the ellipses are.] There … was … no … widespread … voter … fraud.” http://bit.ly/2gyBJ0K

It remains unclear why Dr. Stein is pursuing the recount. She did raise almost $7 million for the effort, which is the way to get Hillary Clinton’s attention. Ironically, Clinton has now joined the recount campaign, although Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin did not receive much love from the Clinton campaign in the form of campaign stops or more importantly policy addresses.

Clinton’s participation seems mainly to reflect her personal problems. As long as she can fan the dying ember of a hope that she is adored, apparently, she will keep the ‘election’ going. Again, no one projects that a recount will change the outcome. However, a delay hypothetically could take two states out of Trump’s win column on December 13 or December 19, whichever is treated as the Electoral College deadline.

Abolish the Electoral College? Why?

One problem with the abolish-the-Electoral-College picture is that it is hard to envision these three ‘Rust Belt’ states getting more attention without the prize of Electoral votes than they got in 2016 with a combined 46 Electoral votes, or 17 percent of the total needed to win the White House. As we already know, these areas are not booming.

Recent U.S. population growth

Recent U.S. population growth

Add Ohio, Iowa, Indiana, Minnesota, and Illinois to Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, and you get 41 percent of the Electoral votes needed to win. First, nothing makes neglecting these states anything but stupid, except for whatever makes it arrogant, self-important, or self-deluded to the point of delirium. Second, to my confreres in the media–if you want to avoid being perceived as elitist, quit using the phrase ‘Rust Belt’. Try losing your job and see how you like it, or watch your entire occupation go under. Wait–that’s already happening . . .

Progressives above all should repudiate this attitude. People who have a hard time finding decent jobs in small towns, open areas, or small cities should not be ridiculed. Nor should they be dismissed from the electorate, which might be the effect of abolishing the Electoral College. Look how well it worked this time.

I despise ridicule directed against any sector of the U.S. (like David Brooks’ comment about ‘gene pools’, for example). A superficial dismissal may rest–superficially–on a careless assumption of moral superiority (racial disparities in the Southeast, Latino poverty in the Southwest, random bigotry in the ‘Rust Belt’; take your pick). So what do the election analysts say about a small city like Binghamton, New York? This was a town where, if you recall, the big employer was IBM. Then IBM left–and now one of the town’s biggest employers is SUNY Binghamton, a nice place but not exactly hiring on the scale of General Motors or U.S. Steel back when. There is much to be said for the locale, from what I hear. You can get a very nice house for $40,000. But where do you find the job to pay for it?

Prince George’s “Democratic” flyer via suspended Sylvania Woods school principal?

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The election flyer that landed in Prince George’s County mailboxes on Friday, October 21, looked typical. Banner top front: “2016 Democratic Sample Ballot for the General Election,” above screamer “Democrats 2016.” Banner bottom front: “VOTE DEMOCRATS 2016” and “DEMOCRATIC GENERAL ELECTION,” with the election date. Heading on the reverse: “2016 Democratic Sample Ballot.” Also, “Take this with you when you vote.”

The flyer endorses four Prince George’s County Circuit Court judges–incumbents Herbert Dawson, Dorothy Michelle Engel and Karen Mason, and nominee Ingrid Turner, who defeated Judge Erik Nyce in the primary. The four judicial candidates are pictured beneath photos of Hillary Clinton, Senate candidate Chris Van Hollen, and House candidates Anthony Brown and Steny Hoyer.

The flyer also endorses five school board candidates. Unlike sample ballots, it includes just one candidate for each position–David Murray in District 1, Patricia Eubanks in District 4, Cheryl Landis in District 5, Alexander Wallace in District 7, and Edward Burroughs III in District 8. Murray is unopposed. Trying to find out more, I emailed the mailer to local school activist Genevieve Demos Kelley. As Kelley noted in her blog, the mailer looks at first sight like any official Democratic Party mailer, but the county’s Central Democratic Committee voted not to endorse in school board races this year.

Committee flyer endorses four Prince George’s County judges and five P. G. school board candidates 

The flyer was actually mailed by the Prince George’s Committee to Elect the Sitting Judges; see below.

Five of the Prince George’s County Board of Education seats, as mentioned, are up for rotation November 8. Two contests include school board members who in August wrote a letter to County Executive Rushern Baker, asking the board’s chair and vice chair to step down after revelations of abuse in county schools. And one of the two has a challenger endorsed on the “2016 Democratic Sample Ballot.” That is to say, Verjeana Jacobs in District 5 not only has an opponent, but her opponent has the implied blessing of ‘Democrats 2016’ from Clinton on down to Van Hollen and Brown and/or Hoyer. (Two other members on the letter, Beverly Anderson and Sonya Williams, are not up for reelection this fall; one is vacating her seat; and one, Edward Burroughs III, received an endorsement.)

The Washington Post endorsed for school board only incumbents and/or non-participants in the letter. Full disclosure: The troubled Judge Sylvania Woods Elementary School is in District 4, my district, and I myself voted for challenger Abel Olivo in early voting yesterday. And speaking of full disclosure–

Fine print

On the reverse, bottom left, smallest print on the page, comes the required-by-law “Authorized by: David S. Coaxum, Treasurer, Prince George’s Committee to Elect the Sitting Judges” and “Committee for reCharge At-Large, Calvin Brown, Treasurer.” The return address (top front left; they don’t make this easy) reads “P.O. Box 2072, Upper Marlboro MD 20773-2072.”

Directories and public records show the postal address as held by Michelle Lynn Fanning, now Michelle Williams, of Gambrills, Maryland, in the Bowie area. Principal Michelle Williams is suspended from her position at the head of Judge Sylvania Woods Elementary School, near Bowie. The telephone number listed for the address is out of service, and Principal Williams has not replied to an emailed query. The main office at Judge Sylvania Woods Elementary did not return a call.

As has been widely reported, a volunteer aide at Sylvania Woods produced child pornography at the facility, using students for his videos.  Additional reports are linked here and here. Law firm Joseph Greenwald Laake has filed a lawsuit on behalf of parents of some Sylvania Woods students. All of this might reasonably raise a question as to why a suspended principal is engaged in politicking. Another question is why it is allowable for the principal to engage in behind-the-scenes politicking for either judges or school board candidates. In the near future, both the courts and the school board in Prince George’s County may have to weigh in on issues arising at Sylvania Woods Elementary, among other issues.

Children at Sylvania Woods Elementary School

Children at Sylvania Woods Elementary School

The Committee to Elect the Sitting Judges sent out a similar mailer for a fundraiser back in February. Same contact information. Somewhat different candidates, since one went down to defeat. An email to Judge Erik Nyce has not been returned.

The same flyer was being handed out at early voting locations yesterday. I spoke briefly with Ms. Engels’ husband, who happened to be standing near a box of the mailers.

Along with Coaxum, the Maryland state Board of Elections campaign finance website lists as chair of the committee Elizabeth Marie Hewlett of Bowie. No one answered the phone at the number provided. Along with chairing the Committee to Elect the Sitting Judges, Hewlett is also chair of the M-NCPP Prince George’s County Planning Board. Questions placed by telephone with an assistant to Ms. Hewlett have not been returned.

This committee looks interesting. The Maryland campaign finance database makes information on contributions fairly accessible. The Prince George’s Committee to Elect the Sitting Judges has received many contributions, loans or transfers since its founding. Many are small donations; many donations of varying amounts into the thousands have come from attorneys, law firms, lobbyists, judges’ relatives and others in the legal community.

In February 2016, the Joseph Greenwald Laake firm–which is representing stakeholders at Sylvania Woods Elementary in the lawsuit–donated $4,000.00 to the committee. A telephone call and an email to Joseph Greenwald Laake have not been returned. Judge Engel’s husband, Michael C. Engel, donated $4,000 on March 8, 2016. The similar Montgomery County Committee to Retain the Sitting Judges of Montgomery Co MD PAC also transferred $4,000 in March 2016. Prominent attorneys and key lawyer-General Assembly members like Joseph Bonsib, Gerard Evans, Mike Miller and Joseph Vallario also made four-figure donations.

Emails to County Executive Rushern Baker, Principal Williams, Coaxum and Brown have not been returned. Calls to the offices of Coaxum and Brown have not been returned. This seems to be a quiet and modest group of people.

The mailer also includes a small-print disclaimer that “This message has not been authorized or approved by any other candidate or committee.”

Secretary Clinton all smiles at newest Trump tape; will media mention Juanita Broaddrick?

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For that matter, will they mention the invasion of Iraq?

The 2016 primary elections in Maryland, by the time we actually got sort of a chance to vote, were a mixed bag. Full disclosure–I myself voted (early voting) for Bernie Sanders and Sanders delegates, a Democratic senate candidate who won, a House candidate who didn’t, and some local judgeship challengers as well as incumbents. Not everybody made it. We had an overflow of good candidates in Maryland’s 4th district. Maryland’s 8th had a similar problem.

We did not have an overflow of good candidates in the presidential race. I supported Sanders heartily, but the fact remains that the Clinton team worked for years behind the scenes to shut out better candidates including Vice President Joseph Biden. Indications are that Clintonistas have spent more time playing keep-away, over almost eight years, than on producing public benefit. Thus the Clinton gravy train continues, and its big-money appeal looks to be the Clintons’ pattern of shafting labor. Note the boost for “open trade and open borders” in Secretary Clinton’s Wall Street-friendly and Wall Street-compensated speeches, as in recently hacked emails. Cheap labor is the Clinton track record.

Will they mention U.S. labor?

The behind-the-scenes domination and the lack of open participation were not small-d democratic. I was and am disappointed in Clinton ‘super-delegates’, who stacked the deck before a single vote was cast. Ditto media commentators who often referred to Clinton’s ‘delegate total’ without clarifying that it was padded by super-delegates. Predictably, an undemocratic process produced an undemocratic candidate. But given the stakes, it is frightening that a bunch of Democratic insiders, dominated by mega-donors, joined beforehand to boost any one candidate. Going forward, we need to make the nominating process more democratic. It would help if we had more clarity about what happened in the run-up to this ‘election’–but we don’t seem to have many news reporters available, to tell the public about it. (What is the good of all that access to individuals of prominence, if you burn the access any time you actually report something?) I am still curious to know whether the Clinton inner circle green-lighted Mitch McConnell’s opposition to President Obama from day one.

Senator McConnell

Senator McConnell

Envy and jealousy do a lot of harm when people are willing to act on them, especially insiders. I still think that President Obama has not gotten enough credit. I wish Mrs. Clinton had strongly supported and defended him, wish she were the Sanders or the Elizabeth Warren she sometimes channeled in the campaign, wish she would actually ‘fight for us’, wish she were solid on economic justice. But that’s not who she is. One of the recent Clinton flaps is Bill Clinton’s trashing Obamacare. We can only hope it’s not a glimpse of the future, under another President Clinton–a Wall Street agenda come to life–of undoing everything the Obama White House has accomplished.

It may be noted that the Democratic Party ‘nominated’ someone who openly speculated about assassination, when Barack Obama was her opponent in 2008. She does not handle being behind in a campaign well. She does not handle being ahead well, either. Right now, Clinton is openly jubilant about Trump’s difficulties with GOP biggies following the leak of his repugnant tape-recorded remarks. But then, Clinton’s most consistent appeal is to big-time Republicans, whom she has been working hard to attract.

Neither major party has given us much good regarding the major crime of sexual assault. The GOP does not seem to have much problem with the might-makes-right outlook. The Democratic Party should be better, and often is, but anyone focused on Election Day 2016 is not going to bring  up rape–given Hillary Clinton’s decades-long joint public career with her husband.

For the record: I listened very carefully to Juanita Broaddrick on national television in 1999, and I believe her. It would be wrong not to say so. Sexual assault is the least reported, the least prosecuted, and the least convicted of all the major crimes. (The Obama administration has begun moving on the issue of sexual assault, including Vice President Biden’s public statements; the Clintons do not mention it.) But when I raised questions on social media, immediate responses from Clinton supporters were the usual troll litany–calling me “bitch” (naturally), “scumbag,” and “psychotic”–none of which I am–ridicule, shaming over my alleged lowly status or lack thereof’, advice to quit, counterfactual claims about Bill Clinton, and dismissing the issue because ‘he was not convicted’.

Not that I am crushed. Unlike the Bush family, I actually am from Texas, and doing that stuff to me is like the old joke about Have you got the wrong vampire. For what it’s worth, I also have a doctorate in Renaissance literature, and in an invective contest, I wouldn’t necessarily lose. But I prefer that we educate the public better about sexual assault. These bullies, after all, may be summoned for jury duty some day.

Back to the present

We can probably look forward to a new release of some sort, weekly, about both Trump and Clinton, over the next few weeks.

In the most recent release about Trump, some vulgar language came out on tape–rather than behind closed doors or on the Internet, where it usually appears. If you listen to the tape recording, you will also hear the jollification supported by Billy Bush, cousin to our 43rd president, nephew to our 41st president, successful entertainment host on NBC, which for years was in the tank for the Bushes. (Lauren Bush has recently appeared evidently supporting Hillary Clinton.) No question, Trump’s language was garishly offensive. (No wonder Hillary Clinton is all smiles nowadays. It is rare for the Clintons to have even the faintest,most tenuous claim to the moral high ground on any topic, let alone that of sexualized grossness.) Billy Bush sounds pretty appreciative on the tape.

Trump’s language was rich-guy locker-room talk. It was crude machismo, partly boastful and partly not. It may even have been Clintonesque. But I am not going to pretend that I was shocked by it. I wish I were. In any case, Joe Biden is wrong to call it “sexual assault.” There are some words that should not be used as metaphors–rape or sexual assault, lynching, mob, riot. They should characterize only the deeds themselves, not be trivialized to characterize discourse, however offensive.

If commentators and candidates now shocked, shocked about Trump feel resistant to my statement, then I invite them to try a single test. Here it is:

When was the last time you, major candidates or media commentators, et al., figuratively called someone a ‘child molester’? How about you, ladies of the WaPo? When was the last time you called someone a ‘child molester’ metaphorically?

No? So that means you know that there are some terms that should not be used metaphorically.

Makes me wonder why you don’t know that about rape. Has sexual assault been trivialized so successfully that it now ranks as mere scurrility?

 

 

 

Toxic atmosphere 2016

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Re the 2016 presidential election

My immediate political concern is the current atmosphere. Poisonous rhetoric swirls around both major-party candidates like a toxic dust cloud. It comes from both of them and goes at both of them. It comes from their allies and supporters, both sides, and is directed against their allies and supporters, both sides.

My concern is that there is a particular danger this year. If the two major-party nominees are a ‘charisma’ candidate (Donald Trump) and a ‘bureaucratic’ candidate (Hillary Clinton), as the terms are used in political science, then–not to be morbid–the lethal danger is to the charisma candidate.

Defining terms here: calling a nominee the charisma candidate is not the same as calling a private person charismatic. The charismatic, the bureaucratic, and the feudal/traditional were Max Weber’s classification of modes of authority. This tripartite classification was drawn upon in 1969 by Lewis Chester, Godfrey Hodgson and Bruce Page, in the best book on U.S. politics that I have read–American Melodrama, about the 1968 election.

An American Melodrama: The Presidential Campaign of 1968

An American Melodrama: The Presidential Campaign of 1968

Of course, the poison is also aimed at and swirls around the major ‘third-party’ candidates–Gary Johnson and Jill Stein. At a time when death threats are an Internet commonplace in conversation threads, it would be almost odd and distinctive if a third-party candidate were not perceived as a threat and treated as such–i.e. with threats–in the dynamic that psychologists call projection.

I have seen and heard the trend on a macro level–national politics, national television, large daily newspapers–and at a micro level–un-neighborly spats and back-biting, sometimes motivated by envy, generally not checked by self-awareness, never from individuals one would characterize as brilliant.

From whatever combination of historical causes, there is a really lethal poison cocktail being passed around this year. (The historical causes will be a later topic.) Any time a sizable group of individuals feels that it has both a) the moral high ground and b) the upper hand, things are destined to get bad. And by ‘bad’, I mean fascistic. This one is hard to guard against, too: after all, most of us would prefer to have the moral high ground. And most people must have moments at least when they would like to have the upper hand, although that one might be harder to confess.

The cocktail of high ground and upper hand gets deadlier when distilled in our concentrated-in-a-few-hands news media.

It doesn’t sit well with me that raving about Trump as a ‘Nazi’ or a ‘fascist’ often comes from the very same people who helped get George W. Bush into the White House. They went along with the invasion of Iraq. They contributed to changing the Republican Party from anti-slavery in the 19th century to pro-segregation, pro-racial-disparities death penalty, pro-redlining, pro-economic inequality, etc., etc., in the 20th century.

Amnesia, much?

Not that I’m not used to media hysteria. It happens every time a presidential candidate comes along who is not controlled by the insider-media types. Secretary Clinton is eminently controllable. Thus she has a lock on The Boys on the Bus, including female boys on the bus. The reverse has been true of Mr. Trump.

Thus any fair criticisms of Trump’s candidacy end up part of an amalgam of hysteria that we have seen before–about candidates not remotely like Trump. The common denominator is that any time a candidate comes along who is not controlled by a few major media outlets, he/she is hysterically represented as a threat. Does anyone remember what the insider media said about Jesse Jackson, even while he was the candidate who received by far the most death threats?* Remember how they treated Ross Perot with blatant cross-cultural stereotyping? If your hatred of either Jackson or Perot is still so engrained that you can stomach any conjecture against them, however false, what is your excuse about Howard Dean?

Remember what the insider media did to Howard Dean, who was showing strong potential to take on the incumbent President George W. Bush? They represented him falsely as having an affair with a female staffer, for one thing. One of the most talented, capable, professional political candidates to come along in years–a successful physician and a candidate who had been elected repeatedly to office in Vermont–and CNN among other outlets ran a continuous loop of Dean supposedly screaming at a rally, with the crowd noise suppressed in the video so that he seemed to be making noise all by himself. Ridicule rampant. Stupidity, envy, and gratuitous ill-will ditto. To make matters worse, most of the media personalities who pulled no punches ridiculing a candidate with character and intellect pulled all their punches when it came to evaluating Dubya. If they’re getting anything right about Trump now, it’s too bad they cried wolf so often.

Some of them probably still tell Jimmy Carter jokes. Oh, yes–a reminder, in case you didn’t know. Some old-fashioned bigot ‘jokes’ previously aimed at African-Americans were converted, in the Carter years, into anti-Carter jokes. I decline to provide an example.

In the immediate future, there is not only an election at hand. Before that, and after, there is also a crucial need to rein in the blood lust. All hands. The Clintonistas may represent all the negative rhetoric as coming from one direction. Some Clinton supporters may honestly believe that it is. If so, they are mistaken.

A word to the wise is sufficient.

 

*It was Dan Rather, then on CBS News, who reported that Jackson received more death threats than the other candidates combined. Probably one more reason the suits couldn’t wait to fire him. Another badge of courage for Rather, in my opinion.

WaPo report: razor-thin Clinton “edge” even in 50-state hand-picked poll

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WaPo headline reverses the story

My morning paper on September 7 had an unusual feature. The 9-16ths-inch headline on The Washington Post’s front page trumpeted, “Clinton has edge in 50-state poll.” Inside, a special pull-out section on “CAMPAIGN 2016” seemed to expand the story.

Actually, it contradicted the headline.

Let’s start with the easy part–pictures.

WaPo front page September 7, 2016

WaPo front page September 7, 2016

This parti-colored map ran above the fold, spanning eight inches. Take a look at the colors. As shown, the paper designated ten states as “tossups,” purple on the map–Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Mississippi, North Carolina, Ohio, Texas and Wisconsin. —Georgia? Mississippi? Texas? “Tossups”?

WaPo also designated Alaska and South Carolina reddishly as “Leans GOP.”

The special pull-out had another graphic divided by colors–blue and blueish, red and reddish, purple–with poll numbers. (Page 21) Blue/-ish states totaled 244 electoral votes, red/-ish states totaled 126 electoral votes, of 270 needed to win.

Setting blue and red aside for the moment, that leaves 168 electoral votes in the purple ‘tossup’ column. Here’s where arithmetic, a closer look, and some effort at exactitude might come in handy.

Accuracy, accuracy, and accuracy

According to the Post’s own poll, among the ‘tossup’ states, Trump led in Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, and Ohio–a total 55 electoral votes. Clinton led in the other six. (Those perennial tossups Arizona and Texas add up to another 49 electoral votes, yielding a total 230 for Trump without going into battleground states, but let’s not get ahead of the story.)

If something about this seems off-kilter, turn to page 24. That’s where readers finally get the breakdown on WaPo’s Survey Monkey numbers. (Yes, they used Survey Monkey–polling only people they had selected. See page 22.)

These were the stats for (selected) “four-way races,” i.e. twelve states with Libertarian Gary Johnson and Green Jill Stein included in the poll. In Ohio, rated a ‘tossup’ on WaPo’s front page, Clinton polled at 37 percent to Trump’s 40 percent. In North Carolina, also rated ‘tossup’ as mentioned, Clinton polled 40 percent to Trump’s 41 percent. In Texas, both candidates polled at 40 percent; in Colorado, both candidates polled at 37 percent (unlike Clinton’s ‘narrow leads’ viz the front pager). In tossup Arizona, Clinton polled at 37 percent, Trump at 39 percent. In Georgia, Clinton 39 percent, Trump 40 percent.

These numbers did not appear on the front page of the paper or the front page of the Campaign 2016 pull-out.

Further, Secretary Clinton polled at 40 percent or less not only in states where that might be expected–Texas, Georgia–but in states touted as winnable for her–Colorado, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, Wisconsin. She ran barely better than 40 percent in Florida and Pennsylvania. She polled barely at 50 percent, if that, in Rhode Island. She polled at under 50 percent in New Hampshire, Minnesota, and Maine. In fact, about the only place in the union seemingly favorable for Clinton, outside of bedrock-blue states like Hawaii and Maryland, is Virginia.

This falls short of an Electoral College landslide. It must have been a crushing disappointment to the WaPo personnel who created that hand-picked sample. The entire thrust of the story is how narrow a needle Mr. Trump has to thread, to get to 270. But by the same token–i.e. WaPo numbers–Clinton’s reported “edge” teeters on the brink–a loss of two or three states.

There are other problems with this kind of reporting. Under the sub-heading “Utah is most uncertain state,” the reader finds–that Utah is still solidly GOP, even with a locally popular Libertarian on the ballot siphoning away red votes. Maybe the problem is with the headings.

But the bigger problem is with the nominee. The short story is that Democratic Party insiders and their GOP/Wall Street/insider-media allies selected the worst possible candidate for Democrats, in an anti-democratic process that was worse yet. She’s not a nominee in the sense of having been elected as such by voters. She is a pre-selected candidate who succeeded in being designated as official nominee.

The whole thing was a betrayal. In Barack Obama, the Democrats selected a president who was elected by both the popular and the electoral vote, in the most genuine election in years, probably the first relatively open election since Jimmy Carter won in 1976. Eight years later, the party and the nation should be moving forward, to build on the foundation created by President Obama. Instead, it took a giant slide backward–about 90 percent from jealous/envious passive-aggressive inertia, so far as I can tell.

In a bleak prospect, Clinton might be elected to the White House, with a GOP Congress elected to rein her in–thus giving us a lousy president and a lousy congress. If past patterns hold, that would pave the way for Clinton to make deals–benefiting the GOP, undercutting Dems and the public, with a big cut off the top for herself. And that in turn would set up a worse, and winning, GOP nominee next time.

By the way, remember Senator Mitch McConnell’s open vow, at the beginning of the Obama administration, to oppose President Obama at every opportunity? It will be interesting to find out whether the Clinton team green-lighted McConnell, and who else did.

Update 9/29/16

As of today, Real Clear Politics has Trump up nationally by 4 points in one poll, Clinton up by 1 point in another. A miserable showing for Democrats.

*Full disclosure–as Maryland public records would show, I am a registered Democrat.

 

Double threat tonight: The presidential debate, and the media coverage afterward

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Live-blogging the September 26 presidential debate

Warm-up thoughts, jotted down to start with

–Resisted temptation to use quotation marks around debate and coverage, in title above

–Bruising still not healed from media handling of that first Democratic primary debate on September 13, 2015. Lemmingword of the day: “commanding.”

–Guess we all got our marching orders. Anyone who wanted to curry favor have credibility with DC insiders (Chris Matthews’ term, not mine; again stoutly resisting temptation to use quotation marks) had to kiss the collective ink-stained ring and claim that Secretary Clinton won. And more; that she was commanding.

–Watching the debate in the privacy of home, I thought that Bernie Sanders won the discussion. Clinton and O’Malley seemed to be locked in a tight head-to-head race for the bottom, unless super-saturated self-promotion is your cup of tea. Sanders, Lincoln Chafee, and Jim Webb all turned in stronger performances. Perhaps most media personnel do not have the luxury of private reflection. (Analogous to fundamental protection for election integrity: vote in private, count in public.) (Not the other way around.)

–For the record, I wrote about Mr. Trump back in August 2015. Compared him metaphorically to the breaker ball, in 8-ball (playing pool). (Television commentators using same line of thought called him a wrecking ball.) Then wrote about him further; also back in 2012 when he was pushing the birther line.

–Also for the record, I don’t actually think that all commentators dominating U.S. political press coverage are stupid. It’s just that their discourse is consistently hard to differentiate from stupidity. (That’s what hysteria will do for you. More on which later.) In the interest of full disclosure–my own big mistake was to prognosticate, in February, that the GOP candidate with the best chance to win was Jeb Bush. Shortly afterward, he dropped out. Rightly so: he had spent all his money.

–On that. Not to sound stubborn, but how dumb do you have to be, to spend $100M+ UP FRONT, in a campaign where your only hope of winning is by attrition? What delirium told Bush that his best shot was to try to dominate early, in a primary where all the attention was going to Donald Trump, exc when Ted Cruz or some other GOPer said something morally repugnant enough to attract media attention? (Thought for the day: Ted Cruz is the new Strom Thurmond.) Many, many political headlines gave Jeb Bush full credit for raising $110 million before the campaign ever started, amplifying the threat to the max. What possessed him not to save that formidable trove for later, after most other candidates had dropped out, when it might have enabled him to harvest the other candidates’ supporters and donors? For all the attention the money got him in the early months, he could have gone with social media blurbed by a couple of relatives.

Senator Cruz

Senator Cruz

–As the historical reference to Thurmond might suggest, it’s too bad a sense of shame, or conscience, didn’t curb the appetite for fatuous predictions. Media-insider amnesia has now become epidemic. Do any of the more self-satisfied types even remember that the co-founders of the Project for the New American Century were Dick Cheney and Jeb Bush? That the Vulcans in the GWBush administration were self-evidently determined from the beginning to invade Iraq? That they steered the U.S.A. into invading another country, on bogus claims of WMDs, costing blood and treasure? And that they did so with the aid of media inattention and sometimes media collusion? (Anyone remember Judith Miller, formerly of the NYTimes?)

More later. Probably tonight. Sad to say.

What are “pay to play letters”? –

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Those Democratic National Committee emails —

Other DNC emails released by Wikileaks in Friday’s first batch contain splashier exchanges of personalities and worse, including the plot to paint Bernie Sanders as an atheist.

But the email thread I want to know more about is the one about “pay to play letters.” Here is the full text of the first email in the exchange, sent May 18, 2016:

From: Lopez, Jacquelyn K. (Perkins Coie) [mailto:JacquelynLopez@perkinscoie.com] Sent: Wednesday, May 18, 2016 3:35 PM To: Alan Reed; Comer, Scott; Brad Marshall Subject: SEC letters and donations Hi all, Can we set up a time for a very brief call to go over our process for handling donations from donors who have given us pay to play letters? Want to make sure we have a robust process in place to make sure that donations that come in from those donors, in any form, get put into the operating account. Let me know when would be a good time for you all. Thanks, Jackie Jacquelyn Lopez | Perkins Coie LLP ASSOCIATE* 700 Thirteenth Street, N.W. Suite 600 Washington, DC 20005-3960 D. +1.202.654.6371 F. +1.202.654.9949 E. JacquelynLopez@perkinscoie.com *Admitted in State of Florida; Admission to DC Bar pending.

First question: what are “pay to play letters”?

Questions about this phrase sent to Perkins Coie, the Securities and Exchange Commission, Ms. Lopez, and another attorney at Perkins Coie who also worked for the DNC as referenced in the emails, have not been answered.

[UPDATE 7/26/2016:]
Some SEC answers about the “Pay to Play Rule” are linked here. Presumably the “Pay to play letters” will turn out to be related to this rule.

The SEC’s regrettably named “Pay to Play Rule” is (Rule 206(4)-5). 202 pages linked here. Summary by law firm Covington Burling linked here. To note:

In general, “pay-to-play” refers to various arrangements by which investment advisers may seek to influence the award of advisory business by making or soliciting political contributions to the government officials charged with awarding such business.

It would be nice to know which Clinton donors fall into this category.

So, only a few clues for the moment:

1. The question pertains to the SEC; email subject line is “SEC letters and donations”
2. Donors have sent these letters in the past
3. — and apparently routinely
4. since (a) the email as written seems to expect that everyone will know what is meant, and (b) none of the recipients email back saying, ‘What are [you talking about]?’

The focus of the replies is agreeing on a time when everyone can be on the call. (For extra clarity, the final email in the exchange is pasted in below.)

More later.

From:JacquelynLopez@perkinscoie.com To: MARSHALL@dnc.org, ReedA@dnc.org, ComerS@dnc.org Date: 2016-05-19 16:58 Subject: RE: SEC letters and donations

Great, that time works for me as well. Scott, good on your end? Jacquelyn Lopez | Perkins Coie LLP ASSOCIATE* 700 Thirteenth Street, N.W. Suite 600 Washington, DC 20005-3960 D. +1.202.654.6371 F. +1.202.654.9949 E. JacquelynLopez@perkinscoie.com *Admitted in State of Florida; Admission to DC Bar pending. From: Brad Marshall [mailto:MARSHALL@dnc.org] Sent: Thursday, May 19, 2016 2:59 PM To: Alan Reed; Lopez, Jacquelyn K. (Perkins Coie); Comer, Scott Subject: RE: SEC letters and donations same From: Alan Reed Sent: Thursday, May 19, 2016 2:55 PM To: Jacquelyn Lopez; Comer, Scott; Brad Marshall Subject: RE: SEC letters and donations We’ve been doing the Operating Acct process set up by Graham for a while now but happy to do a call. Perhaps Tuesday around 4 pm? From: Lopez, Jacquelyn K. (Perkins Coie) [mailto:JacquelynLopez@perkinscoie.com] Sent: Wednesday, May 18, 2016 3:35 PM To: Alan Reed; Comer, Scott; Brad Marshall Subject: SEC letters and donations Hi all, Can we set up a time for a very brief call to go over our process for handling donations from donors who have given us pay to play letters? Want to make sure we have a robust process in place to make sure that donations that come in from those donors, in any form, get put into the operating account. Let me know when would be a good time for you all. Thanks, Jackie Jacquelyn Lopez | Perkins Coie LLP ASSOCIATE* 700 Thirteenth Street, N.W. Suite 600 Washington, DC 20005-3960 D. +1.202.654.6371 F. +1.202.654.9949 E. JacquelynLopez@perkinscoie.com *Admitted in State of Florida; Admission to DC Bar pending. ________________________________ NOTICE: This communication may contain privileged or other confidential information. If you have received it in error, please advise the sender by reply email and immediately delete the message and any attachments without copying or disclosing the contents. Thank you. ________________________________ NOTICE: This communication may contain privileged or other confidential information. If you have received it in error, please advise the sender by reply email and immediately delete the message and any attachments without copying or disclosing the contents. Thank you.