I’m inadvertently live blogging the Ryan/Trump meeting. As I post this, the two of them are meeting. The air crackles with excitement. Work grinds to a halt across the nation as people tune into cable news. It’s hard to get a waiter in a restaurant to refill your coffee.

There are lots of things at stake in this, of course. For Trump, is this the first occasion in the campaign season where he actually has to act like a professional politician and statesman? Act like a grown up?  Shed the clown suit?

Ryan will address the press after the meeting and take questions.  Will Trump? How will Trump look sharing the stage with Ryan after the meeting? Can Trump sustain an extended conversation through the media with Ryan? Can he discuss policy differences?

If Ryan is playing a long (six-month) game to force Trump to prove he has the temperament to be president, will Trump be up to it?

Trump has built his entire campaign through Twitter and big rallies. That’s it. No town halls. No round table meetings with voters (can you imagine? Trump in listening mode? Feeling your pain?)  Like watching video of Vladimir Putin being nice to little kids.

The tweets and rallies are exactly Trump’s biggest weakness in trying to look presidential.

Nothing about 140 character messages from your bath tub tends toward reasonableness and statesmanship.

Nothing about large rallies tends itself to moderation and thoughtful discussion.

The question, then, is will this bring Trump down?  Or does he just look at the Weimar Republicans and say, “well, these meetings have been very useful, but the people are on my side, Lyin’ Ryan?”

Trump’s also meeting today with Mitch McConnell and the white men who make up the Republican senate leadership.  They’ll all support him.  They might even “endorse” him. The question is, will they ever be seen again in the same room together between now and November?

Bet nobody’s done that one before, huh?

Speaker of the House Paul Ryan meets Trump today after more than a week refusing to endorse the inevitable nominee, offering to step out of his convention role (scaring the bejesus out of Trump, I’d wager), and playing a wait and see game.

In an earlier question from Mr Jones about whether Ryan was looking weak, muddle-headed, etc.  I hastily said no way it’s smart and was almost admiring of Ryan.  But then the NY Times runs a piece featuring Republicans who want Ryan to just endorse him already and say he’s walking a tightrope between party unity and his personal choices, and The Economist runs the cartoon above. Suddenly I’m jittery and my mind is wobbling between poles.

This is a symptom of the ‘balanced’ coverage of the press in which every article of every publication feels compelled to put in a counter-quote, or run a story that runs counter or shows a dissenting viewpoint.  (The NY Times piece quotes only one Senator as being critical of Ryan’s wait and see stance.)

So, I think Ryan is being remarkably smart on behalf of the party and himself.

• He’s reading Trump not as a the future of the party, but as the winner against a crowded, muddled, weak field of candidates in a transitional phase of the party.
• He is the only real leader in the party with any kind of clout
• If he believes, as do most others, that the White House is going to HRC, then he needs to protect the only remaining assets the Party has:  Congressional majorities.
• Trump actually needs Republican help, and Ryan is the only player who hasn’t walked away from him, so Ryan might be able to negotiate something.
• Ryan may be the only Republican who Trump can’t bully or mock as a loser.  Ryan’s got none of the weaknesses of Cruz or Rubio, he been enlisted to help the party (Romney ticket, House, almost candidate) and while he may not have the entertainment power of Trump Ryan is plenty savvy.

Ryan loses very little by not endorsing Trump and focusing his energy on the House majority.  There are too many Republicans withholding support for Ryan to be blamed for a loss in November.  It’s a principled stand to say Trump was sinking the party and Ryan chose to keep the ship afloat while Trump went down.  And Ryan gets loads of time in the national press talking about his brand of conservatism and being the guy everyone wishes was running instead – setting up for 2020.

 

A frustrating part of political analysis in the media and amongst people following the election is the facile way in which we characterize voters based on their votes.  We see this with Trump all the time.  I’ll just mention the Rob Reiner interview which got a lot of shares with “Word”, “Truth”, “Nailedit” affirming that yes Trump voters are racist xenophobes, SMH, what’s the matter with these people.

The process is pretty simple:  look at what the candidate says; gather what you think are the salient features of the talk track; turn those facts into the narrative of the candidate; and then assume that every vote for the person is an endorsement of that narrative.   Trump makes bigoted, misogynist, xenophobic, anti-intellectual statements, therefore people who vote for him are … (It might be useful for Democrats who are baffled at people’s votes to put together a counter-narrative of HRC, picking 5 top facts that someone else  might pick for their narrative and see if that humanizes the vote.)

So, while walking the dog, I tried to lay out the dimensions that go into a vote.  I wonder if it helps us see the millions of people who vote for Trump as something other than rabid bigots; people who vote for Sanders as more than bros or sexists who can’t bear to vote for HRC; and Woman Card carrying HRC supporters as being more concerned about the working class or working poor than NAFTA, the welfare reform bill, or war votes might indicate.

1. Values – Does this person convey values that resonate with what I want?  For me, personally, I resonate with people who view government as having a positive role to play in people’s lives, promote economic opportunity, and treat basic economic outcomes as a right.  If a person scans as sharing those values, they are in my consideration set.  For conservatives, it might be smaller government, skepticism of publicly financed anything, a sense that liberals are elitists who only want to be smarter than me.  For many people, not meeting this test means that the candidate won’t get a vote – period, even if it means not voting (gasp!).
2. Character – this is pretty obvious, but think about integrity.  Sanders may not be the crazy uncle, he may be the guy who’s too old and set in his ways to find it worthwhile to screw anybody.  Trump could scan as a guy who knows what he is, isn’t pretending to be some things he’s not.  Most important, he hasn’t done enough public service to have a record of screwing people.  Again, this might be enough to exclude a candidate from consideration – period, even if it means not voting (gasp!).
3. Other people’s endorsements – also pretty straightforward.  Krugman is the person on whom many of my liberal friends rely on to determine that Sanders is an old-fashioned blunt instrument crank and HRC is the ingenious policy wonk.  Unions used to play a role in helping to sort out what’s in your best interest, and various scorecards from groups such as the NRA, NARAL, NRDC, ADA, Family Research Council, etc. help people decide votes.  If you have an issue that you consider to be the most important, than that rating/endorsement may be all you need to know.
4. Policies – I’ve mentioned elsewhere that I don’t know what’s in the Iran deal, but I support it.  I trust the values and approach of the President, think the US needs an ally other than Saudi Arabia, and I’m a sucker for the transformative political, economic, and cultural power of an emerging  middle class in a developing/evolving country.  But, honestly, I have no fucking idea.  I also know that we should have done the stimulus package in 2008 at the levels Krugman says we should have done them because … that math he did.  A lot of policy conversation among the cognoscenti is parlor talk and based a lot more on proxy thinking and faith in 1 through 3 above.  For many people who come home from work too exhausted to play with their kids, looking at position papers, checking out a Vox analysis, or comparing healthcare plans isn’t going to happen.  This is part of the reason they donate to political parties and participate in intermediating organizations.  The previous three dimensions will have to do – sorry if that makes me stupid, and causes me to vote in ways that appear to you to be not in my self interest, but my feet are killing me and I want to see my kid’s soccer game.
5. Competition – “Who is the best of the lot?  I mean, I’ll never vote for the other Party, so who bugs me the least?”
6. Ability to beat the opponent – no explanation needed.

This list is largely in order with the exception of #6, which might be #1 in certain circles and certain contexts.  But different voters will have different matrices and calculuseseseses (hmmm) at different times in their lives.  Some of the pieces above – values, character, beating the opponent – may be go/no-goes.  Policy, for people who are concerned about one issue above all others, might be the deciding factor for people who rely on the party to sort out the rest.

I think there’s more here, but I’m at 719 words when I typed 719, so I’ll stop at 728.

 

Can’t resist going once more into the Living Room Campaign.  This time to the Ford / Carter campaign in 1976. What’s most interesting is that you can see Ford struggling to bring together key elements of what would become the Reagan coalition.  Carter was clearly not the type of candidate they expected to be running against. He wasn’t very liberal. He was from the deep south, and he made his evangelical Baptist faith a cornerstone of his campaign.

So, the Ford campaign seized on Carter’s famous interview with Playboy in which he said that he had experienced lust in his heart.  And produced this strange ad featuring A. S Criswell, who was head of the Southern Baptists.

http://www.livingroomcandidate.org/commercials/1976/criswell

The 1976 race was only four years after Nixon had unveiled his Southern Strategy, to use Lyndon Johnson’s civil rights legislation as the means to move the solid Democratic south to the Republican Party. But, Carter was from Georgia, and 1976 was to be the last hurrah for the Solid South.  Carter carried all the southern states, including Texas! California back then was a reliably Republican state, and Ford carried it.

The Ford campaign eschewed subtly in appealing to white southerners. They rolled out this spot, featuring Strom Thurmond directly addressing racist voters. He accuses Jimmy Carter, in the service of big union bosses, of being willing to eliminate “our States Rights away clause.”  I have no idea what he’s actually talking about there, but everyone watching sure knew what Strom meant when he was talking about States Rights. This one does belong in a museum. “See, kids, that was what a segregationist looked and sounded like.”

http://www.livingroomcandidate.org/commercials/1976/strom-thurmond

Finally, this anthemic spot for Ford doesn’t need much set up. It’s like watching a team of high school students try to make a presidential spot. The song was surely rejected by R.C. Cola as being too vapid to represent their fine product.  For some reason Ford has a ship’s wheel leaning against the wall of the Oval Office. No one bothered to mount it. He wasn’t going to be there that long, why put holes in the wall?

Clearly everyone on the campaign team was using cocaine.  Ford himself looks stoned as he leans back in his chair, gestures in the air and pretends to work for the camera.

They are making all kinds of efforts to be diverse, though.  Which makes the Reagan Morning in America spot all the more striking for its broad-shouldered, car-pooling, hard-working whiteness.  Here’s the link.  Be careful, the song is catchy:

“We’re living here in peace again

“We’re going back to work again”

http://www.livingroomcandidate.org/commercials/1976/peace

 

Any political junkies needing a break from this election need look no further than The Museum of the Moving Image’s web site, The Living Room Candidate. The site’s been up for a while and so the interface is dated, but the content is fascinating.  The site presents every general election television campaign commercial since 1952.

The link is here:

http://www.livingroomcandidate.org/

You can spend a lot of time with the site, revisiting not only candidates, but glimpses at the pressing issues of the day, and also how these ads have changed.  And haven’t.

Because of the way the site is built, I can’t link to individual ads within the site.  And so, the links below are from YouTube, which has a few, but not most of the spots.

Morning in America

Any review of presidential television spots has to start with Reagan’s Morning in America spot in 1984.  It still holds up as a masterpiece. Although, clearly, diversity wasn’t an issue in 1984. The spot could have been shot in a gated community in Johannesburg, with only a couple of children, maybe, vaguely, non-white.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EU-IBF8nwSY

Meanwhile, contrast the Mondale ads.  The only one on YouTube focuses on deficit reduction and is testament to how much Reagan’s Keynesian deficits tied the Democrats in knots.  Mondale—the liberal—running on a platform of “cut spending”, “close tax loopholes”, and “ trust fund”, which is to put new taxes in a trust fund to pay off the Reagan deficits.  How did the country not rally behind this clarion call to action?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCk3WaEUks4

Dark Knight in America

The ads from 1972 are particularly interesting. Many of them still have an earnestness that we usually associate with newsreels from the fifties and early sixties, but some of the spots show the influence of films made in the late sixties and early seventies.

And, it’s 1972.  Probably the nadir, so far, of the American spirit.

Here’s a Democrats for Nixon spot in which the Nixon campaign claims that McGovern has introduced a bill in congress that would put 47 percent of Americans on welfare. It’s notable that this seemingly random number, 47, is also the percent of American’s that Mitt Romney would famously describe as the “takers” in our society in 2012. I welcome any comments from members of the Masons or Illuminati.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7XJH8uI9YI

And here’s McGovern’s “Democrats for McGovern” ad. Amazingly, this ran the week of the November election.  It features a blue-collar guy in the voting booth with two choices: Nixon or McGovern. And his internal deliberations about who he should vote for:  “All the fellas say they are voting for Nixon.” “My dad would roll over in his grave if I voted for Nixon.” “This hand voted for Kennedy . . . “

It’s an ad that only the early seventies could have produced. And, it shows the New Deal coalition unraveling inside one man’s head.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Av_nDxp4iXE

The rest of McGovern’s ads are worth watching.  Several spots with the senator and, mostly short so that McGovern would loom tall, blue collar workers, in urban settings, talking about crime and Vietnam. There’s a rawness to it that none of the other ads on the site even attempt to replicate. A reminder of how bad a place the early seventies were.

This got too long for a comment on Laskas’s New Conspiracy Theory:

Something like what Laska’s talking about there must be happening. Not so much a conscious conspiracy but a conspiracy of themes/interests. Once the Tea Party came in, inevitable consequences of the “Reagan Revolution” were fulfilled, the party started falling apart — not losing elections but losing the organization and discipline to support its electoral successes. Nothing lasts forever. Conservatism may be long past ready to give up on abortion, gay marriage — for people like the Bushes and McCain, that was never real — thus casting off the evangelicals as worn-out tools. As Laska suggests, why wouldn’t establishment conservatives look at coalition with Hillary?

The irony for the left, this season imagining taking over the Democratic Party for socialism and peace, would be that in the absence of a (disciplined) right-wing party to oppose it, the Dem. Party doesn’t get more left, but the opposite, becoming instead the only party with real organization, technocracy, and appeal for elite (i.e., real) conservatism; naturally Dems move to pick up those people and that funding. In this reading, the Dem impulse — just as, I suspect, with DLC/New Democrat “reforms”  — is always ultimately partisan (save and strengthen the party), with ideology following on that imperative.

As certain lefty liberals have long believed that if only the GOP could be destroyed, the Dems, no longer then under rightward pressure, would be free to flower as a lefty party,  evangelicals have dreamed of a Great Awakening via a GOP dancing on the ashes of liberalism. Neither is going to happen. While we’re doing counterfactuals, the really interesting future opposition coalition — opposing what, in this fantasy, will soon become a hyperdominant, center-right Democratic Party, and opposing even party itself, as we’ve come to know it in the USA — will bring the socialist left together with evangelicalism. As it was in the beginning, 1750’s-1790’s.

Pretend you’re a moderate McCain- or Poppy-Bush style Republican:

1. Your party is infested with Tea Party, Freedom Caucus, and unyielding evangelicals.   You’re paralyzed.
2. For eight years,  you’ve only seen them grow.  Your friends are losing their seats to  them, and you’re not sure you can keep winning.
3. Your business friends are seriously worried – shutdowns, talk about defaults, none of that stuff is good for business.
4. You conclude that you can’t reclaim the party in any meaningful time frame and that you need a new home to rebuild the base.
5. Third party?  Oi, that’s a lot of work.
6. Despair.
7. But wait!
8. Look! Across the aisle, a hawkish, pro-business candidate is about to take over the Democratic party!
9. No, guys, seriously.  The new Democratic leader has always been malleable, has women locked up, and seems to get votes from blacks and Hispanics without having to give them anything.
10. Forget abortion!  It’s more trouble than it’s worth as a wedge issue and we can’t count on the women in our lives or in our party to keep going along with us on that one.
11. Seriously:  Let’s blow up this party with a maniacal candidate who will whip our fringes into a frenzy, then flip flop so much their heads will still be spinning by the time the inauguration rolls around.  They won’t realize all the money and structure is gone until the mid-terms.
12. And boom! We take over the other party which is moving towards a center we’ve always liked.
13. Seriously, there’s somebody here already asking for our money!  Let’s make a deal!

#micdrop

#boom

#tellmeimcrazierthantherealshitthatshappening

I’m imagining the upcoming GOP convention as one of the weirder events in US election history. All former GOP presidents will stay away, along with the most recent GOP presidential candidate, along with a lot of their constituencies.

So not even a knockdown dragout floor fight, over the nomination of an incompetent insurgent, whose approval ratings (if elected) will be in the crapper on day one and go down from there, dragging the rest of the GOP electeds with him? Not with a bang but a whimper? Because “the people” have supposedly spoken via this goofball thing we call a primary system, and it would “look bad” to try to override them?

Please. (Or: Sad!) If this election were occurring when men were men, as it were, both Bushes’ organizations, Lindsey Graham’s and his ilks’, and all the anti-Trump forces in every state would show up at the convention — they’d be fanned out around the country right now — in relentless 24/7 activity for one or more alternative candidates, using money, clout, pork, seduction, and threats to deny Trump the nomination on the first ballot, then start working the wedge between him and the number he needs. Push the rules committee around, pressure state election lawyers to find loopholes, ignore the primaries in favor of polls (faked or tweaked as necessary) showing Romney (or somebody) doing better against HRC than Trump. Scare these delegates and other party hacks that they’re going down for good if they stick with this asshat.

This is turning into a counterfactual-history fanfic. Romney, GWB, and, like, Colin Powell take the podium together and speak passionately against Trump. Booing and throwing stuff ensues.

But wait … what’s this? Clint is at the podium! He reads a letter from Pop Bush deploring Trump, reviewing the glories of the party from the time of Lincoln. Now there are sobs and cheers mingled with the boos …

But no. A party-destroying insurgent will actually reap the benefits of the vacuous “party unity” style of contemporary conventions. Disunity will be expressed only by absence. That is, not expressed. It’s insane.