My head is spinning with this election.  So much acrimony, worry, infighting, delegate counting, rule tracking, score keeping of endorsements already hurt my brain.  And now we’re watching the Clintons re-stage the 1990s battle to win the angry white man … or … what?

Over the last couple days, HRC has been taken to task for her comments about putting coal miners out of business, apologized to a coal miner, started pursuing Republican donors, started pursuing alienated Republican voters, and asked her husband to ““come out of retirement and be in charge” of creating jobs in places that have been particularly hard hit.”

Despite Rob Reiner’s keen insight into the American electorate, pundits are finally acknowledging that Trump’s economic message is the more durable and, to HRC,  dangerously effective part of his candidacy.  (CVFD, would love to be pointed to Fallows intense and personal looks at Trump supporters.)  He can pull back on the anti-Hispanic stuff, spend less time on beheadings, and focus more on trade agreements, the decimation of the manufacturing sector, and both parties’ neglect of these parts of the economy.

As a result, we’re watching the weird theater of Trump telling the elite, technocratic Clinton of the day:  “it’s the economy, stupid.”  Oh, the irony.

So how is this all going to come together?  I think the Clintons (and now that Bill is out of retirement, I think I may just start saying that more regularly) are seeing a chance to build the biggest, broadest coalition the Democrats have ever had.  The long-awaited, oft-predicted collapse of the Republican party is finally upon us and everything but evangelical voters seem to be up for grabs.  HRC, running on fear of Trump, is looking at a virtual buffet of voting blocs:

Women + New Democrats + Sanders Supporters + Moderate Republicans + Economically anxious Republicans Voting for Trump + People of Color + Businesses of all sorts of sizes + the angry working man

It’s a dizzying possibility.  Racking up the biggest electoral map victory in recent years, quite possibly destroying the Republican’s legislative majority (numerically, or simply by dividing them), an almost impossibly disorganized opposition party, and an optimistic outlook for the 2018 elections.

Can Clinton make this coalition work?  Can Trump moderate himself with credibility or without losing his base?  Those are the bigger questions, but I want to focus on the economic outrage to which Trump and Sanders have given voice.

For Clinton, this picture in The Guardian today highlights the biggest threat:

I have my doubts that WJC can handle this.  For all his personal charm and his legendary ability to explain policy, he doesn’t seem to handle outrage well and he’s been pretty proud of his record on trade.   It’s one thing to explain how a policy will be good for you and gain trust.  WJC feels your pain, explains a complicated policy, promises it will be OK and we wipe tears from our eyes.  It’s an entirely different matter to convince people that their pain is completely unconnected to your policies, or that your really did help them while you were in office, and that your wife didn’t mean anything when she was so glib about miner’s jobs.

(And the subtext of the picture is that HRC’s coalition is decidedly not Bubba.  While HRC has smartly avoided the characterizations of the dumb, uneducated, overweight, incompletely toothed, unwashed, her supporters, in my experience have a hard time hiding their distaste and many just love crowing about their idiocy.)

It gets even trickier for the Clintons as they wade into this territory, because they could very well find themselves in the odd position of really needing active union support, rather than mere non-opposition.  Sanders has already proven that the rank-and-file membership are suspicious of New Democrat policies and are happy to ignore the endorsements of their national leadership (of whom they are also dubious). While I can’t imagine Trump ever earning the endorsement of the UMWA, I doubt we’re gonna see the legendary miners in camos at HRC rallies.

Which, to many Dems is the point:  “we were never going to win them anyway” but what about striking Verizon workers who saw Sanders walking picket?  What about the Teamsters who saw Elizabeth Warren go to bat for their pensions?  What happens when Trump starts beating the drum about HRC saying there was plenty of blame to go around for the recession including the irresponsible homeowners who took those mortgages?  Watching Trump versus WJC battle to be champions of the working man, the working poor, and the struggling middle class will be a great cosmic joke.  But it will also be terrifying, because Trump has a narrative and no record.  And the Clintons have a worn-out narrative and a highly questionable record.

Oi. Oi. Oi.

Since this started as a replacement to email threads, I’m resisting the urge to mail this and just making it a post:

What are we to make of HRC’s outreach to 1) Republican voters; and 2) Republican donors?

I think they’re separate questions, because I think Trump has proven that Republican voters can be mobilized around jobs and New Deal democratic issues.  But then I wonder, does the freeing up of moderate Republicans who can’t stand Trump mean the Clintons (since Big Bill is making what HRC termed a “comeback”) are going back to the old DLC playback?  (This gets doubly interesting when you layer in Schultz’s backtracking on how she plans to fill committee seats at the convention.)  Where does she need to tack to pull them in?  Can she pull in the Republican voters while keeping the Sanders voters?

The question about funding is the most worrisome.  All I’ve read so far is that HRC’s campaign “intends to reach out to Republican megadonors disillusioned by their party’s presumptive nominee.”  That could cover everyone from . . . well, a lot of disagreeable people.  Imagine what Trump will make of that . . . he’ll probably drop the word “whore” and not even bother to back away from it.

Happy to be pointed to links to do my own thinking, but I’m hesitant to express my fairly predictable misgivings yet.

 

After all the bilious racist, misogynist, xenophobic, birther horseshit that’s come out of this man’s mouth all these months and years, this has finally blown my mind:

 

From time to time I will check out right wing blogs like Redstate.com, just to see what the other side is saying. It’s usually like stepping into the Mirror Universe Start Trek world.

Here at In At The End of The World, we spend time discussing the fate of the Democratic Party and liberalism under either Hillary or Bernie, and the future of those factions of the party. One can only imagine the hand wringing, head banging and soul searching happening on the right.

Fortunately, you don’t have to. Now that Mr. Trump is the Republican nominee for president, a quick scan of Redstate.com shows headlines like:

“It’s Time to Assume We Are All Dead”

“Vichy Republicans Welcome Donald Trump to Paris.”

“I Burned My Delegate Card”

“Never Trump Means Never Trump Ever’

The Restate team opposes Trump because he’s not a conservative, but I have to give them props for opposing Trump because he’s not qualified to be president and is a danger to the republic.

Redstate.com editor Ben Howe was on MSNBC and other networks yesterday calling Trump unqualified for the office and saying it would be better for the country if Hilary were elected, even though she represents everything he opposes in politics.

Erick Erickson, former Redstate.com CEO and one of the most influential conservative voices, has been particularly strong on the issue.  I generally loathe everything the man writes, but he’s been forceful and compelling in making the case against Trump, not on policy differences, but for the sake of the country.

Here’s one of his better articulations of the case:

“Some Republicans may decide it is time to be a team player, but I will put my country before my party and decline to help the voters in this country commit national suicide. For those who lament the loss of the Supreme Court with Hillary Clinton’s now inevitable re-election, I would counter that it is obvious the United States now has far bigger problems than judges.

“That bigger problem begins with Republicans now losing any sense of shame and surrendering to their lesser angels in the name of unity around a man unfit for Presidency.”

The full essay is here:  http://theresurgent.com/where-should-the-line-be-drawn/

My previous posts about Trump being the Republican nominee were all about the fear that he could win.  And he can.  But, here’s why, in November, he really is going to take the mother and father of all tooth-scattering curb stompings.

Don’t bring tweets to a knife fight

For all Hillary’s flaws as a candidate, she’s been front and center in national politics for twenty-four years. And for most of that time she’s been targeted by venomous and well-funded right-wing attacks. Remember when they suggested that she and Bill killed Vince Foster?  Whitewater? Ken Starr?  The list goes on. If you are gonna go low-road against Hillary, you had better bring your lunch.  And a lot more than one jackass with a smart phone.

Humiliator-in-Chief

 President Obama has demonstrated his ability, most recently at the White House Correspondents Dinner, to be presidential, aloof, and, yet, devastatingly funny.  He’s a Carson-Letterman-level talk show host. He’s likely to spend the next six months making a fool of Trump and pointing out how unqualified he is to be president. There are rooms full of joke writers working on this stuff.  He’ll make him a fool, and Trump will take the bait.  If you don’t believe it, watch this from the correspondents dinner five years ago. He gets to Trump at about 3:30 in the clip.  And, I mean gets to Trump. The Donald is not good at laughing at himself.

One billion dollars

Trump’s Republican primary opponents gave him a pass.  I guess, they just hoped he would go away. But, in the few debates where they stood up to him, he looked like a fool.  He’s about to get nailed with a billion-dollar barrage of multi-channel attack ads, tweets, posts, videos, wild postings, and 24/7 of Democrats on television coming at him from every direction.

He barely has a staff.  Meanwhile the Hillary war room is up and running.  And it won’t just be Hillary.  Sure, he’ll hire some people, but at some point organization counts, and you can’t just be some guy in his bedroom doing phone calls and tweets.

He could rely on the Republican establishment for help, but . . .

The GOP takes a walk

A lot of Republican office holders are starting to line up behind Trump in public.  Because they have to. A lot of them are currently running for election or re-election or will be in two years. They are all currently trying to find their footing.

Check out Senator Kelly Ayotte yesterday in New Hampshire.  I hope that Governor Maggy Hassan defeats her in November, but Ayotte is a good politician and a good senator.  She said yesterday, after listing all of Trump’s flaws, that she supports Trump, but doesn’t endorse him.   I almost wanted to give her a hug.

And I would bet real money that Ayotte votes for Hillary. And so will John McCain.  And Lyndsey Graham.  And a lot of other Republican office holders.

My parents have been involved in local politics in Pennsylvania for forty years.  They can tell you that just because someone looks you in the eye and tells you they support you, doesn’t mean it’s true. Early signs are that the GOP is taking a walk.

Watch the retired Republicans                                    

Republicans holding or running for office have to say that they are supporting the nominee.  To understand where Republican voters are going, keep an eye on the retired Republicans.  For, example, last night, former long-time Republican congressman Mickey Edwards from Oklahoma, when asked who he would vote for, said that he wouldn’t vote for Trump, but instead said, “I have to live with myself. Look in the mirror. Explain myself to my grand-children.”

And, oh, yeah, both former-president Bushes wasted no time saying that they wouldn’t endorse Trump. Starting the Retired Republican Watch now.

Following up on Laska’s post this morning about HRC and the woman card.  Specifically, the Woman Card.

As Laska notes, this is a pretty decent campaign idea. It’s a clever enough way to thank a woman who just made a donation. Although it would have been even better if the card gave you a free coffee at Starbucks or something.

Obama pioneered social media marketing. Trump is the ultimate triumph of cable t.v. where content and advertising are all the same. And he’s mastered tweeting insults from his bath tub. Hillary continues to employ traditional advertising tactics.

The Woman Card is a good campaign element of the type that traditional–and increasingly digital– agencies produce. But even consumer marketers realize that this stuff doesn’t work.  If this cycle has proved anything it’s that the :30 second spot and similar traditional campaign tactics continue to decline in effectiveness. Go back to 2008, and cable news channels routinely reported on new spots that were produced by the campaigns.  Back then, the original media buy for a spot was almost irrelevant. They were produced so that cable news could pick them up and provide free media exposure.

Not anymore. The cable news shows rarely cover this stuff anymore.  No more red phones at 3:00 a.m. or Swift Boat Veterans against Kerry. I would assume that by 2024, no one even bothers to make these things anymore.

Hillary should sweep all the Mark Penn’s and other traditional agency types out of her inner circle.  Move them to the “B” team, because the campaign does still need to produce video assets and print collateral. And it has to be well produced and effective. But, the people who produce this material shouldn’t have any role in driving strategy and messaging.

During the White House Correspondence dinner, Obama joked about Hillary’s attempts to use digital media.  It starts at around 2:00 mins into the clip. It’s funny because it’s true.

———

The other things she needs to stop doing is repeating pre-scripted zingers.  During an interview yesterday with Andrea Mitchell, she was candid and ruthless in her critique of Trump as a possible Commander-in-Chief, but, during an otherwise well-articulated response, she remembered to mention that Trump was “an equal opportunity insulter.” Clearly a pre-scripted line. Kerry, Romney, Hillary, all had a penchant for this stuff in previous elections.  Obama rarely uses this kind of pre-scripted zinger. And when he does, he goes all Johnny Carson on it, pausing, shrugging his shoulders, laughing at the banality of it even as he delivers the line. Which, of course, makes it actually funny.

There’s an old rule in advertising that you don’t respond directly to other people’s ads.  The thinking is simple:  they chose to say it, so why repeat it on your dime?  In political terms, we warn that you don’t let your opponent set the terms of the debate.  If they want to talk about it, you more than likely don’t.

HRC is getting a lot of play out of the woman card – offering “woman cards” to people who make donations.  She’s built the “deal me in” line to her recent speeches and seems to revel in delivering it, and her online ads have moved from red, white, and blue, to pink-ish and yellow with a universal symbol for the women’s rest room.  It’s a clever, well executed “campaign” as advertising types would call it.  But is it helping her?

I’m wondering if Trump, or his new staff, is clever enough to  have set a trap.  His very first words on the national stage (the first debate) were “I frankly don’t have time for total political correctness and to be honest with you, this country doesn’t have time either.”  Thunderous applause in the room, and it certainly hit a nerve for people who can’t pay their mortgages and don’t have time to worry about whether “he or she” is as offensive as simply saying he.  (See South Park episode “Sponsored Content”.  Seriously.  See it.)  After months of getting beaten up by the press but rewarded by voters for his comments about women, after watching the Fiorina ploy do nothing to hurt Trump, do we think he was stupid to play the woman card on HRC’s playing of the woman card?

Historically, the Clintons have always worked to distance themselves from special interests that smack of the 60s, the New Left, unions, undue deference to blacks.  Like it or not, WJC and HRC have both won over white centrists with strategic digs at these constituencies and stances against them (eg, DOMA).  At a time when Gloria Steinem and others are scolding women to vote on gender rather than economics, it might be that the one special interest the Clintons held onto – women – could become a liability if HRC plays it too hard.

It’s ironic to watch HRC not only walk into the space Trump has invited her, but to even venture into the true, scary flavor of “political correctness” where you have papers showing you adhere to the party line, and where there are fire and brimstone consequences for those who don’t toe the party line.  That’s a bit of an exaggeration, but might the cards and the tone be playing into the worst parts of PC and right into Trump’s hand?

HRC took, and will likely to continue to take, some heat for saying “we are going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.”  She later apologized to a protestor for the comment and explained herself.

This is HRC’s “you didn’t build that” or “cling to their guns” moment – a sentence taken out of context from a statement that was unarguably sympathetic to the people who will be protesting it.

To clear it up, the larger context of the line was that:  1) moving to clean energy needs to happen; 2) making that move will dislocate a lot of coal miners; and critically 3) we need policies to make sure that clean energy jobs replace the coal mining jobs in those areas.  If you don’t believe it, watch the full clip.

Did you watch it?  You need to, because the problem isn’t what she said, but very subtly how she said it, and how she phrased it.

There are many reasons people are deeply suspicious of the New Democrat/Clinton approach to income equality, economic opportunity, and growth in general.  One of the fairest is that the approach is too technocratic.  Clinton solutions (from husband, wife, or the Ivy League think tank) are typically:  more education, and market forces.  “Change is inevitable” as WJC reminded us during NAFTA and rather than fight it, or hold the line on certain issues in the face of it, we should re-train our workforce and nudge market forces with incentives (credits) and disincentives (taxes called something else).

To affluent voters who appreciate elegant solutions, took microeconomics,  and have (seemingly) unthreatened careers, this is yummy brain candy (“win-win-win”!). However, if you’ve got an education but are struggling, don’t put a lot of stock in micro-economic wizardry, and have no idea what’s in store for your profession, you’re suspicious of the fancy talk.  Break up the banks sounds clean and likely to work without hurting you.  Risk profiles on shadow banks sounds like “wha?” and maybe misdirection.  No more trade agreements which sends jobs overseas, hurray! Education grants, economic zones, change management policies . . . f*!# you.

If we assume that the Clinton/Schumer Dems are in fact committed to helping poor and working families, then “close your eyes and listen” to the clip again, or at least that fateful sentence:  “We are going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.” I hear a proud technocrat: “we are going to do such a kick-ass job at clean energy, that we’re going to wipe out this industry.”  Wiping out fossil fuels is a good outcome, but the construction and delivery of the sentence borders on gleeful.  (There’s almost an exclamation point.)

Compare that construction to this:  “We need clean energy for a lot of reasons:  independence from foreign oil, public health, the water our children drink and the air they breathe, and protection of our environment.  But switching to clean energy is going to have the unintended consequence of dislocating coal miners and disrupting communities dependent on mining companies.  We need to ensure incomes for those people and communities who depend on coal.”

(I used “unintended consequences” because it’s already comfortable language for HRC.  More to the point, it highlights language that she could have used, knows how to use when talking about the crime bill, but didn’t use here – her technocratic side comes through.)  (I’m aware that there’s a tangential connection to clean energy and Flint, but, hey, play the game, right?)

This sounds like parsing, but the differences run deep.  Rather than putting people out of business (ha, look  how we crushed it!), you’re dislocating and disrupting  (“and that’s bad”).  It’s a very human-centered way of talking about  economic problems without being a wonk.

This is the kind of thing that scares me most about HRC in the general.  If she takes up the fight on income inequality and economic disruption, which I think she must, can she do it in a credible way that reaches humans and not just well-educated liberals?  Say what you will about Sanders’s lack of subtlety and Trump’s lack of substance, neither candidate leaves room about their belief in what they’re saying.

God, I hope she can pull this off.

 

 

Well, the Stop Trump movement collapsed and ran like a Civil War army that had its flanks turned.  And now, once it stops running and reforms its lines, what next? My guess, is that the Republican “establishment” lines up behind Trump with all the grace and coordination of football fans rushing towards just-opened turnstiles.

All over the country, there are Republican staffers who, even this afternoon, were working around the clock to whip convention delegates into the Stop Trump movement and are now suddenly erasing whiteboards, shredding the delegate tally sheets, and texting their spouses and significant others that they are finally coming home.  Dozens of local Republican office holders, who this morning were being offered jobs in the state department of transportation, are now planning their next race for county clerk of courts. 

They will fall in line despite the fact that, during his unnervingly measured and professional victory speech, Trump at times sounded like a Democrat from 1982:  “Bring back our jobs!”  “Keep the factories here!” “Keep the mines open!” On foreign policy, he sounded like a combination of a 1930’s isolationist and a post-Vietnam Democrat.

Principled conservatives and true believes on the right will all have to struggle with their conscience about what to do in November. But, congressional Republicans are almost entirely post-policy and Trump is non-policy, so issue dissonance isn’t going to be a factor.

I know that all the polls and demographic break outs show that Trump is headed for a shellacking on the scale of William Jennings Bryan or Barry Goldwater. And, he’s likely to bring down Republican senate candidates in places like Florida, New Hampshire, Ohio—and even puts guys like John McCain and Chuck Grassley in danger. But . . . as they say in sports, there’s a reason we actually play the games.

I do think that tonight increases the likelihood that Clinton might pick Sanders as her running mate.  Not only because he won—and is likely to win a few more smaller states in May—but, watching him tonight criticize Trump in a measured, detailed, but very effective way, suggests that he could do well playing the traditional vice president attack role. And, he gives Hillary credibility when she tries to start sounding like a change agent who really is outraged about income inequality.

Still afraid. Still very afraid.