Is this what we — the voters — are going to get from now until Election Day?
I do hope the campaign can evolve into something a bit more edifying and educational.
I remain befuddled by Trump’s immigration policy … his softening and then re-hardening of his plan to deport undocumented immigrants.
What’s more, I also am equally befuddled as to how Clinton is going to explain whether foreign governments have sought favors from her by their huge donations to the Clinton Foundation and/or the Clinton Global Initiative.
This week, though, the candidates are exchanging rhetorical artillery fire over who between them is more of a bigot.
Is there any reason to doubt just why public opinion surveys indicate such a low opinion of these two major-party candidates for president?
He also knows that using the term “bigot” in a battle between candidates for the highest public office in the land is counterproductive in the extreme.
The former Republican candidate for president has advised his party’s nominee, Donald J. Trump, to cease calling Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton a bigot.
“I kind of left that behind in the third grade. I certainly don’t encourage it because the issues that we’re facing are incredibly important—for us and for the future generations.”
Do you think Dr. Carson, the surgeon who’s also African-American, will be able to persuade Trump to cool it with the bigot talk?
Probably not.
As Trump’s campaign continues its flailing ways, the candidate is left to say things about Clinton that have nothing at all to do with policy differences he might have with her. Oh, but wait! Trump doesn’t have any policies of his own, which leaves him to rely on the insult machine he oils daily.
Carson, of course, isn’t going to let Clinton off the hook, either. “That’s what people do who don’t have anything to talk about,” he said while referring as well to Clinton’s use of the term “racist” to describe Trump’s statements.
While the Democratic nominee attacks the words that come from her opponent’s mouth, Trump has decided to define his foe’s character by accusing her of being an outright bigot.
This campaign should proceed on a much higher plain.
There’s a saying one sees on bumper stickers or on wall posters in Austin, the capital city of Texas.
It urges everyone to “Keep Austin Weird.”
Well, a fellow named Robert Morrow is doing his part. He’s doing more than his part, actually. He’s gone above and beyond the call.
Morrow is the former head of the Travis County Republican Party. He had to quit his party job when he announced he would run as a write-in candidate for president of the United States.
But before he left his party office, Morrow had some choice words to say about the GOP’s presidential nominee.
When Trump appeared at a campaign rally earlier this week in Austin, Morrow paraded outside the meeting hall with a sign that read “Trump is a child rapist.”
Morrow said later that the party sought to oust him because he had “embarrassed the living f*** out of Trump.”
Texas GOP Chairman Tom Mechler of Amarillo, of course, is having none of Morrow’s behavior. He wants him gone. Morrow, according to the Texas Tribune, responded by inviting Mechler to “perform a sex act” on him.
Mechler, someone I’ve known for years, is moving forward with selecting a new Travis County party chair.
Good luck, Mr. State Chairman, in that search. Just remember: There’s a reason Austin is proud of its weirdness.
What we used to call “white nationalism” now has a new name.
It’s called “alt-right.”
We all began hearing this term kicked around a few weeks ago. Its use is most commonly heard among progressive politicians, journalists, online news services. It’s being used to define the politics being championed these days by Republican Party presidential nominee Donald J. Trump.
I sincerely doubt we’ll hear right-wing pols and pundits toss this term around.
The term jarred me when I first heard it. It sounded oddly foreign — which is a bit of an ironic feeling, when you think about it.
I’m not yet sure if I’m going to adopt the term for regular use on this blog.
The bit of research of I’ve done on this term has revealed that it doesn’t define an ideology per se. It’s become something of a euphemism to describe those who adhere to white nationalism, white supremacy, anti-Semitism, nativism.
It’s an umbrella term meant to include a multitude of, um, ideas … I reckon.
I’ll likely stick with the real deal.
If I hear someone utter an anti-Semitic epithet, or suggest that immigrants are spoiling the “American culture,” or that white folks are superior to people of other races, I’ll call it what it is.
I’m wondering, though, if those on the right are going to come up with a name for the more progressive politicians and pundits out there.
Does “alt-left” do anything for you?
If so, what principles or policy statements do you suppose it would include?
The Texas Tribune headline describes the article below as an analysis of how the Texas Republican Party is so serene in this tumultuous election year.
While other state party leaders are sweating bullets over the fate of their down-ballot candidates in a campaign led by GOP presidential nominee Donald J. Trump, Texas’s Republican Party is as confident as ever about success.
Trump continues to hold a lead over Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton in Texas. The latest PPP poll puts Trump up by 6 percent; yes, it’s a smaller margin than what Mitt Romney or John McCain won by over Barack Obama in the previous two elections, but it’s also outside the margin of error.
Ross Ramsey’s piece in the Tribune seeks to break apart where Democrats remain strong and where Republicans maintain their strength.
I think it’s a simpler issue than that.
The Texas Democratic Party hasn’t found its voice. It hasn’t discovered a way to break the GOP vise grip on statewide offices. It hasn’t fielded candidates for statewide or regional offices who can find the magic it takes to persuade diehard Republicans to cross over.
Republicans win in this state simply because they are of the “right” — meaning “correct” — political party.
Trump likely win the state’s 38 electoral votes this fall because (a) we still have straight-ticket voting available and (b) because the state’s Democratic Party doesn’t have the heft to mount any kind of ground game challenge.
Do I wish it were different in Texas? Certainly, but not necessarily for the reason you might think.
Some readers of this blog consider me to be a yellow dog Democrat. Not true. I bemoaned the same one-party domination when I first arrived in Texas back in the spring of 1984. I took up my post with the Beaumont Enterprise, in the Golden Triangle region of the state, where Democrats controlled everything.
I called then for a stronger Republican Party because I feared the dominant party would become arrogant and would force-feed its agenda on constituents without proper debate.
The same thing has happened now that Texas has flipped from solidly Democratic control to even more solidly Republican control.
Texas GOP pols have good reason to feel “sanguine,” as Ramsey states.
Donald J. Trump’s apparent — and it’s not quite clear — decision to pull back from his signature issue while running for the Republican presidential nomination is, to borrow a word, y-u-u-u-g-e!
But not in the way the GOP nominee perhaps is expecting.
Trump rode down that escalator at Trump Tower in the summer of 2015 to announce his presidential campaign and declared right out of the chute that he plans to “build a wall” across our southern border with Mexico. He said the Mexican government is sending “rapists, murderers, drug dealers” into the United States, adding “and I’m sure there are some good ones, too.”
He also announced his plan to deport every single one of the 11-12 million people who reportedly are here illegally. He was going to send them back.
What about the children who were born in this country? Family unity? Forget about it! “The illegals” are going back!
The response from the Republican Party base voters was, well, astonishing. They loved it. They adored and embraced their guy for “telling it like is.” No more political correctness, they said; we won’t tolerate it.
It got him the GOP nomination fair and square. Now, though, he’s struggling with the rest of the electorate. His cure to end the struggle is to sound as if he’s taking back the single issue that marked him as the “future of the Republican Party.”
How’s that going to play among the GOP base bloc that is standing by its man. I know a few of them here in the Texas Panhandle. I’m waiting to hear their response.
Will they continue to support the guy, the man with zero government experience, zero public service record, zero idea of what the U.S. Constitution allows the president to do, zero demonstrated interest in a single thing except personal enrichment?
The TEA Party wing of the GOP has wrapped its arms around Trump to date because of his rejection of what they call the “status quo.” What say those folks now?
As for the rest of the voters whose support he is seeking, they likely understand what is transpiring. Donald Trump has no clue about how to develop a cogent, coherent immigration policy. They are witnessing a desperate attempt to make sense out of nonsense.
Republican presidential nominee Donald J. Trump has made a lot of noise about several aspects of Barack Obama personal history.
* He demanded to see a birth certificate proving that Barack Sr. and Ann Dunham Obama’s son was born in Hawaii and not in Kenya. The president produced a long-firm birth certificate issued in Honolulu. Trump still isn’t convinced that, yep, Barack Obama is constitutionally qualified to hold the most powerful office in the world.
* He continues to demand to see academic records of young Barack’s college career.
So, how is he dealing with demands that he reveal his tax returns, which has been a custom for major-party presidential nominees dating back to the 1976 campaign?
He refuses. Trump says he is being audited by the Internal Revenue Service; the IRS, though, says a routine audit does not impede someone from releasing the returns.
So, as long as Trump has been making demands of, say, the president of the United States to prove certain things about his past, let’s try this one on for size.
Why won’t Trump release a copy of the letter from the IRS informing him of the audit?
No one has seen the letter.
I believe, therefore, it is fair to ask: Is Donald J. Trump really and truly being audited by the IRS?
I am willing to admit the obvious, which is that sometimes I am a bit slow on the uptake.
Things can and do get past me. The swirl of news events at times overwhelms me to the point that I cannot keep straight the particulars of this or that controversy/scandal.
The Hillary Rodham Clinton e-mail matter provides a case in point.
She used her personal server while leading the State Department. The question then became whether she distributed classified or “highly classified” information on this server.
The FBI investigated it. So did the U.S. House Government Oversight Committee.
The FBI concluded that it couldn’t find a reason to prosecute Clinton for any illegal activity. FBI Director James Comey, though, did provide a pile of critical analysis of Clinton’s handling of the e-mails, calling it “reckless,” and “careless.”
Now, though, Donald J. Trump is accusing Clinton of “illegal” use of her personal e-mail server.
Didn’t the feds determine already that she didn’t break the law, or that they couldn’t find reasonable grounds to recommend an indictment?
Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, has goaded Russia into looking for 30,000-something missing e-mails. The House Oversight and Judiciary committees are looking for proof that Clinton committed perjury when she testified before Congress.
Then we hear about 15,000 more e-mails that have surfaced. What does that mean? Anything?
The Democratic presidential nominee has endured a serious media and political scrubbing over all of this.
She hasn’t been accused formally of a single criminal act.
And yet …
Republicans keep calling her a criminal. They want to “lock her up!”
Kellyanne Conway earned her chops as a pollster and spinmeister.
Consider, then, what Republican presidential nominee Donald J. Trump’s new campaign manager has said.
It is that polls would show Trump doing better if “undercover voters” would reveal to pollsters that they are voting for her guy.
I’m trying to understand what she’s saying here.
I think that she’s suggesting that Trump’s millions of voters are too ashamed to admit out loud to strangers that they’re planning to vote this fellow.
Am I mistaken? Is that what “undercover voter” means?
If you’re committed to a candidate for high public office and someone calls you to conduct a public opinion survey, it would follow — normally, I guess — that you would be unafraid to tell the pollster how you think about an upcoming election.
Trump’s supporters, according to Conway, are keeping their thoughts to themselves.
Donald J. Trump is trying to pander, er, reach out to African-American voters.
The Republican Party’s presidential nominee is plotting a curious course in that direction.
He’s held a couple of rallies in recent days. One was in suburban Milwaukee, Wisc., the other was in suburban Detroit, Mich.
I emphasize the “suburban” aspect for a specific reason.
He was standing in front of virtually all-white audiences telling them, apparently, about how terrible life has become for black residents of inner-city neighborhoods. “What the hell do you have to lose?” Trump asked, supposedly speaking over the heads of those who were standing in front of him. He was asking the larger audience that wasn’t there, the African-American voting bloc that — as of this moment — is giving the GOP nominee about 1 percent of its support.
It’s been reported that an avowed segregationist — the late Alabama Gov. George Corley Wallace — polled 3 percent of the black vote when he ran as an independent candidate for president in 1968.
A better, more sincere way to reach out to Americans is to speak to them directly. Venture into their neighborhoods. Look them in the eye, tell them you care about them and offer them demonstrative evidence that you have cared for them before.
Other politicians have employed that strategy while campaigning for African-American votes. I think specifically of the late Robert F. Kennedy and Bill Clinton.
Sure, President Clinton has had his hiccups regarding race relations, such as his occasionally frosty relationship with the Rev. Jesse Jackson and with Barack Obama and the time he scolded the rap singer Sister Souljah for spouting lyrics that promoted violence.
As for RFK, well, those of who are around at that time remember vividly his venturing into an Indianapolis neighborhood the night of April 4, 1968 to tell the black audience before him that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr had just been assassinated in Memphis, Tenn. Many of America’s cities erupted in violence that night. Indy, though, remained calm.
These days, such “outreach” by a leading politician consists of screeds shouted from podiums in affluent neighborhoods.
I’m trying to imagine Donald Trump following RFK’s example.
