How the Clinton-Trump Race Got Close

With the now seemingly close election contest between Hillary Clinton making me at times consider formalizing my dual citizenship with Honduras so that the husband and I could move to and purchase property in Roatan in the Bay Islands, I keep asking myself, "what is wrong with Americans and why isn't Clinton killing Trump."  A column in the New York Times looks at the question and proposes an answers and places much of the blame on a complicit media. A media that much like the German media as Hitler came to power helped normalize ugliness and hatred until it was too late.  Then these same media types found themselves to be the among the first targeted for silencing.  Why can't Americans learn from history?  Here are column highlights:

Monday’s presidential debate was a blowout, surely the most one-sided confrontation in American political history. Hillary Clinton was knowledgeable, unflappable and — dare we say it? — likable. Donald Trump was ignorant, thin-skinned and boorish.

Yet on the eve of the debate, polls showed a close race. How was that possible?

After all, the candidates we saw Monday night were the same people they’ve been all along. Mrs. Clinton’s grace and even humor under pressure were fully apparent during last year’s Benghazi hearing. Mr. Trump’s whiny braggadocio has been obvious every time he opens his mouth without reading from a teleprompter

So how could someone like Mr. Trump have been in striking position for the White House?

Part of the answer is that a lot more Americans than we’d like to imagine are white nationalists at heart. Indeed, implicit appeals to racial hostility have long been at the core of Republican strategy; Mr. Trump became the G.O.P. nominee by saying outright what his opponents tried to convey with dog whistles.

If he loses, Republicans will claim that he was some kind of outlier, showing nothing about the nature of their party. He isn’t.

But while racially motivated voters are a bigger minority than we’d like to think, they are a minority. And as recently as August Mrs. Clinton held a commanding lead. Then her polls went into a swoon.

What happened? Did she make some huge campaign blunders?

I don’t think so. As I’ve written before, she got Gored. That is, like Al Gore in 2000, she ran into a buzz saw of adversarial reporting from the mainstream media, which treated relatively minor missteps as major scandals, and invented additional scandals out of thin air.

Meanwhile, her opponent’s genuine scandals and various grotesqueries were downplayed or whitewashed; but as Jonathan Chait of New York magazine says, the normalization of Donald Trump was probably less important than the abnormalization of Hillary Clinton.

This media onslaught started with an Associated Press report on the Clinton Foundation, which roughly coincided with the beginning of Mrs. Clinton’s poll slide. . . . . As it happened, it failed to find any evidence of wrongdoing — but nonetheless wrote the report as if it had. And this was the beginning of an extraordinary series of hostile news stories about how various aspects of Mrs. Clinton’s life “raise questions” or “cast shadows,” conveying an impression of terrible things without saying anything that could be refuted.

The culmination of this process came with the infamous Matt Lauer-moderated forum, which might be briefly summarized as “Emails, emails, emails; yes, Mr. Trump, whatever you say, Mr. Trump.”

I still don’t fully understand this hostility, which wasn’t ideological. Instead, it had the feel of the cool kids in high school jeering at the class nerd. Sexism was surely involved but may not have been central, since the same thing happened to Mr. Gore.

Then came the debate itself, which was almost unspinnable. . . . . tens of millions of Americans saw the candidates in action, directly, without a media filter. For many, the revelation wasn’t Mr. Trump’s performance, but Mrs. Clinton’s: The woman they saw bore little resemblance to the cold, joyless drone they’d been told to expect.

How much will it matter? My guess — but I could very well be completely wrong — is that it will matter a lot. Hard-core Trump supporters won’t be swayed. But voters who had been planning to stay home or, what amounts to the same thing, vote for a minor-party candidate rather than choose between the racist and the she-devil may now realize that they were misinformed. If so, it will be Mrs. Clinton’s bravura performance, under incredible pressure, that turned the tide.

But things should never have gotten to this point, where so much depended on defying media expectations over the course of an hour and a half. And those who helped bring us here should engage in some serious soul-searching.

If democracy should fall in America, irresponsible journalist will certainly have played a major role in helping it happen.

Scandals Only Make the Clintons Stronger

As the occupants of the GOP clown car scheme against Hillary Clinton and compete with each other to see who can most prostitute themselves to the Christofascists and white supremacist elements of the GOP base, one thing that they have not factored in is the reality that scandals only make the Clintons stronger - sort of like the lyrics of Kelly Clarkson's song "What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Stronger."  A somewhat tongue in cheek piece in Politico Magazine looks at the phenomenon.  Here are highlights:

One has to wonder: When Republicans gathered earlier this year to scheme the defeat of Hillary Clinton, who was the genius who stood up and said, “I know. We’ll challenge the Clintons’ pristine record on ethics. They’ll never see that one coming.”  But of course they did. We all did.

A little newsflash about our past (and probably future) First Family, who pundits, long predicting the Clintons’ coronation, are now suddenly beginning to count out: Scandal surfing is what they always do. They skip the top of the waves, sometimes even giving the impression they might succumb to them. But they never do.

The Clintons have been sent off to their certain doom more times than Tyrion Lannister. During their last sojourn on Pennsylvania Avenue, operators all but installed a new message on the White House switchboard, “If you’re calling with a subpoena for the Clintons, please press 7 now.”

Yet whatever the storm—from blue dresses to funny money from China to an actual impeachment trial—Bill and Hillary are this generation’s Six-Million Dollar Man (and Woman). They always rebuild faster, stronger, and a hell of a lot richer than ever.  

Much is now being made of a CNN poll finding that a majority of Americans—57 percent—do not believe Hillary Clinton is honest or trustworthy.  But is that really news? Roughly half of the country has felt that way for a long time.  Forty-three percent of Americans said that a year ago. And forty-six percent said that back in 2007.

Under the headline, “Hillary Clinton’s honesty problem,” an earnest reporter for The Hill newspaper asks, “Is it possible to win the White House if more than half the electorate thinks you’re dishonest?” Uh, of course, it is, people. The Clintons do this all the time.

Clinton’s margins against her potential Republican contenders is thin, to be sure, but not much different than they have been for months. And, by the way, even in purplish New Hampshire, she’s still beating them all—from Bush to Walker to Rubio. Nationally, CNN has her beating Washington’s favorite Republican, Jeb Bush, by eight points.

Time and again, it’s the Clintons’ accusers who end up humiliated, run out of town, ruined by sex scandals, or left to write soft-porn memoirs about supposed romantic dalliances that read like a letter to a trashy magazine.

The Clintons are often fortunate in their opponents—an assortment of professional prudes and ethical hypocrites who push too hard, who revel in it too much, and who focus not on one charge that might stick but a hundred that go in more directions than a Tolkien novel. Which scandal are we on now? Benghazi? Erased emails? Clinton Cash? The death of Vince Foster? An outrage to be named later?

Bill and Hillary Clinton learned long ago what should be obvious to anyone spending a day in politics: Voters care about their own lives, their own futures, far more than they do about the latest Washington feeding frenzy. Ideas trump innuendo. This is why the Clintons keep winning.

Until the GOP gives us its obsession with the former First Family. Until it positions itself as the party of the future and the Clintons, implicitly, as relics of the past, then the party is going to be in for another shock next year—this one even bigger than 1992.

And the GOP is clearly the party of the past . The time in the past?  Ideally of the 1950's  when gays were totally closeted, blacks were segregated and Hispanics weren't even on the radar screen.  It's a time period that doesn't sell well out side of the GOP bubble.

Is the Main Stream Media a GOP Tool?

One hears constant charges from the far right and Republican side of the isle about the "liberal media" not providing "balanced" coverage.   I would counter that, if anything, the media is too deferential to the Republican Party - much as it gives deference to religious extremists and religion in general - and all too often merely parrots whatever bullshit the GOP is peddling while never fact checking any of it. One only need to recall the lead up to the Iraq War which was based on deliberate Bush/Cheney lies to remember but one example of this frightening failure.   The media bears a huge responsibility in keeping politicians honest, but the same standard needs to be applied to the GOP as Hillary Clinton.  A piece in The Week looks at the media's responsibility.  Here are excerpts:

You can't understand Hillary Clinton's perspective without understanding what happened in the 1990s, and the media transformation that was going on while Bill Clinton was president. From the first moments of that presidency, Clinton's opponents were convinced he was corrupt to the core. They assumed that if they mounted enough investigations and tossed around enough charges, something would stick and Clinton would be brought down. If you think the endless Benghazi investigations are ridiculous, you should have been around then . . .

Conservative talk radio came into its own in the 1990s, providing Republicans both an outlet for their most outrageous charges and a goad to produce more of them. (When they won control of Congress in 1994, Republicans literally made Rush Limbaugh an honorary member of their freshman class). Fox News debuted in 1996, in time for the impeachment crisis of 1998. The previously leisurely news cycle accelerated rapidly, and nothing fed it like scandal.

While the Clintons bear responsibility for getting many of those scandals going with questionable decision-making or behavior, it's also true that the mainstream media made huge mistakes during that period by treating every Republican charge, no matter how ludicrous, as though it was worthy of a full-scale investigation splashed across the front page. Again and again, they reacted to the most thinly justified accusations as though the next Watergate or Iran-Contra was at hand, and when it turned out that there was no corruption or illegality to be found, they simply moved on to the next faux-scandal, presented no less breathlessly.

That past — and journalists' failures to reckon with it — are still affecting coverage today. When this email story broke, how many journalists said it was important because it "plays into a narrative" of Hillary Clinton as scandal-tainted? I must have heard it a dozen times just in the past week.

Here's a tip for my fellow scribes and opinionators: If you find yourself justifying blanket coverage of an issue because it "plays into a narrative," stop right there. That's a way of saying that you can't come up with an actual, substantive reason this is important or newsworthy . . . during the Clinton years, reporters would say they had no choice but to devote attention to some scurrilous charge, whether there was evidence for it or not, because someone had made the charge and therefore it was "out there."

They should apply similar standards to all the candidates; if it's important that Clinton used a private email account while at State, then it must be equally important that other candidates have used private emails for work, and they should be subject to as much scrutiny as she is. When a new revelation or accusation emerges, the questions reporters should ask themselves include: Is there evidence for this? What's the context in which it took place? How does it bear on the presidency?

"Does this play into a narrative?" ought to be the last question they ask. As I wrote about Hillary Clinton, there are ways in which she owes her supporters better than what they've gotten from her in the past. But that's only half the story. The news media owes their readers, listeners, and viewers better than what they got, too.

Don’t Throw the IRS Under the Bus

By way of back ground I often work with clients seeking to set up non-profit entities that seek exempt status determinations from the Internal Revenue Service.   The forms are lengthy and require attention to detail and a lot of supporting documentation.  If not prepared properly and correctly documented, you WILL get enhanced scrutiny.   In doing review, the IRS focuses on possible political activities, but it also looks at whether or not the entity is being established as a means to enrich private individuals rather than support the entities avowed purpose.   One need only think of the large six figure salaries pulled down by Maggie Gallagher and Brian Brown at NOM or Bill Donohue at the Catholic League to realize that "non-profits" can be most lucrative.  A piece in The Daily Beast makes the case that we should not be too quick to throw the IRS under the bus.  Here are highlights:

Since the hullabaloo over IRS investigations of Tea Party groups broke last week, Democratic partisans have mostly been telling President Obama the same thing. First, clear this scandal off your plate so you can focus on the others. Second, the people responsible for this mess, at least according to the Inspector General’s report, were bureaucratic grunts and Bush appointees—you don’t owe them anything. Third, everyone hates tax collectors anyway. In other words, stand aside as congressional Republicans beat the IRS to a pulp.  That would be a terrible mistake.

It would be a mistake because while Obama is not personally implicated in the IRS controversy, the things he believes in most deeply are. Conservatives love the IRS scandal because it supposedly rips the smiley-face mask off government and reveals it to be a “sinister” (Peggy Noonan), “arrogant” (Noonan), “ravaging tyrant” (David Brooks) abusing largely powerless American patriots. As a perennial warning against the abuse of government power, that story has merit. But as a description of the actual relationship between the public and private sector in America today, at least outside the national security realm, it’s mostly nonsense.

The right’s tale of powerful IRS ideologues preying on weak and naïve citizens’ groups bears little relationship to reality. In truth, as an invaluable New York Times investigation explained yesterday, the Cincinnati office that reviewed the Tea Party applications was an “understaffed,” “unglamorous” “backwater.” Its ill-trained, “low-level” staffers “rarely discussed politics.” What they did discuss, according to the Times, was the fact that they were “overrun with applications” that they could not competently process.

In 2010, the fewer than 200 employees of the IRS’s Determinations Unit were already struggling to respond to tens of thousands of applications for tax-exempt status from 501(c)3 nonprofits threatened by a change in the tax code. Then along came the Supreme Court in Citizens United, which made it clear that corporations could contribute directly to another category, 501(c)4 nonprofits, which could spend vast sums to influence elections without having to disclose their donors. Soon, boatloads of new political organizations began asking to be designated as 501(c)4s, a category traditionally meant for groups that perform “social welfare” functions like volunteer firefighting and maintaining community gardens. (Those are some of the actual examples used on the IRS website.)

Since 501(c)4s cannot make political activity their “primary purpose,” it made sense for IRS staffers to look carefully at the politically oriented applicants. (“Which do you think deserves special attention to determine possible violations of the political rules?” writes Kurt Eichenwald in Vanity Fair. “Patriots for Obamacare? Or the Laurel Garden Club?”) As the “review process slowed to a crawl” under the weight of all these new applications, IRS staffers in Cincinnati, few of whom were experts in tax law, began using keywords like “educating on the Constitution” and “social economic reform/movement” to screen applicants. These short cuts didn’t only flag right-of-center groups. Contrary to Noonan’s claim that “only conservative groups were targeted,” more than 24 liberal groups were lumped into the same category.

What happened at the IRS Determinations Unit wasn’t OK. It was a mess. But it was a mess born less of over regulation than under regulation. The core problem was that after Citizens United, a section of the tax code designed to allow people to donate anonymously to garden clubs became a popular way for billionaires to secretly funnel vast sums to Karl Rove (and his Democratic equivalents) to savage political opponents and sway elections.

Obama can’t let the GOP’s tale of totalitarian regulators and oppressed Tea Partiers go unchallenged. When it comes to the relationship between government and the market, we do not live in an age of tyrannical government power. To the contrary, we live in a second gilded age in which the people who benefit most from America’s exploding income inequality have used their wealth to disembowel the regulatory systems through which government protects ordinary Americans.

A right-wing Supreme Court has made it virtually impossible to regulate money in elections. And now Republicans are casting the Tea Party—a movement founded in part by robber barons like the Koch Brothers—as the victim of a mythic, all-powerful IRS in order to further neuter an actually existing IRS that is already too weak to make the rich pay their taxes or respect the rules of democratic fair play. With any luck, the GOP will render it unable to help competently implement Obamacare as well.

It might seem shrewd for Obama to sit out the IRS scandal while he focuses on bigger fights. But this scandal is about government’s capacity to make private wealth serve the public interest, and for a progressive president, there’s no bigger fight than that.