How Democrats Defeat Donald Trump

My biggest fear surrounding the 2020 elections is that Democrats will by default reelect Donald Trump.  How?  By straying too far to the left and lose moderates and independents - and even the small percentage of Republicans sickened by Trump - and/or those so obsessed with "purity" or allegiance only to their preferred candidate - think Sanders supporters - staying home from the polls.  If one is candid, this latter phenomenon is what put Trump in the White House in 2016. The world and the nation have NOT been a better place for it and a Clinton presidency would have done far more to advance their supposed goals than what has occurred under Trump/Pence.A column in the New York Times looks at this danger and suggests what Democrats should do. The only question is whether the mainstream media will not make the same mistakes of false equivalency and allowing itself to be manipulated by Trump.  Here are column highlights:

Surprise, surprise: Donald Trump has no bottom. Just when you think he has sunk as low as he can, he stages a rally like that atrocity in North Carolina on Wednesday night and sinks lower. But the key takeaway isn’t that he’s a demagogue or a racist: These were facts put into evidence long ago. It’s that Democrats can’t afford to take unnecessary risks, dream deferrable dreams and engage in avoidable distractions as they set about the urgent work of defeating him. The 2020 election isn’t about getting everything that Democrats want and that Americans deserve. It’s about getting rid of Trump, because the price of not doing so could be this nation’s very soul.

The Democratic Party and the Democratic candidates for president need to be smarter, more realistic and more disciplined than they are now. Enough with internal feuding. Enough with taking the president’s bait and bumbling into his traps. If he sets the terms of the political discussion, he wins.

He wants to spend the 15 months between now and Election Day talking about “the squad” . . . Democrats mustn’t follow suit. Absolutely they should defend the four congresswomen, and make clear that they are every bit as American as Trump is.

So say that once, loud and clear. Maybe say it twice. Then move on. Trump wants to define all Democrats in terms of the squad, when they’re but a part of a diverse party and hardly its ideological proxies. So don’t let him.

[N]o one’s talking about health care or jobs: the stuff that actually turns elections and will turn this one. If Trump has his way, this campaign will be a bogus referendum on a bastard definition of patriotism. It will be a race-obsessed and racist jubilee. Don’t play along.

We used all those words in 2016 — racist, demagogue, fascist — and he won. Voters saw indelible examples of this same behavior, and he won. The Wednesday rally wasn’t a new Trump, just a bloated one.

Stop talking so much about the America that he’s destroying and save that oxygen for the America that Democrats want to create.

Stop hypothesizing about Democratic voters’ political priorities and policy appetites and look at the actual evidence of where Americans really are. That’s the 2018 midterms.

It may have minted young progressive superstars like the congresswomen in the squad, but they aren’t especially popular beyond their progressive fan clubs. . . . . so their campaigns weren’t lessons in how to move voters from one party’s column to the other.

Other first-term House candidates’ bids did offer such lessons, so look harder at that crew. Lauren Underwood in the exurbs of Chicago, Xochitl Torres Small in southern New Mexico, Abigail Spanberger in the suburbs of Richmond, Va., and Antonio Delgado in upstate New York — these four defeated Republicans in districts where Trump had prevailed by four to 10 percentage points just two years earlier. None of them ran on the Green New Deal, single-payer health insurance, reparations or the abolition of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.

They touted more restrained agendas. And they didn’t talk that much about Trump. They knew they didn’t need to. For voters offended by him, he’s his own negative ad, playing 24/7 on cable news.

Of the roughly 90 candidates on the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s list of 2018 challengers with some hope of turning a red House district blue, just two made a big pitch for single-payer health care. Both lost. . . . The party did pick up 40 seats overall — just not with the most progressive candidates.

According to a May analysis by Catalist, a data-analysis firm, 89 percent of the Democratic vote gain in 2018 was from swing voters. That’s just one set of numbers, one way to slice the pie, but it does raise questions about the progressive insistence that partisan turnout and a surge in new voters, attracted by bold policy positions, is the path to victory in 2020.

But that hasn’t stopped the leftward lunge of leading contenders for the Democratic nomination, several of whom want “Medicare for all” and many of whom support the decriminalization of illegal border crossings.

That puts them on shaky ground. Polling has shown that when voters are told that Medicare for all would mean an end to private insurance or an increase in taxes, support for it drops below 40 percent.

And according to a Politico/Morning Consult survey published a few days ago, 51 percent of voters support the sweeping raids by ICE that the president trumpets, while just 35 percent oppose them. That suggests that anything that smacks of open borders — which is how President Barack Obama’s secretary for homeland security, Jeh Johnson, described Democratic presidential candidates’ positions in a recent op-ed essay in The Washington Post — puts those candidates at odds with public opinion. Voters see them answering Trump’s extremism with extremism of a different kind.

Nancy Pelosi knows this. It’s why she hasn’t been talking up the Green New Deal, single-payer insurance or impeachment, and the suggestion that this makes her some squishy centrist pushover — some musty relic from a timid era — is bunk. She has her eyes on the most meaningful prize, one she pursued successfully in the midterms: Democratic victory.

So Democrats should listen to her. They should also remember Obama’s legacy correctly. I keep hearing that his 2008 election makes the case for an unconventional, daring Democratic nominee. To a certain extent, it does. But don’t forget that he in some ways ran to Hillary Clinton’s right that year, and he spoke constantly of national unity, bipartisan amity and turning down the temperature of Washington politics.

Many voters still hunger for that. Many are wiped out by the raucous reality show of this presidency. And the way to promise something different isn’t to return Trump’s fire with even more heat. It’s to be dignified and deliberative.

I wonder what would happen if the Democratic nominee simply refused to talk about Trump. No responding to whatever stupid nickname he comes up with. No sweeping denunciation of some deed of his that any sensible American already knows is wrong. Just the articulation of better solutions to America’s problems. Trump would go mad with the lack of attention. And maybe then, thank heaven, he’d go away.

New Data: Did Non-Voters or Third Party Voters Elected Trump?

On his morning satellite radio show, Michael Smerconish - who I generally find level headed - made much of a piece in the Washington Post that sought to blame non-voters for Donald Trump's election rather than those who out of "protest" or a hissy fit that their candidate did not win their party's primary voted for a third party candidate.   By his own admission, Smerconish voted for Gary Johnson and, in my view, by default voted for Trump.  Admittedly, the piece reveals that Democrat leaning voters who stayed home - due to laziness and/or a false confidence that Clinton would win - played a major role in putting Trump in the White House, but it does NOT excuse voters like Smerconish who threw their votes away by voting for a candidate who had no chance in Hell of winning.  Some data on three states make my case:

Michigan: Trump won by 10,704 votes.  Gary Johnson drained off 172,136 votes, and Jill Stein drained off 51,463 votes.  While not all of these third party voters would not have voted for Clinton, had they not thrown away their votes, Clinton might well have won and America would have avoided the national crisis it now endures.  

Wisconsin:  Trump won by 22,742 votes.  Gary Johnson drained off 106,674 votes, and Jill Stein drained off 32,072 votes. 

Pennsylvania: Trump won by 44,292 votes. Gary Johnson drained off  146,715 votes, and Jill Stein drained off 49,941 votes. 

While the Pew Research data may allow individuals like Smerconish to try to waive off their complicity in putting Trump in the White House, those who voted for third party candidates bear just as much responsibility as non-voters in placing America in its current crisis state.  

Hopefully, the lessons learned from 2016, especially by younger voters and minority voters who will suffer the most from the misrule of the Trump/Pence regime and its GOP enablers is that (i) they MUST get out and vote no matter what, and (ii) voting for a third party candidate is the equivalent of voting for the candidate that one most dislikes.   Here are highlights from the Post article:

On Thursday, though, Pew Research Center released an unusually robust survey of the 2016 electorate. In addition to having asked people how they voted, Pew’s team verified that they did, giving us a picture not only of the electorate but also of those who didn’t vote. There are a number of interesting details that emerge from that research, including a breakdown of President Trump’s support that confirms much of his base has backed him enthusiastically since the Republican primaries.

The data also makes another point very clear: Those who didn’t vote are as responsible for the outcome of the election as those who did.

As we noted shortly after the election, about 30 percent of Americans were eligible to vote but decided not to, a higher percentage than the portion of the country who voted for either Trump or his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton. Pew’s data shows that almost half of the nonvoters were nonwhite and two-thirds were under age 50. More than half of those who didn’t vote earned less than $30,000 a year; more than half of those who did vote were over age 50.

By looking at the preferred candidate in a demographic group and then comparing the density of that group in the population that voted with the density in the nonvoting population, we get a sense for how nonvoters determined the 2016 results.

 

Looking at race and ethnicity, we see how the heavier turnout of white voters affected the contest. Black and Hispanic voters voted much more heavily Democratic than white votes backed Trump, but they turned out less.

 

People under 30 preferred Clinton by 30 points but made up much more of the nonvoter population than the population that actually voted. A third of nonvoters were under 30; only 1 in 8 voters was in that age group.

 

Evangelicals were the most strongly pro-Trump of the religious groups of voters, and they represented more of the voting pool than the nonvoting pool. Black Protestants and Hispanic Catholics made up less of the voting population than the nonvoting population — and strongly preferred Clinton.

Demographic groups that preferred Trump were three times as likely to be a bigger part of the voter pool than nonvoters. Among groups that preferred Clinton, they were about 50 percent more likely to be a bigger part of the nonvoting community.

Clinton nonetheless won the popular vote. But an increased turnout of under-30 voters in, say, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan could easily have changed the results of the history.

I hope and pray that the 2018 midterms yield a huge blue wave and that Mueller eventually produces evidence to take down both Trump and Mike Pence, whose "sergeant Schultz" routine I find unbelievable.

The Moral Bankruptcy Of Trump's Supporters

As noted in a number of previous posts, much of the 2016 presidential election cycle has provided a deja vue experience of what happened in 1930's Germany where complacency by some, self-centered self-promotion, and putting supposed principle ahead of pragmatic reality led to the rise of Adolph Hitler.  With much of Donald Trump's campaign seeming like a warmed over version of Hitler's bigotry and slogan based campaign, one has to admit that far too many Americans appear to be either morally bankrupt or frighteningly blind to the potential horrible consequences of their actions.  A column in the New York Times looks at the disturbing phenomenon.  Here are excepts:

[B]oth Mrs. Clinton’s virtues and Mr. Trump’s vices have been obvious all along. How, then, did the race manage to get so close on the eve of the debate?

A lot of the answer, I’ve argued, lies in the behavior of the news media, which spent the month before the first debate jeering at Mrs. Clinton, portraying minor missteps as major sins and inventing fake scandals out of thin air. But let us not let everyone else off the hook. Mr. Trump couldn’t have gotten as far as he has without the support, active or de facto, of many people who understand perfectly well what he is and what his election would mean, but have chosen not to take a stand.

Let’s start with the Republican political establishment, which is supporting Mr. Trump just as if he were a normal presidential nominee.

I’ve had a lot of critical things to say about Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, and Paul Ryan, the speaker of the House. One thing of which I would never accuse them, however, is stupidity. They know what kind of man they’re dealing with — but they are spending this election pretending that we’re having a serious discussion about policy, that a vote for Mr. Trump is simply a vote for lower marginal tax rates. And they should not be allowed to flush the fact of their Trump support down the memory hole when the election is behind us.

This goes in particular for Mr. Ryan, who has received extraordinarily favorable press treatment over the years — portrayed as an honest, serious policy wonk with a sincere concern for fiscal probity. This reputation was never deserved; his policy proposals have always been obvious flimflam. But in the past, criticisms of Mr. Ryan depended on pointing out hard stuff, like the fact that his numbers didn’t add up. Now it can be made much simpler: Every time he’s held up as an example of seriousness, remember that when it mattered, he backed Donald Trump.

While almost all Republican officeholders have endorsed Mr. Trump, the same isn’t true of what we might call the G.O.P. intelligentsia – actual or at least self-proclaimed policy experts, opinion writers, and so on. For the most part, the members of this group haven’t spoken up in support of this year’s Republican nominee. . . . If you look at who has endorsed Mr. Trump — say, at the signatories of the statement of support from “Scholars and Writers for America” — it’s actually a fairly pathetic group.

But if you think that electing Mr. Trump would be a disaster, shouldn’t you be urging your fellow Americans to vote for his opponent, even if you don’t like her? After all, not voting for Mrs. Clinton . . . is, in effect, giving half a vote to Mr. Trump.

[T]he response from sane Republican economists has been especially disappointing. Only charlatans and cranks have endorsed Mr. Trump, but only a handful have risen to the occasion and been willing to say that if keeping him out of the White House is important, you need to vote for Mrs. Clinton.

Finally, it’s dismaying to see the fecklessness of those on the left supporting third-party candidates. A few seem to believe in the old doctrine of social fascism — better to see the center-left defeated by the hard right, because that sets the stage for a true progressive revolution. That worked out wonderfully in 1930s Germany.

But for most it seems to be about politics as personal expression: they dislike Mrs. Clinton — partly because they’ve bought into a misleading media image — and plan to express that dislike by staying at home or voting for someone like Gary Johnson, the Libertarian candidate.

In fact, the biggest danger from Mr. Trump’s terrible week is that it might encourage complacency and self-indulgence among voters who really, really wouldn’t want to see him in the White House. So remember: Your vote only counts if you cast it in a meaningful way.

 The column's author is 100% on point.

Will Trump's Purported Rise in the Polls Boost Hillary's Turnout?

While I continue to be dumbfounded as to how anyone sane, decent, and moral can be a Donald trump supporter, some polls suggest he is rising in the polls - thanks in part by a media that continues to engage in false equivalency and that allows itself to be played by Trump's antics.  That said, some conjecture that Trump's rise in the polls may be a boon to Hillary Clinton as it motivates those who detest and/or are terrified at the prospect of a Trump presidency to redouble their efforts and make sure that they get themselves to the polls on November 8, 2016.  Based on the social media activities of two of my children, both so-called Millennials, they are pulling out the stops when it comes to urging friends to support Hillary Clinton and ditch all thoughts of voting for a third party candidate as a futile act of protest.  A piece in Politico makes the case that perhaps Hillary Clinton's by some accounts lackluster September will benefit her in November.  It also looks at the stupidity of voting for a third party candidate.  Here are excerpts:

You can choose one or more of the explanations for what has happened to Hillary Clinton in recent weeks as Donald Trump has closed in on her in the polls.

But what is especially bedeviling the Clinton campaign is that, at least until now, constituencies most critical to her campaign seem to have no sense of urgency about keeping the Donald Trump out of the White House. While Hispanics, who backed Obama in 2012 by a more than 2-1 margin, support Clinton by a similar margin, they seem far less inclined to vote than they did four years ago.

That is what could change now that Trump threatens to actually take the White House.

Younger voters, who not only backed Obama by landslide margins but turned out in record percentages in 2012, have until now expressed relative indifference to the campaign or have turned to the alternatives: Libertarian Party nominee Gary Johnson and the Green Party’s Jill Stein.

And remember: without massive support and a heavy turnout among younger voters, Obama’s margins in Florida and other key states would have been wiped out.

Yes, support for minor party candidates tend to fall when the leaves do; yes, the Clinton campaign has a get-out-the-vote machine whose reputation—yet untested—is formidable.

But what may be their most powerful weapon is the clear possibility that Trump could win, which is why Clinton’s very bad few weeks could, in the end, be very good for her. Trump’s climbing numbers could finally motivate her complacent Democratic base and other voters who have never been crazy about her and not especially motivated to come out to the polls, especially if she were running away with the race.

Clinton campaign’s most plausible argument to its wavering voters: Get real, folks.
 “You’re looking at Johnson and Stein as a way of rejecting a corrupt, unresponsive two-party system,”  . . . . But please be willing to consider that you might be mistaken. Look back 16 years, and see what a similar vote—for Ralph Nader—did. His 94,000 voters in Florida would have wound up giving Gore a net of about 20,000 votes—more than enough to make butterfly ballots and hanging chads irrelevant. Now, between launching the Iraq War and the two Supreme Court justices Bush appointed, did it really make no difference?”

If you vote as a Libertarian for Johnson, you will materially increase the chances of a Trump presidency. Look at the list of potential judges. On everything from gay rights to abortion to his own views of the First Amendment, Trump is on record as rejecting core libertarian principles. If you vote for Jill Stein as a progressive, you are helping to put in power a president whose tax plan makes the rich richer, who thinks climate chance is a hoax, who wants to abolish whole swaths of environmental protection laws. So voting for Johnson or Stein means you’re voting for a label—a ’libertarian,’ or a ‘progressive’—without realizing that the consequence of that vote could lead to a president who rejects everything you claim to hold dear.”

Of course, it’s possible that Trump’s own character and temperament, revealed on the debate stage or in his bizarre-world campaign appearances, will convince voters that in the end , he is a risk they are not prepared to take. But for voters unsure about Clinton, relying on Trump to self-destruct after what he has survived is a risk they cannot take. So, even though the Scottish Presbyterians rejected Cromwell’s plea, and even though the officials at Wimbledon did not change their call, their pleas still suggest that Trump’s rise in the polls could be a powerful argument for Clinton.

Wake Up, Millennials, and Back Hillary Clinton

As the father of three (3) Millennials myself, I know that Hillary Clinton may not be their ideal candidate.  That said, they realize that Donald Trump poses an existential danger to America an, therefore, will be backing Hillary Clinton.  Perhaps their pragmatism comes from having grown up surrounded by political activism (the youngest helped on literature drops beginning at age 4 and liked to help work the polls on election day) and the reality that one often has to pick the better of the candidates one has to pick from.  They may also correctly see a vote for a third party candidate as a wasted vote or a de facto vote for the least acceptable of the two major candidates.  Sadly, too many Millennials seem to be blind to the fact that a vote for a third party candidate in 2016 is tantamount to a vote for Donald Trump.  An op-ed in the New York Daily News makes the case of why Millennials need to back Hillary Clinton.  Here are excerpts:

I am a so-called millennial today, a member of a generation that, having grown up with a disaster stamped in our psyche, now seems poised to make a disastrous mistake.

Millennials are poised to elect Donald Trump as America’s 45th President. In 2012, Barack Obama won the 18-to-29-year-old demographic by a landslide of 60% to 37%. Right now, Hillary Clinton has a minuscule 31%, less than even the losing side in the last cycle.

Millennials have gravitated in huge numbers to the third party candidates, Gary Johnson and Jill Stein, who together are garnering some 36% of support from this cohort, putting Hillary only slightly ahead of Trump in a cohort that she needs if she is to win.

It seems so obvious to me that Donald Trump is unfit to be President that I don’t know where to begin in making the argument to those of my contemporaries who will throw away their votes on a third- or fourth-party ticket. To me, Trump is a clown, an ignoramus, a racist, a bigot, a liar, a misogynist — a moron who somehow, through an act of collective madness, has managed to rise to the top of one of our two major parties.

But so many millennials don’t seem to care. It’s not that most of my contemporaries don’t recognize Trump’s manifest deficiencies. But to some of them something else is far more important. It seems that for those backing Johnson and Stein, politics is an exercise in creating morally pure world.

Bernie Sanders promised them just that with his political revolution and they swooned. Now that the prospect of purification has vanished along with Sanders’ candidacy, they are angry and feel both excluded and vengeful.

This leads them to dismiss Hillary Clinton as a quintessential representative of the unacceptable status quo. Many of the millennials I know trot out the usual complaints: She’s insincere, she’s a johnny-come-lately and phony progressive, and a neo-con stooge. They fault her for having supported criminal-justice policies that led to mass incarceration and for voting to bring America into war in the Middle East.

The same contradiction leads them to view Trump as merely a blunter expression of the same unacceptable collection of qualities they find in the former First Lady.

I want to suggest that, even if all their complaints about Hillary were true, they would still be irrelevant to the important decision that lies before us on election day — and not only irrelevant but deeply pernicious.

A failure to make distinctions can lead to catastrophe. German Communists in the early 1930s fought the Social Democrats with the same energy that they fought the Nazis, declaring that both parties were roughly equivalent forms of “social fascism.” Hitler benefited enormously from this disastrous and false equivalence.

Trump is no Hitler — he’s a lot more ridiculous and therefore less menacing — but he does relish violence, foment inter-group discord, spew falsehoods, brandish irrationality and foster a cult of the personality.

In a world in which there are genuine dangers of the kind that I saw with my own eyes as a child, how could we possibly gamble on giving such a problematic individual the immense powers of the American presidency? If one’s purpose is to make the world better, as so many millennials profess, it would seem that a first obligation would be to avoid making it dramatically worse.

In a curious way, the millennials voting for Johnson and Stein share an outlook with Trump supporters in their eagerness to tear down existing structures with the expectation that something new and better will arise in their place. That’s not a real choice before us.

Hillary Clinton does not walk on water. She will not solve all or most of America’s problems. She will certainly not bring about the kind of revolution that some of my contemporaries are dreaming about.

But at this juncture, she is the only alternative to one of the darkest figures in all of American history. If millennials vote en masse for Gary Johnson and Jill Stein, decades from now they will have a difficult task of explaining to their children their terrible miscalculation.

The Progressive Case for Hillary Clinton

As noted in a prior post, a number of Millennials and progressives who supported Bernie Sanders continue to have their panties in a wad and are making noises about voting for a third party candidate or staying home on election day.  Personally, as a long time political activist, I view such behavior as self-defeating.  All such conduct will do is put Donald Trump in the White House and help usher in policies that are diametrically opposed to Sanders' agenda.  More maddening is the reality that it ignores the fact that Hillary Clinton is running on one of the most progressive platforms in history.  A piece in Mother Jones lays out why Millennials and other disgruntled progressives need to smell the coffee and support Clinton on election day.  Here are excerpts:

For a lot of liberals, the most important goal of this election is to keep Donald Trump out of the White House. And since Trump naturally sucks up most of the political oxygen, that means lots of blogging about Trump and not so much about Clinton.

But a lot of lefties aren't happy about that. They want a positive argument in favor of voting for Clinton, not just a negative one for voting against Trump. That's fair enough, so I figured I'd put one together.

But I should be crystal clear here: Nobody should take this as an attempt to demonstrate that Clinton is perfect or to persuade you to vote for her. If you think she's too instinctively hawkish—as I do—that might be reason enough for a liberal to vote for someone else. On some issues—supporting the Iraq War, supporting the Trans-Pacific Partnership, voting for the Patriot Act, etc.—she's taken positions that might be flat deal killers. On other issues, you might think she's not strong enough, or that it took her too long to get to the right place. Finally, on a personal level, she's often oversecretive, overly lawyerly, and sometimes skates a little close to some ethical lines. She distrusts the press and withholds information too often. And she is, plainly, an establishment politician, with all the flaws that implies.

On the other hand, no successful politician is ever perfect. Franklin D. Roosevelt signed on to lots of compromises that liberals detested. Ronald Reagan did the same with conservatives. Clinton will too. There are just too many competing interests in a pluralistic country like America to expect anything else. But all that said, the liberal case for Clinton remains pretty overwhelming.

The following list is by no means exhaustive, but here it is:
1.     In 1995, despite strong pressure from diplomats and White House aides to remain low-key, she went to China and said, "Human rights are women's rights, and women's rights are human rights."
2.     She worked her heart out for health care reform in 1993.
3.     She now supports Obamacare, and supports expanding it.
4.     She supports increasing the federal minimum wage to $12 per hour. This is good for workers, but less likely to have downsides than a national level of $15.
5.     She supported comprehensive immigration reform in 2007 and continues to support it.
6.     She was a prime mover behind the Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997, and was a key figure in finding compromises that allowed it to pass after partisan bickering nearly sank it.
7.     Sen. Sherrod Brown: "As much as we want to move this country forward, you gotta cajole, persuade, work with, whatever it takes. And I think she does that better than about anybody I know."
8.     She supports LGBT rights.
9.     She worked with Attorney General Janet Reno to create the Justice Department's Office on Violence Against Women.
10.  She was one of the prime movers behind SCHIP, the State Children's Health Insurance Program, eventually signed into law by Bill Clinton.
11.  She pushed the Adoption and Safe Families Act through Congress.
12.  She was instrumental in the founding of the Center for American Progress.
13.  She has been the target of countless baseless attacks but has always rebounded and kept on working anyway.
14.  President Barack Obama: "What sets Hillary apart is that through it all, she just keeps on going, and she doesn't stop caring, and she doesn't stop trying, and she never stops fighting for us—even if we haven't always appreciated it."
15.  She voted against both of George Bush's tax giveaways to the rich.
16.  She favors closing the carried-interest loophole.
17.  Jill Abramson, who covered Bill and Hillary Clinton critically for more than two decades, first in the Washington bureau of theWall Street Journal and later at the New York Times, says this about Hillary Clinton:"Hillary Clinton is fundamentally honest and trustworthy…There are no instances I know of where Clinton was doing the bidding of a donor or benefactor."
18.  She supports legislation to end racial profiling at all levels of government.
19.  She wants to clean up the toxic lead remaining in soil, water, and paint.
20.  As secretary of state, she was tireless in traveling the world to repair the damage to our reputation from the Bush years.
21.  German chancellor Angela Merkel: "I admire her strategic thinking…Whenever I was able to work with Hillary Clinton, it was a great pleasure."
22.  She wants to reduce mandatory minimum sentences for nonviolent drug offenses.
23.  She voted for TARP.
24.  She was the principal author of the sanctions on Iran that brought them to the bargaining table.
25.  She then began the secret negotiations with Iran that eventually led to the treaty stopping their work on nuclear weapons.
26.  She supports Dodd-Frank.
27.  At the age of 29 she co-founded the Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families advocacy group.
28.  She is annoyed by airline bag fees.
29.  She supports a higher tax rate on the very rich.
30.  She supports the Paris Climate Agreement and has endorsed a plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 30 percent by 2025 and 80 percent by 2050.
31.  She wants to restore voting rights to felons who have served their sentences.
32.  She was one of the original co-sponsors of the Employee Free Choice Act, which would have implemented card check.
33.  She has literally spent her entire adult life advocating for children and women.
34.  Sen. Barbara Boxer: "She is authentic. Hillary is Hillary, and she's not going to become a cheerleader with pom-poms."
35.  She supports automatic voter registration at age 18.
36.  She has a lifetime score of 94 percent from the AFL-CIO and 98 percent from AFSCME.
37.  She pushed through State Department regulations that gave same-sex couples most of the same rights as straight couples.
38.  She supports universal pre-K.
39.  She has set a goal of producing one-third of the nation's electricity from renewable sources by 2027, three years before Obama's deadline.
40.  She wants to expand home visiting programs, one of the best known ways to improve child development.
41.  She wants to spend $275 billion (over five years) on rebuilding infrastructure.
42.  She was instrumental in securing help for New York's 9/11 first responders.
43.  In the Senate, she fought Republican attempts to privatize Social Security.
44.  She spent 11 hours testifying in front of the Benghazi committee and made Republicans look like idiots.
45.  She supports net neutrality.
46.  She would nominate liberal judges to the Supreme Court.
47.  She would also nominate liberal judges to the lower courts.
48.  She supports a plan that allows people over 55 to buy into Medicare.
49.  She co-sponsored the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act of 2008.
50.  She is pro-choice and supports the right of all women to have access to affordable contraception and safe and legal abortion.
51.  She wants to prevent pharmaceutical companies from jacking up the price of long-standing drugs.
52.  She supports the addition of a public option to Obamacare.
53.  She wants to overturn Citizens United.
54.  She has fought for decades for increased funding for HIV treatment and research.
55.  She wants to restore the portions of the Voting Rights Act that were recently struck down by the Supreme Court.
56.  She supports Obama's efforts to normalize relations with Cuba.
57.  She wants to beef up antitrust enforcement.
58.  She worked to ensure ratification of the New START treaty with Russia.
59.  She wants to impose a tax on high-frequency trading.
60.  She's a big supporter of the Environmental Protection Agency's Clean Power Plan to regulate carbon emissions from power plants.
61.  In the Senate, she had a very good reputation as someone who could work across the aisle to get things done. Her word was always good.
62.  Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse on his Republican colleagues in the Senate: "Two of them, her very prominent antagonists in this election, and one looked over at the other and said, 'Boy, she's good.' The other one leaned back and said, 'Yeah, she's really good.' And that's the Hillary that they know. Not the talking points Hillary or the caricature, but the real person."
63.  She wants to tighten regulation of the shadow banking system, one of the prime causes of the crash of 2008.
64.  She wants to strengthen the Volcker Rule.
65.  She supports DACA and DAPA, the "mini-DREAM" executive orders.
66.  She supports 12 weeks of paid leave for new mothers or to recover from a serious illness.
67.  As first lady, she fought for the Family Medical Leave Act. As a senator, she worked to expand FMLA to cover wounded soldiers and their families.
68.  She has long supported gender equality efforts around the world.
69.  She has legendary stamina and endurance.
70.  Sen. Al Franken: "She is the toughest, most experienced, hardest-working person I know."
71.  As secretary of state, she personally negotiated the 2012 ceasefire between Israel and Hamas.
72.  She has a 100 percent rating from both NARAL and Planned Parenthood.
73.  In the Senate, she co-sponsored the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act.
74.  She did not kill Vince Foster.75.  She did not issue a"stand down" orderafter the Benghazi attack.
76.  She didn't flip-flop on the bankruptcy bill.

Now consider what a president Trump would do on these issues.  When viewed in such a light, I do not know how a pragmatic progressive can do anything but vote Clinton-Kaine on November 8, 2016. 

Will the GOP Mount a Third-Party Challenge to Trump?

With Donald Trump continuing to top the GOP polls and the Frankenstein Monster that is the GOP party base increasingly out of control and alienating all but white religious extremists and white supremacists (and some vulture capitalists), the GOP establishment is increasingly faced with a Trump nomination and an electoral disaster next November.  In some ways, it is the logical culmination of the process that was started when the Christofascists and racist elements were opportunistically welcomed into the GOP.  Now the cancer is out of control.  Some now think that should Trump win the party nomination, a third party run by a sane Republican (a truly relative term) might be in the offing to "save the GOP" for the future even if 2016 is a massive defeat.  A piece in Politico looks at the possible prospect.  Here are highlights:

Donald Trump may have eased some Republican fears Tuesday night when he declared his intention to stay inside the party. But if their angst has been temporarily eased at the prospect of what he would do if he loses, they still face a far more troubling, and increasingly plausible, question.

What happens to the party if he wins?

With Trump as its standard-bearer, the GOP would suddenly be asked to rally around a candidate who has been called by his once and former primary foes “a cancer on conservatism,” “unhinged,” “a drunk driver … helping the enemy.” A prominent conservative national security expert, Max Boot, has flatly labeled him “a fascist.” And the rhetoric is even stronger in private conversations I’ve had recently with Republicans of moderate and conservative stripes.

This is not the usual rhetoric of intraparty battles, the kind of thing that gets resolved in handshakes under the convention banners. These are stake-in-the-ground positions, strongly suggesting that a Trump nomination would create a fissure within the party as deep and indivisible as any in American political history, driven both by ideology and by questions of personal character.

Indeed, it would be a fissure so deep that, if the operatives I talked with are right, Trump running as a Republican could well face a third-party run—from the Republicans themselves.

That threat, in turn, would leave Republican candidates, contributors and foot soldiers with painful choices. A look at the political landscape, the election rules and the history of intraparty insurgencies suggests that it could turn 2016, a year that offered Republicans a reasonable chance to win the White House and with it total control of the national political apparatus, into a disaster.

In 1964, when Republican conservatives succeeded in nominating a divisive champion of their cause in Barry Goldwater, liberal Republicans (there were such things back then) like New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller, Michigan Governor George Romney and others refused to endorse the nominee. More shockingly, the New York Herald-Tribune, the semi-official voice of the GOP establishment, endorsed Lyndon Johnson—the first Democrat it had supported, ever. With his party split, Goldwater went down in flames.

Would a Trump nomination be another example of such a power shift? Yes, although not a shift in an ideological sense. It would represent a more radical kind of shift, with power moving from party officials and office-holders to deeply alienated voters and to their media tribunes. . . . This possibility, in turn, has provoked strong feelings about Trump from some “old school” Republicans. Says one self-described “structural, sycophantic Republican” who has been involved at high levels of GOP campaigns for decades: “Hillary would be bad for the country—he’d be worse.”

If you want to see the most sulfurous assaults on Trump, don’t look to the editorial pages of the New York Times or the comments of MSNBC personalities; look instead to the most prominent media voices in the conservative world: National Review, The Weekly Standard, Commentary and the columns of George Will and others. In part, they deplore his deviations from the conservative canon; deviations that former Reagan aide and onetime FCC Chairman Dennis Patrick summarizes this way: “Many of my colleagues from the Reagan administration would have a hard time pulling the lever for Trump. We weren’t just Republicans, we were conservatives. It is very difficult to square any principled theory of conservative governance with much of what Trump says."

But it’s more, much more than policy that has stirred the ire on the right: It’s the vulgarity, the fusion of ignorance and arrogance, the narcissism, the dissembling on matters great and small. The composite portrait of Trump painted by these outlets—leavened only by a grudging acknowledgment that he’s touched on legitimate concerns about immigration and terror—makes the idea of handing over the nuclear codes to Trump unsettling. And it makes the idea of embracing him as the alternative to Hillary Clinton somewhere between a reach and a lunge.

Whether he’s seen as an ideological heretic for his views on trade, taxes and government power or as a demagogue whose clownish bluster and casual bigotry make him temperamentally unfit for office, the odds on massive defections are very high.

But what kind of defections? Based on the folks I’ve talked with, it could take different forms. One is a simple, quiet step away from any work on behalf of the top of the ticket. That’s what the self-described “structural, sycophantic Republican”—will do.

He argues “a Trump nomination would virtually guarantee a third-party campaign from a more traditional Republican candidate.”

Why a Republican? The short answer is to save the party over the long term. “It's impossible to conceive that Republican leaders would simply forfeit their party to him,” he says. “Even without the formal party apparatus, they'd need to fly their flag behind an alternative, if only to keep the GOP brand somewhat viable for the future. Otherwise, it would be toxic for a long, long time.”

Trump would also be devastating to the party and other GOP candidates. A solid conservative third candidate would give options to senators like Ayotte, Johnson and [Mark] Kirk to run with someone else and still be opposed to Hillary. In fact, I think it’s plausible such a candidate could beat Trump in many states.”

The very fact that serious political thinkers are contemplating such a possibility demonstrates that when Republicans look at the perils posed by a third-party bid from Donald Trump, they may be looking in the wrong direction. It’s not Trump the Defector that could trigger the biggest threat to the party, but Trump the Nominee.