Trump.

Hello all, reposting this from Facebook, with a few minor edits and embedded links.

Ok, so, we’re five days out from this election now, and two months before Trump takes office, and here’s where we are.

This morning, the president-elect took to Twitter to attack the press (again), and then told an easily-disprovable lie about his stance on nukes, one that even Breitbart, run by his blatantly anti-Semitic campaign head — now his chief strategist — wrote about.

As of this writing, he has also said nothing about the emboldened hate attacks happening all over America now. Speaker Paul Ryan, when asked by Jake Tapper about them, just shrugged and said those aren’t Republicans doing those. (Ryan, for his part, is busy plotting the end of Medicare.)

Meanwhile, the President-Elect has tried to move the trial on his fraudulent business practices at Trump University, because being president-elect is too hard. (Spoiler: the job gets harder after January.)

Despite this apparent busy-ness, the President-Elect *has* taken the time to openly complain about protestors, so that’s speech, press, and assembly — three of your five first amendment freedoms, already getting challenged.

In the first five days.

When asked about the President-Elect’s many ethical conflicts-of-interest at the moment, Rudy Giuliani, who’s apparently up for Attorney General, said “Those laws don’t apply to the president.”

(Note: Giuliani also wants to “fix” cybersecurity — trust me, that’s not going to be in the direction of your privacy.)

Newt — yes, he’s back too — is calling for a new House Un-American Affairs Committee. Yes. HUAC. You’re not reading that wrong.

Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway today, when asked about Harry Reid’s rightfully angry press release about the new president, said the former Senate Majority Leader should “be very careful about characterizing someone in a legal sense.” In other words, she threatened to sue and/or imprison the political opposition.

Across the pond, Putin is telling Trump to withdraw NATO forces from Eastern Europe, while Britain is putting more long-range missiles there to protect it. However you feel about Russia or NATO — I would think Republicans are very divided on this point at the moment — this is the type of situation where things can very quickly spiral out of control if a steady hand is not at the till.

A steady hand is not at the till.

All of which is to say, we have to start recognizing what is happening here, and plan accordingly. People my age have had a good run, but the shit has finally arrived.

There are many good articles floating around right now about the election. One of the best, imho, is this one. Step one: Believe the autocrat.

It doesn’t do any good to hope Trump somehow turns out to be a closet lefty, or is just content to play Don the Builder and invests massively in infrastructure. That’d be great (tho’ his version of infrastructure — prisons, pipelines, walls — may not be your version.) I hope so too – that’d be the best case scenario at this point. But there’s also a lot of bargaining going on, and we’re all going to have push through the steps here and get to action.

I don’t want to tell you how to get involved, donate, volunteer, or organize — that’s up to you. Some of us are more privileged than others in that regard. But make a list of the things you are going to do to stand against what’s coming, because it sure does seem to be coming.

A few other thoughts on the inter-Dem recrimination happening at the moment, which I think is good and necessary to move forward. As others have pointed out, in the UK after a losing election, the party leadership usually quits. We need strong Dem leaders right now in the field. But we also need the people who failed here to be held accountable. No more failing upward or pundit tenure.

There’s obviously a lot of back and forth right now about whether Clinton lost because of racism or sexism or economic anxiety, Comey or WikiLeaks or just a terribly run campaign. The answer here to me seems to be…yes? Many of these things are not at all mutually exclusive. She lost the Electoral College in a handful of places, and a lot of things could’ve changed that — no Comey, or more money/visits in Wisconsin, or a media that wasn’t disastrously bad at figuring out what stories merit continuous coverage, or a message that better resonated with working white people.

I will say that I helped write a book with Bill Press this past January, Buyers Remorse, about how Barack Obama failed progressives in many ways, and I think it definitely holds up now. If his administration had addressed the foreclosure crisis in a way that was less banker-friendly and more people-friendly, or if he hadn’t continued building out Dubya’s extra-constitutional foreign policy of surveillance and kill-strikes, we’d be in a better place right now.

That being said, and as others have pointed out, Obama in 2012 also ran much better on the Rust Belt front, aggressively pointing out that Romney and Bain Capital were giant hypocrites that hated the auto bailout and took people’s jobs. (Mike Pence, FWIW, was against the auto bailout too.) Clinton did some of this with Trump’s outsourcing and whatnot, but the overarching message of the campaign was “he’s a deplorable human being.” Which he is, but clearly that didn’t matter for a lot of people.

In any event, Trump pulled his voters and Clinton didn’t pull hers. That was the difference. There was no massive white surge to Trump. He got the people who would vote for any Republican, and enough in a select few states in the middle who were angry about how things are going. That’s it. This isn’t a Reagan landslide. It was a close election with terrible turnout where many people disliked both candidates, and Republicans, as always, were more motivated to show up.

There’s been a lot of talk about how Dems need to pop their elitist bubble and talk to white working class people again. This is definitely true to an extent. But, by all that is good and holy, that doesn’t mean turning Trump voters into some sort of exotic Heartland “real Mur’ican.” Nor does it mean meeting fools halfway on the racist, sexist nonsense. I grew up with a lot of these folks — they don’t think they’re racists and get offended when you call them thus, but then go on to say and post deeply racist things.

As @theshrillest pointed out on Twitter, saying Clinton lost solely because of racism/sexism is like saying a plane crashed because of gravity. Both are real and pervasive, especially in the 99% white enclaves that went for Trump, and that’s how it is.

So for God’s sake let’s not lose our nerve on these issues and look for a Jim Webb type to save us. Let’s do a better job of conveying the true story about who the real villains are here — not poor people of color, struggling every single day, but the rich white assholes who now control every single facet of the federal government, and will use it as a trough.

Bernie clearly was much better at this sort of thing, and as someone who supported him, I’m more than a little annoyed that various people on our side were telling us to ignore what the polls were telling us back then. But that is water under the bridge, and we have a tsunami right in front of us.

Let’s get it sorted, let’s hold the people who failed our party accountable, and let’s get ready to fight. Because, again, the shit is here. This is not a drill.

The Unbearable Whiteness of Trump.

“Republicans’ great strength is their appeal to white voters, who are still far and away the nation’s largest demographic group. It’s served them quite well in congressional elections…And they’d be winning at the presidential level, too, if they could just increase their level of support among whites by a tantalizingly small amount. Indeed, if Trump is able to increase the GOP share of the white vote by 5 percentage points more than Romney won in 2012, even while holding the strong minority vote for Obama that year steady, the mogul would win handily.”

Remember how I wrote that Trump is already drawing dead because of lack of minority support? As my college friend Shawn Zeller points out in CQ Roll Call, and on the eve of an RNC that promises to go Full Wackadoodle, Trump’s team appear to be aware of the math and are leaning into it, hoping to grow the (old, angry) white vote as a share of the total. “Offending Latinos might even be a good electoral strategy, Frey says: ‘The older white population has a hard time dealing with changing demography, and wedge issues like immigration play well.'”

A good electoral strategy, perhaps, but terrible for the polity…and I still don’t see Trump pulling it off. So he has to grow the overall white vote by 5 percent over 2012 — but he’s running far behind Romney with white women and is still polling egregiously with Latinos. Even notwithstanding Clinton’s iffy approval numbers, it’s a longshot at best. I’ll stand by my earlier prediction: Trump’s gonna lose, handily.

Update: Or, perhaps not.

Frosty Nixon.

“‘There are times when an abortion is necessary. I know that. When you have a black and a white,’ he told an aide, before adding, ‘Or a rape.’” Another round of newly-released Nixon tapes sheds more light on the dark and troubling imaginings of the 37th president. “‘What I really think is deep down in this country, there is a lot of anti-Semitism, and all this is going to do is stir it up,’ Nixon said…’It may be they have a death wish. You know that’s been the problem with our Jewish friends for centuries.’” Class act, this guy.

Reinforcements: The General…and an Army.

“‘They’re trying to connect [Obama] to some kind of terrorist feelings, and I think that’s inappropriate,’ Powell said. ‘Now I understand what politics is all about — I know how you can go after one another. And that’s good. But I think this goes too far. And I think it has made the McCain campaign look a little narrow. It’s not what the American people are looking for. And I look at these kinds of approaches to the campaign, and they trouble me. And the party has moved even further to the right, and Gov. Palin has indicated a further rightward shift.'”

The general is fed up, and he’s not alone. On a weekend when the Obama campaign announced a record-breaking $150 million September, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and Dubya Secretary of State Colin Powell officially endorses Barack Obama, arguing the Senator he is a “transformational figure” who, unlike his opponent, “has displayed a steadiness, an intellectual curiosity, a depth of knowledge…not just jumping in and changing every day, but showing intellectual vigor.“

The GOP’s most famous drug-addled carnival grotesque, Rush Limbaugh, has taken to trotting out more sad McNabb-style race-baiting to try to deflect this unfortunate turn-of-events for the right, but other Republicans out there know — and will own up to — the score. “‘What that just did in one sound bite — and I assume that sound bite will end up in an ad — is it eliminated the experience factor,’ said former House Speaker Newt Gingrich…’How are you going to say the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the former national security adviser, former secretary of state was taken in?’…’This Powell endorsement is the nail in the coffin,’ said one Republican official, speaking anonymously to offer candid thoughts about the party’s nominee. ‘Not just because of him, but the indictment he laid out of the McCain campaign.’“

Astride the Mad Elephant.

“At McCain-Palin rallies, the raucous and insistent cries of “Treason!” and “Terrorist!” and “Kill him!” and “Off with his head!” as well as the uninhibited slinging of racial epithets, are actually something new in a campaign that has seen almost every conceivable twist. They are alarms. Doing nothing is not an option…What makes them different, and what has pumped up the Weimar-like rage at McCain-Palin rallies, is the violent escalation in rhetoric, especially (though not exclusively) by Palin…By the time McCain asks the crowd “Who is the real Barack Obama?” it’s no surprise that someone cries out ‘Terrorist!’ The rhetorical conflation of Obama with terrorism is complete. ” — Frank Rich, QFT, October 12, 2008.

It’d be funny, if it weren’t so frightening, to see this current version of the GOP end as it began. Forty years after the New Right that coalesced behind Goldwater and Reagan saw its first national victory with the election of Richard Nixon on a, ahem, “law and order” ticket (in no small part thanks to the assassination of RFK), the conservative movement that gave us Helms, Falwell, Reagan, Gingrich, and Dubya is collapsing back into its original base state: a seething, festering cauldron of paranoia, race-baiting, inarticulate rage, and eminently justifable, easily exploitable working-class grievance.

And, with no other game-changer left in the Atwater playbook, McCain the mythical maverick, his “Sarracuda” running mate, and the sad coterie of (lily white) GOP deadenders about them have now taken to doing the very opposite of “Putting Country First” — Instead, they’re stirring this pot, hoping the vile, unstable, and extremely combustible concoction therein can somehow propel them into the White House. Call it the Joker strategy: With no other way to win at this point, the McCain campaign is banking on the American people getting so scared, confused, and enraged by their lies and name-calling that we’ll up and decide to blow each others’ ferries out of the water. (In fact, now that I think about it, I guess that might go a long way towards explaining McCain’s bizarre recent “my fellow prisoners” slip. But, sorry, Senator, the prisoners’ dilemma isn’t going to play any better in November than it did in Gotham a few months ago.)

Frank Rich is right: Even as a Hail Mary play in anything-goes politics, this is beyond the pale. John McCain should — and, given his body language of late, does — know what so often results — and has resulted — from that foul brew he’s toying with. In short, this is a new low, and half-heartedly attempting to walk back the hate after fiddling with the lock on this Pandora’s Box is too little, too late.

Of course, we all eventually expected this of the Republican party — Their hold on power is at long last dissipating, and their sick, desperate movement, four-and-a-half decades old, is seemingly now in its ugly death throes, so why not trot out the oldest, saddest one-trick pony in their tiny stable? But McCain, from everything we’ve heard about the man, was meant to be better than this. A straight-talker, a man of honor, yadda yadda yadda. Well, horsepuckey. John McCain has brought everlasting shame on himself, and if there’s any justice left in this country, — and woe to you, Senator, I’m sure there is — his repudiation at the polls in a few short weeks will be devastating.

Surveying the Wreckage.

“Above all, this irony emerges: Clinton ran on the basis of managerial competence — on her capacity, as she liked to put it, to ‘do the job from Day One.’ In fact, she never behaved like a chief executive, and her own staff proved to be her Achilles’ heel…Her hesitancy and habit of avoiding hard choices exacted a price that eventually sank her chances at the presidency.” The Atlantic‘s Josh Green, who covered the dirt on the Patty Doyle firing earlier this year, tells the story of Sen. Clinton’s primary bid from the inside (thanks mainly to being the beneficiary of vindictive document dumps from across the campaign hierarchy.)

Among the many interesting revelations, Mark Penn is apparently an even bigger asshole than he seemed during the primaries. Regarding Sen. Obama: “All of these articles about his boyhood in Indonesia and his life in Hawaii are geared towards showing his background is diverse, multicultural and putting that in a new light. Save it for 2050…his roots to basic American values and culture are at best limited. I cannot imagine America electing a president during a time of war who is not at his center fundamentally American in his thinking and in his values…Let’s use our logo to make some flags we can give out. Let’s add flag symbols to the backgrounds.” Classy.

Update: Speak of the devil. While giving kudos to McCain for his Paris Hilton ad, Mark Penn emerges from his cave to extol the usefulness of negative advertising. “Picking a president is not just about the candidates’ strengths but also about how their weaknesses can manifest themselves. Imagine if, in 2000, Al Gore’s advertisements had hit George W. Bush hard over incompetence on foreign affairs and as a trigger-happy cowboy.“

More “Bill the Victim.”

“I think that they played the race card on me. We now know, from memos from the campaign that they planned to do it along.” It’s not a lie if you believe it, right, Mr. President? I’ve grown bored with trying to keep track of all the myriad ways Bill Clinton has continually embarrassed himself in recent months. But, since I’m blogging today and as per his “mugging”, former President Clinton whines further about the reaction to his unfortunate Jesse Jackson comparison, citing once again a vast Obama conspiracy and now memos that do not exist. (In his own mind, he probably meant the Amaya Smith memo during the MLK/LBJ uproar, which, of course, had nothing to do with Clinton’s idiotic remarks.) The former president also said he couldn’t have said anything racist because he has an office in Harlem. Uh, I live in Harlem…I didn’t realize that constituted a free pass for us white folk to spout ignorant and dismissive bromides whenever it’s politically expedient.

Not realizing the mic was still on, Clinton later scoffed to an aide during the interview, “I don’t think I should take any shit from anybody on that, do you?” Actually, Bill, you really, really should.

Update: Now, in full defiance of the audio, he’s denying he said it. “Outside a Pittsburgh campaign event, a reporter asked Clinton what he had meant ‘when you said the Obama campaign was playing the race card on you?’ Clinton responded: ‘When did I say that and to whom did I say that?‘” (Can you find the Clintonian distortion? I’m guessing it’s “played” versus “was playing,” but who knows how the man’s mind works?)

The Clinton “Mugging.”

“The campaign did not play ‘a race card,’ Mr. Clinton told CNN. ‘We had some played against us,’ he said, “but we didn’t play any.” As it turns out, Sen. Obama wasn’t the only politician to discuss race in the past twenty-four hours. As noted by Emily Bazelon at XX Factor, President Bill Clinton went on TV on Monday to act (surprise, surprise) the aggrieved party with regard to race in South Carolina. “Mr. Clinton said the widespread interpretation of his remarks — comparing Senator Barack Obama to the Rev. Jesse Jackson — was ‘a total myth and a mugging.’ Mr. Clinton added, ‘I think that’s been pretty well established.’” Uh, no, Mr. President, that hasn’t been established in the slightest.

A More Perfect Union.

I am the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas. I was raised with the help of a white grandfather who survived a Depression to serve in Patton’s Army during World War II and a white grandmother who worked on a bomber assembly line at Fort Leavenworth while he was overseas. I’ve gone to some of the best schools in America and lived in one of the world’s poorest nations. I am married to a black American who carries within her the blood of slaves and slaveowners – an inheritance we pass on to our two precious daughters. I have brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles and cousins, of every race and every hue, scattered across three continents, and for as long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible.

It’s a story that hasn’t made me the most conventional candidate. But it is a story that has seared into my genetic makeup the idea that this nation is more than the sum of its parts – that out of many, we are truly one…

I can no more disown [Wright] than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother – a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.

These people are a part of me. And they are a part of America, this country that I love…

The fact is that the comments that have been made and the issues that have surfaced over the last few weeks reflect the complexities of race in this country that we’ve never really worked through – a part of our union that we have yet to perfect. And if we walk away now, if we simply retreat into our respective corners, we will never be able to come together and solve challenges like health care, or education, or the need to find good jobs for every American.

Understanding this reality requires a reminder of how we arrived at this point. As William Faulkner once wrote, “The past isn’t dead and buried. In fact, it isn’t even past.” We do not need to recite here the history of racial injustice in this country. But we do need to remind ourselves that so many of the disparities that exist in the African-American community today can be directly traced to inequalities passed on from an earlier generation that suffered under the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow…

In fact, a similar anger exists within segments of the white community. Most working- and middle-class white Americans don’t feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race. Their experience is the immigrant experience – as far as they’re concerned, no one’s handed them anything, they’ve built it from scratch. They’ve worked hard all their lives, many times only to see their jobs shipped overseas or their pension dumped after a lifetime of labor. They are anxious about their futures, and feel their dreams slipping away; in an era of stagnant wages and global competition, opportunity comes to be seen as a zero sum game, in which your dreams come at my expense. So when they are told to bus their children to a school across town; when they hear that an African American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committed; when they’re told that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced, resentment builds over time…

Just as black anger often proved counterproductive, so have these white resentments distracted attention from the real culprits of the middle class squeeze – a corporate culture rife with inside dealing, questionable accounting practices, and short-term greed; a Washington dominated by lobbyists and special interests; economic policies that favor the few over the many. And yet, to wish away the resentments of white Americans, to label them as misguided or even racist, without recognizing they are grounded in legitimate concerns – this too widens the racial divide, and blocks the path to understanding.

This is where we are right now. It’s a racial stalemate we’ve been stuck in for years. Contrary to the claims of some of my critics, black and white, I have never been so naive as to believe that we can get beyond our racial divisions in a single election cycle, or with a single candidacy – particularly a candidacy as imperfect as my own…

The profound mistake of Reverend Wright’s sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It’s that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country – a country that has made it possible for one of his own members to run for the highest office in the land and build a coalition of white and black; Latino and Asian, rich and poor, young and old — is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past. But what we know — what we have seen – is that America can change. That is the true genius of this nation. What we have already achieved gives us hope – the audacity to hope – for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.”

In the wake of the Wright controversy, Sen. Obama delivers a thoughtful and nuanced speech on race in America. Video below:

Now, on one hand, I sorta wish Sen. Obama had never had to give this speech, that we were as far along with regard to race in this country as it had first seemed after Iowa. That being said, since events of recent days in particular have suggested how far we still have to go on the racial recrimination front, this speech was both a necessary and important one. It’s been garnering rave reviews across the political spectrum, and I’d throw my hat in there too — my main quibble with the address is that Obama wrote it himself. C’mon, Sen. Obama, think of the speechwriters. When political leaders write speeches as memorable and moving as this one, it’s going to put a lot of people out of work!

Seriously, tho’, I thought the address moved beyond soundbites to give a substantive and nuanced view of race in America, the type of which we haven’t heard in this country from a politician in a very long time. (I particularly like the Faulknerian flourish on the legacy of history.) And it — in true Obama form — showed that the Senator has an understanding of the grievances on both sides of the racial divide, and went out of its way to establish that Ferraro and Wright were two manifestations of the same intrinsic problem. Like TNR’s Michael Crowley, I am somewhat concerned about whether the nuance of his message will come through to undecided voters, once the Hardballs, Hannitys, and Blitzers are done with it. Still, today’s address was the type of leadership moment that I frankly can’t see either Sen. Clinton or Sen. McCain providing, and it showed once again how much our country stands to gain by electing Sen. Barack Obama our next president in November. Black, white, latino, or asian, leaders this wise, intelligent, thoughtful, and inspiring do not come along often.

Sex, Race, and Videotape.

“If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position. And if he was a woman (of any color) he would not be in this position. He happens to be very lucky to be who he is. And the country is caught up in the concept.” I saw this yesterday and was going to leave it well enough alone, but since it’s growing into a full-fledged dustup today, and since Team Clinton recently made a point of calling for Samantha Power’s scalp: former veep candidate and Crossfire host Geraldine Ferraro makes some rather unfortunate remarks about Sen. Obama. To quote Ambinder (whom I generally find irritating, but he pegged this one): “Because running as a black guy named Barack Hussein Obama is soooo easy.” At any rate, if the door is now open to playing this ridiculous identity game, I think it’s rather obvious to all that if Ferraro herself was a white man, we’d never have heard of her, since her gender was basically the sole reason for her inclusion on that historically terrible ’84 ticket. Similarly, if Sen. Clinton wasn’t the spouse of a former president, it’s hard to imagine her still in this race, particularly given her virtual mathematical elimination and all.

Perhaps, before Ferraro makes any more dubious claims about an easy road for black males in our society, she should read Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson’s editorial today in the NYT, where he examines the old-school racial fears stoked by Clinton’s infamous 3am ad: “I have spent my life studying the pictures and symbols of racism and slavery, and when I saw the Clinton ad’s central image — innocent sleeping children and a mother in the middle of the night at risk of mortal danger — it brought to my mind scenes from the past. I couldn’t help but think of D. W. Griffith’s “Birth of a Nation,” the racist movie epic that helped revive the Ku Klux Klan, with its portrayal of black men lurking in the bushes around white society.” Some pundits argue that Patterson is over the top here, but I actually think he’s on to something (and, note, I’ve recently defended the Clinton ad people on charges of intentional racism.)

As Chris Orr notes, this wasn’t just a warmed-over Mondale/LBJ Cold War leadership spot. Team Clinton explicitly turned it into an old-school home invasion ad, the kind that’s so passé that even Slomin’s Shield has moved on. The Clinton campaign still could’ve forestalled any possible racial subtext by changing the race of the family, but, as it is, you’d have to be willfully naive not to see a problem with the Clinton version of “Barack Obama is a menace that will harm your sleeping (white) children in their beds” as it came out. At the very least, the ad gurus at Camp Clinton are guilty of willful ignorance about racist cultural tropes in American history, and perhaps a good deal more. Update: In response, the Clinton campaign points to a blink-and-you’ll-miss-her African-American child in the ad, although, given the lighting, that wasn’t immediately obvious, to say the least.)

Update 2: Ferraro blows a gasket, now claiming: “I really think they’re attacking me because I’m white. How’s that?” Well, if it’s any consolation, Rep. Ferraro, I’m sure your fellow national embarrassment, Sean Wilentz, agrees with you. (Patterson rebuts Wilentz here.) Update 3: Ferraro’s done this before, back in ’88: “If Jesse Jackson were not black, he wouldn’t be in the race.“

Update 4: “It wasn’t a racist comment, it was a statement of fact.” Ferraro can’t seem to stop digging herself deeper. At this point she’s either dogwhistling to Pennsyltucky or just completely off the rails. Either way, Keith Olbermann’s disbelief about Ferrarogate last night is worth watching. Update 5: She’s gone, and not very gracefully.