David A. Hopkins/Honest Graft blog:
Two Reasons Why the Press Cares More About the Clinton Foundation Than the Trump Foundation
Over the last few weeks, the prestige press—notably led by the
New York Times—has taken a renewed interest in the activities of the Clinton Foundation, running a
series of
stories suggesting that foundation donors might have received some sort of preferential treatment from Hillary Clinton or her staff while she was running the State Department. The lack of any hard evidence of a quid pro quo has not stopped Republican critics and good-government scolds from attacking Clinton over the foundation's existence. The former group doesn't need any proof to find her guilty, while the latter
takes the position that the "appearance of impropriety" is itself a transgression—which more or less means that if anybody in the news media thinks you might have done something wrong, then, by definition, you did.
In the midst of a charged presidential campaign against a hated opponent, we might expect Democrats and liberals to mount an aggressive pushback—and indeed they have.
Some Clinton defenders have focused on rebutting the news media's suggestions that the former secretary of state violated ethical norms, while
others have charged the
Times and like-minded press sources with imposing a double standard on the candidates. After all, Donald Trump's own foundation not only
broke the law by making a campaign contribution to an elected official using the funds of a non-political organization, but did so just before the official—Florida attorney general Pam Bondi—decided not to launch an investigation into accusations of fraud by Trump's defunct "university." Yet the demonstrated illegal behavior of Trump's organization, to say nothing of the possibility that the money bought a reprieve from punishment for further criminal activity, has received much less press attention than the mere "questions" and "shadows" that supposedly "swirl" around the Clinton operation.
Why the difference? I see two reasons.
Josh Marshall on last night’s nat sec forum:
The last point is I think the big one. You couldn't watch Trump and be under any illusion that he has any idea what he's talking about about really anything. I think we can dispense with any idea that Trump is going to bone up on a handful of policy points and use them during the debates. He totally winged and it showed. Someone I respect greatly said on Twitter that watching the debate we should dispense with the idea that Clinton will mop the floor with Trump in the debate. I've never thought she'd mop the floor with him. But I thought my friend greatly misjudged Trump's performance. The exchange where Lauer kept asking him why he wouldn't discuss his ISIS plans and then asked why he had to ask the generals if he had a plan and then Trump said well, maybe I'll combine the two plans ... this is a case where people are selling Lauer a bit short. That made Trump look like a jackass. People know from a young age when someone is trying to bullshit their way out of question. Trump has no idea what he's going to do about ISIS. It was just nonsense and word salad. I think that was clear in a way that would transcend ideology...
Lauer's devoting a third of Clinton's time to emails was terrible. But on question after question Clinton - clearly by design - tried to bury everyone in policy detail and command of the issues. She was smothering us with experience and we were smothered. You can think she's a liar and a crook and the worst person in the world. But you couldn't watch that segment and not realize she knows basically all the relevant issues inside and out. She's prepared. Whether you support her or like her is another matter. But she's prepared. I think Trump came off as cocky and ignorant. And I don't mean to me - I know he's cocky and ignorant. My best guess is that people who are wary of Trump but open to supporting him will not be reassured by that performance.
Michael Calderone/HuffPost:
Matt Lauer Failed The Moderator Test
At NBC’s “Commander-in-Chief Forum,” the host let Donald Trump slide on false Iraq and Libya claims he’s made all campaign.
Dylan Byers/CNN:
Twitter has a memo for NBC News: Don't send Matt Lauer to do a political journalist's job.
Lauer's handling of the NBC News "Commander-In-Chief Forum" with Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump on Wednesday night was widely panned by journalists and pundits.
The "Today" show co-host was criticized for spending too much time on Clinton's emails, lobbing softball questions to Trump, and neglecting to fact-check the Republican nominee when he falsely claimed to have opposed the Iraq War in 2002.
"This #NBCNewsForum feels like an embarrassment to journalism," New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote on Twitter.
And withering criticism from NY Times:
Matt Lauer Fields Storm of Criticism Over Clinton-Trump Forum
In fact, Mr. Trump initially said he supported the war, a point that Mrs. Clinton had raised earlier in the evening, citing an interview that Mr. Trump had given to Howard Stern. But Mr. Lauer left the assertion unchallenged, zipping along to his next question about Mr. Trump’s professed tendency to “say things that you later regret.”
Journalists and longtime political observers pounced. “How in the hell does Lauer not factcheck Trump lying about Iraq? This is embarrassingly bad,” wrote Tommy Vietor, a former aide to President Obama. Glenn Kessler, the chief fact checker at The Washington Post, posted a link to NBC’s check of Mr. Trump’s claim and wrote: “@MLauer should have been prepared to do this.”
“Lauer interrupted Clinton’s answers repeatedly to move on. Not once for Trump,” Norman Ornstein, the political commentator, wrote in a Twitter message, adding: “Tough to be a woman running for president.”
Paul Waldman/WaPo on the sin of not following up:
Trump’s history of corruption is mind-boggling. So why is Clinton supposedly the corrupt one?
The big difference is that there are an enormous number of reporters who get assigned to write stories about those issues regarding Clinton. The story of something like the Clinton Foundation gets stretched out over months and months with repeated tellings, always with the insistence that questions are being raised and the implication that shady things are going on, even if there isn’t any evidence at a particular moment to support that idea.
When it comes to Trump, on the other hand, we’ve seen a very different pattern. Here’s what happens: A story about some kind of corrupt dealing emerges, usually from the dogged efforts of one or a few journalists; it gets discussed for a couple of days; and then it disappears. Someone might mention it now and again, but the news organizations don’t assign a squad of reporters to look into every aspect of it, so no new facts are brought to light and no new stories get written.
Brian Beutler/New Republic on the sin of asymmetry:
The Media Coverage of Hillary Clinton Is Out of Whack
The problem isn't the scrutiny of her emails or the Clinton Foundation, but treating such sins as comparable to Donald Trump's.
At bottom, this isn’t a debate over whether Clinton scrutiny is merited, but over the judgment news outlets use when devoting resources to stories, and how they gauge competing stories in proportion to one another, in ways that shape public perception of candidates….
Like conservatives, liberals are rarely satisfied with the bent of campaign reporting. But this election, they view the onus on the press corps differently than they have in past elections: not just to report on the election in substantive ways, but to be consistently mindful of the asymmetry between the candidates. An ignorant, unethical, racist authoritarian who horrifies the political leaders of his party on the one hand; and a conventional, if flawed and unpopular politician on the other. The overarching expectation isn’t that the press should campaign for Clinton or help her escape scrutiny, but that they resist the urge to normalize Trump by portraying both candidates as inhabiting similar moral and ethical planes.
Funny because Asymmetric Politics is the title of Dave Hopkins’ new book.
Josh Kraushaar/National Journal:
Here’s the reality from a mix of polling, reporting, and what’s happening in the field. The presidential race is tightening a bit from Clinton’s post-convention boomlet. Her favorability ratings are getting worse, but Trump’s aren’t getting much better. In turn, Clinton’s standing in polls has dropped even as Trump has continued to stagnate, with the Republican still below the 40 percent mark in most polls. The fundamentals are still alarming for Trump: He’s bleeding support with GOP women and college-educated white voters, while being badly outspent on the airwaves. Even if Trump manages to belatedly consolidate Republican support—a big if—he still needs to win constituencies that view his campaign deeply negatively.
It’s unlikely the fundamentals will change all that much before November. Early voting begins in South Dakota and Minnesota on Sept. 23, with six other states allowing early or absentee voting this month. Trump’s negatives have remained remarkably consistent. The clock is running out.
Nate Cohn/Upshot:
In mid-August, Mrs. Clinton led by around eight percentage points in national polling. Since then, there hasn’t been much evidence to confirm that large margin.
Yes, there have been a few polls showing her leading by a big amount.Monmouth, Quinnipiac and USA Today/Suffolk polls all showed her up by at least seven points nationwide.
But note that over the last two weeks there really hasn’t been any indication that Mrs. Clinton was up by, say, double digits. If she were still up by eight points, we would expect at least some data showing her posting huge margins.
In contrast, plenty of recent polls show a much tighter race. Many are less reputable, including online and automated polls of dubious methodological quality or with limited or no track records.
But there have been higher-quality polls with a smaller lead for Mrs. Clinton, and even the CNN/ORC poll this week that showed her down by two points among likely voters. A few weeks ago, there weren’t many polls of any kind showing her in that weak a position….
Late August is not a great time of year for polling, and Labor Day weekend is probably the worst of all. The news can slow down in August, and so can public interest in the race. People go on vacation. News media organizations that spent tens of thousands of dollars polling around the period of the conventions take some time off and wait to re-enter the fray in September.
Over the next few weeks, a lot of these questions are going to sort themselves out. There will be a new wave of high-quality polls. Many will add likely-voter screens for the first time. And not only will we have more new polls, but we’ll also be even closer to the election — and entering a period when the polls tend to be quite predictive of the eventual outcome.
That about sums it up.
Sahil Kapur and Jennifer Jacobs/Bloomberg:
Polls Tighten, But Hillary Clinton Retains Electoral College Edge
The shift appears primarily driven by Trump unifying GOP voters. The CNN survey found him ahead by 88 to 3 percent among Republicans, and by 48 to 28 percent among independents. Clinton led 90 to 2 percent among Democrats.
Popular vote aside, Clinton retains a significant edge in the electoral college, thanks to the Democratic Party's structural advantages and the fact that Trump's unfavorable ratings are higher than hers. She has numerous viable paths to victory while Trump needs to run the table in the most competitive states.
Still, Clinton cannot afford to be complacent. As polling analyst Nate Silver noted in a blog post, the degree of uncertainty in the race is high due to large number of undecided and third-party voters in recent surveys. And state polls can catch up to national polls.
"National polls tend to be of higher quality and the states are not divorced from the national polls," said Ken Goldstein, a professor of politics at the University of San Francisco and a polling analyst for Bloomberg Politics. "At the end of the day this race remains Hillary Clinton's to lose. That said, she may be capable of that."
For now, at least, Trump has a steep hill to climb.
Joan Walsh/The Nation:
Donald Trump’s Misogynist Ratpack
Trump has surrounded himself with sexists and serial adulterers. Sexual harasser Roger Ailes is an “adviser.” No wonder he’s struggling with women voters.
Nancy LeTourneau/Washington Monthly:
Glenn Greenwald really didn’t like Paul Krugman’s column about the Clinton Foundation – and he certainly didn’t like all the attention it got. That’s not news. But I found that within the article Greenwald wrote was one paragraph that pretty much captured all that is wrong with many of the assumptions being made about this story. So it’s worth deconstructing these few sentences.
But it would be journalistic malpractice of the highest order if the billions of dollars received by the Clintons — both personally and though their various entities — were not rigorously scrutinized and exposed in detail by reporters. That’s exactly what they ought to be doing… Beyond quid quo pros, the Clintons’ constant, pioneering merger of massive private wealth and political power and influence is itself highly problematic. Nobody forced them to take millions of dollars from the Saudis and Goldman Sachs tycoons and corporations with vested interests in the State Department; having chosen to do so with great personal benefit, they are now confronting the consequences in how the public views such behavior.
Let’s break that down into three separate arguments.
This breaks my heart to read. But it’s real, from Reeves Wiedeman:
The Sandy Hook Hoax
Lenny Pozner used to believe in conspiracy theories. Until his son’s death became one.
Dara Lind/Vox on Donald Trump’s immigration position(s):
Donald Trump’s immigration plan, explained in 500 words
It’s an ambitious agenda — but it still might not be enough. Trump’s ultimate goal is to make (white) Americans feel safe from unauthorized immigration. That might bebeyond any president’s power to do.