Ooooh, that sweet NBC/WSJ poll (HRC +6, LV in 4 way match) is here. And even the LAT tracker is moving her way (4 points in 4 days), as is UPI/CVoter (3 points in a week).
But let’s talk policy.
Fact Checker/WaPo:
Fact-checking Clinton’s story of meeting disabled children in New Bedford in 1973
Based on contemporaneous news coverage and the 1974 Children’s Defense Fund report published after the project carrying Clinton’s name, it’s clear that not all children in New Bedford (and elsewhere in the country) attended school if they had a disability or any other physical or economic barrier. That is not surprising, given that the federal law requiring all states to educate children with disabilities didn’t pass until 1975.
The former New Bedford mayor acknowledged that not all students with disabilities may have taken advantage of the transportation service the city provided in the 1970s. That essentially renders concerns about the veracity of Clinton’s story moot. Based on the information available from the time, there’s no reason to doubt Clinton’s story of meeting children in New Bedford in 1973 who didn’t or couldn’t go to school because of a disability. She receives the coveted Geppetto Checkmark.
CBS:
Where Hillary Clinton stands on education
Clinton emphasizes education policy in her presidential agenda--pushing for early as well as higher education reform.
“The public school system has been, I believe, second to the Constitution, the most important institution in making America the great country that we have been over the last 200 plus years,” Clinton said in 2015.
Her original plan cost $350 billion over a decade, but she expanded the college affordability portion of the plan significantly in July. There has not been an updated cost estimate. The plan would be paid for by increasing taxes on the wealthy.
Here are the key components to Clinton’s educational policy:
If you’re interested. It doesn’t involve selfies or Brangelina.
Hillary Clinton/NY times:
Hillary Clinton Outlines Vision of More Job Opportunities for People With Disabilities
Of all the attacks that Hillary Clinton and her fellow Democrats have tried against Donald J. Trump since he captured the Republican presidential nomination, one has stood out for its emotional force and persuasive power: No one, it seems, can abide Mr. Trump’s mockery last year of a reporter’s physical disability.
And as Mrs. Clinton strains to make a more forceful case for her own candidacy, after a summer focused largely on hammering Mr. Trump, her campaign believes that a focus on an often-overlooked constituency — voters with disabilities — can accomplish both goals at once.
Philip Rucker/WaPo:
Hillary Clinton has decided it’s about time she do more talking about Hillary Clinton.
After a year and a half of running for president, the Democratic nominee has concluded that many Americans still do not have a clear understanding of what motivates her or what she would do as president. So in the campaign’s home stretch, Clinton is trying to reintroduce herself and her ideas to the country.
Clinton has been unable to break through the cacophony of attacks and counter attacks she and Republican nominee Donald Trump have been yelling at each other. But she will try to do just that here Wednesday by delivering what aides billed as a sweeping address that presents her vision for an inclusive economy in which everyone has a responsibility to contribute and an opportunity to get ahead.
Clinton’s objective is twofold: To lift her sagging approval ratings as well as build trust in her agenda and earn a mandate that could help her, should she be elected, govern in a divided Washington.
WaPo:
Here’s a primer on what we don’t know about Trump’s taxes — and may never learn.
Q. How many people have seen — or could see — the GOP nominee’s returns?
A. According to tax experts and former IRS employees, tens of thousands of people have access to Trump’s tax information, if not his complete returns. Revenue agents, customer service staff and employees at walk-in tax assistance centers, plus a smaller number of federal contractors, use a master computer that shows a summary of everyone’s return. Once they enter a name or Social Security number, these employees could go further into the record, much like scanning a bank account.
Politico:
But given the Bush clan’s proximity to public life, and their progeny’s desire to one day return the family to power, it was only a matter of time before their tongues would be held no longer.
Over a 24-hour span that began with Jeb Bush's surprising and sardonic cameo in Sunday's Emmy Awards broadcast and Monday night’s reports that his father, former President George H.W. Bush, had told a family friend privately that he intended to support Hillary Clinton, the Bushes returned to the headlines, and are giving Trump just the establishment foil he so capably exploits.
"He probably loves that former President Bush isn't backing him because it underlines his whole case against the establishment," one former Jeb Bush campaign staffer said. "I bet he's highlighting it in his stump speech before long."
Matt Lattimer/Politico
To an outsider, a savvy businessman had just engineered a brilliant ad for his latest venture, while efficiently backing away from a controversy he probably didn’t take all that seriously anyway. And as he did it, he left the media caught just a bit in a trap of its own. As they rushed to attack Trump on his latest “lie,” most outlets conveniently omitted to mention that in fact there was some truth in Trump’s contention. The Clinton campaign may not have “started” the birther controversy. But it was circulated by her supporters, and Clinton world definitely had a hand in it. According to a former editor with the McClatchy News Service, one of Clinton’s closest confidants, Sidney Blumenthal, personallyspread the “birther” story himself. (Blumenthal flatly calls this “false,” leaving the story in “his word against mine” territory.)
What an unbiased observer might conclude from all of this is that many mainstream media outlets, so blinded in their distaste for Trump and so determined to unmask him as an unprecedented liar, have now compromised themselves in the process. Which is one more lesson from the Trump playbook: If you make enough gaffes, pretty soon your crazed critics will start making gaffes of their own.
Trump losing college educated whites and Republican women has no place in this narrative. It’s aimed as if the entire universe is non-college degree white males. We’ll have a lot of that between now and election day.
Patrick Murray is the Monmouth pollster. That Monmouth FL poll, btw, had Clinton up by 5 and the Monmouth NH poll from yesterday has Clinton +9.
Brian Beutler/New Republic:
Liberals Have Failed to Teach Millennials About the Horror of George W. Bush
Anti-Trump forces aren’t wrong to see millennials as the key to this election. Their error is in short-handing their critique to suggest millennials are somehow more responsible for Trump than older, more conservative cohorts. But if you stop dividing cohorts by age, and do it instead by ideological leaning, the problem becomes clear. The younger and younger that left-of-center voters get, the less and less propensity they have to vote at all, and the greater propensity to vote (if they vote) for a third party...
But here’s a different theory, under which the very liberals who are laying the groundwork to blame millennials also share in the blame themselves. If 18-to 29-year-olds vote for third-party candidates in sufficient numbers to tip the election to Trump, it will be the consequence of a liberal failure to build an oral tradition around the Bush administration, from Ralph Nader’s vote haul in Florida through the injustice of the recount and the ensuing plutocratic fiscal policy; the 9/11 intelligence failure; the war of choice in Iraq sold with false intelligence and launched without an occupation plan; the malpractice that killed hundreds in New Orleans; the scandalousness that makes the fainting couch routine over Clinton’s emails seem Oscar-worthy; and finally to the laissez-faire regulatory regime and ensuing financial crisis that continues to shape the economic lives of young voters to this day.
Try suggesting Nader cost Gore the election. You’ll get 50 push-back responses to it, all of them wrong.
Thomas Patterson/LA Times:
If Hillary Clinton loses the presidential election in November, we will know the reason. The email controversy did her candidacy in. But it needed a helping hand — and the news media readily supplied that.
My analysis of media coverage in the four weeks surrounding both parties’ national conventions found that her use of a private email server while secretary of State and other alleged scandal references accounted for 11% of Clinton’s news coverage in the top five television networks and six major newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times. Excluding neutral reports, 91% of the email-related news reports were negative in tone. Then, there were the references to her character and personal life, which accounted for 4% of the coverage; that was 92% negative.
While Trump declared open warfare on the mainstream media — and of late they have cautiously responded in kind — it has been Clinton who has suffered substantially more negative news coverage throughout nearly the whole campaign.
Brian Beutler/New Republic:
The fact that Trump’s ethical, legal, and moral failings dwarf Clinton’s just isn’t breaking through all this. It’s not for no reason that Trump routinely trounces Clinton in polls measuring things like truthfulness and transparency. If there’s a silver lining here it’s that Trump occasionally says something so offensive that it damages him. But then sometimes he calls Muslim refugees a “cancer from within,” comparing them to “a Trojan horse” and to poisonous snakes, and nobody seems to notice.
We’re gonna feel pretty dumb if our weird obsession with State Department email practices and relative disinterest in fraud, bribery and self-dealing ultimately leads to ethnic cleansing.